Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  I draw it from her chest, and she sighs as it emerges—a tiny flame. I press it into my own chest, and I am overwhelmed—

  everything at once, and the singing, and the force of it all, I am unmoored, I am in my heart’s riptide, feet torn from beneath me, out of control—

  and I stop, close my eyes, gather myself, all the bits of me everywhere, and I breathe.

  Until I am steady.

  There is a hole in my heart, small and burning-cold and insistent. I look into Allemande Left’s dark eyes and remember everything, remember how afraid I was of how strong my love was—my fear that it would distract me, preoccupy me, consume me. I remember dividing myself to keep from falling.

  But I was fallen all along.

  “There’s a hole,” I say, my voice unsteady.

  “Do you know why now?”

  The Angel

  Jack is behind the bar, pulling pints, but he looks up the instant I enter the room, Allemande Left’s hand in mine. The expression on his lion face is hard to read, but I think I read resignation in his posture—and then a stray shot of hope, like sun through clouds. It’s in the way he straightens, and the formality of his pose as we approach, hand in hand. “Zee,” he rumbles.

  “Jack.”

  “Your quest?”

  I slide onto a barstool. “I found my heart at the Mercy Seat,” I say. A passphrase from who knows how many years ago.

  He opens the cash register and hands me a red construction paper heart. It’s tattered, feathered at the edges from age and rough handling, but it's mine and I’d know it anywhere.

  I press it in.

  I see all of Jack at once: human, lion, ox, and eagle. I see all of Allemande Left at once, all of the faces and bodies I have no name for. I see all of me at once, echoes down the worlds, hall of mirrors.

  Jack takes my hand and Allemande Left’s.

  I am not afraid.

  The Vampire and the Werewolf

  Both of the brides wear white lace; Mary Magdalene Kendall’s dress is long and formal, with tapered sleeves, and Agony Jones’s echoes 1984 Madonna. We sit in the back row, me and Jack and Allemande Left, silent through a lovely service. Allemande Left and I wear matching suits, grey pinstripe; Jack has eschewed matching as too silly, but he’s deigned to appear human so’s not to frighten the crowd. This is an all-humanoid world, after all. We must do our best.

  The brides dance, and everyone is out on the floor before long; Allemande Left and Jack and I hang back by the door.

  “What’s next?” Jack asks. “Now that your heart is whole. Now that we’re whole.”

  I smile. I see worlds around me, shimmering like heat mirages … places my loves have never been, never seen, never imagined. I take their hands. “Let’s find out.”

  LILO IS

  Corinne Duyvis

  I’ve slept with plenty of men, and I can safely say that in our one night together, Ramon the spider-demon upstaged them all. The extra arms make for good multi-tasking. And then there’s those mouth appendages—cheli-something—and as long as he was careful about keeping the fangs tucked away—

  Let’s avoid the details.

  Here’s what matters: Ramon the spider-demon was unique in a lot of ways, and the utter failure of my birth control pill was just one of them.

  But it was definitely the one I least expected.

  * * *

  “And here’s her little foot,” the sonographer says. Her finger traces the screen by her side.

  I follow the blurry monochrome lines of my daughter’s foot up to her body, her arms, the curve of her head. I point towards the screen. “And this?”

  “Oh.” The sonographer leans in, moving the transducer across my belly without looking. I try not to squirm at the cold. “I think—that might be—yes. Probably just her other arm.”

  She already counted two of those earlier. She doesn’t seem to remember. I stare at the screen.

  Single motherhood will be interesting.

  * * *

  A couple of months later I’m huffing and puffing in La Paz hospital, then focus on the midwife’s reaction to three spindly arms on each side of my still-red daughter’s body—but all they do is look her over and clean her up, noticing nothing.

  My frown fades. Ramon could hide his arms, too. Maybe she’ll be okay.

  They wrap her and hand her to me.

  “Hi there, Lilo,” I whisper. My thumb brushes over the wisp of dark curls on the top of her head. “Do you know you have my hair?”

