Heiresses of Russ 2013

by Tenea D. Johnson

  You were past answering by then. I could feel you shivering in long wracking waves.

  All the stories you’d told me were true. Wonders and horrors.

  I knew the shape stories took. I was a studious child.

  “She’s my love,” I said.

  By claiming it, did I make it true?

  The Queen of Air heard me and stood still. No noise of boot on grass, no ring of horse-gear.

  Only a moth in the thyme, a bat in the dusk, a gnat caught in the long strands of my hair.

  “Faustine,” she said.

  I still wonder what would have happened if we had named ourselves different names that day.

  “Faustine, maker of bargains. Bargain with me. Of what worth is your love?”

  •

  My first kiss: Dane Ellison, behind the portable, during the sixth grade Hallowe’en dance.

  My second: Dane again, under the willow by the creek behind his subdivision.

  My third kiss: you know my third. I left it in your memory just as it was. I know you have not forgotten, although you will never speak of it.

  Those earlier kisses were to this one as ice cubes in a glass of tap water are to an iceberg, looming above and beneath the sea.

  •

  The Queen of Air, for I still have no other name for her, bargained with me. Even before she finished speaking, I felt the breath shock back into your body, the rigidity leave your spine. You turned against me, coughing and heaving. I found later a spot of blood upon the leg of my jeans.

  Maybe we all get such offers, once or twice or thrice in our little lives. Maybe someone takes every one of us up on the mountain, shows us the breadth of the world, and tells us it could be ours.

  Maybe, in our wisdom, most of us turn it down.

  I took it. The breadth of the world was held in the span of my hands, spitting blood onto my pants.

  I took the bargain. I took the choice from you.

  •

  The kiss: my grass-stained hands cradling your face, knotting in the wealth of your hair. You tasted of blood and rosemary.

  Your lips shut for a moment against mine but your breath still came hard. You pulled away to pant through your mouth.

  I watched your pupils narrow down, and the sinews in your wrist draw tight as your hand closed.

  It closed on nothing. The Queen had turned away. The fur at the edge of her mantle brushed my elbow; I still have the scar, a pale frost burn.

  You gulped air, wiped your mouth on your sleeve. You shook your head dizzily.

  When I saw your eyes meet mine again—proper blue now, tear-wet—I touched your hair and smoothed it down and freed a broken stem from the strands.

  You slapped my hand away.

  “What will I do now?” you said, your voice still scraped raw. “Where else can I go?”

  •

  By the time your father had done selling his sculpture, the one of you as a little girl dancing, I had cleaned up everything. You, your mind, your face, my hands. All except for the spot of blood on my jeans, which no one noticed.

  Some of the richness went: the royal purple wisteria dulled down to plain greenery, the sunset smeared and pale. Some of it stayed: the taste of herbs, and the brightness of your hair.

  •

  I left you the kiss, but you never let me repeat it. You met Jason Krantz not long after that, and you dated him most of the way through high school. I never saw you with another girl.

  Jason Krantz used to corner you in the stairwell and rope your hair around his fist and pull your head close to his, seizing the tip of your ear between his teeth. He used to make you sit on his lap in the coffee shop, and he’d pinch your thigh if you moved too much.

  I asked the Queen if I could do something about Jason Krantz. She reminded me of the terms of my bargain. I asked her about the clover-chains, the owl-feathers, the little protections she had given you once upon a time. She told me they had not been protections.

  You went through a plump phase, and then through a phase where you were thin as a grass-stem, bent under the weight of your sweaters. You and I took to hanging out in one of the restaurants on Spadina where no one asked for ID. You would order Tsingtao while I ate chicken fried rice. If you stumbled on the way out, I would walk you home.

  All of this happened just as you recall, and I am to blame.

  •

  I said you were my love. I made you stay.

  I get to know, each morning, that I’m waking into the same world in which you live. I get to see you, every few months when you’re back in the province. Sometimes I even get a stiff little hug, and my hand touches the paintbrush edge of your hair before you pull away.

