Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  We drifted and we drifted.

  The wind filled my veil and the skirt of my dress, and I discovered that no mattress on earth was as comfortable and soft to lie on as the sky. Stars were floating all around like unblinking fireflies. Your father gave me one for an earring. All the rest were sparkling in my eyes.

  Why is everything so beautiful? I asked your father, my mother said.

  Because this is the world that you were made for, your father said, and the world that you will live in from now until forever.

  And I believed him, she said.

  The Raven

  Julia Elliott

  WE WERE AT KRYSTAL, eating what my mother called a skin graft on a bun. I’d put on my raven mask to give our order, and my best friend Bonny, aka the Poet, stood behind me in her black beret and fake mustache, croaking, Quoth the raven after everything I said: Six hamburgers (quoth the raven), three large curly fries (quoth the raven), three medium Cokes (quoth the raven). I aimed my glistening black beak at the cashier and said, By that heaven that bends above us, by that God we both adore, please give us some extra ketchup. Bonny cracked up. But Brunell Hair just stood there looking pickled, her face scrunched up, dirty toe of her ballet shoe digging into the floor. She hated our guts but followed us around. She was Echo, scrawny as a wormy mutt, flouncing in a bruise-colored dress. Miss Joetta Shick, proprietress of Joetta’s School of Dance, said the dress was chiffon, the color of dusk, of shadows, of gossamer insect wings and midnight passion flowers. And the feathers on my bird costume had gleaming rainbows down in their fibers.

  “Thing of evil,” said Bonny. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

  “Nevermore,” said I, and Brunell rolled her eyes.

  “I’m having a slumber party,” she said, “for my birthday. Right after the recital.”

  “Quoth the raven: Nevermore.”

  “Y’all’re immature,” said Brunell. Brunell came from a tribe of pinched-up possum-eating Pentecostals and she couldn’t relax. Daddy said her people looked like they were being eviscerated, which means having your guts scooped out. Back in kindergarten, Brunell would follow you around babbling baby talk about hell. If you snatched a Lego from her, she’d say, “You’ll burn.” If you cut her in the lunch line she’d say, “You’ll fall into the bottomless pit.” If you pulled her pigtail she’d hiss, “No water will quench the eternal fires of hell.” When she was little, she’d had the exact same creepy croak as that kid in The Shining, and we were always begging her to chant Redrum, redrum, redrum. Sometimes she would, sometimes she wouldn’t—depending on where she was on the mood spectrum: despairing, desolate, ghastly, bleak, melancholy, somber, or just plain dreary. Her smile was a twitch, uncomfortable and over in a flash. Her eyes were silvery and tormented and slightly froggish. She looked like an inbred angel from one of those old Flemish paintings my daddy liked—gray freckles, cornsilk hair, eyes goggling up at heaven—or maybe like a skinny vampire child who would float up to your window in a clammy cloak of fog, tap on the glass, and just stare at you until you went insane.

  Despite Brunell’s church bullshit, she was the one who’d somberly explained the mechanics of sexual intercourse to us in first grade, familiarized us with the meaning and usage of the word fuck (second grade), and haunted our tender minds forever with the story of a girl raped and mutilated, her body scattered through a forest where a satanic cult held their drunken orgies (third grade). Tapping into a dark underground stream we couldn’t see, Brunell delivered disturbing information that turned our heads inside out. You never knew when she’d come at you with a big dirty monkey wrench and pound it into the mushy machinery of your brain. She’d be talking in that hillbilly drone of hers—about the pink pom-poms on her roller skates or her stuffed Garfield doll—when there it was, real and nasty, a slab of rancid meat on a lace tablecloth: a transvestite prostitute dying of pneumonia at Kuntry Kabins motel; a baby born without kidneys; an old woman left dead in her house for a month and eaten by her starving kitties.

  That Tuesday night before dress rehearsal Brunell was going on and on about the electric curlers she was getting for her birthday, taking weird little rodent bites off her hamburger, when all of a sudden she bursts out with: Joetta Shick wants your daddy. She pointed a burnt french fry at me, ate it, then told us that Tonya Hutto, our cashier, had had three abortions.

  “What do you mean Joetta Shick wants my daddy?” I asked.

  “She wants to jump his bones,” said Brunell.

