Beautiful Sorrows

by Mercedes M. Yardley

  She hugged him back and took him to the Water Room. Keeping her feet carefully away from the edge, she tossed the cat into the air. He sang a joyful note before splashing into the water, zipping around the floating furniture and stroking his way even deeper into nothing. His happy sounds created bubbles that floated to the surface and broke.

  There was a knock at the door. Surprised, the girl danced over to answer it. It took several minutes to disassemble the door enough so a dark haired man could step through.

  His hair was mussed and he held a bouquet of singing flowers. He peered at the girl with raised eyebrows.

  “Perhaps I am lost?” he said almost hopefully. Toby the tiger shark prowled over to inspect him. He rubbed against the man’s leg several times, his rough skin fraying the corduroy of his pants. The man patted the shark’s dorsal fin absently, and Toby slid away from his hand.

  “Perhaps,” the girl agreed. The flowers had their heads together like an old barbershop quartet. The man looked at them again and handed the bouquet to the girl. She accepted it graciously. The flowers applauded themselves and began a new song, something melancholy.

  “How about something with more pep?” asked the girl, and the flowers switched to an old June Christy song.

  “Lovely,” praised the girl, and the flowers beamed.

  “Anyway,” she said to the handsome, dark-haired man, “what brings you here. Can I help you in some way?”

  His head swiveled as he studied the room. “I’ve never seen a place quite like this. It’s extraordinary.” His gaze settled on the girl, whose hair floated around her face as though she were underwater. She smiled at him.

  “It is quite wonderful,” she agreed. “Although I do get lonely. I was forgotten here, you see. I had a friend who used to visit quite often, but that was so very long ago. Perhaps he has changed, and I haven’t, and I will wander around this eccentric apartment reading poetry and evading the sun and keeping the horrors away from those who can’t do it themselves. I suppose this is loss. I wonder if I should be sad.”

  The man didn’t have an answer for her, but he studied her face with eyes too serious and too angry for someone so young. The girl didn’t blush under his analytical gaze, but watched him carefully, and her smile grew even wider inside her heart.

  “Ah, you have seen many horrors,” she said knowingly. The man nodded gravely, and didn’t flinch when she reached for his hand.

  “Then that is why you are here,” she told him, and led him through the apartment. He wrapped his fingers around hers carefully, and listened as she spoke. “Don’t mind Toby; he’s a bit of a pest. I have a cat who loves to swim. He’s always in this room. Do you care for sweets? I have some fresh muffins, if you’d like one.” She chattered away and he listened, a stranger in a place shielded from horrors, his empty shoes left by the door, already being mauled by a curious tiger shark.

  CROSSWISE COSMOS SABOTAGE

  I am standing in the backyard wearing a red shirtwaist dress and heels like it’s the 1950s. I’m spraying something with the hose.

  It’s my son.

  “He likes it,” I tell my neighbors, who are staring at me over the fence. My son is hunched over with his hands covering his head. “It sounds like he’s crying, but really he’s laughing.”

  It doesn’t matter what I say; my neighbor doesn’t speak much English. I hear him chattering to his wife as soon as he’s inside the sliding glass door. Maybe one of these days he’ll actually close it.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I say, and turn off the hose. My son raises his face to me, water running into his eyes. “Maybe Daddy will hose you down after work tonight.” I coil the hose neatly, ignoring my child as he throws himself backward on the ground. The grass is lush. He won’t hurt himself. The neighbor’s wife rushes to her window to peek at us. I smile brightly and wave, walking across the lawn on my tiptoes so my heels don’t sink into the grass. She disappears behind the curtains. My son is still screaming. I step inside my house, kick off my shoes, and slide the door closed. It dims the sound a little.

  The doorbell rings, and I’m surprised. It’s the bug guy.

  “I thought you were coming on Thursday,” I say.

  “Nope, Tuesday.”

