Nevertheless, She Persisted

by Mindy Klasky

  Miss Bailey turned her head to one side, studying the dried out corn husks blowing in the winter breeze outside her window. “There’s another way,” she said at last.

  Hope kicked my heart so hard I almost choked. “What?”

  “There are people who help girls like you. Doctors.”

  I shook my head. “Not anymore.” I’d learned about the clinics in my Exceptionalism class. Some of those doctors went to prison. Most were executed for mass murder, strapped to tables and shot up with drugs a million times more merciful than the butchery they’d practiced on innocents.

  Miss Bailey sat down beside me. She took my hands in hers. “They’re out there. All you have to do is find them.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “There are signs. Guideposts for girls like you. It’s like the Underground Railroad—do you remember your hist—your Exceptionalism?”

  I nodded. Good Christians had saved the slaves. Men and women who showed Christ’s mercy to the least among them.

  “I can point you toward the first stop,” Miss Bailey said. “The woman there will tell you how to find the second, then the third, and the fourth.”

  “How many are there?”

  “I don’t know. Each of us only knows the next stop on the line. That keeps everyone safe. If I’m caught, I can’t tell too much. But the system works. There’ve been other girls like you. Girls who are free now.”

  Like Constance Marsh, I thought. I hoped. I prayed. I whispered, “How?”

  “The quilts.” Miss Bailey leaned closer. She whispered so softly I could scarcely make out her words. “You’ll walk till you find a Roman Stripes quilt hanging over a porch railing.” I pictured the bold rectangles, the strongest pattern I’d worked into my sampler. “You’ll talk to the woman who lives in that house. She’ll tell you the next road to walk, the next pattern to find.”

  I put my hand on my belly. “Do I have time? Will I get to the end before…”

  “If you leave now. If you start today.”

  Mom would worry. She had to be praying for me even now. Mrs. Miller must have told her I had strayed, that I was lost. “Will you give my mother a message?”

  Miss Bailey shook her head. “I can’t do that. I can’t be connected to you in any way.”

  “But—”

  “It’s for your safety. You and all the other girls.”

  I closed my eyes. Would Mom ever understand? Would she ever forgive me?

  Not now. Not yet.

  They’d make me marry Ezekiel. Raise his baby. Keep his house.

  I opened my eyes. “I’ll go.”

  Miss Bailey nodded. She was dry. Calm. Peaceful. Unaffected by the storm that was certain to rage around her.

  She hugged me close for one breathless moment, and then she hurried me out to her car. We drove in silence for ten miles, fifty, one hundred. She took turns I didn’t know. She brought me to a country lane I’d never seen before. When she let me out at a deserted crossroad, she said, “Walk from here. Don’t stop until you find the Roman Stripe.”

  I started walking. I found the quilt just before dusk, navy and crimson and white, glowing in the light of the evening sky.

  I’m hiding in a ditch, waiting for the moon to rise. It should be full tonight. Round. White.

  I curl my fingers into fists and press them against my belly. Some time in the last twelve weeks, I’ve perfected that gesture. It’s angry. It’s rebellious. It’s strong.

  Not at all what you’d expect from a girl named Faith.

  Not a girl. A woman. A woman named Briana. I’ve changed my name. I’m Briana now.

  And tomorrow, I’ll find the seventh quilt, the tumbling blocks—the never-ending illusion of in and out, of past and present, of foreground and background forever trading places. I’ll find the tumbling blocks, and I’ll be one step closer to freedom.

  The Purge

  Jennifer Stevenson

  It was the most horrible dream I have ever had.

  I couldn’t wait to get it into form, get something physical under my hand where I could control it. Until then I would feel defiled, invaded, somehow guilty for the creature’s filthy touch on my clothes. There was risk in form, but that was a faint fear beside the need to purge myself of its utter vileness.

  If it were going to be reproduced I would have cast it. That was a temptation. A clay model would feel cleaner, be finished with sooner, and then there would be only the making of the intaglio mold, pouring the resin, breaking the mold, and releasing the creature. I’d still have to paint it no matter how it was built. But a mold would take less time than the right way, and I might be tempted to refrain from breaking the mold. A cast piece can always be recast. I didn’t want reproductions. In the dream it reproduced itself quite handily. I shuddered, nauseated.

