by Eugen Bacon
But sleep she did. Matter of fact, she slept so well, she dreamt of pressing against a window, one that gave and collapsed to a million little pieces.
She woke up to the sound of boots, prisoners on a dawn run.
• 45 •
Silhouette . . .
We must be satisfied that we might never find answers for Amber, or the citizens of Xhaust. Keera’s words when I told her of Balmoral.
• 46 •
Summer came, radiant as a bride. Her smile fluttered like meteor dust. She caressed flowers that swayed carefree in merry wind. These flowers, already painted and peppered wide along the landscape by spring, transformed the parks of Middle Creek into highlights akin to the canvas landscapes of Master Oschin Palomar, an artist way before his time. He portrayed water that held fragrance, painted mountains that flew, and penciled moonlight that throbbed against the horizon.
Wind shared hearty whispers with the carefree gardens, sometimes called upon her own laughter to make merry with the natural world and her myriad talk. That same summer, as the river pounded surf along the shores, a little man named Fuller Goodwill, four feet nine, tattooed to the lips, stepped from a private yacht into Middle Creek. Accompanying him was a colorful entourage of a butler, a houseboy and a maid named Fifi.
Chap turned out to be a vet and a bachelor, but what he largely vetted were not dogs or horses. Fuller was promiscuous and diverse in his pickings. Perhaps it was the shorts and knee-highs he loved to wear, how he showed off chubby legs, bottle-shaped like a woman’s. Or was it those tattooed lips? Women loved him. Or perhaps they loved his scent, the scent of a woman—a variation of ylang-ylang, marjoram, sandalwood and some complex floral nectar. Whatever it was Fuller’s charm spread. The mayor’s wife, a woman who was noble, intelligent and hitherto loyal, was the first to betray her husband. And then it was Dallas Lonsdale, the postmaster’s wife, a young woman, a spring chicken, really, with shoulder-length hair. She too joined Fuller’s harem. Discarded for a little man, the postmaster, who was six feet five, was as baffled as he was desolate.
That summer of the town’s colorful gossip on the wiliness of Fuller Goodwill on hitherto virtuous housewives of Middle Creek was the same one that Myra took it upon herself to ship her family to 180C.
The terraformed planet boasted her conversion over years from rugged rock to a new populace of botanical mermaids and knights, even a few rebels and odd pirates—such as the impuritan blooms with folded ears and unusual patches on their faces.
As for Lake Oorong . . . she was one thousand times more alive, more beautiful, arching her back to send turquoise tongues of thermal waters to lick the shores. The sleeves of the shoreline possessed as much corsetry as the ample breath that flourished bird of paradise flowers, far-spreading gladiolas, Peruvian lilies, cream magnolias, poinsettias, hybrid hellebores and anemones. Even the lilysanthums deepened their blush and cast an ardent waft of fennel and clove.
It amplified the heady mood that had touched Amber and Tempest, both nearly nine—well, possibly. Nobody quite knew Amber’s age, especially when she smiled that blue rose smile, organic. The one Myra first saw the day the band played When You Were Young and Amber asked Myra for a dance.
Nothing remarkable had happened over the years with reference to the beast in Tempest’s belly or the storm in her fist, until that wild summer of Fuller and his entourage. Same summer Tempest disabled with a ball of lightning a purse thief at Central, in the middle of a bus zone, right opposite Chinta Ria (the women’s shop, not the restaurant). She stunned the teenager enough for him to forget about suing but it earned her more punishment than Vida’s thinking chair. First, she peeled potatoes and onions one week straight for the boy’s grandmother who had raised him, and with whom he lived after being orphaned young.
Grandma Helga was a woman simple enough to not know about prosecuting but shrewd enough to keep Tempest on her toes with added chores: the baking of bread after bread, the mopping of floor after floor, the weeding of garden after garden . . . But Myra was quick to notice when Tempest’s malevolent silence at the dinner table after Grandma Helga’s chores transformed to animated chitchat surrounding the quarters of her penance. Not only had Tempest long made friends with old woman Helga, the prepubescent girl was being swept off her feet by the thieving teenager, Flavel.
