Magic for Unlucky Girls

by A. A. Balaskovits

  You have to apologize afterwards, make amends for letting that small part of you out, or if you sneeze, invoke the divine. Lizzy was a great cougher, really loud booming, startling noises, and she never apologized.

  In this way, we continue on—brutal hacking things.

  * * *

  I watched Lizzy on the news, saying what the man had done for her, how he had plucked her in the air. She was so happy, so ecstatic, but she lied and said she tripped over the edge. My stomach clenched. I’d never seen her so happy before.

  Of course he’ll save us, Lizzy said. She was in the midst of a mad kind of belief, and I never thought her as lovely as I did then.

  We don’t have to be afraid. We don’t have to leave, not while he is here.

  * * *

  When the earthquake bounded across my room, I hid under my oak desk, like those kids did in the atomic age with their arms over their head. I was thrust side to side, up and down, and even though I had removed most of my objects to the floor and off the tables and the walls, everything fell over. Outside, I could hear short, quick screams, and the grumble and quake of pieces of the building breaking off. I tried to light a cigarette but I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking, even after.

  When it stopped I stayed where I was, even after the sirens awoke outside. I waited for the aftershock, a sign that the larger one had already happened, and it would soon be over.

  The aftershock did not come. How long would we have to wait?

  * * *

  That night, I watched the figure of the man in the window of the high-rise across from and below mine. We were old stranger-chums; I had spent many mornings watching him over coffee as he struggled with his tie in his mirror or went to his own balcony and frenzied his hands at the pigeons. Though I’ve never seen him watching me, he must have seen me out on my balcony smoking and known me in that friendly, voiceless way, where you are so tuned to someone’s habits you know them as well as your lover, except you do not know their name.

  He stepped out onto his balcony and looked down. He was crying, great sobbing shoulder-hunching bursts, and put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The pop left his face a wound. His useless torso and limbs fell forward over the edge.

  I did not look down at first. I knew what I would see: his body crushed under its own weight, and his pants soiled with the remnants of his colon, the last thing he would do. And then I did look, that long horrible glance, the fine sizzle of his blood in the heat, the body. People gathered around him until, slowly, methodically, they got on their knees and put their hands over the places where his skin had cracked and the wet oozed out. It was a fantasy kind of first aid, if you put enough pressure on the body it will right itself.

  He had not inflicted a wound but exposed one.

  * * *

  Soon after they taped off the sidewalk and cleaned him off, the whispers started. That miracle man can’t save us all, if any of us. He should have known that man was suicidal, sick. We’re as alone as we always were.

  The believers remained because they trusted in a man who sat on my balcony every evening and plopped nicotine in his mouth without inhaling. Others remained because they could not afford to leave.

  The earthquakes were getting worse, stronger. They lasted almost a minute, now.

  * * *

  Lizzy, I think you need to get out of here.

  Where the fuck have you been?

  Listen to me. I can’t explain it, but I think it’s going to get worse. Have you been watching the news?

  I have been calling you and calling you. Why didn’t you answer?

  They’re not saying it, not outright, but this guy, whoever he is, he can’t make the ground stop shaking. We’re all going to get caught in this if we stay.

  I almost called the police; I thought you were dead. For fuck’s sake, why didn’t you call?

  Are you listening to me? You have to get out.

  Get out? And go where? Look, this guy, you don’t get it. He’s already saved both of us once. He touched us, bestowed some magical shit on us or something. Why wouldn’t it work again? Why bother to do it once if not again? What would be the point of that?

  All the king’s men, Lizzy. All the king’s horses.

  Well, she laughed, who the fuck tries to put eggs back together with hoofs?

  I thought, only a fool would try with their hands.

  Why did you leave me like that? she asked. Was it something I did? I kept going over it. I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything.

  Don’t say that, I thought. It all means something.

  * * *

  He was staring at my breasts again, so I took off my shirt and let him see. I handed him a lit cigarette.

  I explained how when I inhaled it wasn’t really supposed to go to my lungs, that was just an unfortunate byproduct. It had to get into my blood to feel good. In the lungs, there are millions of alveoli, little pink, hollow tissue, and they absorbed the smoke and drugs and spread it into my bloodstream. They were good little suckers.

  Every time he tried to inhale he coughed.

  A man died here, I said. My neighbor.

  The man inhaled and did not cough.

  You’re getting good, I said. Now you’ll start craving them.

  He stood up and looked out onto the sky. There wasn’t much to see up above, but across, we could see the lights, all the lights that people had strung up high and lit.

  You should let us be, I told him. Go back to where you came from. We can handle ourselves.

  * * *

  I had a dream where Lizzy and I had purchased a special kind of house. It was made of endless rooms, the kind the psychotic architect cannot help but continue, for if it ends then so does he. There was a room with all sorts of twinkling lamps and soprano songs in the walls. In one room, there was a piano carved out of a tree, still stuck in the ground, but alive all the same. Blossoms fell onto it, and it was so beautiful, and I knew we could live there forever; we would never become bored, and never get lost, because we would always find something new.

  We did not even have bodies, not really, we just floated along, floated into one another, a happiness in not being corporeal.

