“You look different,” Rhodes said.
He looked different too. The gauzy light made hollows in his cheeks and under his ears, brushed his forehead smooth and took away the dark spots in his eyes. He looked like a piece of ice with its edges melted.
“I wonder if we look like them,” Rhodes said. He pointed at the people clustered around the room. They stood in comfort and some of them held small glasses of yellow wine. They nodded their gleaming heads and looked pleased with the quality of their conversation. He said, “It’s funny, I always thought it happened all at once, you’re there and then you’re here, like that.” He pinched his fingers together and drew a line in the air. I wondered when he got so graceful.
“Hello.”
The girl spoke from next to us. She was one of those small, fragile girls that people can’t stop looking at. The weight of the stares should snap them into pieces, but it doesn’t. “Are you new?” she asked.
“We just got here,” Rhodes said.
“I thought so.” She waved her hands as she spoke and her long hair spilled and poured across her shoulders. “But don’t worry. You’re already starting to blend in. You know, at home, no one remembers to look at me.”
We didn’t believe her, of course. We watched her rub her hands over her arms, and we watched her hair flick and shine like a stream of dark ink.
“It’s nice while it lasts though,” she said. “You’ll see.” She picked up our wrists and pulled us close so we could walk to the waiting crowd together. I think her hands were cold, much colder than mine, or Rhodes’s, but it was hard to tell.
I don’t remember what we talked about when we got there. If I did, I would write everything down and save it for later.
The short man from the passageway had lost the green bottle and his beard was combed flat on his chest. He smiled while he spoke and I was surprised by how white his teeth had managed to get and how he stood up straight and didn’t need to lean on anything. The girl interrupted him and asked if it was time to dance. She was rubbing her arms again, digging her fingers under her hair and pulling on her chin.
“No. Don’t ask me that.” The short man backed away. He stuck out his beard and his arm rolled into a ball that shook. He muttered several things very fast to himself: “Not enough, not ever, but someday, if only I could wait, if only I could stay, and you know not ask me these sorts of things, you know that, not if we want to stay.”
I held my breath.
The man’s arm unwound and hit the girl in the face. It listed at the end and went sideways, and at first I thought he missed because the girl didn’t sway or stagger, didn’t do anything except look at him without surprise or anger—or even redness—marring her face.
“How could he do that?” I asked.
“Do what?” Rhodes turned away from the conversation. It had picked up where the girl and the short man left off, and swallowed the hole they made, as if they were no more interesting than a soap opera playing softly in another room. Rhodes’s mouth was still closing on the end of a laugh when he swiveled his head to look.
The girl danced alone. At first she only swayed, tilting between her feet. Then she lifted them and smacked them on the floor, so the noise beat the turned backs and decorous shoulders that hunched against her. The girl didn’t care. She flew away from us and flailed her arms. She got sweaty and her hair stuck out in dull and frizzing brown. Her face blotched; it lost its cold smoothness and revealed a split across one puffy cheek that had just begun to turn red.
She had become someone I wouldn’t notice if I passed her on the street, except that she was dancing like a crazy person, and we were the only people who bothered to watch.
She slid between the silver trees, into a gap hidden somewhere in the wall, and was gone.
“Oh,” Rhodes said.
I asked him what happened.
Rhodes said he couldn’t explain.
The short man was telling a story about someone who found an enchanted kingdom inside a hill of bone—or was it a forest?—and challenged its queen to a game of wits—as if that would help—with the prize being a stay lasting exactly as long as the winner desired—something you can’t know until you get there, can you?
There was never enough time, Rhodes said, and he wanted to hear the end.
“Don’t you?” he said.
Once, Rhodes told me he was afraid of the dark. We were young and hiding in a closet for a game. It was a birthday party, and we were both still small enough to fit in the closet together.
Rhodes took a little flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on so the fine beam bounced off the shelves of board games and picture albums, and drowned itself in the folds of a spare blanket. I asked him why he had a flashlight in his pocket. It’s not something that people usually carry. Because his mom had given it to him, he told me. Nobody gives flashlights, I said. You buy them in stores and keep them in cupboards in case of emergencies, or when the lights go out and you can’t find what you’re looking for.
