CINNAMON
HAIR ON FIRE
“Who’s afraid of the future?”
Cinnamon Jones sucked a deep breath and raced downhill in the dark on fast hybrid wheels. Almost 1:00 AM and still on the bike path, miles from her bed. Shooting-Star was lost, or there’d been an accident, or worse, some rough crew had snatched her. The SOS was unclear. Shooting-Star had taken to wandering at night, keeping an eye on stray goats and suspicious drones. Maybe it was no big deal.
Cinnamon’s nerves were scrambled. Why was this happening right before Festival? She needed to rehearse. She needed to sleep. The eight-bin trailer attached to her bike rattled in protest as she picked up speed. She’d done Wheel-Wizards’ deliveries all day, roving the Pioneer Valley, from Electric Paradise and the Co-Op farms to the hill towns. She was wasted. Her headlight blinked and dimmed, needing a charge, still—
Cinnamon zoomed by downed cables about to spark a fire, flood walls ready to leak sludge, and a twisted body caught on a smart electric fence. Bear? Big person? She swallowed a shriek. Whoever climbed up into a 10,000-volt current was already dead meat. After she found Shooting-Star, she’d alert Valley Security—a private firm offering premiere services in Western Mass since the Water Wars. Game-Boy and his Back-From-The-Dead Crew would also want to investigate and Indigo’s Vamp-Squad too. They were more of a neighborhood watch; still, keeping everybody and their mama righteous was a 24/7 gig. Cinnamon resisted irritation. “We save ourselves, Bruja. No Deus ex Machina to the rescue.”
Bruja was fine with that and charged ahead, a black-and-white Border Collie blur. Bruja was committed to each step, each breath. No other place she’d rather be. She tracked Shooting-Star and yapped at Cinnamon to keep up. The Circus-Bots were loaded in the Wheel-Wizards trailer, farting and wheezing, slowing her down. Parking the trailer was a bad idea. Cyber-thugs usually avoided Cinnamon’s tech. She had a horror rep on the Darknet. Messing with her Bots was like doom scrolling and calling down the wrath of the gods. A new gang had hit the scene, though. They might get bold and snatch the Circus-Bots. That would be cataclysmic.
The bike path plunged into mist, a silvery ribbon that caught the March moonlight. Cinnamon zigzagged through hulking shadows who sported long limbs and spooky crowns—new leaves were sprouting. Golden owl eyes peered from hollows. Crows huddled on branches and posed as clumps of darkness.
Bruja grumble-growled, smelling danger her human didn’t see. She jumped on a stone bench and tasted the air. The bench read: You’re Half Way There! Take A Break! Take a Breath! Cinnamon screeched to a halt between lilac bushes and a Wheel-Wizards porta-john. Her rayon tunic was drenched in dew and sweat, and bamboo pedal pushers clung to muscled thighs. She clawed damp salt-and-pepper braids from her face, licked plum-colored lips, and scanned for trouble.
No storm wind, yet trees smacked their branches together so hard, leaves rained down on her. Only the antique cell-tower tree with its antennae leaves and cement roots was unmoved. Trees usually whispered secrets to themselves and swept up starlight and car exhaust without complaint. Tonight, despite still air, the wooden giants creaked and groaned. They sounded angry, desperate. Horror movie trees on a tear about …
“OK, OK,” Cinnamon muttered. She had to keep her ImagiNation in check.
Bruja yapped and paced between the bushes and the horror trees.
“What?” Cinnamon said. “Is Shooting-Star here somewhere?”
Bruja licked her chops, a paw in the air. The Circus-Bots burbled from their trailer bins. Bruja jumped up and slobbered on them, her favorite squeaky toys ever. Several years ago, Cinnamon did dumpster dives with Bruja and fashioned a Chinese Dragon, an Anishinaabe Thunderbird, and a West African mer-woman, Mami Wata, from broken junk nobody wanted. These AI clown-spirits—sacred fools—were tech fantasia for the Next World Festival. Cinnamon had more stamina back then. She was scientist, artiste, and hoodoo conjurer doing a sci-fi carnival jam to honor the ancestors and celebrate new life. Right.
