He gives the outer lens of the spyglass a wipe with the chamois in his pocket, clearing off the damp. He positions his face against the eyepiece and waits.
The Sparrow approaches from behind. Her feet are silent on the dampening ground. The dogs and the butterfly are waiting for her in the shadows. They will not come until they are called. They hold watch and do not move.
“Are you real?” Jonah asks. He does not pull away from the eyepiece. He keeps his gaze upon the stars.
The Sparrow says nothing. She is right behind him, so close she can feel the heat from his body, so close she could let her fingers drift in the soft clouds of his breath. So close she could kiss him if she wanted to.
“I think you’re real,” he says, adjusting the second lens. Tipping the whole of the spyglass slightly upward on its hinged tripod.
“How do you know?” the girl whispers.
Jonah yelps in surprise, and scrambles to his feet. He faces the Sparrow, breathing hard. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He reaches his hand toward her, but thinks better of it, and shoves both hands into the mop of his hair, hanging on tight.
The Sparrow feels her heart in her throat. She smiles. Her body feels more discombobulated than usual. As though each particle is only barely hanging on to the others. As though she may fly apart at any moment. She is hot. She is cold. She shivers all over.
“You’re shaking,” the boy says. “Are you cold?”
“Yes,” she whispers. Her voice wobbles. It is a dry leaf on a windy day. She pinches her face and shakes her head. “No,” she corrects herself.
“You are real,” the boy says. “Aren’t you? You’ve been real this whole time.”
She says nothing. Her skin is heat and light and sweat and goosebumps. Her face is tight with hope.
He stands. Brushes the grass and damp from his knees. There will be no moon tonight. The sky will be so dark it will hurt to look at it. The stars will stab the eye. The girl is beautiful in the fading light. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Her skin glows orange and pink and damp gray. She is an opal in the gloom. He is dizzy. He wants to touch her but he doesn’t.
He has seen her before. He has talked to her before—and she to him. He remembers it now, standing in front of her. He remembers it all. He remembers that each time he sees her, he has a similar flood of remembering—that each meeting vanishes when she vanishes, and unfolds again before him when she returns. That her presence opens his mind like a map. And when she leaves it flutters away, as though snatched by a strong wind.
He knows that the last time he saw her, he nearly kissed her.
Nearly.
“Will I forget you this time?” he asks, a sob hiding in his throat. He feels a needle in his heart, and he sees her wince.
Is it the same needle? he wonders. Is it the same thread, pulling at my heart and her heart? He does not say it out loud. She takes a step closer.
“I don’t know,” she says. There is too much breath in her voice. As though she is already fading. He reaches out his hand, palm up. An invitation. She accepts, lays her palm on his, as light and hot as ash. He nearly blisters from the heat of it.
“Are you sick?” he asks.
“I am,” she says. “But not for long. Soon I will never be sick again—but I need you to help me.”
“What can I do?” His breath comes in quick, short gasps, his soul escaping in sigh after sigh after sigh. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t want to miss her for a second. With everything in him, he tries to stitch her in place in his mind.
“Leave a note for your mother. Tell her you’ll be back when everything changes. And tell her to cover for you.”
The Sparrow waits for a long time in the growing dark. She lays her hand on the homemade spyglass. She knows that Jonah had a brother, two years younger than he, who was taken away by soldiers on the day that she was left on the trash heap. She knows that his family does not talk about the lost boy—worked and squeezed away to nothing by now. Drained. The Sparrow has no idea what happened to the children like her—not really—but she has always suspected the worst. Even in her situation, even after her lifelong attempt to suppress the magic welling up inside her, she knows she can’t last long. Already, she can feel her body yearning to disassemble, fly apart, scatter across the landscape like mist. It doesn’t frighten her, this thought of her own dissolution. She only wants to make it matter.
All this magic, pulled up by the comet. It’s too much for one person. Spread it around, she thinks. Bless the land and the people on it.
The minutes tick by. The wind picks up. The stars keep their rigid courses in the dark sky. She crouches down and hangs on to her knees with her jacketed arms.
“Come,” she calls, and the dogs and the butterfly come. The dogs take posts on either side of her, while the butterfly alights on her back.
The boy comes too, carrying food in a satchel. He has been well brought up. His parents have taught him to plan for the future, to provide for himself and others. They have raised him to be a good person—and he is. The Sparrow stands. The dogs growl. The boy hands her a bit of homemade bread and honey. She eats it gratefully.
“Where are we going?” he asks. And she knows he will follow her anywhere.
“We are going to meet the Minister,” she says with her mouth full. “But we don’t have to go far. He will be coming to us.”
24. Then.
The day after Marla told him about the baby—not a baby anymore, obviously. She’d been a girl for a while—the Constable put a sign on the door of his office. The Constable Is Ill Today. Please Refrain from Committing Crimes Until Tomorrow.
It was not the first time he used that sign—indeed it was heavily wrinkled and ragged around the edges. Rain-blotched. And oddly effective. Every time he had actually been out ill, the town residents who might normally bend toward rule breaking followed the sign to the letter. Bar fights ceased, petty thievery vanished, employee insubordination all but evaporated, and domestic disturbances were blissfully unavailable.