  The middle hand on her right side balls into a tiny, perfect fist that reaches up at me.

  I lean in. Press my lips to her ear. “And you have your daddy’s everything else.”

  * * *

  Lilo is magic.

  Lilo is: Paper towels full of fingernail clippings. Sticky webbing in her sheets. Scratches on my tits from her fangs until I finally, regretfully, switch to bottles.

  Lilo is: Learning to sew. Buying shirts and cutting them up before I even pull off the tag. Making brand-new, oddly-formed sleeves.

  Lilo is: Wrapping two teeny hands around her sippy cup while she draws and scratches her neck and waves to get my attention. Arms fluttering by her side. Pressing her fingers onto all the keys to her red, plastic piano at the same time.

  Lilo is: Hypnotic when she dances to preschool music I can barely tolerate, when her feet shuffle flatly over the floor and she sticks out her round belly and her arms spin and spin and spin. Fingers stretch and curl, align and flow through the air, and she smiles so wide the fangs in the corners of her mouth poke into sight. I don’t tell her to be careful; no one but me sees. She belongs to just her and me.

  Lilo is: Leaning over breakfast, her chelicerae dangling from her mouth to just outside of her yoghurt bowl. Thirty fingertips align along the rim of the table. Shiny black eyes look up at me.

  She grins with yoghurt-smeared teeth too fragile to use.

  * * *

  “Mom-ma!” Lilo is five, and she puts the emphasis on the first syllable, always. “Mom-ma, we played soccer in gym class and my team won, and then we climbed, and I reached the top the fastest out of everyone.”

  While she talks she clasps her lower arms in front of her belly, but the top four, they wave and gesture in the corner of my eyes. They mimic climbing.

  “I’m not surprised. You used to climb from your cot all the time.”

  She giggles. Hands flap excitedly. “Everyone else was slow.”

  And then I hesitate, like I always do. “Maybe you shouldn’t go as fast next time. Okay, Lee? Give others a chance to win.”

  “But.” Her hands slow down. “Why?”

  I crouch and let my fingers run along her middle arms. I promised myself—and her, though she doesn’t know it—to be honest, always. “You know how you shouldn’t talk about your arms? Because people get confused?”

  Lilo nods.

  “This is … like that. People might wonder why you climb so fast.”

  And then, when they look closer? Right now no one but me sees her arms. Ramon could hide and show his at will. Lilo doesn’t have that choice—she’s not all him, never all him—but that might change. She might trigger it without meaning to.

  Lilo jerks away one arm when I reach a tickly spot in the inside of her elbow. She suppresses a giggle, but then her face is all serious again. “When did you lose your arms?”

  I stop mid-tickle.

  Then I explain it doesn’t work that way, and she asks further and I answer that, too, and we end up, finally, with that one dreaded question: “So … where do mine come from?”

  * * *

  Her school calls one day. They think the food I pack Lilo for lunch isn’t enough.

  “She’s just,” her teacher says, so very carefully, not wanting to imply anything at all because I’ve given him hell in the past and he doesn’t want a repeat, “she’s very skinny. Does she eat enough solids?”

  I make up a story.

  * * *

  “C
an we have a kitty? Please?”

  Lilo’s on her haunches in the backyard, wild grass and weeds burying her feet and ankles. She pets the neighbor’s cat, Momo; he looks like he doesn’t know what to do with himself, what to make of stereo cuddles and big eyes hovering right overhead. He keeps his head low under Lilo’s arms, his body tense. Just as I want to warn her away, Momo rubs his head against her knee.

  Lilo spends her time on video games, on a hundred different K’Nex constructions. She has few friends. I wish I could give her this one.

  “I’m so sorry, Lilo. My allergies … ”

  She’s not sure what the word means so I explain it to her, and her face falls, breaking me in half.

  * * *

  Lilo is seven. I find her in the kitchen with her mouth wide open, her chelicerae extended inches from her lips. The fangs at the end grip a chunk of bread, mash it between them, shove it into her mouth and grab another chunk, until Lilo notices me and startles away from the counter. The bread drops to the kitchen tiles.

