Another Squirrel
When the first coil of cigarette smoke ensnared my nose, I imagined it had a life of its own. Like magic from a wand. The sun had made its way behind me, finally, so the front of the rock was brightly lit and as bare as a canvas, the smoke casting a willowy shadow across it, replenished a few times over with fresh lungfuls. I looked up and my eyes followed the smoke deeper into The Woods, where it had rambled around the thick arms of trees and hopped from leaf to leaf and bud to bud, which were as round and pink as gumballs and blurred the jutting lines of the branches. It came to a concentrated point at the end of a long white cigarette in the claws of a little squirrel. The same little squirrel I’d seen eating the hamburger a few minutes or hours ago. Gray. A fluctuation of black and white like a snowy television set.
It was sitting up straight in the skirt of collected skin over its feet, looking at me. It then set its sights on the scroll of smoke that had made its way to my nose and with a hop began to follow it. Around branches, over leaves, under buds, skewering the smoke through the center with its wet nose until he was right up against my nose.
He tossed the cigarette in the pool of blood that had collected next to my hip and then stuck his little hands out, rolled up the skin on his arms, and dipped them into it. When he pulled them out they were drenched with red. He did the same to his feet. Then, without warning, he scurried up the rock, leaving a trail of little prints all around it. Returned to the inkwell, re-soaked his quills, and began the process again. He did this four more times and finally, the last time, he didn’t return from the dark side of the rock. I stared at the little red prints, stared and stared and stared until they became a picture. A picture of The Terrible Thing, right there in front of me. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping to lose the picture the way that images in clouds can be lost if you close your eyes and think of something else.
And I suddenly wished that I could have been born as ink on paper. Printed. Because then I would know that I was really here. Because there I was. A hieroglyph in a cave, chiseled with iron or fingered in blood, etched into stone or scratched into a tree. I wanted to be a print on the rock.
To be a print on the rock. A print on the rock. Five little squirrel fingers and toes, red rippling bumps, red footprints all over, two hundred, two hundred, two hundred, counted three times: two hundred, and all exactly the same. Two hundred prints on the rock. Things that could be counted were very special to me now. I’d counted leaves and twigs and birds today, understanding The Woods by its numbers.
Counting the seconds before the sun was almost all the way down. And The Woods took on the cold, metallic quality of dusk. It must be getting close to six o’clock. The Mother would have wondered where I went by now.
And I wouldn’t mind being found, either. It was getting dark and cold and I didn’t want to be out here after the sun went down and the nighttime critters that feast on bleeding things came out. I thought I saw a pair of eyes between two slim trees.
“Hello?” I croaked.
A few seconds passed.
“Hello? Is someone out there?”
I hate the fuzz that grows over everything at dusk, that frosty gray blurriness that makes you feel like you’ve got to get your eyes checked or that everything has suddenly started to foam.
“Please, if someone’s out there, could you step out? I’d like to go home now.”
No one emerged. Maybe next time I saw the squirrel I’d ask it to go get help. But I wasn’t expecting to see another one. Fuzzy things tend to clear out when it gets dark.
I looked down at the blackness spread all the way up my shorts. I could feel the stiffness at my waist. I would soon be a tiny figurine, like one of Mr. Ungula’s, and he could stick me wherever he wanted. Forever. Looking in the same direction, at the same collection of crotchety trees, decorated with old sneakers and rags and foils and wrappers and cups thrown from cars zipping along the highway. I hated the way they seemed to lean on each other like a battalion of elderly war heroes, demonstrating camaraderie for a photo. And they were in on it, too; they could have entertained me if they’d wanted to, but they didn’t. They were just standing around being boring. So I hated them.
Even though it felt like hours, it’s possible that I’d only been here for twenty or thirty minutes, minutes becoming little lifetimes. But I had to have been lying here for longer than just half an hour because I just had to have been. The thought of not knowing, the possibility that I might have only been lying here for a few minutes, snatched the breath from my throat. My lungs felt like they were being squeezed shut, pulled closed as though by strings on a hood, tighter, smaller, harder to breathe. I couldn’t be stuck like this anymore. I couldn’t be trapped. My breath kept getting caught up in my throat, sticky, swollen, barely getting through without a loud wheeze. I could feel something horrific bubbling, some reaction worse than crying or screaming, even worse than vomiting.
Furry creatures with flat fingernails and feisty little teeth gnawing on the cords that connected my eyes to my brain.
Short circuits running through my body, sirens going off everywhere, even in dark corners behind slacker organs that never see any real action, like the spleen, who was able to rub the sleep from his eyes just in time to look busy and see all the other organs in a veritable tizzy. The hardworking organs freaking out. Father organs kissing their families goodbye, leaving gooey, crying children behind, then sliding down my bones like fireman’s poles, off to work to figure out where the problem was coming from. None of them would ever suspect the snappy, nervous, belligerent little critters making mince of my eye wiring, disconnecting them from the world but not blinding me.
