Her goggles, Docs, and motorcycle jacket serve her well—no pins make it through. But her exposed legs and face are now scratched, cut, bloody. Charlotte pushes herself up, scraping her hands as she goes. She opens her basket and takes out a bottle of iodine and methodically applies some to every inch of broken skin. Charlotte is a wound and its cure, a germ-free adolescent.
Which way is grandma's now? She looks around, trying to orient herself. She rubs her eyes, leaving bloody smears across the lens of her goggles. From now on, she will see the world through the haze of her own blood.
Something about the tiling of these corridors looks familiar to her, but not until she reaches the glass booth does she realize that she's in the Astor Place subway station. She brings the subway pass out of her pocket and waves it at the token clerk, who is not there anyway. She jumps the turnstile. She sees the rabbit on the platform and begins to run toward it, but the dirty feral creature spots her and is so distressed that it leaps off the platform, launching its body straight out over the tracks. As it falls and Charlotte watches, it changes from a rabbit into a small mouse and scurries away.
Charlotte is disappointed. A snake certainly could have swallowed that morsel.
She is not disappointed for long, though. She is thinking about having a cigarette and whether or not her grandma would smell the smoke in the folds of her jacket or the cuts in her skin, and if she did, whether she would believe Charlotte if she told her that the smell was from the show she went to last night, when the train comes hurtling into the station at breakneck pace. Snakes have no necks to break, thinks Charlotte. Or maybe they're all neck until their tails.
Charlotte has always loved the subway system, the dark, dank smelly stations, the more labyrinthine, the more exits and interchanges the better. She likes the seemingly random assignments of letters and numbers; she likes the confusion, and mourned when the difference between the AA and A was dissolved. She likes it when an uptown local becomes an express on an entirely different track and when the F with no warning starts running on the A line. She likes the small signs that presage the coming of the train—the soft clank of the track shifting, the mice moving quietly to the sides of the track, the faintest pin-prick of light down the tunnel. It won't be long now. Not long. She loves the look of the stations, the steel beams and bolts and cracked concrete—the bones and organs of the city. And when the train comes, she likes that best of all, the free-fall rush of air it pushes before it, the long loud clatter and screech. Subways, Charlotte thinks, are like snakes when snakes ruled the earth.
When Charlotte was little, she used to make her mom ride in the first car so that she could stand at the door at the head of the car with all the warning stickers (Riding between cars is strictly forbidden; No se apoye contra la puerta) and press her face against the glass. As the train hurtled through the darkness, Charlotte would watch wide-eyed as incandescent lights stretched out in bright streaks flashing by like the Millenium Falcon making the jump into hyperspace, only better. What Charlotte liked best was the occasional ghost station—18th St. on the 6, for example. Abandoned, covered with phantasmagoric graffiti, but still kept lit up in perpetual, futile wait for passengers and trains that never stopped. Charlotte used to dream about getting off in the old stations to explore, being left behind as the train pulled away, left to fade into the stretched and flamboyant graffiti. They were nightmares, sort of.
Charlotte gets on the train, arranges her skirt, and closes her eyes. She tries to doze but she is just too hungry. Instead she opens her basket and peels a hard-boiled egg, leaving bloody fingerprints, a murder mystery detective's dream, on the shell and on the surface of the white, which gives beneath the pressure of her fingers and then returns to its perfect shape. She is eating her second egg when she becomes aware that the shrieks and squawks of the other passengers have been drowned, engulfed by a silence, the silence of people pressing away, the silence of fear and loathing.
As Charlotte chews the second bloody bite of her second egg she realizes that the other passengers are birds: not pigeons or other city-vermin birds, but dodos, lories, eaglets, and hawks. She thinks she even catches sight of a bird with plumage all of pins, which would be painful for a snake to swallow, but perhaps she is mistaken. Slowly and deliberately she finishes her egg as a finch in the little love seat in the corner tucks into a tupperware of living centipedes. Charlotte shifts position, which is painful because of the way the cuts in her legs are sticking to the seat.
