Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 24

by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant, Jedediah Berry

  "Don't they get all full of dirt?” I asked. The tornado was lifting me upward, away from Marie who, by an intricate series of body-wigglings and flips, managed to stay just ten feet or so above her sister.

  "It's not bad if you start at the bottom,” she shouted back. “Besides, we always sift it later.” I could barely hear her now. “Stop by for some tornado juice if you're in the area..."

  By the time I untied the knot, it was an hour later. I drove to work so fast I nearly flew.

  Over the next few weeks, I learned to ride the winds a little, though I had to be rescued more than once. I watched how people dove into the middle and rode up to the top, then wiggled to the outside to ride back down. Some of the people had even developed a thick, fleshy ridge of cartilage along their back to better direct their flight.

  I was so afraid Kaiko would find out. My hips were sore from sitting on the bathroom floor—the only room with a lock. Then one day, as I crammed food in my mouth while standing over the kitchen sink, she came storming in. Her cheeks were flushed bright red. “Where have you been?"

  "Mrf Marmuf."

  "Are you cheating on me?"

  I swallowed my food, eyes widening. “Of course not! You're the most beautiful girl in the world!"

  She came towards me slowly, seductively, swinging her hips. I realized how long it had been since she had spent the night. She unbraided her hair. It gleamed under the fluorescent kitchen bulbs, its phosphorescence flickering off the walls.

  "I don't suppose you've seen a strand of my hair lying around? I seem to have misplaced one."

  "You never do that,” I said, widening my eyes to look shocked again.

  "Sometimes,” she said. “But I always find them later."

  I kissed and hugged her, hoping she wouldn't notice my shaking hands or that she would think they shook out of passion. I could feel the strand of hair pulling at me from the bathroom, where it sat coiled in my traveling toothbrush case.

  We went out, and I tried, I did. We met Kaiko's friends at a crowded bar and I clung to her hand all night. I missed the moving air of the tornados, and the open hospitality of the tornado people. Here I felt like I would choke to death from cigarette smoke. It was too loud, and there were too many people.

  I sat on a toilet in the bathroom for a while with my head on my knees, but that only reminded me of what I could be doing at home. Clenching my car keys in my hand, I slithered through the swaying crowd and touched my lips to her ear.

  "I think I'm going to go home. I don't feel well."

  Kaiko turned to look at me. She might have even believed it. My eyes were bloodshot and I was sweating.

  "You want me to come take care of you?"

  Sweet of her to ask, but I shook my head. “I have some work I should try to get done. I'll just sit around and do that."

  I left. I didn't look back.

  At home, I slid into my bathroom with a sigh. I folded up a towel and laid it over the bathmat, then draped another over the side of the tub. I pulled out my beautiful, live strand. It was translucent, the color of sand and air. I tied it over my eyes and caught a westerly wind.

  Marie and Babop had given me a standing invitation to eat with them whenever I was in the area. It took me far longer to find them that evening than usual. The sun was starting to go down, and that made me nervous. I'd never tried to ride the winds in the dark before. I wouldn't do it, not unless Marie or Babop was with me, telling me how not to break my neck.

  At last I spotted their picnic table midway up a tornado coming my way. I folded up my umbrella and dropped gracelessly out of the sky. Marie had suggested I use an umbrella to control my flight. It had saved me from a really nasty fall more than once. I opened it again to catch the wind they rode.

  "'bout time!” Marie hollered when she saw me.

  "I zdidn't know you'd be riding the northern winds already!” I shouted back. There was a definite chill in this tornado. Both women wore heavy sweaters and hats pulled tightly over their ears. I rubbed my arms.z

  "Guess we got spring fever,” Marie said. “When we were kids, we'd see who could ride the north winds first. Sometimes they were more blizzard than tornado!"

  Babop grinned and handed me a plate. I hooked my legs over the bench seat and jammed my umbrella into a crevice of the table—they'd started using this picnic table for my benefit. They had a beautiful oak dining set somewhere, but I still couldn't manage to balance my own chair and eat at the same time. Last time I tried it, I wound up taking off my belt to strap myself to a leg of the table. Not exactly good manners.

