Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 29

by Edited by Kelly Link

  Stephen appeared at the door, a shadow back-lit by the sun, and called to me.

  “Half the units sold out already,” Nic said. “Location’s everything.” Nic’s a short guy who compensates with gold chains and a shirt always open to the navel. He glanced up at Stephen approaching and then at me with a stare like I was missing something. He dropped his voice. “Tourists aren’t evil. Listen, you could be my tour guide. You know the place like the back of your head. I’d pay well. Hear you lost your job.”

  “Leave her alone.” Stephen could only have caught the last line. He threw me a questioning look and I kissed him. Behind his back I gave Nic the one-finger reply. That evening when I dumped Gregor’s manuscript in my nightstand with the others a page fell out. I had exits on my mind. The cave has lots of exits besides the bar. One comes out in the closet of my college dorm room. Another opens on the kitchen of my stepdad’s house just after Mama died, where I’m always six and it’s always two a.m. All the exits I know of are human-sized. There had to be one I was missing. Somewhere lay a hole just off my brain map, big enough to drive a crane through. The condo unit rose in my thoughts like a monster. My children are all elves, tiny like their mother, until their twelfth birthday, when they each bring a cloud into the house. They let the clouds go and they float near the ceiling, where only I with my height am suffocated by them. In the corner of my eye a shadow rustled. I spent the night searching my bedroom, dragging furniture from walls, down on my knees rubbing my thumb along the wainscoting, sure I’d found a new entrance.

  This is what I did wrong. I waited a week before I went to tell Gregor changes were on the way. He was just closing the case on his typewriter.

  “Gallimaufry,” he mumbled. The sound from the ceiling had grown louder, he’d explained. It was stealing his words and he wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “I’m getting married,” I told him.

  “Nacreous.” It made him look up. “But you’re sixty-two.”

  “No, I’m not, Gregor. You just wrote me that way.”

  He’s never understood marriage, at least the getting part, any more than he understands numerical age. You’re married to someone when you decide you are, he told me once, like turning a page in a book, married for life to the newborn son you hold in your arms for the first time or the friend who always knows what you’re thinking. When he’d said it I’d asked myself if it was like that for me with Stephen. Stephen with his caring and his shadows. My back-lit fiancé, dark in the hollows where my eyes can’t adjust. I suddenly realized how strange it was that someone like Nic knew about the caves but Stephen didn’t. How he was bound to find out one day, probably from someone other than me, how a person—no matter how caring—might resent a thing like that.

  I pulled the saw from my jacket pocket and told Gregor about the condos. It made him moan. “So there goes the neighborhood. You have to leave here with me, Gregor, go to an exit now. You and the women. I’ll find some place in the up where all three of you can live.”

  “I’m not living with the dancing queen.” He was waving his hand in front of his face as if someone had let one rip. His ongoing feud with Leila made me want to hit him. There was no time for it. Evil tourists were on the way. “You know, she’s never read a book in her life?” he went on. “I suggested Emotion for Dummies to start her out.”

  “Leila may be hard on the outside, but she’s soft on the inside.”

  “So’s a cyanide pill.” He clicked the typewriter case shut and I realized it was luggage. He hefted it. “I’ve made my decision. I’m going deeper.”

  I had started to squeeze my head in my hands like I could hold back the headache whirring under my scalp. “Why do you all have to be so fucked up?”

  I realized the whirr wasn’t coming from my head. Gregor’s imagined sound from the ceiling had turned into a roar. The room was shaking; dust cascaded into our hair. The next instant a drill bit, big as daylight, broke through the ceiling at the far end of the room, whirling chunks of limestone in a spatter pattern. A rock hit Gregor in the head and he slumped to the floor. “Get up!” I screamed at him over the roar. “We’ve got to run!” The drill screwed deeper, gouging its way in, and half the room collapsed, Gregor’s bed and desk disappearing under rubble. Even over the noise and the terror of being sucked in it was hypnotic to look at—a steel stele that had reached the floor by now, so that it seemed to be holding up what was left of the ceiling rather than demolishing it, a monument to phallic symbols everywhere. Gregor stumbled to his feet, half-blind with blood in his eyes from the wound on his scalp, then he grabbed his case and I pushed him out the door and tumbled with him down the pelican shaft into the main passage.

  We ran until the roar faded. Instinct said down. Too panicked for exits. He stopped for seconds at a limestone splashcup to wash the blood from his face, and then it was on down, past corridors choked with breccia and beds of coruscating gypsum flowers that would have taken my breath away if I’d had any. My brain map of the caves became a velvet nest without lines, only womb cognition to tell me where I was. As the dip became steeper the phosphorescence turned red. We followed the flowstone down and came to a stop with a screech at the edge of a lake that stretched away on all sides. The end of the trail, the phreatic zone below which every cavity was flooded. Clear water down to forever.

  Gregor clutched his typewriter close. “This is it.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “There are things to discover down there. I’ll be all right.”