Rhodes asked me if I had ever looked at the dark. Not in the dark, but at it.
I lied and said I hadn’t.
The flashlight was shockingly bright for being so small. I was sure that it showed, white and glimmering, at the crack beneath the door, and I got so mad that I would have left, if I hadn’t been afraid of giving myself away.
When the skin begins to fit too tight, and the mask starts to stick, then it’s time to dance. You shouldn’t do anything else.
“Stop fidgeting,” Rhodes said.
I couldn’t. The cold had attached itself to my bones. I wanted to take deep breaths. I wanted to swing my arms and stomp my feet until the top of my skull shook and I could be sure that I was still alive. Everyone’s faces were pale and flat. They seemed to have put on layers of makeup while I wasn’t looking and now their faces couldn’t move. I twisted my hands and scrubbed them down my front because I was sure that my clothes had grown into my skin, but nobody noticed except for Rhodes.
“Oh well,” he said. “It’s probably better this way.” He didn’t say goodbye to our new friends. He took my hand and walked with me to the center of the room. Our feet moved together. They touched the ground at the same time, through his fine leather shoes, through my terrible, hungry, feet-eating slippers of velveteen. We put them down and I remembered they were only summer sandals made out of rubber and flat plastic string that slapped the back of our heels.
Have you ever tried to walk with someone, really tried to walk with them? You might as well be dancing. You don’t need to whirl them or leap them; you don’t need to wrap your arms around, or fold their hand on the inside of yours; you don’t need to rest your cheek against their cheek and measure the space between your mouth and their ear. You don’t need to do any of these things, although you could, and they might be nice.
All you have to do is keep their bones next to yours, your hearts in close proximity. And then you need to listen.
There was an accordion, a pipe, a calliope, and someone far away, an old lady in a striped silk gown, clapping her hands.
“Do you know the way?” Rhodes asked. “It’s not that hard.”
The silver trees flickered around us. Curls of silver paper drifted through a long dark space where there wasn’t enough light to see. We danced between them and my side began to pinch. The bottoms of my lungs were scraped raw from too much breathing and sweat soaked my clothes. It slid down my arms to make our hands slippery.
Rhodes was next to me. I could hear him breathing.
Then we weren’t dancing anymore. The music tipped us over and made us step on different sides of it. I tried to catch up, and then to slow down, but it was too hard in the dark. Our fingers bumped each other, fumbled, let go.
“I’ll only be a little while,” Rhodes might have said.
It was too dark, he might have said. He just needed to go back for something. He would be fast, he might have said, he would be late. He would run there and run back, and I w
ould barely even notice.
I think that’s what he said.
I walked by myself in the dark, wishing for a flashlight, cramped between two fences in a space that smelled like jasmine. The streetlamps were still on when I got to the end, but their light was obscured by the start of morning.
I waited. Other people came out from between the fences, ordinary people with sweat on their faces and wilted clothes. They went slowly, as if their feet hurt and they could only keep moving if they sent themselves straight to their beds.
I waited a long time.
“What happens,” I asked, “if you come back late?”
Rhodes’s mother opened a cupboard and took things out. She put them on the counter one at a time: a can of soup, a box of crackers, a crackling cellophane package half-filled with pistachios.
“You might lose the way,” she said. She didn’t turn around, just kept reaching up into the cupboard and back down again. “You might forget where the doors are, and then you might forget how to open them, and then you might forget that things like doors even exist.”
“Are they hard to find again?” I asked.
She took down a bundle of dried leaves, blackened and frail; a neatly folded square of something covered with tiny, glittering scales; and a jar of brown powder that hummed.
“It depends,” Rhodes’s mother said. “But that’s the wrong thing to ask.” She dug her fingers between the wood panels that made up the cupboard’s inner wall. She slid one to the side and reached into the space while I waited for her to explain what she meant.
