“We need to get it done before the first of the month,” said Wren. “Else they’ll send me back to the monster.” She rubbed her jaw and winced.
Wren managed not to get her parents to come into her room by showering early and being by the door when she had to go to school. The Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket was way too big to hide from them now. Her father bought it right away and smiled and ruffled her hair and said she was growing up, but her mother smiled tightly and narrowed her eyes. When Wren used the bathroom during breaks on the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket she would catch her mother dusting the table in the hallway, the table her mother never dusted, and was very close to Wren’s bedroom door.
When it only needed the final finishing touches, Wren and Gizmo smeared generic glue all over the gewgaws and spent the night sitting on them so that they would be firmly fixed in the morning. Then it would be ready for flight.
“I made a spot for you,” said Wren. She pointed at the perch she glued next to the pilot seat, which was really just a stick Gizmo had brought in by accident one day.
“I can’t go with you,” said Gizmo. “I can’t breathe all the way up there.”
“But Giz,” said Wren. “You have to go where I go. We’re a team.”
“But I can’t,” said Gizmo. “You want to go somewhere where no one else can follow.”
He turned away from her and jumped on the sill.
Wren didn’t know if she wanted to go to the moon all alone, even though she had to escape her aching teeth. Gizmo was the only one she knew who was not like any other of his kind, or her kind, and it was not only the pink beak that made him stand out, or that he could carry way more than he weighed, or even that he once tried to train her to poop when she was happy just like him. She wasn’t even sure why she liked him so much, except that he seemed a part of her, if blackbirds with pink beaks could be a part of a little girl.
There was a soft knock at her door. “Wren,” said her mother’s watery smile. “I think you slept in. It’s time for school.”
“Uh,” said Wren. “I’m very sick. Over 150-degree temperature. Cough. I better stay in bed. And you shouldn’t come in or you’ll get just as sick as I am.”
“Wren,” sighed her mother, “I know you hate the orthodontist, but that’s no reason to miss school. In a few years you’ll thank us for making you go, trust me.”
“Doubt it,” said Wren.
The knob of Wren’s bedroom door caught on the lock. “Wren,” said her mother, “you have to let me in.”
“No, I don’t.”
Wren’s mother called for her husband, and Wren ran to her window to get Gizmo to help her with the door, but Gizmo was gone. Not even a bit of his poop remained on the sill.
Wren’s braces hurt more than they had ever hurt her before.
“Wren!” cried her father. “Please open the door.”
“No!” said Wren. “You can’t make me go to school and you can’t make me go to the monster! I’m going to the moon!”
Wren hopped into her Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket and pushed the button that heated up the fuel in the veeblefetzer. She set her straight-o-meter to aim her at the moon and hurried it along because she could hear her father hitting his body against the door.
“Wren!” they said. “Wren, what do you mean?”
The gauge-o-meter that told her everything was filled up and ready to go began to beep and glow, so Wren pushed the button that started the explosion out of the butt and held on to her seat.
Just as the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket began to lift off the ground, her father broke into her room and stumbled when he saw Wren in her machine. It was the first time Wren saw her parents without their smiles, and she realized how grown up they were.
Her parents grabbed onto each side of the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket and held it down. It shook and whined in their grasp, but together they dug their heels into the plush carpet and whitened their knuckles over the wings. They said, “stop, Wren! You haven’t done your homework! You haven’t eaten dinner! You’ve got an appointment at the orthodontist!”
Wren looked at the straight-o-meter and it said if she didn’t get off the ground right-at-this-moment-now she wasn’t going to go straight to the moon, so she cried to her parents that they had to let go, or she wouldn’t make it.
Her mother openly cried great big watery tears, and she cried with her mouth open. Wren saw that her mother’s teeth were big and gapped. The spaces between the molars and incisors and front two were so large whole pieces or carrot or celery could fit in-between. Her mother had teeth just like Wren’s own, except that her mother’s weren’t covered up with metal and wires. Wren wanted to say just how cool her mother’s teeth were, and probably would be even beautiful if she ever showed them in a smile, but her mother saw Wren looking and slapped her hands over her mouth.
Alone, Wren’s father couldn’t hold down the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket, and it burst out of his hands like a rabbit hops, jittery and with its legs kicking furiously at the air. Wren was pushed to the back of her seat when she blasted off from her room, breaking into and past the ceiling, and into the great big blue sky. She wanted to turn and say goodbye to her parents but she couldn’t turn her head. So she opened her mouth to scream her farewells but the pressure was so great she couldn’t form a single sound. The air was so thick and hot that when she pushed her head forward against it she felt the braces on her teeth begin to come undone.
