“Sarah,” she said and waved a hand in farewell, her slight form suddenly swallowed up. It took me two days to work up the courage to try to find her, try to figure out who she was, where she belonged.
She owned a florist’s shop over on Midland Avenue, a small building of crumbling brick that I’d passed often enough to know the sign. I spent another three days driving past it, telling myself each time that I would stop, would go inside and talk with her, but I would speed by, afraid she would see me and think I was some creep.
Fucking do it, Danny. Just stop the goddamn car and walk inside. Tell her that you want to know her, tell her that you can’t stop thinking about the things she said, tell her that you want to take her to dinner, to coffee, anything. Thoughts bumping against themselves, and my blood throbbing at my temples when I finally worked up the courage to go into the shop. Hoping she could be the thing to help me forget the house, the water, the beasts at the end of that long road.
“Looks like you aren’t running away after all,” she said, a small stone glinting in the curve of her nose. I hadn’t noticed it before.
And I swallowed and told her the thing I’d been practicing for the past week. “Maybe it isn’t running away. Maybe it’s just taken me all this time to figure out what I was running to.”
“You’re fucking kidding me with that line, right?” she said and narrowed her eyes, but there was a smile curling at the edges of her lips, and I dipped my head, tried not to grin.
She taught me the names of flowers, my tongue tripping over the syllables, and at night when we lay in bed together I told her the stories locked in my head, the ones I knew by heart but was afraid to write down.
“You should do something with these, Danny,” she said and pressed a hand against my chest.
“Maybe one day,” I said, only I knew that I would never put them to paper. If I did, the world would come undone by its strings, and I’d be fifteen and on the long road again with Pop standing over me, his body dripping into the dirt.
“I’m serious. You’re too talented to be stuck writing ad copy for some shitty, small time roofer.”
“Maybe one day,” I repeated, but then her mouth was on mine, and her lips tasted of honeysuckle and wine, and for a long while, I lost myself in the movements of her body.
When the nightmares took me, she didn’t speak, didn’t move until I came back to the world.
She only asked me about them once. “What are they? You talk about them in your sleep.”
“It’s nothing,” I told her, and she pursed her lips, nodded. She had her secrets, too. A mother she never mentioned. An expired bottle of anti-hallucinogens tucked deep inside her bedside table drawer. A long vertical scar on her right wrist.
She filled my bedroom with flowers, and underneath the nightmare smells of salt and decay, the Carolina jasmine breathed its perfume into the night air, and slowly, slowly, the nightmares began to recede. The beasts becoming nothing more than shadowy figures, incorporeal wisps compared to Sarah’s sleeping form, her breath warm against my chest. My childhood shrinking against what we called love.
Six months in, I wrapped a key to my place in an old watch box, lit some candles, opened a bottle of wine. She opened the box slowly, her fingers tracing the key’s jagged outlines, her face expressionless.
“I’m sorry. It’s too fast. Is it too fast? Just so you can get in if I’m not here, you know? You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.”
“Would you shut up for a second?” She lifted the key from the box, a momentary flashing of silver, and closed her hand around it.
“If you suddenly morph into some asshole, I’m cleaning this place out and selling all your shit on Ebay,” she said, and I brought her hand to my mouth, pressed my lips to her fingers.
“Never.”
She bought a delicate silver chain and wore the key around her neck; the metal nestled in the hollow of her throat.
“You shouldn’t wear it there. Some weirdo could see it and follow you back here,” I told her.
“You would protect me.”
“Great. Have you seen me, Sarah? They’d probably rape me first.”
“I like wearing it. The heaviness of it. It reminds me of you. Lets me know it’s real.”
It took another six months to save for a ring—a fleck of diamond in a thin gold band.
“It’s a beautiful ring. She’s a damn lucky gal,” the saleswoman said and smiled, winking an eye smeared with one too many layers of kohl black eyeliner.
I told her we were going hiking. “Supposed to be the best weekend for fall color,” I said against her protestations. There was a small mountain to climb, and when we crested the top, our breath coming quick and shallow, I gave her the ring.
“It doesn’t fit,” she said against her laughter.
“We can fix it,” I said, and she pulled me deep into the forest, away from the trail. The smell of pine lingered in her hair for days afterward.
But then winter came and the nights grew long, cold, and she began to vanish inside of herself. It was like watching her disappear, like watching her become a ghost.
In January she stopped sleeping. She would lie in the dark with me, match her breathing to mine until I fell asleep. But when I would wake in the night, covered in the hard sweat of dreams, she would be gone, the place where her body should be cold.
I could hear her moving about on the roof above me, whispering to the stars, telling the faceless gods her secrets as she chain smoked, the cigarettes burning down to the tips of her fingers.
“It’s nothing. I’ll put some ointment on it,” she said when I saw the burns. But each night she would leave me, find her way onto the roof, her voice floating down to me, words cut from nightmares.
“They found me once, when I was a girl,” she told me one night in late January. There was snow, a light dusting of white over hard ground. “They came crawling out of the walls, made nests in my hair.”
“What found you?”
