Free Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan

neatly cut cavity where the sex had been, full of drips and runnels like a grotto in the hill caves. Its eye was still sealed, its mouth torn partly open. Brain-fluid and matter ran down either side of the grey-stopped nose, in the high sun.
    My own head felt light and hollow. Good, was the only thought in it. My heart thumped hard, and burned red. Crush the whole town. And the plan , too, and everyone on it. Do that.
    Three small, ornamental picture frames appeared in my mind, around three faces—Jumi’s, Dochi’s, Jupi’s—all looking downward, or to the side. Far overhead, guilt whipped at me as always, but it barely stung. I was deep in my insides; against my cheek and ear, some black inner organ, quite separate from my body’s functioning, turned and gleamed.
    It’s only fair.
    The beast managed, though one-legged, to take a kind of step. But it sagged towards the missing toe; it gripped and tried to hold itself upright with a toe that wasn’t there. Then the weakened knee gave, and the creature jerked and wobbled tremendously above us. And fell—of course it fell. But it fell away from us, stretching itself out across the farther plans .
    And it lay still.
    There were several moments of silence. Nothing moved but eyes.
    Then there was an explosion around me, a fountain of striped shirts and shouting mouths, a surge forward.
    I knew what they meant; I myself was hot-bowelled and shaking with relief. But I didn’t surge or shout or leap; I couldn’t quite believe. So vast a creature and so strange, and yet the life in it was one-moment-there, next-moment-gone, just as for a dog under a bus-wheel, or a chicken that a jumi pulls the neck of. And the world adjusts around it like water; as soon as the fear is gone, as soon as the danger is passed, normalness slips in on all sides, to cover up that any life was ever there.
    The plan -workers rushed in. People came exclaiming into the yards from the town—those who had not seen had certainly heard, had felt the ground jump as the beast collapsed. Women and children crowded at the plan gates, and some of the little boys were allowed to run in, because they were not bad luck like the girls and women.
    Lots of people—and I was one of these—felt we had to approach the beast, and touch it. Lots of us felt compelled to walk its length and see its motionlessness end to end for ourselves, see its dead face.
    ‘Oh, oh,’ I said, to no one, as I walked, as I stroked the skin. ‘All my Jupi’s careful work.’
    All the plans from 16 to 13 were cracked clean through. The beast had crushed plan 13’s steamer-shed to splinters, its trypots to copper pancakes; it had filled plan 12’s hair house to the rafters with brain-spheres—dead spheres, grey-purplish spheres, spheres that held nothing unexpected.
    The stretcher-men went to and fro with their serious faces, bearing their serious loads. The bosses withdrew; theirs was the most urgent work. The rest of us could do nothing until they had bargained our jobs back into being, weighed up the damage and set it against the value of the beast and parcelled everything out appropriately. Yet we couldn’t leave, could only wander dazed, and examine, and exclaim.
    Finally they made us go, because some of the day-jobbers were found snipping pieces of hair, or taking chunks of eyeball or somesuch, and they put ribbons and guards all around the beast and brought the soldiers in to clear the plans and keep them clear.
    So Jupi and Dochi and I, we walked, still all wobbly, back to our uncrushed home. There was Jumi, waiting to be told, and Jupi described how he had seen it, and Dochi how it had looked from his position up on the forelimb, and I told her yes, between them that was pretty much how it had seemed to me. There was too much to say, and yet none of it would tell properly what had happened, even to people who’d been there too.
    Still people tried and tried. They came and went—we came and went ourselves—and everyone