THE LAST MIDGARDIAN


LABELED


"Janey...Janey...," shrieked the familiar voice in her ear. Jane turned her head to the side to where her younger cousin lay beside her on the blanket.

"What?"

"There's something alive out there! I just saw something move!" Chrissy answered, the fear in her voice lowering her response to a tense whisper. Jane felt cold fingers dig into her shoulder as Chrissy clung to her.

"Where?" she whispered back. She scanned the desert sky overhead. In the darkness, meteors dripped across the sky like rain on a windshield, only broken by the silhouette of the distant mountains. Jane's dad and uncle were still arguing over how to position the telescope to find Venus. On another blanket, little Eliza lay curled up asleep on Aunt Jen's lap. It was too far past her bedtime to find a meteor shower as interesting as Chrissy and Jane did.

"There!" Chrissy answered, but failed to point her fingers to designate where she meant.

"Give me the binoculars so I can check," Jane said. Without sitting up, she tried to grab them from her cousin's hand but Chrissy's hand held them tight against her side. In her panic, she had not moved from her rigid position on the blanket.

"Don't move a muscle! It might eat me!"

"Eat you?"

"I heard it rustling in the bushes right there...then it jumped!" Chrissy breathed out. Jane heaved a sigh of relief mixed with disappointment.

"Chrissy, I thought you saw something move in the sky and I was going to be excited to see a UFO or something."

"Oh no. This is much worse. I think it was a mouse!"

"You're ridiculous. If it looked like a mouse then it was probably just one of the local kangaroo rats. They aren't going to hurt you."

"See! Rodents crossed with kangaroos and I'm not supposed to be freaked out? That's like something straight out of a nightmare!"

Jane sighed and sat up. She moved to stand but her cousin's hand caught hers.

" What are you doing?" Chrissy squeaked out.

"Rescuing you from your worst nightmare...and getting the Fritos," Jane answered. She disentangled herself from her cousin's grip and stood. Her back was sore from lying on the hard ground for so long. She stretched to try to get the blood flowing again. As she did, a small shadow scurried from the bushes and out of sight behind a rock.

"It's gone," Jane told her cousin. Chrissy visibly relaxed.

"Wait! Don't leave me here alone! What if it comes back?" Chrissy said and she jumped up to follow Jane to the folding table where the snacks were waiting. Jane grabbed the bowl of Fritos and took a crunchy handful before taking the binoculars from her cousin. The wrapper of the bag of Oreos crinkled as Chrissy struggled to get it open in the dark. Jane scanned the sky through the binoculars and barely caught the bright flash of the tale of a meteor in the lens. She grinned and kept searching.

"Do you really think you would be excited?" Chrissy asked between bites of Oreo.

"Excited for what?"

"You know. To see a UFO. I think it'd be terrifying," Chrissy said.

"I think it would be awesome! Imagine all we could learn or see out there!" Jane said and motioned to the vastness of the sky above them. In her young brain, she imagined all the swirling galaxies and distant planets teeming with exotic life forms and infinite possibilities. Her heart nearly swelled to bursting with her desire to see it all, or as much as she could fit into her lifetime, already insufficient for her oversized curiosity.

"No, thanks. What if they have mice the size of dinosaurs?" Chrissy asked.

"Then you'd better hope they are vegetarians!" Jane answered and both girls fell into a fit of giggles. They were interrupted when Chrissy's dad called them over to the telescope.

"Girls, come here! I finally found Jupiter," he said excitedly. Both girls dropped their snacks and ran over to see the King of the Planets.

oooooo


Every exhibit in the museum boasted a uniform placard on the lower left hand corner of the glass enclosures. If the meticulously maintained placard so much as tilted a centimeter askew, the Owner's frigid glare was enough to scatter the Keepers like frightened cockroaches until one managed to remedy the errant label.

Jane couldn't read them. She tried. She strained her eyes to clearly see the geometric shapes and patterns of lines, but the alien alphabet characters were incomprehensible to her Midgardian eyes. She could guess, though. They must have some system of taxonomy used to categorize their perception of the universe. Perhaps it was based on living and nonliving objects. Perhaps it was based on size and shape, or subsistence patterns, habitat, or locomotion. They could even be organized by "animal, vegetable, or mineral," and she wouldn't know the difference. She had no way to tell, but she knew she was one of the many things in the museum with a label.

