“Darling!” she said. “I’m so glad you came. I’ve been waiting for you all day. I was dying to see you. Is that a new haircut?” It wasn’t. “Well, you look amazing. I’ve missed you. Why do you always stay away so long?” It had only been a week since I’d seen her. “Jeb went to buy a power drill from Sears. He’ll be back soon. We can have a nice cup of tea. I got those butter cookies you like so much.” I’ve never liked butter cookies. It was gingerbread cookies that had always been my favorite. “Sit down right there. That’s good. Now, tell me all about yourself and how you’ve been. Is your boss still giving you trouble at the office?” My boss had never given me trouble. It was my brother, Harrison, who was having problems at work. His boss had decided that he wasn’t working hard enough, and to be fair, he was right. Harrison was so bored at his job that he just looked at porn all the time and tried to find new positions to try with his latest girlfriend, who had once been a dancer. “And what about that plant I got you, is it still alive? Are you treating it well? You know, you have to give it a lot of light. Light is crucial for that kind of plant. I forget the name, but the guy at the nursery definitely told me that what it needed was a lot of light and not too much water.” The plant had died three months ago. I’d told her this at least twice. I said nothing this time. “Oh my, I can’t believe I forgot to tell you. Did I tell you? Jeb’s getting a promotion and we might be moving to Oklahoma! Isn’t that wonderful?” She’d told me this at least twice on the phone in the past week. “Oh, darling, I’ll still get to see you. Since Jeb is getting a raise I’ll be able to take the train over any weekend I like. Your brother’s said I can stay with him.” He hadn’t. That was my sister, Eliza, who had offered her a place to stay, albeit reluctantly. But she didn’t really love Eliza and she couldn’t bear Eliza’s girlfriend, and we all knew it. She wouldn’t stay with them, even if her life depended on it. “Have you been watching American Idol? Didn’t you use to like that show?” Never. “I thought so – but you probably don’t have time for it now, not anymore, not with all the work you’ve got piling up, I’m sure. You really shouldn’t take those freelance jobs, you know, they’re way too much for you. You never have time for anything anymore, darling. You never come and see me. Oh, Jeb had these two tickets to the game that’s happening at that stadium – oh, what’s its name? You know the one, the one downtown next to the mall. That one. So do you want them? There are three tickets, really, but Jeb is going to go alone because his friends don’t like going to the game – isn’t it silly, they all say they’re too old and that they prefer being at home in front of the television. As if Jeb is old! He’s in the prime of life, he really is. Anyway, do you want the tickets? You’ll have to sit with Jeb, of course, but you should spend more time with each other anyway.” I’d never been to a game in my life. Well, maybe one or two in high school, because my friends had wanted to go for some obscure reason. Maybe it had been the cheerleaders. “Also, you know, I showed my friend Pam the picture of Lia, and she pointed out how much Lia looks like me when I was younger – isn’t that funny, darling? You know, they do say that-” I actually had noticed that, but it was much too creepy and disgusting a concept for me to entertain for long. “Oh, I’m just teasing, don’t make that face. You know I don’t go in for all that psychobabble anyway, darling. Pam does, though. Do you know, she’s seen five different therapists in the past year? I mean, aren’t you supposed to stick with one person if you start that whole thing?” It’s incredible how people manage to judge things they don’t even believe in. “Going already? Oh, darling, you didn’t even finish your tea. Do you want some butter cookies for the drive home?”
story
Venison
Three winters ago, Mick and I went hunting. I didn’t know what I was in for. For one thing, the gun was so much heavier than I thought it would be. For another, I hadn’t realized how much waiting around happens.
Mick was so excited about my finally agreeing to go with him. He promised me that he would show me how to cook whatever we killed. When we first started going out, I couldn’t believe that he was the kind of person who went hunting. When I found out that he did, I was horrified. For a while there, I was going to break the whole thing off because it bothered me so much. But Mick was… well, Mick, and I guess I just sort of decided to see where things would go. I think I also didn’t quite believe him, because he has such delicate hands and he plays the piano. I couldn’t reconcile those long, large-knuckled fingers and his mild tenor with what I imagined hunters to be – rugged, rough, hairy manly men.
Eventually, though, I had to accept him in all his various incongruities, because there just isn’t a way to ignore a rabbit carcass roasting over a bonfire in someone’s backyard.