There were times when the Constable put the sign up just to give everyone a break from themselves.
On this day, though, he locked himself in the back room of the Constable’s office—the room with no windows and one door and one lock to which he had the only key—and did not come out no matter how hard the egg woman knocked.
He had a jug of Special Occasion Whiskey, one that he received as a gift from his mother the day he was appointed to his position (a bald-faced attempt at brownnosing, the Constable knew, but he appreciated it all the same). He’d never touched it in all those years, but he would do so now.
That baby!
He took out his notes and files—illegal, probably—on the birth of the stillborn magic child, of its mother’s eventual unraveling, of its days in the box on his desk, of the sounds (oh, god, that laughing) that came from . . . somewhere. He couldn’t say where. Indeed he did not want to.
Whiskey, in the end, tastes no better in the dark than in the light, and it certainly is not improved with lack of sleep, or a hot morning mouth, or a belly raging for some kind of food.
He threw that child on the rubbish heap. A baby, for god’s sake. And by some miracle . . . He shook his head. He couldn’t even think it.
The cardboard box haunted his dreams.
The sound of a laughing baby, from that day to this, any baby, made him shiver and quake.
And he hated the Minister. Hated him.
The egg woman gave him three days to think—or in this case, drink—on it before she came in with her tools and her grim silence.
Working quickly, she removed the door from the wall, hoisted up the mostly unconscious Constable onto her shoulders, and heaved him into the back alley where she could wet him efficiently with the cistern hose. He stood there under the back awning, dripping and cold, his
nose and eyes running with old rainwater and old regrets and new sorrow. He let out one long, lonely wail, and let it die in his throat. He closed his mouth and shivered in silence.
Marla let the hose fall to the ground. “Are you quite through?” she said.
The Constable nodded.
She offered a curt, grim nod in return. “Very good. Now, if you wouldn’t mind putting on dry clothes and following me, there are things that I would like to discuss. And it wouldn’t do to have such conversations on government property.”
The Constable did as he was told. He made a stop at the shower, cleaned the stink of the last few days off his skin, and slid into clean clothes. He slumped his shoulders and bowed his head and went outside next to the egg woman, and allowed her to lead him.
The junk man and the girl were camped on a small hillock just outside of town. It was one of their favorite spots. Three of the Midges had escaped the coop, opting to follow both junk man and girl for the last several days, and were having the time of their lives hunting for bugs in the grass. The girl sat in the branches of one of the trees, encouraging a nest full of baby birds to crawl onto her dress, as the mama bird looked on indulgently.
The junk man squatted by the fire, roasting fat, greasy sausages on sticks.
“I hope you’re hungry, my bird,” he called up to the girl in the tree.
“Simon,” Marla said sharply. The junk man looked up and nearly fell onto the ground. He pointed an accusatory finger at the egg woman.
“TRAITOR!” he shouted.
“I am no such thing. I have brought us an ally. Sit.”
And the girl listened as the three adults discussed her future. They said things like escape plans and protective custody and worst-case scenario. She could hear their worry and their fear. She could hear the echoes of loss.
They spoke of the Minister. Their voices trembled with fear. And hatred.
“He can’t have her,” the junk man said, his voice dangerous—the rusty edge of an old tin can. “I’d die first.”
“Yup,” the Constable said, rubbing his face. “She does seem to have that effect. Did when she was a baby too. Or a dead baby. In any case, I pretty much feel the same way. The exact same way. The Minister takes too much. And enough is enough.”
The girl listened intently. The mother bird flew away to find food, and the babies had been replaced in the nest. They cried out—not for their mother, but for the junk man’s daughter. She frowned.
She didn’t understand everything that the adults said. She did not fear as they feared; she did not hate as they hated. But she knew this: She had something inside her. Something special. And a bad man wanted it.
(Or a good man; or a bad man who could change; a human being deserving of love, and oh! How she loved! How she loved everyone.)
She looked up at the sky. The sun hovered over the horizon, fat and lurid. A delight of color. And it was for everyone. It shone equally on Minister and junk man, on soldier and egg woman, on dogs and hens and bugs. It could not be claimed by a single individual—it shone for all.
Well, she thought. What if I did what the sun does? What if the Minister came and the magic was gone? What if I gave it to everyone else instead?
And, as she drifted to sleep, she dreamed of a wave, swelling up beneath her feet. She smelled foam and wind and salt. Yellow coins. Red flowers. A dead child. A child that lived. A particularly fine hen. And she felt herself lift, bubble, dissolve. She felt the wave cover the world.
And she disappeared.
25. Now.
The Inquisitor, in the end, did not make the customary stop in the baker’s shop, and he did not purchase a pie for his wife. (And more’s the pity. One slice would have saved his marriage, cured his gout, straightened his back, ended his impotence, ensured his raise, and set his career on a more prosperous track; the apples, after all, came from Marla’s farm. They were not to be trifled with.) Despite the dark that night, despite the jittering fear that chokes the town every time someone from the capital comes calling, everyone living along that dark street peeked through drawn curtains and watched that black car as it slid to the Constable’s office. They held their breath as it slid away.
