The Refrigerator Monologues

He rushed over to me, knocking over his coffee onto an ethics textbook (onto a first edition copy of Jane Eyre). “No, no, Jules, that’s not what I meant. I mean . . . you’re really something else. You can’t buy a Julia Ash off the shelf anywhere, at any price. I’m a mockingbird. You’re the HMS Beagle.”

I still wasn’t like everyone else, not really. I wouldn’t find the end of what I could do until years later, at the edge of a white dwarf star.

• • •

1:51 AM

I met everyone I ever loved at St. Ovidius.

We got to pick new names when we graduated. My friends stopped being Henry Hart and Lachlan Reed and Lana Kowalski and became a pantheon: the Silver Siren, Zigzag, Pell-Mell, the Maroon Marauder, Snow Queen, Whitewater, Paravox, Ha’Penny. Hal Cyon. Bruce Force. Crucible.

Henry. My Crucible.

After graduation, Professor Yes called a group of us into her office. The melted chunks of the bronze phoenix I’d exploded still sat on her desk. We sat down—me, Crucible, Bruce Force, Hal Cyon, Zigzag, and Paravox. I was the only girl. I tried not to let it bother me. It was time to take the next step, Professor Yes told us. To use our powers for good instead of spinning our wheels. She was putting together a team. The best of us. To fight, not crime or mustached evildoers or endemic social inequality, but other mockingbirds. Mockingbirds who wanted to expose us or enslave everyday normals like our parents. Or just plain rule the world, like some people had always done, long before any of them could fly. In time, there’d be dozens of us, but just then, in that office, while I stared at the clumps of phoenix on her mahogany desk with the smell of green apples swimming in my brain, we were only six. The Millennial Men. We were going to make a better world.

For a while, that’s just what we did. Hal Cyon trapped Doctor Nocturne in a pocket dimension stuffed inside the blue whale in the Museum of Natural History. Crucible burned down the lair of the Rat Bastard with his army of mutated rodents inside. Zigzag got to Victor Volatile’s Boomsday Device just in time and cut the wires with his razor breath. The Clock of Ages changed the timeline so that none of us ever met—and Paravox changed it back with one arm tied behind his back. Bruce Force just beat the hell out of anyone and chomped his cigar while he did it. I personally erased the eight-sided mind of the Arachnochancellor and disintegrated his webship. We battered Miasma in the streets of Guignol City while his mustard-gas golems hissed and spat under every stoplight. But mostly we fought Lodestone, Professor Yes’s nemesis, a mastermind right out of our textbooks, able to command stone from the depths of the earth and bent on bringing all mockingbirds under his control. Their war began long before any of us were born.

Of course, they always came back somehow. Doctor Nocturne rode that blue whale into a crowd of philanthropists and turned them all into philanthrozombies. Victor Volatile built a new laboratory on the moon. Lodestone always slipped through our fingers, his iron face disappearing back into the shadows. But that was the game. We grew strong. I grew strong. It made everyone nervous, but I couldn’t see why. Isn’t stronger better? Would they all have whispered like that if Bruce suddenly sprouted new powers? I doubted it. The world likes a big man punching things to get bigger and punch harder. But even Crucible got quiet when I came into a room by the time the whole disaster with Sergeant Pluto started darkening the edges of our little family portrait.

Some Sundays, I wonder why the Millennials agreed so easily to be Professor Yes’s personal matadors. They don’t call her that because she never says no to a child in need. They call her that because she can make anyone do whatever she likes. Say no to drugs; say yes to Professor Yes. Her psionic strength beats even mine. Of course she’d never do it.

That would be wrong.

She wouldn’t.

• • •

1:53 AM

By the Terrible No Good Very Cosmically Significant Day, I could fly.

Flying is weird. The first time I did it, I got airsick. Flying doesn’t feel like flying. It feels like the sky is inside you and hates the earth so much, it wants to rescue you. The worst thing is the cold. It’s brutal up there. My hair freezes, my eyebrows, my eyelashes—I have to thaw them slowly in the sauna or it shatters into a million dark red pieces. Flying in space is worse.

When I say the words flying in space, you don’t really think about it much. An action in a place. Right. Fine. Julia flew through space. But once you’ve snorted a line of physics and punched a hole in escape velocity, you’re not flying at all anymore. There’s no wind to ride, no storms to stow away on. Up there, you’re not a bird; you’re a ship. Your skin goes hard, crystalline, you stop needing to breathe, and your endocrine system shifts into propulsion mode. And you roar through the stars. There’s no up or down or end to anything. Eddies of radiation and stray gravity and microscopic debris spin around you like ribbons on a maypole. It hurts the whole time.

Only Zigzag and I can do it, out of the lot of us. But Zigzag was born that way—a nuclear-powered engine in a pixieish boy’s body. I just kept going one day and by the time I looked behind me, I had made it past the Kuiper Belt. The point is, none of it would ever have happened to Zig, who’d been best friends with space since he was playing with plastic soldiers three feet above his mother’s backyard.

We were coming back from victory on Mars. Lodestone had built a new city under a diamond dome on the red sand of Isidis Planitia, a city where mockingbirds could live in peace—so long as they lived by his law. We pulled down his statue onto the long red central boulevard of Lodria Prime, and I swear I only thought for a moment of how nice it might be to live in this place, where we wouldn’t have to hide. Lodestone himself escaped into a maze of underground tunnels, but all in all, we

’d had a very satisfactory Monday. Zigzag and I raced each other through the black while the others napped on their fancy Falk Industries rocket, fitted out with mints on every pillow. The sun winked and sparkled on the hem of Zig’s violet cape, on the glass edge of the Earth, on the crags of the moon. I wasn’t paying attention. I was happy. I ran right into it, like a deer and an eighteen-wheeler.

Later, Professor Yes said it must have been a solar flare, but that’s bullshit. I caught something up there, but it didn’t come from the sun. I felt it slide over me and around me and into me, the color of hunger, the color of the future and the past, the color of the Galapagos Sea.

Its name was Charybdis.

I shivered electric. I tried to call out to Zigzag, to the Millennial rocket disappearing far ahead of me, but all that came out of my mouth was fire and geometry. I vaporized into infinite particles, each cell of me, briefly, fully sentient and screaming.

I rematerialized in my parents’ living room. They were at work. Only the dog saw me. Hard winter sunlight streamed through windows I hadn’t seen in years. I turned on the radio; David Bowie told me to shut my mouth. I opened the cabinet—they still had the clay mug I’d made in second grade. It was shaped like an elephant, but the trunk broke off in the kiln. I made myself a cup of coffee, but when I tried to drink it, my two-creams-one-sugar turned into red Martian dust. I poured Mars out into the sink. A thin white stalk spooled up out of the sand and opened into a flower on fire.

“Huh,” I said.

Everything had changed.

• • •

1:55 AM

At first, it was all fantastic, just splendid, what a gift for the cause! Professor Yes was perfectly happy to wheel me out on the showroom floor, a mockingbird who’d flown past all her limits and become an eagle, a hawk, a 747. The metaphors fell down. I was the biggest gun she had, and, for a while, she aimed me everywhere. There were no rules. I reached out one hand toward Sergeant Pluto and he disintegrated into a hundred shades of the color green. I wept and cities rebuilt themselves. I laughed and Victor Volatile turned into a new inland sea somewhere in North Dakota. Nobody had a problem with the new Julia as long as she did their chores for them. Kept the world nice and tidy, took the rubbish out, dusted off the minimalist black-and-white discussion piece morality had become.