When he took me hunting, Mick told me that it would be a real adventure. I guess it was. We tramped all around through a forest with brightly colored vest things over our jackets so that no one would accidentally shoot us. We crouched down and waited, and breathed, and I felt the mist turning to a drizzle on the back of my neck.
I could hardly hold the gun up, let alone shoot, but watching Mick was fascinating enough to make the ache in my muscles worth it. There was something in his face that seemed akin to his concentration when he plays – but there was something else there, something almost feral. I didn’t, and still don’t, get it. There wasn’t anything exciting happening, but at every breath of wind and rustle of the leaves, his pale skin would flush and a small smile appeared on his mouth, but otherwise he’d stay absolutely still.
He killed a deer that day. That’s something else I didn’t realize – that we would have to carry something huge like that back to the car. Deer are much bigger than you think they are from far away. It was heavy, and Mick almost didn’t want to take it home, but I couldn’t stand the thought of him having killed it for nothing. If we brought the poor thing home, at least we’d be making use of it.
I couldn’t watch him turn the deer from animal into meat. I went to the bathroom and threw up after I saw him slit its stomach open, but I didn’t tell him. I pretended to be hungry, and, to be honest, the smell of the meat roasting actually made me hungry. It was easy to separate the venison from the deer I’d seen lying dead on the forest floor with its thick tongue hanging out and its eyes glazed and empty. I’m glad I never told Mick that I threw up, though.
We didn’t last for very long after that, but it wasn’t because of the hunting. It was because of his other passion – the piano. He got picked up by a touring orchestra and went to Europe. He cried a little when he said goodbye to me, and he apologized. He told me he would always remember me. I know I’ll always remember him too, especially when I see a deer or smell the telltale scent of venison.
Around the World and Back Home
Once upon a time, a little girl asked her grandmother what was on the other side of the forest. You see, this little girl had lived all her life in the little cabin that her grandmother owned, and this little cabin was on the edge of a large forest. Its treeline extended as far as the eye could see on both sides of the cabin.
You may wonder how it is that this little girl had never seen the other side of the forest; the town where her grandmother went to sell the chickens’ eggs and the cow’s milk and to buy provisions she couldn’t grow for herself was on the other side of that forest. You may surmise that the girl didn’t go with her grandmother on these excursions to town. You may assume that the girl was too little to walk across eight miles of winding, forested path to reach the town.
But the truth is even sadder than that – the girl had never been outside her own room since the day she was born and set into her dying mother’s arms. The little girl was very ill, you see, and too weak to leave her bed. She spent her days reading the books her grandmother exchanged at the library in town, and looking out of the window.
Why, you know what’s on the other side of the forest, my dear, the little girl’s grandmother told her when the question was posed. It is the town that I sell our produce to and get your books from.
Yes, Grandmother, I know, the little girl said. And what is beyond that?
Beyond that there are roads and other towns, the grandmother said.
And beyond those?
Beyond those, I suppose, there is the ocean.
And beyond-
Look here, the grandmother interrupted the little girl’s question, we’ve talked about how the world works. I brought you that book with the big maps in it, remember? Beyond the ocean is more land and more ocean, and if you continued to ask what was beyond and beyond and beyond, why, eventually we would come right back to this little cabin of ours.
The little girl sighed and smiled. I thought so, but I wasn’t sure, she said. So it doesn’t really matter that I can’t get out of bed, does it? Because even if I could walk all around the world, I would just get back here.
The grandmother bit back her tears, kissed the little girl’s forehead and left the room. That very night, the little girl died with a smile on her lips.
Her grandmother wasn’t satisfied with the answers she’d given to the little girl. If she had known that the little girl would die so soon, she thought she would have found a way to bring her into the world and show her all its marvels. She felt that by making the world seem like a small place, she had cheated the little girl out of her life. Perhaps, the grandmother thought, the little girl would have lived for many years if she’d have thought that there was something worth seeing out there. The grandmother had thought that the books the little girl read would convince her of that and would help her get stronger so that she could see the world. But the grandmother had been wrong.
It was the custom in the place where the grandmother lived to burn the loved one’s remains and keep them in an urn on the mantelpiece. But the grandmother decided that she couldn’t live out the rest of her life with the urn sitting there and reminding her of the little girl who thought the world wasn’t worth it.
