by Pratt, Tim
“What happened to your feet?” he asked when she’d finished drawing the circle.
She glanced at him, frowning. “Do you know the story of the little mermaid?”
“I saw the movie,” Billy said.
“I don’t know about any movie. I’m talking about the one where the mermaid is given legs so that she can walk around on land, but every step is agony, as if knives are being driven into her feet. That story.”
“I don’t know that story,” Billy said. He looked at her feet again, fascinated. “You were a mermaid?”
She laughed. “No, kid. But my dad liked the idea, and thought making my feet hurt like that every time I left the house would be a good way to keep me from running off.” She shook her head, her dark red hair swinging and obscuring part of her face. “Didn’t work, though. I could ignore the pain for a while, and eventually I always found somebody to carry me.”
“Your dad did that?” Billy couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“Yeah. When that didn’t work, he tried the box. He said it would keep me young and beautiful, and I guess it did, but he didn’t tell me he never planned to let me out. But I’m my father’s daughter, and I know tricks, too. It took a long time, but I finally managed to get away, glass box and all—”
“Caroline!” someone shouted.
Billy jumped, and the girl put a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she whispered. “The circle keeps him from seeing us, but he can still hear us.”
They sat very still. The voice called again. “Caroline! I know you’re here.”
Mr. Mancuso appeared, walking into the pool of blue-tinted brightness cast by the sodium-vapor lights. He headed straight for Billy’s bike, propped against the pallets, outside the protective circle. “Oh, little boy,” he called. “I know you’re here. You found her, didn’t you? My pretty little girl in the glass box.”
Mr. Mancuso was Caroline’s dad. Billy thought of her scarred feet and tried to breathe quietly.
“I knew if I followed you I’d find her,” Mr. Mancuso said. “Little boys get everywhere, they see everything. Where’ve you gone? Come out and give her up, my boy. I’m used to young men doing foolish things for my Caroline, but you’re a little younger than most.” He laughed. “She’s a bad girl, Billy, always running off, abandoning her old man. You can understand how much that hurts, can’t you? Your father left you. Nothing hurts worse than being left behind. I’m offering a straight trade, boy. You give me Caroline, and I’ll give you back your father. I know you’re afraid he’d just run off again if he came back... but I can make it so he won’t. I can make him want to stay.”
Billy believed him, and part of him wanted to shout, to scuff away the chalk circle with his foot and let Mr. Mancuso in. Because he loved his dad, and he wanted him back. Mr. Mancuso was right. Nothing hurt like being abandoned.
Billy turned his head. Caroline stared at him, her eyes wide. She crouched perfectly still, watching to see what he would do. Billy thought about opening his mouth. He could scream before she stopped him, and then he’d get his dad back. His mother would be happy, and she wouldn’t yell at him so much, and she would let him go and play with his friends.
But Billy remembered Caroline’s tears, when she was inside the box. No matter how tough she seemed now, she’d been crying before. And her feet... if something like that, some spell, was the only way to make Billy’s dad stay home, it was better to let him stay away.
Maybe some things did hurt worse than being abandoned.
Mr. Mancuso touched the bike’s handlebars, then sniffed his fingers. He walked toward the coffin, frowning, squinting.
He stopped on the edge of the circle. “Now what’s this?” he said. He waved his hands in front of him, frowning. “Something’s amiss.”
Caroline grabbed Billy’s arm, her fingernails digging into his skin. She looked at her father, who was muttering, and moving his hands in strange patterns, and chuckling to himself.
Billy looked around. The far edge of the circle went right up to the wall of the Safeway. There was a hole in the bricks there, a small opening half-hidden by a broken pallet. Billy pointed toward the hole. Caroline frowned. Billy gestured more vigorously, a shooing-in motion. She shook her head.
Trust me, Billy mouthed. Caroline scowled, then nodded. She moved laboriously away on hands and knees, carefully avoiding the fragments of the casket lid. Billy got up and tiptoed to the casket. When Caroline reached the edge of circle, near the dark hole, Billy put his hands on the casket and shoved as hard as he could.