  The right way was the slow way. I wanted to think about it, deeply and completely, once. Just while making it. Then I could cleanse myself, knowing the job was done.

  I started with a wire armature, black and heavy but soft, life size at ten inches high, soldered to a forty-pound lead base. Something heavy was needed. This critter wasn’t going anywhere once it was built. The armature did most of the show work, too: all scrawny limbs and joints like a mantis or a grasshopper. It sat on its haunches, foreclaws to its mouth, gnawing, a pest, a parasite. I soldered on the sharp hooked spurs at forearm and shin, remembering how terrifying it had been to feel a tug on my uniform pants-leg, look down and see its feral face, half rat, half insect, see it climbing me with those spurs.

  In the dream I had not noticed if it was scaly or bald or chitinous; as I painted on layers of resin I compromised, etching on scales with a dental tool on one layer, then painting it with a wash like dirty dishwater, then over that another translucent layer of sewage-colored resin etched with a few coarse hairs in large pores, then a wash like oil on a wet tarred street, building up the thickness of the strong thighs and upper arms, the bulb of the head. Color went on in washes. The effect was to be pearly and obscene, and the viewer would remember it black, as I did, though it was many colors.

  In my head as I worked I saw it scamper through cratered villages to pick up a bit of charred skin, a child’s finger. I saw its bullet head, all eye and mouth, swimming strongly in the latrine, and my sphincter squeaked as I drew back unemptied. I saw a bulge in the belly of my friend, dead two days and unburied under the shrieking yellow sky, the bulge and a busy, squirrel-like tugging and pecking under the skin as it maneuvered in the little room it was making inside him, working its way toward his genitals. I feared it in the bellies of the living. Who will die next? What will he do first? I never saw one dead or stretched to its full length.

  I positioned the foreclaws close to the head, mouth parts askew in the act of chewing. Chewing what must remain ambiguous. For that I used a piece of green pepper partly coated with resins, knowing that the pepper, rotting, would leave the resin convincingly shredded-looking, with a lingering odor. The creature took shape, rubbery and durable, squatting on a flattened, empty cigarette pack, completely at home.

  I had no business submitting it to the veterans’ show on Halsted Street. I knew that. I photocopied decoration certificates from a library book, forged a signature on the entry form. I could more easily have put the beast in one of my regular galleries, where I would rub it in the public nose, if it had any validity at all.

  But what if not? I couldn’t bear the idea. What if it was my dream alone? I believed in my monster completely, but I wasn’t quite sure of the war. I didn’t have that nightmare and do this work to make a bogeybeast for white chicks from the suburbs.

  They didn’t question me. I walked among the authentic photographs and the helmets painted by genuine veterans with my hands in my pockets and dread in my heart, waiting for a reaction to my work.

  There must have been a dozen men in the gallery. Some still wore the rags of their uniforms. My guilt lent me second sight. Blinding fire shimmered off them, granting t
hem vitality that made my eyes water and my throat tighten.

  The first man stopped in front of my creature. He swayed.

  That was the most satisfying gallery experience of my life.

  He looked for a long time. Then he looked toward the card. I said, “Mine,” without thinking, and he looked up at me.

  “You saw it too?” I said.

  “All over the goddam place,” he said, shuddering, his gaze shocked and inward.

  I should have kept quiet. I should have left. “What was it called?”

  He faced it again. In his eyes I saw the echo of my own reaction to the thing: shame, defilement, invasion. He swayed again. “Nothing. I never saw one—so close.” His eyes narrowed on it. I wondered if for him the memories returned, sputtering over reality with a horrid paintbrush. He shook himself. “It isn’t real, you know.”

  This is the exquisite moment. No hunter takes greater satisfaction in the capture. I exulted, for now I knew, as I had suspected, that our nightmares were the same. Joy rushed out of me toward this man, and toward the thing I had made, the unknown parasite, eater on the dungheaps of war. We shared that. That justified everything, the horror itself, my impertinent illustration, my intrusion into authentic veteran space. That justified him. I wanted him to know that. I wanted to say, I did this for you.

