Strange Folk You'll Never Meet

by A. A. Balaskovits

  “It would ruin the realism,” the fat one added.

  They left her with the poster and a cup of water to make sure she would have enough liquid in her eyes for leaking.

  The tent filled up that evening. With the word of a new show spreading—why, you’ll cry, you’ll scream, you’ll feel—even those who swore they could only witness her weeping once came back to see what the fuss was all about. Many people had to clamor in the aisles. The bears swiped and growled at those unlucky enough to stand with their backs pressed to the cages.

  Gerda and Maria took their spots on opposite ends of the dirt stage, bowed, and then twirled towards the center where Wilhelm rose his arms and cackled through the jam in his mouth. His executioners, in their faded princely garb, which should have been beautiful as all royalty, even pretenders, should be, stabbed a fake little knife into his belly.

  The two women twirled towards the center of the room.

  When Wilhelm opened his mouth to bite those poisoned sweets, Maria’s vision blurred, but no matter how she spun and no matter what arrangement her feet made upon the ground, the water stayed in her eyes as if it were ice. The executioners lifted their guns to his stomach—BAM—and then to his forehead—BAM—but even then, not a single tear escaped. She could see the mismatched bodies of the managers squirm in their seats, but even furious blinking did little to move the water. The jam in Wilhelm’s mouth splattered to the ground, but even as the executioners bound his body with rope she did not cry.

  She heard the splash and faced the audience.

  Dry, dried up Maria. No magic left.

  A young voice, perhaps a child, cried out in the back of the crowd. Strange—it was usually the front of the audience that cried first. Maria felt her cheeks to see if the liquid was leaking and she did not feel it, but no, it was not a cry of sorrow that erupted from the back of the audience and spread to the front. A polar bear, a small one, had escaped from its rusted cage. Theirs was a cry of alarm.

  Women gathered their children into their arms and men flew up onto their chairs, as if being slightly above the bear would protect their meaty bodies. The executioners ran into the back of the tent, pulling Gerda with them, even as the audience screamed at them to use their guns on the beast. Fools, the guns were not real, and they would be as useful at stopping a bear as a song. Maria sat still and watched its claws and teeth come dangerously close to her face—it was running straight at her—but the strongman jumped on the bear before it reached her. He put his beefy arm around its white neck and flexed until the beast whined and huffed. Its head fell to the ground, tongue waggling out. Maria was grateful the poor thing couldn’t taste the dirt it was licking with all the times she and Gerda had stepped on it.

  The only noise from the audience was the sigh of the managers in the back.

  Once the bear was conspicuously dragged off the stage, the managers waved their hands at the executioners to come back and resume their roles. They snapped their fingers at Maria and motioned towards their faces, puckering their eyes and making exaggerated frowns.

  She turned around to look at the false body of her father just as the executioners dragged in a breath of air as rough as stone. The three men dragged the body out of the water. Wilhelm never was any good at holding his breath, and the executioners were exceptionally good at tying knots.

  When they lowered him to the ground, the soaking caused the clay on his nose to fall off, revealing a slightly bent nose, but thin. The true nose under all that falseness.

  “Is this part of the show?” a woman in the audience asked in such a loud whisper it could be heard throughout.

  She never looked at the photos of her father’s body in the papers. First, her mother wouldn’t let her, and then as she grew older Maria had no desire to have her memory tainted with how others saw him. When she looked at Wilhelm, she suspected her father must have looked a little bit like that; soaked, with red near his mouth.

  The tent was silent. His executioners, suddenly thrust into the realization that they had lived up to their roles, however accidentally, looked at Maria with the pitiful longing of children who need their parents to tell them how to react. She turned from them and faced the audience and they, too, were holding their breath, staring at her, waiting for her tears, perhaps, or her screams. Waiting for the release from the indecision of response.

  There was a feeling curled in her breast. Rather, she called it a feeling, but only because it pushed against her lungs the way sorrow did, but unlike sorrow it was light, like Gerda’s pointed toes on the ground. This feeling was unfamiliar, like a childhood friend, the sort you remembered was a part of your life long ago but disappeared once the hair on your legs began to sprout. It curdled behind her eyes and in her throat, and she found that she had no desire to keep it inside.

  She opened her mouth and giggled.

  She turned to see the jam burbling around his lips and wondered how anyone could believe it was blood in his mouth. You could see the seeds.

  Maria opened her mouth even wider and laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

  Not a single voice in the crowd rose up to meet hers.

  I had to send them away. They were not children born of my belly. They came rushing out between some other woman’s thighs, one right after the other. I was told she lost so much of her liquid that, as soon as they emerged, squalling in the air, she dried up, all broken apart, and pieces of her blew away with the gust of their father’s grief. I had not known her, being so young myself when she died, barely out of my first bleeding, that when I was invited to her funeral, as we all were, such a tiny village we come from, I looked at the remains of her bones with the pity one has for any dead animal. I expressed the appropriate grief to the father, my eyes down and my lips trembling, but he must have seen something genuine in me, where there was none at all, that he asked my father if I would be a suitable replacement, and then put a bag of coins in my father’s hand when he hesitated.

