Sit

by Deborah Ellis

  Sit

  Stories by

  Deborah Ellis

  Groundwood Books

  House of Anansi Press

  Toronto Berkeley

  Copyright © 2017 by Deborah Ellis

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2017 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  groundwoodbooks.com

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ellis, Deborah, author

  Sit / Deborah Ellis.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77306-086-6 (hardcover). — ISBN 978-1-77306-110-8 (softcover)

  — ISBN 978-1-77306-087-3 (HTML). — ISBN 978-1-77306-088-0 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8559.L5494S58 2017 jC813’.54 C2017-900416-6

  C2017-900417-4

  Jacket illustration by Clare Owen

  Jacket design by Michael Solomon

  To all who just need a moment of peace.

  Contents

  1 The Singing Chair

  2 The Time-out Chair

  3 The Question Chair

  4 The Knowing Chair

  5 The Plain Chair

  6 The Day-off Chair

  7 The Glowing Chair

  8 The Freedom Chair

  9 The Hiding Chair

  10 The War Chair

  11 The Hope Chair

  1

  The Singing Chair

  Jafar was sitting on a work bench in the furniture factory.

  Not sitting, exactly. Perching, like a little bird on the edge of a trash can, ready to take flight at the first sign of danger from a cat or a truck.

  Or from the boss storming through looking for slackers.

  As he rested his bony little body, Jafar stared into a sunbeam. It was only a second-hand sunbeam, one that bounced off the window of the coffin shop across the lane, but Jafar looked forward to it every day. It meant his workday, which began in Jakarta’s pre-dawn gray, was heading toward the end.

  The second-hand sunbeam pushed through the factory gloom. It made the men and boys glow like angels as they bent over their work. The dust particles danced and sparkled in the air.

  I’m in a gold factory, Jafar thought.

  In the haze, the rows and rows of chairs looked like thrones meant for gods and goddesses, not just kings and queens. No wonder the workers were not allowed to sit on them.

  “Don’t sit on the chairs!” Boss was always yelling at them. “The chairs are not for you and your filth.”

  Jafar had to agree with Boss about that. All the boys and men in the factory were filthy. Even Boss, although he was not nearly as dirty as the rest of them.

  One of Jafar’s jobs was to sweep. He swept the whole factory floor several times a day, but the dirt kept coming. Wood dust, wood shavings, grime from the sooty car and bus engines that blew in through the open wall that faced the street. The factory refused to stay clean while work was going on.

  The dirt stuck to him, too. No matter how careful Jafar was with the glue and lacquer, drops always landed on his skin and clothes, and everything stuck to these drops. At the end of an especially busy day, when they rushed around to get their work done, sawing and sanding to fill orders, Jafar looked like some new kind of animal, with wood shavings for fur and soot-dust for skin. When he scratched his head with his glue-hands, the glue and wood dust made his hair stand up on the top of his head like many small ears.

  “Quit daydreaming!” Boss yelled. He slapped the back of the boy’s head as he moved through the factory.

  Jafar jumped. He felt a little guilty because he had been daydreaming. He was working, though, and quickly. He could work with his hands and still daydream in his head.

  Jafar was sanding chairs today, the final sanding before the chairs would be loaded on a truck and taken away. His chairs would go on a journey and he would be left behind.

  Who would sit on his chairs? Would it be a happy person or an angry person? Would someone sit on one of his chairs and give up on life? Would his chair be a place where a child learned arithmetic or where an old man sat to eat a meal? Would someone sit on one of his chairs to watch a sunbeam and keep watching as shadows grew and turned into night?

  Jafar wanted to know, and he knew that he would never know.

  These were not chairs that would be painted or polished. These were cheap chairs. They would be sold to people who still had to work hard and save long to buy them. The fancier chairs Jafar’s factory made were beyond those people, and the real carpenters worked on those. Boys like him worked on the cheaper ones.

  Jafar didn’t care about not working on the fancy chairs. Work was work. Each day he worked brought him closer to paying off his family’s debt, closer to being able to keep the money he earned, closer to having a life where his belly was always full and he could take the time to find work in a place where the boss would not hit him.

  “We would make perfect murderers,” said Sanu, who was a year older than Jafar but had only been at the factory for one year. Jafar had been there for three.

  “What are you talking about?” Jafar asked.

  Sanu held up his hands and wiggled his fingers.

  “No fingerprints!” he said, laughing.

  They could laugh now, but when Jafar first started sanding, his fingers got so sore and bloody!

  “Get one more drop of blood on one of my chairs, you little cockroach, and I’ll send you back to your family in a garbage sack!” Boss had yelled at him.

  One of the older boys had slipped Jafar a blood-stained rag.

  “My fingers have healed,” he said. “You can have this now.”

