The Otherworld

Blue runners were not newts. ‘Blue-slime-producing proto-reptiles from another planet’ was just a mouthful and most people could not care less either way. What they really were was common, somewhat household, and as prevalent on the everyday mind as squirrels.

If I were any less professional, I might have one in hand by now.

A few were in reach – pencil-length, fat-bodied little things, emanating a beautiful blue that penetrated the dark rock shelf they rested on. When they were excited, they left trails of slime on the walls, inciting others to do the same, creating a mosaic that annoyed custodians and delighted idiots like me. I had followed their trail up here to see their early morning resting place, where they began to shut their eyes, lying parallel to one another in rows, preparing for a long day of rest after a long night of newt-themed activities.

“You have five minutes,” Patty announced from the ground.

I whispered back, “Did you know these are the only Otherworld species to ever become invasive on Earth?”

“You keep telling me, yeah.” Patty came closer, the light from her chest lamp dimming as it tried to fill the dark crevices all around her. “Grab one. You can take it to your interview.”

I was tempted, the grabby child in me at direct odds with the trained professional.

She went on, “You gotta get some extra credit if you show up with a frog, right?”

“Not frogs. Newts.”

“Same thing.”

I slipped down the boulder I had been perched on, tripped, and landed on my puffy backpack. It absorbed the impact – not the first time, not the last time. I lay amongst old beer cans, cigarette butts, soggy magazines, and, for some reason, an unopened box of chocolates, which was half-hidden under one of the rock shelves.

I was saying, “Well, that’s weird,” as Patty was helping me up, and then launched straight into my list, “Big difference between frogs and newts. So, to start, newts have tails and long bodies, and-”

“But these are different, anyway, right?” Patty said. “I mean, they’re not really newts.”

I stewed on that. “Right. Do you want to see them? I counted at least six today. When they huddle like that, they all line up like sardines in a can.”

“Nope.”

“Why do you keep coming with me, then?”

Patty shrugged. She was busy dusting off my backpack, from which she stealthily stole a granola bar and stashed it in her pocket.

I retrieved the box of chocolates, “I know why. You’re hoping one day I won’t be able to wiggle out. You’ll turn my ribs into drumsticks, my skull into a goblet.”

Patty smiled, her intentions exposed. She tapped the box, instantly regretting it because the soggy cardboard gave way at the touch and one of the edges deflated. “Eww.”

I said, “Littering. Let this be a lesson.”

Patty led the way out of the cave, which was a twenty-foot straight shot, a heavy incline, and a sharp turn to the right – alright, it was a little outside of the definition of cave, more like a crevice. It had very cave-like features, like the low temperature inside, the darkness, the slimy walls, the frequent arm-sized gaps, and it looked a lot better in my field notes to say I was studying a cave that housed blue runners instead of a stinky trash heap I played in as a kid.

We were almost out when Patty suddenly leapt backward, throwing me in front of her.

A little king snake blocked the path.

I said, “We talked about this. Nonvenomous. Not aggressive. No hands.”

Patty grimaced, her hands locked into my backpack so she could steer me into any sudden attacks. She was raised very anti-snake by her dad, who was bitten as a child – but then again, my mom raised me the same way. It just didn’t take. Once I got my hands on my first copy of All Creatures Great and Small, all bets were off.

I skirted the snake, saying, “You gotta stop trying to sacrifice me to things.”

“You do stuff with snakes, pick them up and stuff. Biology.”

“It says that on my certificate – biology, division of snakes, picks ’em up and stuff.”

It was too hot outside, too bright, too humid. North Carolina was a damp oven in the summer. It might as well be on fire. When the sun beat down on you, you could hear that high-pitched whining sound they played in movies to express extreme heat.

We walked across a barren field at the edge of our neighborhood. It used to be a forested lot, hiding the crevice and its secret little newts, but now there were just sun-bleached stumps, and the dead remains of an attempted garden. It belonged to the city, and it was as unloved as it was ugly. I had a working theory that the newts once occupied parts of the forest, but now that the trees were gone, the direct sunlight would fry them, or the birds would eat them, or some enthusiastic floating head would studiously record all of their activities. It was best to stay inside, where it was a little cooler, a little damper, and there were plenty of places to hide.

Patty was the first to the sidewalk, where I had left my bike in an unceremonious pile. She brushed herself off, examining her clothes. She wore a stylish, impractical pair of skinny-legged overalls with a sequined shirt underneath. Not cave material, but, in my eyes, not exactly made for twelfth grade either. If I showed up at school wearing that, I would have been laughed straight out of the building. She was popular, though. A baby-faced blonde who looked more like twelve, to me, than seventeen, who played volleyball and had a hot dad.

“Can I come with you to your interview?” Patty asked, looking off down the street. It would be an hour or more before the bus came to pick her up. She was doomed to summer school because of her lackluster grades.