  “How do you know this?” I demanded, but Brunell Hair pressed her lips into a line and refused to speak another word on the subject.

  Joetta Shick looked like a hyperthyroid mannequin—that’s what my mother said—the kind of mannequin that would come alive in a horror movie and chase you down with a knife. My father didn’t exactly agree with her, and this pissed my mother off. Yes, Miss Joetta’s eyes bugged out like a Pekingese dog’s, but she painted them Egyptian style, and her mascara-thickened lashes were an inch long. She had cheekbones out to here. Raven black curls swished around her skinny butt. She painted lines around her skeleton lips to make them look luscious, and she kept her freckled chest powdered pale. Nobody knew her age, her past, or her true hair color. Everybody knew she had over a hundred antique clocks in her brick ranch house, that her Chinese hairless dogs had to wear sunblock when they went outside, that she did the flowers for St. John’s Episcopal every first Sunday of the month—lush dark roses from her own garden.

  Long and lank in a sheer-skirted leotard the color of a scab, Joetta Shick was fluttering back and forth across the Andrew Jackson Elementary stage, instructing a crew of fathers in her rich whine. As I sat in the wings watching Wanda Blitch’s daddy struggle with the Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher inflatable castle (a Day-Glo orange toy spray-painted gray), I remembered something that made me wonder. Last year when we were trying to come up with a theme for our October recital, I’d told Miss Joetta my father’d written a book on Poe. I even recited a passage from “The Raven,” and Miss Joetta’d paced around with a fevered look on her face. She got so wound up about the prospect of a dance recital based on what she called Poe’s oeuvre that I didn’t mention that Daddy, an English professor up at the community college, called Poe the greatest comic genius in the history of American letters.

  “What if your parents got divorced and your dad married Miss Joetta?” said Bonny. She’d picked up my raven mask and was trying to put it on. I snatched it out of her hands, tearing a few feathers off.

  “Shut up,” I said. “Brunell Hair’s full of shit.”

  But my telltale heart beat fat and obscene in my chest as I imagined my father kissing Miss Joetta. They were about the same height, whereas my mother was a little woman who kept her hair cut short so she didn’t have to mess with it. She designed her own furniture and sold it to rich people in Charleston and Atlanta. She’d made almost every stick of furniture in our house, including my princess canopy bed with the built-in drawers, and of course she’d created my raven costume, researching bird anatomy for a month before carving the beak out of teak and rubbing it with ebony lacquer until it got just the right dark shine. She’d also designed the coffin for “The Premature Burial,” the pendulum for “The Pit and the Pendulum,” assorted gothic furnishings, and several grotesque papier-mâché masks for “The Masque of the Red Death” that she was supposed to be bringing over from her workshop tonight.

  “Your mama’s here,” rasped Brunell Hair.

  Brunell was floating in a dark spot right behind us. I didn’t know how long she’d been there, humming with weird thoughts.

  “Hey baby,” yelled Mama. She waved at me then walked to the other end of the stage where Miss Joetta was telling Pinkie Sprott what to do with his stack of Styrofoam tombstones. As my mother stood there balancing a liquor box full of masks on her hip, it seemed like Miss Joetta was making a show of ignoring her. When she finally gave my mother the look-over—bug eyes skipping over her pixie cut, her stretched-out T-shirt, h
er faded cutoffs, and chunky leather sandals—I felt little stabs of pity, then shame, then guilt for feeling pity and shame. But I felt sorry for Miss Joetta when I saw Mama smirking with superiority at her pancake makeup, the beads of sweat that seeped from above her upper lip, the tacky rings she wore on every single finger except her thumbs—Gypsy rings with fat, dark stones that I secretly coveted. I imagined my dance teacher pacing her rose garden at night, restless in some kind of billowy antique gown. I saw my father step from the bushes into a puddle of moonlight and this gave me an evil thrill.

  I held my breath as Mama pulled her masks from the box. My mother was not a normal woman. She thought too much about everything she did. She couldn’t just throw together some carnival masks with glitter and a glue gun like an ordinary mother. She had to make papier-mâché caricatures of certain people in our town, people she called money people: a real estate agent with a hairdo like a nuclear mushroom cloud, a Baptist preacher with a bulldog face who drove a Cadillac with silver doves stenciled onto its doors, and a baloney-colored politician who wanted to develop a whole swamp into a golf course with little Tudor mansions on its fake ponds. The night before when I went to bed, Mama was still holding her palette up to a piece of baloney, trying to get what she called Bobby Skink’s hypertensive complexion just right.