  Marie served up the roast, and Babop tossed a bread roll into the air for me. It spun counterclockwise around the table and bounced against my cheek. I'd already eaten once that night, but I shoveled in food enthusiastically.

  Babop poked my arm. “Slow down. We've timed it."

  Marie smiled. “We'll reach the top just in time for post-dinner drinks."

  "'Always drink upwind’ as our father used to say."

  "Nothing's better than a Bloody Mary at the top of a tornado."

  I grinned and lingered over the buttery mashed potatoes and medium-rare roast—sticky things that wouldn't go flying off the plate at the smallest bump. When we were finished, Marie cleared and secured the plates. Babop started to mix our drinks just as I saw the sky opening up above us.

  Somewhere in the distance I heard a loud boom.

  "What was that?” I asked.

  Babop shrugged, raising her voice. “Just the winds. All matter of junk flying around in here."

  Babop handed me a Bloody Mary made with tornado juice. “Liquids are tricky, but I ain't gonna give you a kiddie cup for hard liquor. Try to keep it level."

  I heard the boom again. “There, there did you hear it?"

  Marie shrugged. “I didn't hear anything, honey. Probably the wind comin’”

  "No, it wasn't the wind,” I said. My knees felt shaky. “It sounded different, like—"

  I was abruptly jerked back to my bathroom. I flailed around trying to stand but was knocked backward again. The back of my knees hit the tub and I fell in, smacking my elbow on the faucet hard enough to make that whole side of my body tingle.

  Kaiko stood over me, her hair lifting toward the ceiling and crackling as though charged. Her eyes were clear, the color of a tornado. The bathroom door hung off its hinges.

  "You lied."

  I wrestled with the shower curtain, trying to get to my feet, but before I could stand or speak, Kaiko looped another strand over my eyes and tied it. Only she didn't use a tying-your-shoes-in-a-bow knot. She used a triple sheet bend followed by a hitching tie. I've always said she's not just beautiful and sweet, but smart too.

  I landed in the world with the long-haired lumbering people and nearly crushed a large man I call Tom. I lay on the ground panting, shocked by my travels from one world to another to another. The air hung still and heavy, like a wet wool blanket. Tom peered down at me, concerned. He later became my best friend.

  My relative hairlessness is definitely an advantage here as everyone else moves very slowly. I'm trying to devise a way to saw off their hair with sharp rocks, and I'm sure it will work soon.

  I'm sunburned and craving tornado juice. I imagine Kaiko taking care of my body at home, lovingly making sure I'm clean and nourished, knowing someday I'll get the hair off my eyes and return to beg her forgiveness. I spend part of every day trying to untie that knot. I tried using one of those sharpened rocks to saw it off from around my eyes, but it broke the rock. I had Tom try to burn it off, but he only scorched both my eyebrows.

  Eyebrows are a small price to pay. I know that if I can manage to get back, Kaiko will be waiting for me. If I can get that hair off, it will prove to her I will never, ever lie again.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Superfather by J. W. M. Morgan

  My father flipped the canvas cover from his latest sculpture and revealed six plaster men and women faced outward from a close
d circle, their arms raised high overhead. The statuettes were male and female, African, Asian, and Caucasian, arranged so that no one stood beside another of his or her own gender or race. The figures were joined at the butt, a wagon wheel pattern. “World Peace,” my father said, on a quavering out-breath.

  My mother dutifully examined the sculpture. “Cute,” my sister Pam said. My father sniffed. His nostrils flared. He scrutinized the curve of the Negro woman's mouth.

  "I'm presenting World Peace at tonight's town hall meeting,” he said. He tried to lay a hand on Pam's shoulders, but caught only air as she fled. He turned his probing eyes to my mother who quickly faced away, then followed my sister out of the room.

  "Can I ask you a favor, Harold?” he said to me. He sounded weary and sad.

  "Sure, Dad."

  "Tell your mother that soon nothing will be as it has been."

