by Jean Roberta
Doubting—
Dreaming—
Dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before—
•
I open that book of poetry after all, the one by the woman whose name I don’t recognize. It can’t take more than five days to read one book, even one that may be the work of a decade of stolen moments, scribblings in margins and tinkerings on napkins. To read it the right way, I mean. Surely I have time enough yet for that.
(Not to read it in the way that I have always read as an adult, as though checking off boxes or filling in a worksheet, reading to pass time or to build credentials, but rather to read it in the way I read as a child, poring intently over one book, one poem, one line, burning the words into my brain, because for the moment what I read was all that there was, the extent of the universe, the limit of creation, as it was in the beginning, as it is now, forever and ever, ever and ever, forever and ever, and world without end, without any end, the world without any men, the end—)
Yes, even if all my other horizons are shrinking, even if all my other tides are pouring out to sea. Even if the highwayman has come riding at last, tapping his whip impatiently against the shutters as I struggle numb-fingered to plait my grey and thinning hair—
Even now, perhaps I can still be transported. Even now I can still be kidnapped by life.
Show me a ghostly galleon. Show me a ribbon of moonlight. Make me wonder at anything for the next five days (no matter how trite! no matter how obvious!) and in exchange I’ll remember you for life.
•
Made Light
Melissa Moorer
All that light and no heat, it couldn’t be real. It just wasn’t possible. It was a fairy tale. Wasn’t it?
•
I don’t have a father. Mine was a virgin birth, but not in a Jesus Christ kind of way. There were no angels and no trumpets and I am not a boy. God doesn’t speak to me, but sometimes the stars do. Mom says it’s because we’re related (me and the stars), but I am not convinced. When I ask about my father, she laughs and says he was a lightning bug.
“I’m serious. I swallowed a lightning bug and nine months later,” she motions dramatically toward me, the living proof of her immaculate conception. “You.” When I respond with a suspicious stare, she huffs back into her lawn chair and goes back to snapping beans. “Ask your Gran if you don’t believe me.”
My grandmother just rolls her eyes and exhales a loud “Hmph,” but she doesn’t say no. She shakes her head, but she has never said it didn’t happen that way. And she would if she could.
I believed this explanation when I was little and didn’t know any better. Lying awake at night, I imagined I would someday be able to fly, my fairy father arriving in a swirl of color and light to whisk me away to the glittery firefly world or fairy kingdom. But he didn’t and I don’t—have any magical abilities.
Anyway, I know now how babies are made and that fairies don’t exist. I bring home biology books to prove it to my mother: you can’t get pregnant by swallowing anything, it just doesn’t work that way. I lay the book on the table between us open to full-color illustrations that look like some strange underworld map. See, stomach and uterus—totally unconnected. No highway from the red state of the stomach to the pink sea of the uterus, not even the dotted lines of a gravel road.
“When you were learning to walk we had to tie a string to your ankle so you couldn’t fly away,” is her answer.
“Whatever,” I say. “Then why don’t I float away now?”
She points to my feet and the heavy black corrective shoes I have had to wear as long as I can remember. “The shoes.
“Remember when you were six and you fell in love with the light in the pantry?” My face burns with shame before she reaches the end of the sentence. Memories of lying curled under the burning beautiful glow all night. I tried to stay in my bed, but the light sang to me, drawing me out of my room to lie on the cold hard floor as it lulled me to sleep with its bright, sweet voice. They finally had the fixture replaced and I was inconsolable for weeks.
But I am too old for that now. Too old to believe their stupid stories about firefly fathers and invisible wings in my back. I went through her things years ago searching for my real father: an old photo with a note on the back, a sperm-bank receipt, a love letter. Because in the real world I am the bastard child of some sweaty fumbling in the backseat of a Chevy Nova or worse, the shameful offspring of a rape or some twisted first-cousin star-crossed love affair. They may choose to live in that fantasy world of fireflies and fairies, but I have to go to school every day at Fayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. I have to live in the terrible real world, so I quietly collect the facts I need to end the fairy tale.
•
1. Fireflies aren’t really flies. They are beetles. The glow is caused by an efficient chemical reaction in the guts of the insect that creates luminescence and almost no waste heat.
•
The smug fluorescent lights in the cafeteria hum and wink at me, probably because my few friends have second lunch and the lights know I have no one else to sit with but them. The other students don’t notice their constant muttering about my shoes or hair or whatever else they can see from up there. I eat my lunch outside when it’s warm enough, so that I don’t have to hear their condescending ramblings, but it’s raining today so I look for a table toward the edges and find one under a dim and erratically blinking tube of light. One of the bulbs is dying a long, slow death, which has caused the nearby bulbs to go desperately silent. I slide into the faint outline of an unoccupied seat and concentrate on my lunch.
That’s what brings her to me, I guess: the shadowy table and the girl in near dark. She has black black hair, thick eyeliner and dark clothes, some kind of glittery powder all over her face. That’s all I can absorb in one cursory glance. Enough to know that I don’t recognize her. She must be new here. That would explain the confusion. There is no other reason to sit at this twilight table with me. She will know soon enough what I am, so I ignore her attempts at conversation and pretend to read despite the mumbled blinkings of the desperate and dying light bulb above us.
