by Eugen Bacon
“Tell me about the land of morphing stars,” Vida begged.
“I thought you liked the land of the brass witch, ageless as the moon, whose eyes are like desert sun.”
“I like them all. Perhaps you’ve told me everything.”
“Not about Amaharti.”
“Go on, then.”
“Well! Amaharti has wriggly-wormy creatures that talk. Its winter is a grim fog that lurks, that waits to do terrible things to people. Its summer—”
“Nh-nhh,” he said. “You’re making it up.”
“But I’m not.”
He held her fingers. “Making it up. I know the lands you’ve traveled and Amaharti is not one of them.”
She leapt to her feet. “How would you know?”
“Just would.”
“Hah bloody ha.”
“Would.”
She started running. Not fast enough, he noticed. He caught up, and then they rolled on grass, oblivious to shapes that crouched in the woods, cloudy gray shadows prowling between hanging branches and fat tree trunks.
When Myra folded in Vida’s arms, she was a perfect fit.
His heart pounded ba-boom! ba-ba-boom! a perfect beat.
The sweetness of her flesh, the warmth of her lips, tossed him to a vagrant mood. He groped, awkward: hands on her hair, on her face . . . on her breasts, up creamed thighs inside a claret uniform . . . She pulled away and sat abruptly. She looked straight ahead.
“I’m sorry—” started Vida.
“Did you see that?”
“See . . . what?”
“Light. Through the trees.”
“What light?”
She had already jumped, was cutting diagonally into a cluster of trees.
“You stay, Vida.” Her words rushed at him across a shoulder.
Stay. Like a dog.
Vida stared at his hands, helpless human hands. Wind brushed his neck, reinforced the swell of night around him. Fog seemed heavier. It clung around trees a meter out. Thunder. A clap traveled and shook the hill above him. Movement in the trees. A flicker of light swept behind a Banksia a couple of yards away. A shape, a body. Night carried shadows in droves, Vida assured himself. Or Myra was playing games. In the dusk she was shadows and a glow of eyes. No, he wasn’t a dog. He would not stay. So he followed.
Myra’s shadow slipped from tree to tree, further and further, deeper into the woods. It stopped when he stopped, moved when he moved. Dampness caught his throat. Light never touched fully on the shadow’s shape or face; just a silhouette, then it vanished.
Vida swirled, aware of a presence. The shadow had slipped closer. It was not Myra. It stood tall as a human, three yards away from him. Breath floated from its nostrils like silver shimmers in the blackness of the night.
“Who are you?” Vida managed.
The heart of its eyes gleamed blue and bold and powerful.
“Who are you?” Myra this time.
She stood beside Vida, fingers clutching his. Together they faced the intruder.
He stepped out of the shadows, an ice blond male, almost Scandinavian in looks.
“Al,” he said, confident. “My name is Al.”
“Why are you following us?” said Myra.
“Look,” he said. His hands spread. Balls of flame bounced from them, leapt into the air and chased into the sky.
“Fire,” said Myra in wonderment. “You make fire.”
“Lightning,” he corrected.
Vida watched the flames turn crimson, then blue, then orange. Fireballs shot from the palms of a boy, or a man, named Al.
As Al flicked his fire, as his eyes swallowed light from the flames and danced from crystal blue to purple to an in-between shade of green, Vida struggled, besieged with anger. His hatred of the incongruous man-boy who was much focused and very accurate with his lightning-making was instant. Al continued casting light from his hands, tossing it through the trees as if that was all it took to woo a girl. It was all it took. Myra’s coal eyes warmed. She half-smiled at the boy with iced blues that carried no soul. From her laughter, a tinkling sound that deepened and sank to a belly cough, Vida saw just how well the tossing of light worked.
“. . . can make patterns,” the blazing idiot was saying.
Myra listened, nodded, wide-eyed and curious, accepted without question the fool’s ability, his guileful presence.
And just like that, they were walking home. All three together.
