Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, 28

by Edited by Gavin J. Grant

  Mother may be correct. She has warned me all my life that flirtation leads to ruin, that one must always focus on the task at hand and not entertain those old impulses inferior people used as their shaky foundations. I can see now that even beautiful Palmetto is prone to such folly.

  As this morning I walked toward the shrine, I saw her sitting on her front step, her work boots unlaced and dangling free. Her father had gone ahead, and she suggested that I walk with her. Father looked down at me and nodded in a not so solemn way, a twitch in his face intimating that he thought it a fine idea for me to walk with Palmetto, an opportunity I might enjoy—and what is one to do when given such ill advice from one’s father? Looking back on that moment, when my own father ushered me toward danger, I see now the wisdom in the Seeoh’s proposal that the children of unwise and inefficient Pleasants be raised instead by the Mangers.

  But to the point: In this still-dark morning Palmetto turned from Central Road and walked brazenly down the alley that runs behind the storefronts for the Seeoh’s wares, then quickly past those tar lots behind the manufacturing sites, and then up the hill where the honeycomb offices for administration overlook the lake. This, as we all know, is where the roads end for Pleasants until the brilliant few, the most productive of us all, are selected into Manger life. But impetuous Palmetto walked onward, ducking without hesitation beneath a loose panel in the retaining wall.

  I stood frozen. “Palmetto,” I said, “we will be late to work.”

  “Manger Wall has an away-from-shrine appointment this morning.” She beckoned me forward. “I want to show you something.”

  The news that Manger Wall would be away mattered not: we were to work on the shrine as assigned, and if we did not we would generate not a shrine but great disappointment. I had hoped that today we would finish sculpting the Seeoh’s golden face, for The Pleasant Work Unsupervised Just as the They Do ’Neath Manger Eyes!

  Then Palmetto laced her fingers around my wrist. Such a heat! Such a shock! It is no surprise that presented with such a phenomenon I was so easily swayed to do the irrational, the unthinkable, the taboo. I pray that no Manger read here, or that if they do they understand our actions only as the frailty of exuberant youth wanting in cultivation. My hand, shamed, shakes even as I form these words: I ducked through and stood with Palmetto on forbidden soil. I stared stunned as she waved her hand toward the landscape: a gorgeous valley in the pre-dawn light, streets lined on one side with pear trees and on the other with apple, buildings two and even three stories high separated by large swaths of rich grass. It is an order from no less an authority than the Seeoh—an order by Seeohs of all cities I know of—not to gaze upon the property of Mangers, and this is precisely what I now did, Palmetto told me. All can see, of course, the Seeoh’s dwelling; it sparkles high and majestic on the eastern hill, the jewel of the sky—but we know things come from leering with envy at others’ belongings, none good. Oh, how I wish we’d stopped then, for though a transgression interrupted is yet a transgression, that we continued onward is beyond mere misbehavior; it threatens my name as a Pleasant.

  “Come,” she said. “Come look.”

  We peered through a first-floor window in the nearest house, saw the room filled with luxurious furniture and eccentric objects—a marble elephant, a painting of an orchid in rich oils, an intricately decorated urn—from what must be distant and charmed lands.

  “This is Manger Wall’s house,” Palmetto said. “Just him and his wife.” I must have stared back in disbelief, for Palmetto insisted upon it again. Imagine! The space inside: a palace, two palaces, a veritable realm for each person.

  “He visits the woods, you know,” Palmetto continued. “He lives here but has a second woman among the Cacklers.”

  I had heard such viciousness before, and though Palmetto was never lovelier with the blush rising in her cheeks, I told her it was a lie.