First the small bits of metal bent and twisted against her teeth, but her teeth were slimy from her spit so they screeched and slid off the white part like they were rolling down a slide. Then they formed into a small scratchy ball on her tongue, all that metal torture, and Wren could taste the gritty cement-glue. She rolled it to the front of her teeth with her tongue and spit it out. It landed against the front of the cockpit. Wren ran her tongue across her teeth and her gums, and though she could feel the bumps of the glue at the edges where the tooth met gum, for the first time in a long time her mouth didn’t hurt at all, and she smiled wider than her parents ever did.
She looked down below her and saw that the world was really truly blue and big. She couldn’t even see her house, it was all a blur. She strained her eyes hard at the world and thought, maybe, that tiny little speck of pink there was Gizmo flying around looking for parts for something else they would have made, or maybe he was looking for her, or maybe he was saying toodle-hoo.
The pink speck faded into the big blue, and Wren felt, in her stomach, the pressure drop away from all sides of the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket. But when the pressure dropped away so did everything around her. It started as a small vibration, then went into full out shakes. Outside she could see the gewgaws begin to tear away from one another. She cursed that she had not insisted on the Elmer’s Glue, because the cow on the front of the package was reliable. Once the gewgaws fell away the doodads went next, because they were made out of wire and black feathers. Then the whatchamacallit simply dropped out the bottom back to earth, and then everything else fell away except for Wren, who kept on floating and floating towards the moon.
This is better than Africa, supposed Wren, who looked out into space and thought what a grand adventure it was going to be, especially when she discovered all those girions and laraffes who, if they didn’t live on earth, probably lived on the moon.
It was interesting, thought Wren, and new, to not hear a thing at all in space. It was vast and quiet, and she didn’t feel anything except for a little tinge in her mouth. She stuck her fingers in, cringed, and out came a little bit of blood from where the braces had scratched the side of her tongue.
This book is dedicated to my three nieces, who must navigate the strangeness of being alive. May your journey be full of wisdom and growth that is kind to you. Please don’t read this book until you are older.
These words would not have existed without the continuous, loving support of my m
other and father. Special thanks to those who have navigated words alongside me: Misha Rai, Michelle Zuppa, LaTanya McQueen, Colette Arrand and many others. I want to especially thank my husband, Nathan Riggs, who reads Aesop’s Fables to fall asleep, and who asks me what I dreamed during the night.
The following stories were previously published with slight variations in the following places:
“The Candy Children’s Mother” at Okay Donkey
“The Skins of Strange Animals” at Story
“Egest Leporidae” at Spider Road Press
“They All Could Have Loved You Until You Ate That Child”
at Juked
“In the Belly of the Bear” at The Golden Key
“How One Girl Played at Slaughtering” at Ginko Tree Review
“The Mother Left Behind” at Gone Lawn
“An Old Woman with Silver Hands” at Smokelong Quarterly
“A Bird, A Girl, A Rocket to the Moon” at Pink Narcissus Press
“A Girl Without Arms” at Pink Narcissus Press
“Home Belly Wants” at Pindeldyboz
“Mama Floriculture” at Pink Narcissus Press
“A Woman With No Arms” at Wigleaf
“Get Bent” at Gargoyle
“Match Girl” at Variant Literature
“Girl Teeth” at Pidgeonholes
A.A. Balaskovits is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls and Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet. Her work has been published in Best Small Fictions, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Story and many others. Find her on Twitter @aabalaskovits and at aabalaskovits.com
Also from A.A. Balaskovits
“Magic for Unlucky Girls is that rarest of things: a book that doesn’t remind
me of anything else I’ve read … A wonderful, truly original work.”
— Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
“To say that the stories in Magic For Unlucky Girls are unsettling is an understatement.
In these tales, A. A. Balaskovits has created characters and worlds we think we know,
and then destroys our expectations-unflinchingly, with no gory or sordid detail spared,
and often with alarming violence. Yet, despite kicking us out of our collective comfort
zone, these stories go down like pleasant poison, with language that moves seamlessly
between brutal starkness and hypnotic lyricism. Balaskovits takes the stories that form
the core of us from childhood and reshapes them into something dark and unfamiliar.
Magic For Unlucky Girls is a bold debut from a bold author, and make no mistake—
these are stories that matter, and that will stick with you long after you’ve read them.”
— William Jablonsky, author of The Indestructible Man: Stories and The Clockwork Man
About Santa Fe Writers Project
SFWP is an independent press founded in 1998 that embraces
a mission of artistic preservation, recognizing exciting new
authors, and bringing out of print work back to the shelves.
@santafewritersproject
@SFWP
www.sfwp.com
Strange Folk You'll Never Meet Page 13