  I don’t care; I’m just happy to see him. He’s letting the cool air out, so I take him by the sleeve and pull him inside. My daughter crawls over and grabs onto my skirt. I pick her up.

  “What do you have?” The bug guy asks. He’s young and pretty. He has huge plugs in his ears, and although I don’t usually like that sort of thing, I like it on him. They say: “Hey, I’m not going to be a bug man forever. I’m going to be Rob Thomas.” It’s oddly endearing. My daughter reaches for his white work coat, and I switch her to the other hip.

  “Cockroaches,” I say. “Big ones. Everywhere.” I tell him one crawled across the small of my back while I was sleeping the other day. I had been all curled into a ball. I tell him they could be a viable, renewable source of food if we could all just get over the yick factor. They live through anything.

  “Not this stuff,” he says, and goes to work. “When this activates, they’re going to want to bail, right? But they’re all going to die.” His obvious joy over their demise makes me happy. Bloodthirsty. My son wanders in, still dripping. He takes one look at the bug guy and cries.

  The bug guy looks at me.

  “He doesn’t understand,” I say simply. The bug guy nods. I smile and call my son into his bedroom to change his clothes.

  The doorbell rings again. It’s my neighbor from across the street and her terrible child. I want to beat the kid with a hairbrush. Most of us want to, but nobody ever mentions that to his mother.

  The boy goes tearing off to cause damage and his mother sighs dramatically and sinks down at the table. “What a stressful day,” she says, and lays a hand against her forehead. She spies the bug guy, whistling cheerily as he sprays under the kitchen sink.

  “Disgusting. You’re infested,” she says, and shudders exaggeratedly.

  I hear something breaking in the back room, and go check. Her son has taken my jewelry box and thrown it into the bathroom sink. I come back to see the mom has my Coke bottle out on the table.

  “So let me tell you about this day,” she says, and pours Coke into her glass. We both pretend not to notice how much of it she drinks. There won’t be any left for my real friend when she comes over, but I don’t mind that much. I’ve decided every sip she takes earns me another iris stolen from her garden.

  My daughter pulls the tiny keys off the laptop keyboard and promptly starts choking. I lay her against my shoulder and whack her back until she spits it up on my shoulder. The ‘J’ key. Always a troublemaker.

  There is sobbing from my son’s bedroom. The bug guy’s spray-gun looks like a giant hypodermic needle. I leave Neighbor and Boy to do as they will, and go check on my little one.

  “We’ll be in here if you need us,” I tell the bug guy, and he nods.

  I sit on my son’s bed, both kids on my lap. They snuggle against me. I read stories and my neighbor pops in with the phone.

  “It’s your husband,” she says.

  I take the phone. “Hi,” I say.

  “She answered the phone like she lives there,” he says.

  “It’s all part of her plan. Soon she’s going to kill me and just move in.”

  “That would suck. I could never live on a vegetarian diet.”

  I smile although he can’t see me. He knows this, laughs and hangs up.

  There’s a hesitant knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I say.

  The bug guy opens the door to my son’s red and blue bedroom, looks around a little bit. He’s cute in the way that small children are cute. Puppies. I want to put him in a box with a warm towel and a hot water bottle.

  “Your friend left,” he says. “The kid pulled down your blinds in the living room. His mom took a necklace out of that broken box in the sink. I don’t think I was suppose
d to see it.”

  He holds out the paperwork for me to sign. I pat the bed next to me and he shoves over some stuffed animals and sits down. He’s not as scary without his equipment and my kids squirm over to him.

  “When I was a kid,” I say, “I’d sit on my bed and pretend that it was a boat. I’d take the broom and paddle my way over to Hawaii.”

  “My bed was always surrounded by molten lava,” he says.

  I look at the paper again and smile. His name is Billy. I’m not surprised.

  “I have a confession to make,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Your friend here asked for some spray to take home. I told her I can’t do that, but she kept bugging me. So finally, I gave her a squirt bottle.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I ask.