It didn’t resist him this time. The glass box slid off the pallet and smashed on the asphalt, shattering just like Dad’s brandy decanter had when Mom hurled it into the fireplace. Caroline scurried into the hole, the noise of her escape covered by the splintering of glass. Fragments of the coffin cascaded over the chalk line, breaking whatever charm had hidden Billy before.
Mr. Mancuso blinked at him, then stepped on the broken glass. “Where is she?”
Billy did his best to look like a scared kid. It wasn’t hard. He whimpered and backed away. “I don’t know. I broke open the coffin, and let her out, and then she drew this circle around me and told me that if I stepped outside it her dad would catch me, and put me in a glass box until I ran out of air and died.”
“Why did you shove the coffin over?” His hands moved slowly, sinuously, as if independent of the rest of his body.
Billy shrank away. “You came so close, I was sure you’d find me. I was afraid you’d put me inside the box, so I broke it. I was afraid you’d put the lid back on and seal me up.”
“That’s just what I should do, too,” he said. “Why didn’t you do as I asked? Why didn’t you take me to her? I would have given you your father back.”
“I know,” Billy said, and when he cried, the tears were real. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Mr. Mancuso kicked the fragments of the coffin. “I should punish you, little boy. I should tie you to your mother forever, make it so you vomit blood if you’re ever out of her sight. Does that sound nice?” He grinned, and the snake-dance of his hands sped up. “You don’t have the will my Caroline does, you’d never manage to break that bond. And when your mother dies—because all of you always die—you’ll have to lay atop her grave just to stay alive. Yes. I’d make you a devoted son.”
Billy closed his eyes and whimpered.
“Bastard,” Caroline said. “Leave him alone.”
Billy’s eyes snapped open. Mr. Mancuso whirled around. Caroline was standing outside the circle. She must have crawled through the dark, charred inside of the grocery store and come out another hole in the wall. She held a large triangular shard of glass, from the coffin or just from the general wreckage around the store, Billy didn’t know. She put the point of the glass against her throat. “Let the kid go, Dad, or I’m really going to leave you forever.”
“You wouldn’t,” Mr. Mancuso said.
“You know I would.”
Mr. Mancuso looked at Billy, then spat. “Fine. Come back to me, and I’ll let the boy go.”
“No negotiation, no compromise. Let him go now, or I’ll cut my throat.”
“If you kill yourself, I’ll do anything to the boy I want.” His hands were moving slowly again, hypnotically, but Caroline didn’t look at them.
“You won’t let me kill myself, though. Then you wouldn’t have anything left.”
Mr. Mancuso’s hands stopped moving, and then he slumped. He suddenly looked very old. “Go on, then,” he said, flapping a hand at Billy.
“I want your blood on it, Dad. That you won’t harm him or anyone he loves.”
Mr. Mancuso frowned. “Are you trying to trick me? You think he loves you, that you’ll be protected?”
Billy looked at her, startled.
“He might love me a little, for coming back just now, but that’s not what I mean. I mean his mother, and his father, wherever he is. You never try to hurt m
e, anyway, do you Daddy? You just try to keep me safe.” She spat the last word, and pressed the glass closer to her throat, until a spot of blood welled.
“Fine!” Mancuso shouted. He held a long, shining blade in his hand, a slender silvery knife that had appeared as if by magic, but without sparkles or fanfare. Mr. Mancuso cut his palm and made a fist, dripping blood onto the asphalt. The blood hissed and smoked where it touched the ground, and Billy backed away, afraid it would spatter on his shoes. “I will not harm this boy or any he loves.”
“Go on, Billy,” Caroline said, lowering the shard of glass.
“But what will happen to you?” Billy said. “What about—”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You let me out of the coffin. I’m better off now than I was before. I might get away clean this time.”
“You’re mine,” Mr. Mancuso said. “You’re my blood, and you will not leave me.”
“Get on your bike and go, Billy,” Caroline said. She sounded very tired, as tired as Billy’s mom often did.
Billy took his bike and pedaled away, not looking back, crying as he rode, the wind blowing his tears away.