  Her face looks—torn open. I try to look past the fangs. I rarely see them. She keeps them inside. She doesn’t need them for the food I give her, mashed and blended to avoid damaging her too-fragile teeth.

  Lilo tries to talk, but her lips can’t even close; the chelicerae stretch open the corners of her mouth. She folds them back inside. One fang slips past her lip, slices it open. A drop of blood wells up.

  “I just wanted to—I didn’t mean to—” she blubbers. “I just wanted to try—”

  “Lee,” I say, “Lee-lee, baby. Don’t worry.”

  I wrap her in my arms, press her face to my chest, wipe the blood from her lip. She’s shuddering. Like she’s scared. Like she did something wrong, and not me, for making her think this wasn’t okay.

  I have more reading to do.

  I screwed up.

  * * *

  I show her pictures, diagrams. We study spiders. I try to make it into a game.

  But she’s hesitant to even show her chelicerae anymore, let alone use them in front of me, and sometimes when she’s cold, or when it’s evening and she plays a last video game before bed, she likes to wrap herself in my robe so only two of her arms will stick out through the sleeves.

  * * *

  “Mom-ma? Are you working?”

  I peer over the computer screen. “Yes. Why?”

  Lilo lingers in the doorway. Her fingers toy with some webbing, spreading it out, folding it back up. “You said Dad-dy is somewhere else. Can you make him come over?”

  I’m thinking that the last time I did, with my belly ready to pop, Ramon still smelled of sulphur. He’d smiled, ever-so-pleased at the sight of me, then said, “Do I seem like a father to you?”

  “You didn’t do much to prevent becoming one. You could’ve warned me my pill wouldn’t work.”

  “That only occasionally happens. Avoid screwing demons in the future.”

  I could’ve pushed, asked for support, for advice; there are some things the Internet doesn’t cover. But then I saw his hands, two of them stained with blood I refused to ask about—and I didn’t want him near my daughter. Didn’t want him near me.

  I don’t need him, anyway.

  “Why do you ask, Lee?”

  “’Cause I need to ask him questions. For school.”

  “You can ask me.” I push the laptop aside. My hand doesn’t leave the plastic cover, though.

  “But I want to…” Lilo frowns. “I want to talk to him.”

  “Aren’t you a little young?” Now I just sound desperate. But she doesn’t need him. Shouldn’t need him. I screwed up but I’m doing better now, I’m reading, I’m learning. I’m letting her be the way she is.

  “Everyone in my class knows about their dad-dies.”

  “Later,” I promise. “Maybe later.”

  * * *

  I take Lilo’s sheets to the laundry room, pluck out bits of accidental webbing and dump them in the washer. When I return to make her bed anew, I open the window wide to air out her room. A glint under her desk catches my eye and makes me pause.

  There’s webs there, reflecting the sunlight. They stretch from the desk’s underside to her chair and the side of the drawers, huge and clumsy and unevenly spaced, with big gaps and knots and threads that clump together. They look abandoned midway through.

  I crouch. My finger traces the nearest web from millimeters away. Then I notice the garbage bin next to Lilo's desk; there’s an empty juice bottle and plastic candy wrappers and wadded-up printer paper with bright scribbles. Some of the paper balls are blank. I reach in and unfold one. It’s sticky with silk.

  I bite my lip. I know Lilo. She’s been trying and failing and cleaning up, then trying again.

  My dad searched my room when I was young. I’m not sure what for, because at five or six there wasn’t a lot for me to want to hide. All that came later: boyfriends—or simply boys—and alcohol and all those things I’ve sworn off for Lilo’s sake. My dad said I could talk to him, but by then, the unease and distrust had trickled in and settled, because who knew if he was still going through my stuff? Who knew if he was just hiding it better?

  I don’t want to do that.

  I don’t.

  But two minutes later, I find a photo in the inch of space between Lilo’s carpet and the drawers, a space that was empty when I vacuumed just last week. It’s a print-out from one of the websites Lilo and I studied.

