I scoop a few flies out of my jar and blow them at Winnie. They stick to her woolly sweater. Her mouth hangs open but her words blur around me as I jump up and spin in circles across the porch and into my room and into my closet where the tallies slice the world into small, digestible bits.
—
Wake-ups since birth: 4758. Science-fair exhibit: T-26 days. Winnie’s relationship with God, number of days: 13. Growth of plants, millimetres per day: 0.5. Chance of winning science fair, percentage: 0.0000000000000000000000000001.
My exhibit still hasn’t grown any mouths. Extra moss hasn’t worked. Rainwater hasn’t worked. The specially choreographed please-grow-a-tooth dance hasn’t worked, though it did scare the neighbour’s dog from lifting its leg at our fence ever again. I even wiped the dust off my window to let in more light. Nothing.
The smell of lemon meringue pie wafts into my room. Its homey fingers pull me into the kitchen, seat me on the countertop. Winnie and her friends are cleaning the kitchen and throwing out the contents of the fridge. The smell comes from the aerosol foam Winnie sprays over the cherry-pattern tiles, her movements quick and angry, as if the cracked little squares did something wrong.
After they empty the fridge they move on to the shelves and cupboards, all in preparation for Winnie’s fast. A few days ago she even went off her Marlboro Lights.
Chip bags, Twinkies, TV dinners, frozen pizzas, tubs of margarine fly across the kitchen into a garbage bag. I see the items suspended in the air for an instant and imagine we’re in zero gravity. I sit and watch. I turn the empty microwave on for a few seconds, to see what happens. Another few seconds. Ten seconds this time. Funny girl you have, someone says to Winnie. They are on to the cereal cupboard now. Fifteen seconds. What’s left of the stale but perfectly frosted corn flakes spins through space. I’m winding the dial to 100000 seconds when Winnie tears the plug out of its socket and, saying all sorts of things not recorded here, carries the microwave to the back alley. Out of a cardboard box she fashions a sign: RADIATION (FREE).
1. THE HAND
And this time I drape the hand over my stomach, my shoulder, it’s the loving hand that knows all my secrets. My, my, such smooth skin you have, I whisper. Do you lotion? Bubble bathe? Will you stay with me a while? Before someone drops a bag of needle leaves from the holly tree on you and me, before everything starts to prickle and your skin becomes my skin, your fingers my fingers, and when it’s over it’s just me again. Me lying here, trying not to move.
2. ME (THE GIRL)
Edison Middle School, science lab. Bottled insects, bottled eggs, bottled rodents, bottled bits of lung. Instruments not to be touched without supervision. Glass to keep the fingers out. Klaus, the science teacher, looks at the girl seated across from him through two magnifying glasses that are his eyes. Beautiful grey watery eyes. The girl’s bare legs don’t touch the floor, she could swing them back and forth. But the girl keeps still as she asks the teacher about the effects of starvation on rats. That’s an interesting question, says Klaus. His eyes drift toward the window, follow the movement of the clouds. There are measurables, he says. The girl likes this word, how it feels in her mouth as she asks if he could help her measure these measurables. For a special exhibit. For the science fair.
Why don’t you do something more fun? Look at what Lisa Ferrell is doing with those little bean stalks of hers, hey?
She tells him the seedlings he’d given her earlier didn’t have much of a chance. Please, Mr. Klaus. The girl knows she is good at saying please.
When the girl leaves the lab, she leaves with a promise: one rat, just one, not to be harmed (but harmed scientifically), and a whole lot of instruments not to be used (but used under supervision). Klaus even suggests the girl name the rat, the silly man.
—
Subject: Winifred Haze. Fast: Day 1. Age: 39 ¾. Height: 5.8 feet. Weight, according to driver’s licence (expired): 140 lb. Hair: brown. Eyes: blue. Smoker, nail chewer. A history of mumbling.
Subject Winifred reports feeling light. Before you bring in the new, you have to cut away the old and the sick, she says. Subject Winifred whizzes around the house, breathing easy in a cloud of euphoria and a team of supporters.
Another kitchen meeting:
I see you got rid of your microwave, says the woman sitting beside Chewing Man. A hard step but well worth it, she says. That’s one less thing cooking us all in deadly invisible waves.