At the fork of the road that weaved downward and eastward to Vida’s home in the valley, he shifted his weight on a foot, waited for Myra to say something, anything.
She didn’t.
“Walk you home,” Vida offered.
Myra cast a glance at Al. “Be fine, you go.”
“Where’s home?” asked Al.
Vida started to tell him to mind his own business. Myra pointed.
She could take care of herself, Vida assured himself.
• 28 •
Mrs. Featherstone’s voice droned in the classroom. She wore a short crop, masculine, and a neat boyish figure inside her woolen skirt. Always it was something woven. Her nose, the size of it, the shape of it, was hard to ignore. On and on she spoke in a monotone about Tigris and Euphrates and the Ziggurats of Ancient Mesopotamia, until the bell went.
“Al pester you last night?” Vida asked Myra, way before the clip of the teacher’s heels had gone cold behind the door.
“Don’t know what you mean.” She busied herself with books. “Mr Hall’s coming,” and burrowed into her algebra book.
• • •
“. . . the endpoints of this Circle are X—in brackets, minus five, seven,” labored Mr. Uriah Hall behind a tangle of hair. His chalk-hand moved, furious, on the board. Vida was far from focused. His mind was scattered. He had nothing to worry about, he assured himself. Nothing at all. But it was with disquiet that he eyed Myra. She sat, pencil in hand, eyes on the board, in blissful absorption of algebra. But her mind, where was her mind?
“. . . to determine the coordinates of the center, C.”
It was no secret that Vida was a mere human; frazzled hair only burgundy, not blue or white or blond. His legs were spindly, not as fast as hybrid or supernatural legs. His pale skin self-tanned in splotches at whim. Al, on the other hand, with his boast of fire play, was clearly another breed. And if he stalked his raggedy ass down Myra’s way, there was no telling–
“. . . origin or midpoint formula. Vida! Quit dreaming.”
• • •
Myra bounded for the woods soon as the first peal of the bell went. Normally she would lunch with Vida. He followed, raced nervous after her, jumpy, for something assured him he had not seen the last of Al.
Sure as dawn, there was Al in the woods wearing cool denims, tossing fire from his palms. Must have been expecting them, certainly expecting Myra, because he said, “I brought sandwiches.”
“Oh,” said Myra.
“Anchovies and cream cheese.”
Vida’s good sense and fortitude held back his words. He rebuffed Al’s sandwiches for his own almond butter and jelly ones. Myra accepted Al’s offerings with giggles.
Vida sagged against a tree and watched Myra and the world fly away away . . . from him. He scratched up soil with the lip of his boot. He caught snatches of Myra and Al’s engrossment:
“. . . this blue and yellow rosella perched on my finger . . .”
Al was leaning back on elbows, vamping Myra with his eyes as she shared with him her time travel stories.
“. . . giant clam with big wavy lips, and this bronze eagle with a three meter wing span reeled upside in a flip and drop, and snapped the clam from the seaside.”
Myra’s knees were pulled up, her face surreal. Vida had never known her to be indifferent to him. Not when they tossed pe
bbles in the river first time they met, and hers whizzed in a rapid hail to bounce several times on the river surface, and his dropped way short. She had faked indifference.
Vida moved to another tree. A nesting bird with dull plumage and large eyes jumped squawking from a branch. He elbowed it and missed; poorly coordinated was he. So he continued to scratch up soil with the lip of his boot, but could not dissolve the corpse in his gut. His kick connected with a stone on the ground. He picked up the stone, tossed it at quavering branches, but was surprised when it actually met and tore a bunch of leaves.
“Who cares!” he yelled.
On the way back to school, Myra caught him in a hug without reason or warning.
Her scent soothed him. “You wore perfume,” he said, wondering.
“Clover!” she laughed.
• • •
The faraway look in Myra’s eye perturbed Vida. Her brooding was obvious all through history. Every now and then, he caught her gaze casting out into the fields, wandering beyond the woodlands, the misted hills, the folding vale.