As muttering and chirping starts to replace hostile avian glares the train judders and shudders, stopping suddenly. The lights go off and then back on. Charlotte and the birds stare straight ahead as seconds and then minutes drift by silently. The PA system emits a loud crackle of static. Charlotte doesn't know it, but if she could play that static backwards and at twice the speed it would be the sound of her mother as a little girl telling her to be careful on the path of pins. But she can't, so she will never know. To her, it just sounds like a hoarse snake, hissing and spitting and coughing all at once. A snake with strep throat.
But you and I know. That will have to be enough.
There is a pause in the static, and then the PA starts to play music, particularly insipid sentimental pop that seems to distress the birds as much as it does Charlotte, who has no intention whatsoever of sitting in a stalled-out subway car listening to Celine Dion. She stands up, walks over to the door leading to the area between the cars, where you're not supposed to ride, and opens it. She steps out onto the ledge and lowers herself onto the track, followed by the birds who are grateful for her deft opposable thumbs even if she does eat eggs. They are clearly more comfortable following a bleeding egg-eater than they are staying behind in the subway car which is beginning to fill with hot salt water.
Charlotte walks deliberately and firmly. She is convinced that every so often she can spot a pin glinting up at her from the tracks. The birds follow silently. Every so often Charlotte glances over at the third rail lying coolly under its sheltering guard. The lure is strong, like the fear that you might throw yourself off the top of the Empire State Building or try to grab a policeman's gun just because you can imagine yourself doing so. Charlotte pictures herself laying her hand against the third rail and filling from hair to boots with burning electric energy, her consciousness flickering and then running straight into the electric blood of the city, crackling through trains and street lights, merging purely and quickly with the pulsing islands surrounding her.
She doesn't know if the birds are thinking along similar lines or not.
The way along the tracks is long, much longer than the path through the woods, and the birds become restless, rustling their feathers and crowding forward, even pecking Charlotte's back, although she certainly can't feel it through her jacket. One of the wrens decides that he can lead way better and takes off straight into the third rail. His skin turns black and splits, spilling his bones and lungs, still quivering, onto the ground. The smell of burning feathers makes Charlotte vomit. She stops walking in order to rinse her mouth out with cinnamon mouthwash from her basket.
The remaining birds are looking a bit green as well. Charlotte passes out the comfits for them to suck on.
After they have been walking for what seems like hours, Charlotte finds that they are at the abandoned 18th St. subway station. The funhouse graffiti is layered on over older graffiti; infinite strata of urban fireworks marking successive waves of fucked-up youth. Charlotte walks through the station: her goggles, her blood- and iodine-stained face and legs, her bandaged hands, her red motorcycle jacket, and her comet-tail of birds make her look like a walking piece of graffiti. She climbs the stairs only to find her way blocked by an iron gate. She rattles the bars but the grille is locked. She picks up one of the birds and pushes it through the bars. It flies away and the others get the idea. Soon the only company Charlotte has left is the dodo, who is too large to fit through the gate and can't fly anyway. Together they walk back down the stairs.
When they wake up, Charlotte is unsure how long she has been sleeping. She lights a cigarette, stubs it out, and passes it to the dodo, who eats it. Charlotte thinks this is all to the good, because she doesn't like to litter. The city has enough trouble. So does she.
She sighs and puts her goggles back on. The red smears of blood are still damp. The dodo looks a bit anxious, so as a gesture of friendship, Charlotte gives the bird a second pair of goggles from her basket. She tightens the strap around the bird's head and it squawks in appreciation. Then she takes a small bottle of seltzer and piece of cake out of her basket. She and the dodo share breakfast? lunch? dinner? Neither one of them knows and neither do we.