What happens when eyes still work, operate just fine, but are no longer connected to the brain? Something worse than vomit is what happens.
And for my poor innards, having no idea what was going on behind my eyes, no knowledge of the furry, flat-nailed creatures and their feisty teeth, there had to be some other reason. The worker bits in the vomit room were sweating buckets. They’d pressed the vomit button fifteen minutes ago; something should be gurgling by now, WHY WASN’T ANYTHING GURGLING?? Quick, get Walter on the phone in Guts. I can’t get him, sir! Well, keep trying! My cells were praying, gathering up close together, waiting for the new, worse-than-vomit thing to happen.
Another minute passed, another island of consciousness traversed or maybe two islands or three or forty-five. I was making sounds. I’m not sure for how long. I had a big breath in my lungs and was releasing tiny, croaking spurts of it through the very back of my throat, like hostages.
Controlling this voice that was so different from my own.
These spurts started to sound like a word, a name that I’d been thinking of all day:
“Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev, Lev.”
But I was sure he couldn’t hear me, sure he was somewhere on Princess street, in bed, in his bug-filled basement room that smelled of cold and hair, or at his parents’ dinner table slurping up subterranean humanoid mush, or even walking to the Miniature Wonderland to see me. He couldn’t be The Something Coming, here to push the rock and hoist me up and save me from The Terrible Thing. No one was coming. I’d be all alone forever.
I decided that I should become evil then. Wait for someone else to come traipsing along the path, lure them close, then catch them and hold them so they’d have to keep me company forever. I’m the bad guy. The undead. The demon. The evil thing lurking in The Woods, making it unsafe for young girls to wander. And actually it was better this way because now I never had to worry about bad guys ever again. I’m the bad guy. And the odds of there being two bad guys in The Woods at one time were pretty slim, I think.
Easter Story
The Mother always said that without powder, she was nothing but a hunk of meat. A steak flayed from a carcass, and once flayed, entitled to its own anatomy. As a steak she had an i
dentifiable T-bone and a relative weight and a particular marbling pattern. Easter liked the idea of a part being cut from the whole and turning into something else all together. A callous sliced from the soft tissue of a mollusk becomes a pearl. A parasite cut out of a woman becomes a person.
But everyone is just flesh, warmed by a heart pumping blood through organized veins and into and out of internal organs. To The Mother, this wasn’t an existence at all. A hunk of meat isn’t alive unless it’s understood differently, as something separate from the flesh it was cut from. Understood in the way that it’s supposed to be understood. As a rib eye or a porterhouse or filet mignon. So The Mother wore her powder and existed in the world as a Beautiful Woman with a little lucky dice nose.
She was fanatical about it. Compulsive. Blossoms of blush brushes lay aside dishes of bone-colored powder on just about every flat surface in The House. On the tops of bookshelves, windowsills, and end tables, brushes relaxed, idle, waited to be plucked by The Mother for a quick swipe or circle or smush. The areas surrounding the powder dishes were always covered in a film of barely there dust, perfect to drag a finger along or flatten a hand into or leave messages like the ever popular “ wash me.” Before she left The House, she had to be sure that she’d dusted herself over with powder, allowed it to settle on her shape and indicate her perimeters. A little lipstick as well. Always a little lipstick. She wouldn’t want to go out with an invisible mouth.
Clouds of unpredictable particles, invisible in the air but visible on clothes and in hair, billowed around The Mother all the time and Easter was terrified of any landing on her. It was too soft, too absent. Between her fingers it felt like nothing. But it was definitely something. Easter wondered how old The Mother had been when she’d first put on the powder, first realized that she was a shade without it. First understood that she needed it to exist in the world in the same way that she needed just enough food and water and a warm bed to sleep in. Maybe she left The House one day and no one noticed her and she thought for a moment that she might have died in her sleep that night. That is, until she smashed a jar of spaghetti sauce in the international foods section at the grocery store or bumped into a surly old man on the bus, and then people noticed her. But not in a good way. She wanted to be noticed in a good way.
So she bought a tablet of packed tight, bone-colored powder and brushed herself all over so you could see her perfectly well, or at least a shell of powder perfectly well. And a pair of lips. And the more she wore this mask of talc and ground fish scales, the more invisible she became underneath. Every night when she wiped it all off, the face that stared back was more and more nothing.
Would Easter reach an age when she didn’t hate the powder? An age when it stopped making her feel chilly all down her spine? Or would she simply start disappearing? Wake up one day and wonder if she’d died because no one noticed her. Not that it sounded bad. Not to be noticed. It would be nice not to be noticed, the way that people didn’t notice Julia. But she didn’t want to start something like that, applying the powder, without being sure. Because she still wasn’t totally clear on what came first: the absence, or the powder.
