Table of Contents
Jaimie, whats that?
I looked where Kim was looking, and saw Rugee, gleaming green and orange, on my desk, his white tongue extended. Oh, dear.
Kim shut the door quickly. Theres a dorm policy about pets, she said.
Hes not exactly a pet.
She put her laptop on her desk and knelt next to Rugee. Is he real?
Rugee turned his head toward her. She held out a hand, hesitant. He tasted the tip of her finger, bobbed his head three times. Hi, she said. I thought I knew all types of salamanders and geckos. Reptiles and amphibians are some of my favorite animals. Ive never seen anything like you before.
I glanced at Dad, who leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. He cocked his head and watched Kim.
She stared up at me. If hes not exactly a pet, what is he?
Um, I said. A household god.
FIREBIRD WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT
A Stir of Bones
The Blue Girl
The Dreaming Place
The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm
Firebirds: An Anthology of
Original Fantasy and
Science Fiction
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Charles de Lint
Charles de Lint
Ellen Datlow and
Terri Windling, eds.
Sharyn November, ed.
Firebirds Rising: An Anthology of Original Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Game
The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest
Growing Wings
Hannahs Garden
Ingledove
The Magic and the Healing
Magic or Madness
The Secret Country
Tam Lin
Tamsin
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
Waifs and Strays
Diana Wynne Jones
Ellen Datlow and
Terri Windling, eds.
Laurel Winter
Midori Snyder
Marly Youmans
Nick ODonohoe
Justine Larbalestier
Pamela Dean
Pamela Dean
Peter S. Beagle
Diana Wynne Jones
Charles de Lint
FIREBIRD
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006
Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008
Copyright Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 2006 All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.
eISBN : 978-1-101-09482-2
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
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This one is for Sharyn,
for cuts, capers, and encouragement.
Its also for my nephew Connor,
who reads my books to pieces.
PROLOGUE:
Kim
W hen I was small, my thoughts and feelings were all visual. The taste of chocolate might be a smear of deep, warm yellow, with gold sparkles. Hot water was a warm, blue blanket, but really hot water had prickles and spikes like shiny silver needles, and cold water, the kind that froze your hand when you dipped into it, looked like sheets of gray ice with bright light shining through.
Images came all the time. Sometimes the pictures were jumpy, like a slide show, images flashing fast, overlapping; sometimes smooth and fluid, like Chinese calligraphy.
One day after I had learned to read, I had a mental click. I was wandering the playground during recess. I watched kids on swings, scraps of color arcing up and down against the chill blue sky, and I wondered if I could think about this in words.
It wasnt easy. It was the good kind of hard, puzzling and compelling, with the same pull I got from computer solitaire. I felt like I was solving something, and I didnt want to stop.
Words were slower in lots of ways, more linear. I couldnt just leap from thought to thought.
The better I got at thinking in words, the fewer pictures I saw. My brain was all noises weighted with meaning and hooked together in strings.
One morning after a dream of ocean and sky, swimming and flying melting into each other, I woke up and the pictures faded. I thought, Time to get up. Better get ready for school.
I felt like I had lost my native language.
I wanted the pictures back.
My parents kept art supplies in a cupboard where my older brother Don and I could grab them any time we wanted, and they sent us to an art teacher two afternoons a week after school.
Our art teacher always put something on the table in front of me and Don and told us to sketch it, but I wasnt interested in drawing fruit, or a stupid sculpture of a robin, or a vase.
Don did our teachers assignments. He got good at representational art and branched out into illustration. He drew hot, big-breasted manga girls, which made him popular at school. All the guys wanted him to do notebook covers and pictures for them.
I wasnt interested in drawing an object the way a camera took a photo. I made pictures of how I felt.
After I lost my pictures to words and had to work to get them back, I was less inclined than ever to paint what was in front of me. I laid down colors on paper, dripped and drizzled other colors, mooshed things together, tried different brushes and pressures. My hands could still make pictures, even if my head wouldnt.
In pursuit of my lost language, I used up reams of scratch paper, jars of poster paint, and cakes of watercolors. Brushes lost their bristles, left hairs in my pictures. I made images on paper until I could summon them in my head again. Getting them to flow without defining them in words was another big job. I finally did it, though. I forced the flow until it came back.
Now that I could think in pictures again, I used art to capture them. Once Id made the pictures, I had them for good, even if I threw the paper version out. In the process of traveling from my head out my hands and onto the paper, the pictures printed themselves in my memory, fixed there so I could summon them at will.
At first Dad didnt get my art at all, but Mom liked it. She used the fridge as my gallery, swapping out paintings every week when I brought them home. Later she convinced Dad to attach corkboard to a whole wall of my room. I tacked up big sheets of paper all across it. Finally, I could paint as large as I wanted.
I had just finished a big piece Delight , a green core streaked with gold, lots of little yellow explosions around the edge, red dots, and blue-green spiralswhen Dad knocked and came into my room. He stared at the picture. Then he went and got the digital camera.
![Dzhon Makdonald - The Night Jaimie Grew Up [story]](/uploads/posts/book/917089/thumbs/dzhon-makdonald-the-night-jaimie-grew-up-story.jpg)