  "Okay,” I said, too frightened to ask him to explain.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Pam said, “His job drives him crazy.” She sat on my bed. I gazed at the sad mess of half-built models scattered across my worktable. Each day our father drove to the think tank on Route 128 outside of Boston to elaborate his signature project: a plan for the president and congress to survive a nuclear winter aboard submarines cruising underneath the arctic ice. He'd made sure we knew that the Pentagon considered his work vital and that the president and congressional leaders were regularly updated on his top secret strategy. Lately, however, the Subarctic White House and Capitol Project was not going well. A rival planner had proposed an alternate White House and Capitol Building deep inside abandoned coal mines in West Virginia. “Ridiculous!” my father had blurted to us at dinner. “Too dusty!” he'd snorted.

  The hinges of my bedroom door creaked. My father appeared. Pam looked at his long, pleading face and marched out past him. “I do it all out of love,” he said. His voice sounded weirdly doubled to me, as though he spoke on two pitches at the same time. “I love the town,” he said. “And I love the state and country. I love the world.” He looked at my ceiling in which cracks were plentiful. “I love the universe,” he said. He clutched his belly. His excess of love disturbed his digestion. “I need a hand carrying World Peace out to the car."

  "Sure, Dad.” I gave the pedestal an experimental lift. “But I wonder if the town meeting is your best place to present World Peace."

  "Of course it is,” he snapped. I disagreed. A month before, he'd proposed that our town send a goodwill mission to North Korea and lost a lot of credibility. Another time he had advised the townspeople to leave their car doors unlocked on rainy nights so the wandering homeless would have a place to curl up and sleep; the jeers had left scars.

  "We have the one sure weapon against those who mock,” he said.

  "What's that, Dad?"

  "The righteousness in our hearts.” He touched his chest, then withdrew from his pants pocket a button for me to wear on my shirt that read “Drive in Buddha Consciousness; Prevent Traffic Tragedies."

  * * * *

  When the mayor gaveled the meeting open, we sat at the front, World Peace between us. The first speaker was a wan woman with a querulous voice who presented a petition to shorten the hours of a folk music club near her house. Next, a man in a red flannel shirt complained about potholes. My father was next. He stood and composed his cheeks into his habitual smile. He lifted the cover from World Peace.

  I ran from the room.

  On the drive home, my father told me the West Virginia coal mine plan had gained surprising traction with Pentagon officials. Worse, an FBI agent had questioned my father about his political ideas. His security clearance was under review.

  * * * *

  Since long before I was born, my father's daily life had been basically fraudulent. He appeared to the world outside our home as a small, handsome, energetic man with bright blue eyes, a full head of yellow-brown hair, a habit of overdressing (cheap white shirts and, often, a clip-on tie, even around the house). In fact, he was a minor god come down from a mysterious elevated region, who inhabited the body of a human male only with great ill-ease.

  My mother considered his eccentric demands and chronic inaccessibility burdensome. She often complained that his “great accomplishments” led nowhere. Pam wanted a father who played golf and drank beer like other fathers. She begged him to buy a sports car, a Triumph or a cute Austin Healey, and grow a beard.

  I alone understood that my father must not be distracted. I was honored to serve him. Not easy. I wasn't really up to it—who would be? Still, I never lost faith in him and I never stopped trying to help with the great work.

  In an attempt to imitate his creativity, I littered my bedroom table with the plastic parts of models, mostly boats and cars, one knight in not-so-shiny armor with a missing sword arm, one plastic turtle whose head I'd lost. I rarely finished a model. My real enthusiasm was reserved for far more difficult “special” projects, which I believed I would one day build: my ESP machine, my cat shrinker, my stairway to the stars. Looking back from adulthood at my long-running struggle with those self-contradictory ambitions, I feel pity and generosity toward my earnest young self. I wanted only to honor my father and become like him. This would have required a genius and a charm that I lacked, a kind of double understanding which I now believe is only rarely present in the world. So my efforts were foredoomed. Of course, I didn't know that at the time and I labored mightily on those far-reaching inventions, all deeply sincere but profoundly misguided attempts to imitate and honor my father as best I understood him.