“What matters is how much finding them is worth.” She took one dusty bottle from the hidden shelf and put it on the table in front of me. Her fingers left clean oblongs behind and I could see the yellow wine inside.
Then she gave me instructions on how to get there. She didn’t seem to expect me to follow them, and even though that made her look sad, I could tell she wouldn’t follow them herself. Maybe she couldn’t, and all she could do was wait.
Rhodes’s father slept through the whole thing. He was waiting for her to whisper something in his ear to wake him up, and I wondered if she would.
The first time that Rhodes and I kissed, I thought he was funny looking, even though he was waiting with me for my mom, who hadn’t shown up when she said she would. It was the day that she was unavoidably late. We were sitting on the curb and I made sure we arranged ourselves so I could watch both Rhodes and the street at the same time.
When we kissed, our noses pressed against each other, sideways, and I felt them rub together like cats walking around a stranger’s legs. It made me sleepy and it made me want to curl up on the sidewalk and close my eyes, but I left them open so I was sure to see the way Rhodes’s ears stuck out against the sky, and the empty street behind them.
I’m almost certain I didn’t know then how to find him if he ever went away. I’ve been trying to remember while I stand here in front of a space between two fences. The bottle I’ve been holding feels like I just pulled it out of a bucket of ice, and I can still smell the jasmine, though it’s fainter now in the daylight.
I can almost hear Rhodes’s footsteps, even though the passageway is empty and I can see it’s very short and that it ends in a plain fence grown over with vines and tiny white flowers that gleam in the sun.
We’ll walk back together of course. We’ll go carefully this time and we won’t lose the steps.
I’m not sure why I’m saying all this. There’s too much wine in here for one, but you won’t want it now when everyone else has gone home. Maybe I just thought I should, in case something happens and we don’t make it back until late.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Megan Kurashige is a professional dancer and a writer. She and her sister, Shannon Kurashige, collaborate on wild and quixotic dance projects under the name Sharp & Fine in San Francisco. She attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop at UCSD in 2008 where she learned that telling stories rocks her soul. Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared in Sybil's Garage and Strange Horizons. She has a blog (immobileexplorations.blogspot.com) and is on Twitter (@mkazoo).
Butterfly Effect
Mishell Baker
I’m sitting behind a bush staring at an airstrip with an assault rifle on my lap, and for the life of me I can’t remember why. But Toto, I am definitely not in San Diego anymore.
Not the war, either. Women don’t get drafted, and I am not in the desert; behind me and across the field are forests, almost but not quite jungle. I’m wearing civilian clothes; my whole shirt and my lap under the CAR-15 are a cherry-wood mess of someone’s blood; the knees of my jeans are stiff and itchy like they’ve been soaked and then dried under the mid-day sun (wolf’s bad knee he stumbles and my wrist slips from his hand and i’m going under, the swift cold makes me gasp and fills my chest). These little details tell me I am not dreaming. Where is everyone?
There were six of us at some point. Eight counting the CIU guys, Adal and what’s-his-name (ryan says “de qué se trata todo esto” to germán, friendly, a half second before the point-blank suppressed shot hits his brain and adal's beer bottle shatters on the tile) so where is everyone?
I can’t remember who I’m here to shoot or what’s wrong with me (it fills my chest and batters me against a rock) or where everyone is. I put a hand to the back of my head where the pain is and my hair is crusted. Preacher said I shouldn’t be doing this (“your pupils aren’t the same size”), and where is Preacher anyway (can we not assume this is goodbye)? Something about an RPG we found. He’s going to blow up a truck and while they’re all running I’m supposed to shoot someone. But really I just want to go home because the last thing my husband said is that he was leaving me (“get off your cross, you were never gonna medal.”). This must be on the news by now. Eight cops missing in Mexico, among them couple of young veterans and a former Olympic FemaleAthlete™ and Captain Vining’s son; they love that kind of drama.
The airstrip is not much more than a hangar, half canvas and half aluminum, and a squat little ancillary building with all the shingled charm of a dead armadillo. But there are several trucks and three little Cessnas and about forty guys unloading stuff; something kind of big is going on which is why I’m hiding.
