Letters From the Sky

by Tamer Lorika

  She never much liked doing laundry—the lye hurt her fingers and the water was always scalding, but now more than ever she just wanted a layer of skin off her fingers.

  It was already past noon. Her field trip to the river had cost her a great deal of time. She wasn’t really hungry, though. She thought about Paris and Jedrick, wondering how they were doing, if they were mad at her for not showing up that morning.

  As she walked back into the house, she found the water almost at boiling and, grabbing a rag to put around the handle, took it carefully down from the hook. She began to drag it outside, sliding it along the floor the way Maman had told her not to, careful not to spill any on herself. It was more difficult to negotiate the threshold and the uneven strip of ground separating the back of her townhouse and the ones squished next to hers, the looming apartments behind them. She managed with little mishap and only a scalded skirt. She poured the rest of the water into the tub, shook a bit of the lye in with it—not too much. Gramaman would be appalled at the paucity but Jeanne couldn’t help it, it hurt so.

  She took out her shirt from that morning first, setting at it with a single-minded intensity she could not have explained. All that she knew was she had to clean it, get it spotless. She ran it against the washboard, scraping her fingers but caring little, scrubbing furiously, eyes focused on the red-brown patch of rust that had come from someone she had cared about.

  She hardly noticed when the tears began to flow again, too immersed in the water to feel any extra pain.

  “Jennie! Jeanne, hey—hey, pet, are you all right?”

  The voice came from the back door of the kitchen; female, but not Gramaman. Jeanne turned, face hidden by a curtain of hair.

  Paris stared back, framed in the doorway and looking concerned. Peering out from behind her was Jedrick, looking harried as always. “Jeanne, why are you crying?” Paris asked with uncharacteristic delicacy.

  “The kitten,” Jeanne murmured. “The kitten is dead.” She held up the sopping blouse as if it were evidence, but the blouse was unstained again—or seemed that way, the blood only spread out and diffused, coating the expanse of pale pink fabric with the slightest, lightest maroon flush. No one would ever know, no one but Jeanne. Seeing it now, she threw the shirt in the dirt and stared at it in horror.

  Almost immediately Paris and Jedrick were at her side. They put their arms around her but she did not feel them, her skin going numb and cold.

  “Is that why you didn’t come to school today?” Paris pressed obtrusively.

  Jeanne shook her head, her curls bouncing but not moving. She couldn’t stop the tears.

  Paris spoke again, but Jeanne was distracted for a moment by that familiar but comforting rush of heat. Again, the flooding feeling of someone with her, someone to whom she could belong. Jericho was with her, holding her, or at least that was the way it seemed. Feeling the tears slowly, slowly begin to recede, she wiped her eyes on her wrist, tugging back her hair to put it behind her ear.

  Paris gasped. “Jeanne!” She put a hand to her friend’s cheek, unafraid of touching it as Maman had been.

  Jeanne stared at the tub of water by her knees. “Oh, yes. That.”

  “What?” Jedrick asked.

  Paris grabbed his hand and clapped it to Jeanne’s cheek, and he stroked it lightly, running fingers along the whorls of hard flesh. He raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. Doesn’t seem recent. What in the hell is it?”

  Jeanne shrugged. “Burn. Something. Maman doesn’t know. Neither does Dr. Kembrough.”

  Paris narrowed her eyes. “Well, whatever it is, you don’t seem bothered by it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It isn’t contagious?” Jedrick questioned.

  “Doubtful.”

  None of them asked, “What happened?” or “What did you do?” It was for reasons like this Jeanne was so grateful she knew them. Neither of them looked especially comforted, but neither panicked. Paris looked faintly pitying and fairly disgusted. Jedrick just seemed puzzled.

  Jeanne poured out the tainted water in the tub and wordlessly went back into the house to put on another pot for the rest of the washing. Her friends followed her, Paris using some of the water on the fire for coffee for her and Jedrick. They sat with Jeanne at the kitchen table, talking about very little of importance. Paris filled Jeanne in about their lessons for the day and Jedrick began to complain about something Armand had said, and things seemed fairly normal. Gramaman never came back into the kitchen to check on them, and Maman stayed in her room until the evening sun began to sink, too tired to hold itself up any longer.

