The scent of marmalade hangs in the strange air, and then it is raining marmalade from the trees. Globules of orange and gold patter upon the gray stones, the gleaming rails. Marmalade sizzles as it strikes the train engine, as if she were still warm and breathing but when I slide my hand over the metal, it is cold and empty. The low thrum that once filled the metal husk is gone. Within the belly of the engine, the hand clasping the golden cross remains, blackened and charred by fire, splattered with lemon marmalade.
I close my hands tight despite the pain; I crush the cigarette to dust and bow my head. I do not know what is being asked of me. I will myself away from the wreck, trying to remember what it was to have a body of flesh, a body that had needs and wants. Simple things: air, water, clothes when the world grows cold. Complicated things: touch, communion, the desire to be full of all things, always.
When my severed hand was placed in the hot belly of the speeding dragon—Jackson thought it so, the first time he saw the train on the rails in the rain—I was named anew. Reborn into a machine that would cross the world, would cross time, going where and when she would, carrying those beloved far beyond the existence of their fated threads.
When you give a thing a name, you give it power. I was given an extraordinary name and thus, an extraordinary power. I push away, past. I reach for everything. I root the body in the world it would have known. The world comes into focus like a stuttering filmstrip, black and white and then on fire with neon and gaslight. Popcorn and cotton candy pervade the air and dragging in a breath leaves me dizzy; somewhere, blood has been spilled, because its fetid layer lingers under everything, keeping everyone warm, filled.
I pay no attention to the reflection of my body in the misshapen mirrors I pass. I am light and unbroken, and even spreading my hands brings no pain. I reach for everything I want. I have never been allowed to want, so I allow the world to flood me.
I caress crones and angels alike; I dance with satyrs and share potions with a man in a black mask that shows me my own face—my face, writhing threads that refuse to be knit into any one feature. The potion steals my breath; the man drinks it down as if it is his own and grows into a huge dragon against the night sky; wings of stars and nebulous breath, and he’s gone, screaming in fire and longing.
This circus fills my veins, delights like the traveling circus never did. We were freaks; homeless and wandering for eternity. Broken from the world, a fragment of glass pressed into a bleeding heel. This circus is life, rooted and fixed into the spine of creation.
The lights drain from the world when I turn a corner; the calliope music grows distant and now there is only the scent of blood and tears. Sweet treats do not exist in these dark lanes. Within the cages that stack the alleys, small black girls have been dressed like daisies, their delicate petals splattered with blood. They are two-headed and three-legged and all watch me pass with silent, black eyes. Even smaller girls reside in jars, their lids spun tight, gifted with single air-holes. Farther on, girls have been crafted into strange and terrible things; bats, cats, rats. It is a broken poem, one that ends in the hideous display of what I know to be a siren; this beautiful creature is part woman, part bird, but here she is only all misery. She is pinned to a board, oil-slick feathers streaked with saliva, blood, ejaculate.
“Agnessa?”
She lifts her head, her familiar gaze defiant. I am struck as if by a fist, straight in my throat, and I run, refusing this nightmare. But I cannot go back, for the lanes have closed themselves away. I go forward into the unending labyrinth that leads me to him.
Of course it’s him. Jackson, on display as he might have always been had it not been for me. Jackson was only ever a misunderstood horror. No longer did he possess any human aspect but was wholly as he had first been made: thick scaled body, slavering fanged mouth, countless tentacles snapping as he tries to escape the cage holding him. He is nearly the color of blood, suffused with fury as every attempt to pry the cage apart fails. He takes no notice of me, which allows me to get to the very edge of the cage before he greets me with violence. One tentacle coils around my throat and shoulders, effortlessly lifting me from the ground.
“I know your face,” he snarls.
His touch gentles, and in my pulse I can hear the click-clack of a train over metal tracks. It never happened here because I, because we never crossed threads. After his creation, we never saw each other again; he never asked me to bind him into a mortal body, and the world has fallen to ruin. I see the scars that mark his body, the evidence of humiliations which must be meager compared to those he has known on the inside. In this place where he cannot even see the sky.
