by ed. Pela Via
The surgeon met with Jack to discuss options, while Ernie lay in a room many floors away, kept alive by pumps and tubes and the hands of awestruck nurses. Both men folded and rested their hands atop the surgeon’s oak desk, poised like opposite ends of a business negotiation. Ernie hadn’t a hairline yet, so the surgeon agreed to cut and sew where he thought hair might grow. He sketched his plan with a green marker on a whiteboard propped beside the desk. The infant’s head formed at strange angles, and the mother’s apparently hasty drop-off only deepened the crevices, molded the already shifted bones to the difficult shape of rocks and metal tracks. Aesthetics meant little to Jack—his own grooming kit included one razor, a broken toothbrush, and a cracked mirror—so he told the surgeon, “I don’t care how the hair grows. You’re fine to just keep the brain in there however you can. Though honestly,” and he leaned close, breaching the desk’s perimeter with his large, hooked nose, “what are the chances it will ever work again anyway?”
The surgeon capped his marker. He shuffled through photographs taken upon Ernie’s arrival. He rotated particularly strange images, searching to orientate himself to the correct angles among so much realigned skin. He let a long sigh ruffle stray hairs from his mustache. “I’ll try to rebuild the brain back, but more importantly I’ll try to just keep it in there.” The doctor stayed with the photos. He stretched the sigh further. “I know you, Jack. You get paid by the carcass, and you’re not the type to prioritize species. Why did you keep this one?”
“I think it’s mine,” Jack said. “Can’t you see the resemblance?” He smiled for the doctor.
Hours later Jack occupied an emergency room waiting area with a family of three: one mother, two daughters. Between failed attempts to quiet the giggling girls, the mother dabbed her wet cheeks with a napkin. Jack met her glassy eyes twice, retreating quickly both times to his own projected pain. The girls played tag until one stubbed her toe. Only then did she join her mother’s tears.
After the surgery, the doctor pulled Jack from the waiting room back to his office. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the doctor said. “My team swears it too, that he should have died. We laid him out, went through the motions, we basically prepared for a loss. But that sound, the heart monitor, each beep would fuel another, and so on . . .” Each beep-beep, the doctor said, encouraged the boy’s heart to further share the rhythm.
Jack smiled past every superfluous word. “I have a son,” he said.
———
Jack’s home rests at the intersection of a strip of railroad he adopted fifteen years ago and a woody area known for spewing wildlife into the town’s suburban sprawl. He enjoys watching from his window, the animals’ adolescent pilgrimages from birthplace to a home of their own. But often the passages end interrupted. The years have trained Jack’s ears to recognize the subtle thump of an animal cut short over the thundering locomotive beat. Utility bills and rent have their ways of changing the ear’s physiology. The night Ernie dropped to the earth, that subtle thump against the ground woke Jack from a dream in which he cared for a child of his own. He cleared his head of the dream and stepped out into the dewy morning, still feeling the imagined child’s hand in his. “His name was right there on my lips,” he says to the empty field at his front door.
Anticipating no more than a single doe, perhaps a family of raccoons if he were lucky, Jack idled his rusty Ford the short distance to the tracks, letting the image of a son of his own stew in his head. He closed his eyes, let the muscle memory developed by years of traveling this same path steer his truck.
He saw first a foot, recognized from his dream. The leg cascaded down the gravel bank, ending at toes the size of infected mosquito bites. Jack accepted the child’s limp body not as a professional token, but as a realization of the night’s vision.
———
Home from the hospital, Jack lays Ernie upon the worn living room carpet. Twisted yarns cradle the tiny body, nesting the way weeds and rubbish did just weeks earlier. Unhappy to let the floor have his child, the new father builds comfort himself; he experiments with blankets of various textures and densities, settling on a half-complete afghan that a dead aunt willed to him during her final stages of dementia. The blanket dangles unraveled at one end, but otherwise suits the baby and his bandages. Ernie’s chest pulses to the irregular soundscape of cricket songs and croaking frogs. Jack watches his son survive through the night.