  “Oh, Bolder, you never disappoint,” she said, as if I had just finished singing a Seeoh song in a particularly impressive manner. But as she walked away her words hung in the air and I felt as if they lacked sincerity. I lingered for a moment and then raced to the work site where Manger Wall sat, back to the rising sun, impatiently tapping his foot. He delivered a deserved scolding, meticulously crafted and as sharp as if it were of the Seeoh’s own inditing. Yet I admit that as I rose rung by rung to finish shaping the Seeoh’s impressive nose—I worked on the right side; my father the left; I could see his head bobbing just at the Seeoh’s bridge, his tattered shoes feeling for balance below—something in my chest ached at what I had seen, ached all the more for knowing it shouldn’t ache.

  To Ask is Not the Task! To Ask is Not the Task!

  It is as if my fellow Pleasants had forgotten that simplest of truisms. It is not enough that Father skips his evening dessert and then tells inappropriate tales that redden Mother’s cheeks. It is not enough that Palmetto ignores the laws of our land, tarnishing her simple beauty with an impure spirit. It is not enough that Vera, ever fumbling, breaks again her leg and Stinch tries to pretend it is because of loose ladder rungs and not his sister’s own ineptness. No.

  On top of all that, after lunch the Cacklers cruise past on their rickety cycles shouting propaganda and spewing insults—serfs they call us, slaves—just sad and self-delusional claims of superiority. One of their women, her threadbare shirt revealing much of her breasts, paused long enough to make obscene gestures toward Manger Wall, who made the mistake of calling her by her name. She cackled wretchedly, satisfied to have elicited such a response, and then sped into the dust left behind by the other cycles.

  Then things grew more troubling yet. I know one rises not to be Manger, to live in the Manger housing with all the items fantastic, by slumming with Cackler sluts; the others, though, saw Manger Wall’s use of her name as some kind of proof, and began to question him. Only Palmetto’s father continued working diligently, setting down his trowel only to tell Palmetto to lead with head and not heart. Yet even as Manger Wall so ably answered their questions, they pursued that sad line, asking him how he came to be Manger (by hard work and healthy habits), if it were true that the Seeoh selected Mangers based on breeding (false as a Cackler’s prayer), if the Cacklers were as lacking in evil as they were possessions, if wickedness and virtue were but words (no, no, no: The Cackler’s Evil Runs Deep as Earth, While Goodness as Gold is Worth).

  At last Manger Wall reached his limit. He rose from his chair and held his hand above his head for silence. He told Palmetto’s father and I to stop our labor, for though we’d not engaged in such idle queries we too needed to hear, in turn, his questions for us.

  “Vera,” he said, “almost daily you stumble and break yourself. Why, last week you nearly severed your thumb clean through. And what do I do? Though it is balanced on the Seeoh’s very ledger, I pay for your remedies so that you may continue. And I ask you, what is the remedy of the woods? What ailments and woes do the Cacklers leave untreated?”

  Vera nodded her ugly head, scratched her arm in an uncouth manner. She answered: “All of them, sir. Their medicine cannot rightly be called that, ancient as it is. And some injuries they let heal by ‘natural means.’”

  “Stinch,” Manger Wall said, “you gaze westward with a glimmer of envy in your eye, as if yonder Cackler life held for you some gift. But I ask you, has a poor Cackler ever given you work?”

  Stinch stared down at his cement-splattered boots, ashamed at the obvious answer.

  “And you two.” Manger Wall motioned now toward Father and Palmetto, reserving his greatest disgust for them—a disgust, I must say, that I shared in part; though I love Father and cherish Palmetto, those sentiments can only be stained by their behavior. “Has a Cackler ever allowed you overtime when the Seeoh’s work is not properly finished? Have you ever been asked to build a shrine to the honor of a shabby Cackler?”

  “No, sir,” they both sa
id.

  We returned then to work, but our labor was silent, save the occasional and distant Cackler shout punctuating the air, like a hawk screeching at the find of fresh prey.

  Mother has put Father on warning. She reminds him that the Mangers no longer dissuade spouses from separations, as some can in fact be more productive alone than in tandem. Yet Father refuses still his desserts, continues his grotesque advances.

  Palmetto today pulled me behind the shrine as Manger Wall napped. She held a photograph of a man and a woman by the edge of the woods, limbs entangled, his head plunging down her body.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Can you not see for yourself?”