  Then I looked at the vents where it was musky, and there, piled onto one another, were corpses, and I knew without seeing that the entire house was built with the dead in its walls. I called Lizzy over.

  She screamed and screamed and screamed, but it felt right that we should build and live amongst our dead. I floated into the vents with the bodies. It was warm there, and honest.

  I woke up and turned on the television.

  Sunday mass. A man in black with bowed head and clasped hands:

  We must have faith that he can save us, not because he can. We know he can. But we must have faith that we are worth saving. There is something in our history, in our foundation, in our lives, that is worth remaining for. If we leave now, we forfeit, we retreat, and all that we have made is dust.

  * * *

  I was on my balcony when the big one hit.

  The dogs started barking first. Sometimes, with the quakes, they were so small that I heard some people could feel them in one room of a house but not in the others. This one was everywhere, and it was quick. I could see people in the building next to me slam against the walls, and their computers and TVs slide off their desks.

  The building beside mine cracked, like a zipper opening up, and each side began to move away from one the other. Loose pieces fell off. People screamed along with the crashing stonework.

  People were running out of the way, but not all of them would be fast enough, and the miracle man could not be there for all of them. Some could barely stand and were crawling on the ground, falling onto their sides. There was glass on the ground. If they lived, they would get infections and slow-die. My cigarette fell over the bal
cony, still lit, and it left a trail of weak fire in the air. There were many stomped cigarette butts on the ground. A little memoriam of my own.

  The building was shaking hard, but I lifted myself up to the stone surface of the ridge. I could see St. Ruth’s wobbling like Jell-O, and the dogs were barking mad.

  And in the distance, the man, flying. Flying straight towards me.

  I turned my back on him and jumped.

  Falling felt like nothing, like being unconscious, like holding your breath really long until you’re about to explode for release.

  Still I saw him, rushing towards me—this man who could really do magic, just like Lizzy said he could. Lizzy, Lizzy, where are you now? Still here? Crouched under your desk, near your bed, your cellophane wrappings shaking so hard you piss right through them?

  A falling object descends at an increased rate, meaning the farther you fall, the more impact your body has on the surface, the more it has potential to leave a mark. An object that is caught, however, must be caught delicately, without panic, else it will break.

  I wanted so badly for the ground to catch me.

  My arm twisted under me when we made contact. My bone, I know this feeling, was broken. His bones, under his skin that cannot have been skin, felt like steel. I screamed, but I was not louder than all the voices under me, rising up louder and louder around the sounds of our concrete toppling over, breaking upon itself.

  He flew me up higher and higher until we were above the dust clouds and I could see St. Ruth’s fall apart and all the descending buildings breaking away from her.

  We went higher still. I felt sick.

  Postpartum

  You must never begin a story with waking up, so let us start right before. She slumbers unaware of two small, dumb mouths pulling at her body, her children, those twins with fine hair and greedy eyes. One of each, a girl-child and a boy-child, naked and filthy, their genitals soaked with the grease of unattended months. They empty themselves as they crawl from her thighs to her breast, where they suck the ever-flowing milk. They smear brown and yellow. They chirp for more.

  Asleep, she dreams: an old woman, a caretaker, removing cinnamon buns from an oven. It heats up the room, a smell of rich comfort. She reaches to taste the risen dough, but the woman gently forces her hand away; too hot little girl, not yet. The girl is unused to waiting, so the woman tells her to recite her daily lessons.

  Keep my fingernails clean. Tie my hair away from my face. Press my thighs tightly together.

  On your wedding night, what do you say?

  Here I am, husband.

  Yes child, and one day your prince will come. Sing with me now child, one day he’ll find me, one day he’ll save me, one day he’ll take me away. Chapped skin on her fingers, the years compounded into the bony knuckles, a sheen of gray over her eyes, the old woman ices a bun with melting sugar. Eat it slowly, savor it, let it melt. There’s a good girl.

  She has been pricked twice; once, not her fault, her father was short on golden plates, and a fairy with thunderous eyes went hungry at the baptism. This fairy knew her own value and would eat on nothing less than malleable metals from some faraway war-torn place. She never forgot the slight, and later placed a thorn whittled with a sleep spell in a spindle, certain the girl would touch it when she was of age. The second time, not her fault, she was in her hundred-year bed, and a man with a crown on his head found her. Dazed and delighted, he bent over her still form and placed his lips on hers, found her warm enough. He undressed and climbed in.

  * * *

  The boy-child, with nothing to gnaw and his milk teeth aching in his mouth, begins to scour her body for something firm to connect with. By chance, he happens on the thorn in her finger and sucks with the same insistence of his father. It dislodges easily.

  The dream begins to fade, and she fights to see it to its end. Give me your palm, the old woman says. I can tell you what your beloved will look like. Ah, see here? He will be handsome. He will be kind. He rides a great white steed, and he has got all his teeth. Close your eyes now; if you think hard enough, maybe you will see him, too.