Instead, the grandmother packed up some provisions into a bag, tucked the urn under her arm, and walked through the forest and into town. She walked beyond the town and into another forest and then into yet another town. She continued walking until she reached the ocean, and then she boarded a ship and sailed to the next continent.
It took her ten years, but eventually, she had walked and sailed right around the world. Hobbling home from the opposite direction of that she had started in at the very beginning, the grandmother held the urn tightly. But she was very tired, and the ground was wet with the spring rain, and she slipped and fell.
The urn smashed, and the little girl’s ashes scattered in the meadow as the wind picked them up merrily, as if greeting an old friend. The grandmother watched the gray dust that was once her granddaughter fly happily to and fro, and she smiled. There, she said to the little girl who she could suddenly see quite clearly before her. I’ve taken you right around the world and back home.
Soundtrack
The day was brisk and revenge was in the air. Trevor was looking forward to the end of it all. He wanted to reach the point at which he would feel vindicated and satisfied. But he didn’t know when that would be, and even though the wind blowing the strands of damp hair away from his face was cool, he still felt too warm and continued sweating profusely. He contemplated taking off his coat, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Revenge required a certain style, there were standards to be met, and those included the long, black leather overcoat he was wearing.
He knew he looked the part, but he wasn’t feeling it anymore. When he’d woken up in the morning, everything had felt right – the stars were aligned in his favor and his muscles were loose and pliant as he conducted his daily exercises. Everything matched his expectations, right up to the fine spread of grayness that filled the sky in a perfectly foreboding way.
The clothes were already prepared from the night before and they lay draped over the chair beside his bed, inviting him to put them on. He put music on first so that he could pretend he was in a movie. When he dressed, he made sure to pull his sleeves taut in time with the bass line and to knot the tie when the drums started up again after the bridge.
Trevor lived with a soundtrack. Although he worked in a job that he enjoyed – he was a studio musician – he wanted to work at something different. He wanted to be the person who chooses the music to go with each bit of a movie. When his friends described their lives to him, he constantly thought of which song should go with each instance. In his own life he kept meticulous playlists on his iPod and was ready for any situation he might fall into.
Today he was listening to his revenge playlist, but he only kept one earphone in because he also needed to hear the door opening. When it opened, he would be ready for her.
He tried to make his hand stop shaking. It looked distinctly unprofessional. The only thing he could hope for was that when she came in everything would suddenly work on instinct, just like in the movies. That’s what should happen.
But the door slammed open and she rushed out, clearly in a hurry. She was putting her earrings on as she jogged to her car. His hand kept shaking, and the metal didn’t glint, and it was all wrong now. Somehow she was already in the car, and the car was starting and then she was gone, and Trevor was left there, hunched behind the rose bush, the sweat finally growing cold on his face and his hand finally beginning to steady.
Too late. He was too late. He wanted to scream. His music stopped and he looked at his iPod and saw that it had died. He must not have charged it for long enough. This was awful.
“This is awful,” he said aloud. “This isn’t how it should go.” He wanted to ask someone what his next line was, or maybe ask to do the whole scene from the beginning, but life didn’t work like that and there was no director waiting to say “cut!”
It started raining as Trevor walked home and he wondered whether this was a turning point. Was this when the hero of the story was supposed to learn something? Was he supposed to take this as a sign or should he just try again tomorrow? Maybe he needed a sunny day, something less obvious than a gloomy day. Or perhaps he needed to just break into her house at night and do it then.
When he got home he put another playlist on. This one was called “Disappointment.” After a moment he changed it to the one he’d named “Failure.” It sat better with him. Stretched out on the bed, on his back, he struggled out of his clothing, trying not to lift his body very much because he was suddenly exhausted. He wondered whether he was coming down with something. He was drenched from the rain, after all.
The phone rang. He didn’t pick it up for a while, but finally, when it didn’t stop ringing, he decided to answer. It was her. She was asking him if he was ready to be friends yet. He said “Yeah, okay,” and made plans to meet her for dinner that evening.
Maybe there had been a reason for his failure after all.
BFFs
“I do mean it!”
“No, you don’t, you’re just saying it to be nice.”
“Would I do that?”
“Yes. You would.”
“Okay, yes, I would. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it now.”
