How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

by Connie May Fowler

  She closed the door and spied in the shadows Olga Villada swirling, conjuring a dust devil composed of the debris of abandoned dreams. Surely after you have lost everything, even your life, in the most violent fashion possible, and you are spending eternity at the scene of the crime, what else is there to conjure other than dashed dreams?

  “It’s all over,” Clarissa said, unshaken by the visage of the ghost. She had moved on. Her husband’s disregard for her no longer bothered her. Anger? Sadness? Hopefulness? Nothing applied. She had transcended banal emotions. Truth was a great clarifier. As she watched the ghost spin with the manic religiosity of a dervish, a calm and steady Clarissa decided her husband was an unreconstructed Afrikaner who carried with him the malignant stain of his people’s sins. She could not allow him to remain in her presence or even in the house. Olga Villada and her family deserved better. Hell, Clarissa deserved better. Yes, she decided, standing in the shadow of a whirling ghost, she had married an amoral and dangerous man. He would not leave willingly. He had, after all, a perfect life: no bills or responsibilities, a beautiful home, someone who cooked and cleaned for him, and a bevy of naked women with whom he shared, she was certain, a lot more than witty banter. She had no choice. She would kill the son of a bitch using the only gun in the house: the rifle that he claimed had taken the lives of thousands of Zulus at Blood River.

  She walked through that labyrinth of a house in the pressing moments before dawn with a purpose and energy previously unknown to her. Olga Villada, fascinated by this newly confident Clarissa, slowed her spin and, skirts swishing, sadness intact, followed her.

  Clarissa marched into the library, grabbed her machete off her bookshelf, walked into the chandelier room, stood before her husband’s alleged ancestral rifle in its pink ivory wood shadow box, and swung. She hit it dead center, causing the glass to break in radiant spokes. She continued to strike strategically, turning her head and closing her eyes with each blow. A small shard hit her cheek. A rivulet of blood flowed darkly against her pale skin. She did not care. She was not in a hurry; she was not seized with panic. She was, she believed, in charge.

  Olga Villada stood under the chandelier’s dusty glow, wondering if she should intercede, sensing that a placid, insane fury had taken hold of Clarissa. She knew that women whose anger had grown so deep that it presented a smooth surface even as they reached for a rifle were capable of almost anything humans could dream. Perhaps she should fetch Amaziah.

  The fly Clarissa had killed earlier that day lit on the ghost’s shoulder. Olga Villada cast an annoyed glance but, recognizing that he had traveled a very far distance in a single day, allowed him to stay. The fly could not imagine why his killer, who was also the object of his affections, was swinging a machete, breaking glass, and doing so in a fashion so deliberate that she appeared to be in total control of her faculties.

  Despite her careful approach, Clarissa cut the fatty rise of her palm when she removed the last shard. She took off her robe’s cotton belt and wrapped her hand. She removed the rifle and retrieved the box of bullets from the rolltop desk. She wasn’t sure if she would remember how to load the thing—it had been three years—much less shoot it; but clarity serves memory, and she slipped a bullet into the chamber, snapped the breechblock closed, and thought life must have been good if you were Annie Oakley.

  She didn’t know what type of rifle this was, other than it being a single-shot contraption. She didn’t know its vintage or its provenance, but from the research she’d done regarding the 1838 massacre of Zulus at Blood River—the battle her husband was so proud of—he was obviously a lying sack of shit. The Boers had been armed with muskets, not single-shot rifles. They’d had to pour gunpowder down the barrels and, using rods, ram the weapons full of lead balls. The Zulus, armed with spears, never had a chance. And then the fuckers had the nerve to claim the victory was God’s. I’ll show the bastard victory, she thought; I’ll show him what it means to lie. She hefted the rifle. One shot would have to do.