  “It’s full of sugar water.”

  I laugh, but he still looks worried.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. My son is trying to look under Billy the Bug Guy’s shirt. “For everything she does to me, I pay myself back in flowers from her garden.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Of course not. That would take the sport out of it.”

  That night I get a phone call. It’s my fake neighbor friend.

  “There was somebody in my yard,” she tells me. “Sneaking around. I think it’s a member of a gang.”

  I don’t know what to say to this, but it doesn’t matter. She has more to share.

  “I have ants,” she says. Her voice was trembling with, I want to say rage. “I have never had ants before. Never.”

  I remember the sugar water and try not to crack up.

  “And you have somebody coming up your drive. Somebody in a ball cap. Maybe it’s the gang member!”

  The doorbell rings.

  “He’s running away!” she hisses.

  “Gotta go,” I say, and hang up.

  I answer the door. Flowers are strewn all over the porch. Irises, cosmos, daffodils.

  “Who is it?” asks my husband, coming up from behind me. The air smells sweet.

  “Flowers,” I tell him.

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “The bug guy swiped fake neighbor friend’s flowers and then he ran away.”

  My husband yawns. “Good for him. That took initiative.”

  I take a flower from the porch and slide it behind my ear. There are enough blooms here to fill the tub.

  Maybe I’ll do that.

  LIFE

  Anna lay back in the long grass, staring at the halo around the sun. Her gaze skittered away and landed briefly on a heart-shaped cloud before looking past it into forever.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Quit said. He was sprawled out in the grass as well, his head resting on Anna’s abdomen. He still had the flowers in his hair that she had braided into it earlier.

  “I don’t believe that life is meant to be fair,” Anna said. She felt the warm weight of his head rise and fall with her breath. The responsibility of it scared her a little, and she watched her stomach go flat, held it there until she gasped again. Quit’s brown hair fluttered in the breeze that she created.

  “I could love you like my brother does.” His voice was surprisingly steady. He had a lighter cadence than Michael Thomas, a much more playful sound.

  “Say that again,” she commanded. He did.

  “You almost sounded like him that time.”

  “That’s not funny, Anna.”

  “I didn’t say it to be funny.”

  Quit’s long brown fingers worked at a piece of grass, shredding it into thin slivers. He tossed them up into the air and they were carried away by the wind.

  “A thing of beauty,” he said about nothing in particular, and held his hand up to the sky. Anna reached out and grabbed his index finger. He wrapped his hand around hers.

  “What do you think he’s thinking about right now?” she said, turning their laced fingers into the light. Her foot rested in the patch of grass that usually belonged to Michael Thomas. She wiggled her toes there.

  “Dying,” Quit said simply, and kissed her hand. His lips left a spot of moisture across her knuckles, and she squinted at it. He began to kiss the tips of her fingers, each one in turn, but she pulled her hand away.

  “Stop it,” she said, and put her hands over her ears.

  “I was just practicing.”

  Anna ignored him, listening instead to the muffled sound of the wind and the grass through the palms of her hands. Quit began to hum, and turned his face toward her belly. She felt the vibrations through her skin.

  With her ears covered, her breathing began to sound very loud. She worked on making it slow and even, lining it up with the beating of her heart. Four beats to every breath in, four beats to every breath out. Like the machines that counted Michael Thomas’s breaths.

  “He always got to the things that I wanted first,” Quit was saying in the background. The way that he shaped his vowels was painfully lovely. “He was always older and faster than I was. He wasn’t content to wait for anything. He’s probably looking at this as a challenge.” He traced lazy circles high on Anna’s thigh where her yellow dress had ridden up. She remembered vaguely that she had kicked off her shoes somewhere in the high grass, and couldn’t quite remember where they were.

  “I don’t think…that I will ever be able to find my car in the parking lot without him,” she whispered suddenly. The sun’s halo burned in her vision when she closed her eyes. “Michael Thomas always remembers things like that.”