Jane and Erin argued all the time. They had known each other since they were both in preschool and knew each other better than they knew anyone else. They knew their friendship was rare, and they appreciated it, but they couldn’t help bickering. It was precisely because they knew each other so well that they couldn’t help this. Jane knew that Erin always tried to soften her criticisms of any artwork that Jane showed her, just as Erin knew that Jane could never be unbiased when it came to her relationship issues, since she always thought that Erin must be right. It meant that, although they could discuss anything and everything, and although they did, there were some subjects that would always be problematic.
They walked down 42nd street toward Grand Central Terminal and continued to disagree, voices getting shriller until a man painting a cartoon portrait of a little girl in pigtails stared at them with such astonishment that they both burst out laughing and changed the subject.
“So did you and Mark go to that thing?”
“Oh, yeah, we did. It was so boring, you have no idea.”
“But then why do you always go to this stuff?”
“I don’t know, cause he wants to, and I’m like whatever.”
“But you don’t enjoy it so what’s the point?”
“I don’t know.”
Grand Central Terminal was teeming with people going home. It was peak time and Jane and Erin complained about the increased price of the train fare as they bought their tickets from the only two machines on the bottom concourse. They saw a pair of twins walking together and talking urgently to each other with violent hand gestures.
“The one on the right is cute.”
“What? They look exactly the same. They’re both cute.”
“No, the one on the right is better dressed.”
“You’re so full of it. That’s blatantly ridiculous.”
“That’s not how you use the word ‘blatantly.'”
“Oh, fine, English major, educate me, why don’t you.”
And they were off, unknowingly mimicking the twins as they talked with their hands on their way to track 106 to the train. They threw themselves down onto empty seats and continued to talk in loud voices as the train filled up with people in suits, leaving their fancy city jobs and going into the small towns on the Harlem line.
“Excuse me, could you be a little quieter?”
“Excuse me?”
“Excuse you, rather. This is a public place-”
“We’ll speak however we want.”
“Yeesh. Can you believe the nerve?”
“I know! I mean, dude, seriously, how can anyone ask anything like that? It’s a loud freaking train, you know?”
“What if one of us had ear problems?”
“Yeah, like, what if we were half deaf or something?”
“Yeah.”
But they both lowered their voices without meaning to, embarrassed that they’d been talking loudly enough to make anyone ask them to be quieter. They often felt like they were too rambunctious when they were together. They knew that their other friends couldn’t stand being around both of them at the same time, because they would end up talking only to each other, or, if they talked to the others, they would still have inside jokes and references that nobody else could understand and that they refused to explain even when asked about them.
The train began to move and they recited the stops with the electronic voice that came on over the PA system. They took the train into the city every weekend, religiously, and they always left and came back at exactly the same times, so they always knew what stops they were going to pass by and in what order.
“I’m concerned about you.”
“Oh, brother.”
“Who says that anymore?”
“What?”
“Oh, brother. No one says that. Have you been watching old movies again?”
“So what if I have?”
“Oh my god, never mind, that’s like so beside the point. How do you always manage to do this? I was saying that I’m worried about you.”
“And then you went on a rant about how no one says ‘oh, brother’ anymore.”
“It wasn’t a rant. It was an observation. Anyway. You need to go out on another date.”
“Ugh, but boys are icky and stupid.”
“If you like girls, just say so now so I can start finding those for you instead.”
“No! No, I don’t like anyone right now.”
“That’s exactly why I’m worried. You need to get out there again! One bad boyfriend doesn’t mean they’re all like that.”
Jane and Erin continued fighting until they got off the train at White Plains and walked home together, still disagreeing on the subject of dating.
The Little German Boy
“Everything will be just fine,” Greta murmured. She rocked back and forth with the small, frightened child in her lap, and hoped that he didn’t feel her racing heart and her fear. He clung to her neck and sobbed, voicelessly. He didn’t even pull on his nose or sniffle. He just let his tears and nose run and his shoulders shake, all in eerie silence. Greta was horrified that any child his age – she guessed he was four or five, although he was small and terribly thin – could control himself this way. The boy that she’d had when she was younger had been rambunctious, always running around, putting his hands into everything, shouting at the top of his voice until he tired himself out and plopped down in the comfiest spot in the house for a nap, just like an enthusiastic kitten might do.