I have no sisters here, no sisters who might help me undo what has been done. In my terror, I reach for them. Across the years and unreal construct of this place—this place never happened, I tell myself. I tell Jackson. In concert we shriek as the world is undone, bodies flayed in a ceaseless, consuming wind. Within its heart, my sister Mae who bears all things; who waits, who holds even my thread and might end this torment.
Jackson's sleeping compartment is no more lavish than any other on the train, though it is possessed of a single curtain drawn across its entire width for a measure of privacy beyond that which the locked car door provides. Against this black cotton curtain, Mae’s naked body glows and I linger to see her back, am drawn by her breath.
With Jackson’s ruined fingers I pull the burned marmalade spatters from my sister’s skin, from the long line of her neck. She is not burned, though her skin flushes pink every time I peel away another piece of candied marmalade. As I go, her skin smooths back to its ivory, the color of elephant tusk, the color of a dream turned inside out, and there is as always that low sheen, that shimmer that tells me to dip my fingers in and watch the ripples. I stroke a finger down Mae’s arm, starting at the crest of her shoulder, lingering in the concave curve of her elbow. Her pulse thrums hello.
In the gloom that falls between us, I cannot tell the marmalade’s flavor until my tongue is on it. Burnt limes. My mouth works the splatter with a strange fervor; teeth and tongue glance Mae’s skin, lightly marking her, and that is when I feel the slide of her hand into my hair. I expect Mae to pull me away, for it rests with her to say when a thing is finished, but Mae’s hold only tightens. Does she know it’s me, her sister within Jackson’s body? I exhale, teeth closing on flesh and not marmalade, and the low sound that fills the curtained space comes from us both.
The press of tongue becomes too much for the skin to endure. The skin that anchors Mae in this world parts, dissolves, and I fall into the reality of her. More coils of thread; familiar spools and spindles. I look for my own path; each of us must also have a thread. But I never find it, and understand that I never will (that I cannot, for some things are forbidden even to us). I look until it’s Mae’s mouth I find—I want to kiss a willing mouth—and I’m kissing her, and she’s kissing me, and she knows me for her sister, for the beginning of all things.
As if she can sense my questions, she licks them from my mouth, carries them away, and for the moment, there is only the blessed tide of her body rushing over mine. No gentle swell but a wave to knock me to my knees. Mae lifts Jackson’s ruined hands, and in her eyes they are whole again, unbroken, and if not beautiful then usable. I slide them over breast and belly, fitting fingers into Mae one by one by one, until she breaks.
“This isn’t the end,” Mae says.
She strokes her fingers down the inside of my arm. My skin peels back under the gentle pressure. No muscle, no bone, only the threads wriggling like fish beneath a calm pool, blue until Mae touches them. Her finger is electric inside me. Her fingers plait me into sections for study, for love, for disposal—but the disposal never comes. I ache for it and it never comes.
“Everything ends,” I whisper and the hot, broken metal of the train groans as cold rain pours from the sky.
“Not everything.”
After the rain, fog swallows the world. I emerge from the wreck
of the train, into a cottony wall of fog that obscures everything but vague tree limbs above. A skeletal dog trots out of the fog; she’s following the line of the tracks, ignoring the hulk of the train, but draws to a stop when she sees me. Long legged and lean like she hasn’t eaten in—
“Years,” I whisper, and my voice sounds large in the dense air. The dog’s ears go up, like small bits of fabric in a sudden breeze. They gleam with wetness; she has been walking in the rain, this dog the color of fog. Everything is familiar.
The dog pads closer, then sinks onto her haunches, watching. Her eyes reflect a shrunken world, though when she blinks, the landscape shifts, vanishes, then slowly returns. I watch her until she yawns, and then I head down the track, along the burned length of trains. The dog follows me as I poke through the rubble.
The survivors do not see me, and when I find Jackson’s body in the rubble, I understand why. Yet, I still occupy this body; the hands I reach with are still his own, if under my control. His body is flattened beside the tracks, his cheek clammy beneath my fingers. Jackson is dead, the train is demolished, and I— Could go anywhere.
This is the choice. It is mine to say, when never it was before—though I am still the point of creation. This: the moment before.