  “How much do I pay you?” Jafar asked.

  The older boy shrugged. “Someone gave it to me. Pass it on to someone else when you’re done with it.”

  The blood stayed off the chairs, Jafar was not sent home as garbage, and his fingertips grew tough and strong.

  “No fingerprints. That’s a good one,” Jafar said to Sanu. “You should go tell the others. We could all be murderers!”

  He laughed again, but he really needed Sanu to go to another part of the factory and leave him alone for a moment.

  There was something he had to do, and he could not have any witnesses.

  Sanu looked pleased with himself but made no effort to move.

  “I’ll tell them later,” he said. “If I go over there now and tell them, they’ll think it came from you. They think all clever things come from you.”

  Jafar looked at the rows of completed chairs. There were only a few left for him to sand. Then the whole lot would be loaded into a truck and driven away.

  He could not miss his chance today! There would be other chairs and other chances, but he was ready today! Another day, he might not have the nerve.

  Jafar decided to use an old trick. He starte
d sanding viciously, really putting his muscles into making the chair leg smooth like milk, going at the bumps and slivers with all the strength of his bird-thin arms.

  “What are you doing?” Sanu whispered. “The fellas have just got the boss used to the slower pace. You want the old quotas back? You want to keep working until midnight again?”

  “I just feel like finishing up,” Jafar said, not slowing down one smidgen.

  “Sweat by yourself, then,” Sanu said. He picked up the chair he was sanding and moved away to sit and sand more slowly with the others.

  Jafar kept up his speed for a few minutes more until he heard the voice and stomp of Boss returning to the factory floor. He slowed his pace then, but kept the boss in his peripheral vision. He kept watch on everyone.

  No one must guess his secret.

  No one must guess that he went to school.

  Boss had not told him he couldn’t go, but Jafar suspected he would if he knew about it. Boss said nasty things to workers who were smarter than he was. The other boys would make fun of him, too, if they knew. They would poke him and trip him and tell him he thought he was too good for them.

  They gave him a hard enough time the day they caught him writing on a piece of scrap paper with a tiny stub of a pencil.

  They grabbed his pencil and would not give it back. They tried to get his piece of paper, too, but he would not let them see what he was writing. He popped the paper in his mouth and chewed it and swallowed it. They did not get to see what he thought about the beggar on the corner, how her face looked like sunshine when she smiled. They did not get to know his private thoughts.

  Anyway, he had written it clumsily. The words scrawled on the paper did not at all match the thoughts and feelings in his head.

  His teacher at the school for working children read them poems. Poems told him feelings he didn’t know he had. Poems made his heart dance and his mind fly above the smoke and stench and sweat of the city.

  How do writers do it? Jafar wondered for the millionth time.

  Today, he had a whisper of an answer.

  Today, he had completed his first poem.

  He had worked on it for days, trying to find the words, the words that would say exactly what he wanted to say.

  Today, the poem was done.

  Six words.

  Six words that told the story of him.

  Six words. Today, he had to grab the time and the privacy to write down his six words and send them off into the world.

  Maybe someone would discover them. Maybe someone would discover them years from now when the smooth yellow-wood chairs were gray with age and dust, the smoothness battered with dents and scratches.

  Jafar kept watch for his chance.

  He saw his moment.

  He took a nail from his pocket. He lowered himself to the floor, tipped over the chair he was sanding and scratched his six words into the underside of the seat.

  With this chair

  I am there.

  Boss would not like the poem on the chair. He would see it as damage. He would certainly hit Jafar if he found it, and make him pay for the damage with months and months of labor.

  But Jafar needed his poem to leave his head. He needed to see it written down, and when he did, it was more beautiful than all the stars and all the flowers and all the kittens that ever were.

  Quickly he pocketed the nail again and stood the chair up on its legs. He placed it in the row with the others.

  Astonished at his boldness, adrenaline dashing through him, he finished sanding his last chair and put it with the others, too.

  “What are you standing around for?” Boss yelled at him. “You think those chairs are going to load themselves? Move!”

  Jafar carried chair after chair into the truck. The chair with his poem on it looked like all the others. But to Jafar’s touch, it hummed and buzzed with life. His life.

  The driver got into the truck and started the motor.

  There was clean-up to do, sweeping and more sweeping. But Jafar leaned on his broom and watched.

  He watched the truck with his chair and his poem move off down the street, passing the coffin shop the sunbeam had abandoned, merging with the motorbikes, taxis and people.

  Somehow, amidst the honking horns, revving engines, hawking merchants and crying babies, Jafar heard something else. Something wonderful.

  He heard his chair. It was singing.

  With this chair

  I am there.

  It was the happiest day of his life.

  2

  The Time-out Chair

  Macie is sitting in the time-out chair.

