Thirty minutes before: The spangled acrobats are climbing the ladder to begin their show. They have been married for thirty years tomorrow. This is trust: flying. Only on two hands. They have both slipped, but never at the same time.
An hour before: Archie sees Philomena Butler, her brown braids and their curled ends, on Tom O'Fallahan's arm. His smile is forced.
"Good evening, Mena, Thomas."
Tom acknowledges the greeting with a tip of cotton candy.
Mena looks straight ahead.
Archie spends two dollars at the tin shooting-range, and wins a prize. There are stuffed animals and gilt-fans. He chooses a fan and puts it in his pocket.
Six days before: Although everyone has scoured the roadside for an hour, none have found the ring, or admitted that they have. And five years later, nobody will say anything when Justin Cooper gives a similar ring to his fiancée, Octavia McGill, telling people it was bought for a song in St. Paul. No one will say anything, but they will all wonder how a farmer got the money for that, especially because he only courted Octavia for three months, winter months at that. Surely not enough time to save for a sapphire. But by then Mena Butler will have been married to a black-haired druggist in White Pine for four years, with three children, two blonde and one with a shock of red hair, and a fourth on the way, and, as Archie will never show up again, no one could fault Justin too much. Archie was always hot-headed after a sound public beating, historically and figuratively speaking, and it's pretty likely that, if Justin had had the ring and had returned it, Archie would have tossed it back into the night, never to be found again.
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Away
William Alexander
Herman came home after seven years away. Home had moved three times while he was gone, and he only found it by the familiar smell of the old corduroy couch. His wife Harriet kissed him on the cheek, said “Welcome home,” and went off to work. Their three sons sat around the kitchen table, eating cereal. They were each seven years older. The youngest was only seven years old, and Herman had never seen him before.
"Hi,” Herman said.
"Hi,” the oldest one said. The middle one didn't pay any attention. The youngest glared at Herman with a fixed and furious glare.
"Do you have school today?” Herman asked.
The oldest nodded. “Bus stop's on the corner,” he said. “We know the way.” He rinsed out his cereal bowl, picked up his lunch bag and left. The other two took their lunches and followed. The youngest glared at Herman as he shut the kitchen door.
Herman poured himself some cereal.
* * * *
The cats found him, and sniffed at the tips of his fingers. Seven years ago they were kittens. Now they were round indoor cats, long-haired and imperial.
"Where have you been?” the orange cat asked. Its name was Orange.
"Away,” Herman said. He wasn't surprised to hear cats speak to him. He sighed. He wished he'd been surprised. “I struggled for years to get home again. I danced with giants and wrestled glass statues and crossed wide lakes of frozen bile. I spent several months shackled to a narcoleptic gryphon, and survived its somnambulant plunge into the sea."
The cats were not impressed, and walked away. This was not necessarily rude; cats understand “hello” but none of them understand “goodbye.” When it is time to go, a cat simply leaves.
Herman finished his cereal and wondered what to do now that he was home. He found a newspaper on the porch and checked Help Wanted ads.
* * * *
At dinner Herman folded his napkin into an origami dragon to amuse his youngest son. His youngest son was not amused, not even when he made the wings flap, not even when the dragon breathed fire and immolated itself by accident.
"I have a job interview tomorrow,” he said to the table at large.
No one answered him.
The oldest son had brought his girlfriend to dinner. She neither smiled nor spoke, and gave out the unsettling impression that she knew more about the nature of the universe than anyone else around her. She was not fey. Herman was sure of this. He tossed salt at her when she wasn't looking, just to be doubly sure. She didn't flinch. She wasn't fey.
The second son looked down at his plate and said nothing, and no one said anything to him.
The third glared at Herman.
Herman began to make up words to see if anyone would notice.
"Valareg,” he said. “Nishmashnee fleen."
No one answered him.
Orange jumped onto his lap, and stuck its head up to sniff at the dinner plate.
"It takes practice to be part of the world,” Orange said. “You'll remember how. Are you done with the fish?"
* * * *
He slept on the old corduroy couch. The bedroom door was a door he did not know how to open. The doorknob was made out of iron. It wasn't locked. His wife had not locked him out or slammed the door shut. He wasn't forbidden. He just didn't know how to turn the doorknob.
* * * *
The next morning he walked downtown for the job interview. It did not go well. He tried inventing new words again, testing the man in the suit to see if he was actually paying attention. “Vlocknik,” he said, smiling, when his would-be boss asked after Herman's familiarity with The Chicago Manual of Style. The man in the suit passed this test; he had been paying attention. Herman, however, did not pass the interview.
* * * *
The silverware at home was all made out of iron. This proved that none of his family members were actually changelings, or at least it would have if they didn't all wear gloves at dinner.