  The photo shows a spiderweb, the kind with dew drops that seem carefully placed for maximum effect and minimum damage. The sun highlights ruler-straight patterns that burn soft yellow.

  It’s a work of art. And when I compare it to Lilo’s own webs, I see the frustration that laces every last, uneven thread.

  * * *

  I ask Lilo about the webs. I have to push a little, and I try to take it slowly, try not to make her feel any worse than she already seems to—she’s shuffling and bowing her head and fiddling with all her hands at once.

  “I didn’t like making the webs, anyway.” Tears well up. “I’m sorry, Momma.”

  “You need to talk to me. Okay? We can hang this photo up on the wall if you like. I can help you practice somehow. You have nothing to apologize for.”

  “But it’s not normal.”

  And we talk and a minute later she says, quietly, almost like she’s hoping for me not to hear, “I wanted to like it.”

  * * *

  When did she stop dancing? I remember that suddenly, as I’m scanning in photos my parents took with their old camera. Lilo no longer dances.

  Is that normal? Is that just growing up?

  I miss her spinning arms.

  * * *

  Something is wrong.

  Lilo wraps all six arms around herself like she used to do when cold. I can barely see her summery spaghetti top, hidden under rows and rows of tan arms. There’s nothing but fuzzy dark hair, the outlines of bones under skin.

  Yesterday, she turned nine.

  “I didn’t mean to.” She stretches out her upper left arm, revealing the paler inside. Two irregular red scratches stretch across it. She looks up, pleading. Her lip is swollen, split open, like she retreated her fangs too quickly. “Mom-ma”—like she’s a toddler again—“I didn’t mean to. I thought Momo liked it when I petted him—he was purring—and then I—I—I couldn’t—”

  She’s shaking as she leads me into the backyard, to a tiny, silken ball. She’s hidden Momo behind the trashcan. The cocoon seems smaller than it ought to.

  And that evening Lilo doesn’t eat much and I am hoping praying begging that she just feels guilty over Momo, that she just lost her appetite and that is all.

  * * *

  When she changes the channel every time she sees a cat on TV, it can still be guilt, right?

  But then it’s any animal, any small animal. It’s puppies on the street and peacock chicks in Retiro Park, and on the TV, it’s hamsters and birds and anthropomorphized cartoon mice and, one time, a wolverine. After ch
anging the channel, she always waits a bit, shooting furtive glances at the clock and at me while I do my translating or talk to clients on the phone. Her mouth distorts. Things press into her cheek. There’s the faint click of—of something. Like chittering fangs.

  And it’s usually twenty minutes, thirty if she really stretches it, before she opens the candy drawer or asks when dinner is.

  It never satisfies.

  * * *

  Lilo asks, “Why doesn’t anyone else see my arms?”

  She knows I can’t answer that, so I flick the tip of her nose and say what I always say: “Because you’re magic, Lee-lee.”

  “I told Conchita about my arms and she said I was crazy.”

  And my next words, my next joking, loving, apologetic words, they freeze on my tongue. Inside my shoes, my toes curl and press against the leather. “Why. Why did you tell Conchita?”

  “’Cause I wanted to know.” Lilo won’t meet my eyes. “What she’d think of me if she did see.”

  I promised her honesty. I tell her what Conchita might think.

  Sometimes I wish I’d never made that promise.

  * * *

  Lilo sometimes pulls one hand away from her video game controller to pop some candy into her mouth, to rub something from her eye, to yank curls away from her face and push them behind her ear. Then she returns the hand to the controller and continues to play.

  Other times, she stretches out my arms, pokes my sides where my ribs are. She stares in fascination as I chew my dinner.

  I try to make sure Lilo eats well. I let her choose the kind of meat she wants and how she wants it: raw, for her to mash and not me. I give her bugs I order online.

  I tell her it’s okay to use her arms, that she shouldn’t hide them, that she’s beautiful the way she is. I tell her all of that.

  But.

  But I wonder if it matters what I tell her if I can never show her.

  * * *