Freda backed away from the water. Her classmates were scrambling up the embankment onto Exchange Street. Someone clipped her shoulder and sent her into one of the metal struts. She grabbed on and swung around so she was facing the underside of the bridge. A dropped flashlight illuminated the defaced beams, the drifts of empty bottles, the anemic bushes growing up through the rocky soil. Freda saw these things clearly. Saw them and also the woman lingering near the water. She pulsed weakly at the periphery of the light, like a television screen getting ready to die. But not before she raised a hand, flashed Freda a little smile.
***
Meanwhile:
Timothy Brighenti, fourth-generation toolmaker, answers a knock at his well-appointed Pleasant Street home. He’s surprised to see the smiling, oil-streaked face of Clyde Chaisson, one of his day shift foremen. Clyde nods politely, then hammers Brighenti to death with a Barrett Ballpeen # 4. Well, not quite. The tool falls apart halfway through the job, and Clyde has to finish things by putting the sharp end of the hilt through his boss’s eye.
Walking down the gravel driveway afterward, his shirt sticky with blood and brains, Clyde thinks about leaving town, starting over. Somewhere beyond the smoke and the flames, the cinders falling into the rushing water.
BIOGRAPHY: Paul Edmonds lives in Massachusetts. His fiction has recently appeared in The Literary Hatchet, and anthologies from Rainstorm Press and Horrified Press. He has a website, which he updates on a semi-regular basis: pauledmonds.net.
MAYBELLE
MERE JOYCE
The worn carpet is stained with a hundred spilled drinks, a thousand muddy boots, an entire town history all of its own. I smile as the floor creaks under my weight, the quiet whine of the boards a satisfactory greeting. Most of the other libraries in town have been remodelled, freshly designed for a new generation of users. But I like this old branch best. The dust is warm, the high rows and dank overhead lighting familiar. My childhood took place here.
“I hate this library, Aunt Henny,” Bennett mutters, as we exit the elevator and head past a wall of romance books.
I give my nephew my best look of indignant surprise. “This is my favourite library,” I say sternly.
“Why couldn’t we go to the one downtown?” Bennett asks, his pre-adolescent face brimming with distaste. He runs his fingers along the book spines as we walk. The resulting sound is like the music of a paper orchestra. “It’s way nicer.”
“But this one is way closer,” I remind him.
“You know you could learn to drive,” he says, glancing at my lower half. “People without any legs can drive. And you’ve still got one.”
“Well technically I have two.” I reposition my crutch as we curve up the main aisle between the stacks. “It’s just a foot I’m missing.”
“Yeah, well, even less of an excuse,” Bennett says. He veers towards an aisle, the sign on the end cap labelling it as the fantasy section.
“Fantasy, eh? I see you’ve got your aunt’s tastes.”
“Who, you?” Bennett barely manages the exclamation of surprise before he disappears between the rows. “You never read anything besides craft books.”
“I used to,” I say, joining him in the narrow aisle. “I used to come to this library and check out books from this very section.”
Bennett’s sceptical of my declaration. I’d laugh at his suspicious gaze, if I wasn’t oddly unsettled moving among the shelves of my youth, the stories I used to read for hours on end whispering reminders of my past.
“So why’d you stop?”
I tilt my head to one side as I peer at the assortment of colourful covers lined up in author-alphabetical order.
“Don’t know,” I say, reaching up to a shelf and stroking the spine of a few books at random. “Just decided I liked reality better, I guess.”
It’s a lie, or at least half of one. I stopped reading fantasy fifteen years ago, after the fire took my foot and scarred great portions of the remaining skin on my left side. But I can’t remember why the fire made me cling to reality, when my reality had become so grotesque.
My fingers clutch at a book, pulling it from the shelf. The title, Blood and Honour, is not exactly original nor is the cover illustration of a sword-yielding warrior a very inspired piece of art. It looks like an abysmal read, but still I open the cover and begin rifling through the pages.
“I think I read this when I was younger,” I say as Bennett glances over to see what I’m looking at.