“Shh, shh,” Greta began and stopped herself immediately. No, no, she shouldn’t, she mustn’t shush him. The poor thing hadn’t spoken a word, hadn’t made a sound since entering her house. She knew why, or she thought she knew why, but she didn’t want to think about it, and succeeded in pushing the complicated, conflicting notions out of her mind. She hoped that her son wouldn’t get home tonight. He hadn’t said he would, but sometimes he popped by after a night of drinking with the men, and when that happened, she never knew what kind of mood he’d be in. He was often weepy and melancholy as a drunk, and he would want to discuss her memories of him as a boy. But sometimes he would get himself into a rage and would talk at Greta, pacing around and around the small kitchen like a caged tiger at a circus. When he was like that, she tried to make herself small. He frightened her then and reminded her of her husband, may God rest his fiery soul and protect him from ending up in Hell.
The sobs abated and Greta pulled back from the child, trying to look into his face. He allowed her to do so, becoming limp like a rag doll in her arms and looking down at his little hands instead of up into her eyes. He’d only met her gaze once, when she’d found him in the outhouse, shivering, and then there’d been such fear – such absolute terror! – in his hungry eyes that Greta was almost thankful that she hadn’t needed to face it again.
A shout from outside made them both jump. Greta listened, and recognized the sounds of a parade starting to go through the village streets. The soldiers paraded often – theirs was a small town, and they didn’t have much work to do in it in between ventures to other towns in the area to recruit or into the countryside to scour it for runaways. As the boots began to pound the street, the boy in Greta’s arms started to shiver violently and then tried to leap off of her.
She struggled to hold him close, but he was like a wild animal, scratching at her hands and kicking his feet, trying to get away. When he bit her finger, she let out a moan of pain and let go and he scampered off through the house. Greta was off the couch in a second, after him. He ran from one small room to another, trying to open doors and windows, but they were all locked – Greta had locked them quickly and silently when she’d brought him in. She’d pulled the shades down too. When he couldn’t find a way out, he crawled right into the chimney and attempted climbing up it, frantically, falling down over and over again, try as he might to catch a handhold.
Greta knelt in front of the hearth and held out her arms to him, ignoring the pain in her finger. “Come, I’ll protect you,” she whispered. “They won’t get you. They won’t come here. You’re safe. You’re my little boy – I have peroxide, we can dye your hair, everything will be alright. My little blue-eyed boy.”
He stared at her, his sea-blue eyes stretched wide. He touched his hair, so filthy that Greta didn’t know whether it was brown or black. He met her eyes again, and she wondered whether someone like her had betrayed him once already, because there was such wariness in his face, such uncertainty.
“Everything is going to be alright, I promise. I’ll protect you,” she said again. Slowly, ever so slowly, he crawled out the fireplace and allowed her to whisk him away to the kitchen, where she made him a hot cup of tea as that parade went by outside.
Ryan-ish
Dawn broke, and so did Ryan. He felt his mind splitting, disappearing within a vortex of pain and anguish. He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel this way, but here he was, lying in bed as the sun rose outside his curtained windows, and there was a yawning pit of emptiness sitting within his chest and sucking his internal organs into it. He had yelled, for a while. But then the neighbours from upstairs had pounded on the floor with their chairs and somewhere, Ryan still cared about what they thought, and he shut his mouth, feeling a burning shame come over him.
So for the last couple of hours, Ryan lay in bed silently, barely moving, knowing that the sound of the sheets moving sounded loud only to him and that no one else could hear it, but still too scared to move.
Nothing made sense to him. Nobody had died. Nobody had dumped him, not recently anyway. There was no reason for him to be feeling the way he was feeling. He thought he must be going mad. He wondered whether anyone else in the history of the universe could have felt as much pain as he was feeling at that moment.
There was a part of his brain that was talking sense and that kept telling him that he was merely going through a depressive episode, that it would pass, and that he had a lot of nerve to be assuming that what he was more dramatic or worse than what other people had felt at other times. When he thought of people dying in wars, being tortured and interrogated or gassed, he felt ashamed of himself.
The logical bit of him that was thinking this, the part of him that still had a personality and that hadn’t given everything up to the despair, was also rather intrigued by the whole thing. It was interesting, in a way, to be feeling as deeply about something that was utterly undefinable, unexplainable and unreasonable.
It was that part, that still reliably Ryan-like part, that decided that something had to be done. It forced the languid, limpid body to lean over and grab the phone from the bedside table. It forced the fingers to uncurl from their tight fists and to dial the number of his best friend.
“Ryan? Is that you?”
“Deb?”
“Oh my god, what’s wrong? You sound awful.”
“Yeah…”
“Seriously, Ryan, what is it? Who died?”