The June Room
She couldn’t sleep and the other girls probably couldn’t either. The thought of all of those people not sleeping, just lying frustrated in their beds: breathing heavily, perfectly tucked in, arms over blankets outlining their bodies; impressions of four torsos in four separate rooms through four floral bedspreads. Holes bored into ceilings from the glare of eight still eyes. They were all awake but not moving, reaching desperately for sleep as it drifted further away. The harder she stared, the more her walls began to look like they were covered in bugs, alive with bugs, throbbing with scuttling, slimy bugs. The same bugs she’d flicked off Lev, the same bugs that invaded his underground lair. Every one of them sucking the life from her daffodil paint. She was stiff as a statue, eyes round and wide and vulnerable, cracked bowls brimming with fear. Her palms splayed out on the comforter beside her concrete body, warming it with worry and dampening it with sweat.
What were the rules here?
Could they leave the walls?
Would they touch her?
No, they couldn’t leave the walls unless she looked at them. When she looked at them they could come closer. So all she had to do was not look at them. That should be easy enough. When her eyes closed, something began to happen. A sound from the deep dark of her head. A single bell. Small and held between two thick fingers, their nails as big as coins. The bell’s shapely body, limp-looking and exhausted as a plucked flower; the clapper gliding against the petals and sending a shudder rather than a shock through the round silvery lip.
Just barely singing but growing louder, slowly moving over the ripples of her brain like warm water, starting to move faster and faster until it kept perfect time with the bugs’ pattering little feet. They almost fed off of each other, faster and faster and faster, agitated and extending their perimeters, moving closer to the bed.
The bell was calling them. The bell from The Tooth House doors, the bell she heard when Lev was near, made these bugs writhe nearer.
So she had to stop. Stop thinking of the bell. Just go to sleep, kill the bell. But the bell was persistent. And it liked the shapes the bugs put themselves in, the order they brought to their frenzied crawling. She looked out the window and calmed herself down by finding shapes in the stars. The sky hadn’t changed the whole time she’d been in the apartment building, so the stars were a scene she knew inside and out, a scene upon which any number of stories could be played comfortably. Familiar faces and objects, the same you’d find in patterned wallpaper or hardwood panelling after the lights are off.
But she could still hear them, scuttling feet along her springtime paint, like tiny pebbles falling into a tin can from the puckered circle of a slowly opening hand.
Segments ribbing against segments; the crackle of an old record; a bustling street; the lub-dub of a ceiling fan; a consistent complement upon which other sounds may fall nicely.
Flecks of dried bug skin probably hemmed the room, falling to the floor in a graceful zigzag like snowflakes. She could smell them, too: the brisk, sour smell of cold blood. Wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall bugs. The thought of their feet on her skin wrung her with anxious nausea.
Quivering eyelids closed over wild eyeballs. Paddleball heartbeat, awake beneath the costume of sleep.
Sorry
The front porch at Mrs. Bellows’ Apartment Building had a wicker rocking chair that caught the breeze easily, like a kind of squeaking wind chime. I’d already squeaked away a million seconds that day when Lev walked right into my line of sight and stopped in the dead center of it. Lev, who’d told me long ago that he lived somewhere along Princess Street. Lev, who I’d said I didn’t like anymore.
I squeak squeak squeaked without saying hello.
He broke the silence.
“Hi,” he said.
“Did you follow me?” I asked.
“You really hurt my feelings.”
“I’m sorry.”
“At first I really wanted to hurt your feelings back,” he said. “Then I saw that you’d moved in here, and I thought maybe you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.”
“No, maybe I didn’t really want to.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” And I turned my head and continued squeaking.
“What are you doing in here?”
“That’s a very personal question, you know.”
And when he looked down at his peeking feet I saw a little bug scuttle across his head and slip into the collar of his shirt. The same little bug that made the walls of the June Room froth. And then I heard the bell again; it rang lightly, thrummed along the lip instead of banged.
“I’m really am sorry,” I said.
And he lifted his head and two more little bugs t
hat had been hiding beneath the epaulets of his jacket lifted their antennaed heads with him. I noticed that they moved in the pockets of his jacket, too; I could trace their outlines moving over each other excitedly. The bell got louder.
“It’s okay. You’re not working anymore, I hear.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“I went looking for you at the Wonderland. Mr. Ungula chased me away with a broom. He said you had enough problems without me sniffing after you.”
I laughed and the bell got louder still, making it hard to see for a minute, everything all blurry. Then Lev, still smiling, took a step back. He disappeared from his clothes, which kept his shape for a split second and then crumpled to the ground in a whoosh. Solid cylinders of writhing bugs scurried from the arms and legs of his clothes like water from hoses. I closed my eyes tight and opened them again and there he was. Lev. Standing like normal, not transformed into a thousand bugs at all.
“There’s not a lot that would stop me following you around, Easter,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you can tell me why you’re here if you want. It won’t change my wanting to follow you.”
The Lonely Page 18