  When Maman entered, she looked like a somnambulist, never having bothered to put up her hair the whole day and her clothes sleep-wrinkled. The children were in the backyard, hanging the washing to dry. There was little sun—Jeanne was aware she had timed the washing wrong—but a faint, warm wind had kicked up, and one way or another the clothing would be dry by the time supper was over.

  “Jeanne,” Maman said shortly. “What are you doing?”

  “Washing?” Jeanne asked, thinking it obvious.

  Maman just nodded and disappeared back inside.

  “Has she been ill?” Jedrick asked bluntly.

  Jeanne shook her head, bringing her fingers unconsciously to her mark. “Just tired.”

  None of the three were particularly convinced by the explanation, but Jedrick left it be. Soon they split up to go home for supper. Paris hugged her and Jedrick pecked her cheek, her marked cheek, and she felt a rush of gratitude for the both of them. Strangely, despite the events of the last few hours, she had not spent a more content day in weeks.

  “Go brush your hair and then run along to pick up your Papa,” Gramaman called out the back door.

  Jeanne girl nodded obediently. Upstairs she ripped out a page from her notebook and wrote two words.

  Thank you.

  She folded the note in a familiar pattern and threw it out the window, not bothering to stay around and watch it disappear.

  * * * *

  That night Jeanne had a dream, different than any she had ever had before. It was different because she knew she was only dreaming, knew this was a movie reel she could not touch, only watch. That night she dreamt about Jericho.

  Jericho stood in the middle of a dim room, legs close together, back stiff, and eyes straight ahead, staring at some point on the wall opposite. She looked past the creature in front of her, who sat at a desk like an eternal auditor, draped in a single white cloth like those Jeanne had seen in a history book of the Mediterranean ancients once. The Auditor was distinctly male, with long blond hair and eyes that were endless, violent white, wrenchingly different than Jericho’s pure black. He officiously scribbled on a piece of parchment on the gilded writing desk more suited to days long past. He did not look at Jericho, and time stood still in tense silence.

  Jericho broke it first, knees bending the slightest, posture collapsing—her eyebrows knitted and her fists clenched.

  “Get on with it,” she ordered, the muscles in her bare arms twitching in obvious anxiety.

  Jeanne tried to reach out and smooth the anxiety away, but she had no body—or at least, it didn’t translate in this world

  Still, at even the thought of tactile comfort, Jericho seemed to calm somewhat, though her body was still strung tight and shook slightly.

  “Are you that desperate to hear what I have to say?” the Auditor asked in a synthetically monotone voice.

  “No,” Jericho answered, her own voice more rich and anxious in comparison. “But I have matters to attend to.”

  Jeanne, even without a body, shivered when the Auditor turned the full force of his glare on Jericho. “Your Ward.” It was not a question.

  “Yes,” Jericho confirmed anyway.

  “The one you marked.”

  “Yes.”

  There was more scribbling on the parchment in front of him. “You are aware that said marking is expressly forbidden.”

  “Yes.�
��

  “Can you say anything else?” There was sincere curiosity radiating from the Auditor, though it did not translate to his voice.

  “Yes.”

  The Auditor raised a lazy eyebrow and wrote something else. “Let me rephrase my questioning, then. Explain to me, seraph, why you chose to mark the girl.”

  “She would be dead if I did not.”

  Jeanne was overwhelmed with surprise at the blunt phrasing, but perhaps Jericho was correct. Perhaps, left alone…she did not remember a lot of the past few weeks, and yet the danger stood out in sharp detail. It had been dangerous, she knew. She was at the breaking point.

  “It is not up to you to be the judge of that.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The Auditor slammed down his pen. “I’ve had enough of the insolence.”