  (Not lately. Not since those things I said after your wedding. I wrote to apologize. You didn’t write back.)

  I get to hear, from my own mother, that you and your husband are in town over the holidays. I get to imagine you in your old house, sitting on the window seat. For a few days you and I get to share the same weather. I get to leave messages at your mother’s house, and wait for your call, which does not come.

  For this, I’m promised to a hundred years beneath the hill.

  •

  The winter before our graduation, you held the hand of your stepfather as he lingered in a morphine dream. You told me you’d forgiven him, and I watched your fingers go tight and bloodless on his. When he was gone you stopped wearing the gold cross he’d given you for your First Communion.

  You said you’d go to prom with me. I bought a suit in the boys’ department at Eaton’s. A week before the night, you said you were going to get back together with Jason Krantz instead, and wasn’t it great that you had found a real date. I went home silently and cancelled the order for your corsage.

  You dropped out of Art, and passed History, and aced Chem. On the edges of your notes, you wrote your first name, and a blank line for your last, with hearts and question marks about it. Never Rosa Mundi, nor any other such name. You had stopped telling stories by then.

  Sometimes I’d catch that wide dark look in your eyes. In the cafeteria, while you picked the chocolate chips out of your muffin. Outside the locker room, while you waited for Jason Krantz to pack up his football gear. Or in the Annex, as we walked past the dance studio, where you were no longer enrolled.

  You still wanted to leave. You couldn’t remember how.

  •

  I caught the bouquet at your wedding. It crumbled to dust in my hands, not right then, but later, in the hospitality suite, at the end of the night. The Queen and I agree on this: you are my love, and I will have no other.

  You, however, have always been free to love as you will. I did not have the foresight to arrange it any other way, and for this I am grateful; I was not a cruel child, but I was a child. I could have made things so much worse.

  There is a Faustine in a poem, you see, who I did not know when I chose the name. To love her is to court death.

  You seem happy with your love, truly. Eric Farrar: a real person, a person you chose for yourself. He has given you a son. He likes trading stocks and baking cakes, he dislikes motorcycles and fitness enthusiasts, and he does not remind me of either your stepfather or your father. On your wedding day, Eric Farrar wore a lake-blue pocket square to match your eyes. You took his name.

  I haven’t seen the dark look on you in some years, now that I think of it.

  The Queen comes, now and again, to watch you when you are near me. She breathes over my neck, leaving blisters. She reminds me that if I break my bargain, you must go with her. She tells me all I need to do is ask.

  If I break my bargain, I will not spend a hundred years under the hill, and I will not have an icy Queen stirring the curtains of my bedroom, driving away any lover who might spend the night. I will not have to pant over the tiny scraps I have of you: a hair ribbon, a sport top you left at my house.

  You will not have Eric Farrar. Your son will not have his mother. But you’ll have what you wanted, all those yea
rs ago, in the garden.

  If you read this, you can tell me: do you want it still? Does the Queen’s voice ever call to you, out of my hearing, subtle and cold? Do you ever wake troubled, forgetting your dream, with a frost on your lips?

  Are you opening my letters? Or will this one, like the last, be thrown away still sealed?

  The Queen brought me that one to taunt me, I think; she left it on my bedside table, the envelope cold-parched and wrinkled by her fingertips. Your address was smudged a bit, as if by rain. Through the paper I saw the ghost of my own script, heavy and black.

  This choice should not be all mine to make, but how can I compel you to answer me? Shall I stand beneath your sensible vinyl-framed bedroom window and cry out until you rise from your marriage bed?

  Rosa Mundi, in which world will you bloom? In which world will I finally catch fire?

  •

  Beneath Impossible Circumstances

  Andrea Kneeland

  The sky is tender as a fitted leather glove lined with silk; firm but soft. Safe. The brightness of it, cap-like and rounded across the horizon, makes me feel tethered.