  “Those look awful heavy,” said Miss Joetta.

  “Oh, they’re not,” said Mama. “Just paper and latex paint. Kate gave them a test run this morning.” Mama pointed at me and grinned her sarcastic grin. Miss Joetta picked up the amazing pig-nosed likeness of Tooty Tewksbury, which had a full head of ruby red crepe hair, and marveled at its lightness. “They’ll work,” she said. “Thank you, Edna.” Then she dropped the mask back into its box and turned her attention to the gaggle of chubby third-graders dressed up as tap-dancing demons—they were figments of Poe’s deranged mind. Every time something ominous was about to happen, they’d swarm the stage and start tapping like mad, plastic bat wings flopping on their backs.

  I was out piddling in the night, crickets going full blast like a thousand teeny machines, the moon on the run. It was still warm outside, wet grass under my bare feet. I wore a long paisley skirt with my bathing-suit top. Twenty Gypsy necklaces tinkled on my flat chest. I snuck up to the square of light that was the dining-room window and peeked in. Daddy was hunched over a whiskey, the crisp wing of his hairsprayed bangs ripped to hell, making him look exactly like Jack Nicholson. My brother and I loved for him to yell, “Here’s Johnny,” roll his eyes like a homicidal maniac, and chase us around the house, which he would do, but he refused to wave an ax in the air. Mama was pacing around Daddy, taking quick drags off her smoke. Daddy said she had the constitution of a hummingbird—never gaining weight and always moving, talking, thinking, going, buzzing. He looked like he was having trouble keeping her fast little body in focus.

  I watched Daddy pull Mama onto his lap and kiss her neck. She didn’t close her eyes the way women on TV do, and I thought she’d look a whole lot better if she grew her hair long and wore some makeup. Plus, I was sick of her trying to teach me lessons with everything she did. For example, she’d turned Brunell’s birthday party into one of those you-should-realize-how-fortunate-you-are Sunday-school scams, and she said I should probably go. I already knew how fortunate I was. I was glad I wasn’t Brunell Hair. But that didn’t stop me from wanting things. I wanted a home perm. I wanted boobs. I wanted some purple Candies with cork wedge heels and a pink Corvette with a sunroof. I wanted a disco ball in my room and lavender wall-to-wall and a pair of gold roller skates. I wanted a light-up mirror and a makeup kit with a hundred shades of eye shadow. I wanted a white Persian kitten and a raven black horse and a penthouse apartment that rotated at the top of a high-rise. I wanted a swimming pool shaped like a Hawaiian island with a video arcade and fluffy cockatoos squawking in gilded cages.

  I wanted to jump out of my freckled skin into a long brown body with Coppertone legs that dwindled down to a pair of hot pink three-inch heels. I wanted to strut across a lit-up dance floor in a leopard-skin cocktail dress, luscious boobs filling my décolleté top like a double scoop of butter pecan, my hair an explosion of black curls, my laser-shooting cat eyes burning holes into anybody I looked at, except the tall dark pirate who would storm up on his motorcycle and kidnap me. We’d thunder up an Evel Knievel-style ramp and fly into the air, arcing right into the open door of a luxury spaceship that would shoot out past the moon, past Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, past the Milky Way Galaxy, way out into the black purple light of deep space where he would kiss me on my glossed lips.

  On nights like these, with the crickets all wistful and a restless moon, the things I wanted formed an ache in my gut. I turned away from the window and gazed out into the street. Sometimes, when I felt like this, I’d lie down on the asphalt and listen for the vibration of approaching cars. My heart would pound as the sound got thicker, then I’d hop up just before the car appeared. I was about to recline on the road, when what did I see but the silhouette of a woman, somebody tall, holding two skinny dogs on a leash, standing across the street next to our neighbor’s vine-choked mailbox, one of her canines doing its business in the ditch. Now the only person in town with dogs that scrawny was Joetta Shick. The only person in town who wore exotic garments that billowed in the wind just so was Joetta Shick. But now she was hightailing it, striding toward the wood patch where the Bickle triplets had built their underground fort, dark fabric fluttering behind her like a comet tail.

