Drop City

caught fire. “The dogs,” he said.
    And then it came to her: the dogs were silent. Two days at their stakes and no one home--they should have had their noses to the sky, expressing their impatience and their joy. But they were silent. Worse: they were lying still in the weeds, the chains like nooses at their throats. And when she and Sess got there, when they'd beached the canoe and sprinted up the bank with no breath left in them, the carcasses were already stiffening round the ragged dark openings where the bullets had gone to shelter.

Drop City
    PART THREE
    DRUID DAY
    One pill makes you larger,
    And one pill makes you small.
    And the ones that mother gives you
    Don't do anything at all.
    --Grace Slick, “White Rabbit”

Drop City
    11
    Star didn't have a mantra on this particular morning, no nonsense syllables or song lyrics ricocheting around her head while the sun sang in the windows over the sink and thirty-two fresh-cracked and beaten eggs fluffed in the pan. Or pans. Four of them, cast-iron, black as char--four pans, four burners, all balky. Posters climbed the walls, four Beatles, three Youngbloods, five Rolling Stones. Basil, rosemary, tarragon and lemongrass. Clay pots. A big spill of green. She was crumbling goat cheese over each of the pans, the fragrance rising, the spatula working, fold and stir, fold and stir. At her elbow, the chopping block, and this morning it had a wet sheen to it, the residue of the tomatoes, peppers and onions she and Merry had diced while Lydia squeezed oranges and Maya pulled biscuits from the oven. On the table, the tin plates were stacked high and the silverware awaited the rush in two big plastic tubs that had once held Blue Bonnet margarine. For napkins, there was a roll of paper towels, just like at Camp Minewa.
    Numbers were important this morning, that's what it was--she was into numbers, two dogs stretched out on the floor, four women in the kitchen (and she wasn't going to call them _chicks,__ because that was just stupid, that was demeaning and belittling, no matter what Ronnie said), two goats under the tree, forty-three people lined up for breakfast and one sun, fat and glowing, making a magical thing of the flat black grid of the screen door. She scrambled the eggs, one pan, two pans, three pans, four, the scent of the onions competing with the biscuits until the whole room was dense with it and Jiminy stuck his head in the door. “Ready yet?” he wanted to know. “One more minute,” she said, and she loved this, this place and this moment, more than she'd loved anything in her life, “sixty short tiny little expiring seconds--you can start counting them off on your fingers.”
    To Merry, at her shoulder, she said, “Cats and chicks, whoever invented that--I mean, those terms? Isn't it stupid? I mean cats are predatory, they're tough and--”
    “Unreliable?” Merry said, leaning in with a smile and the crudely rolled, fat-in-the-middle joint they'd been sharing. She held it to Star's lips while Star plied the spatula and finessed the pans. “Always catting around? Spraying the furniture? Sharpening their claws?”
    “Right, that's what I mean. They name sports teams after cats, the Tigers, the Nittany Lions, but what are chicks? Little fluffy helpless things that come out of eggs.”
    “But cute, right?”
    “I don't want to be cute.”
    Merry was cutting bread into inch-thick slices. Her hair was involved with her hands, the cutting board, and she whipped it back with a flick of her neck. “What do you want to be, then--tough?”
    The eggs tumbled out of the pans and into a matching pair of big fluted ceramic bowls lovingly fabricated by Harmony and Alice, Drop City's resident potters. Star shifted her face away from the swirl of steam and called out, “It's ready!” then tuned back in. “Yeah, sure--I'll settle for tough. It's a whole lot better than helpless. Or predatory, maybe. Predatory's even better.”
    “Like a cat?”
    But that was too much, and they were both giggling and rubbing at their eyes and the suddenly itching tips of their noses as they served up eggs, first to Jiminy, and then to all the rest of their brothers and sisters, as Drop City and special guests filed by, tin plates in hand. Jiminy was almost always first in line because he was the hungriest, skinny as a concentration camp survivor but he could out-eat anybody Star had ever seen, including her brother Sam, who played left tackle on the high school football team