  As she threaded her way through the broken glass—she cut her left foot but not her right—and then retraced her steps through the brightly lit house, the rat family in the attic scurried to the dormer to see what tantalizing possibilities dawn would bring. The armadillo, sensing daylight and danger, retreated to his den under the house. The love herons, just beginning to feel dawn’s tug on the tender undersides of their wingtips, stretched their long necks skyward. Throughout the house and grounds, diurnal spiders were waking (an entire day of weaving and killing awaited them), while their nocturnal cousins were withdrawing into crevices alive with such sincere bursts of activity that they resembled a bug-life version of a bustling city. As the crescent moon rose in the east, tied to Venus’s blatant diamond shine—and even as dolphins, manta rays, flying fish, and sharks anticipated the sun’s ascent from African shores—Hope, Florida, teemed with creatures of disparate minds: those that sensed—even in slumber—that a new day was imminent and those that dealt with the reality of the solstice’s short feeding night and thus began their journeys back into nooks and crannies far beyond the sun’s deep reach.

  Larry Dibble, wide awake in the barn, lay prostrate amid dirt and roach droppings. Finally, after nearly two centuries of fighting the truth, he began putting together bits and pieces of his hazy past, crying like a little bitch because he could not face what he had done.

  Amid the change from dark to light, energy from the heat-driven storms still lurked.

  Clarissa allowed herself, as she advanced through the house, to consider the possibility that she was temporarily insane. Her contemplative moment was cut short by a resounding Nonsense! When the judge asked her to plead, she would say, “Guilty by reason of pitch-perfect sanity.”

  The fly zoomed in spiraling circles, tracking her progress. Olga Villada whirled from room to room, in search of her husband. She found Heart where she had left him an hour earlier: asleep in the upstairs bedroom, one corner of the wedding ring quilt bunched in his tiny fist.

  Clarissa held the rifle perpendicular to her body, the butt end tucked under her arm. Her hand bled through her robe’s cloth belt. She didn’t notice. Upon arriving at the closed bedroom door, she opened it with her free, uninjured hand, walked over to her snoring husband, put the cold nose of the rifle to his neck, and said calmly, “Wake up, Iggy. We’re going to talk.”

  He opened a weary eye and then squinted at her as though she were an apparition composed of sandpaper.

  She jabbed the rifle into his jugular. He made a gurgling noise, and his big baby blues widened. “And I mean now.”

  “Clarissa. Skort.”

  “Don’t tell me to be careful, you son of a bitch. In fact, don’t even move until I tell you to.” She raised the rifle, looked down its scope, kept him in her sight, took three steps back, and eased onto the big black trunk filled with old stuff—photos, newspaper clippings, her first fan letter, poems scrawled in the desperate light of a dying day and never to be seen or read by anyone.

  “What the fowking hell do you think you’re doing? That’s a family heirloom!”

  “Oh, stuff it. This rifle never saw action at Blood River. The Boers used muzzle-loading rifles in 1838. This baby here”—Clarissa patted the barrel with her bleeding hand—“is a single-shot, breech-loading motherfucker that didn’t even exist for another, I don’t know, let’s say quarter century. You’re such a liar.”

  “It did belong to my family. A distant uncle.” Iggy pulled the sheet up to his chin. As if that were going to protect him.

  “Great. Then why all the crap about Blood River?”

  He shrugged. Getting caught in a lie didn’t appear to faze him.

  “You know what I think?”

  He looked at her; his thick lips—abundant amid his beard—had begun to fold in on themselves, forming a long, thin, pink line. Maybe he wasn’t breathing well.

  “All your talk about renouncing your family and rejecting their colonial, racist ways is bullshit. You’re
just like them.”

  “Skort! I am not just like them, Clarissa.”

  “Oh, yeah? Liar. You trumped up a story about this fucking rifle and paid God knows how much money to display it. And you used pink ivory wood, no less. Talk about rubbing salt into an ancient wound! You’re proud your family took part in a massacre. Or did you make that up, too?”

  “My great-great—”

  “Shut up. You don’t get to talk yet. You think you’re better than me. You walk around this house as if you own it. Well, you don’t. I do. You don’t own squat.”

  “Careful, Clarissa.”

  “Or what? I’m the one with the weapon.”

  “You don’t even know how to use it.”

  “Are you really willing to risk that?”

  “You are so stupid, Clarissa.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s stupid. Your paintings are stupid. Your sculptures are stupid. Your meaningless, gibberish-filled films are stupid. Your photographs are stupid. Your bimbo models are stupid. The way you treat me is worse than stupid.”