  When the birds drop from the sky, I’m not sure where the fall begins, because I never see them in the cap of blue. The cap of blue today looks spotless, but the streets are lined with feathered carcasses. This is the kind of day that makes me feel more like a janitor than anything else.

  My latex gloves are smeared with blood and yellowish fluid and stuck with feathers. I’ve already loaded five bags of the tiny bodies into my truck. By the time I’m done cleaning the street, I’ll only have enough time to test ten of the corpses. There is no way I can convince myself that ten would be a representative sample. Ten will be statistically insignificant.

  I go home and do it anyway, submit my report a little after eight p.m.

  •

  Analise wants to have a baby. A real baby. I tell her that if we had a baby together, it would be a real baby. It would be a real baby and it would have parts from both of us, and it would be a real person made from both of our genes, and that I want parts of myself in a child just as much as she wants parts of herself in a child. When I tell her these things, she turns on the faucet or runs the vacuum or opens the refrigerator door wide and sticks her head in like she’s looking for something so she can pretend not to hear me and I can pretend not to see how damp and salted her reddening cheeks are, and on days like these, when I tell her things like these, the bed sheets between us stay cool and dry and I remind myself of the virtue of silence and I bite my lip to draw blood so that in the morning, when I move my mouth, the pain will remind me not to say a thing.

  •

  The sun is a white-haired girl, fever sleeping and swaddled in a blue blanket. The sun pretends not to notice that birds are shaking free from her blanket in alarming numbers, broken and useless. As the sungirl sleeps, she becomes hotter and hotter. One day we will die from her sickness. Our death will only be a symptom, not a final result.

  Government work is not glamorous, but it’s stable and pays relatively well. I have a pension, and the pension is guaranteed. The work, it’s not going anywhere, no matter how much further the economy dives. Analise told me that when I say that phrase to her, that the economy is diving, she remembers photos she saw in a history class when she was a little girl, of a man named Jacques Cousteau and another named Émile Gagnan. Men in suits made for breathing beneath impossible circumstances, all rubber and harness and threatening tubes, explorers from a time when the sea was nothing but an expansive blue geometry of cold and mystique. Explorers from before we knew what we know now. She imagines them combing the bottom like man lobsters, like simian bottom-feeders, fingering pockets into the smooth-soft ocean floor, searching for coins.

  The slush of bird skin and gore lining the streets in the morning: that’s my job security. I am only worried about what happens when we discover the cause of the mass avian deaths. The discovery of a cause is the true threat to my job. I tell myself that even if we do find the cause, another species will start dying, and my pension will be safe. Donkeys. Wasps. Rabbits.

  And we are so far away. So far away from anything right now. It’s been three years now, and we don’t know if the problem is a short circuit in the battery of the caudal thoracic air sac or an organic de-evolution of the nidopallium. We can’t replace the birds as quickly as they’re disappearing, either. Birds are one of the most expensive animals to produce; even a dust-brown nothing of a finch costs more than pig or a horse. Especially with the Chinese economy also diving, and them pulling out of the bioelectrical species rehabilitation project.

  My hair is clumped with sweat and sticking to my skin in spite of the low humidity in the air, the atmosphere dry as bleached bones. I slick my bangs back with my fingers, only to realize that I have not yet removed my gloves. I peel the latex off of my hands, a synthetic skin gummied with sweated powder, shed my clothing, step into the shower, and stand beneath the hot water, face up, rubbing the sticky blood from my forehead.

  •

  Analise’s preoccupation with our baby’s source began after she made new friends. A group of Naturalists who had been frequenting her restaurant for the last year or so. At first suspicious, Analise began to hover by their table as they talked, motivated more by boredom than anything else. What began as entertainment gave way to something else that took hold of her like religion on a child. I can’t say that I understand, no matter how many different ways she has tried to explain it to me, and if I do admit to myself that I understand, I am overcome with an overwhelming sadness that pitches me through the night like a dying gull.