(“i can hotwire a plane”) Shotgun will get us out of here, even though Shade had his doubts about the kid. Oh God, it should be Shade behind this bush, he’s the better sniper, we argued about it (wolf’s hand on my shoulder like sand on a fire: “okay frank and annie”) and now Shade’s dead (staring at the sky i closed his eyes). They got him. This much I remember now. El Reino del Día, the rebels du jour. They want to free Michoacán (have you ever heard a butterfly?) from the godless evil influence of (heathens and wizards and serpents and their “puppy-bitch Calderón”) the United Sins of America.
El Reino was starting to be a real problem down here (raptor eyes painted on walls – eye am eye, don quixote), and so we came like we often do to teach the local cops a few SWAT tricks. It’s good to have friends here when some scumbag makes a run south. We were just trying to be neighborly, and Rafael invites us to his family’s half-ruined hacienda out in goatfuck nowhere for drinking and dancing and that’s when it all goes to hell. My first time ever in Mexico.
R.I.P. Shade, by the way. His real name was Paul Bandhauer, and he was a misogynistic shit of an ex-Navy SEAL. His heart stopped the minute the round hit. I got his shooter.
Now I look out across the airstrip and past the men unloading and fueling planes, at the opposite edge of the woods, at the skewbald truck that Preacher (why did you take his gun away) is going to blow up. Preacher kissed me (can we not assume) before he went, even though he doesn’t know my marriage is over. I don’t know why they gave him that name; he is a man of action, not (why did you take his) words. Shade (i closed his eyes) always talked for Preacher, said he’s been like that since Fallujah, but he’s all right, really (why did you take his gun away). I still can’t believe Shade is the one who died first; h
e was like a (knight with his banners bravely unfurled) movie action hero, and what harm does it do at this point for me to say that I actually kind of (“if you even think about cozying up to me i will turn you inside out like a tube sock”) liked him.
Actually, Shade didn’t die first; Fastball was dead already. Oh for God’s sake, Adal and Ryan died first; I keep not counting them because they weren’t SWAT. I saw them die, because (in the night, drunk, I slipped out and) I couldn’t sleep. So I saved everyone’s lives, or what was left of them. Fastball (can hotwire a car? “that turned you on a little”) died on the way out of the hacienda but we killed the ones following us, all of them, because we didn’t know which ones were dirty (eye am eye).We had to leave Fastball covered in a sheet (in the night, drunk, I slipped out and into his room, but one of the dancers was there under the sheet with him) because we had to move.
Again, R.I.P. I don’t know much about Jay “Fastball” McLaren besides the fact that a few beers made me contemplate casual adultery with him. He knew a hundred drinking songs and how to hotwire a car. He got shot in the belly and took a while to die; we had to carry him over the wall and through the orchard. I got his shooter, too.
Of all things, I remember the way Shotgun (“because he gets sick unless he rides up front”) looked when we covered Fastball with the sheet; I remember he looked how I felt. We're not military like Preacher and Shade; we had never watched anyone we knew die. Shotgun’s an English major and a hobby pilot (“I can hotwire a plane” offhand just trying to one-up fastball and damned if it’s not going to get us out of here) whose dad happens to be Ops Support Captain so the kid works hard as hell for his mediocrity. His dad will be as shocked as anyone by the fact that his son is saving our lives. Shade was bitching that Shotgun was going to slow us down, and Shade’s the one who got shot through the chest in mid-sentence (shotgun holding onto preacher like he’s trying to keep him still even though preacher might as well be the one staring at the sky with a hole in him).
I look across the airstrip at the little ramshackle radio building and something sings through the static of my (hey honey gonna swing by radio shack on the way home and pick up a) memory. This whole thing was my plan. Wolf is going to use Preacher’s distraction; he’s going to try and get to the radio equipment while I shoot whoever it is I’m supposed to shoot (eye am eye don quixote). Wolf needs to somehow contact the military and get a helicopter out after us.
Electric Velocipede Issue 25 Page 2