  It was not so bad, at first. The children would not suckle from my breasts, but I warmed milk from the goat and dripped it into their mouths. They grew: the boy, Hansel, with his greedy appetite, and the girl, Gretel, long and thin like a branch, but with arms that knocked the china from the table if she did not get her way. They loved me, I suppose, as much as their father did, though when they saw my belly begin to expand, the rain forget to fall on our small garden of vegetables, and the goat dry up, the four of us knew what would happen: a fifth would devastate us, and two would have to go. We would all starve if we remained together. I have not been taught numbers as the men are, but even I know that three is less than five.

  I have heard that once you go into the forest, you come back a changeling. Or you don’t come back at all.

  Gretel was awake that night. Our small house had only one room for sleeping, and so all of us dreamed together. Yet, with my belly protruding too noticeably to be mistaken for anything else, I climbed above their father and massaged his neck and behind his ear, as he likes. I pressed his hands to my belly and rejoiced at what we had created. I whispered that I would not die with its birth, for I was made of stronger things than dust.

  It was difficult, after we finished, to fall asleep, for that daughter who was mine but not mine stared at me all night, the moon reflecting off her dark eyes.

  They cried, of course, the boy more than the girl, for his emotions reflected his appetite, and he was capable of keeping neither in check. Their father cried as well when he held the door open, but I held my hand on my belly—my only bargaining chip—and he gave them a little bread and told them they were old enough to make their own way, though they were young, too young.

  At night, I asked them to forgive me, though they were already gone.

  I bore him my daughter and I did not die.

  * * *

  She suckles from my breast and squirms and laughs with all the happiness of a small thing.
I see myself in her, that bit of myself that did not have to choose. With so few mouths to beg, the goat returns to its milk. We are saved.

  Their father weeps for them, though quietly, as he knows it upsets me and my daughter. I don’t voice what flows in my veins: I do not want them to come back, not my strong-armed daughter nor my voracious son. If they come back, it is I who will pay the price for saving us, I who will pay the price for desiring my own daughter over them, I who will pay the price for making the difficult decision, though it was his hand on the door. After a few months, I suspect they have died out there, and while I feel the ache of loss, I am also relieved that I will not suffer their retribution, even though they would be within their right.

  Tonight, a little before the birth of the new year, I sit on the little landing with my daughter wrapped up against my breast, showing her snow for the first time. Two figures make their way towards the house. Rather, I smell them first, the sickly stench of rotten sugar clings to them like a death. The boy is so big he makes the earth shake with each step, and the girl, tall and thin as she always was, has a red glint in her eye, and her teeth, when they are near enough to see, are filed to uneven spikes.

  They are almost upon me, and I hold my sweet baby daughter to my breast as I stand tall to receive them, these children that I have sacrificed to save my own, these children who are mine and not mine, these children who now sniff at my arms and neck, looking for the place to bite.

  Her mother said, “Darling pie, your lips are made of sawdust.” And on her tenth birthday her mother bought her matches to scrape across that skin, to keep her warm when a mother’s love is buried in the earth. The girl’s cheeks were made of wood. “A flawed design”, Mommy said, “but you make do with what you are given.” In the matchbox there were only five sticks. Five matches for five lives, and as each one burned, the girl was to remember what she saw. Remember what she’d want to keep. If she chose right, maybe she will learn something. Maybe she will stay warm forever. Her mother, perhaps knowing she was a woman who had given birth in a fairy tale, had done her duty to the narrative and died, so sad, and took all the wisdom and snide humor in her veins with her.

  * * *

  Strike one—a scene of a little bird. Common. A sparrow? No, too big. One of those starlings who carry the night sky on their backs. His feet were tied with fishing wire to a tree branch, beating his little wings as fast as the tap-tap-tap of his heart. Someone put him there, some creature with nimble fingers and a thumb. The bird was not alone, no, his little partner twitted from one branch to another, unwilling to leave her lover. Perhaps the bird thought if she shook the branch hard enough with her body she would shake him down, and he would be with her in their nest again. Little bird brain. She didn’t know his legs were broken.

  * * *

  Sawdust-lips kicked the snow at her feet.

  * * *

  Strike two—a man stepped on an ant, and then he wept. He built a little mound to remember the ant, or perhaps to memorialize his carelessness, but it withered away with rain because he had built it out of sand. So he built a larger memorial, using fallen branches, but a large wind swept it away to sea one evening. When his friends asked him why he was weeping so often they, too, felt the loss of the little ant, and the guilt that they loved someone who had done something so thoughtlessly cruel. They petitioned the city to build a stone monument in the square, sculpted into legs and a long abdomen, and it was beautiful, for a time, but an earthquake ripped the ground in two, and the sculpture cracked. On and on, the whole town built more memories, and on and on they fell apart, until one day they constructed a steam tower to float over their heads with banners floating behind it, circling their homes and the courthouse. But they forgot to put enough grease in the engine and it collapsed in the middle of the city. It crashed on the heads of eight children playing red rover, red rover, won’t you come over?

  * * *

  Wooden-cheeks curled her toes as they became numb.