  Quit ran his hand over her leg like he was erasing something written in the sand. He pulled her hemline down demurely to her knees, smoothed it there.

  “I could help you find your car,” he said. She shook her head, rustling the grass.

  “You get as lost as I do, Quit.”

  “I could try.”

  Anna slid out from under him, cozied up to him nose to nose. She ran her hands through his hair, slid them over his cheekbones and rested her thumbs in the hollows beneath. His lashes were wet.

  She slipped her knee between both of his, and rested her nose in the hollow of his throat. She felt his pulse jump under her cheek.

  “You’re alive,” she said, and closed her eyes. She felt his shoulder twitch once, and then he stilled. His hand rested on her back. It almost felt like Michael Thomas’s hand. She had to say it again.

  “You’re alive.”

  LUNA E VOLK

  The first time Andros saw her, he knew. He had been raised on tales of the old ways and recognized immediately that there was something more to this girl, something rolling under her skin like the waves of the sea. She was too beautiful; her eyes were too new. She saw magic and wonder in things everybody else took for granted.

  “Isn’t that stunning?” she said once, studying a tiny white flower that bloomed near a brick wall. The men agreed vocally, as they agreed with everything that she said. The women narrowed their eyes. The girl didn’t seem to notice.

  “What is your name?” Andros asked her. She straightened and faced him. Starlight shone through her skin.

  “I’m Serena. Who are you?”

  “Andros,” he said. His heart cried out in joy. Serena? Even her name sounded mystical.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked knowingly, and Serena laughed.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Maybe not to everyone, but it is to me.” He smiled at her, a we’re-sharing-a-secret smile, and Serena laughed again.

  “You’re a strange man, Andros. But I like you.”

  He liked her too, whoever she was. Wherever she had come from.

  He tried to recall everything he could about shape shifters. Was she a skinwalker? He cast the idea aside immediately. Too lovely. Too ephemeral. He felt only lust and desire and his protective instincts rise to the surface when he was around her. No fear. No distrust.

  A selkie? A mermaid? Did she come from the sea? This wasn’t something he could ask, and she could never tel
l him; but more than that, he should be able to piece this together on his own.

  He asked her out. He rented a canoe and valiantly rowed them around the tiny pond that the city deemed a lake.

  “So,” he said, panting a little from the exertion, “do you like to swim?”

  Serena shuddered delicately. “Oh, goodness, no. I abhor the water. I nearly drowned once when I was a child, and I have been deathly afraid of it ever since.”

  He stopped rowing and the boat drifted silently.

  “But you’re here with me,” he pointed out. Serena bit her lip and gave a small smile.

  “Well, yes. This is where you wanted to come.”

  “But if you’re afraid...”

  Her cheeks reddened ever so slightly. “I am afraid. I’m telling myself to be brave, because the water isn’t very deep and I believe that you wouldn’t let me drown, but I’m still afraid. Yet this is where you wanted to be, and I wanted to be with you.”

  She turned her face away from him. He studied her dark hair, her pale skin painted with that delicate blush. He suddenly understood what she was trying to say.

  “Oh,” he said, surprised and delighted.

  “Oh,” she answered, and covered her face with her hands. Andros leaned forward and took them.

  “I would kiss you right now, but I have seen the movies and know that this is when I would upset the canoe. And I never want you to be afraid,” he told her.

  “How very practical,” she agreed, and they both started to laugh. Andros rowed for shore.

  She wasn’t a selkie. Not a water nymph or a mermaid. She must be something else.

  He brought her to a steakhouse for their next date. He stuffed his mouth with meat and watched her push her salad around her plate.

  “Not much of a carnivore?” he asked her.

  Serena smiled at him quizzically. “That’s a rather unusual question, Andros.”

  He swallowed and then grinned, his teeth sharp in the dim lighting. “I don’t mean it to be. I love a good steak. I could eat one every night. But you ordered a salad. Does meat make you feel...unclean?”