by Unknown
Paul pulled away and looked up at Sarah. There were stars in his eyes. She smiled at him. She would not hurt him; she was sure of it. Not like she had been hurt. Not ever.
“There are stars in your eyes,” she said.
“There are roses in yours,” he answered.
“That’s because you’re seeing your reflection. And you’re like a rose, a beautiful little flower!”
“Then that means you are a star,” he said.
He kissed her cheek and then slid off her lap. They began playing with the horses again.
Sarah’s mother called when she got home from work. She talked vaguely about Carl being in trouble.
“I know he’s been raping his daughter,” Sarah said, interrupting her mother.
“Sarah! That’s nonsense. He’s been accused of molesting his daughter. He’s innocent until—”
“Until you can ignore it long enough to forget it?” Sarah said. She wanted to slam down the phone and be rid of her mother.
“You shouldn’t dress that way,” she had told Sarah once. “It only provokes men.” Sarah had been thirteen and the loose, peach-colored dress was a birthday gift from an aunt. Sarah hugged herself. She knew her mother was talking about provoking her father.
“You shouldn’t be so angry,” her mother said now. “You’ll die an old, bitter woman.”
“Good-bye, Mother,” Sarah said. She dropped the phone into its cradle. Why did her mother bother to call? She had never admitted that her husband had raped her daughter on a regular basis, even after Sarah told a school counsellor when she was sixteen. When confronted, her father had denied it, and her mother refused to discuss it. She stayed with Sarah’s father, and he stopped coming to Sarah’s bedroom.
Sarah unplugged the phone and went to the bathroom and took off her clothes. The day had seemed endless. Paul was the only bright spot. She had been nauseated all day, like she had been when she was eight and her father first came into her room and roughly fondled her. After that, she had always felt nauseated, until she was nineteen. She was in her second year of college when she found a tattoo place and had an illustrated man scratch a rose tattoo in her dimple. Her way of reclaiming her body.
She twisted her neck to look at the tattoo. It was a tiny blossom, barely visible. She had been proud of it; now she wanted to cover it up. She didn’t want to think of her body and what her father had done to it.
She stepped into the shower and turned on the water. She closed her eyes and thought of Paul. Today he had spoken of his mother’s death. Maybe soon he would cry. He needed to. She wished she would cry. She hadn’t since she was eight years old.
That night, Sarah dreamed she stood at one end of the Hood River Bridge. The Columbia River flowed beneath her. She was wrapped in gauze like a modern day mummy. On the other side, Paul stood, his child’s arms held out to her. Between them was darkness. Sarah couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.
She woke up gasping for air. She lay still for several minutes until her heartbeat went back to normal. Then she wrapped the blanket tightly around her. She was frightened and alone, a child again with no safe place left in the world. She hoped morning would come quickly.
She felt tired and lost at work the next day. She told the secretary that she wasn’t in if anyone related to her called. The secretary laughed and said she understood.
Sarah went into her office and closed the door. She wished she understood. She should have dealt with all of this by now. She had moved to the West Coast to get away from her family and the memories, yet here they all were again. When she was younger, she had thought the only way to escape it all was by dying. But she didn’t want to die, so she had just gone away. She had floated above it all. A living ghost. She couldn’t stop her father, but she didn’t have to participate. She left and wished she never had to return to her damaged little body. Sometimes, she felt as though she had never really completely returned.
Sarah stayed in the office long after everyone had left. Near nine, she went outside to eat a sandwich. She sat on the steps and turned her back to the lights of the Hood River and stared up at the stars.
“Hello, Sarah, whose name is like a sigh.”
“Paul,” Sarah said. “Where did you come from? Isn’t it late for you to be out?” He sat next to her on the steps.
“I was watching the stars. I followed one and it led me here.” He smiled. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, so I can stay up late.”
“Do your grandparents know you’re gone?” Sarah asked.
He shook his head. “They’re asleep.”
They were drunk, Sarah supposed.
“Look, there’s the Big Dipper,” he said, pointing to the sky.
“And there’s the little one,” she said.
Paul laughed. “You and me.”
“Two dips?” Sarah said.
“Two dippers! You’re silly!”
She laughed. They watched the stars for a time. “How are your grandparents? Do you like living with them?”
He shrugged. “They don’t notice me much. I go away sometimes.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah held out half of the sandwich to him. He took it.
“Sometimes, when my mother was screaming or my father was around, I’d go away. You’ve done it before. I remember.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. He had never spoken of this before.
“I float away. I did it the first time when my father put out his cigarette on me. Called me an ashtray. Grandpa says I was too young to remember, but I do. I was three. I floated away to the stars. I met them all. They were my friends. You were up there, too. You breathed your name like a sigh.”
Sarah remembered one night when her father raped her, one of the last times, nearly six years ago; she had left her body and floated above the house, the street, the town. For a moment, she had sensed other souls pressing up against hers. Now she looked at Paul and wondered if those souls had been other abandoned or abused children trying to find a safe place in the world.
He smiled. “You were a rose blooming across the sky,” he said. He looked at his feet. “My grandparents say I can’t come here anymore.”
“Here to see me?” Sarah asked.
