Beneath Ceaseless Skies #98

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Issue #98 • June 28, 2012

  “Lady Marmalade,” by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Death and the Thunderbird, Pt. II,” by Michael J. DeLuca

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  LADY MARMALADE

  by E. Catherine Tobler

  “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 which scatters 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.

  “Pomegranate pear?”

  The voice at the window draws her attention. The young man there is tall, for his eyes meet Beth’s over the sill. His eyes are the color of the bottle just above the window, its label a scrawl that only Beth knows: Co. Kerry, morning mist, November.

  Pomegranate pear was a flavor she didn’t want to make, but she still did, turning the golden pears into a smooth chocolate-brown butter, dribbling in the crimson seeds. Beth had allowed herself one spoonful before jarring it, admitting to herself it was one of her best. She reaches for the jar now, fingers knowing where it rests, but her fingers close around nothingness.

  Amid the cluster of jars upon the counter, there is a vacant space, a jar-shaped space, a space pomegranate pear should occupy but doesn’t. She looks past the marmalades, beyond the canisters and knotgrass, the jarred yeast and dormouse footprints. The deep opal bowl which houses dreams is still near to overflowing and she drapes a soft towel across it before she moves to the bell jar, fingers printing the lid before she works up and up, past jarred breaths an
d bottled cities; past boxed fields and ribbon-bound supernumerary rainbows. No pomegranate pear and when she comes back to the window; no young man.

  * * *

  It is easier to move a single person than it is the entire train and its company. Beth can and does move the train when necessary, even enjoys the challenge, but takes a different kind of pleasure when it’s just one person; when it’s just herself.

  She opens the jar to find herself on a Himalayan plain, in a time before humanity has discovered this place. The air here is cold, pinks her cheeks. She picks her way toward the pomegranate trees which line the foothills and opens a wide-mouth jar. Two pomegranates will fit inside, little else. She twists the lid into place then sinks into the dark soil at the base of the trees. If she keeps still, the sunlight sinks through her and she hears only the wind.

  She doesn’t keep still. She hears the faint beat of a heart and pushes up from the soil. It cannot be her own, she refuses the very idea, but then she sees the shadowed figure on the hill before her. The heartbeat lurches.

  She runs. Clutching jars against her sides, she runs toward the figure that shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be here and she screams. He’s not supposed to be in this place—she broke all the jars he ever had claim to, removing those places and years from her reach. (But you didn’t, oh you didn’t, whispers a distant voice.) Still, he leaps into motion, long legs and flailing arms and that shock of curling black hair. She knows the color of his eyes even if she cannot see them now.

  He evades her advance. The pomegranates jostle in their jar, making a solid thumping rhythm against her ribs. The empty jar in her other hand slips and she tightens her hold. Don’t drop it, she tells herself. Don’t. Don’t be stuck here with this shadow-creature. Her feet come down hard with every stride.

  “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”

  The word comes with every fall of her right foot. And then: “Don’t go.”

  But he goes; vanishes through another stand of pomegranate trees as a breath of wind, pulling her after, turning her heel over head until she does not know which way is up. If the ground is blue, then so be it. She feels as though something precious has been taken from her yet again, even though it was lifetimes ago. Once, she could have counted the time on her fingers, but not now. Even so, she remembers the feeling; it remains a broken place that never healed straight. Staggering, she turns from the trees and runs.

  She reaches for the train, pulling caboose walls tall around her, patching in every jar she knows by touch in the dark. She pictures the rusting Ferris wheel under the gleam of the glass and the sugar bowl with its chipped edge and paired dormice curled inside; she draws the taste of sour dough into her mouth, swallows it down, and lets it consume her. Himalayan air slides down her arms, summer sunlight taking its place. Eamonn and Ichabod come into slow focus and she allows the jars to slip from her fingers. Eamonn startles, then moves to the broom.

  * * *

  She doesn’t think she will ever grow tired of the sounds of the carnival. When night comes and the jars fall to darkness in their nooks, Beth closes her eyes and listens.

  Even from a distance she names the lions by the sound of their voices. If the train stays in one place long enough, she comes to know the voices of the children who frequent the rides in the same way. The tightropes creak under Pasha’s feet while the cotton candy machine buzzes like an angry bee and the filaments in the electric lights hum high and bright. A soft moan runs below it all, something old and fluid like a river and Beth’s toes curl inside her shoes, as though she were dipped in up to her ankles. The heart of the circus, dark and wet and cold and pounding.

  “Miss?”

  The boy standing outside the caboose is lit by the clear glass bulbs, his hair like spun gold curling into his open collar. It’s warm enough that’s he’s barefoot and clutching two dollars in his shaking hands. Beth leans across the counter and holds to the feeling of that ancient sound at the base of all she knows. Eamonn leans, too, against Beth’s shoulder as he looks out at the boy.

  “My ma said—” He swallows hard, thin throat working as if he has an apple lodged there. His eyes skip to the dwarf, then back to Beth. “She said you have jams, or jellies, or summat?” He offers the money up, the bills trembling.

  Beth reaches for a crate. “Did you want to spend the whole two dollars?”