Tempest’s infatuation with Flavel—a lad who blinked asphalt eyes with innocence moments before his hand slipped for the wallet at the back of your pocket—created distance with Amber: fewer secrets, more scrapping. Amber fought silently. She used stealth and speed, creeping before an attack, her heels just barely touching the ground as she stepped lightly, moments before she rolled, leapt, tumbled without a sound and bowled Tempest over. Tempest had a sound. When her muscles twitched, or her pupils dilated, she growled or hissed before she roared . . . Amber stayed silent.
Finally it was all too much, enough to convince Myra that the craftiness, the maudlin air Fuller Goodwill had brought to Middle Creek, was no fake. That gave another reason for a getaway, an excursion to 180C.
At the remote planet, Amber and Tempest were enchanted as usual. They raised besotted eyes to shooting stars spiraling in the sky like gems in broad daylight. They lowered those same eyes to an effervescence of lively, lime-green springs at their feet; to the crash of waterfall against giant rocks down south; to the mushroom carpets alive with bees east of the lake. It was a wonder, Vida later said to Myra, that the girls had managed to mislay the newfound ladylike poise that often accompanied the novelty of menstrual rags. Amber’s bony legs presented a more bottle shape. Budding breasts pushed out her chest. And though Tempest stood twice as tall as her adoptive sister and was thrice as curvy, the girls stayed as like as twins in countable ways.
As Myra took photos, Vida warned the girls: “Your mother is going to frame you.”
T-MO
• 47 •
Silhouette . . .
He was kindred with evil, or my name is not Silhouette.
The day he stood on a crag by the river, shaded by fog, cloaked by night, his eye focused westward. He sought and found an upstairs room somewhere in Middle Creek where titian locks of a nine-year-old spread wide on a white, white pillow.
• 48 •
Myra’s topaz hair was also spread on her pillow but her night was awake. She struggled to find sleep. Beside her, Vida stirred in his dreams. He was her world but not in the same way as it had been between T-Mo and Salem, because for Salem, T-Mo was it and a bit; no wonder his leaving broke her. Unlike them, Vida and Myra were partners, there was equality in their togetherness. In their freedom. No one’s leaving would break the other, but their bonds were no less strong.
Myra was in the heart of thinking, of pondering how she understood Vida, knew the volume of his body to the weight of it; was contemplating the tenderness of his fingertips when the bedroom door burst open.
It was Amber.
She rushed in and bounded on their bed, startling Vida. He sat, unfocused for a moment. Remembered he was naked and clutched a sheet. Myra was never sure the foster child liked her. But here she was on their bed. The girl’s eyes held a plea.
“What is it?” said Myra.
“It’s Tempest.”
“What about Tempest?”
“She’s gone.”
“Gone . . . Where?” asked Myra.
The child shook her head.
“What do you know?” asked Myra.
A shrug.
Myra gripped Amber by the shoulders. “Where did Tempest go?”
The girl shook her head again.
Tempest was not in her room. But the bed had been slept in.
“Perhaps to Nana Salem’s?” Myra’s question was to nobody in particular.
“At this time of the night?” said Vida.
Still they phoned. Got Tonk who practically yelled: “At this time of
the night!”
Myra circled the backyard, front yard, out the gate, called at the top of her voice. “Tempest? Tempest!” Ran down the streets that bordered the house. Footloose and eyes roaming, she searched further out. Vida stayed home with Amber; someone had to mind the child and Myra wasn’t a stay-at-home person. Her voice grew hoarse with roaring. “Tem-pest!”
She found her on the weather coast opposite the crag where the river shouldered the forest of Solemn.
“Tem-pest . . .”
The child was swallowed in a wave. Her flame head bobbed in and out of tide. While she was a dominant swimmer, the water’s malevolence was potent.
Myra plunged. She got no further than three meters before a giant wind pushed her back. She charged back the same time that a monster wave first spat, then gobbled Tempest. Its lips opened for Myra. She got no closer than three meters.