He nodded.
“Do you want to keep coming?”
He looked surprised. “Yes. I like playing together. I can teach you all about the stars and you can teach me about playing horses.”
“You are a wonderful child,” Sarah said. She rubbed the top of his head. “Don’t worry about your grandparents. I’ll talk to them. It’ll be all right.”
“I better go now,” he said. He started down the drive and then he stopped and looked at her. “I’m glad you came down out of the stars. I like you here.”
She watched him disappear into the darkness. She stood until she saw him under a streetlight again, and then she watched until he reached his grandparents’ house. She finished her sandwich and then she went home.
Sarah dreamed about Paul. This time, they walked across the bridge together, hand in hand. Whenever the darkness started to close in around them, they laughed at it and it drifted away like smoke. The sky was filled with stars which blossomed into white roses.
Sarah drove to her office first thing the next morning. She sat in the middle of the floor and pulled the toys from the toy box. She galloped Caesar and the palomino across the carpet and laughed. This was why she enjoyed her sessions with Paul so much. She was a child during their fifty minutes. They were growing up together. Her only real childhood.
She pushed the toys away and looked around. She shuddered. She felt afraid so much of the time. Like the darkness was just around the corner waiting for her. A darkness her father had brought into her life when she was eight.
Sarah stood and got a piece of construction paper and a box of crayons from her desk. She often had the children draw, another way to express themselves. She pulled out a brown crayon. At first, it felt fat and awkward in her fingers as she drew an ou
tline of a man. Then she wrote “Daddy” across his torso. She picked up the blunted children’s scissors and cut out the figure. She took a matchbook from a candle holder on her desk and then went to the bathroom. She lit a match and held Daddy’s foot to the flame until it caught. The fire ate his feet. The pillow pressed harder against her face. She gasped for air. She was thirteen and she put her hand between her legs and gently rubbed the place where it hurt. The fire licked her father’s crotch. He was always so hard and hurtful, disgusting as his penis rammed up against her. She was too tiny. The flames ate his buttocks and started up his back. Sarah began to cry.
And always as he pushed into her he whispered that he loved her, loved her, loved her. His body spasmed and shuddered and he did not see her. The fire severed his body from his head. The ashes floated into the sink. Sarah choked on her sobs. Then she screamed. She hated him so much. She had loved him. Why had he done it? The fire ate his mouth, his eyes. Sarah’s scream became a wail. She dropped the last bit of paper into the sink before the flames touched her fingers. “Good-bye,” she whispered. She wiped her tears and turned on the water and washed the ashes down the drain. There went her father. Her brother. Her mother. All the bad memories. She looked around. Everything appeared fresh and new, as if all had been out of focus and now it was clear and sharp. Perhaps all these years, parts of her had been scattered across the universe. Now she had come home to her body. Or almost. It would take time. But she was safe. She was whole again. Now she was ready to protect herself and Paul. She would make certain he was safe and happy.
She turned off the water, went to the front door, and opened it. The darkness was gone. She thought of the stars in Paul’s eyes, and she smiled and stepped out into the morning.
FOR THEIR WIVES ARE MUTE
Wayne Allen Sallee
What can you say about Wayne Allen Sallee after making the observation that he is a very remarkable guy? Well, I guess I could tell you why I think of him in such a way: for starters, he’s published more than 700 (yes, you read that right) poems, and probably close to one hundred short stories in the small press magazines and several major publications and anthologies. He has written a grim, hard-edged look at himself--a novella entitled Pain-Grin—which details his life with cerebral palsy, and also a strange, surreal novel called The Holy Terror. He is soft-spoken, courteous, and just the other side of brilliant. He sent me lots of stories before I finally selected the one which follows—an odd mix of obsession, fear, and ultimately, a unique brand of passion.
She had been glad that the damp, cold spring had kept them from burrowing through her skin and into her world again. It had been seventeen years. It had been a lifetime.
“Jen, how can you say you like this weather?” Vonnie would say to her over egg and cheese croissants at Warburton’s. “It’s the middle of May and we haven’t reached sixty degrees yet! Don’t you want to go to the beach?”
“Why, so I could look like a little nymph?” she retorted and instantly regretted using that word. It made her think of the cicadas just beneath the surface of the ground outside. She knew all there was to know about cicada nymphs—seventeen-year locusts in Chicago—and had read and reread the information in her daughter’s World Book until she was ready to puke.
“Happy are the cicadas, for their wives are mute.” Some Greek man named Xenarchos had written that in Rhodes. Wherever that was. In Greece, she supposed. “Jennifer Spano, you can’t be expected to know everything,” she would look in the mirror and say to her reflection. Then she would examine her scalp for gray hairs and wonder where all the time had gone. Contrary to the popular saying, it hadn’t flown because she was having fun.
She had fun for awhile. A senior in high school who maybe could have been visited by the titty fairy, she had had her fair share of dates. And a lesser share of meaningless trysts in AMC Gremlins and Chevy Caprices. A teenager who thought she was in love each time. Not a tease or a sex fiend, and there were plenty of nymphomaniacs to go around in Wagner High’s class of 1973, oh no. Yet she never argued when she had been denied the final word in the consummation of the act.