The woman is a Certified Breatharian, though a troubled Certified Breatharian. How am I supposed to feed on sunrays if there are none, she says. That’s the problem with the West Coast. I’m pretty sure my DNA is already restructuring itself to absorb more nutrients from the air but—
For a slice of a second, light fills the kitchen. Someone gasps.
Who snapped a photo? asks Chewing Man.
Subject Winifred narrows her eyes at me, tells me to go to my room.
How lovely, you didn’t mention you had a child, says the Breatharian and looks in Subject Winifred’s general direction. Subject Winifred hesitates between a nod and a shake so her head goes around in a lopsided circle, which makes me laugh a little. She mutters something about my born ability for camouflage, and that makes me laugh too.
—
There’s no shortage of food for me—the natural-disaster suitcase went untouched during the cleaning. Every day is a feast: canned beans, canned soup, canned spaghetti, canned meatballs, and for dessert, canned syrupy angel food cake with maraschino cherries (also canned). Two winters ago, Winnie came home dragging a cartload of food, convinced a major earthquake was coming to town that evening. Dragging, because the security feature on the cart’s wheel snapped shut when she tried rolling it out of the store. Good thing she did that. Looking out for our survival, thrifty Winnie.
—
Subject: Winifred. Fast: Day 3. Weight: 134 lb. (When asked to step onto scale, Subject Winifred frowns and says, You think I’m doing this to lose weight?) A white coating on the tongue, a sweet quality to the breath. Subject Winifred leans on doorframes before passing through them. Vomits at the sight of canned feast on the table.
That’s pretty normal, says Klaus when asked about the symptoms above, just the body readjusting to its new state of being. When did you see Patches throwing up, though? he asks. Patches is the name he’s given the rat. I haven’t seen him throwing up, Klaus says.
Today Mr. Brown, P.O. Box 450, Miami, FL, arrives in the form of a cheque with the words Dream big and dare to fail printed on it in gold. His cheques always have inspirational messages on them. Constant dripping hollows out the stone. The world is all gates, all opportunities. Happiness depends upon ourselves. The going is the goal.
III
OBSERVATIONS (CONT’D)
Subject: Winifred. Fast: Day 7. Weight: 129 lb. Enlarged eyes or the illusion of enlarged eyes?
Subject W meditates on the front porch. The neighbour’s dog runs up to the chicken wire fence and barks at the wax figure in the flowing shirt but W keeps her eyes shut as she tries to see to the Real World where God and Light reside.
Yesterday Annabelle Poitras, the Certified Breatharian, said the human body is a dark house with blackened windows, and we try to look out at the real world but are aware of very little.
What does Subject W see in the Real World? Yesterday Annabelle Poitras said there are a billion colours and neons and frequencies above the normal human range of perception and hummingbird tail feathers vibrate like violin strings and—
I am trying to meditate, Subject W says, one eye squinting at me. I ask if she’s seen the Real World yet and what does it look like.
A lot prettier than this one.
Prettier how?
Subject W closes her eye again and suggests I do something productive rather than follow her around taking pictures of her so-called natural habitat.
I am doing something productive, I say. Prettier how?
Close your eyes, she whispers.
Okay.
>
What do you see?
Eyelids. Nothing.
Look closer.
But—
Ssssssssh…
IV
SOURCES OF ERROR
Subject W is sleeping on the couch for the nineteenth hour when the girl starts to rattle her, brings can after can of food for her, eats it in front of her, tries to push a spoon of mango syrup at her mouth, one spoon of syrup please, and W opens her eyes and considers the spoon before shaking the girl off with an unknown strength. The spoon and can of syrup crash to the floor.
You scared me, W says. I’m fine! She pinches her cheeks to prove it.
The girl almost blew the entire exhibit, stupid, stupid girl.
Trying to sound smooth, the girl says she needs a nice shirt for a science fair that’s coming up. Subject W asks how fancy does the shirt have to be. Pretty fancy, the girl guesses. Preferably with buttons and a front pocket. W says she happens to have the old swamp-green one from her days at ifty Finds, and it has buttons and even a front pocket, if you can believe it. And the girl thanks goodness.