What did hers say? Did it call her a "Midgardian" or a "Terran" or a "primitive humanoid being from the Aesir's extensive protectorate"? Was she identified by her native planet or solar system or her galaxy? She could imagine some alien version of Latin classifying her as a "female Homo sapien," but was her label limited to a scientific description or did it include some of the political and socio-historical context? Did it explain how she was "acquired " from Asgard? Did it display her earthly moniker of "Jane Foster," or her Aesir title, "Jannike, daughter of Luke" or did she lose all personal names completely upon waking in her cage?

During her initial months in Asgard, she was flattered to be given a name in their language. Heimdall's firm command of "Lady Jannike, you are required in the observatory," at first deceived her into thinking she belonged there. As months dragged into decades, she grew to miss hearing "Jane Foster" (even more than she missed coffee and Christmas and blue jeans). "Lady Jannike" became another way that Asgard rewrote her and emptied her of who she had once been. However, at least on Asgard she still had a name. Here, she doubted she received a designation more specific than "Specimen 35" or "Earthling AX4" or "Pink Bipedal Vertebrate Mammal".

This "loss of name" unsettled her so much she decided to give names to all her fellow exhibit mates that were more personal than descriptions of their physical characteristics. She called the giant butterfly "Scorpius" and the rounded, armadillo-like creature she named "Perseus." The tall, pale humanoid down the row was "Orion" and her nearest neighbor, the blue man, was now "Sagittarius". She sometimes caught a glimpse of "Draco," "Cepheus," and "Leo" when they woke and stretched their various limbs and antennae. She named them all as she saw them. Her view from her cage was limited, but whenever a new display came into sight, she tried to come up with a new, unique, and personal title. Sometimes she dreamt up backstories and personalities for them.

Scorpius came from a rainforest planet and was part of a colony of intelligent Lepidoptera who inhabited the canopy and fed on the verdant flora fed by the constant rain. The winged giant was caught by an exotic insect hunter armed with invisible nets and sold to the museum at a high price. Someday, Scorpius would be released again and would return to flutter above her beloved flowers again.

Perseus once loved to roll in the dirt and bask in the dual sun. He buried his mate's eggs in the soft soil of a blue-grassed planet and drank dew drops from orange leaves. He outlived a dust storm that engulfed half the planet and only survived when a passing traveler found him and nursed him back to health. He lived as cherished companion of the traveler for decades until that man's death parted them and Perseus was set adrift and eventually planted in the museum.

In this manner, Jane wrote their fictional biographies and tried to make their stories as cheerful as possible. It worked well - until she looked into the sorrowful eyes of her blue neighbor. One glance at the huddled figure of Sagittarius was enough to sap the optimism from all her fabrications like helium from a punctured balloon.

Sagittarius was like Jane. He was the last of his kind, the slowly dying remnant of an extinct people. There were no verdant forest canopies or benevolent travelers in his eyes. She could inscribe no joy into his past or his future and so she gave up trying.

Ursa Minor gave her no such difficulties. Even half-drugged and caged, the little creature was bursting with cheerful optimism. It lived across from Jane in a glass enclosure about half the size of her own. Ursa Minor was the size of a bulldog but it resembled a cross between a bear and a triceratops. It was as pink as bubblegum except for the overly large, beady black eyes in its head. The soft, rounded muzzle was framed by three horns and a fringe of bony protrusions covered in feathery scales. The four stubby legs ended in sharp claws which scratched at the air when it slept on its back. A long, horned tail curled and twisted on the floor of the cage and vibrated ever faster the more excited it became. Soft snuffling sounds and plaintive cries like the sound of a peacock accompanied its waking or hunger, but it chirped like a young cheetah when it was happy, which was most of the time.

Jane imagined that one day, when she managed to escape, she would take Ursa Minor with her and keep the cheerful creature with her to make her smile on rough days. She would share her Poptart corners with it and let it sleep on her couch on her favorite grey, fuzzy blanket. Ursa Minor, free of cages and sedatives, would frolic and learn to play fetch and chase its tail in circles till it rolled onto its back to sleep.

In the museum, Jane could always depend on two things: constant change and timeless monotony. Despite innumerable days spent across from Ursa Minor, the little creature was not permanent. One day Ursa failed to eat and the next she failed to wake. A Keeper came and poked and prodded and ran a scanner over Ursa before calling for the Owner. When he came, arguing and chattering with the three Keepers at his heels, he removed the limp, unmoving pink mass of fur and feathers and placed it on a cart. The cage was cleaned, the label was removed, and all lay empty for the next twelve meals.