“You guys picking up more distress calls?” Cinnamon talked to the Circus-Bots.
No answer. They were powered down to sentinel-mode, low energy yet alert—slicksters like the crows, they’d folded in on themselves and posed as compacted trash. LED eyes glowed blue and red, greedy for data. They repeated Shooting-Star’s SOS on speaker, a jumble of Mavis Staples’s and Chaka Khan’s funky music:
I need you, you need me
Ain’t nobody loves me better
Why would Shooting-Star broadcast such a muddled SOS?
Cinnamon’s heart was skipping beats. Two years of peace had lulled her. Then last week the net was abuzz over burglaries in Electric Paradise. Folks weren’t content to hack in; they stole hardware too. What if bold desperados decided to kidnap the Circus-Bots? What if they tortured her AI clowns for secret code the Bots didn’t know? Origin code. Bots couldn’t explain themselves. (Who could?) High-tech gangstas should kidnap Cinnamon. But nobody really knew who she was. She barely remembered her glorious gearhead self. How soon before enterprising wonks sussed her out?
Bruja was still sorting scents, mapping the dark.
“Hey, girl, the sooner we find Shooting-Star, the sooner we rehearse.”
Bruja whined. Fingers of mist drifted up from the Connecticut River, possibly blunting the scent trail. Clouds obscured the moon, and the Circus-Bots rattled their bins. Their eyes blinked on and off, fireflies sparking in the mist. They were as agitated as Cinnamon. The wind snarled in the bushes and slammed a trash can against the porta-john. The door swung open. While Bruja figured their next move, Cinnamon marched over to take a piss. She groped in the dark for the bamboo wipes. Nothing.
“Scheiße!” she cursed in German, and fumbled in her fanny pack.
Two years ago, when she was taking a pee break at a porta-john near the old auto shop on Route Ten, there were no wipes. Back then, Game-Boy and crew were wannabe gangstas. They charged in, flaunting high-tech weapons as big as her bike, straight out of an old Schwarzenegger movie, TermiNation. Cinnamon and a few other Wheel-Wizards had zip except tee shirts they were giving away at Festival: Thank the Trees for the Air You Breathe.
Game-Boy had planned to ambush Indigo Hickory, a runaway camping in a dumpster and dealing cheap weed, for half the legal pot-shop price. Before any damage was done, Game-Boy’s crew fell out, catatonic, at Indigo’s feet, like someone switched off their video-game force. Eyes rolled up; tongues were sticks of wood and muscles squishy rubber. Dance of the dead, they all fell down. For no good reason. Only Game-Boy was left standing. He lurched around the bodies of his boys, gibbering off the beat.
At first Cinnamon imagined leaving the young thugs in the dirt. Her second thoughts were more charitable. The other Wheel-Wizards loaded Game-Boy’s comatose crew into their trailers and biked them to the free Co-Op Clinic at the Ghost Mall. Saints. Cinnamon ended up hauling Game-Boy and drug dealer Indigo. Hooray for second thoughts … Since that raid/rescue, Cinnamon always carried bamboo wipes with her.
“Game-Boy and Indigo play in our show now!” Cinnamon shouted as she exited the porta-john. Bruja wagged her tail. “So, I refuse to think the worst of everybody and everything.” Hard work recently. The hinge on the porta-john was trying to fall off. Cinnamon used the trash can to hold the door shut. “Which way to Shooting-Star?”
Bruja darted onto a footpath that ended at a swamp. Cinnamon pedaled slowly over uneven ground until her rig was invisible from the bike path, even if the moon came back out. She dismounted, turned off her lights, and staggered. The darkness was thick, and the ground and sky seemed to trade places. She’d felt dizzy all day. Bruja jabbed a cold nose in her crotch and steadied her. Cinnamon stayed close to Bruja as they stumbled along the path. Sneaky roots tried to trip her. Branches reached out to smack her face and butt. A cloud of insects flew in her mouth and nose. She spit them out.
