***
I sit in the shade of the door, but the sun hides away behind a chalky sky. The clouds move in like angry saviors, clogging up the humidity but keeping the day darker and therefore, tolerable. By noon, there is the spittle of rain on my forehead and I creep about the rooftop with no place to hide from it.
Finally, I spread my wings out over my head and huddle beneath. In the cup of my own wings, the rumble of traffic splashing down below is magnified and so is a faint, gritting whine.
Triiiiiiiig...gul...
It is a rusty sound, like the tin man squeaking about without an oil can. It could be a weather vane, if there was one. I peer out at the antennae, the electrical lines, and the pipes. All is motionless. I shift beneath the spines of my wings, scooping the amplifying cup in different directions to locate the sound. As I scan past the lion statue, the sound bellows deeply into my wings, TRIIIIICK...gul!
I fold down my wings and scoot closer, listening. The rain drools down in a relentless sprinkle, instead of the previous spitting, and as I scuttle even closer, the squeaking turns to a whine, triiiiiick gul! Triiiiick gul!
I creep to the ledge and lean around, as I did the night before, not looking down but keeping my eyes glued to the lion that is still immobile as it was the night before. The rain is dribbling through the hole at the top of its head and running down into the mouth and dripping off the ferocious teeth.
The stone eyes of the lion grate to the side to see me, and the thing, in a rough, roaring whisper, booms TRICKLE!
It scares me back a step and then, when nothing else of the statue moves, I step forward again.
"Did you speak?" I ask.
There is a short huff from the mouth of the lion as it growls a whisper, TRICKLE!
The thing is absolutely right; the water is trickling through it, and I wonder if it is tickled, if it wishes me to stop the flow. I spread out one wing and inch closer, until it hovers over the reaching stone wisps of the mane, and shield the hole in the top of the lion's head.
I stand there, petrified I suppose, waiting for the thing to leap to life and gobble me down. But it does not speak again.
"Is this what you wanted?" I ask and the lion's eye closest to me droops, exhausted or sad or dissatisfied, it is hard to tell. The rain increases and it beats hard on my wing, poking the underside against the sharp points of the lion's mane. After a moment, the drooping at the corner of its eye gets droopier and I worry that this was not at all what the lion wanted.
Cautiously, I pull back my wing, letting them stay open and ready to fly, in case I must suddenly learn how, by being thrown from the rooftop. The drops of rain gather and flow through the lion's head and out its mouth, and I see the throat undulate like a snake forcing its food out rather than in.
"Triiiii...ckle," the lion's voice says. "Myyyyyyggg naaaaahhhmmmm..."
I squint; I roll the sounds he made over my own tongue. Myyyyggg naaahhhhmmm. The rain continues down, beating on my head as if the drops are trying to nail in the name itself. Myyyyyyggg naaaahhhhmm.
The teeth begin to drizzle the rain and the throat quivers. The lion's jaw moves. It closes, the spears of teeth still exposed over its lip, and then open up again, allowing a gush of water to flow out over the thick mane beneath its chin. I take a step backward, spreading out my wings further, and trying to remember just how Moag pushed them down to rise straight up.
The lion smacks its lips and says in quite a lovely voice, "Trickle. My name, dear sister, is Trickle."
All I can do is stare. I can't absorb that this magnificent stone beast is named something so small and meaningless as Trickle. Or that it is speaking to me instead of jumping off its base to rip me to pieces.
The lion closes its jaws again to allow the rain to pool inside it’s mouth. It sloshes the water around and opens up, letting the rain drop over the edge of the building and plummet to the street below.
"I hope for a long rain." The lion says. "So that we may get acquainted."
I fold down my wings slowly and the lion pays my suspicion no mind, busying itself with filling its mouth, sloshing and then letting the water flow out.
"Are you a gargoyle?" I finally ask.
"Certainly. Truer a gargoyle than you, in fact. Driven by water, animated and controlled by it, unfortunately." Trickle finishes the last sentence with a sigh.