  He smoothed the sheet as if he were settling in for a nice cup of tea. “I treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”

  “What are you talking about?” Clarissa spit the words through gritted teeth. Her bleeding hand hurt. The rifle was heavy.

  “You are a silly little fool, Clarissa. You write your silly books and talk to your silly friends and live your silly little life while I make art.”

  “And you fuck your models.”

  “So? They’re prettier than you.”

  Clarissa stood, aimed the rifle, tried to keep her soul intact—the fly landed on the muzzle; in his fly heart, he hated Igor Pretoriun—and slipped her finger into the curved sweetness of the trigger. The belt-bandage slipped off her hand. It had started to rain again; she heard it coming down on the tin roof: ping! ping! ping! Iggy laughed. He laughed so hard that tears ran down his cheeks and moistened his beard. He was mocking her. Again. Her finger flexed twice, and then she began to squeeze. She wanted Igor Pretoriun dead, and if her spousal death scenarios weren’t enough, perhaps a 150-year-old bullet to his nether regions would do the trick. She had to decide: Head or dick? Head or dick? Fuck! She couldn’t make up her mind, so she aimed the rifle at his heart.

  “You don’t know anything, Clarissa. You don’t know how much you bore me. How your little dinners with your little salads and your little garnishes and your little desserts make me want to puke. How your books about stupid women who struggle and overcome and who are full of female wonder make me embarrassed for you.” He smiled—a big, grand, generous smile. “You, my dear, are my private joke.”

  The fly landed on Clarissa’s shoulder. He felt the monumental breaking of her heart. He wished he were a cougar, not a fly, so that he could kill the man himself.

  Clarissa, however, went through yet another transformation. With her heart shattered, it was easy for her to decide that she would not let him hurt her one more time. She refreshed her aim: his big, fat face. “Iggy, you’re a sick, sick man, and I’m sorry I ever married you.” Clarissa tilted the rifle to a point just above his head and fired. The kick knocked her back.

  “You fowking bitch! Jou teef!” he yelled, leaping from the bed.

  He lunged for her and wrapped his big hands around her throat. He slammed her against the wall. She felt her skull crack; her larynx, veins, and arteries began to constrict and fail.

  The ghost fly couldn’t take it anymore. He had to do something. So he buzzed through the hot and humid air of the bedroom, took dead aim, and landed on Iggy’s big eye.

  “Shit,” Iggy said, shaking his head. The ghost fly, with those wonderful sticky ghost feet, held on. Iggy let go of Clarissa, stumbled backward, and cried, “Ahhhhhh,” as he scratched at his eye.

  Clarissa ran into the closet, locked it from the inside. Iggy roared. The ghost fly lost his grip, and Clarissa honestly wondered what she had ever seen in her lousy excuse of a husband. She threw on the clothes she’d worn that night as he pounded on the door. She needed her keys. She needed shoes. She needed to get into Yellow Bird and flee. She had barely pulled the chemise over her head when the door gave, splintering along a fault line in the wood.

  Iggy pinned her to the floor and slapped her, his big ham-bone hand crashing into her cheek and top lip, which split open. “How dare you try to shoot me, you bitch!”

  Clarissa had clearly shot over his head. He was ridiculous. Maybe he had been waiting for years for an excuse to murder her. “I didn’t shoot you, you asshole!”

  He lifted his hand again. Clarissa did not think she could take the blow. She reached wildly, found her blue spike pump under her coral chemise. Unbeknownst to Clarissa, her attempts to pull it out of the cobblestone had sharpened its steel edge. She gripped that shoe as if it were a cleaver and—with a strength that transcended a need to scream, Fwuk u u liho!—dug the spike heel into Iggy’s soft, doughy, alabaster cheek. He screamed, and she scrambled from beneath him. The spike, she thought as she watched him tug, must have hit bone. She was only half-sorry that she hadn’t gouged out his eye. He screamed louder as he extracted the heel from his face.

  Clarissa ran. She tumbled barefoot into the yard, without her keys. In her panic, she could not remember where she’d left them. And she could not go back into the house. Surely he would kill her.