Three weeks later she is still sitting with me under the flickering fluorescent. “Look, I’m not into Nine Inch Nails or Slipknot anything,” I blurt out. She continues reading for a few seconds before resting the paperback copy of Wuthering Heights face down on the plastic surface of the table.
“Okay,” she says, drawing out the syllables in a slow sing-song. Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Neither am I.” Sure that she will pick up her tray and leave me alone finally, I return to my book. “Well, what are you into then? You know, since we’ve established what you’re not into.”
I say “Sleater-Kinney,” a band I’m sure she hasn’t heard of, hoping to end this conversation, but she smiles. Her eyebrows rise and peak as she picks up her notebook carefully, bringing its scarred, grafittied surface between us. It takes me a moment, but my eyes finally focus on the familiar lyrics scratched out in ballpoint.
I wanna be your Thurston Moore
Wrestle on your bedroom floor
“Oh,” is the only response I can manage. As she removes the notebook I notice a swirl of color and design sneaking out from under her long-sleeved shirt. A tattoo. Probably some kind of fairy thing or maybe even a riot grrl symbol. Yes, that’s it. She’s probably some kind of rabid vegan, rebel grrl, hipster punk wannabe who spends all of her time collecting obscure albums on vinyl and boycotting Starbucks.
I glance at her tray looking for any signs of dogmatic dietary restrictions. There is no meat, but plenty of brand names: two Cokes, Reese’s, Skittles and a couple of bags of Doritos. This in a school full of anorexic girls. A normal lunch for someone who looks like her is a Diet Coke and a bag of carrot sticks.
“Carrie Brownstein’s new band is playing in Cincinnati on Friday. Wanna go?” Stunned by the invitation and the contents of her tray I nod my head automatically then realize what I have agr
eed to. Not just the concert with this girl I don’t know, but a total of three hours travel time alone with her.
“We probably can’t get tickets now anyway,” I say, hoping she will use this opportunity to take it all back.
She just shrugs. “Sure we can. I’ll charge them on my Dad’s credit card. You can pay me back.”
•
I always thought my name, Greta, was the one thing my mother gave me that was mine. Such a sturdy, solid name. A name for movie stars and soccer players, not pale fatherless freaks. Greta was a name I could aspire to. Grow into. Until today. We had to research names and their meanings for English class and that’s how I found out. The hard way. Greta means “child of light.” Even my name isn’t real. Part of Mom’s firefly fantasy life.
I was so angry, I walked right past Mom and Gran when I got home from school and refused to eat the homemade macaroni and cheese with tomato slices on top I know Mom made just for me. It’s like she has a sixth sense for when I’ll be angry and does exactly the wrong thing.
I decide not to leave my room until morning and spend the night going through my “Dad box” again sifting through the evidence I’ve found of possible fathers scattered through my mother’s things. The most likely candidate is just a faded yearbook photo with a note written in jagged ballpoint. “Always, Glenn” is all it says, but he looks like a potential father. His hair is white blonde like mine and he is so pale his face bleeds into the page, leaving only faint outline and dark eyes. I’ve already established that he lives in Cincinnati and that he works for some big corporation. He’s like the ideal normal dad. His wife even has a blog with recipes and jokes and photos of what could be my half sister and brother. I try not to check it for updates more than once a week. He’s probably not even my real father and it feels kind of stalkerish, but I can’t seem to help it. Can’t help smiling along with the ridiculously happy toddlers smiling from their ridiculously perfect life that should be mine too.
It’s been less than a week but I check the blog again. It still hasn’t updated. It’s been nearly two months with no update. Maybe something happened, something terrible. Maybe one of the kids needs a bone marrow transplant and I will be the only match and save them. Or maybe they are at Disney World or on a camping trip or one of the ten thousand things normal families do. I sit near the phone for a while and consider calling the number for the millionth time, but what would I say?
•
2. The glow acts as a warning to potential predators that fireflies are poisonous. The chemicals that create the eerie glow also make them deadly.
According to the blue jays in the backyard, they taste pretty awful too.
•
My grandmother’s room is small and crammed with books and figurines. It smells like cigarettes and cheap rose soap, but I like to lie on her always-made bed and look up at the stained ceiling while she smokes and knits and occasionally tells a family story. It is one of the only safe places in the house, like she and my mother divided up the house years ago and declared this a separate country. There are battles at the borders, but never inside.
Every time she lights up a cigarette she says, “Don’t let me ever catch you smoking. I’ll wear you out if I even smell cigarette smoke on you. I don’t care how old you are.”
I don’t even bother answering anymore, just close one eye so the larger coffee-colored stain near the right angle of the wall looks like an elephant’s head.
“So you’re going to this concert with a girl?”
“Yeah, her name’s Miranda,” I respond absently, wondering again what I will wear.
“So. Tell me something about her.”
“Like what?”
She sighs a little and begins a new row of gray knots. “Like does she have a last name? What do her parents do? That kind of thing.”