“Nobody.” He wanted to say more than this, but he wasn’t managing to articulate the words. His mouth opened but his tongue seemed to dry up almost at once and he gasped for air even though there was a steady breeze coming in from the other room.
“Ryan. Talk to me. Right now. You’re making me talk in cliches, and you know I hate that.”
It was that, more than anything, that somehow made him begin talking. The Ryan-ish part of him couldn’t bear to hear Debra talking in common phrases, so far from her over-stylized and careful vocabulary. Other people asked how you were when they talked to you on the phone; Debra asked you whether your muse was around and whether your lungs felt happy and whether your toes were enjoying the cold. She didn’t say things like “talk to me.”
Ryan explained, haltingly, with many pauses for gasps of air, what was happening. Deb was in London, and he knew even as he was talking that there was absolutely nothing she could do for him. He hoped that talking about it might help, but it wasn’t, not so far. On a normal day, Ryan couldn’t talk to her for five minutes without bursting out laughing, either at something flowery that she’d said or at a witty remark she’d made at his expense.
When she grasped the gravity of the situation, she began to ask him, with utter seriousness, whether he wanted her to come home. He teared up and began to sob, because she was the only person in his life who would do something like that for him. He choked out a resolute “NO” somehow, and made her promise him that she wouldn’t cut her vacation short.
He could almost hear her in his mind’s ear correcting him, as she’d done for the last few months when he’d complained about her going away. “It’s not a vacation,” she would say every time. “It’s a honeymoon. We’re going to dip the moon in honey and eat it and read poetry to each other during the rest of the time.” He’d rolled his eyes and expressed his opinions about how wrong it was for her to get married and she would shove him off whatever chair he was sitting on.
But she didn’t correct him this time, and that was what made him understand. He put down the phone without saying goodbye, and felt a fresh wave of sorrow lap at his feet and steadily rise to high tide. Meanwhile, the Ryan-bit of him was repeating the words “Huh. I didn’t realize that,” over and over again.
Lucy’s Temple
Not all temples are made of stone. Lucy’s temple, the one she prayed and sacrificed in, was made of a few stout and sturdy cardboard boxes that she’d pulled apart and made into walls that surrounded her shrine. The shrine itself was a dirty old plastic milk crate that someone had drawn a few rude pictures on. But Lucy thought that made it rather more authentic. After all, the old Greek and Roman gods were always naked and rather naughty, weren’t they?
The best thing about her temple was that it was moveable. She could pack it into her rickety shopping cart whenever she decided to move her camp to somewhere else. The cart was filled with the other essentials of her life – some extra clothing for the colder weather, a few emergency Twinkies that she kept for the worst nights when she hadn’t managed to get any money for food, and, of course, her box of treasures and sacrifices.
The box held her most prized possessions besides the temple and shrine. She never showed anyone what was in there, not even Dumbo, the large-eared man who she encountered on most days, feebly playing his trumpet for the passersby. He was her best friend on the street, and they would often share things with each other – their food, their drugs, and occasionally, when the mood struck them, their bodies as well.
When Lucy woke up on this Sunday morning, she realized that she hadn’t seen Dumbo in a while. Not since she’d constructed her shrine and her temple. She wanted to share them with him, because she thought that he would understand and that he would see exactly what it was that she was worshiping. Other people had laughed at her, and she ignored them easily enough – living on the street was an education in ignoring and being ignored – but she wanted to show someone the magic she’d discovered and cultivated in her collapsible temple.
She decided that, since it was sunny and warm, she should go and look for him. She didn’t find him in any of the usual spots – he wasn’t at any of the subway stops that he frequented, nor was he in the parks that were friendly to the homeless population of the city. The last place she looked was at the soup kitchen that neither one of them went to very often, but he wasn’t there either. The proprietress of the place tried to wave Lucy in and yelled out a few times for her to join the line and get some food, but Lucy smiled her semi-toothed smile and shook her head. She didn’t like being somewhere with so many people.
When the sun began to set and she still hadn’t found Dumbo, Lucy realized with a jolt what she had to do. She took her shopping cart back to the alleyway she’d spent her nights in over the last week and began to set up her shrine and the temple. She opened her box of treasures and ran her fingers around it, feeling the bits and pieces of her favorite things as they seemed to nuzzle against her, almost sentient. It was as if they were assuring her that she was loved by them and that they appreciated her taking as good care of them as she did.