Once he got home, Billy crept into the house, only to find his mother lying on his bed with the lights on, clutching his pillow.
“Mom?” he said.
“Billy?” she said, sitting up, still holding the pillow. Her hair was mussed, her eyes red from crying. “I thought you ran away.” She shivered, and stopped speaking, and sobbed, soundlessly, shaking.
Billy dropped his bag and got into bed with her. He held his mother in his arms and cried with her. “No, Mom, I won’t run away, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Never leave me, Billy,” she said, her voice muffled against him. “Just stay with me, don’t go, never ever go away.”
Never? Billy thought. Never ever?
He held his mother close.
He said, “Shh.
Terrible Ones
The Greek Chorus first appeared on Thursday night, as Zara lugged two paper bags full of groceries into the gravel public parking lot. The Chorus members wore tattered togas made from faintly flower-patterned, oft-washed bedsheets, and their faces were painted white with greasepaint.
Since she was in Berkeley, Zara assumed the Chorus members were performance artists of some kind, and didn’t pay much attention when they drifted from out of the bushes and among the parked cars to stand in a loose semicircle a few feet behind her. As she unlocked her trunk and wedged the grocery bags between a box of mismatched shoes and a broken lamp she’d never gotten around to throwing out, the Chorus said—in a single voice, from many throats—“Crazed with rapture, she sings and trills, dark bird that loves the night.” The line sounded familiar—Zara was an actress, and she’d done several classical plays—but she couldn’t quite place it.
Zara straightened, slammed her trunk, and looked at the Chorus. The fading light and white make-up smeared their faces into blank anonymities. They might have been looking at her expectantly. “Fuck off,” she said. “You’re in my way.”
One of the Chorus members cupped his ear theatrically. “What did you say? Never mind, I heard—as I hear your destiny. Weeping, cacophony, cries that assault the ear.”
Zara got into her car, locked the doors, and threw it into the reverse. The Chorus scattered like pigeons making way for a bus. Once she’d backed past them, they reformed in front of her car, and their eyes shone in her headlights. She flipped up the high beams, and they shielded their faces from the brightness. Zara turned the wheel and drove away, leaving the Chorus to stand in the cloud of dust her wheels threw up from the gravel.
***
The Furies were old in those days. Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera lived together in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, in an apartment building decorated with chipped carvings of lizards, between a strip club and a three-story liquor/erotic book store combination. Sometimes they became confused and lived for a while, cuckoo-style, in someone else’s home. The rightful residents would go on drunken benders, or crack their skulls on curbs, or suffer hysterical blindness—whatever the specific cause, the effect was ignorance of the presence of the Furies in their midst. Eventually, inevitably, the ladies would look around and realize they’d been sleeping in strange beds, eating someone else’s saltines and vanilla wafers, and they would leave, allowing the people they’d disrupted to recover their senses and resume their lives. Those intruded upon by the Furies in this way tended to throw open their windows and bundle their sheets down to the laundromat, for the ladies left a smell of dried blood and rancid olive oil behind when they departed.
Alecto was the most practical of the three. She did the shopping and kept the ants out of the kitchen. Megaera muttered darkly to herself, and walked the streets at night, hoping to be attacked—all she wanted was an excuse to do violence in self-defense. But in a place where murders were commonplace, no one ever threatened Megaera, who shuffled along in her housecoat until dawn. Tisiphone tended to stay closer to home. She went down the stairs fifteen or twenty times a day to check their brass-and-glass mailbox in the lobby, even on Sundays, though they never got anything other than take-out restaurant menus and pamphlets from upstart religions. Once, years before, when they were more self-aware, they received a jury-duty notice, addressed to the apartment’s previous occupant. The ladies had a good laugh over that.
One day, while Alecto stood dropping dried scorpions and seahorses into a pot of boiling water on the stove, and Megaera sat staring out the window at the drug dealers and college students thronging the sidewalk, Tisiphone went down the creaking stairs to their mailbox. She opened the box with a tarnished key, and inside found a thick piece of parchment, folded in thirds, sealed with a dollop of red wax. The symbol embossed in the wax was a monstrous face, mouth gaping; an oracle’s face.