  “Because soon,” she says, “nothing in the world will be real.”

  “But I’m real.” I try to hold her in my arms, and she shrugs away. “The birds; they’re real,” I say. “I hold the corpses in my hands every day. Life; all of it is real. It doesn’t matter what the specific components are or how the life is made.” I pause, searching. “Wires don’t unmake reality.” I know this is the wrong thing to say to her.

  Even in the dark, I can see her eyes shining with tears. I can barely remember anymore what she looks like when she’s not crying.

  •

  The kitten is black, with one blue eye and one yellow eye. She says the imperfection of its face is what makes her love it. I ask her what makes her love me and she ignores my voice completely.

  Geraldo, the Naturalist she talks about the most, gave her the cat. I am too worried to ask her how he got it. I am worried that we will be discovered and I will lose my job and we will be arrested. I am worried that she is moving farther and farther away from me in both her mind and her body. The second worry is greater than the first worry, so I don’t mention what being charged with a felony for harboring an unlicensed naturally bred species will do to our family. I know I cannot say my worry out loud because she will contest whether two people constitutes a family, and that argument would be more than I could bear.

  After she brings home the kitten, she allows me to make love to her for the first time in months. I am overcome with gratefulness and need, even as I realize that this moment is tinged with something terrible; the same terrible thing that has overshadowed every moment of our togetherness for longer than I can remember. That thing that moves her to tears at any moment of the day has taken hold even in this moment, and as I run my tongue inside the groove between her legs, I can feel her body trembling, choking back sobs.

  I give up and hold her against me. She pushes her face between my breasts and covers my skin with sticky tears. I know she is thinking about what is beneath my flesh, and cataloging the difference between us.

  •

  I curl up on the couch and cuddle the kitten against my cheek and it purrs loudly. I keep the animal there, a warm radiant of blood-heat and quivering muscle, and I whisper in its ear, to show Analise what a nurturing person I am, to remind her that I want desperately to be a parent. I can see her body tense with jealousy that the kitten doe
s not reserve its affection exclusively for her and I wonder what can happen to a person to change them so absolutely.

  “Analise,” I say, “It would not even be possible.” The kitten climbs onto my shoulder and chews on my hair. “Between us, the way you want a baby, would not be possible, even if the internal differences did not exist. You know that.” The kitten begins making hacking noises and I reach back to remove my hair from its teeth and its tongue. While I am engaged in this calming endeavor, studying the miniature teeth of its mouth carefully, unwinding the threads of thin brown protein, I finally ask what I have been asking with every unspoken word for over a year. “Do you want to have a baby with me or not?”

  Seconds later, Analise is next to me on the couch, sobbing so loudly that the kitten runs, frightened, to hide behind the refrigerator. Analise is clutching at my arms and my legs and my breasts, words pouring out of her that I eventually recognize as repetitions, that I eventually am able to pair with meanings. “I want to raise the baby with you,” she is saying, “not Geraldo. I want to raise the baby with you,” and this is when I realize that it is not a theoretical baby she is speaking of; that she is speaking of a baby that is alive, a pod-like cluster of flesh that is blossoming in her abdomen; that she has gone out and created a new life form the way she wanted it, free of wires or hardware or synthetics or any of the miracles that will keep the planet running until a temperature change too fierce or a bomb too large makes scientific advancements inconsequential.

  I feel my heart convulsing against my chest like a test rabbit in a cage, panicked and sick and wild, and I know that this is the same way Analise feels her insides and emotions, regardless of whether they are tinged with circuitry or not. She and I are exactly the same, except that she only has compassion for kittens and criminals.

  I rise from the couch and coax the kitten out from behind the refrigerator; no small feat with Analise wailing on the sofa as if someone has died. I stand with the kitten clutched to my hip, manage to keep it there even while it squirms in a mixture of confusion and defiance. “We’ve had this kitten for a month and you’ve never even named it,” I say. “You’ll make a terrible mother.”