  I thought about punching the moron’s lights out. In the silence we could sense the systole hum of the cave breathing. It raised hairs on my arms, and when we looked into the water we saw a creature like the world worm move below the surface, large as the lake itself, gliding from one submerged passage to the next. All my air left my cells. I was a cavity, phreatic, filling fast with liquid from that place between my thighs, the thought of smooth eel flesh infusing every crevice. He felt it too.

  We took our clothes off and screwed there on the lime crust, such a human thing where no human had ever been, the perfect edge of the world, where you fall off and don’t care, and when I came I felt it in my fingertips and in the top of my head. We wiped moonmilk on each other. Later he reached across me and handed me a manuscript from his shirt pocket.

  “Don’t publish this one.”

  I read while he sat on the rimstone and dangled his legs in the water. ‘I cry at their school plays,’ she told him, ‘because I want to stand up and scream at them that they should be happy now while they’re still tiny, before their clouds find them and come home with them.’ He listened to this one. ‘Before they stop being the same race as me. My own children are going to grow so large I won’t be able to hug them, I’ll never see their heads again once they’re lost in those clouds, unless they

  Gregor was gazing at the water, ready to go. “Don’t marry that real estate agent,” he murmured.

  With a hot thump a bank of lights went on. We both yelped. From a side passage a pink and green mine train crammed with tourists trundled into view on hidden rails. As the first cars emerged from the passage people turned and began to snap photos of us. Gregor was screaming. My mind was hot as the bank of lights. If they had built rails this deep then they had them everywhere, but how and when? How had I refused to see them? In the third car creeping into view a group of men with frat-brat good looks—clean and slimy at the same time—and she-asked-for-it laughs had hold of Leila. They were tearing her few bits of clothes off to samba music while she screamed and fought their touch. “Dance for us,” one cooed. Tourists aren’t evil, a voice in my memory was chanting, then the last car appeared and I saw that the women tourists there had tied the knight in white rags to the caboose by her wrists and were dragging her along the rails. Blood ran from her face and legs. Her tortured stubborn eyes looked more like a man’s than ever.

  I had the saw out of my jacket before I knew it. I howled as I ran. A naked berserk woman rushing the
ir train startled the tourists for the second it took me to sever the knight’s ropes. She expressed her thanks with a rebel whoop, then she wrenched the saw from my hand, wielding it like a sword, and caught up with Leila’s car. Frat brats piled out of her way, squealing when they hit the limestone as though they’d never suspected the surfaces beyond the train were real. The knight’s jabs and thrusts looked professional and one of the men who stood up against her collapsed clutching his stomach as the saw slid in. The last I saw of Leila and the knight, they were heading up a tunnel that was off my map, Leila’s shredded backpiece dragging like a tired peacock’s tail.

  The train was still moving. Near the middle sat a group of tourists who had obeyed all signs and kept their elbows in during the fighting. They turned now as one and lifted their arms toward me. They had too many fingers. As they pointed at me the fingers grew, flesh bungee cords writhing through the air, bone-white nails that extended the length of the train before I could move and caught me, scratched me, tasted me, drawing intricate madman lines of blood on my arms while I twisted. I felt bone-white pain that turned gray. A gray cloud I couldn’t scream through. I must have tasted wrong because they retracted from me and swooped toward Gregor. “Go!” I screamed as soon as my throat was free, and he grabbed the typewriter and slipped beneath the water just as the fingers reached the edge and plunged in after him.

  I stayed conscious long enough to see them come back up empty. When I woke up the tourists and their train were gone. The rails were cold to the touch. I haven’t been back since. Weddings are hard, you end up with no time. What’s harder though is not knowing how the story of my life will go on now or whether he’s still writing it down there.

  Noise

  David Galef

  When everyone has gone to sleep, I hear

  A small, persistent tapping at the door,

  But no one’s there. I check outside. It’s clear.

  It stops and I decide it was a deer.

  But what’s this scratching from the floor,

  When everyone has gone to sleep? I hear

  The scuttling of mice, just what I fear

  in this old house, emerging from the core,

  But no one’s there. I check. Outside it’s clear

  And moonlit, chill for such a time of year.

  But from the shed come creaks I can’t ignore

  When everyone has gone to sleep. I hear

  The clock-tick sound betray that time is near

  An end, or maybe something else in store.

  But no one’s there. I check. Outside it’s clear;

  Inside, the humming always in my ear

  Builds sure and slowly to a subtle roar

  When everyone has gone. Asleep, I’m here,

  But no one’s there to check outside, it’s clear.