  Cold rain pelted her skin, the armadillo watched her from behind a blind of daylilies, thunder rolled long and hard like a breaking wave. The ghost fly lit on the back porch screen, trying to determine if his spectral wings would carry him through the storm. Olga Villada, not knowing the whereabouts of the rifle-toting Clarissa (perhaps I influenced her a bit too much, she fretted) or her husband, scooped Heart out of bed. The little boy began to cry.

  “Shh, baby, shh. We’re going to go find your father.”

  Clarissa ran toward the rose garden; if nothing else, she would escape into Jake’s Hell. She heard a huge commotion coming from the house. She looked over her shoulder and saw her vase—her beautiful, beautiful cut crystal vase full of roses—somersault through the air and shatter on the porch floor. Iggy, blood rushing down his face, slammed open the screen door, screaming, “You fowking bitch!” He held up her checkbook from her secret account and the keys to Yellow Bird. “You’re the fowking liar, you fowking cunt!” He heaved the checkbook and keys through the rain. Clarissa watched them arc and tumble through the air and then land amid the thick chaos of the magnolia’s fallen leaves.

  Iggy ran after her. He was tall, and those long legs made quick work of the distance between them. She felt as if she were in that childhood nightmare, the one where she kept trying to run but her legs kept disintegrating into dust while the giant snake slithered closer and closer. She had barely made it to the center of the garden when he tackled her. She fell facedown in the dirt. He grabbed her hair and yanked. She thought, Oh, my God, he’s pulling my hair out.

  The ghost fly, his legs twitching, decided he had no choice. Invisible, he pushed through the screen and flew on wobbly wings—as if he were an unskilled aviator rather than the aerial acrobat of just hours ago—through the rain, toward his beloved, who he was sure was about to die.

  Olga Villada, her son in her arms, having scoured the house for her husband, thought, He’s not out there hacking away at the tree again, is he? Not at this hour, in this storm. She rushed onto the back porch, her son still crying, broken glass crunching beneath her boots. “Oh dear, no,” she said as she saw Iggy snatch Clarissa by the hair and wrench her neck into a horribly unnatural angle.

  “Olga! Hurry! Hurry!” Amaziah ran across the yard from the direction of the sentinel oak, an ax in his hand.

  “Have you been hacking the tree again?” Olga Villada yelled. “In this weather!”

  “Honey,” he said, reaching her side, his eyes alight, “this might be it! Come on, let’s go!”

  Olga Villada, annoyed with her husband (how could he not break the family rule just this once?), jabb
ed her head in the direction of the raging couple. Clarissa screamed, “Please stop!”

  “We have to do something! We can’t let him kill her.” Olga Villada brushed away her son’s tears. “Shh, baby, shh.”

  “We’re ghosts, honey. They’re humans. And there’s lightning in that storm cloud.” Amaziah pointed skyward with the ax.

  “Darling, you’ve been saying that same thing for nearly two hundred years.” Olga Villada shifted the weight of the boy on her hip.

  “I’m telling you, woman, this is it. I’ve got a feeling. Let’s go!” He set the ax by the door, took Heart into his arms, grabbed her hand, and said, “Now!”

  “And what about them?” Olga Villada said, gesturing toward the living.

  “We leave them be.” Amaziah’s eyes were fierce.

  Olga Villada thought about the unbearable burden of living forever in a state of twilight. She also thought about the terror of being beaten alive when you’ve done no harm. She squeezed his hand. Her beautiful lips began to tremble.

  “We’ve got to try, honey.”

  Olga Villada looked into her husband’s tortured but hopeful eyes and knew she had to let him do it his way; he had never stopped believing that a new world awaited them, one where even their son would be free. “Okay, my love. Let’s do it.”

  Amaziah guided his family through the storm, past the struggling couple and the inflamed beauty of the rose garden, toward their crucible.

  The first rays of dawn seared the approaching thunderhead with quicksilver light, but as the storm moved over the tiny village of Hope, the towering clouds obliterated the first moments of the new day.

  According to old Mrs. Hickok’s thermometer, just before the storm’s arrival the temperature was ninety-eight degrees. When the hail began, the thermometer’s mercury plummeted fifteen points. The wind howled, stirring up a tempest, and the hail forced both husband and wife to cover their heads, effectively pinning them to the earth.