A lifetime ago. Her daughter’s lifetime.
The largest of the bugs of the order Homoptera, special organs on the male cicada’s abdomen produce the long shrill sound associated with its name.
And oh, how the young boys would stroke away. Like they were on borrowed time. Thursday night, May 31. The cicadas were out there now, the temperature rising these past few days into the eighties away from the lake, high sixties inland. “Vic Solvig always said I could be a great weathergirl on TV,” she said to the mirror.
They were loud, very loud, making sounds like the giant ants in that fifties movie. Vic Solvig had said that the cicadas sounded like a lot of miniscule Shemps. Shemp, the forgotten Stooge, whose trademark was his almost lamentable eeb-eebbee-eebbee-ebe-ebe-ebe. Vic Solvig had told her that and made her laugh the night she became pregnant.
He had folded his four limbs over her body like a roof and let his drumlike membrane do its dirty deed. She hadn’t been a nymph like the others in her class.
But the cicadas wouldn’t be around when autumn closed in, no sir. The big blue city trucks would come and spray the trees. Her heroes, the Streets and Sanitation. “I don’t know what kind of poison they use,” she spoke now to the gray hair she had plucked from her scalp.
With dozens of red eyes staring in at her from the trees.
The cicada female has a chisel-like ovipositor beneath its abdomen which is used to slice openings into twigs. Eggs are laid, which then hatch and fall to the ground to enter the soil and feed on the tree roots.
And now they were back. Her forearms prickled and she thought that if she looked, she might see a young female again burrowing out of her to shed its skin. She hadn’t wanted to get pregnant, and now, why she was almost thirty-five. Who would have her now?
She listened, every day it seemed, but there were no men making keening noises or singing antiphonal songs.
The male produces his chirping sounds by oscillating an arched plate, the tymbal, which is stiffened by parallel ribs. This produces up to 600 rasping noises per second; they sound like the clicks made by depressing and releasing the arched lid of a metal box.
Or my computer beeping when I type a word wrong, she thought. Were there computers seventeen years ago? She had gone to the school’s ten-year reunion in 1983, amazed that eight of her classmates had died in that decade following graduation. Tony Chiarmonte had been shot in a bar fight in Tallow Lake, Wisconsin. Chestine Diedzek had gotten drunk and fallen off the bleachers at Poplar Creek during an AC/DC concert. Jen couldn’t read past that.
Three years ago, and she hadn’t gone to the reunion with anyone. Thinking, what kind of world were we born into that eight children couldn’t live to their ten-year high school reunion?
She hadn’t given her unborn baby ten weeks.
The Magicicada septendecim, or periodical cicada, are among the most striking of insects, owing to their grotesque shape. Their forelegs are modified digging tools, the shovels being formed particularly by the femora. The imago, in the four to six weeks of its existence, does not eat.
And the wives remain mute, Jennifer thought.
She couldn’t watch the news or read the papers because it seemed that every day another clinic was being bombed or another march was taking place around City Hall. That was the only time the women did the talking, the men who did the dirty deed cowering mute in the shadows of the County Building or their male-bonding get-togethers.
I don’t want to say that I was an unwanted child, but I was born with a coat hanger sticking out of my forehead. She hated that joke more than she hated the rustling of their skins on the trees outside her window.
She stared back at them just the same.
Not much later, she was standing in front of the biggest tree. “Look at me,” she said to the rustling shadows. There were hundreds of them, covering the tree the way army ants wou
ld converge over a wounded animal. She wondered what they saw. Even when her hair was not pulled back into a tight bun, she had a pronounced widow’s peak. And crow’s-feet visible and magnified beneath her wire frame glasses.
She looked down at her almost non-existent breasts, like two little nubs poking at her T-shirt, which read PEPSI: THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION. She had gained a secretary’s ass from her days at the computer. Her mother, if she were alive today, would have said that Jennifer had hips for good breeding. Once, she had. And maybe it had driven her crazy. Just a little.
The other day, Vonnie had met her for lunch at Old-Timer’s. She had a longer lunch hour and always got there first to reserve a table in the non-smoking section. When Jen had finally gotten across Michigan Avenue and rushed breathless into the restaurant, the first thing she saw was the engagement ring on her friend’s finger.
She made an excuse for not staying, turned west down Lake Street in her confusion, and heard their voices. The cicadas.
She went down Garland Court, one of the Loop’s glorified alleys, and came across an old brick storage house. They were in there somewhere. In the brick. She was mesmerized. A man with a briefcase asked her if she was okay and she was embarrassed. Maybe the cicadas had been on the roof.
But for seventeen years? Vonnie had been wearing an engagement ring …
She was mesmerized again. Looking at their eyes as they shifted and she did as well, moving the weight from one foot to the other, their forms were a fractal image. Always changing. What was so terrible about these creatures?
Did they find her beautiful, as well?
She hadn’t gone back to work since seeing them downtown.
She pulled the T-shirt up over her head, feeling self-conscious of how pale she must look where her ribs pressed against her skin. The temperature had dropped down to the fifties by ten that night, and her nipples were tiny, hard bullets. What did they see in her?