“Any good?” he asks, his own hands flipping through the pages of a potential read.
“I never finished it,” I say slowly, my voice its own unanswered question. I stop at a chapter, my fingers running over the inked words until I feel a bulk under the paper. I pass a chapter or two more, and with the turn of a certain page, the book falls open and my eyes drift to something wedged in the crack of the spine.
I let out a strangled laugh.
“I can’t believe it,” I murmur, as I reach forward to grab the object.
“What is it?” Bennett steps close to me as I hold up a small bird, paper-thin but actually made from sewn together scraps of fabric. Its wings are spread in flight, its head raised up to the right.
“This is mine,” I say, turning the bird over, studying the floral fabrics joined to the checkered ones, the tiny black-threaded eyes and yellow-threaded beak.
“Really?” Bennett grabs the bird. It fits nicely in his palm. “Did you make it?”
The answer takes several seconds to form. “No,” I say uncertainly, feeling my way through the cobwebs of memory. “I didn’t make it . . . I found it.” A slow grin spreads across my face as I recall the past so recently uncovered. “In our old house, there was a loose bit of baseboard in my room. Behind it, I found this bird. Maybelle, I called it. It—she—was special. She was like a treasure.”
“Cool,” Bennett nods, impressed with my story but bored with my bird. He hands her back to me and returns to his task, and I return Blood and Honour to its spot on the shelf, Maybelle no longer gracing its pages.
“It is pretty cool,” I say smugly to myself. I pocket the bird and glance up at my nephew. “I’m going to sit by the elevator. Don’t take too long, okay? Your dad’s moving in this afternoon, and we’ve got to help.”
Bennett glowers. “Don’t remind me,” he mumbles. He’s as angry with his mother as I am about Kaleb moving back into the house. She promised it wouldn’t happen again, and we were both fools to believe her.
I give Bennett a sympathetic smile before I make my way towards the row of seats by the elevator, pulling a knitting book out of my tote bag once I sit down. I start reading the pattern for a sweater I’d like to knit, but within the space of two or three sentences, my thoughts drift back to my bird.
I lower the book to my lap and fish Maybelle out of my pocket. As I study the delicate needlework still even and tight, I let myself wander through half-formed recollections of our days together. I try to remember how we parted ways, but I’m soon distracted by a stinging pain in my left foot. I flex my toes in discomfort, and only then do I realize my left foot cannot be hurting, because my left foot became dead flesh when it was amputated fifteen years ago. I look down at the stump above my ankle, confused. I haven’t had phantom pain this intense since right after the fire. I haven’t had any phantom pain in years.
I swallow and concentrate on the blank space where my foot should be, the sting gradually dissolving into the stuffy air of the library.
“What do you make of that, Maybelle?” I squeeze my fist, expecting the woven softness of patchwork, but feel only my nails digging in against the flesh of my palm. I drop my gaze to the knitting book, where the bird has fallen from my grasp and landed on the page. I cup my hand around her wings, just as my eye catches something in the text. My fingers still pressing Maybelle to the glossy paper, I pause to consider the knitting instructions.
I read a handful of words before the world around me shifts.
Withou
t warning I’m pitched forward, the room rocking as if the entire library is nothing more than a small boat in a big storm. The book drops from my lap, and I roll off my seat. I land painlessly on my side, the fall cushioned by something soft. When I push myself onto my hands and knees, I see it’s something green, the colour of grass.
“What the . . . ” I look around the library, only to discover I’m not in the library anymore. Around me, the grass-green expands in all directions, and I get the distinct impression I’m in a peculiar kind of meadow. Overhead stretches a makeshift sky of blue, no cloud in sight to spoil the vibrant effect. But it’s all wrong. The grass, the sky. I grip the green beneath my hand, my fingers sliding into evenly spaced holes within the softness. The ground beneath and the sky above are made of knitted yarn.