The night’s rhythm breaks with the day. As the sun quiets the crickets and frogs, Ernie quiets too, the faint rise and fall of his afghan slows to a scarcely perceptible blip. Jack, already attuned to the breath of this child, wakes by the silence, jumps from the floor beside the boy, and panics. The blanket soon stops beating. Ernie’s lips blue. Forfeiting the moment, Jack considers the shovel in his truck. “At least you were real for a day,” he says to the body.
A train whistles in the distance. Its wheels grind a familiar click-clack, click-clack, and with that click-clack little Ernie’s lip gathers crimson back, click-clack, click-clack. His valve flaps, whip-whap, then Jack picks at the limp wrap, unrolls the child and holds him close, afraid for what the passing train will leave as the click-clack inevitably dies to silence. Jack wills his own heart to pulse with the rhythm of the train. “Stay with me,” he tells the boy. The new father forces himself into a panic, imagining the worst for his boy, the worst for himself, a life as it was just weeks before, more pulling the dead from the ground without this chance to place the living upon it. He imagines the worst so to fool his body into anxiety, to keep his heart feeding the boy long after the passing train.
As the locomotive whistle grows and the click-clack rattles Jack’s window glass and dusts the carpet with abandoned cobwebs and ancient flakes of ceiling paint, Jack pulls the boy tighter. The sound drowns even their shared beats. The whistle eventually fades, Jack can hear his own heartbeat still drumming from within. He envelopes the boy, coaxing him to transition to Jack’s beat. Ernie opens his eyes for the first time. “Green,” Jack says. “Just like me.”
———
Ernie learns to walk. And soon after, takes to chasing trains. The engines’ laborious and productive rumble mocks Ernie’s own skewed gait. Jack anchors his boy with a shovel and brings him along to scrape fetid flesh from rocks and streets. Jack calls it the family business despite having no reason to fake pride in his work; Ernie’s comprehension tops out at the awe of his own footsteps. Intangibles like pride and family loyalty offer no beat of their own, so are of no use to the boy.
Some say the boy chased his mother’s heartbeat, that the trains’ rumble pounded stronger than Jack’s chest. These whispers, perhaps his own, never spoken outside his head, bring Jack nightly to tears, but still he stays close to the boy, charging the young heartbeat the way his mother never did.
Jack took to scattering his own collected dead animals along the track in hopes of keeping his boy occupied during passing trains. The boy’s misaligned eyes would widen, his crooked smile would stretch, his distressed shirt—a gift from his father’s closet—would throb at the chest as trains approached. “Mom,” Ernie said, six years old, his first word. The following morning, Jack rose early and started planting these bodies of his own.
Ernie scooped. He dumped. Jack retrieved the carcass and returned it to the ground. Ernie scooped. This was the new rhythm, but could sate Ernie only temporarily. The routine weakened Jack’s aging body, but strengthened his son’s. An unfair but inevitable transition. Jack couldn’t fight the train forever.
Ernie learns to wake to night trains. Jack builds alarm systems from rope and antique brass bells to intercept his son’s escape attempts. Years pass. Ernie’s awkward gait muscles to a skip, matures to a gallop, finally qualifies as a legitimate sprint. “Mom,” he said at age six. “I’m coming,” he learns at eight. One night, shaken awake by a railed monolith, larger than Jack had ever seen, he chases his boy, but cannot compete with the mother’s heartbeat. Jack manages a final goodbye, b
ut the deafening click-clack steals even that.
——————————
The World Was Clocks
by Amanda Gowin
for Heather
Descending the staircase as one, four legs in perfect time, the light was blue on four black braids.
Clasped hands parted with an electric pop as Tilly paused on a creaking stair. Her knuckles whitened on the rail. Rocking, she repeated the offending creak. Her eyes widened, cheeks reddened.
Tabitha, one stair lower and suddenly one plane removed, widened her eyes and laid a hand to her cheek.
Nothing.
Tilly said: “One day this place will fall in, and I will not be under it.”
Symmetry disappeared.
Tabitha scratched the palm of her hand, scratched the itch of a phantom limb to see Tilly’s half of the room stripped bare the following morning.
