Free Trading Rosemary by Octavia Cade Page A

the hell am I supposed to
do
with it now?” she snapped at the cat, his eyes winking up at her, reflecting in the kitchen lights. The trouble with neighbors . . . word would get around that Rosemary had a wild cat about the place and starved, it would go after native birds. Of course it wasn’t starved, just good at looking feral. Good at behaving monstrously to poor defenseless creatures—although the penguin had left a sharp slice across the nose as a parting gift. Rosemary felt no sympathy as she held the cat down and doused it with iodine.
    He scratched her, sharp and indignant. The iodine stung her as well as him. “Bugger off then, you little bastard,” Rosemary said, and there was real feeling behind it.
    The penguin stayed in the freezer for a long time, and every time Rosemary caught sight of its blue feathers through the freezer bag, the staring, milky eyes, she had been irritated. She began to wish she had buried it as soon as she had found it splayed across her floor. Surely it was only paranoia that made her want to hide it as quickly as possible, but that same paranoia kept it safely buried under tuna steaks and lamb chops. The little penguin ghost hung over her, wheedling and threatening in turn, gazing mournfully at the ocean. Eventually she tired of its mute accusations and fed it to the cat. He didn’t like it, but Rosemary refused to give him anything else until the penguin was gone. It took an entire fortnight, and the birds in her garden suffered for his disgust. They were smaller than he was, weaker, and the cat had so little sense of shame that Rosemary would see him mooning at her through the glass of the living room door, a delicate wax-eye green in his mouth. He dropped them unmarked on her carpet, although some mornings brought only feathers.
    How Rosemary wished he would pick on something that would fight back! And not as ineffectually as the penguin, but something that would put him off his downy dinners for good, freeing his mistress from the obligation of cleaning up after him. Yet the only bird she could think of that he wouldn’t challenge were the albatrosses that sometimes flew over the coast and circled the fishing boats. On sunny days, when she needed to feel her own freedom from the cloistered walls of the library, Rosemary would barter to spend the day on one of those boats. As a child it had been her favorite treat, and she saw no reason to deny herself as an adult.
    When quicksilver fish were netted and brought to deck, shiny-scaled and scattered over the salt-wet wood, Rosemary would watch from her perch at the bow, resplendent in a yellow parka. She loved to see albatrosses drop to the boat; their still wings a dark scythe against the sky. Protected, they swooped for the fish, were permitted their tithe. Giant beaks sliced through flesh, tore and gulped in ruthless greed. Dark eyes watched Rosemary, fearless, and fascinated she kept well away from those razor beaks, the heavy wings each as long as her arm.
    It was their freedom that appealed to her, that and the disdain with which they floated in currents that slapped Rosemary’s face, chafed it raw, and rocked the boat from side to side. Air cracked in the sails, waves smacked at the hull.
    She would have liked to take them home with her, to circle her house in stormy weather and remind her of the wideness of the world, the world that wings could take her to, the freedom those wings would give her. Coined albatrosses were nearly unheard of—bad luck to kill an albatross, it was worse to capture them—although there were several known copies on the black market, and Rosemary had purchased one of them. She found—but she would never have admitted it—that the false freedom of albatross flight in her library couldn’t match the reactions of her own escape to the fishing boats, her own identification with the bird. This gave her disquiet, and so she dreamed of an albatross that flew home to her, a garden of better birds,