Interfictions 2

by Delia Sherman

  I placed it in the sink on its side as gently as I could. There was no risk of its flying away now. I put the bowl for the blood and innards in the sink next to it, brought the feather bowl a little closer to my work area. Guess I wouldn't need the cutting board after all. Or the machete.

  I took a breath. It's okay, I thought. Just stay calm and work fast.

  I clutched the knife in my right hand, held the pigeon steady in my left. Should I cut off its head first, put it out of its misery? I was afraid I would do it wrong, that I would cut indecisively and have to hack at the neck, torturing the bird even more. I was desperate to kill it mercifully, quickly. With my left hand I lifted its useless wing. With my right I guided the knifepoint to where I thought its heart was. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I honor your sacrifice. Thank you.” Then as hard as I could I pushed the knife all the way through the bird. My brain burst into a swarm of bees. The knifepoint gouged the sink's porcelain.

  The front door opened. Papi. Home early. The pigeon lay dead in the sink, transfixed by the knife still in my hand. I looked around wildly, sought any means of escape, but it was as if my fingers were glued to the knife. I couldn't let go.

  Wait. No. I could let go. I just didn't want to. I wanted to be punished for what I had done. I took a breath and faced the kitchen's swinging doors.

  Mami shouldered her way into the kitchen, struggling with three paper bags overflowing with groceries. She couldn't see me over the bags. “Sal, I'm home!” she yelled, loud enough for me to hear her in any room of the house. In English.

  "Hi Mami?” I asked.

  "Oh! Jou're in here?” She laughed. "?Bueno, no te queda parado c?mo un bobo! Come hel’ jour Mami with these bags.” But she was already putting them down on the kitchen table. “?Tonigh’ we're goin’ to have a feas'! I goin’ to ma'e jour favorite. ?Boliche! I was at the estore, and I saw ... ?Qu? te pasa?"

  She stopped dead, stared at me, her eyes following my arm, to the hand, to the knife grip. I stared back. Then I started to cry.

  "?Qu? te pasa?” she repeated, terrified, running over. She looked in the sink.

  Covered her mouth. Screamed into her hands.

  "?Qu? hiciste, Sal?” She yelled. She started crying, too. "Bendito sea Dios. ?Qu? hiciste?"

  I started to respond through my bawling, but Mami slapped me. I instantly tasted blood, stopped crying. She slapped me again. "?Dime que diablera hiciste aqu?!"

  Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten Mami was a hitter. She took off a sneaker and proceeded to give me the walloping of my life.

  It was the happiest moment of my childhood.

  * * * *

  When Mami disappeared again, slipped off the tightrope of my Y time and tumbled into another, I knew I had to look for conclusive evidence to prove to Papi she had returned. And of course I found none: time retroactively righted itself the moment she vanished. The only thing it left were the marks she left on me. Shoe welts on my back and legs. The cut she slapped into my lip.

  Nevertheless, when Papi got home, I told him everything: I showed him The Ebos of Santeria and described my encounter with Miss Pigeon and showed him the pigeon I sacrificed, still in the sink, and pointed to my lip. “Mami did this,” I said.

  "Did you get in a fight at school?” he asked.

  "No. I told you what happened."

  He picked up The Ebos of Santeria. “This book told you to kill a pigeon?"

  "No. Not exactly. I made up my own ebo. But I used it as a guide."

  "Where'd you get it?"

  "Ms. Anbow."

  "Your assistant principal?"

  "Yes."

  Papi called information and got her number and even paid the extra twenty-five cents to put him through immediately. “Ms. Anbow? This is August?n Vid?n, Salvador Vid?n's father. I'm sorry to bother you at home, but we need to talk. Now. In person. Would you mind if we went to your house?” He looked at the sink. “I'd invite you here, but my house is a little messy right now."

  * * * *

  I don't know exactly how long I spent kneeling on that Cal Tech sidewalk speaking cooingly to the pigeon I'd almost punted. I didn't stop until my cell interrupted my reverie. Caller ID showed the number. Home.