When Mrs. Featherstone turned to board and chalk, in a breath Myra was gone.
• • •
Two hours of misery. Vida waited until school was over.
Lick-a-tee, lick-a-tee. He ran at his best to the sleeve of the woods, inside a creep of wilderness. Lick-a-tee-tee-lick-a-tee. He stopped at the sight of two people kissing. It was Myra and Al.
But wait.
Now Myra was pushing Al. “You fool.” Slap!
“If spindly legs can do it, so can I.” She tried to slap him again, but he gripped her wrist. “Get away from me, you, s-sick unit, you.”
Al moved. Sudden fire engulfed him and Myra. The flame’s belly throbbed white, its lip orange as ginger, ardent as lust. When the flames settled, Al was gone.
Myra sat trembling on the ground. Her face was furious.
Vida approached, too afraid to understand. He took in the ruffled tunic, buttons off, bruised breast half-exposed.
“What do you want?” Her voice was hostile.
“I’m going to sit down,” he said.
“Why?”
He slipped beside her anyway. He put an arm around her shoulder but she shrugged away, jumped to her feet. He tried to keep pace but the anger in her walk took her further, out toward the river.
Up on their crag, Vida saw him: flammable Al. He was watching them, smiling. A dam in Vida gushed. He tore yelling toward Al. But even as he surged and closed the space, Vida had no plan. He was unclear about what he proposed to do when he actually reached Al. It mattered that Al was unperturbed by the sight of a shouting human chasing toward him. Closer to the rock’s edge above the river, Vida faltered, realized too late that Al would step aside and let the river do its work.
Al did not move.
The impact echoed wide. Both fell, spiraled in a tangle into the black river. Al’s back slapped the water first. The splatter caught Vida’s face. He splashed blind in the deep womb, yelled, but his words got lost in spray. Tide clasped his feet, its hungry belly sucked at his knees, tugged at his body. Vida swallowed gulps of water. Many ideas, mostly of death, rushed at him. Then Al’s head bobbed to the surface, his eyes rolled to white.
“. . . can’t . . .” he gasped. “I . . . can’t . . . swim.”
Vida struggled with a pull of current at his feet. He crawled, dolphin kicked but lacked muscle. He bellied up, scissored his legs. He forced his body to relax, to stay afloat. But his breathing was tense. He looked at the sky and took a deep breath, held it for a moment and exhaled. He pressed his weight on his shoulders, relaxed his head as if on a pillow. Again he inhaled, held it, exhaled. Now he kicked gently, gently, alternating leg movements, kick, kick, kick. Water warmed in a circle.
Vida looked, and saw Al’s eyeball had loosened. Al was melting.
“. . . ghelp,” Al gurgled.
Vida’s calm, his idea to float on his back, to bit by bit kick, kick, kick to shore, that composure ebbed.
On the jutted lip of the crag, Myra did nothing. Hands limp by her sides, she watched. A worried wind whipped her skin the color of dark caramel with its strands of blue hair.
“. . . ghelp.” The roar of a gargantuan wave closed above Al’s dissolving head, and it vanished, then was visible again, skin, eyes and bones. “. . . ghelp.”
Vida at once understood—Al was a fire boy: water broke his composition. In a forever split of hesitation, as Vida wondered if he could save him, Al collapsed into skin and hair, into a spread the wave’s jaw swallowed.
With a cry, Vida flipped himself belly down. He stretched arms to a breaststroke, pulled knees to his waist, and cycle kick kick kicked away and away from Al. His strokes were labored, messy. His arms were too high, the cycle in his kick too short. Something knocked softly against him. It was the porridge of Al floating on kelp. Vida tore to the water’s surface, coughing, spitting, to the firm but soothing touch of Myra’s hand. She hauled him out of the water.