I dragged my bike upright, patted the seat, which lightly scalded my fingers, “If you can find a way to fit on this with me, you are more than welcome.”

Patty laughed, seeming nervous.

“What’s up?” I said.

“If you get the job, er, the internship,” she said, fiddling with her nails, “Are you going to move out?”

“It’s not far, so probably not.”

“Oh.”

“Unless they spontaneously pick me for the expedition, which would mean,” I pointed upward dramatically, and then added, “But that is extremely unlikely. Don’t go making any plans to turn my room into a private gym just yet.”

She smiled, the nervousness abating. “No promises.”

“I’m probably gonna get pancaked riding my bike down the highway.”

Patty smiled, “Call me?”

“Yeah, sure. Bring a spatula.”

XxXxX

Wakefield was a growing city. It had an uptown, a downtown, a little common area for concerts and festivals. Neighborhoods sprawled away from the city center, spiraling, fingers reaching further and further into the countryside. Cookie-cutter houses sprung up on shaded, curving roads, everything new and shiny. The trees still had strings holding them up, fresh mulch around their skinny trunks. Everything on the outside was bright and white and thriving. It had grown too fast, uncertain whether it wanted to be a sprawling southern city, or a towering northern one, and so it had clusters of enormous buildings surrounded by rows and rows of flat malls and little hobby shops.

Its claim to fame – its main source of funding for its explosive growth – was my destination, and my obsession since I was a child living in a decidedly less shiny part of the city. Werner Otherworld Park. If you left uptown, cycled through downtown, avoided getting hit while trying to navigate countless roundabouts on two wheels, and took a heavily-labeled exit in the northernmost part of the city, you would be on your way to the zoo. It was a dedicated road because there was little else there. Werner was a half-mile down that road, which steadily narrowed into two lanes, and it backed up to a massive forest, and was bordered on the east by a nationally protected swampland with no roads cutting through it. I knew because my dad and I shared a poor sense of direction and had once spent hours trying to continue north past the park after a visit, only to end up turning all the way around, coming back down this road, and taking a different exit in the city.

It was a straight, treeless road, so the sun thrashed me the entire ride. It had no bike lane, not much breathing room between the solid white line and rough grasses and ditches, so cars flew past me, close enough to touch.

Werner had one massive parking lot subdivided with regional names so people knew where they had parked. Outside of the main entrance, it smelled like sunscreen and bug spray. Kids screamed impatiently. Cars queued for spaces and honked at each other as they waited. I rode past, a dumb grin on my face, and took a quiet road that was marked ‘employees only – research center.’ It was lined with dogwoods and, when I was hastily tying a string around my bike at the rack out front, the visitors seemed to be a world away.

It was a museum inside.

I had been on a few tours of the research center as a high schooler and then as an undergrad. It was not a public place, more like a private library that every Otherworld nerd was dying to visit, myself included. I rang a doorbell, a voice asked me what I was there for, and a security guard checked my ID at the door.

I remembered an interview I saw once, where they were asking Tony Werner, the founder and owner of the park, about his collection. “Some have suggested that your research center is overly extravagant – a waste of money. How would you respond to that?”

Tony Werner, pushing eighty, skinny and crooked and wrinkled, had laughed at the question and said, “I would say that art makes people have a second look and really think about what they see. Some people are very visual. I think it captures enough attention to be worth it.”

His extravagant research center had a three-story-tall lobby with columns shooting up the center and polished marble floors. Relics from Otherworld were displayed in glasses cases on every wall. Feathers and eggshells. Skeletons and skins. Small, feathered canopy-dwellers to megafauna that had never been transported to Earth. On the balconies, murals showed massive flying predators, their bodies silhouetted against a bright sky, tiny explorers painted into the corners to point and stare at them. A life-sized model of an eagle-like monstrosity was slowly circling above, and smaller birds spun around the columns on tracks.

It certainly had my attention. I had been so focused on the biggest model as a child, on one of my first fieldtrips, that I ran straight into a pillar and almost broke my nose.

I took the elevator to the second floor and looked out over the balcony for a few precious seconds before stepping into a decidedly more research-building-like hallway with posters and certificates lining the walls. Offices on either side were mostly closed.

I found the one I was looking for. A man stood in the doorway, taking up the whole space, plucked right off the cover of a Scottish fantasy-romance novel. Long hair, green eyes, the face of a model. He just needed to unbutton his shirt, spray himself with water, maybe add some mood lighting and a kilt.

He turned when he saw me, gave me two finger guns, “New girl. Are you Kody?”

“Sure am.”

“Wesley Barker. Call me Wes. We’ll have your interview in the library across the hall.”

I found my new favorite room – wall-to-wall books and relics – directly opposite the office. While I waited for him, I browsed books on Earth birds, ecology, biology, animal behavior, environmental sciences, anthropology, and even geology. Old copies of books on the Falkland Islands and obscure dots of land on the southern coast of Australia were lovingly arranged by topic. On the next shelf there was a parallel for otherworlders. Otherworld had fewer books because much less of it had been explored, but there were diagrams, artworks, and taxidermy in the gaps between the books.