  * * *

  Strike three—there was a girl who had just been ripped out of the belly of a wolf by a man with an oversize ax, but he’d nicked her face on one side, and on the other the acid in the belly marked her as half-digested. She ended up better than her grandmother, though, who came out without eyes, her jaw hinged off, and very, very dead. The woodsman brought home the bloody ax and the bloody girl, and because he once read that if you rescue a girl, she’s yours to keep, he placed her in his basement, which is like a belly in a way, but much colder, much drier, and so very dark.

  * * *

  Darling-pie shivered.

  * * *

  Strike four—there was no image with this one, only a feeling that curdled in her belly like sour sausage, the sort of nausea one experiences when they have had nothing to eat for days, but they forget that a starving stomach must have only bland food to start, and they imagine lavish feasts of pudding and toffee and syrup dripping over the edge of stacked pancakes, the kind of food that settles like a stone in your gut, but there is no stone, there is only a hole, and no table exists for you to sit at, no fork for you to grasp. Your teeth have nothing to chew.

  * * *

  Ten-year-old growled. She, too, had not eaten in some time, and that was the sound her stomach made. None of these stories made her feel any warmer, or any safer. Only the matches as they sparked to fire near her eyes did that.

  * * *

  Strike five—last match. Last light. Last warmth. Poor girl’s fingers were too frozen by then to be careful, and she caught the edge of the match on the side of her wooden cheeks. By accident? By accident. She went up in flames—poor design!—but she was not unhappy, in those last moments when she was alight, because she forgot about the bird and its broken leg, and the man who cried for ants, and a woman with a broken face in a basement, and she forgot that she was hungry. All that she knew was her face felt so alight! So red! She was the brightest part of the world.

  * * *

  Her body crumbled to black soot in the snow.

  * * *

  And so it was that, some time later, a group of revelers on their evening walk came across the black stain of her body with five burnt-out matches beside it. Each felt a quick little agony in their heart as they shaped the black into the body of a girl in their mind. As soon as they did, each one thought, well, this little thing has succumbed to her pain, hasn’t she? Animal like, at the end. One by one, they walked away, and did not think of her ever again.

  Iwant a womb. I wonder if mother notices how hungry I am for hers, how I look at her belly, expanded past her hip bones, filled with cakes, cookies, meats dripping with good sauces, upset that those stretch marks are from sugar and fat and not from me. My own body grew and stretched out a foreign woman with familiar skin.

  I am jealous of the kids who can point to their mothers and say, this is where my synapses were brought together, strapped and crisscrossed in pink. Electrified. Or this is the place where my body-cord pulsed with blood, was connected to the source. Where is my source? To what ash have I sprung, and to what dust shall I return? I am homeless in a home.

  In bright and cold September mother comes into the basement where I sleep, cocooned by the darkness of bulbs that have never been replaced. Her voice is soft. She says my name. She says my name again. “Are you awake? The doctor called. It’s diseased from disuse. They have to cut it out. Are you awake?”

  We sit, together, on an old rocking chair that was my grandmother’s. Though I am grown, I curl up on her lap and put my hands on her, whispering healing nonsense. I get down on my knees and kiss her swollen belly.

  They cut it out. I wonder, after they sliced and diced, if they held it in their hands like something precious. Was it deflated, rubbery, bloody skin ripped apart? Or was it golden, like the ball the princess dropped, a treasure hidden so deep in my mother’s body she forgot it was there yet, like all treasures, has a way of being di
scovered?

  When she is healed, we spend our evenings on her bed. Her belly is misshapen. There is an indentation where parts used to be.

  “Come here,” she says. “Look, they made room for you.”

  The space is big enough for my head. It is comfortable. My face makes an outline in her skin. Mother wraps her fingers in my hair and holds tight.

  The seventh child would be perfect. She would make sure of it, just as she made sure her hair was expertly coiffed each morning, and her front and back garden were in bloom when spring came.

  The previous six came forth wailing ugly notes and flailing thick, bulbous arms and thighs. They’d been malformed, throwing what should have been cherubic off. The firstborn was inexplicably wretched, covered in blood, like weepy milkweed, and so she had to bury it the moment it detached. But that son had grown lovely orchids above him, the little dear, and so she was not mad at him anymore. And, at least, he told her what to expect with the second. She did not look at that daughter until the girl had been cleaned off and smoothed out, wrapped in a clean towel. But there were indents under her bright blue eyes, thick gashes where the skin met itself, so she too went into the ground and made tea roses that all the neighbor ladies stopped and admired. The third was a funny color, like rotten azaleas, but it had been close to beautiful, so she kept it in a pot against her bedroom window, and was now her tulip child. None of the rest had even come close, and so they were in the earth or in barrels of dirt, their tiny bones growing something more lovely above them.

  It saddened her when she realized the imperfection was her own refined body. It was spoiling their pliant flesh before birth. So when the seventh child was seeded months in her belly, she reached inside herself and squeezed the slick, bloody flesh, put too much pressure on her bladder (she wet herself, but it was over the bathtub, and she held her breath until it was all down the drain), pinched his slippery toes between her thumb and forefinger and yanked him out.