“I command you!” she yelled at the gobbling waves. “Let my daughter go!” Without thinking, without knowing why, perhaps a pure act of instinct, she cried, “T-Mo!”
A wash of water spat Tempest ashore.
• • •
Water no longer arches and thrusts her back. She is tranquil, close to slumber. She is replete, her hunger gone.
Myra allows Tempest to gather herself. When the child speaks, she tells of sleep and dreams, of waking and walking, of hearing a call. She found herself at the river’s edge. The rest Myra knew.
On the way now home, to where Amber and Vida would be at the gate or a window policing their return, Myra speaks.
“I know you see things,” she says.
“Yes?”
“I know about the stepping. How you step inside people.”
“Do you know about T-Mo?”
“What about him?”
“When I step, he is inside.”
“Inside what?”
“Who. Inside people I step into.”
“Like?”
“Nana Salem and Nana Margo and Pappy and Ken.”
Myra goes on her knees so they are facing. “I have thought about this, argued with it.” Her eyes are shining. “The events of tonight have brought me to a decision.” She lifts Tempest’s chin so the child looks into her eyes. “No one but Salem knows T-Mo better than I. He is, after all, my father. Step into me.”
“But you slapped–”
“Now.”
“But–”
“I said now.”
• • •
It is like walking into a mirror and it gives. The moment Tempest steps in, Myra sees what the child sees. There is the fading shadow of an ashy man. He is walking in giant treads toward the Forest of Solemn by the river. Tempest trails him. He leads her miles, miles away from the river into the woods. He casts a huge shadow on the ground, thunder feet going boom! boom! boom!
They arrive at a grave lane at whose mouth a stilted post reads: Immortality. Myra transforms into an eagle. She follows in a soar the soft footfalls of Tempest’s tread below until they come to a shout of wind. Tempest pauses. She eyes a vortex.
“Wait!” cries Myra.
But Tempest has already dived into the jaws of the eddy. “Weeee-e!” fading sounds of her glee inside the black jaws.
Myra, now a water mole, plunges into a slap of cold. Things come undone in her head as she tumbles, fingered by darkness. Now she is crawling—or is she slithering? She is not sure any more which part of her body is which, what belongs here, belongs there. She reaches with a finger or a knee—or is that a neck? By the time she sweeps to the bottom of the tunnel, claws out of its toe into a kelp-filled trail, acres and acres of kelp, there is no Tempest. No sign anywhere, just ungovernable silence. Then: “This way . . . way,” a woman’s voice, ancient as dusk. Myra looks about, no one there. “This way . . . way.” A whisper of feet, laughter in fragments inside the wind. Myra follows the sound.
A weave of corona ivy, the kind with tails and sunspots, runs along a wrought iron balustrade. Myra follows its climb up a spiral of outdoor stairs. It leads to a door whose handle turns easy. She steps into a dim room filled with the scent of dried poppy. The house, upon entering, is a tomb—stillness, darkness everywhere. Then . . . movement, kitchen sounds in an adjacent room. Water runs. A spoon tinkles on glass, the peal of a whistling kettle . . .
Myra shape-shifts into a gecko, pushes past swaying beads, glass beads of many colors forming drapes. A man coughs. He is on a bed, his eyes full of space. It is the ashy man, the one of the woods. His skin is ancient, a work of art. His hair is frayed, aged hemp. It’s T-Mo. Not as she remembers him from when she was little. Then he was strong, held honest shoulders before he became sick.
To Myra’s surprise, Tempest enters the room bearing a tray. It holds a steaming bowl and a goblet full of berries. She rests it on a side table. Myra’s heart staggers. She replays a scene of many years ago, the one that happened when Myra was four. T-Mo was in a sickbed moments before he vanished. But the scene is now, and the child not herself but Tempest, the one with a bowl. If he dares! If he dares harm her daughter, what would she do? Bite him to pieces with gecko teeth?