“Can’t you see them, Danny?” she asked, and her voice reminded me of Pop’s, of the deep gurgling of the beasts, and I had the sudden desire to wrap my hands around her throat, to make her choke on the words she offered up like holy baubles.
“There’s nothing there,” I said, but she shook her head, turned from me, and moaned.
“They come out of the walls. Mother always said they come out of the walls. They want my skin, Danny. They want my skin.”
I took her to the doctor, watched her as she took the pills he prescribed. But night after night, I could hear her moving above me.
“They won’t leave,” she whispered, and I held her tight, her bones like knives threatening to cut through her tissue paper skin.
When she split open the old scar, peeled back her flesh to let the things step inside of her, I found her too late, her blood blooming around her like the flowers she loved.
And I buried her, screamed what I had known was love against the frozen earth. Old Danny Boy and his fucking pipes are calling.
* * *
Sarah has been dead for two weeks, and I am on the long road. It’s certain what I will find waiting for me when I reach the end of it, and I listen for the beasts to begin their singing. Seems like I was always headed back here.
The old itch starts up in my belly, and from under the water, the beasts move, the smell of salt and decay thick in the air. I do not think of Sarah, only of the itch that needs scratching.
Pop is waiting for me in the house at the end of the long road. And when I get there, I’ll take the glass of water he gives me. I have been walking for a long while, and I am so thirsty.
The Lightning Bird
Gable began turning into a bird at night two days after her mother died.
“Gable is a boy’s name,” one of the grandmothers said and turned her teacup in gnarled hands. A dark wart hung from her left eye, and Gable thought of snatching it between her fingers and dropping it into the tea that the group of old wom
en, who had come to visit and help her mourn, requested that she make.
Gable had not wanted to make the tea, the itiye the old woman expected, and when she heard their slow footsteps on the front porch, she had thought of running, her legs tearing through the thick bamboo that grew up to the back door of the small bungalow she had shared with her mother for seventeen years. In the end, she had not and opened the door to their wrinkled faces that twisted into concern and sorrow when they saw her.
“Uma named me,” Gable told them, and they clicked their tongues and shifted large bottoms against too small chairs.
It wasn’t entirely true. Gable was her nickname. After her mother’s favorite film star. Over and over they had watched the movie. Scarlett with her tiny waist and voluminous skirts, and Rhett with a smile that Uma said the devil had sneaked inside of. A handsome smile. In this tiny Florida town far from their home of South Africa, it made Gable proud that she carried his name.
When she was born, Uma had gifted her a traditional Xhosa name. Lindelwa. The awaited. After the Inkaba, after the burning of the placenta and the umbilical cord, her mother had whispered her true name into the smoke, and had only called her Gable. She did not know how to be anyone else.
“It is a disgrace,” another grandmother said.
“You’re one to talk. Hair like a white woman,” wart face said, and the other woman patted her platinum blonde hair that she had cropped short against her skull.
“I am an old woman. I can do as I please.”
Gable turned from them and carried the pot back into the kitchen, but she could still hear their muffled voices worrying for her. Pitying her.
From the sitting room, a single word floated to her, and she brought a fist against her stomach thinking that it would keep her from unraveling.
“Amagqhira.”
They would expect her to take her mother’s place.
When the first dream had come to Gable, she was seven, and her mother held her tight when she awoke screaming into the dark. Uma did not scold Gable when she vomited over her mother’s dress and the bed sheets, but smoothed her hands over Gable’s face, and whispered to her. “It is like drinking the stars. Hard and sharp inside of your belly, and they burn and burn. You cannot keep them. The dreams. They must come out. No matter how good. No matter how bad.”
No one had ever expected Gable to meet a man. No one would marry a girl so skinny that even the smallest dresses had to be taken in, and a face that was so dark, so plain. A face filled with darker eyes that seemed too large.
She would never be a mother.
“Your life will be the drums. The chanting and the music and the dreams. Bones in the dirt, and the people will come to you,” her mother had told her that night, and Gable had swallowed the idea down, tucked it deep inside of herself like a beautiful jewel that only she and Uma had known about.
Now, standing inside of the tiny kitchen that Uma had kept scrubbed clean, Gable could not think of herself sleeping alone in this house. Day in and day out the people tramping dirt into the carpets and asking her for guidance from their ancestors over the stupidest of things.
Without Uma, the life that she had seen for herself since she was a girl rose up and choked her, dragged her down like a chain attached to her neck.
Setting the teapot on the burner, she waited for the water to heat. The grandmothers had not asked for more tea, but she needed to be away from them, away from their probing eyes and thinly disguised questions.
Again, their voices rose in the next room, and one of them laughed, a sly, high-pitched tittering that implied someone had told a dirty story. Probably about one of their husbands and how he couldn’t get his pecker up.
Gable had heard variations of the same stories from the same group of women hundreds of times, and she had always been thankful that she would never be one of their kind. A used up woman with nothing better to talk about than her husband’s shriveling penis.
The water boiled, and she dropped in the leaves and tried to ignore their snickering. She wished they would go away, leave her to the quiet of the house. She wanted nothing more than to sit in Uma’s bedroom, lie down on her bed, the smell of smoke and incense thick in the room, and wait for the dreams that would surely come. The dreams Uma had promised her.