  “No one knows her like I do,” Jericho pushed. “I am her guardian. If you did not want me to mark her, you should not have taught me how. Your orders contradict themselves—keep them safe within your power, stay away from their lives, watch, don’t touch, treasure, don’t abandon—”

  “Enough!”

  “No!” Jericho breathed hard, her chest rising and falling in a heavy rhythm with which Jeanne was unfamiliar.

  “Are you quite finished?” the Auditor asked at length, his monotone somehow poisonous and disdainful.

  Jericho’s face twisted. “Yes.”

  “Do you understand why the mark was a gross mistake?” the Auditor inquired. “Do not answer—it is rhetorical. I know you do not understand, or you would not have injured your Ward so easily.”

  “I—”

  “You have meddled in her life. Do you think she can live in society so easily now? No one will trust her, not any longer. That mark is important because it claims her as your own—you know this. That is why you did it, because you are a selfish, possessive creature. But it is not just our kind who understands the significance. At their basest level, humans know, too. They know she is marked, claimed by someone from another world, and they cannot reconcile that knowledge with the rest of their universe. You, seraph, you know what humans do when they cannot understand. They hate.”

  Jericho was shaking again, muscles locked, hands in fists, staring passed the Auditor, fear and remorse etched on her face. Jeanne wanted nothing more than to soften the tension from her guardian’s forehead. She sent the strongest comfort she could towards Jericho, just the suggestion, just the air, hoping the creature could her.

  “She would have died.”

  “Let her die. It would be her own weakness.”

  “She is not weak!” Jericho screamed suddenly. Her body pitched forward, legs bent, ready to lunge. Fury was painted violently onto the Auditor’s features, and on Jericho’s own.

  Jeanne woke up.

  Chapter 7

  The whispers started the moment she stepped into the school, flanked though she was by the solid figures of Paris and Jedrick. Eyes flicked to the group, then forward, as if they had not been itinerant at all. Jeanne did not really notice, much, until Paris stiffened beside her and almost bared her teeth in a growl. It was less protective, more annoyed, as if she had been bitten by a mayfly. The rest of the long walk down the hallway, Paris was tensed as if ready to run off. Jedrick was given the privilege of retreat instead, dropped off in Armand’s classroom. Jeanne saw a faint sliver of the young teacher’s shocked face before she left for her own class.

  Paris left Jeanne’s side to gossip with other girls as soon as she spotted them; nothing had changed in that respect. Still, Jeanne knew what their topic of conversation would be. Her hair had been tied back in a simple, boyish horsetail that morning—some of it swung free, but it could not even come close to hiding her mark. Maman would never have let her out of the house that way, her appearance so unorthodox, but Maman did not come down from breakfast, and Gramaman barely looked at her that morning.

  Jeanne sat at her cedar-scented desk and breathed deeply, smiling a little. For once she understood why it had calmed her on so many occasions. It smelled of cinnamon and yeast as well as spice—it was Jericho’s scent, or part of it, at least.

  “Ah…”

  Jeanne turned her head to see Charles standing awkwardly beside her, eyes wide and mouth gaping.

  “Good morning,” she said quietly, voice almost a whisper.

  “Good…” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. His voice had cracked a lot in the past weeks. “Good morning, Jeanne. We missed you at school yesterday.”

  He stared determinedly at anywhere but her face, and Jeanne wondered why that annoyed her so much.

  “Did you need something?” she asked him, not rudely but with a certain amount of genuine curiosity.

  Charles guppied back at her. “I—no—I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you?” Charles blurted, voice strained.

  “Yes.” A feeling of déjà vu. Jeanne turned to look out the window, the predictable, half-cold weather infiltrating in an invisible draft. She shivered a little.

  “Ah, if you’re cold…I’m not. You can borrow my jacket,” Charles offered.

  Jeanne shook her head. She was a little cold, but accepting favors from Charles seemed wrong somehow.

  The whispers continued throughout the day; a hushed susurrus took over the cafeteria as she slunk in at lunch time. She stood in line for food with Paris and Jedrick.

  Paris plucked at Jeanne’s hair ribbon. “You should leave it down. Your cheek will be less noticeable that way.”