Wes sat on one side of the table and I reluctantly took a seat across from him, turning back and forth to scan shelves, to make notes for later.

“Have you ever been to the park before?” Wes said, forcing his outrageous hair into a bun. He had a line of grease going down his collared shirt, a weird mixture of a put-together professional and a humble laborer. We were sort of similar in that way. I brushed a spot of dirt from my shorts.

“I came a lot as a kid. Almost every week.”

“Get bored?”

“Went to college.”

He made a face, “Worst three months of my life.”

I laughed.

A woman appeared in the doorway – all legs, bright-eyed, older than me. She was high-energy, a little loud, a little too enthusiastic, “Oh, hey, are you Kody?”

I nodded.

“I’m Whitney. Nice to meet you. Wes and I are going to interview you – and Nava, when she gets here. I saw her walking up.”

Wes had the opposite vibe. Calm, no rush. He produced a knife and started picking at his shorts under the table. “Tore a pocket,” he said, maybe realizing it was weird.

Whitney sat beside him. “I’ve been looking for you all morning.”

Wes shrugged. “There was a problem with the fish launcher.”

She sighed, smiling at me, sitting quietly. I was hoping she would ask him to elaborate, because I had questions about the nature of the fish launcher.

Another woman joined us, this one with dark brown skin and intricate patterns tattooed into one side of her shaved head. She had a phone in her hand, texting, as she sat on Wes’ other side. She tapped for a moment longer, and then tucked her phone away, giving a small wave and a forced smile. “Hi.”

“And this is Nava,” Whitney said, after a long, thoughtful silence, probably hoping Nava would introduce herself. “I’ll give you a little context on us to start. I curate the Earth collection here at Werner. I’m responsible for the day-to-day welfare of Earth animals and all the staff who care for them – so, movements, propagation, diets, all that good stuff. Jack Redford, who has not graced us with his presence, is the curator of the Otherworld collection. Nava is the head keeper under him. You might be starting out in my department, depending on how everything goes, and then move on to the Otherworld department after that.”

She gave no introduction for Wes, and he said nothing about it.

Whitney said, “We all looked over your resume. It’s pretty impressive for someone your age. Duke Otherworld Program – with honors. Start off by telling us about yourself.”

“Duke?” Wes said, clearly the exception to the ‘we all,’ “I heard they got proto-simians in from the University of California.”

Whitney shot him a look.

I said, “I mostly worked with the proto-avian species. It was a whole thing with the simians – health protocols, screenings, all that jazz.”

“So you like birds, then?”

“Oh, yeah.”

He narrowed his eyes, recognition flooding him, “Kody Mills. Kody. Mills. Ko-dy Mills. You worked on the aviary design for the tree hawks at Duke, right?”

It was my only claim to fame, my proudest accomplishment. I was glowing. “Yes.”

“Very cool,” Wes said. “We have tons of cold-blooded otherworlders, but no simians. If you like birds, this is gonna be paradise for you. Tony is an ornithologist. His whole world is birds, birds, birds.”

“I got into birds because of him,” I said.

He smiled, “Same.”

A brief lull, and then Whitney said, “Why did you apply here, for this internship?”

I had this answer rehearsed. “I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. Tony Werner’s work on Otherworld is just… it was a big part of my life, and the whole reason I started studying animals. I was hoping if I was good enough I might get hired one day.”

“It’s very competitive. Internships typically last six months and our interns are evaluated every two months. When the six months is up, you either get let go with a completed internship, have the option to extend your internship another six months, or you get offered a permanent position as a keeper, if you fit in well enough.”

It sounded like a warning, but there was really only one way to move forward for me. I was going to get a permanent job at Werner. I had to.

A long silence followed her words.

Whitney was flipping through my resume. She had some parts highlighted, a few notes written down. Wes was resting his chin on his fist, watching me. Nava was staring past me at one of the bookshelves, completely checked out of this interview. I studied the tattoos on her head, trying to work out what the patterns were – it almost looked like a map, sketched out in bright blue ink.

Wes broke the silence. “What fieldwork have you done?”

I dug into the details of my field training, staying focused for about ninety seconds before I went off on a tangent about dropping a frog and then chasing it through a stream in Panama. Wes was fully engaged, waiting until I stalled out to ask a few more specific questions, prying into my background – finishing by inquiring about how I finally caught the frog.

“I threw my shirt at it,” I said.

“Very nice,” Wes said. Once he was satisfied, he sat back in his chair, drumming his hand on the table, “You guys wanna ask anything else?”

Whitney shook her head, “I’m good if you guys are.”

Nava glanced at him, glanced at me, “Nope.”

Wes said, “Nice. I think that about does it. We’ll give you a call if you’re a good fit for this internship. Keep your phone on.”