“I’m too old for this late-night action adventure.”
After what might have been five or twenty-five minutes of foggy darkness, Cinnamon halted. Bruja tugged her sleeve and nipped at her ankles.
“I don’t know how much further I can walk in the dark.”
Bruja raced toward faint blinking lights. A little girl wrapped in a blanket wore a tiara of flashing orbs. Her arms were draped around Shooting-Star-Bot, her face pillowed against the Bot’s soft tresses. Bruja wagged her tail, nothing in the world better than FINDING LOST THINGS. An almost full moon broke through the fog. Cinnamon gulped deep breaths to counter the last hour’s adrenaline surge.
Shooting-Star-Bot was a roving guard looking out for Cinnamon’s farm—not a lot of complicated code, elementary warn-and-shield routines. Powered up and on the move, she looked like a boulder with her hair on fire. Low energy, sitting at the edge of the swamp, she passed for a piece of sky that fell long ago and then became moss-covered Earth landscape. Nobody noticed her, a perfect spy-bot.
Bruja licked the girl’s face. She jerked awake and scrambled away from doggy concern. “It’s all right, honey,” Cinnamon said. “She won’t bite you.”
Doubting this, the poor child tried to shrink into her muddy blanket. She was plump, darker than Cinnamon, and had a swirl of cornrows and ribbons on her head.
“We won’t hurt you, OK? We’re the rescue team, answering an SOS.”
“Uh-huh.” The girl wanted to make a run for it. Bruja blocked her.
“What you doing out so late?” It was 12:46 AM. Late for a kid and for Cinnamon getting up at 5:00 AM to do a Ghost Mall delivery run. “Tomorrow’s a big rehearsal and I’m not ready. We should both be in bed.”
Bruja licked a scrape on the girl’s chin. This engendered a halfhearted, “Ew,” which Bruja ignored. She put a paw in the girl’s lap and nuzzled her.
“Trying to steal my dog?”
“I’m not doing nothing.” The girl had a tiny, high voice.
“She likes you. I call her Bruja. What’s your name?”
The girl hunched her shoulders and leaned into doggy comfort.
“You from the Ghost Mall?” No Co-Op farmer let their kids run around here after dark. Farmer kids knew better anyhow. Cinnamon stepped closer. “Flood refugee? Or what, an Electric Paradise stray?”
The girl stroked Bruja’s back. “Uhm…”
“You don’t know where you’re from and you don’t have a phone to call somebody, do you?” Cinnamon resisted impatience and patted the Bot’s fiber-optic tresses. “Shooting-Star is a good friend of mine.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Shooting-Star?”
“That’s her name. She broadcast an alert, then went silent—stealth-mode for tricky situations.”
“Oh. Yeah. Tricky.”
“Bruja tracked you down. She’s sniffing out your secrets now, but don’t worry. She won’t tell on you.” Cinnamon pulled up Shooting-Star’s control panel and sent a message to Back-From-The-Dead Crew and Vamp-Squad to meet at the sugar shack ASAP. They traced lost kids and reunited refugee families. Neighborhood heroes! Cinnamon routed the Bot’s remaining battery power into locomotion. She’d check the camera feed and shield routines later.
“Is your stomach grumbling at you?” Cinnamon held out the last of her Naughty Nuggets. “My great-aunt’s world-famous recipe—vegan crunch passing for chicken.” Bruja drooled. The girl shook her head. “I made these fresh this morning. You like honey mustard or maple barbecue sauce? Bruja likes them plain.”
Bruja gobbled one in a flash. Before she wolfed a second one, the girl snatched it. She eyed Cinnamon and chewed slowly. She licked her fingers, wiped her mouth, and whispered, “Thank you.” Maybe very soft was her normal voice. “That was good.”