  Jeanne nodded vaguely, the whispers like the sound of a river washing around her. She felt isolated, like a rock in a stream.

  Even Jedrick seemed on edge; though he could not easily see the mark on Jeanne’s skin, he heard the commentary even more clearly than she did, his senses heightened beyond hers. Still, Jeanne heard almost all of it.

  “What happened to—”

  “Poor girl—”

  “—so disgusting—”

  “—was so pretty, too—”

  “—bad omen—”

  Bad omen. That was the part that made Jeanne stiffen, the part that drew her attention more than anything else they might have said in their ignorance.

  Bad omen. Her father had said that, too.

  The children at school just did not understand, she contented herself with that. They were only children.

  Ms. Milovskaya had let out a small cry when she saw Jeanne that morning, silent concern on her face when Jeanne was not forthcoming with an explanation. Armand, when he came to irritably collect Jedrick after lunch, was caught tracing the sign of the cross on the outside of his right thigh, in tiny strokes, as if to be unnoticed.

  That evening, when Jeanne left her friends to stop by Cello’s on the way home for a small jar of yeast, Cello’s gaze repeatedly flicked to the crucifix hanging above the door. Jeanne saw him throw a pinch of salt over his shoulder as she left the shop.

  You are loved, the mark was to remind her.

  She made it home with little incident, feeling the gazes of others on her, watching and whispering and judging. She clutched the jar of yeast to her chest, though she kept her head stubbornly high and facing straight ahead.

  She clipped up the wooden step to her front door, but stopped a moment when she saw a flash of color interrupting the brown of the step and the brown of the dirt street. It was white. Curious, she peeked beneath the step, into the dark green weed that had sprung petulantly to life. In the center of a thicket of wild mint that had twined itself in the wood slats was a small, sprawling plant bubbling white flowers. White heather.

  I am loved. Jeanne did not pick the plant, just smiled.

  “Jeanne!” Maman shrieked from inside.

  Jeanne looked up from her squatting position on the ground in time to see her mother mince out in stocking feet onto the narrow front step.

  “Jeanne, get inside,” Maman said, beckoning jerkily.

  Jeanne stood and gra
bbed the jar of yeast, holding it in front of her as a peace offering as she slipped inside the house. “Yes, Maman,” she agreed. “Do you need me for something?”

  Maman shook her head, taking the jar of yeast from her. “Just do your homework quietly, please, or something inside. Help me dust the living room.”

  Jeanne nodded. “Yes, Maman.”

  She spent the rest of the evening locked inside the house and did not leave until the next day for school.

  * * * *

  That night, as Jeanne became aware of her surroundings despite the fact she may have still been asleep, she said only seven words. “You were right. I am not weak.”

  The statement was met with a pair of desperate lips against hers, for a long, fevered moment. When they broke away, Jericho was smiling. “I never doubted you.”

  “I know. I dreamed about you.”

  Jericho raised an eyebrow. “You did?”

  Jeanne smiled nervously, as if caught doing something wrong. “Yes. You were beautiful. Frightening, too. Jericho,” her voice dropped slightly, serious for a moment. “You were doing something dangerous.”

  “Not dangerous. Or at least, worth it.”

  “What will they do to you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They won’t…take you away, will they?”

  Jericho frowned. “They wouldn’t dare.”

  That was easy enough to trust in.

  “Come downstairs with me. I’ll make you coffee.”

  Jericho raised an eyebrow. “This is not the first time you have made a strange request of me, but I still find it hard to understand why you want this.”

  Jeanne shrugged, but she became flushed around the ears. “I just…want to do things with you.”

  Jericho smiled, indulgent and bemused and strikingly beautiful. “I would like to do things with you, as well. I assume cutting your hair was not something you’d like to repeat?”

  “Coffee is good,” Jeanne muttered in embarrassment. “And anyway, I like my hair.”

  Jericho just laughed, standing up and unfolding her long legs before helping Jeanne to her feet, as well.