  Mama was spazzing out over the dining-room table she was making for this woman she called the Muzak heiress. My mother hated rich people, but only rich people bought her stuff, and therein festered her misery. The Muzak heiress wanted a birch dining table with fur-lined legs, and all morning Mama’d been stomping around the house with scraps of white polar-bear fur, shrieking, “I’m not a fucking upholsterer,” so Daddy took me out to lunch to escape her hissy fit. I was finishing up my french fries at Frances Ann’s Front Porch, a strip-mall joint posing as an antebellum house, when guess who walks up with her bald dogs: Miss Joetta Shick, wearing this silky black number with a big veiled hat, the noose end of a rhinestone leash chafing each of her bony wrists, her hellhounds looking antsy in the sunlight.

  “Hello, Kate,” she said. Then she moaned, “James,” looked at the ground, squatted to mess with one of her dog’s paws. “Good to see you again.”

  Where, I wanted to know, had she seen him? And since when did she call him James?

  The dogs, pale and greasy, smelled like Panama Jack sunscreen. With the exception of the rock-star tufts of hair cascading over their gargoyle faces, they were completely bald, scrawny as hell, veins webbing their bellies, scabs and bruises and odd spots speckling them from head to toe.

  “How do you pet them?” I asked, wanting to but not wanting to.

  “Try petting their mantels.” My dance teacher lit a Virginia Slim.

  “Their hair?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did their fur fall out or were they born like this?” I asked, and Daddy kicked me under the table. It seemed like he was trying to protect her feelings.

  “These dogs were bred, Kate,” he said. “Do you show them?” he asked Miss Joetta.

  “Oh no. They’re my companions.”

  I squatted down by the dogs and got a whiff of their roadkill breath. Patting the frizz on the little one’s head, I remembered all the mean things Daddy said about so-called purebred canines whenever a dog show came on TV, wondering why he chose not to express those opinions now. The dog whined and sniffed my hand, glanced toward the road, and whined again.

  “What’re their names?” Daddy asked.

  “William and Wilson,” said Miss Joetta.

  Daddy laughed. Miss Joetta frowned. Daddy tried to look serious, but a constipated smile quivered his lips. A truck honked, and both dogs jumped like they were wired together.

  “Doppelgängers,” sa
id Miss Joetta. She took the leashes in her left hand and swept an arc in the air with her right. “Are you interested in litra-toor, Mr. Cantey?”

  “Literature is a nightmare I’m trying to wake up from,” said Daddy. I gave him a look. His nose twitched like it did when he was about to say something smart-ass. I couldn’t tell whether he was full of shit or not. When he launched into one of his lectures—this one about the farcical elements in the William Wilson tale, lighting a cigarette in the middle of the whole thing and getting totally full of himself—he looked so handsome it made my stomach hurt. Miss Joetta leaned against a fake antebellum column entwined with plastic ivy and sighed.

  “I love litra-toor,” she said. “Poe, in particular. In fact, I don’t know if Kate told you, but my autumn recital is based upon the oeuvre of the unfortunate poet, a mélange, if you will, of his most famous works.”

  “Oh,” said Daddy, “that’s what the bird head’s for. ‘The Raven.’”

  “Duh,” I said, but nobody paid me any mind.

  “So my little daughter’s playing the role of ghastly hopping hell hen,” said Daddy. “How did this escape my attention?”

  “Will you come see it?” asked Miss Joetta. She collapsed against the column, her black hat tilted back, two long curls jumping loose from her hairdo and bouncing around her face. She smiled what people call a radiant smile, flashing long teeth, her cheeks on fire, her shimmery pink lips disappearing. Her eyes throbbed at my father, and I wondered if it was true that toy dogs’ eyes sometimes popped right out of their skulls when they freaked.

  “I wouldn’t miss Kate’s performance,” said Daddy, “for the world.” He flashed his killer Jack Nicholson grin then turned to wave down our waitress. Miss Joetta went pale, said, Good to see you, and billowed off. After lunch Daddy was quiet for quite a while—he who loved the sound of his own voice.