“Lindelwa? Our tea has grown cold.”
Now that her mother was gone, she would never be Gable again. The grandmothers, the people of her little town would call her by her birth name, and eventually, they would call her something else.
Amagqhira. The healer. The diviner.
Gable went back to them and refreshed their tea. They sat with her until the first streaks of night slipped into the room, and then they each stood and patted her shoulders and cheeks as they made their way to the door.
“Goodnight, Umamkhulu,” she said, and then she shut the door, listened as they shuffled away. She counted to two hundred, then five hundred to be certain that they had actually gone, that one of them had not decided to turn back, determined to stay with Gable through the night.
Had that happened, Gable would have run. Straight out the back door and into the dark stalks of bamboo that stretched green fingers into the night sky. Ran until the feathers began to sprout and her bones shifted to make room for something lighter.
Even now she did not know how much time she had left. Each night had been different. The first night she had woken halfway through the transformation and had been so frightened that she had hopped into the closet and stayed there until morning.
She had slept, remembered dozing off, but she had not dreamed, and in the morning, her legs were her own legs, and she had drank glass after glass of water, but she was still thirsty.
She’d spent the day wandering through the house, arranging and re-arranging the picture frames, the small wooden figurines of birds that her mother had loved so much, but her skin would not rest easy on her bones. For hours, she walked down the streets of the country she had come to know as her own. The country that her mother and so many of their people had adopted, but she could not settle into the cracks in the asphalt under her feet and came back to the house with its blue clapboard siding and white shutters and waited for night to fall.
Tonight, she threw open the back door and walked into the bamboo. As she went, she unbuttoned the simple green shift she’d put on that morning, her shoes left beside the door, and walked into the darkness, traced her fingers over the dew that clung to her skin.
And she waited.
* * *
The older girl leaned over Gable, her eyes wide. “That isn’t true. Uma told me,” Gable said, and the girl threw her head back and laughed.
“Do you believe everything your Uma tells you, little girl?”
The older girl’s name was Sisipho, but everyone called her Sisi. On nights when her mother went visiting, Sisi stayed with her. To make sure that Gable didn’t get into any trouble, her mother said, but Gable never got into trouble, and she hated this girl who was only two years older than her fifteen years. Hated her for her soft hair and light amber eyes that crinkled in the corners when she smiled. Hated her for the way every boy, every man, would turn his eyes toward her swaying hips as she walked, her breasts straining against the thin dresses she wore.
“No, of course not. And I’m not a little girl,” Gable told her, but of course she believed her mother. Uma knew things. Her dreams told her. The bones she threw told her. And Uma would not lie to her only daughter.
Uma had told her about the Lightning Bird, Impundulu, but it was not the fearsome creature that Sisi described. Her mother’s eyes had gone soft and dreamy as she talked of a beautiful black and white bird that could be small enough to fit in the palm of your hand or big enough to fill the entire sky.
“Impundulu brings lightning. The rain. Gives us eyes in the night, lets us see the entire world opened up. A familiar. Impundulu has visited me, has served as my eyes. One day, it will visit you.” her mother said and smiled a slow, heavy smile
.
“Watch for him, Gable. You may wake to him in the night, a beautiful man at the end of your bed, and he will take down the bed sheet, and lift up your dress.” Sisi pinched at the tops of her thighs, and Gable slapped her hands away.
Gable left Sisi roaring in the kitchen and made her way outside. More and more frequently, her mother visited on the old grandmothers, held their hands and guided them from this world to the next. So many of them nearing the end of their time, and they called for Uma day in and day out, and Gable tidied the house while Sisi watched, made herself a meal that she did not eat, and then wandered through the bamboo until the moon rose.
Her mother had not talked about the black blood that Gable had found in the toilet. Uma had not had her monthly blood in a long while, and Gable was far from her own cycle. When she asked about it, her mother pressed her lips together and went back to her herbs.
“It’s nothing, Gable,” she said, and Gable had not asked again. She knew better than to press her mother to reveal something that she did not want to.
Gable had her own secrets. The darker visions that came to her, the ones that left her heaving with hot tears slipping into her mouth that she gobbled down. Fathers sweating and heaving over their daughters like beasts while mothers cowered in the next room, their hands clamped to their ears and a curse that would never come true on their lips. A son eating his meager breakfast and thinking of putting a pillow over the face of his mother, holding her there until her clawing hands fell slack, those terrible hands that would never rise to strike him again. She would not reveal them to Uma. Could not.
Uma’s visions were of joyful things. Marriages. Births. Fortune. Her daughter’s visions came with the darker tinge of nightmare, and when they came, Gable locked them inside and pretended that she had eaten something spoiled, that she needed to use the toilet. Nothing more.
“Some of us see the shadow world. Dream of terrible, terrible things. But we are still the amigqhira. We do our jobs,” her mother had told her once, standing in front of a large, boiling pot of soup, and Gable had cast her eyes downward even as her mother watched her carefully. If Uma knew, she never spoke of it to Gable.
Everything That’s Underneath Page 8