  I felt a nausea as I stared at the vile image. I felt a stirring in my stomach. I felt so many dizzying things too shameful to be named.

  “It is Manger Wall,” she said.

  Father and Palmetto’s father were arguing. They remained quiet so as not to wake Manger Wall, but I saw that over great objections Father emptied the lunch time desserts into the cement for the shrine’s base and filled the cups instead with a shimmering blue liquid Stinch had concealed in a vial.

  “I don’t blame Manger Wall,” she said. “But if it’s not forbidden for him it shouldn’t be forbidden for us.” I meant to name her a liar, but the very word stuck in my throat, lodged there with a stubborn taste of brass.

  When night fell, I toiled next to father on the uppermost part of the shrine, the sculpted waves of the Seeoh’s hair rising elegantly to our waists. It was good to work there, for rain fell during our break and we were afforded good grips as we welded and gilded and buffed until the Seeoh’s head gleamed like moonlight on water. Below, Manger Wall was small as a pin, his balding head nodding toward sleep, and there arrived a sense of wonder that a man so small might be still so mighty, though that sense was laced with something I could not quite identify, a heat beneath my fingertips as if I’d touched the mean end of a hornet.

  Later, Father and I walked home while distant coyotes howled. Mother’s dinner awaited, and I was eager for it, but I tarried as we neared our small house. Father noticed my troubled look and asked me what was the matter—as if he knew not, as if the day had been smooth and seamless as we hope to make the shrine.

  “Why did you empty our desserts?” I asked. As soon as I said it I worried Father might anger at my temerity, but he merely put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You cannot imagine a world without desserts, can you?” he said.

  “No, sir,” I answered proudly.

  “That is the fault of me and others of my generation, who can still remember such a world.” He sighed and looked skyward; I thought he might loose a midnight call to match the coyotes. “It is my debt to you,” he said.

  He entered our tiny house then, and under Mother’s watchful eye I could inquire no further, for it made no sense that he considered himself in debt. Indeed, it is his generation, as all Pleasant children learn in their earliest years, that ushered us into this wondrous age.

  I am weary. I watch Father again in front of the fire and I wonder what troubling blood must course in my own veins, the impulse that makes me itch again for Palmetto’s touch against me no matter the cost.

  Night again, the work done. A starless sky so dark I cannot see my hand drift across this page.

  Father.

  Manger Wall is, even sleeping, a wily man, and today he lifted a heavy eyelid just in time to see Father tampering with the desserts. Stinch and Vera both leapt from their workstations, trying to obscure Manger Wall’s view, Vera knocking over a bucket of black oil paint—either her natural clumsiness or an attempt to distract Manger Wall further. But Palmetto’s father raised his shaking hand. Quivering at the mouth, with a dab of sickly spittle hanging from his lip, he swore to Manger Wall that he had done his best to stop such a plot.

  I watched it all. I do not remember seeing Palmetto.

  Manger Wall grew furious, angrier than I have ever seen him, even at the Cacklers. He raged and raged, invoking the name of the Seeoh with the threat of full vengeance. As I watched, I felt again that burning sensation, greater still than Stinch’s blowtorch, like a fire both within and without me. I recognize now that it was an urge to run to Father’s defense.

  Too late. For Manger Wall raised his gun and shot Father in the stomach.

  We all fell silent, but Manger Wall spoke. “You will need a remedy. Would you like a remedy?”

  Father merely held his stomach, trying not to cry out in pain. The blood massed around and over his fingers, bubbling as if oil struck from the ground. Manger Wall picked up a cup filled with untainted dessert; he knelt and held it inches from Father’s face. In his other hand, aloft, he held the pager for the physical remedies to be delivered.

  “I can mend your body,” he said, “with the press of a button. But first we must mend your spirit.” He knelt closer yet to Father, all but forcing the dessert into his mouth—but Father pinched his lips inward, bit down on them and turned his head away.