She pulled out a piece of red string and held it up to the light that came from the lamp-post at the far end of the alleyway. It was still clean and shiny. She pulled a small pack of matches from her pocket and placed the string on her shrine. Lighting it on fire, she watched the smoke curl into the air of the temple and she began to pray. She prayed to the gods to find Dumbo and bring him to her, but she also prayed to them to keep him safe even if he didn’t come to find her.
She could feel them responding to her. She could feel Dumbo coming closer to her. She could smell him getting closer to her. Sure enough, as her lips finished mumbling the last words of her prayer, Dumbo ducked under the walls of temple and caused them to sway precariously. He knelt beside Lucy and watched her curiously. His long dreadlocks were tied in a tight knot at the nap of his neck and his beard was scraggly and dirtier than ever.
Lucy moved a little so that he could be more comfortable. “This is my shrine,” she said. Dumbo nodded. “I know,” he said. “I could tell.” He closed his eyes, put his hands together, and they began to pray together. Lucy was pleased. She knew that Dumbo would understand.
Mara and Alicia
Mara seemed to radiate as she crossed the stage. It was her night. All eyes were on the small figure with the big hairdo, tightly fitting clothing and long legs. As she began to dance, she could feel every muscle in her body stretching and contracting in just exactly the right way, willing her to use it to the utmost. It was the opening night, and she was a star.
When she was onstage, she could forget about the real life. In her real life, she was named Alicia. In her real life, she had to go to the hospital twice a day to check up on her mother who had recently gotten alcohol poisoning. Again. The doctors had insisted on keeping her there for a while because they thought they also felt something strange in her breast when they’d done a full physical. Alicia had no idea how they were going to pay for it all. Alicia knew she needed to call her father again and plead with him to send them more cash. Alicia fell asleep every night with her tears drying on her face.
Mara, on the other hand, didn’t have a mother. She lived as a tenant with an older woman, yes, but there were no ties between them. She told her friends that the old lady had gotten alcohol poisoning and how pathetic that was. They all nodded sympathetically, with their too-big eyes drifting away to their tiny cubes of cheese which were their only sustenance for the day. Mara hated them all and she knew that they hated her too, but they had to get along because they didn’t want their director/choreographer to give them another lecture. Then, too, was the fact that none of them had any other friends anymore. That tended to happen during the strenuous periods before new shows went on, because they spent so many hours of the day rehearsing that they naturally could only talk to and complain with each other, since no one else understood exactly how much their toenails hurt, how hungry they were, how itchy their scalp was because of the hairspray and how much they craved a cheeseburger and a beer on the beach.
Alicia knew she wasn’t well. Alicia went to a therapist twice a week because she was terrified of herself and what she was doing to her body. She hated the feeling of her fingers going deep and the vomit creeping up her raw and swollen throat. She hated the raspy voice she’d developed, even though the man she worked for told her it was “tres sexy.” She hadn’t needed to do this only two years ago when she’d gotten accepted to the company and there was really no reason for her to be doing this now, except that everyone else was and it seemed to be expected. But she worried about needing replacement teeth and she knew she didn’t have enough money for that.
Mara never worried about money. When she went out with the friends she hated, she was the one who managed to get free drinks by nuzzling up to the older men on the bar. She would sometimes find herself in their beds in the morning, but she didn’t allow herself to worry about that too much. It was worth it, she figured, for the feeling of bliss that crept over her when she had had so much to drink that her head was fuzzy and the room was spinning gently and she knew that no matter what – no matter what – nothing could really hurt her at that moment.
When Alicia and Mara met, as they sometimes did, accidentally, when the were switching out the use of the same body, they seemed to hedge warily around each other. Alicia idolized Mara and Mara looked down on Alicia. But Alicia also knew that Mara wasn’t practical, and that she would ultimately destroy her. She hated Mara, even though she envied her carefree lifestyle and her confidence. She also worried, because she knew that the facade of Mara was wearing thin. She wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to keep it up.
But right then, under the hot spotlights, knowing that the audience couldn’t see how hard she was working or the sweat already rolling down her back, knowing that they only saw this graceful body moving with the utmost precision – at that moment Alicia took over from Mara and allowed herself to simply be within the dance, to fly and leap and soar and tumble to the ground in an ecstasy of movement.