  * * * *

  During my thirteenth October, my father suddenly turned his vast powers to cleaning his car windshield. What little conversation he engaged in involved bird droppings, squashed bugs, and sap. Mid-mornings, when he should have been at the think tank, we'd find him kneeling on the hood of his car, working with gauze pads, dental scrapers, and toothbrushes.

  "What about the submarines?” I asked him one day as he affixed a new tip to a dental appliance. I might as well have been speaking Urdu.

  On Thanksgiving afternoon, while most men in our neighborhood watched college football on TV, my father worked to perfect the clarity of his car windshield. He had become misunderstood at the think tank and been laid off. At first, I had not accepted this news. What about the Pentagon briefings? Wouldn't the president soon ask for his update on the Arctic White House?

  No more could be said on those old topics.

  At the time of first snowfall, my father applied his scientist's discipline to studying reruns of lady's professional tennis matches on TV. He hypothesized that minute, seemingly superfluous movements of female rear ends embodied a previously unknown, cuneiform-like language with which supernatural beings sent information needed for human survival. Computer techniques would be needed in the long run, but for now simple visual observation would begin the process. A shiver of an abdomen, a clench of a buttock, a momentary tip of the pelvis or thrust of the midriff, these movements transmitted information vital to the protection of our species.

  He often conducted his deep video study while lying in his red leatherette easy chair with the foot support up. He'd cover himself with his favorite blanket, raise a little tent over his lap with his hands, and suck on peppermint and butterscotch sourballs while he watched. When he was most deeply engrossed, his breath slowed and I easily pictured roots growing from his hips and legs into the chair.

  At New Year as our furnace rattled and a blizzard enforced stillness over our neighborhood, I understood in fullness that nothing could be as it seemed with my father. Great religious mystics had said that the evidence of the senses was illusion, or, at most, a minor sidebar to the central drama of existence. Yes, my father appeared to be half-asleep in his armchair, involved in self-titillation, just as he had appeared to be in the garage, kneeling on the hood of the Buick, vigorously polishing the windshield glass. He appeared to have lost his job and to have fallen victim to bizarre obsession
s. Nothing could be further from the true situation. He was working more intensely than ever at his great ideals. When he appeared motionless and plantlike, his true self engaged in fateful battle with supernatural forces in another universe that I could not see. He bore terrible responsibility in the higher realm. The problem of time, for example, and the construction of the future, including tomorrow's sunrise and the germination of next season's crops. Yes, my father had gained direct access to the exquisite mysteries. He had moved on from our everyday world and was now making vital contributions in an arena I had no hope of understanding.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Through a snowy February and March and a warm April of impressive wetness, my father continued to fade from the social fabric. He hadn't spoken to me in months. I missed him sorely. He knew I was around; I could tell by his sidelong glances and his maneuvers to avoid me, such as his sudden switching to the side path and using the back stairs. He wasn't avoiding me in particular. He shied away from any contact that might disturb the precious chrysalis of dream that now encased his life. Unfortunately, I had the kind of heart and mind which inevitably yearned for the unattainable and, as my father slipped from my grasp, my wish for openhearted, father-and-son closeness grew stronger.

  During his final June with us, my father dragged home branches from the surrounding woods and constructed a pine bough canopy inside his studio. He spent most of his time inside this “nest,” surrounded by his half-done sculptures, now neglected. He no longer spoke about submarines, or coal mines, or the warnings of asteroid collisions communicated to us by movements of the female pelvis. He no longer spoke about the spiritual changes required to achieve the more peaceful world. He rarely spoke at all. What he had to communicate to us now could not be expressed with words.

  In July, he hit upon wearing a lamb's wool vest under his clothes, even on the warmest of days. This mortification of the body was successful for a time. He was often seen strutting slowly down Main Street, arms puffed to the sides, still in conventional dress, face fixed in a subtle and mysterious smile, plain and public evidence of his pleasure as he gradually attuned himself with God.