  Roused against the lethargy, she looks down at her body, the mold all around her from a wet bed, the dried blood between her thighs from a lonely birth, her breasts askew atop their dressing gown, the girl-child weeping against her arm and the smell of spice far away and fading. Desperate, she tries to hold onto that wrinkled old face, the taste of dough rolling under her tongue, but it dissolves as she opens her mouth. Unlocked, she attempts the eruption of a hundred-years-buried song in her breast, one she never learned, the long wail, but her throat is dry, parched, and all she manages is a whelping croak. Beside her, the girl-child, ecstatic to hear the sound of her mother, begins to wail.

  Eden

  Everyone called him a horse fucker, though not in his hearing. No one dared. Rolo had a mean face, like someone had pressed thumbtacks into his cheeks when he was a kid and the impressions remained like tired wounds. He never talked to anyone, and if you tried, they said his small eyes got even smaller.

  Jim-Bob, Earwig, and I used to hang around the stables where Rolo worked on Mr. Scarsdale’s farm. There was less to do there than anywhere else in town, but nobody bothered us, so if we wanted to smoke or drink the beer we hid under our jackets or look at my father’s crusty nudie mags, we could do so in peace. Rolo kept to himself, minding the horses and shoveling shit out of the stables. For a long time I didn’t think he knew we were there.

  Of the three of us, Jim-Bob was always first to grab a beer, light a cigarette, or pull on his dick. He was named on account of his mother compromising between either of the two men who may have been his daddy. She never called him Jim-Bob. It was always one or the other, depending on which man she decided she liked better that day. Or maybe to make the other jealous. Jim-Bob had several theories. His mom smoked clove cigarettes every day and throughout every pregnancy, though Jim-Bob was the only one who’d made it out alive. She used to pull up her shirt and show her cesarean scar to anyone who cared to see. “Bikini cut,” she’d say. “Right across. Like they were cutting down a tree.”

  We called Earwig after the little critters because he was kind of like an earwig, ugly and small but pretty harmless. When we showed him a picture of one he flailed his arms and shrieked, and so we kept showing it to him until it bored us to see him react.

  The three of us were always looking for new things to get off to, especially around the Apple Fest when the weather was warm and dry and all the girls wore their clothes tight on their bodies and put extra wag in their hips until we were halfway mad. We couldn’t get out of the town—the whole of our families broke bread and brow there—but we could get off on the town. It was Jim-Bob who’d found a picture of last year’s Apple Queen in a two-piece, so we were spending the day masturbating over it.

  “Where did you get it?” I asked.

  “Dad’s Bible. In Leviticus.”

  “Which dad?”

  Jim-Bob shrugged.

  Last year, the Apple Queen was a tall girl with long hair. Every girl in town wanted to be the Apple Queen, crowned at the Fest. It meant she was the prettiest seventeen-year-old around. This one had been especially attractive. She had blond hair. I liked blond hair. Hers was the palest I’d ever seen. Almost like fresh-fallen snow. I was in the middle of whacking away, thinking about her looking at me or maybe talking to me or something, so I didn’t hear Jim-Bob or Earwig stop or back away. I didn’t hear Rolo approach, or Jim-Bob do up his pants real quick.

  “What’re you doing?” Rolo said. “Hell you boys doing?” It was the first time I’d heard his voice. It sounded unused and that made it cruel. He was wearing a faded red cap, long unwashed strands of his hair falling around his face, the rest of it tucked behind his ears.

  Jim-Bob and Earwig got up and started running without any care for me. Earwig was screeching, trailing his pants behind
him like a flag. I didn’t move. Up close Rolo looked like the boogeyman, except worse because he was real.

  “What’s this?” he said and picked up the picture of the Apple Queen from where Earwig had dropped it. It was crumpled, and there was a bit of Jim-Bob splashed on her belly. I didn’t know what to say, or if I should say anything, so I sat there dumb quiet and watched him stare at the photo with a long and sad face.

  “How old are you, boy?” he said.

  “Thirteen. Almost fourteen.”

  “She ain’t for you,” he said.

  I didn’t know what that meant. I was going to ask him, but he turned around and said, “Aw, shit.” One of the horses was hitting its ass against the fence, bucking its head and whinnying. It was a stallion. I could tell from here.

  I noticed Rolo slipped the Apple Queen’s picture into his dirty overall pocket before he ran off. For a while I watched him coax the horse. Even though he was probably a crazy fuck, I had to give Rolo credit. He stayed calm, even when the thing jumped and kicked its strong legs. A horse that size could take your head off. When he calmed it down they just stood still, both of them, staring at one another like they were both batshit or something. It was weird. That night I dreamed about horses running away from me until I couldn’t see them anymore.

  * * *

  I didn’t see Earwig or Jim-Bob again for a week after that, but I knew I’d see them at the Apple Fest. Everyone went to the Apple Fest except Rolo, and his lack of attendance was always spoken about in the beer tent, loudly or softly, because who else but a horse fucker wouldn’t want to come and see an Apple Queen get crowned? Whenever he was the punchline, they all slapped one another on the back and laughed. Rolo was the easy joke. It united them. Even the women thought it was funny to laugh about Rolo. Often they wouldn’t have anything funny to share with the men, but they could all laugh about that poor old horse fucker guy. I felt sick when they said those kinds of things.