After eating, Charlotte examines the bottom of her left shoe and pulls out several straight pins that had stuck in the rubber. She is oblivious to the dodo's embarrassment at having nothing to give her in return for the goggles and food. Luckily, the awkward bird spots something glinting in the corner of the abandoned station. It is Charlotte's own thimble, which has rolled out of her pocket while she was sleeping. The dodo, ignorant creature, has no way of knowing the shiny thing's provenance. It picks up the thimble in its beak and solemnly presents it to Charlotte. Charlotte accepts it back graciously, although she'll never need to use it again. Snakes, remember, don't sew. She slips it in her pocket.
Charlotte stands up. As she pulls away from the wall she feels her jacket sticking, but she cannot see why. The graffiti that she was leaning against, old and chipped as it was, has imprinted itself on her jacket like wet paint in a silent movie or a Sesame Street sketch. The mirror ghost print of half-a-dozen punk slogans criss-cross her back.
Together Charlotte and the dodo climb the stairs. Armed with the pins from her boot she begins to pick the padlock keeping the gate closed. It's a fruitless exercise. The straight pins cause nothing but pricked fingertips and a steady subway rumble of foul language from Charlotte.
Finally she gives it up and throws the pins away. Sitting back down on the ground she opens her basket and takes out a large solid key with four different ridged edges that match the + at the bottom of the padlock. She unlocks the padlock, puts the key back into her basket, slides the lock off of the gate and locks it around a belt loop on her jacket. Then she pushes the gate open. She and the dodo step through together.
They climb up another set of steps. When they come up from underground they are at the very edge of a forest. Looking back Charlotte can see two paths winding back through the trees. Looking the other way she can see her grandmother's cottage two, maybe three blocks away. She checks to make sure she still has everything she needs: goggles, jacket, basket. The dodo watches her uncertainly. It shuffles its feet and clears its throat. Charlotte picks the bird up and hurls it as hard as she can up in the air. The dodo spreads its stubby prickly wings and flaps ferociously, twisting its barrel-like body back and forth as it rises. It hangs suspended for a few seconds, contemplating Charlotte. From this height she looks like a red blur, a blood-stained egg, and compared to the dodo, she is barely more than an egg. The dodo wishes her luck and then continues its ascent.
Charlotte has already turned away and is walking to her grandmother's cottage. There is nothing left in her way, just smooth sidewalks unrolling under her feet. When she gets to the cottage, she knocks gently on the door, and when there is no response she uses her school ID to jimmy open the lock. She walks in.
Grandmother is not bed-ridden, and her eyes, ears, and teeth are just the right size. She is wearing a green dress and kneeling in front of the crackling sparking fire in the fireplace. She is crying softly and inconsolably. She does not even turn her head to look when Charlotte comes into the room.
Charlotte kneels down next to her grandmother and takes her hand. “It's OK,” she says.
Her grandmother continues to weep over the long tube of patterned snakeskin. “It's dead,” she whispers. “It's dead."
"No, Grandma,” says Charlotte. “It's not dead."
But her grandmother continues to weep gently, bent like a willow over the shed skin. Charlotte sets her basket down and takes from it a loaf of fresh bread, a quart of homemade chicken soup, and a bottle of red wine. “These are for you,” she tells her grandmother. She takes a red apple from her basket and places it in her grandmother's hand, closing the older woman's fingers around it, but still her grandmother does not turn her head.
Charlotte stands behind her grandmother and begins to undress. She takes off her motorcycle jacket, folds it lovingly, and lays it on the floor. She unties her blood-stained apron, takes it off, and lays it on top of the jacket. Her sky-blue dress follows as do her black cotton underpants and bra as well as her hair ribbon, leaving her standing in only her purple Doc Martens and her goggles.
"It's OK, Grandma,” she repeats. “It's not dead. Look."
And as her grandmother turns to look, Charlotte—slowly, slowly—begins to shed her skin.
* * * *
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A Last Taste of Sweetness
Karina Sumner-Smith
Alone in my kitchen, I make pancakes. I shake flour from its plastic container, watching until it forms a mountain of white in the bottom of the bowl. As I put the container down I wonder, did I watch the way the flour shifted and fell? Did I see it explode into the air, float through the band of sunlight?