—
I don’t think Patches is doing too well, says Klaus, prodding the rat with a gloved finger. A few hairs fly off its body and glitter under the lab lamp like star dust.
Have you been keeping an eye on him? Making sure he’s drinking? Haven’t seen you around the lab much lately. The refeeding phase is part of the experiment too, you know. And have you seen the camera?
Klaus’s words flutter by me and for a second I forget where I am. Klaus looks at me like a kid looks at a worm steamrolled into fresh asphalt. Curious but a little sorry at the same time.
Klaus asks if I want to know a fun fact. It’s how he cheers up his keener students after a bad grade. Last week he told Ricky Fielder the average person weighs nine pounds post-cremation—not much more than a newborn, hey? Lisa Ferrell burst out laughing and Ricky Fielder burst into tears. Anybody who is anybody in Edison knows Ricky Fielder’s the one with the troubles at home. So there was Klaus in front of thirty wide-eyed students, scouring all the shelves and drawers of his mind for another fun fact to save the day.
No thank you, I say to him and he says, I’ll just go ahead and tell you anyway. I tell him I’ve already heard the one about the mantis shrimp and he says, Oh.
V
PHYSICAL POSSIBILITIES & IMPOSSIBILITIES
Subject: Winifred. Fast: Day 14. Weight: 115 lb. Subject W is unresponsive to sight of food. That sweet smell of the breath is acetone, according to Klaus, a toxic product of the body eating away at itself. Also a sign of kidney malfunction. Common household uses of acetone: paint thinner, nail-polish remover.
I’ve never felt lighter, cleaner, better, says Subject W during a kitchen meeting.
The others nod—they’ve all been through this before. Chewing Man fasted for eight weeks once. Annabelle Poitras for twelve. That’s how she became closer to God, found eternal joy. She says in the final phase, when your body is free of toxins and your tongue is pink as a baby’s, that’s when you really feel it.
W says she can’t wait to feel it.
You’ll know when it’s happening.
She’ll know when it’s happening.
It’s like you are in a ray of colours, says Annabelle, and what you’re breathing is not air but pure unadulterated energy and you want to breathe it forever. And it’s warm and kind and you’re gone from all the shit back here, prodding you every day, you’re gone. It doesn’t touch you anymore.
The others nod.
W nods.
Annabelle smiles and puts her hand on my hand. It’s warm, her hand, and I should but don’t move my own.
—
The rat died this morning. It was all gritty fur and bones at the end, like an owl pellet, whatever the bird can’t digest and has to choke back out.
I’m not happy about this, not happy at all, says Klaus. His magnified eyes bore into mine and I wonder if he can see anything past them. The school administration won’t like it either, he adds.
I tell him I didn’t know when the refeeding phase was supposed to start.
That’s why you should have been here measuring, he says. Blood pressure, body heat, urine volume—wasn’t Patches your whole exhibit?
I tell him it was. I do the downcast eye and knitted brow thing heroines do in English class because at this moment I guess I’m supposed to be conflicted and heart-wrenched.
Might be a bit of my fault too, Klaus says, petting the rat’s foot. Should’ve kept him better company. He might’ve just lost hope after a while. Poor Patches.
—
Poor Patches, says Lisa Ferrell after class. Klaus told me. That sucks.
It really is a physical impossibility for her upper lip to touch the lower one.
Don’t worry about it, I say, and ask how her plants are doing. Good, big, eating up a storm, she says. Can’t catch enough flies to keep up. I’m surprised your mom doesn’t catch them all for you, I say, and she says, What’s that supposed to mean? I say nothing. Even if my mom did catch them, Lisa Ferrell says, she’d have to mail them to me in a little envelope all the way from Saka. Saka, Madagascar. Actually, a giant envelope because the flies in Madagascar are giant. That’s where my mom is now: Madagascar. Well that’s just neat, I say. Lisa Ferrell deflates a little when she says, Nah, not really.
VI
THAT FOR WHICH SHE IS SORRY
Subject: Winifred. Fast: Day 21. Weight: 110 lb (estimate). Kitchen meeting attendance: 3. Science-fair exhibit: T-3 days. W is extremely prostrated, one of Klaus’s favourite words. W perspires. W’s interactions with the world and its mysterious workings decrease. Caught smoking a Marlboro deliciously in bed, mumbling like old times, one stem of an arm resting on layers of fleece blankets. It could be snapped between two fingers, this arm.