  I flipped it open and said “Hi, Mom and/or Dad."

  "It's both of us,” said Mrs. Dravlin. I mean Ms. Anbow. I mean Mom.

  "We heard you on the radio,” said Papi, his voice younger than it had been for the span of years when he'd been unmarried.

  "How'd I sound?” I asked. Fishing for compliments like a ten-year-old.

  As always, Mom obliged. “Like a genius,” she said.

  And, as always, Papi said, “Well...” He made that word four syllables long.

  "Oh, don't start, Auggie. He sounded brilliant, and you know it."

  "Of course he did. But that NPR reporter: what an idiot! Couldn't they find someone who at least knew the first thing about quantum physics?"

  "No, they couldn't, because nobody knows the first thing about quantum physics. Except maybe Elegua.” Suddenly inspired, Mom added, “Hey, Sal, you know what would make this moment perfect?"

  "What?"

  "Your mami."

  "Don't say that,” I knee-jerked. “You're my mother."

  "Oh, don't be so sentimental. I know that. I'm just saying it'd be nice if Alma were here to see this. Don't you think, Auggie?"

  Papi went quiet; we listened to him think. Then he said, “Well, sure. If only that were possible."

  "You know what,” Mom said, startlingly chipper. “I forgot I need to pick up some things for dinner tonight. I need to run out to the store.” And then, her voice devoid of connotation, the way only psychologists master, she said, “You boys be good."

  "Love you, Mom,” I said. I heard her smile before she hung up.

  Papi and I waited until she shut the front door behind her. Then Papi said, “Now all we need is a pigeon."

  "No worries, Papi.” I held out my hand, and the pigeon I'd almost kicked trundled toward it happily, as if it were as pleased by this serendipity as I was. “I've got one right here."

  Ash? O.

  * * * *

  Borges's “The Garden of Forking Paths” gives us one possible way to create an infinite book. It's not unlike—forgive me, Borges—a Choose Your Own Adventure, though in Borges's story the book loops around like a Rolodex and is therefore infinite. But it's a small infinity: a unidirectional line that circles around to bite its own tail.

  While I was thinking about Borges and time, I was also thinking of my abuela, who was senile and dying. She was a Santera. She used to plant curses (ebos) in my mother's garden. She didn't like Mami. One I remember was an egg left to rot beside a rose bush. I think it was meant to dry up Mami's womb. Anyway, Mami would find these ebos and grow terrified. She would tell Papi, and one time Papi got so angry that he beheaded the statues of all Abuela's gods. Papi would fight any god, any time, any place. Abuela bought new gods, and the cycle began anew.

  In my house, Santeria was tantamount to black magic. It was the opposite of Catholicism and, therefore, the opposite of the Good.

  I went to college. I learned that Santeria wasn't black magic, but a religion, an act of defiance created by Caribbean slaves so that they could hide their faith in plain sight from their captors. I learned it was a vital part of Cuban culture. I learned it was a difficult thing to learn: practices varied a great deal, and little was written down.

  And now Abuela was senile and dying. I could never know what she knew about Santeria.

  This is how histories fall out of time. This is how we forget.

  But sometimes histories don't fall away completely. Sometimes they get stuck in the interstices. There they lie, waiting to be excavated. You won't find much in your digs—a femur, a shard of pottery, a strip of paper inscribed with ideograms from an undeciphered language. But from these bits, a vision of the past emerges—wavering like a mirage in the desert, but a vision just the same. And, for one delicious second, the tyrann
y of time is broken.

  Carlos Hernandez

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  Shoes

  Lavie Tidhar

  He remembers going to Sanara when he was young, standing barefoot in the water off that great bleached-white stretch of dazzling sand, and fishing. Now they used bamboo for a rod, and the line and hook were cargo, had come on the ships from the waetman's distant countries. Back then he had used a bow and arrow, to shoot at the fish as they pooled beneath the cool shadow of the great black stones. He guesses it doesn't matter. The fish are still there, and the naura too, the sweet white meat enclosed within an armorial shell, that one needs only dive for.