“Why did you drown me?” Tempest asks him.
“It’s complex.”
“You didn’t have to half-kill me.”
“And if I said it wasn’t me?” His voice is silk, his eyes not quite so fogged.
“Who then?”
“Like I said. It’s complex.” His voice is rasped. More coughing, deep chest coughs that want to call up bile.
“You alright?” asks Tempest.
“Burns.”
She lifts the bowl to his lips. “Drink.”
He tilts his head, sips a little, pushes away the bowl.
“Ah, better.” He closes his eyes. Now he’s coughing again.
Myra understands she cannot interrupt. Neither seems aware of her presence, her place as a bystander in the past, present, future.
• • •
Myra’s mind returns to her childhood, where she feels rather than sees T-Mo. The strength in his arms, in his adoration . . . She remembers those wilderness jaunts when he tucked her in an embrace or aloft on his back, her hands spread as wings and, together, they wandered the universe. She remembers their descent through the skies just after sunrise.
She remembers that terrible night in Grovea when T-Mo turned into a stranger, days before he vanished . . . Before that, when they first arrived at Grovea, before the many wives cooked a feast, Novic was cold. He received them outside the Temple of Saneyth. Stood at its tall doors and said: “What?” His eyes gleamed glass.
“That the best welcome you got?” T-Mo.
“You done roaming?”
“Thought you’d thaw on seeing my lot.”
“Your lot?”
“My wife Salem, and this . . .”
“Vanished for eons. Now you show with a human.”
“The child, look at the child. Tell me how human she is.”
“What’d her daddy say, your human, when you sought her hand?”
“Welcome home, son.”
“Right.”
“What do you expect? Told me to piss off.”
“Sounds more right. Piss off?”
“Best way a pastor can say it.”
It took one of the wives to mellow Novic. Perhaps it was Xinnia: number three—or was it Clarin: number four, with an accent from France? She rested a hand on Novic’s arm and said, “Be okay.” And Novic’s eyes of glass warmed. He shifted the weight on his foot and let Salem, Myra and T-Mo in.
• • •
Same way she was a bystander to those events in Grovea (what had happened between Novic and T-Mo?), Myra is a bystander to events now.
• 49 •
T-Mo,” he speaks from the bed. “Know . . . how I came about . . . that name?”
“How?�
� says Tempest.
“Could have been Transfix.”
“Transfix?”
“Or Trap or Tell.” A cough swallows his smile. “T-Mo. Sounds like a T-Missile.”
“Yes,” says Tempest. “Like war.”
“Havoc in all directions. Guaranteed.” This time his smile stays. “But I wasn’t the trouble. Miss Lill . . . used to say Little Poetry come to visit, bless those eyes. Gave me fish licorice.”
“Fish?”
“Best licorice ever. Taste like honey and vegetable and fish.”
“I don’t like any of those.” Then: “Who’s Miss Lill?”
“The one who found I wasn’t the trouble.” He is somber now. “Wasn’t trouble when I met Salem. She looked like a queen dressed as a nun . . . Worked at a local IGA.” He smiles. “They sold milk.” He chuckles. Pause. “Salem. So . . . naive. Her youth, her innocence, filled me with something . . . I had known women of glamour, of knowledge, of power. But Salem . . . my Salem. She was the one.”
“But you left,” says Tempest. “Migsy said.”
“Migsy? That what you call Salem?”
“Migsy’s my mum. She doesn’t like it when I call her that.”
“Then why do it?”
“Just. How come you died?”
“Only way they stayed safe. He’d never leave them if I hadn’t.”
“He?”
“Kwa. Lik. Cain.”
“Who?”
“Idi. Göring. Bokassa. Pol Pot. He was all those, he was worse. Nagasaki, Kosovo, Rwanda, Chechnya . . . Some things are left silent.” He closes his eyes, his breaths rugged.
Tempest holds his head tenderly at the crook of her arm, presses a chalice to his lips. He drinks a little water. She rests his back to the bed, tucks him, softens his pillow.