Honey, maybe you should try a different strategy, Annabelle whispers, rewinding her sandal straps around her ankles, about to head out the door. She’s busy these days, working at a laser hair-removal clinic. Soon all the others are busy these days. The stucco house empties.
Subject W shows no desire for refeeding and will keep fasting past 21 days. Past what, exactly, she does not say.
—
In the next room, the girl can’t sleep. Her skin is live, electric, her sheets burn. She reads her closet tallies, all of them, even the ones from the beginning of time. Their controlled, steady shapes are cool and calming as they centipede into the future. Tomorrow she will have woken up for the 4781st time. Her nails will have grown 1/5 of a millimetre. The day after tomorrow, the girl will have won.
—
Subject: Winifred. Fast: Day 23. Weight: unknown. Ankles swollen. Hair thinning. Science-fair exhibit: T-I day.
W’s bedroom blinds are closed, barring out the spring light. It isn’t kind, this light. Lately it makes her skin sore.
Can you get up? I ask W at her bedside. I preferred it when she napped on the couch. There’s less finality about a couch.
No answer. Daring to inch closer, closer than I can remember ever seeing her, I observe the pores on her forehead. Tiny craters. An unfamiliar landscape, the surface of the moon.
The eyelids shiver and I jump back. W opens her eyes, closes them, opens them again. Whoa, she says, her voice hoarse, as if she’s waking from a lifelong sleep. She says, Here I thought you were the Lord Almighty himself, coming to visit me.
Not quite, I say. Can you get up?
W props herself up on one elbow, falls back, laughs. I get dizzy when I do this, she says.
It’s just a few steps to the bathroom, I say.
You’re taller, she says. How long have I been asleep? My God, you are giant. A thousand times taller than me.
I tell her to cut it out with the hallucinations, but she only laughs harder. Something hot starts climbing my spine and I count the blinds: 25. A perfect 25.
I’m still smaller than W, carrying her to the bathroom will be near impossible. I can’t bring the scale
to her—the carpeting on the bedroom floor will throw off the calibration. There’s no way around it, I need that last little number.
I say, Put your arms around me, I can help you.
She’s quiet now, as if there’s magic to my words. Slowly, very slowly, her mouth stretches into a smile. She says, Okay. Okay.
I lean into her. She wraps one arm around me, then the other, and I start lifting her to a sitting position. I’m too fast at first. Maybe it’s nerves or one of those brain glitches, when you grab a milk carton off the counter, thinking it’ll be full and heavy, and you jerk it up because it turns out to be light. W feels so light. I imagine her bones hollowing. There’s a smell to her, damp and sour, and I have trouble taking a full breath.
We hobble over to the bathroom, her limpness draped over me. Would you look at us, isn’t this just the funniest, she says, I’m like a monkey on your back.
She steps on the scale, says I really do worry too much, and would I like to hear a song? For her full weight to register I tell her to let go of me for a second. She sings into my hair. Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town. She wants to kiss me on the nose, misses, jabs my eye. Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown. She unwraps her arms and teeters on the spot. Tapping at the window, crying at the lock. I tell her her toes are covering the dial. Are the children in their bed? She shuffles her feet back. Hey Willie Winkie see there he comes. The dial twitches, stops. 105 pounds.
My arms and legs feel strange, as if they’re the wrong size, a bad fit. Someone must have glued them onto me because they aren’t mine. This body isn’t mine. This house isn’t mine. This isn’t me.
—
Nifty Finds, photo department. Beach balls on the walls, happy babies happy people happy cats preserved in gloss, matte, semi-sheen finishes. Glass frames keep the fingers out. The girl stands at the counter, also glass, contemplating her own floating fingerprints, smearing them on the counter, the awful child. When future Lisa Ferrell (orange uniform, orange curls tied up) hands over the package of photos, does she give the girl a look? Hasn’t she peeked inside the package? The girl shakes her head clean and it’s a man behind the counter and he does not look at her at all.
The Journey Prize Stories 29 Page 14