I scan the horizon, taking in the sight of the endless soft landscape like something from an incomplete picture book. When I try to stand, the ground is too soft, as if there’s nothing underneath the knitted blanket of green. I slouch into a cross-legged position instead, vaguely aware of two ankles, two heels, two arches curving up towards ten wriggling toes. My foot is back, my skin unscarred and full of blood, veins, and feeling.
Grasping the beautifully warm flesh of my left foot, I stare dumbfounded at my surreal surroundings until a sound attracts my attention.
It’s a sweet, singing whistle. Birdsong.
“Maybelle,” I mutter with quiet satisfaction, and only after I’ve said it do I wonder how I know it’s the bird. I glance to where the knitting book fell in the tumble between the library and this meadow. The book is beside me, only it’s no longer the same book I dropped. I grab it, pulling it onto my lap again. The patchwork bird isn’t lying on the page, but when I focus on the text, the trilling birdsong tingles against my fingertips where they grip the book’s covers.
The words make no sense. There are no letters, no sentences in English or any other language I’ve ever encountered. Except, I have encountered it. As I take in the unfamiliar sight of the black symbols scrawled haphazardly over the page, I’m overcome with the certainty of what to do next.
When I was eleven, there was a morning spent studying for a geography test before school. I used Maybelle as a bookmark while I hurried to get ready, and before I left, I opened my textbook again, desperate to absorb just one more fact. I read a sentence in my room, and then I found myself spinning into someplace else. I caught my breath, looked around, and found I was by mountains like the ones in my book, only the formations were made of snow with rocky caps threatening to crush them.
It was like someone, something, had translated the words of the book, but the language got twisted along the way. I sat before the mountains in awe, until I heard the birdsong, grabbed the book, read the unreal text and found myself back at my desk as if nothing had happened.
How did I ever forget? My own magic portal, a best friend to transport me to new realities.
I read the foreign words of the book in the meadow, even if I can’t understand what they are, can’t actually identify them as words at all. And when I read, Maybelle’s song becomes louder, shriller, my whole body shivering with its vibrations. The sickening motion of summersaulting through a murky sea jerks my limbs and chokes my throat as I’m flung back into the library.
Within an instant I’ve returned to my seat, the knitting book still in my hands, and the small bird lying in the middle of the page. I pick her up, clench her in my fist, and giggle like a child.
“What’s so funny?” Bennett asks, walking up the aisle with a book in one hand.
“Nothing,” I reply, but it’s a struggle not to hold Maybelle out in the air and cover her with kisses of delight.
***
I never found out where Maybelle came from. I assumed she was a toy sewn decades before we moved into the house, a plain explanation which satiated any desire for history I may have had. I never wondered why, when I found her, she didn’t have so much as a speck of dust on her mismatched feathers. I never questioned why I settled on the name Maybelle. I never pondered who had created her, never asked myself why he or she stuck Maybelle behind a baseboard in the first place.
These details were unimportant to me then, and they’re still unimportant now. Sitting in the living room after we’ve returned from the library and finished dragging Kaleb’s things back into the house, I’m more interested in discovering how Maybelle ended up pressed between the pages of a mediocre book.
“Hey Stump, stop hogging the popcorn,” Kaleb says.
“Don’t call her that,” my sister Cleo snaps, and Kaleb’s smirk quickly hardens.
“She likes it,” he sneers, and sadly, I can’t deny that at one time I did. Kaleb used to call me Stump with the happy gleam of an inside joke I loved being a part of. I grit my teeth against the vicious way he’s twisted the once endearing nickname.
Kaleb came into our lives when I was eight—my sister fifteen—his dark hair and dark eyes and bright, unshadowed smile irresistible to us both. The injury changed him. Six years into dating Cleo, an illegal tackle on the lacrosse field ruined Kaleb’s back, along with his dreams of playing lacrosse in the national league.
The first six years with Kaleb were wondrous for my sister and for me. But it’s been a long time since those days of wonder. Now, Kaleb does little more than hate. He hates my sister and his son because they’re able to do the things he cannot. He hates me because I’m like him, without the constant waves of bitter self-pity.