"Can you move?"
"Not off my pedestal." The lion shakes its head, which is another sudden and unexpected movement that makes me wonder if it is indeed telling me the truth or simply keeping me here as it waits for its faculties to become flexible enough to attack.
"Why not?"
The lion chuckles, a soft gruntish sound. "Why?"
"You don't want to move?"
"I have no need." Without shaking his mane, the water sprays off as if he has. "A better conversation: tell me how you came to be."
Came to be. What a jarring thing it is not to be able to answer the question. I came to be an imperfect girl, a lover with too much to add, a conspiratorial murderer, a dead body, a deader body, a resurrected huddle of bones, and now, this. I am something that I still do not believe I can be—a thing of frightening stories, and yet more real now than the angels that were preached to me for years.
Which thing should I answer to? None of who I have been is fascinating and all of it ends the same. Killed in one way or another, until there is nothing. There is no story of me.
"I died. Almost," I finally say.
"Didn't we all," the lion harumphs.
"Are you a Slip too?"
"A Slip? No. But I was slipped away from, I suppose you could say."
I have no idea what he means, but he quivers and the heavy rain sprites from his mane and it seems to be all the answer I should expect. He waits a moment for the water to accumulate in his mouth again. He spits it out over the city before he speaks.
I don't want to ask about his life because I worry that it will lead to his asking about mine. At the very least, I assume I'll start thinking of The Boy with The Golden Rod Voice. Worse, I could think of my Bean, captured inside me, and then, buried with a nameless marker inside my heart.
I search desperately for a different question that will avoid the most dangerous ones.
"What are you doing here?" I settle upon. It's not a safe question, but the best I can do.
"I am here to improve my sight," the lion says, "among other things."
"Are you blind?" I ask, thinking of his stone eyes with the irises drilled through them.
But the lion answers, "Not at all." His eyes rove the horizon, searching the sparks of lightening over the city. "My faculties have been sharpened to perfection."
"Then what is there to improve?"
"I can not see what I must," The lion says and then with a growl, as if I doubt him, "I assure you, I am as diligent in this life as I was in the last. What I need to see was supposed to be as obvious as my human blood once was, to me. The only clue the King has given me is that it is something which will make me bow my head. I assume it is a certain brick or the curve of an archway, but I've studied the architecture, the color of the sky, the masonry, and I guarantee, what I've been assigned is a fool's game."
I peer out from the ledge to the neighboring structure in confusion. Standing apart from the apartment building, almost as if it is leaning away in protest, is the next highest building in the neighborhood. It is the one Trickle stares at, or over—I am not sure which. Its rooftop is spread with an elaborate garden, as thick and reaching as peanut butter at the edges of a slice of toast, but the brick is black and there are no stone archways. None of the buildings I can see have the blood red brick or archways Trickle speaks of.
I scan downward to the penthouse apartment, with its enormous windows, as big as God's eyes. It is the only dwelling with windows that size and without curtains, it is easy to see inside. The decor is expensive and the lights are dim. No one is home.
"I'm thorough, I assure you," Trickle contin
ues, "but whenever Moag returns to inquire what new I have seen, I have never impressed him with my answer."
"You know Moag? How well do you know Truce?” I lower my voice, afraid that the wind will hear the gossip and carry it back.
"How well?" The lion seems to straighten out invisible creases in his posture, although somehow, there almost seems to be a smirk at the corner of his mouth. "He is our king, after all."
"He sent you here?"
"Of course," Trickle says. He lets a gush of rainwater splash out over the side of the building. "You ask the most obvious questions."
Trickle makes a show of closing his mouth and swishing his accumulation of water inside it. I decide to trade subjects rather than risk losing the friendship of the only other speaking thing on the rooftop.
"Are there a lot more of us? Gargoyles?"
He snorts a laugh. "Of course there are many more. We are of a brethren."