  When he was a child (but how long ago was that? he no longer knows), he went to Sanara almost every day. It was, is, his family's land: his land. Back then the only things that washed on the beach were driftwood and coconuts. He remembers it years later, when his son, David, who was now a policeman in Santo, was merely a boy, and the Americans had come and there was a war. There were five Americans living up on the hill above Mosina. There was a great tree up there, and they had built a house at its top and put a bed there, and each of them spent six hours at a time sitting antap with binoculars, looking out for the Japanese. His boy, David (was he a policeman now?), helped carry food for the Americans. He was there when the man in the tree discovered a sea monster, its body rising from the deeps between Vanua Lava and Gaua, and the sun caught its metal hide and betrayed it.

  The man had scrambled down the tree as fast as he could, and when he came down his hands were raw and took a week to heal. He spoke to his captain, and the captain used the great machine blong toktok and half an hour later airplanes came, with a great buzzing excitement like a cloud of flies, until they had located the monster, which the Americans said was a submarine. Neither he nor David had seen a submarine before; it seemed as impossible as an airplane.

  The airplanes circled high above, but one by one they darted low, and as they did they seemed to defecate on the monster, but they were planes, not flies, and the things they had released were bombs.

  On and on they went, one after the other, and the water in the distance rose high and made clouds of tiny drops, and rainbows arced between them, until there were no more bombs.

  He was in Sanara when the debris of the dead monster began to wash ashore the next day. Broken crates, and bottles with a strange curved script on them, so different from the Europeans, and shoes. He remembers the shoes best. There had been no bodies, and he thought then that it was better that way, that the soldiers inside that metal hulk were better off left in the sea as they had lived. He had only seen the soldiers once, and that was before, at Surevuvu, though he had not realized it then.

  So there were no soldiers. But shoes there were, and as the years went on, as his son grew and became a man and had children of his own, their country was changed, and the waetman brought with him new things beside religion, and chief among them was footwear, shoes, and ol slipa, what the waetman called flip-flops, and now every time he went to Sanara more shoes were washed ashore, enough to fit an entire village, and when the pikininis came with him they ran along the shore and tried them on and walked in them for a while and then discarded them again.

  But now that he is old, he knows the danger of shoes and does not wear them himself. For he is old, and there is no arguing the point, but he had been young once, more years ago than most people believe.

  "Angkel,” his niece says, and the old man turns and regards her with a puzzled expression, and yet smiling, “kam insead long haos. Wind ia I kolkol."

  But the old man waves her away with a vague gesture, for he is not cold, and the wind is pleasant. That language, too, which when he was young was called beche-la-mar, after the sea slug that the traders lusted after, and was now called Bislama, it, too, was a mark of change, and now all the children spoke it, and it was no longer a pidgin but a creole—that is, a language one spoke from birth: a mother tongue. When he was young, they each spoke the language of their own village or island, and there was no common tongue, so that sometimes you did not understand the man from the village just down the beach, on the other side. But Bislama came with the Europeans, like shoes or fishing lines, and the old man could speak it well; for they had come even before his time.

  "Angkel?” His nephew comes and sits down with him, and the old man smiles. His nephew is a good boy; he still remembers him as little more than a baby; they had taken him to Sanara once, and he had climbed a great black rock and could not come down again and had cried. He has become a good man who knows kastom, and the old stories and the dance. He knows, and that's important, the old man feels, that he is not the owner of this land, but its caretaker. The Europeans never understood that, when they spoke of traditional landowners. You did not own the land as much as it owned you. “Shall I make a fire?"

  The old man makes the same vague motion with his hand. He looks out, but his eyes are not good and he can no longer see the volcano, and it is getting dark. Beyond the volcano is Surevuvu, the hill of the dead, and the old man knows that soon he will have to go there, as is right; and besides, he has been there before: he knows its secrets.

  "I would like to go back to Sanara,” he says dreamily. “You and I should go. Is the old bush path still there?"