Tisiphone broke the seal and opened the parchment. It was what she’d been waiting for, what they’d all been waiting for. A letter of commission.
Weeping a little, for reasons she could not have fully named, for happiness and anxiety and simply because the worn-down gears in her mind refused to mesh properly anymore, Tisiphone went back up the stairs, clutching the parchment, afraid it would disappear or transform into a Thai restaurant menu. She had to tell Alecto and Megaera. They had to prepare.
Zara got home, and kicked off her shoes, and hurriedly put her groceries away. She only had a few moments to eat before leaving for rehearsal. The red light on her answering machine blinked at a seizure-inducing rate. There were so many messages since this morning that even the machine appeared to have lost count. She pushed the button on her way to the kitchen, and Doug’s voice emerged from the tinny speakers, calm and rational, a financial analyst’s voice, saying, “I need you to beat me with a bamboo cane,” and “I need you to plug my ass and lash me bloody.” One message after another, a continuous litany—whenever the machine cut him off, he just called back and resumed his patient pleading. Zara rooted through her fridge for mold-free cheese, and cursed as she listened—this was the second day he’d called, and apparently he wasn’t going to give up easily.
One of those assholes at the club must have given Doug her home number, probably for a substantial bribe. At least he wasn’t calling her cell phone. She wondered, briefly, if he had her address, if she should worry. But if he showed up here, she could play along, get him naked and tied up, then shove him out in the hall, or call the cops, or try to reach his wife—surely someone like Doug, middle-management pillar of the financial district, would have a wife, someone who wouldn’t approve of him going to clubs like Damien’s Basement, or of his more expensive private play-partners, like that of her own summer-job persona, Mistress Zara.
Mistress Zara was just a role she played, no different than Ophelia, Medea, or Blanche DuBois—though she did enjoy whipping assholes like Doug, she had to admit, and it paid better than temping. She’d made enough money working at Damien’s over the summer to concentrate on the
ater for the rest of the year. At the time, it seemed like the perfect job. She hadn’t realized Doug would get so attached. He didn’t understand that their relationship, such as it was, stopped when she put down the whip. She’d have to do something about him, eventually—get one of her big, tattooed friends to pay him a visit at work and tell him to fuck off, for instance—but she didn’t have time to worry about it right now. Final dress rehearsal was tonight, and the show opened tomorrow.
Zara ate a cheese-and-wheat-bread sandwich while standing up at the counter, followed it with a gulp of lowfat milk, grabbed her bag, and slipped out of the apartment, with Doug still droning on her machine about how he needed her, she owed him, they had a connection.
In the empty apartment, a new voice spoke from the machine, another message hidden among Doug’s. It was a woman’s voice, smoky, throaty, like a torch-singer past her prime. “I know you won’t hear this, Zara, but I’ve got to give you warning, and this counts, by the rules. There are three old ladies coming to see your play tomorrow night, and they’re harsh critics. Maybe you should let your understudy play the lead. There. Advice dispensed. Nice and fair.”
A click, and then it was Doug again, demanding all the torments he thought Zara owed him.
***
Zara ran to catch the BART train from the East Bay into San Francisco, thinking briefly that if Doug saw her dressed like this (in running shoes, a t-shirt, and loose cotton pants) instead of a leather corset, knee-high boots, and several silver piercings, it would help disabuse him of his illusions about their relationship. She went into the tiled, brightly lit station and headed for the escalator, only to encounter a blockade of scaffolding, sawhorses, and yellow tape—the escalator was closed. A crudely hand-lettered sign with an arrow directed her around the blockage. Cursing, sure she would miss her train, she followed the signs, walking along a passageway of covered scaffolding farther than seemed reasonable—was the train station really so big?—until finally reaching a stopped escalator that led, apparently, up to the platform for San Francisco-bound trains. She began to wish she’d driven, even though parking was nearly impossible in the part of the Mission district where the theater was.