Darkness’s Melody
Darkness protects her own. She is a loyal mistress to some, a protective mother to others, and, to a rare few, she is a constant companion. She hugs her lovers’ figures with a sweet and cool caress. She throws a warm blanket over her children. She kisses those few who live with her eternally and teaches them the secrets of the senses that no one else possesses.
Melody had woken up one morning in her narrow bed to discover that she was one of those few that Darkness chooses to initiate into those secrets. The sun was barely over the horizon – the nurse told Melody – and the ground was white with the snow that had been falling all night. Melody held her hands out in front of her face, stretched her eyes wide, and began to wail.
It took a few days to calm her down. She had hysterics that exhausted her still-weak body, and then she would fall asleep for hours. During those blessed hours, she dreamed of a world awash with color and lit by sunlight. That world was locked for her, now forever.
She missed it terribly. She cursed the Darkness over and over again, screamed her throat raw and lashed out violently at anyone who dared come near and try to comfort her. The narrow bed that she lay in gave her the only joy she was able and willing to receive because it allowed her to disappear from the Darkness.
Eventually, there came a day when she was strong enough to get up – so the doctor told her. He was a kindly man, and she remembered his pudgy face, so at odds with his withered body. Everyone knew that he had been sick for many years now. How he clung to life, how he’d managed to keep the rosy boyish cheeks from sinking, nobody knew. Melody remembered him, but whenever she tried to look into his face – she didn’t stretch out her clawed fingers to him, because he seemed to bring calm into any room he entered – she could see only Darkness.
Once the doctor left, she tried to sleep. But she couldn’t. She was too strong now to fall into bouts of healing sleep and her legs were shaking with the wish to move, to run, to sprint, to dance. She had loved dancing. She wondered whether she’d ever be able to dance again.
The room was quiet as she slowly swung her legs over the side of the bed and found the warped wooden floorboards. Nobody sat through the day with her anymore – she’d made it abundantly clear that she didn’t appreciate such attention and that she wanted to be left alone. Nobody was there to see her take her first faltering steps, arms stretched out in front of her, reaching out to make sure that Darkness wouldn’t try to trip her up on a table or chair.
She wondered whether all the other girls who’d used to be in her room were dead. The sickness had taken many of them. Few survived. She knew that, because she could hear the Sisters talking in hushed voices in the long hallway. For the first time, Melody felt guilty. She hadn’t thought about the other girls in her rage against the Darkness. She didn’t know whether or not any of them was suffering the same fate as she.
Hush! the Darkness seemed to whisper. Listen! Melody paused. Her eyes closed of their own accord. She could hear the wind softly touching the curtains of the cracked window and making them sway. The fabric moving sounded like a small child shifting in its sleep. From above, she could hear the creaking of a bedstead as someone climbed onto a bunk. She knew it was a bunk because there was a rickety sort of rattling that came from the old wooden ladders that still clung desperately to the three-tiered bunks.
Footsteps in the hall. Melody felt them in the floorboards before she could even hear them. All the Sisters walked barefooted and had the trick of walking silently, avoiding the squeaky spots on the floor. A knock. Melody turned and slowly walked to the door, letting her arms drop to her sides. She used to walk to the door in Darkness even before, whenever she had to go use the bathroom at night. She knew how to get there. The Darkness seemed to smile at her encouragingly. Yes, we were friends even before, she seemed to say.
Melody could smell the cheap varnish on the door before she reached it. Putting her hand out, she found that she’d stopped at precisely where she would stop if things were normal again – she wasn’t too far and she wasn’t too close. She turned the handle of the door and opened it.
A warmth emanated from the Sister standing there. She moved closer and Melody stepped back. She didn’t want anyone to be too near, yet. A combination of sound and feeling told her that the Sister had raised her arm and was going to put it on her cheek. And there was the hand, caressing her. There were callouses on it.
“Sister Hannah,” Melody said. The hand stopped for a split second before moving up to smooth her hair. Not knowing how she knew it – maybe the hand trembled just a tad – Melody knew that the Sister was crying silently, and she could see, as if an image was imprinting itself on the Darkness, the way the Sister probably looked, tears rolling down her face and collecting on her round chin.
The Darkness danced around Melody. The weight was becoming familiar, like a serpent draped around her shoulders.
Stepping into Sister Hannah’s embrace, Melody held out a mental hand to the Darkness and joined the dance.
Slightly Ignorant 