The Inquisitor, people whispered. Here? They wondered and fussed, but they did not look up. They shut their curtains and counted their children and looked around their houses for anything incriminating.
Not a soul in town slept a wink that night.
And now, the next day, everyone continues to whisper. They continue to fuss. They confer and collect and collude. A crowd forms in the square. They speak of nothing else. First the Inquisitor. Now what?
It’s not so much the visit, they think but do not say, but what comes after. Soldiers, maybe. Re-Educators. Overseers. There were rumors of labor camps. And family splitting.
There’s no concrete proof of that, people whisper. You’re being ridiculous.
They have heard of whole towns simply wiped from the map in earlier generations. Well. No one can be sure. It’s not as though a thing like that would be included in a book.
Inquisitors don’t just visit towns for their health. And the Minister’s eye doesn’t stray on communities by accident.
That thing that no one talks about.
That thing that no one says.
Well. Someone blabbed.
But who? Who is the blabbermouth? The mayor? Surely not. Not the Constable, neither. Constable’s got everyone’s back—that’s well known. Maybe the tax collector? Or the orphan matron. Or the junk man.
Yes, the preacher nods. The junk man. That’s who told. Must have been.
“Heard it from his own lips,” the preacher says. “Junk man told me just before he sold me this here watch. I mean Bible.”
He clears his throat, gives his fist a quick shake, and the gold watch in his palm vanishes. In its place is a Bible—dusty, well worn, lovingly thumbed. The preacher smiles. If he decides to shake it again, it will become a glass tumbler of good whiskey, served neat. Beautiful thing. God bless the junk man. Despite the unpleasant aroma, the gentleman knows his business, that’s for sure—links the right product to the right customer, always. And this little beauty, thinks the preacher, is the rightest of them all. He licks his lips and grips his Bible tight. Soon, he tells himself. Once he has left his insufferable flock for a blessed minute alone. He gazes out at his community with what he hopes is a beatific and forgiving expression. “But the junk man only reports rumors, and does not participate in vice. Remember this, my friends. Let us not judge—”
“Nah,” a neighbor interrupts. “The junk man never knows nuthin’. It was the egg woman. The egg woman knew it first. Heard it from her last week, and that’s a fact.”
“You never did,” Marla, the egg woman, says. She had been standing in the shadows, listening. How strange that no one noticed her. Very strange. She gives the man a swat on the backside of his head. The man rubs the injury, mutters something that sounds like didn’t see you there, and stares at the ground. Marla gives him a hard look. (She is also agitated, some notice. She scans the crowd, and beyond the crowd. She searches the sky. She is looking for something.) “I only heard it just now. Just like you.” She says it like she means it.
And it’s true enough. They all know just know. That’s why they’re talking in the first place. But who knew first? This is important. Lives might be at stake. And the crowd is divided.
“The schoolteacher,” says another neighbor. “Musta been. She has that look on her.”
“Or the men at the Soldiers’ Home.”
“I think it was the undertaker.”
“No! The butcher. Pretty sure.”
“Or the washerwomen.”
“Or the miller.”
“Or the miller’s shiftless sons.”
“The children told me,” says another. “It is always the children
who know.”
“By the way, has anyone seen my son? He left before we woke.”
Everyone’s children left before dawn. School project, their notes said. Odd. But no matter. There are more important things to be dealt with. Not getting arrested, for starters.
The town murmurs and frets. They practice their excuses and alibis until they know them by heart. They imagine what they will say to the constables, or the soldiers, or the inquisitors. They pick at their teeth and rub at their beards and shoot worried glances at the road.
An unlicensed magician, people whisper. Here. Of all places. They shake their heads, carefully layering incredulity into their voices. Well. My stars.
Marla, the egg woman, listens to the conversation for as long as she can tolerate. She lives, she knows, in a village of idiots situated at the edge of a nation of morons. There are worse things, of course.
Though, in truth, not many.
She clutches her basket as though it is a raft in a stormy sea.
No one knows for sure, of course, what a magician looks like—unlicensed or not. Who had met a magician, after all? One that wasn’t a baby, that is. The only thing for sure is that magic belongs to the government, which is to say that it is given, freely and forever, to the Beloved Minister, and him alone. The unlicensed practice of magic? Well. There are punishments for that sort of thing.
Harsh punishments.
No one knows what those are, and indeed the idea that anyone could even attempt at magic is a bit of a head-scratcher. It’s not like there are any books on the subject. Or stories. Magic is a banned subject, after all.
Clearly, the town decides, they are all blameless. One by one they excuse themselves. One by one they hurry home. They whistle as they lock up their apple-producing bowls and their bottomless liquor bottles and their baby-soothing blankets.
Marla the egg woman sits on the stone edge of the fountain. She presses her basket to her ample bosom, and waits.
By noon, the junk man arrives. He sits next to her. He hesitates, swallows nervously, then lets his bony arm drape across Marla’s shoulders. She doesn’t shrug him away. Their eyes are red. Their noses are red. Their cheeks are the color of ash.
Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories Page 20