  The time-out chair is an ugly pink plastic chair with a picture of a dinosaur on it. The dinosaur has a bow in its hair.

  When Macie was two, she loved this chair. She could climb into it all by herself. Now that she is seven and knows that dinosaurs do not wear ribbons, the chair is an insult.

  “If you don’t like the chair, then don’t do anything that makes you have to sit in it,” Mommy says.

  Mommy likes the chair. She points it out when people come to visit.

  “Yes, this is our china cabinet,” Mommy says to all the people who come over. “We got it just two years ago, ordered it special from the city. Ignore the little pink chair in the corner. That’s Macie’s time-out chair. She lives in that chair, don’t you, Macie?”

  Mommy laughs after she says that, and all the visitors laugh with her.

  Then they say things like, “Eleanor, how in the world do you get her to sit there? I can’t get my Bradley to do anything.” And, “Can I borrow your chair, Macie? I could use a little time-out!”

  The worst is like today, when the house is full of company and Mommy catches Macie with a bad attitude.

  “I have to take time away from my guests to deal with you again,” Mommy is saying, standing very tall beside the very short chair. Macie feels small beside her but she wants to feel smaller. The time-out chair is in a corner of the dining room. All the ladies are gathered around the table having cupcakes and coffee.

  They can hear Macie being told off. They can see her sitting too-big in the too-small chair.

  Macie is facing the corner but she knows they are staring at her.

  “When I ask you to do something, I expect you to do it. Is that asking too much? If you had fetched the napkins from the pantry when I asked, we could have avoided all this. But you had to open your mouth and be all smart, telling me you’d do it in a minute.”

  You brought this on yourself, thinks Macie.

  “You brought this on yourself,” says Mommy. “When I tell you to do something, just do it. Life would be so much easier! She will not stop answering me back!” Mommy says to her guests. “She loves the sound of her own voice.”

  Mommy winds up the kitchen timer.

  “I do two minutes for each year of her age,” Mommy tells her company. “The experts say one minute but they don’t know Macie! Fourteen minutes, young lady. Sit there and be quiet. None of your crying! No one here cares.”

  Macie is not crying, not one tear.

  Mommy puts the timer down where Macie can see it and goes back to her chair at the table.

  “More coffee, anyone? There’s lots here and I can always make more.”

  The ladies pick up the chatter about the coffee. “I’ll have a little more.” And, “Where did you get these cupcakes? Are they from Betty’s Bakery? I hope they are calorie-free!” Which makes them all laugh, although Macie can’t understand why.

  “I really shouldn’t have one, but they look so pretty! Dare I? Do you think I should?”

  Just eat the damn cupcake, Macie thinks. She happily rolls the swear word around in her head.

  No one is talking about Macie, but everyone knows she is being punished and she knows that they know. W
hen the buzzer goes off, she will have to get up off the stupid pink dinosaur chair and apologize to her mother in front of all the company. Her mother will lecture her again, then give her a cupcake and send her to the front porch to eat it. She can’t be trusted not to drop crumbs on the floor if she eats it in the living room, and there is no room for her around the dining-room table.

  When the ladies leave they will pass right by her on the porch and say things like, “Did you enjoy your cupcake?” And, “I’m coming by to borrow your special chair one day, Macie,” which will make her feel worse than if they ignore her. If they talk to her, she’ll have to talk to them in return, with a little smile plastered on her face. And she’d better be polite about it, or she’ll be right back in the time-out chair!

  “Macie? Are you being good?”

  “She’s being very good, Eleanor,” says Mrs. Sardee from two doors down.

  “She’s probably sitting there scheming. What are you scheming about now?” Mommy asks Macie.

  Macie doesn’t answer her. Talking is verboten in the time-out chair. Verboten is German for forbidden. They are not German, but Mommy and Daddy always use the German word and laugh, and that is another joke that Macie doesn’t get.

  There is silence behind Macie. Then Mrs. Grenville, mommy to Cindy who babysits sometimes, says, “It’s such a lovely day. Why don’t we take our coffee outside?”

  This is a popular idea. Macie hears all the ladies push back their chairs

  “Macie, if you move from that spot before the buzzer goes, I will know it. When the buzzer goes off, bring the timer out to me,” Mommy says. “She tries to get away with everything. Honestly, I’m in for it when she’s a teenager!”

  Macie hears the ladies leave the dining room and head out to the wide covered front porch. She hears them pull the comfy outdoor chairs out from the wall and arrange them in a semi-circle so they can see each other while they talk.

  Macie looks at the kitchen timer. Ten minutes left.

  She hates sitting still! Her legs and feet want to move, to run, to carry her far away from here to the park two blocks away where she is not yet allowed to go to by herself even though she knows all about looking both ways to cross the street.