Jane quietly placed all her daydreams of life with Ursa Minor into her least favorite place in her mind: the Box of Buried Dreams. It was the same box she kept her seventh grade softball season in and her tenth grade crush and her first rejected thesis and her final failed grant proposal. It was a dark and dreary box that she tried to keep the lid on as tightly as she could. She allowed the mental dust and cobwebs to thicken on its unopened lid as deep as the scrapbook hidden under great aunt Margery's guest room bed. She avoided looking into the empty cage as much as she could and pretended she didn't care that it was empty.

She realized that she cared when she woke to find it inhabited again. Neon green winged centipedes silently crawled and flew through the glowing cage. They did not chirp or vibrate their happy tails and they did not look at her with expressive little eyes. They could not be taught to fetch or sit beside her on the couch. She let three tears fall down her cheek for Ursa and then she curled into a ball and went to sleep, determined not to think of Ursa again.

She failed. It wasn't long before a new exhibit emerged on the shelf behind Ursa's old home. A Keeper came and pushed aside the jars of preserved eyes and claws and then moved the display of pinned insects a few feet higher on the grey wall behind. She carefully dusted the emptied space in the center stage of the shelf. Four meals later, the Keeper came with a box and began to neatly arrange its contents in the space. Out came a freshly cleaned skull, a fan of pink scaly feathers in a glass box, and a preserved horned tail. Lastly, she placed a new label beneath it all, perfectly aligned to the left. Alongside the alien characters was an unmistakable portrait of Ursa Minor.

After that, every time Jane looked across the room, she saw Ursa and was forced to think about the deceased creature. Jane shuddered as she envisioned her own corpse someday immortalized as an exhibit with a picture of her on her label. Would it be her scalp or or hands that they kept? Would they preserve her in formaldehyde or make her a taxidermic mount or only keep her skeleton? She longed for the cold, impersonal escape of soil and earth more than she ever thought possible. She did not want her tenure in the museum to continue long after her consciousness left her body. Could not even death prove a reprieve from the constant gaze of the anonymous eyes?

Ursa Minor's skull was a constant reminder that whether alive or dead, display was inescapable.


After Ursa Minor's death, a haze of depression rolled over Jane like June Gloom on the California coastline and it wrapped her in an impenetrable mist that barricaded her from any rays of sun. For more meals than she bothered to count, she lay curled on the floor of her cage. She did not bother to name the three new exhibits that made their way through the hall. She did not notice the punishment of an errant Keeper or the egg that hatched at the end of the row. She let herself sink into the haze and forget about everything else except the beckoning grey.

It was the blue that roused her. Blue fingers connected to a blue arm crept into her range of vision. She wouldn't have noticed it at all except for the strange opaque layer of white that came first. From the palm spread against the side of the cage nearest to her, frost spidered out from where the pads of fingertips met the glass, creating flaky rivers of white crystals along the walls. Layer upon layer of ice covered the wall until it was fully white. Then a sharp fingernail began to draw patterns in the ice. They began as swirls and geometric shapes but then became stalky animals and winged creatures and basic stick figures.

Jane sat up and watched in fascination. She had never seen him create ice, let alone display such an artistic flair. She wondered what his inspiration was. Red eyes met hers and his lips pulled back into a closed half-smile. His eyes were no longer sorrowful but filled with something warmer, something almost questioning. Then he slumped back against the side of his cage, allowing his designs to slowly melt away in rivulets down to his bare feet. He kept his eyes on her and they both sat motionless on the floor of their cages, their eyes fixed.

Jane was the first to move. She crawled to the edge of her cage that faced his and knelt. She felt the chill of the glass as she blew her breath against it and formed a little circle of fog. She used her pointer finger to draw a happy face. Underneath, she wrote, "hi." When she realized it would appear backwards to him, she breathed on the glass and wrote it the other way. Then she frowned and chastised herself.

He wouldn't be able to understand her writing. What an idiotic, childish instinct.

She was about to follow his example and slump to the floor with her eyes closed when she caught his movement. He crouched facing her, his red eyes fixed on her quickly fading message. He placed his hand on his glass and in the spreading ice, he mimicked her drawings exactly. Still watching her, Sagittarius placed his large hand against the glass at about her eye level and let it linger there. He cocked his head to one side, as if waiting for her to do something. She raised her own hand against her glass at the same level as his hand and pressed it flush on the cold surface. While separated by at least four feet of space and two panes of glass, she felt more "human" contact at that moment than any handshake or hug she had ever received at home.

For the first time in recent memory, Jane smiled.

She pulled her hand back and used her breath to fog up the side of her cage again.

"Jane," she wrote backwards for him to read and pointed to herself.

oooooo