  Manger Wall circled around, trying again to make Father take dessert, the two of them making a lunatic dance along the ground, raising a billowing cloud of dust.

  “Dessert,” Manger Wall said. “Dessert or death.”

  Father spoke at last: “Then death.”

  Manger Wall stood and turned his back on Father. He spoke to us more than to him: “Shame of shames. To live as a Pleasant and die as a Cackler.”

  “Call me what you will,” Father said.

  “You’ll be left in the open earth, flesh for the Cacklers’ rituals, tossed to the woods where they waste their days, run wild and dirty as wolves . . .”

  “. . . and live!” Stinch shouted, interrupting Manger Wall, “guided only by their collective sentiments and individual desires, weeping in sorrows and singing in joys.”

  For that transgression Stinch too was shot. Manger Wall offered no more remedies. He merely sat back in his chair, resting his eyes while Stinch and Father bled. I raced to Father. His fingers were papery and cold, but he could still grip my hand. I remembered, suddenly, when I was a child of five, my father walking me down the road toward my first day of work, his thumb rubbing back and forth across my trembling fingers to ease my anxiety.

  “Bolder,” he said. He looked at me and his eyes were watery; the sensation I felt I have no words for, but I know in the days before remedies and desserts they felt such unpleasantness often. “You are my son and I want you to live better than I.”

  “I will work hard, Father.”

  “No,” he rasped. “Not that. There are other lives to be had.” His eyes fluttered toward the west, and I looked to see Palmetto racing for the woods, escaped in the confusion of the moment. She had loosed her hair from its band and it flowed, dappled by the sun, behind her.

  “I cannot go to the Cacklers,” I said. I did not want to disappoint Father in his final moments, and yet there he was asking the one thing I dare not do.

  “It isn’t cackling, Bolder,” he said. “Only laughter.”

  That was the end of it, and at Manger Wall’s command we resumed work, though my sight was so blurred I am sure my errors were many.

  And now, as I said: Night. The sky dark as ink. The Darkness Pleasant Need Not Fear for Darkness Draws A New Day Near.

  That I have been told so many times, and even Mother, in receiving the news of Father, found in it a pitiful solace.

  I think now of walking toward the woods, of finding on a cool bed of pine straw my Palmetto. If I imagine deeply enough I can smell her scent mixed with the damp earth, feel her long hair between my fingers. Could I see I would go to her. Yet the shrine of the Seeoh reaches toward the clouds, rising so high it blocks even the moonlight.

  Once upon a time there was a story so tiny that hardly any one could see it.

  Akashi
yaki (Octopus dumplings, serves two)

  Erica Hildebrand

  Kento followed the octopus for twelve city blocks, keeping his distance, avoiding the trail of oily residue its eight arms left as it slapped along the sidewalk.

  He pulled out his cell phone to check the time. It was late, not that he ever planned this sort of thing around a set schedule. Whether an oddly shaped cloud or a club-footed pigeon on the street, he had a habit of following things. Tonight, it was the octopus which had escaped from his brother’s restaurant.

  The phone rang, display brightening and plastic vibrating in his sweaty palm.

  The octopus stopped. It twisted around to stare at him with one protruding, tubular eyeball. Then it stared at the phone.

  Kento flipped open the phone and put it to his ear while he watched the octopus watching him.

  “Hello?” Kento said. “Oh, hi Hiro.”

  The octopus, accepting this, slithered onward, waddling its boneless mass up the street. Kento followed, his brother jabbering in his ear, his voice tinny from the poor signal quality.

  The octopus pulled its bulk under the glow of a streetlight, its wet skin gleaming. It didn’t really keep a set shape; it wadded itself up and lifted what Kento thought of as its face, tube-eyes swiveling like periscopes.

  Hiro shouted: “Kento!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you listening? I asked did you catch him yet?”

  Hiro asked a lot of questions.

  “I’m following him. I think we’re close to the pier.”