The oak tap-tapped at the window in sympathetic Morse code, but the sun and tree were too bright to be trusted. Finding Tilly’s imprint on the bare mattress, she folded herself against the light and pressed the concavity of her sister. What tomb?
Sixteen years old, Tabitha was astounded at the world through one set of eyes. Pausing on the judge and jury stair, her parents’ twinspeak crept up to her, peppered with words and phrases for the first time.
Tabitha stepped into their world.
A faded set? She stared. At five, the twins smiled from the sandbox and the mommy and daddy smiling down were vivid and flushed with youth.
Suddenly time was everything.
“I must acclimate myself into this world,” she whispered into the mirror, into Tilly. Forehead to the cool glass she remembered their hatred for Alice—Alice didn’t know. On the other side was another—where else would a twin come from? There had been much debate as to who belonged to this world, and who had daringly climbed in.
The tears her reflection gave back were a comfort until breath obscured the face in fog. Tabitha pressed, but the glass did not yield.
Ill-equipped, with naked eyes and thoughts, school whipped around her in a flurry of bodies, voices, and bells. Without Tilly the world was clocks. They hovered with round faces and she scurried away from their pointing hands.
“Their world.”
Other girls began to fascinate Tabitha. Peering from around her melancholy, studying them, a picket fence of red lockers lit a vertical path to the circle they made. Deep breath and sense of falling, one big step. Surrounded. She searched the eyes of a redhead, murmured into the ear of a brunette, smiled at a dark girl so different and perfect as to almost be unreal—this girl flushed and broke her gaze.
“We are—no, I am beautiful,” she told her conspirator in the long bedroom mirror.
Late nights in cars drinking gin from the bottle with a shy blonde who had never done this sort of thing. Tabitha kissed the girl’s palm and placed it flush with hers, admiring the differences.
The ghost of Tilly itched and Tabitha cried, palms pressed to their cold reflections in the mirror, an aura of moisture welding them.
Tabitha blinked, the bell of her skirt had paced her. She opened her eyes and high school was over, the girls disappeared. Again, she was expected to recreate the whole world.
Tabitha studied her parents—aged turtle doves—and envied their stasis.
She discovered males.
Clumsy and oppressive, they lacked softness. But she rested in the crooks of their arms while they confessed the same fears as the delicate girls she had loved.
And what was love? Yellow urine on a stick turning pink, pails of blue paint obliterating the room she and Tilly had known. Her parents asked who it belonged to, their brows furrowed.
“Me,” Tabitha answered, puzzled, hands on her warm belly.
She grew fat as the tree out her window unfolded tiny green hands. Love was color in the world. Her laughter drew laughter from the mouths and eyes of her parents—rusty notes that became well-oiled and silver, and came easily. Tabitha browned in the sun.
Her reflection no longer resembled Tilly’s. The mounting wire snapped as she took the mirror from the wall, and mourning for her twin ceased.
Movement and rush, laughter and tears as they piled in the car. Headlights slicing through the sheets of rain, tiny green suitcase on her lap, Tabitha was too happy to scream. Palms flat on the suitcase of carefully folded nightgowns and handmade baby clothes, and two worn bears exactly the same.
Color grows slowly but disappears in an instant—in a click of teeth hard enough to make the tongue bleed. Alone in the hospital, the color and motion were sucked away into the fluorescent lights above, leaving only the drone of the doctors’ voices.
Tabitha remembered nothing but the taste of pennies. She woke from the dream into this ugly grey world to hear about ‘the accident’ from a stranger. A story as preposterous as the TV ones her mother watched in the afternoons.
“So I dreamed it all?” She saw only her suitcase, tiny and insignificant in the corner.
The doctor didn’t understand.
“Where’s Tilly?”
All efforts to reach her sister had been unsuccessful . . .
Rolling to the wall, the better to forget the little suitcase, she cried without the comfort even of a mirror.
The clocks stopped, or spun backwards and forwards in apathetic bursts. The lights marked a forgotten pattern, off and on. Beeping machines, murmurs from the hallway. Scratchy, drab sheets around her and under her hands. Interrogations were called ‘evaluations.’ Armed with clipboards and scowls, white coats floated in like vultures, made their faces into question marks and scratched at their boards before leaving.