  Then he saw me. How young, how female and unscarred. “Hey, you weren’t there.” His face reddened. He swelled with anger.

  I hung my head. I felt disastrously exposed and ashamed of myself.

  “Who do you think you are? This isn’t your war!” He shouted and shouted at me. “You don’t know what’s real! You can’t just come in here—”

  The other men came to listen. I felt their scrutiny, damning me deafeningly. They saw my work, they heard him accuse me. I said nothing. I put up my hands, mortified. I still saw their faces, stripped and angry.

  He pushed me. I stumbled against the pedestal. The pedestal rocked, but the piece stood solid. I had screwed it down.

  They stood around me now, the fire radiating out of them, an anger that knew how to express itself.

  “Who told you about it? Who? Come on!”

  Cringing, I whined, “I dreamed it.” Stand up or he’ll smash you, I thought. In a stronger voice: “I dreamed it.”

  “Easy now, easy now.” The gallery owner pushed forward. He looked at me and at the card pinned to the pedestal. “Who’s this Andy Franco? Your father? Your brother?”

  “My brother?” I echoed, dazed. “Th-the papers—” I stammered, but they only looked at each other. I stopped, sour fear in my mouth.

  “He checked out,” the gallery owner said.

  Relieved, my harasser demanded, “So your brother made this?”

  Oh no you don’t, I thought, I know what you’re doing. I was still desperately ashamed of myself. I shouted, “What does that matter? Can’t anybody believe in the war?” My belly cried, Never mind all that, get out or get hurt.

  The gallery owner stepped between us. “You can get out now,” he said to me. His jaw unclenched. Grudgingly he added, “Thanks for delivering it anyway. Andy did good.” He turned back to the listening men. “Settle down. She’s leaving.”

  One by one, each man gave me a hot look and turned his back. I had to dodge around my creature, screwed forever to its pedestal, to get to the door. There was a small tearing sound as I opened the door. When I looked back, the card with the false name on it lay on the floor in four pieces. Beyond, a barrier of implacable, shabby green coats.

  The beast sat on its pedestal at the end of a dark tunnel. It looked, suddenly, impossible. Fresh air blew in past me. My skin felt less sticky, my mouth less sour. My shadow scuttled across the floor, fleeing the sun at my back, and disappeared into the bodies of its rightful owners. For the first time since my dream I felt clean.

  If It Ain’t Broke

  Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Eugene Bulinsky is what you’d call a klutz. He’s also what you’d call a flippin’ genius. Unfortunately, in social situations, the one does not balance out the other. No one cares much if you’re a genius when you’ve just dumped a gallon of clam dip on their new carpet and the clam dip clogs up the vacbot, which proceeds to explode and spray their guests with fuzzy goop.

  Eugene Bulinsky, this is your life.

  At least, it was Eugene’s life pre-nanny. No, Eugene didn’t hire a nanny to look after him. He made one. Actually, he made a whole bunch of them. Euge isn’t a genius for nothing.

  I found out about the nannies when Eugene called me up and invited me to a party at Garry Greenwald’s. My first reaction was total disbelief.

  “Euge,” I said, “Eugene. How the hell did you get invited to a party at Greenwald’s condo? The last time you were there, he said he’d never let you anywhere near the place again.”

  Eugene laughed. (It sounds like snorting to the uninitiated, but it really is laughter.) “Garry’s having a problem with calculus,” he said, which was explanation enough.

  “And you offered to bail him out,” I surmised.

  “Yeah. Besides, I promised him it’d never happen again.” Eugene pushed his glasses up his nose and grinned sheepishly at me from the vucom.

  “Huh! Promise the poor damn cat!” I said. “He’s the one with the concussion.”

  “I paid his vet bills.”

  “Don’t whine, Eugene. I hate it when you whine.” I plopped a big blob of clay on the table in front of me. “And how the hell could you promise Greenwald something like that? You leave a wake of total destruction wherever you go. You’re like Hurricane Eugene.”

  “Not anymore,” he told me.

  Something about the way he said that made me take my attention off the soon-to-be award-winning sculpture I was working on and look at him. He was glowing. I knew what that meant. I glowed when I completed a sculpture, Eugene glowed when something in a test tube cried, “Papa!”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Okay, Frankenstein, what’ve you done this time?”