I cannot let myself worry about such things. The moment is gone; let it go.
* * * *
A little girl peels bark from a tree in her back yard. Her mother has told her not to. She holds the strip in her hands saying, “This is brown. Brown. Brown."
She does not know how to spell “brown” and does not realize that she will never learn.
* * * *
I crack eggs into the flour, aiming it so that they fall at the peak of the mountain. They hit and gather cloudy whiteness as they slip down the side of the flour to wallow against the side of the bowl.
I feel things that I have ignored for years: the sticky feel of raw egg white on my fingers, the rip of the egg's fine inner membrane, the chill of a refrigerated shell.
* * * *
She does not know why she told him that she didn't want to die a virgin. Maybe because that's what girls say in movies. Maybe because she didn't know what else to do.
They do it in the basement, where it is cold and dim and they will be hidden. It hurts, and she knows that she will bleed.
She lets him come into her, unprotected.
As she listens to him pant, she wonders, what does it matter, anyway?
* * * *
I get the milk from the fridge. I have always bought milk in bags, three of them, even though I now live alone and she was the only one who drank milk. There is something of tradition and something of her in this. The milk, too, is cold, and I take the time to smell it; I dribble some on my fingers, just to know what milk feels like. I do this over the sink. Everything is ending, soon to be engulfed, and yet I cannot bear to get milk on my clean countertop, or splatter a little on the Spanish tiles.
I wonder if this is habit or something deeper.
I pour milk into the bowl in a long, thin stream. I've always liked the way milk twists as it falls. If I was a scientist—or maybe if I'd paid more attention in high school science class—I'd know why that happens. Maybe if I were going to be alive tomorrow, I'd look it up.
* * * *
She lies in bed with the window open. She gets up only to go to the washroom, or to make herself tea and toast. She has always loved breakfast in bed, and now breakfast is every meal and every meal is appropriate for bed.
Lying back on mounds of pillows as a cup of
tea steams on the bedside, she watches the summer air push out the window sheers. Smells cut grass and pollen. Hears the songs of birds.
* * * *
I blend the mixture on a low setting, watching until large bubbles rise to the top and are sucked under again by the spin of the beaters. When it is ready, I drop the beaters in the sink and heat a pan. I pour in a bead of corn oil, roll it slowly around, waiting for the sizzle.
If she were here, she would say that I was doing it wrong. Mixing too slowly, heating the pan too quickly, using too much oil. And she would laugh as she said it, and that would somehow make it okay.
I cannot let myself wonder if she is alive. I cannot let myself wonder if she too is waiting for the light, wishing that she could share these moments with me, wishing that we hadn't let it end.
But I will not speak of regret. I will not speak of memories, fond or otherwise. I will not speak of dreams. These things fill me, and my eyes stream, and I have no words. I need no words, not while I have breath. Merely the shock of knowing, like the sudden meeting of eyes across a crowd.
* * * *
The air is cool but the water is not. It rushes up around her feet and ankles, a nothing temperature, inviting her in. She walks slowly, but the water rises quickly around her. She can feel the round lumps of rocks, the wash of sand, the edges of shells beneath her feet. Soon, she can feel nothing but water.
With calm, easy strokes she begins to swim. The sunlight sparkling across the surface brings tears to her eyes, but she does not need to see where she is going. There is only an empty stretch of ocean before her, waiting.
* * * *
I set the table for one, with an ordinary plate and ordinary cutlery. I light a lilac-scented candle because it reminds me of her, and a lily-scented candle because it reminds me of me.
I place a pancake on my plate; there is a whole stack waiting for me in the oven. They are round and flat and even.
I lay a row of strawberries across the middle of the pancake and then slowly roll it like a crepe. I pour maple syrup, as much as I want. It is golden and heavily liquid, thicker than water, sweeter than blood.
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