"Do they come here?"
"Such as...to visit?" The water dribbles from Trickle's unamused chin. "Not without purpose. We are not living, after all. We have purposes to fulfill, to ourselves and to others. We are not here to socialize."
"Truce said we have gifts," I say.
Pride seems to thrust his voice, rather than his chest, outward. "Gargoyles have exchanged the beauty of living for the sorrows of the world. We are here to trade our one last living hope, for the understanding we never acquired during our lives. That's what I've been told."
"Who is your recipient, Trickle?"
The lion's mouth closes. I hear the water welling up behind his teeth and his stone eyes glare. I take a step back as the lion opens his jaws and the water gushes out, splattering violently off the building's edge.
"That is not your business," Trickle growls. "Do I ask how you died?"
"I drowned..."
"That is not my business!” Trickle's voice is its own crack of thunder. I scuttle back from him even further and wait until the stones of the lion's body seem to relax. He finally sniffs, blows out some rainwater, and begins again in a calmer voice. "Gargoyles do not reveal, nor do they ask, who a human recipients are. In life, I would never ask to see your bank statement or mention it, if I had noticed that you had soiled your pants. Likewise, a Gargoyle doesn't ask another who their recipient is."
"I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't know. I only asked because I don't know who mine is and I don't know how to find out who it should be."
Trickle's mouth closes in a temporary frown.
"It is like falling in love...or vomiting.” His tone is as stiff as his stone body. "It's obvious when it happens. When the time comes for bestowing your healing gift, nothing and no one will stand in your way. Your instincts will take over.”
The lion's eyes grind upward, sliding his stone vision across the tarmac of breaking clouds. "Oh, the pity. The rain is coming to an end. And that means it is the end of our discussion as well."
"You won't talk to me unless it's raining?"
"Cannot," the lion corrects. "The rain whets my whistle, as humans say. It runs through my head and loosens my dried tongue. Without the drizzle, it seems I've nothing to say."
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
"I suppose, if you could captuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu." Trickle's jaw locks in the same position as when I found him. His tongue flounders behind his teeth to finish the word, but it is so horribly trapped, I cannot imagine it. I wait for him to try again, but then his tongue freezes in place too, nothing but a ramp for the dry well in his head.
"Can you tell me in some other way, Trickle?" I beg. "I didn't understand."
But Trickle's eyes simply slide back across the city skyline and I release an exasperated sigh for us both.
***
I sit with Trickle a long time, watching the moon move across the sky.
"I'll pray for rain," I tell him, before I leave his side. His eyes don't move, he doesn't answer me.
I cross the rooftop to the opposite side, perching on the ledge there for a different view, but I end up staring at my claws and my crackling, ashen skin. How can I have any gift to give? I look more demonic than angelic, and it seems like proof, that the angels let me fall through the cracks. There must be a reason for that. The more I reason through it, the more I am sure of exactly what I've done to deserve this.
It must be the little bean that I left behind. Lullabied with slut and whore, by the men and women who littered the curb with fliers and blocked the clinic door. Entrusted to, and cradled by, the empty armholes of the white paper robe the clinic gave me to wear.
I left that place, alone.
Alone, with all those men and women bleeding up around me, to say those things that must've kept God awake all night. One threw her coffee cup at me, as if she could stain me more.
Moag should have left me to disintegrate among the fish. Truce didn't need to make me more of a monster than I already was. I should not be here.
Everything about this is wrong and therefore, I must learn how to fly.
***
Even stacked, the buckets are not high enough. In the dark, I clamber atop them over and over again, wobble, and jump before they fall, but each time, I end up flat on the rooftop with the buckets rolling around me. My skin is as scuffed as old leather. My bones don't break, but they feel like they will.
I finally stack the two tar buckets beside the stairway door and heave myself up on top of the closet. My eyeballs itch behind my bone mask. Down is too far. I hear the traffic scurrying along even lower, at the very bottom of the building, and I sway with my claws scraping to hold me upright. I wonder how I will ever fly over the top of it all when the fall is so far down.