  “Nannies,” he said.

  “Huh! I always said you needed a keeper.”

  He snorted and yucked a few times, then pushed his glasses back up and said, “Not a nanny. Nannies—nano-machines.”

  “Nano-what?”

  Eugene looked exasperated. “Honestly, Nina, sometimes you’re such a dwit. Nano-machines. Little tiny machines that do little tiny jobs. Except that these nannies do big jobs. They’re…mega-nannies.”

  “Mega-nannies,” I repeated.

  “Okay, so that’s probably a contradiction in terms, but well, they’re bigger than most nano-machines; too small to be called micro-machines.” He shrugged. “So—mega-nannies.”

  “Right. Well, that’s very interesting, Eugene, but I don’t have time to concern myself with all this scientific mumbo-jumbo right now. I’m preparing to create some truly great art.”

  Eugene scratched his head, which he always does when the subject of art comes up. He didn’t understand art any better than I understood nano-whatever-it-was. I asked him to explain the nanny business to me again, but he went multo-mysterioso on me and told me I’d have to wait till the bash at Greenwald’s to witness his new invention—and his new persona.

  Great, I thought. Dr. Nanny and Mr. Hyde.

  Saturday night we arrived at Garry Greenwald’s Marblehead condo when the party was in full swing. Everybody watched our entrance, and it wasn’t because we made such a glam duo—although Euge looked better than usual, I had to admit. His hair wasn’t in his face and he wasn’t wearing that damned white jacket that looked like a cast-off from Dr. Who. Together, well, together we were quite a sight. He’s so conservative and I’m so Punk-emian.

  Garry looked like he wanted to run and hide when he saw us. I saw him glance toward the aquarium like he might go throw his arms around it for a final farewell. Instead, he smiled (talk about in-sin-cere) and came over to say, “Hi.”

  Actually, what he said was, “Bulinsky, if you screw up my condo
again, so help me—”

  “A Bulinsky never makes a promise he can’t keep,” said Eugene solemnly.

  “A Bulinsky never makes a party he doesn’t wreck, you mean.”

  “Go soak it, Greenwald,” I snarled. “He promised, okay?”

  Eugene was already wandering off toward the buffet.

  Garry paled.

  “God, Greenwald, you’re such a yup. Didn’t your folks ever teach you that friends are more important than things?”

  He glared at me. “God, Zubin, you’re such a punk. Didn’t your folks ever teach you that money doesn’t grow on ATMs?”

  “Oh, look who’s talking!” I shot back. “Your family is so loaded, you could buy Boston UAT. I got here on an art scholarship, and Euge lives from grant to grant.”

  “Euge!” He glared at the buffet again. “I don’t know why you hang around with that nerd, Nina. People think you’re weird.”

  “People think I’m weird anyway,” I said. “Or hadn’t you noticed?” I swung my head quickly toward the group next to us and caught Susie “Sugarlips” Santini staring at me.

  She smiled and pointed a gold fingernail at my hair. “Nice stripe,” she said. “That’s real cute the way you dyed your hair to match your…outfit.”

  I gave Greenwald a “so there” look and went to find Eugene. He was still at the buffet happily stuffing his face.

  “Tr’ un’a dzz,” he said as I arrived. He was holding out a puffy little ball of something vaguely fishy smelling.

  I shot a glance back at Susie and nibbled it out of his fingers. He grinned, and she looked like she wanted to throw up.

  “Lemme get you a plate,” he said.

  Before I could say, “Don’t bother,” he’d reached across the table, between the coffee samovar and the punch bowl, and grabbed a bio-foam plate from the stack.

  I saw it coming before it happened: The plate hitting the punch bowl’s long-handled glass dipper; the dipper flipping up, end over end in a graceful arc, spraying bright pink punch all over the white tablecloth and coming to rest with a cartoon “squish!” in an untouched mold of Crab Angelica, which disintegrated into goopy blobs. The effect was almost artistic. I heard a loud groan go up around the buffet and glanced at Eugene. Usually, when these things happen, he blushes, cowers, and apologizes like crazy. But this time, he was just standing there with his hands in his pockets, grinning.