Finally, the word she longed to hear: Release.
The sad box of a room ejected her. A woman with careful hands tucked her into a car and followed familiar roads. ‘Social worker’ the woman was called.
Tabitha rubbed her eyes, waking, planted in the living room with the suitcase at her feet.
Not one clock dared tick. The house was a tomb.
No pain in the crescents her nails made in her palms, but the rage was consuming. She dragged all the mirrors into the painted room. Her father’s hammer was found on the porch rail, laid to rest after hanging a wind chime from the rafter. She gripped the handle tightly as dragonflies spun and tinkled, leaving spots in her eyes.
Her heart swelled. Running up the stairs, the fateful step creaked and she released a howl that scratched her throat in its escape, blurred her vision, but did not slow her ascent. She raised the hammer, watched by a thousand overlapping Tillys and Tabithas, and did not put it down until the pieces were too small to reflect.
Yawning, she dismantled things little by little to know she was awake. Time was marked by Social Worker’s visits—the woman arrived periodically to wear a face both worried and confused.
Mainly it was the dolls that worried Social Worker.
The project had been time-consuming—taking them apart and hanging the pieces by bright skeins in the branches of the big tree.
Social Worker warned about the group home.
The dolls belonged to the twins, their mother had dragged them from the attic back in the time of Tabitha’s swollen belly. Discovering them in a sad pile on her parents’ bed, she remembered the chaplain at the hospital saying her baby had gone into the sky. It was comforting. She mimicked it the only way she knew.
Sometimes when the wind blew, the plastic arms knocked together and she thought of babies clapping, and the dragonfly wind chime gave up a few rusty notes. For a moment her heart was light and so was the world, for a moment there was color, faint hues of blue and gold in the sky, blue in the dolls’ eyes.
What could it matter to the warm body whose job was only to see that she was eating and keeping herself clean? Turning her head, Social Worker eventually went away again. Falling, change, upside down, all these words were forgotten.
One day a taxicab appeared, an improbability so far from town, and crunched to a stop
in a cloud of gravel dust. She rose—the porch swing gave a perfect view, but she did not believe. From the cloud emerged Tilly, suitcase in hand. On her hip balanced a birdlike child of perhaps two, black hair and round eyes.
Tilly shuffled down the walk, head down, steps deliberate. The child’s eyes flickered back and forth between the twins and her mouth made a perfect O, asking, “Who?”
“Tabitha,” Tilly said in both answer and greeting, dropping the suitcase. Her eyes flitted over the tree.
“What’s her name?” Tabitha’s voice was a croak.
“Don’t know. Won’t tell me, won’t answer to anything.” A single braid snaked over Tilly’s shoulder, scars zigzagged the arm enfolding the child. “Where are the others?”
“Dead.”
Tilly nodded. “I’ll come in and never leave again.”
“No.”
“I’ll come in anyway.” With sad eyes she plodded up the porch steps.
The little girl put out both arms and Tabitha wrapped her up, the weight comfortable against her, warmth unfamiliar. Tiny fingers linked behind her neck. The screen door slammed behind all of them and Tabitha’s limbs tingled. The nameless child dropped to her bare feet and scrambled under the kitchen table.
“Can I stay in our room?” Tilly asked.
“It’s not ours.”
Tabitha watched her sister—Tilly’s eyes swallowed every change, her hand fluttered over the stair rail.
The rattle of pans, crack of eggs, sizzle of bacon failed to draw the girl out. Tabitha fought the feeling of waking up, stirred and turned and blinked. She felt the child watching.
“What’s your name?” Tabitha asked.
“Tabitha.” A heart-shaped face appeared between the chair legs. Blue eyes. Voice like a bell, a wind chime.
“Yes. What’s your name?”
“Tabitha.”
Tilly reappeared at the foot of the stairs, pale.
Bending, Tabitha asked, “Will you be Tabby? We can’t both be Tabitha.”