Herman watched his wife chew a mouthful of rice and vegetables. She couldn't be fey. She was kind and distracted rather than intense and capricious. She hated dancing. She loved to sing, but only when she thought she was alone. She couldn't be fey.
He glanced at his youngest son, who glared at him without ever blinking.
* * * *
"I think he's a changeling,” Herman said to Harriet that night, after she had found him on the couch and they had made love for the first time in seven years. She was still wearing her gloves. Her gloved fingers traced absentminded pathways through his hair.
"Oh, there's no such thing,” she said.
"Yes, there is,” Herman said. “There really is. And he's always watching me, so I can't toss any salt on him."
"You're just anxious that he isn't your son. He is. He's too much like you to be anyone else's. And a changeling is just an excuse. A healthy kid gets sick, suddenly, or throws tantrums when they never did before. A teenager who has always been a good little girl goes dancing all night, and sneaks home just before dawn. A grown man turns into a hulking, radioactive beast when he gets angry. ‘It wasn't me, officer. They took me away. They left a changeling in my place.’”
"Did they leave anyone here in my place?” Herman asked.
"No,” Harriet said, yawning and snuggling into the space between him and the back cushions. “You were just away."
He woke up alone, and went upstairs to their bedroom door. It was shut, and he didn't know how to open it.
He went back to the couch.
* * * *
Herman tried to find a job. He tried to remember how to exist. He was limited to job interviews in rooms without doorknobs, in buildings with motion-sensing or revolving doors to the outside.
He tried to amuse his youngest son by juggling three broken pieces of moonlight, but the child only smiled when Herman cut his finger on a jagged edge.
The youngest son wore little black ski-gloves to hold his iron fork at dinner.
* * * *
"I think he's enchanted,” Herman whispered to the cats. “He's not himself."
"You wouldn't know,” said Orange.
"And he isn't enchanted,” said Grey. “Enchant-ment is absence, to him. He doesn't trust it. He doesn't trust you. And he doesn't think that you're actually here."
"And he's the youngest,” said
Orange. “He's the third. You know what that means."
Herman knew. He wished he didn't. “I don't want to lose him,” he said. “He's the only one who ever makes eye contact."
The cats left abruptly, intent on other business. This is how cats leave.
* * * *
That night Harriet worked late. She called and left a message for the boys to fix their own dinner. Herman heard the message. He had been fixing dinner for a week now, because he was still unemployed and had little else to do, but no one ever noticed. Dinner appeared, just like it always did. Everyone was glad that it appeared. No one wondered how.
He fixed dinner. The oldest son went to a movie with his all-knowing and never-smiling girlfriend. The second one went down to the basement to watch TV. Herman and his youngest son sat alone at the table and glared at each other.
Herman broke eye contact and let out a long exhale, surrendering.
"There's an egg,” he said. “There's an egg inside a hollow tree, and the tree is on a mountainside, and the mountain is at the end of an endless swamp. I left it there when I came home. It was easier to travel without. But now someone needs to break that egg, or I'll never really be here at all."
"I'll go,” the child said.
"Thank you. Take the cats."
The youngest son left. The round and imperial cats followed behind him. None of them said good-bye.
Herman folded his napkin into a child-shape. He wondered if anyone would be fooled. Then he went upstairs, opened his bedroom door, and waited in the dark for his wife to come home. He hoped she would notice him there.
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Vinegar and Brown Paper
Becca De La Rosa
Jack the Ripper comes to lunch on Thursdays dressed in his Sunday best. He brings me macaroons wrapped up in parchment parcels, Penny Dreadful magazines and wilting wildflower bouquets, and he always carves the lunch meat. Today is Wednesday, but when I carry my rose gloves and my pinking shears out onto the patio he is there waiting, his top hat full of wild onions. “What are you doing here?” I ask, surprised. Jack the Ripper smiles very beautifully.
The sun has warmed the wrought-iron garden chairs for us. We sit beside the fish pond, watching greenflies and bumblebees. The bees come to us, because we are so sweet. Jack the Ripper takes seven sugars in his iced tea. “You'll rot your teeth away,” I tell him severely, but he has other things on his mind.
Once Jack the Ripper came to my house in the middle of the night. He told me he loved my hands, the hollow of bone where my thumb lifted up, my joints and nails. He leaned in close, and I smelled sweat and lavender water. Jack the Ripper whispered all the things he would do to me. I can't repeat them here.
"Where is she?” Jack the Ripper asks. It's the first time he has spoken. Jack the Ripper sounds a little bit like my father, and a lot like Big Ben.
I dip a ladyfinger into my iced tea. “Not here."
"Strangely enough, that had come to my attention."
"Don't be rude."
Jack the Ripper has a black tattoo on the back of his neck, if you get close enough to see. It says: Mea Maxima Culpa. Jack the Ripper lights dead flies like candles on the shrine of my windowsill, so fire shoots stained-glass through them. He loves me more than anyone. I am very fond of Jack the Ripper, but I'm not interested. He isn't my type.