“I don’t know.” I shrug and hear her grind the cigarette against the cracked china saucer she uses as an ashtray.
“Well, you must know something,” she says and there is the blackboard squeak of yarn against teeth.
A lawnmower starts up just outside the window and I hear the irritable clatter of my mother doing dishes in the kitchen. I try to stay very still hoping my grandmother will let me just lie here quietly for a few minutes.
“I hope she’s a good one, ’cause you need a friend,” she says and her accent softens even more, all the vowels going long. “You’re in a rut, baby girl, and a rut ain’t nothing but a long grave.”
I have no idea what she means, but it is the kind of thing she says to my mother to put a stop to all the talking, so I smile up at the elephant and close my eyes.
“Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who lived in a castle and all of that stuff. Only, she wasn’t like other princesses, she was shy and bookish and kept to herself. Even though everyone at court wanted to be her friend, get on her good side, she wouldn’t have any of it. She saw ’em for what they were. A bunch of fakes.”
I recognize it immediately as The Firefly Princess. She hasn’t told me this one in years. When I was thirteen I decided I had outgrown it, outgrown all of them: The Dragonfly Guy, The Rise and Fall of Spider King, and The Superbright Adventures of the Flutterby Girl. They are all ridiculous stories for gullible kids.
“Except for this one girl, a lady-in-waiting who was just as shy and bookish as she was. Those two took up like peas in a pod. Spent all their time together. Even had this secret code with lanterns to talk to each other at night from their bedroom windows. They’d meet up in the gardens and study the moon and the stars and talk about books. But you see, the rest of the court wanted the princess all to themselves so they had her poor friend kidnapped. Even used their secret lantern language to trap her. And they had her taken off someplace on the other side of the forest so the princess would be all alone and need them again.”
She’s changing something in the story, I’m almost positive, but it’s sleepy warm in the room and I can’t remember.
“’Course when the princess found out she got all bent out of shape. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep.”
There is the metal snap and sizzle of her Zippo and her voice gets tighter around the smoke.
“So her daddy called in the old witch woman and she locked herself in with the poor princess for two whole days and nights.” The clicking of the knitting needles stops and I hear the gravelly hiss as she pulls on the cigarette. “All kinds of strange sounds and smells were coming out of that room, but nobody dared bother that old witch. Finally at dawn of the third day the witch walks out smiling and the king rushes in to see his daughter, but she’s not there. The old woman tells him to go to the window and he sees her out there flying around with her black cape flapping out behind like wings and that lantern blinking on and off. You see she’d gone out looking for that poor girl and she still is every night. That’s what all those fireflies are doing—helping that poor princess find her true friend with their lanterns and capes.”
The smoke curls and winds around itself circling the smug little light above her bed and I wonder what the moral of this story is supposed to be. Fairy tales are supposed to have a point.
“What’s the moral of the story, Gran?”
There is a long silence and another inhale like dry leaves blowing in fall before the knitting needles restart their cricket clicks. “The world’s a jealous place, baby girl. Always trying to tell you it’s one way when it’s another, so you watch out.”
Squinting, I turn to make sure she isn’t laughing at me, but her attention is focused on the gray sweater she has been working on all week. Closing one eye, she stretches it, tilting her head to the side to examine the fine net of her work.
“But shouldn’t there be a prince? Or a happy ending or something?”
“Then it wouldn’t be the truth, now would it?”
•
I have tried on everything in my room, which wouldn’t seem strange if all of it wasn’t gray or black and virtually identical. A tentativ
e knock and I get angry immediately, a Pavlovian response. And I’m even angrier that Mom can make me feel something so strong without any effort. I want to feel nothing around her, just numb. I want to walk through this house like a soulless thing, a zombie, so she understands how dead I am. What they have taken away from me with their stories and lies.
“What?” I ask, unsuccessfully trying to hide the angry embarrassment. My mother takes a tentative step inside and frowns at the clothes strewn everywhere.
“I hope you’re going to clean all of this up before you go,” she says and then frowns harder like she didn’t mean to say it. It’s the same frown she uses when I’ve said or done something she finds distasteful.
“What do you want?”
Her head snaps back slightly at the tone of my voice and her shoulders square, but she doesn’t say anything, just hands me a folded bill. A hundred. I try not to look surprised, afraid that she will take it back. We’ve never done this before—I’ve never gone out and she’s never had to give me money for anything but lunch and my meager allowance—so she has no idea how much money to give me. Obviously.
I stuff it in my pocket and mutter my thanks before she can reconsider.
A tight smile and she turns to leave, but pauses on the threshold. “You should wear a sweater too. In case it gets cold.” She points at the pile on the bed. “The gray one.” They’re all gray. “With the pink buttons.” Gran sewed them on for me and I never wear it because it seems wrong, all of that color in the middle of so much same.
I don’t say anything and she leaves still frowning, but not at me.
“There’s a big black truck out here, baby girl. I think it’s your friend,” I hear Gran’s voice downstairs. Smiling nervously, I grab the sweater with the pink buttons on my way out.