Vida ripped his clothes, lashed at them with a foot. They flew to a distance. He yanked his hair, matted and wild. Nothing could rid him of Al’s river broth. The hero had avenged the damsel. So why was he crying? Tongues from the river splashed at his toes. Why, oh why hadn’t stupid Al moved? The man-boy had underestimated Vida’s assault and wiry frame; even Vida had underrated himself. Sure, he wanted to take Al out, as in shirt-front and head butt, but not, not . . . this!
Myra wrapped her arms about him. Her body was gentle and strong as she cradled him and they exploded into the night. The horizon neared and fled. A glowing moon swelled and burnt a fierce orange, as they soared into space, time and stars, to a place he could find solace.
• 29 •
Pedestrians give way to buses, read the sign on the road.
Vida and Myra stood at a crossing. A Passings Lane bus ground past, same one whose doors had moments before trembled open and shuddered shut. Vida had gone with Myra to check out car sales. He was now eighteen and had his sights on wheels. He didn’t know what he wanted, what make, engine or model, if he would go new or used, whether it was a coupe, truck, sedan, van or wagon. All he wanted was to look.
Look he did, and there was much to see. Still, he was undecided until Myra ran her hands on a convertible. It was a black sapphire metallic with 83,057 km on the clock. Owned five years, a six-cylinder 3.0 engine car. Limited edition, manual gearbox, the salesman said. He was in his low twenties, the type to wear little dick togs at a beach, Vida reckoned as he studied highlights in a sidewise brushed fringe.
“Look,” Dick Togs said. “Active bending headlamps. And the wheels: eighteen-inch alloy.” The intensity of his lake green eyes deepened with each sales pitch.
But his interest was fake. Myra and Vida lost him for a moment when a woman with a bold forehead, such red hair and white skin, wanted a bigger car, a more expensive one than the black sapphire metallic. That sale pocketed, Dick Togs ignored the man with a pancake nose who did not throw up a clue as to the size of his wallet.
There was something bold and handsome about the car. Stock clearance and sound car finance made it affordable, enough for Vida to find excitement with it. He would collect it in a couple of days.
“Are you going to be a polisher?” asked Myra.
“Grief no,” said Vida.
“One car and you’re beginning to sound like Tonk.”
When they got off the bus, Myra was wearing her important face, but not for car sales reasons, Vida realized.
“You must declare your intentions,” she said.
“To whom?” his glance was cautious.
“I’d like to bring you home.”
“But I’ve been.”
“Formally,” she said.
“Why?”
“You must speak to Tonk.”
“But why?”
“Aw, shut up.”
“When?” he conceded.
Her face softened. “Tonk is like a barking dog that does only that: bark.”
“He’s also a prick.”
“He has his moments.”
“So he’s not a prick?”
“How about a small one.”
He cast her a look.
“Maybe a big one, then,” she said.
“Darn.”
“But Salem’s a magnificent cook.”
“Better be, if I’m to suffer Tonk.”
• • •
A blazer or a coat with tails?
He struggled between Party Specials and Fashion World, major clothing chains in Middle Creek. He settled for a suit with tails. Nipped in waist and a somber tie, not the cashmere slacks and polo shirt. All dressed, he froze at the last minute. Pulled out an old blazer, accompanied it with a bow tie. He licked his palm, shone his hair. That should put Myra’s step-dad in fine disposition, he said to the mirror.
But Tonk was in a fit of ill temper. “Messing with my gal, boy?”
“Oh, no sir. I have no intention—”
“What exactly is your intention?”
Salem changed the subject. “Tell us what you do, V-vida,” her voice falsely bright.
“Final year in college. I’m studying cosmology, madam.”
“M-madam makes me anxious. Call me Salem.”
But Tonk was on a war zone. “Cosmetology? Not keen on a chap bent on beauty services. Hair, skin or nails?”
“Sir?”
“Do you do hair, skin or nails?”
“Pardon me, sir, not cosmetology. I meant cosmology, study of the cosmos. I learn about the universe.”