  Eggs

  Claire Hero

  Sometimes I feel it, feel that sudden release, as though whatever string has tethered me to the world has been severed. Like yesterday. We are at the supermarket, in Kingston, Good Friday, selecting a salad dressing, and we run into Sarah, a colleague of John’s. Sarah is disheveled and smiling and graying, I notice, but happy, and proud to introduce us to her daughters. I had not noticed them at first, I seem to never notice children, but Sarah makes a little gesture—an open hand, palm up—and there they are, the three daughters: the eldest, in her teens, so casually beautiful, aware that the world is waiting for her to grow up; the baby in the cart seat, round-cheeked and quiet; and the middle daughter, dark and gap-toothed and thus awkward beside her beautiful sister, her lovely mother, and yet watching, and in that watching, becoming. John makes excuses for why we won’t be attending their Easter egg hunt on Sunday, and I feel awkward, tucked up against a display stand, the middle daughter shy and watching. When we walk out to the car, carrying our thin bags of food, I think of them tucking the groceries in the trunk of a car, a clean car, I imagine, a faint scent of milk. We are traveling home. There is a flare-up by the eldest daughter, or a sudden burst of jealousy from the middle one—Beatrice, I recall—and Sarah smoothing it over, a weariness in her voice, and I am looking out the window of the car, seeing cars in parking lots, imagining the families inside the shops, and when I know I will never have that, the burden of daughters, my shy dark child, I feel the world slip from my side. “Such lovely daughters, Sarah,” John says. “The apples didn’t fall far from the tree.” I am something inflated, empty, floating above the world. There is a mention of rain. “They’ll just have to be tough,” Sarah says, laughing, “if they want those eggs.” She looks at her eldest daughter, who is smiling, I see her. I see her now, her Easter dress wet, finding the egg that shines like a jewel in the wet grass, and the middle daughter, my Beatrice, shivering under a tree, her dress filmy as tissue and clinging to her thighs, the tree above her on the brink of leafing. In the basket at her feet are two eggs, one slightly cracked, the exposed egg flesh flecked with dirt. She can see the adults inside in the house, gathered in the kitchen. They hold mimosas and small plates filled with small foods, gesture with bruschetta at the children in the yard, the lowering clouds, the forsythia rising on the edge of the lawn. She is suddenly, inexplicably humiliated. Her mother taps on the window and points toward a little boy squatting in the muddy flowerbed and eating his hard-won egg, shell and all. She must rescue him, must remove the bits of shell from his tongue and smuggle her unbroken egg into his basket. He is a strange child, too quiet, head like a fruit, a child of one of her mother’s colleagues. He never seems to grow. “You’ll be missed,” Sarah says, and touches John’s arm, lightly, just above the wrist. At the edge of the lawn, beside the stone wall that separates the yard from the woods beyond, Beatrice’s sister, the beautiful one, is crouching, and, still crouching, small, she turns on her heel and holds up another egg. The younger girls run to her, laughing, the rain turning their hair into thin, dark ribbons, to touch her dress, her wrist, to touch the egg red as an ember. With their small hands they cup it, they hide it from sight. We watch as slowly her sister stands, so much taller than the clutch of girls, her limbs stretching and stretching. To Beatrice she seems impossibly tall now, standing beside the wall, the trees blushing green behind her, and their mother, Sarah, so far away, a blue shadow in a kitchen window, handing around a tray of tiny quiches. And Beatrice, she of the eyes and the gap and the crown of brown hair, feels herself suddenly set loose between them, feels herself rising above them. Suddenly we are rising through the gaps in the unleafed branches, my Beatrice and I, we are rising over the lawns and the hands, over the babies and homes, watching as below us the small boy breaks open our last egg and fingers its hard center, its hard yolk haloed in green.

  Disaster Movies

  Christopher Stabback

  It’s the lie of it that gets me. The lie of the moon that hangs so fat and yellow over the horizon, watching me walk home from dance class, wearing its own shadow as a hood. Whatever it looks like, it isn’t getting closer at all. It won’t crush us. It won’t swing lower and lower in orbit, decapitating buildings in order of height until it eventually clips you on the back of the head when you aren’t looking. It won’t suck up every unnecessary little piece of crap in its gravitational wake, or submerge half the earth at a time with immense tidal movements. Despite all the promise I can see in that low hanging golden orb, it isn’t really getting any closer at all. The oceans won’t reveal their treasures, we won’t have to live on barges or rafts, scampering out onto the drained seabed to find food at low tide. We won’t have to grow gills or die in our billions, either, so I know it is wrong for me to be disappointed. Only, I told a guy I would let him fuck me tomorrow, and I really don’t want to do it.

  I know I am a bad person to think this way, but I wouldn’t be thinking it if I hadn’t seen you, so why you gotta play me this way, moon?

  A is A: have you read my

  book yet?

  Jupiter: no

  sorry :P

  I don’t have a kindle,

>   remember

  A is A: I’m really

  excited about

  sunday

  Jupiter: yeah

  A is A: You’re mom

  is still going to be

  gone?

  Jupiter: yeah

  It’s good that I get

  the place to myself

  and all,

  but I don’t

  understand why she

  keeps going to see

  Bert after all the crap

  he did to us when I

  was a kid

  A is A: Most women

  i’ve met don’t think

  of that.

  They have been

  beaten down to an

  irrational pulp

  they end up as

  another meatbot,

  like 99% of the

  population. That’s

  why i’ve been

  looking for someone

  like you.

  You haven’t let it

  happen to you yet.

  You aren’t just

  another pod person

  Jupiter: Thanks . . .

  A is A: It’s getting

  harder with Liz, too.

  She used to be

  different than that

  but sometimes it

  seems like she’s

  becoming one of