“Here,” I say, handing over the popcorn bowl. I meet Kaleb’s smug gaze, refusing to allow him the pleasure of power over my nerves.
I sit back against the sofa, slipping my hand into the pocket of my cardigan and pressing my fingers against Maybelle’s sides.
As Bennett’s choice of movie rambles on in the background, I work to piece together my memories of Maybelle. I recall the nights I would flip through my geography book, picking the prettiest locations and travelling to strange copies of them. The translation was never perfect. White-cliffed beaches would turn into expanses of rock framed by enormous, frozen waves. Forests would fly while elongated birds stayed rooted to the ground. But it was good enough for me. Better, in fact. It was mine.
Eventually I moved into history books, biographies. I wanted to visit famous people long dead, but the bird couldn’t translate bodies correctly, either. They were always featureless, their limbs wavy and misshapen. Still, I loved seeing what they would be like. Guessing at the mistakes became part of the fun.
I relax against Cleo’s sofa, the putrid scents—dirt and old sweat—mingling with the buttery aroma of popcorn.
A thought niggles at the back of my mind, a vision blurred and dark . . . The day I decided to test what would happen if I used Maybelle to enter a fictional world. I try to pull the unclear memory into focus, but it refuses to sharpen. My fingers tingle against the bird’s stitched feathers, and a cold sweat dampens my forehead. I tune out my surroundings, focus on the memory until it’s so close a single blink of the eye could bring it to the surface or push it away.
“Hey Stump, do you want the popcorn back or not?”
Kaleb’s voice explodes into black spots behind my eyes. Pain shoots down the left side of my face, my chest and arm, my hip, my leg, my foot.
I gasp, scream. The blackness obscures my vision until I can’t see anything, and I collapse, sliding off the couch and curling into a ball on the floor. Blindly, I claw at the bottom of my leg, trying to grasp my foot, trying to curb the searing ache as the memory cascades over me.
Blood and Honour. A fantasy about mystical creatures and handsome knights. I chose the climactic scene, imagined I could watch the hero battling the fire-breathing dragon. I didn’t consider how the translation might fail, how anything could go wrong.
All those years ago, I found myself transported to a place full of raging fire with living swords hacking through the air and a faceless beast advancing towards me, the shaking force of its footsteps bringing a wall of fir
e down on top of my body. With my last inklings of pain-drenched sanity, I heard Maybelle’s birdsong, and screamed the not-words to plunge back into reality.
I was already unconscious when I returned to my room. My parents found me, and they blamed the old house’s electrical system because they didn’t know how else to explain the massive burns. They must have eventually returned the undamaged copy of Blood and Honour to the library, Maybelle tucked unseen among the pages.
I feel the pain I could never recall after waking in the hospital. The burning of my flesh, the scorching torture destroying my foot.
“Henny, what’s the matter?” Cleo says worriedly. I hear rustling around me as my hands continue to grab wildly at the air.
Air. No limb, just air.
“What the hell is this?” Kaleb says.
“She’s obviously in pain,” Cleo snaps. “Kaleb, let me go!”
“She’s just trying to get attention,” Kaleb replies coldly. Someone kneels beside me. I’m sobbing now, certain of what happened to my foot, wondering how it ever escaped my memory.
“Henny, you okay?” It’s Bennett whispering into my ear, and I struggle to nod, struggle to shake off the blackness concealing my vision. When at last the living room blinks back into sight, Bennett helps me sit up, and then runs to fetch a warm cloth for my face.
Kaleb studies me, trying to decide if my pain was real. I don’t look at him, but I hold my head up so he knows I’m not being meek.
“You’re such a drama queen,” he says after a minute, shaking his head. Even from the corner of my eye, I can see his stare is dark, unnerving. He wants to give me something real to cry about. I take a long, steady breath, and slip my hand back into my pocket. I grip the patchwork bird until I’m sure my knuckles are white.
Maybelle’s translation caused my leg to burn, and now, fifteen years later, I think she’s trying to make amends for the damage she caused. In her world, I have two feet. I can walk without crutch or imbalance.
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