  "It is only beyond the hill,” his nephew says. “We will go soon."

  But of course he will never go beyond the hill again, for his body is too old to travel even that short distance. His grandchildren and their children are the ones to follow that ancient trail through the bush now, and fish beneath the great black stones, and dive for naura, and sleep in the shade of the elder trees ... He had a good wife, and she loved him, and he cared for her, too, and they had many children. But sometimes at night he still thinks of Met?r, and the ship, and the far distant country of the waetman, and he misses her.

  "We will go soon,” his nephew says again, no doubt thinking to humor the old man, and the old man smiles and stares out to the sea. His nephew is a good man. He works for the province (had they won independence then? were the British and the French really gone?), and pilots a boat, and knows the pathways of the sea amid the islands. For him, waetman and blakman are natural facets of humanity; he does not remember a time before the waetman came.

  * * * *

  But the old man remembers this place before it was a town, and before it was a plantation, before the coconut trees were planted and buluk were brought on the ships and bred and ate the grass between the trees, and there were horses. He had been a child when the Southern Cross came, the way it had come in his father's time, and the men on the shore looked and saw white men and thought they were ghosts.

  But they were missionaries. When they came ashore, his father told him, he had been afraid. They were vui, ghosts, come from the land of the ancestors in the giant hulk of a spirit ship, and they had lost their native tongues; their speech was fathomless.

  Yet they did not prove dangerous; not then, at any rate, the old man thought. The white men had wealth, had cargo, and they exchanged many things for food and hospitality, but they were particularly interested in the young. There was a school, they said. A fabulous school on an island far away, where the teachings of their powerful god could be shared. His father had been unsure what a god was. He knew of Qat, the trickster, who had come from Vanua Lava—from their own land, in fact—and Qat could perform many miracles, could shrink and sail in a shell of coconut and hide his brothers in the beams of a nakamal, and he fought Qasavara many times, and made the tree grow until it stretched from Gaua to Vanua Lava, and his stones were everywhere. The waetman's god had no tambou stones, but it only needed one look at their ship and their clothes and their guns to know that he was powerful indeed.

  And so his father had gone with them. Sometimes he had told him stories of it, of the school on Norfolk Island, where they dressed like the white men did, and learned to read the waetman's books, and learned of Jesus. They were fed well.
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br />   There were people there from other islands, other nations, and many from the islands of King Solomon, and his father learned with them, and sometimes he exchanged his own knowledge with them, too, although the missionaries didn't know this and would have been angry had they known. There was magic in the Solomons that was new to his father, of which the most prominent was the knowledge of sea ghosts. Indeed, Bishop Patteson was eventually killed by sea ghosts, off the island of Nukapu, where the islanders had mistaken his mission for the man stealers, and their chiefs raised the sea to protect them. Patteson was the first martyr.

  When his father returned, he was a Christian, and he brought up his son to be the same, and why not? Their god was a powerful one, and had cargo. But he also taught him the old ways, the way to speak to vui and to prevent nakaimas and to spot, amidst the dogs walking down a road of an evening, which one was real and which a man in different shape. And when his mother died, his father had taken him to Surevuvu, when he was young, and together they danced the rusrus deng? in the dark with the other men and raised her, and he got to speak to her one last time and tell her that he loved her.

  The missionaries settled at last on Mota, which they had called Hat Island, and which you could see from the shore of Vanua Lava every day even when clouds formed like a screen. And they took on the language of Mota, and taught in it, and their ship, the Southern Cross, made frequent visits to the islands of the Banks, as the white men called them, and they still took young boys to their distant school, and returned educated and dressed in the waetman's fashion. And their god was all-powerful, beating even Qat.

  So when his own time came—the old man, who was then not old at all—he, too, had wanted to go and learn of the power of their magician-god. And when he saw the Southern Cross approaching the bay, coming across the point which they now called Port Patteson, he was excited, and waited for the bishop (it was Wilson now, after Patteson's death and Codrington's short service) to come on shore, and vowed to join him.