“It is,” said Mam.
Then Feral looked at himself, moving closer to the mirror to get a better look. “I pretty,” he said, smiling.
“And silly. Come on, get down,” said Mam.
Mam put them in cloths called drawers that covered their privates, then in stretchy cloth called tights, then thicker stretchy cloth called leggings, then an undershirt, a shirt, a sweatshirt, and a sweater.
Howling admired his reflection. “I’m a bear,” he said. “Fearsome and beautiful.” He loved his new slippers, made to look like bear feet. He stomped and stomped, then roared, beating his chest.
Mam pressed her lips against his ear, then nuzzled it with her nose. “You are. Y’all both look so gorgeous. Damn.”
She was about to start crying. Mam was always about to start crying.
Once, Howling had a nightmare where a coyote came in the night and fed on his face and his belly, then started on Feral. He called for Mam over and over, but in the dream she was the coyote.
Sometimes it seemed like there was a creature inside her, lurking, trying to bust through her bones, a demented birth. Mam would be a pile of skin and guts and skeleton, and the creature, clean and bright, would never know that she used to be a mam.
Animals had dead mams all the time. Howling had seen it happen. Orphaned fawns and cubs and hawks. Sometimes orphaned by Howling’s own hand. The child could hunt, yes, he could! Slingshot or arrow, he’d take down a mam bunny who surely had baby bunnies back in her den lonesome for milk.
* * *
EVERYTHING WAS NOISES. Everything was colors. It burned, all the smells and the stinks, all the flashing artifacts of the world. There was only one kind of bird here. Pigeons. Only one kind of animal. Squirrels. But what this place lacked in animals, it made up for in people, all sizes and colors and shapes and builds and dispositions. Yelling folks. Staring folks. Pinched-lipped folks. Mouth-open folks. Folks with big hats and folks who whistled at Mam from their big rolling beasts that stampeded along the concrete rivers.
“Why we in these clothes, Mam?” Feral asked. It was a good question. The clothing they’d had before was perfectly serviceable, no holes or nothing, and snuggly and warm.
“Because we got to try to blend in. It’s like camouflage.”
“Like chameleons?” Howling asked, impressed with his own knowledge. Mam had told him about most kinds of animals there were.
“Yes,” she said.
There were some pieces of the woods in this outside place. Howling saw them, stalks of wood, like trees without branches, shooting up so high into the sky. When Mam stopped the cart, he jumped and went running toward it and climbed. He needed to move. It had been a thousand years since he’d climbed a tree.
There was nary a branch on which to step up, so he had to shimmy and shimmy all the way to the top, poking his head in the space between the rope. He could hear Feral under him, huffing and puffing. His sibling was always copying him, and they both reached the top together, looking at the whole world. Like Mam had said, it did just go on forever, studded with dazzling, unfamiliar wonders.
“Look, Howling!” said Feral, pointing up, his white hand turned red in the cold. His breaths were white ringlets.
Howling turned his eyes toward the sky, where overhead a plane flew by. He’d heard them before, seen them, even, but never so clear as this, so close. He’d always thought them a kind of bird. It was clear now they were not.
“Children!”
Mam was calling. Had been for some time. In all his lust for the sky, he’d not heard. “What, Mam?” he said. “Come up!”
She couldn’t, though, not with her whole body always aching and sore, like a lame deer or a broke-winged bird. She used to chase him and Feral up trees all the time, but not lately.
“Please, God of Cain, come down! Right now!”
Feral groaned, but he worked himself downward. Once he’d made it several yards, Howling slid down after him, stopping himself whenever his feet were about to crash into Feral’s head.
It wasn’t just Mam there when they made it back down to the ground, but two other people, white people, but not white like Mam-white and Feral-white, a strange skinny white, all their features chiseled into a bony, sticklike sculpture. Hair straight as grass. Shade all wrong. They were white like the man who tried to burn him and Feral up. White like the white people in Mam’s stories.
They wore blue clothing, crisp and tight.
“Do you have some kind of ID?” one of them asked Mam.
“Not on me, no, I’m afraid,” Mam said, her face stern but calm. Her voice was wrong, stiff and strange and high, a copy of the person talking to her. Howling tucked himself behind her thighs, just like Feral did.