Cinnamon smiled. “What I tell you?”
The girl poked the fiber-optic tresses. “Why Shooting-Star?”
Cinnamon sat down beside her and leaned into the Bot. “My grandparents told me that people used to think comets were wild women roaming between the stars with their hair on fire in the sun.”
“On a rocket ship?”
“No. Just so. Flying free.” They stared at a trail of stars. “My grandmother, Miz Redwood, said she tried flying a few times, out in space, took Granddaddy Aidan along. They rode stolen heartbeats. He swore these were grand trips. I never knew whether to believe them or not.” Cinnamon grinned. “Miz Redwood seemed like a woman who could ride the night on a heartbeat. Granddaddy Aidan too.”
“I wouldn’t try that if I was you.”
“Why is that?”
“Space is very cold and there’s no air and my mom says these are end times.” The girl was near tears. “She and Daddy wished they never had me.”
Cinnamon rubbed her face, suddenly weary. She put an arm around the child. “My mother used to say that nonsense to me too, when I was young. She didn’t mean it.”
The girl shivered—maybe her mom meant it. Bruja sprawled in their laps, looking expectant. The girl scratched raggedy black ears speckled with silver. Night-sky ears. She talked on to the dog. “Mom and Dad are always fighting. ’Cause they had me way too young and ain’t in love anymore, and I’m too bad to handle since the world’s gone to shit.”
Cinnamon patted her shoulder. “This world has always been a hard rock, but Bruja don’t like everybody. She knew right away you weren’t stealing my Shooting-Star.”
“’Cause I wasn’t.”
“‘Bruja’ means ‘witch’ in Spanish. She’d have bitten your head off if you weren’t a good person.” Bruja barked at the truth of this. Her fangs glistened in the moonlight. She flipped on her back, wiggling and pawing the air. Cinnamon rubbed a mottled tummy. “Bruja can always tell the good eggs and she found you, didn’t she?”
“Yeah…” The girl stroked Bruja’s stomach too.
“Bruja has the sight for finding lost things or maybe the nose. How old are you?”
“My dad says I’ll be a decade next year, in December.” Eight years and some change, yet trying to skip to the other side of these mad times. “I’m a Sagittarian.”
“Almost a whole decade. Wow.” Cinnamon whistled.
The girl smiled, proud of her years. Bruja jumped up and barked, ready to move. The girl stood up, clutching a knapsack almost as big as she was. Bruja wagged her butt.
“I’m Cinnamon Jones. What do they call you?”
“Zaneesha Williams.” The girl bit the inside of her cheek. “I’m not really that bad. Mom says she’s mad all the time, ’cause of hell and high water.”
“She’ll be so glad to see you. Where is she?”
“She got a day and night shift in Electric Paradise from the Utopia App, taking care of baby animals.” Zaneesha sniffled. “We have a tent, sleeping bags, except nobody’s s’posed to camp there, so after Mom left, I heard crying and kids getting snatched from tents. Ours is by the trees, always. I grabbed my backpack and blanket like we practiced and snuck out to find Dad. He don’t live with us. He’s Valley Security working a checkpoint and keeping everybody safe, a big zigzag walk.”
“Mm-hmm.” Cinnamon nodded and waited for more.
“The checkpoint was gone or … I couldn’t find him. Men with flashlights chased after me. They said they had jelly beans, like I’d let ’em catch me for candy. I’m not a baby. Shooting-Star bumped into me and covered me in moss hair. They ran right by us.”
Cinnamon’s heart banged in her chest. She wanted to scream and rage, but that wouldn’t pay the rent. “Shield and warn. How about that.”
“When we didn’t hear ’em anymore, Shooting-Star played music, like Grandma listened to. I ain’t seen her in a while. Shooting-Star and I walked till my legs hurt. I sat down to rest.” Zaneesha yawned and almost toppled over. “Standing up is hard.”
Copyright © 2024 by Andrea Hairston