I lift a burned scrap of paper from the ground, a fragment of a poster, and the dog sidles closer. She stretches her neck to take a breath of air around the burned poster and I, moving slow, set the paper before her. She bends her head and the paper sticks to her nose. I pluck it free and fold it into my hand.
“Walk farther down with me,” I say. The fog keeps my voice close, and the dog’s ears perk. She watches when I gesture toward the caboose that seems to have turned itself inside out.
The caboose’s contents litter the world. Jars of marmalade exploded under the intense heat, splatters of sweet having adhered themselves to the train, the tracks, the ground. Burned droplets of sugar and fruit drip from the meager canopy of trees. Oil-slick colors have melted into stained glass mockeries the dog licks.
I find one of Lisbeth’s cooking knives in the debris, under a flood of orange marmalade which is burned to an amber lozenge. One of her mixing bowls rests on its side, clouded dreams spilling onto the railroad ties; the stars are black now, the mass no longer churning out the star stuff that makes everything and everyone. A bell jar sits where the caboose’s back door used to be, a miniature Ferris wheel captured under its perfect dome. There isn’t a fingerprint on it, nor dust, and even when the fog reaches down, the wheel recoils from the glass. Untouchable.
A marmalade jar rests against a railroad tie, whole and uncracked. I roll the time-heavy jar into my hand, and before me stand my sisters—Mae and Lisbeth—and the ground is wet with rain and blood both. The sun is out and it is snowing and I push myself to standing. I offer Lisbeth the knife, Mae the jar. We could leave this place at long last, we three; we could allow the train to keep this broken fate, or we could choose one better. But to take this path, we must be bound as we were.
This is the decision.
Cold fog, the whine of a dog (the whine of a god), and the press of a willing mouth against my own.
We are a train, tonight comprised of forty-seven cars. Our shape and size are dictated by the needs of Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade. Sometimes we are smaller, and sometimes we stretch long—as long as we ever have, tonight! We run slipstream rails alone under moonlight—it’s cold here, but growing warmer, sunrise on the horizon. Within us, cars expand for miles as needed: green with dense jungle, polka-dotted with blue-eyed lakes, deserts tonguing thorned acacia trees. Sometimes, glittering snow rushes in our wake; sometimes, warm seawater, gushing from hidden springs.
I was a body.
I am, once more, a train.
Lady Marmalade
1946, your hometown
“My old San Francisco, Beth?”
The lime rind is slick between her brown fingers and she looks up to Jackson’s face, which peers through the caboose’s side window. Weathered, lined, still the color of a baby’s belly in the gloom of pre-dawn.
Beth is not her name, though she responds well enough to it by now. Perhaps one of the countless jars that line the wall of the caboose-turned-bakery contains her real name, but if so, it is pushed well to the back, gathering dust, cobwebs, forgetfulness. She has not forgotten; she cannot.
She flicks the rind into the bowl before her, wipes fragrant fingers over her apron, and stands from her stool. She has time to go. Fingers trace over soda-lime glass, milk glass; amber, cobalt, green. Ball blue, violet, clear, and black. Jewel tone marmalades press against the curves: lime, lemon, orange, quince, pomegranate. Colorless fogs, rivers, rains, and bogs. Sparrow hearts. A first blush, a last breath, countless in betweens. Her fingers close around a square jar. She gathers one more, this one empty, before leaving the caboose. Eamonn the dwarf perches on the counter, hovers over the rind bowl, and does not look at the bell jar which sits on a shelf at his eye level. Inside, a Ferris wheel stands beside a tree caught in perpetual autumn.
“Just a little jaunt,” Jackson says and slips his arm through hers before she takes the lid off the first jar and they vanish as though never there.
Jackson is a jar himself, containing in every aspect the time he wishes to visit. Beth dips her hand into him and the streets permeate her skin. Stone cobbles run like gooseflesh and bridges arc where her fingers once did, stretching into piers, looping backward into avenues soaked with smoke, shade, spice. Through Jackson she can smell the salty ocean the iron rails, the stink of love and bloom of despair. She walks, her feet inside his shoes, her fingers around the knob of the red-flecked door he opens. His slim sketchbook is hidden in a woman’s wrapper pocket. Beth feels the trespass of his fingers into the pocket, the tug of a thread as the sketchbook slips out of time’s place.