  She already knows he does; his mother is a bright star in his head, fully formed in a white dress splattered with blue flowers. Twelve buttons run between her breasts, from waist to throat where her own spun gold hair tangles in a knot. At present she is screaming and laughing to be let off the Ferris wheel. This woman tasted the marmalade before—three years ago?—and with it the memory of a boy she kissed when she was but twelve. A small peck, standing barefoot at the end of a lake-wet dock; the gangly boy fled and she never saw him again. Lakes and docks always make her wonder where he is. He’s in New York, Beth could tell her; he tasted the marmalade five years ago and remembered that kiss as well. He never married.

  “She said you would know, see.”

  “I know,” Beth says.

  Beth fills the small crate with six jars: two orange, two lemon, one lime, and one cherry jam. The cherry jam doesn’t sell well, but the crew likes it—Manny says the lions like it especially well. Still, she knows this woman (Lila, the wind says) and knows these cherries will remind her of her husband. Though it is a small jar, Lila will savor it over the course of a month, remembering the warmth of his fingers and the way he held her hand when their golden haired boy was born in a field of wheat. After, there was the sweet taste of cherry cola.

  The boy runs back to his mother and Beth leaves the caboose, knowing Eamonn can sell the marmalade well enough without her for a bit. She seeks the main tent, where a cacophony of sound spills. Shards of light escape the tent flaps and vents; screams and laughter come in bursts like thunder. Inside the tent warmth, Beth keeps to the outer edge of planked bleachers, unseen as she steps past a young boy and girl who have found more to enjoy in each other’s lips than they have in Rabi’s center-ring show.

  Vanquisher and vanisher, sink me down into this dirt and let me rest. Beth wants to speak the words to Rabi, but doesn’t and won’t ever. She knows too well how his talent weighs on his mind, how it’s not such an easy task to make someone or something disappear. She has been asked to open a jar she would rather not; she has crossed that line, and will again. They are almost in the same business, she and he.

  Beth disappears through the shadows, fingers trailing along the bleacher supports. Paper cups dot the landscape here, dropped from careless hands; she finds a wallet amid the soft dirt but leaves it there—perhaps its owner wishes to be someone else. Under the tent, everyone should be given that chance.

  The Kerry-eyed boy is not within the tent. Beth knows this from the moment she enters, yet still she looks for him, an automatic response like a leg jerking when tapped. She finds instead Eamonn, at the end of the curving bleachers. He claims her hand and drags her from the tent, into the wash of yellow-white light outside. It’s the parked caboose he pulls her toward and to the second empty space within it.

  The bell jar is gone, a perfect faded circle in its place where the sun has worn around it all these immeasurable years. In its center sits a silver coin with an owl upon it.

  * * *

  In the beginning, darkness lay upon the face of the deep. When this darkness roused itself, it was the great lifting wings of a raven who was Mother Night. From her crawled doom, fate, sleep, and dreams. From her fingertips spilled the aether, the madness, and the ancient river’s boatman. All things would come to an end, she decreed, even night herself as dawn crept over her wing’s edge to spread warmth where there had been but cold.

  To see that all things would be kept in their place, that all things would end, Mother Night divided fate, bestowing her daughters with tasks they might never finish. Every night, a breath would be stilled even if another came into being. Every night, a love
would be confessed as another fell to ash.

  Into her eldest daughter’s hands, Mother Night placed the scissors to cut the thread, forgetting that fingers might also tie knots in severed lines. What was torn asunder might yet be joined again.

  Beth remembers her name, even if no one uses it. She wishes that it were a lost thing moved elsewhere by Rabi’s clever fingers; that years from now she might come across it in a corner (huddled and dusty and reaching for her) and say “oh yes, that.” “I don’t remember” would be a comfortable lie, the way carpeted with sugared rose petals.

  In her name lingers the blade her mother gifted, a thing meant to cut so people might be at final rest. But this cutting takes its toll and, when confronted with the one thread she realizes she cannot cut, makes Beth search for other ways a thing might be ended. Gather it up, wrap it tight, seal it with a lid. Every jar becomes a knot in a thread, a way to stem the tide.

  In the middle stands the discovery: that what is sealed away tends to leach into the ground no matter how hard one tries to control it. Water is meant to run; earth is meant to shift. Threads, if not cut, often fray on their own. Better then to control these things, parcel them out so that a thing doesn’t end but somehow goes ever on. If a thing must end for one person, surely it can continue for another.

  Yet here rises the absurdity: Beth wishes the thread she cannot cut would fray, but it is stronger than any one thing she knows. Stronger than he knows too, and though his own sharp name cuts the strand once and twice and he walks away, meaning to go forever, there is yet that thread, spooling out through dark labyrinths. Wherever he walks, there is a trail in his wake, a trail she can trace no matter how she tries not to. She wishes to end it, slip it in a jar and hide it away, give it to another person so that she might at last be ended and rest, but she cannot.

  She is bound as surely as everyone else is, to her own spooling thread. She cannot cut it. She has tried to tie it in knots so that she might run elsewhere, but she comes always again to the main line.