I am paralyzed for five inches of time; I measure the moments it takes the moon to drop down from the sky. It is no use. I climb back down to the roof top and squat beside the stone edge of the building. I can't even bring myself to go stand beside Trickle and have his big stone eyes grinding sideways to acknowledge my failure.
I lean against the raised lip, holding on, while I peer over the edge. The mask over my face turns everything into a spec at the end of a deep corridor, but still my eyes drop and drop and drop, seven floors—until my vision splatters onto the street. It is a dizzying height that requires deep breathing, licking my lips, and locating the horizon of the other rooftops again in order to feel balanced.
Maybe this is a test. Just silliness to overcome. Maybe these gelatinous wings are strong enough to support me after all and the real test is simply to allow them to do it. Faith, I suppose. Faith in me, rather than a god who let me fall through the cracks.
I step up onto the curled stone lip, my taloned toes scraping at the cement, my gray soles so thick that my feet barely register the coolness of the stone. What I decide to do first is not look down. To keep my eyes rooted on the roof of the neighboring apartment building that is at least four car lengths away from me. It is too far to jump. It is too far to get to by any other means than flight. The wide windows of the neighboring seven floors taunt me; most of them with shades drawn against the dark. Some wink with light, and tiny movements stir behind the glass corneas, living lives I may never see.
CHAPTER SIX
The sun comes up, pulling the humidity into a tight ponytail that will likely swing across the sky all day. I huddle down, beside the building ledge, peeking over the side as I try to revive the excitement of life inside me. Something, to overcome the self-pity that is filling up my soul.
In the first morning light, the road below is empty, and without the cars rushing by, it doesn't seem so far down. It's not even as exciting or as dazzling. I look out at the rooftops all around and then at the windows of the building across the street. Most of the blinds are still drawn, but some are open and the lives behind them play like a store window full of TV screens.
In one, a young man hunches over a tiny kitchen table, scrawling on rectangles of paper. There must be a million crumpled pieces at his feet. I squint through my mask and the vision tun
nels down to a pinpoint. I can read the letters on the paper. I open my eyes just a bit and see what he is doing. There is a name on a sheet of paper above his fist. With his other hand, he guides the pen, copying the name down onto the second rectangular sheet, his head so close to the paper, I am sure he is cross-eyed. When he is finished, he sits back, holds up both sheets, and studies them, held up to the light of the window. I duck down a little lower when he holds the sheet to the window, but he has no eyes for me. I see him sigh and crumple his copy, letting it drop from his fist as he slumps back a moment in his hard backed chair. Then he begins again, on a fresh sheet.
Another window houses a fat woman, with her ample bottom hanging out from behind her fridge door. She gnaws a chicken leg behind the door, as her three children, one teen, and two little ones, ask her what is for dinner. She growls, with her greasy jaw pumping, that there's hardly anything to eat, and to not expect much. I skim the windows and see an older man, in boxers and white undershirt, sweating into his couch as he sleeps. There is a young girl in another window, draped in a short dress, turning from side to side to study herself with an angry face. She pinches the skin of her thighs.
I scan up to another window, four across, and two up. It dangles open a few inches like a fascinated mouth. A boxcar apartment, with several windows, it's easy to see a boy, standing in his bathroom. His back is to me. He has hair the color of dried driftwood, and his faded jeans cling low on his hips like a desperate woman. He is studying his face in the mirror. I study his body.
There is something about his straight, boyish hair, layered to the sides, or maybe it is the way he stands, like a curved stem. My interest is immediately tethered. His hips are narrow, his muscles are seeds. As he bows his head over the sink, I catch a small glint of his face that sends me staggering backward. He has a slight under—bite, acne scars dimpling both cheeks, and against even his own odds, he is impossibly attractive.
Mercy, A Gargoyle Story Page 4