Jackson whispers, “Four years later, this place is gone.”
Time does not matter to Beth, but it is a thing which anchors Jackson and others like him. These rooms haunt him; he hates and loves them by turn. What becomes of them in four years? Part of her wants to know. Part of her presses hands against that pane of glass and peers. Still, she can’t reach it, not even through Jackson; for he won’t be there to remember it by sight or smell. She wishes time did matter, would wish it with all her heart if she still possessed such a thing. She slides the empty jar into his hand and hears the whisper of the book curling inside glass.
“And, back.”
Eamonn is still not looking at the bell jar when they return in a blink, steaming in the summer air, the opalescent light. It is not heat that sluices from them, but chill, for it was winter Jackson wanted, claiming his book from a lady he refuses to name. Beth doesn’t ask; she never does.
Jackson takes his leave with his jar. Beth slides her jar against another—Exposition Universelle, where Jackson admired the gauge railway—then settles into the well-worn groove her bottom has made upon her stool. She returns to the lime rind, cutting, cutting. Eamonn perches—not looking—until at last he turns away and moves for the dough bowl. He peels back the damp tea towel. The scent of yeast fills the caboose.
The carnival opens as the sun touches the tips of the long field grass, to allow the crowds to capitalize on the warm yeast rolls, the glazed buns, the sour breads. Eamonn’s large hands cradle each one as they come free from their pans, then set them to cool along the caboose windowsills. His slippered feet leave small impressions in the flour scattered over the counter. The tails of his black and green striped coat sweep up after him.
Beth hears the soft murmurs from several paces away; older ladies dressed in their Sunday best though it may be Wednesday or later. Older ladies clutching straw pocketbooks (adorned with flowers made of gleaming plastic jewels) with gloved hands, every step tentative though not because of age. They fear the very thing that draws them forward.
“It smells like my childhood.”
“Mine, too. Do you think they have—Ah! Elephant
ears!”
A thin arm points toward the banners which snap in the warm breeze above the caboose, while the scent of fresh fried dough reaches the woman's nose. She closes her eyes a moment and stands in place, near a swoon.
Eamonn extracts the fried dough while Beth readies the marmalade. Lemon and a touch of twenty-two, Beth knows, and has the confection ready as the women come to the window. She lets Eamonn deal with them; they love to fuss over his fancy coat and marvel at how small he is. He either doesn’t hear them or doesn’t mind, for he is never put-out when they laugh.
The lemon elephant ear seems to melt against the woman’s tongue; Beth can almost feel it upon her own. It tastes like the woman’s childhood, but the marmalade brings with it another memory, the memory of a younger body that once balanced on a high wire. Maybe an umbrella, Miss Sophie, a dark-haired boy says. His eyes rake up her stockinged leg and she loses her balance, plummeting.
“Oh.” It arrives as a soft exhale. “Do you—Do you sell this lemon marmalade?”
Of course they do and Beth reaches into the long line of bright jars, retrieving the proper one for Miss Sophie. A square of fabric that looks to have been cut from a circus tent just that morning covers the lid. Beth ties it with a yellow ribbon that makes Miss Sophie recall the feel of that young man’s tie between her fingers.
Beth feels nothing as they walk away and she turns back to the jars which line the west wall. The shelves which Rabi made her are worn with time and fingerprints, allowing only one gap for the thin window on that side. Every jar is different and Beth knows where each came from the way she knows the lines on her palm. Her fingers dance over them now, glass shoulders and corked tops; embossed lettering, the thick curve of a sealed lip. Sunlight sneaks through the windows to fragment itself in the bottom of the jars. This shattered sunlight scatters across the shelves which bracket the back door, over the counter and sweltering stoves, across Beth’s brown cheeks in a stained glass mosaic. Small black monkey feet scamper across the topmost shelf as Ichabod steals inside, leaping down to Eamonn’s shoulder where he chatters at the customers.
The Grand Tour: A Jackson’s Unreal Circus & Mobile Marmalade Collection Page 14