"The clematis is beautiful this year,” I say, because it is. “Have you seen my herb garden? A black bird ate all my rue, but the rosemary and the mint are doing very well."
Jack the Ripper does not have very many thoughts about herb gardens. He waves one white-gloved hand, impatiently. He would rather talk about my fingers and my wrists, my toes, heels, insteps. He would like to scatter these words around like birdseed. I know this. But you have to be strict with Jack the Ripper. It's the only way he'll learn.
The clematis is beautiful this year. It drops down the greenhouse wall like a hanged man, glittering. It has a hundred eyes.
Jack the Ripper leans in towards me. I can taste smoke in the air between us, even though he promised he's quit. “You want her,” he says. The way he says it makes it a threat or a promise. Up close, his nose tilts like an old tombstone. His teeth are white as bone.
"Not at all,” I say.
Jack the Ripper is not an intuitive man, but he knows when I'm lying.
* * * *
This house belonged to my father. When we moved in it had dirt floors, cabinets full of shed snakeskins, and a tarantula squatting on the kitchen sink to stand guard. We laid down pine floorboards and scrubbed out the cabinets and hung new gingham curtains in the kitchen windows, but left the tarantula to his business. We named him Petulance. Neither of us is good with spiders.
This is not a story about spiders.
My father's house had no bed, but there was plenty of hot water. This didn't come as a surprise to either of us. We slept all night in the bath, and woke up with new pink skins, ready to go meet the weather.
* * * *
I wait for Jack the Ripper to speak. He takes out a thin cigar and lights it effortlessly without matches, which is something you can do when you're Jack the Ripper. Smoke pours from his mouth. I am worried about his lungs. They must be black as peppercorns by now, and even though he can be troublesome sometimes, I don't know what I'd do without him.
"You fought,” he says. It is not a question. Jack the Ripper does not believe in questions.
"Maybe."
"About me."
"Don't flatter yourself,” I say.
Fish glint in the veins of the fish pond. I clink ice in my tea and for a moment I'm thinking of carp nuzzling my mouth, my nose, rainbow fish looking out of my eyes and the whole world drowned. I'd be made of moss and bone. How could you love something made of moss and bone?
"I don't know where she is,” I say.
Jack the Ripper taps ash over his plate of crumbs. He says, “I know."
* * * *
How I met Lizzie Borden?
At my mother's house I found an ancient wedding dress under a chest of drawers, yellow and dry like old Scotch tape, trailing lace from the hem. It fit me perfectly. There is only one thing you can do in a wedding dress like that one, and that's go swimming. I pumped up a plastic Tellytubbies paddling pool, filled it with water from the hose, and lay down with my arms folded over my chest. Lizzie Borden found me like this. She was visiting relatives in the neighbourhood who didn't appreciate her sense of humour or her taste in clothes or literature. “What the fuck,” Lizzie Borden said to me. This was the first thing she said.
Lizzie Borden has arms like swastika arms and a nose like a question mark. That day she wore a navy blue pea-coat and I thought her mouth looked like a piano string stretched tight. I was distracted by her. “I'm drowning,” I said. Lizzie Borden raised her eyebrows.
Where is Lizzie Borden?
We slept in water and grew flowers in my father's garden. We ate honeysuckle honey and drank wine from fish bowls. Jack the Ripper danced with Lizzie Borden under a school of Japanese lanterns one night while I watched, braiding daisies. Jack the Ripper did not love Lizzie Borden.
After a while she grew thinner. Her bones lifted like fish. She had this secret, this little Moses basket in the rushes. She ate nothing but light until the veins of her face were traceworks for electricity, her mouth a socket shooting sparks, her heart a lightbulb. Darkness slunk around the edges of the house, a kicked dog. Lizzie Borden was the glint under the shut door. She brought me a dead mouse on a coal shovel and said this is my love. She told me to follow and I followed, and I followed. I made her tea from sweet herbs and offered her crystallised rose petals, but she slapped my hands away. I was not allowed to touch her. All day and all night she whispered, excelcis Deo. Excelcis Deo. What is wrong with me? she asked. I said, “We know what we are, but not what we may be."
I don't
know where Lizzie Borden is.
* * * *
Jack the Ripper is the black bird eating my seedlings. He is the black cat under my window. He is the thumbnail of my curtains not quite shut. It gets dark around us, and the bees turn into moths, dead-winged, and the fish turn into red streaks like blood in the water. Jack the Ripper cups my cheek in his hand. The bones of his wrist are scaffolding. Sin glitters underneath his fingernails. “Goodnight,” he whispers. “Goodnight. Goodnight.” There is water everywhere. His eyes are flat like a fish's eyes. When he goes, I am alone.
The dark grows darker. I wait for her. She is a cup of light.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Page 6
