by Eugen Bacon
“Peddlers,” said Tonk. “They have fleas like you’d never wish for.”
“And there are artists,” said Myra. “They play accordions and bagpipes and harps and banjos.”
She liked best the tom-tom drummer with his cymbals, roped hair to his knees, and beats that shifted from something straight to layered loops and jams. Costumed dancers arrived at intervals. They were skimpy clad or wrapped in color—colors that hopped, stepped and wriggled to melody.
Nothing Myra said impressed Tonk and his curled lip.
“Such terrible peril,” he said. “Everything I’ve got and you insist on malingering with ruffians.”
“There are fresh fruits and vegetables,” said Myra. “Straight from gardens.”
“Hang out in stalls like wet washing,” said Tonk. “Straight for a stomach ache. Or worse.”
Salem, who appeared to feel average about Tonk’s goading, still needed persuading. She was not contemptuous but was hesitant. It took coaxing to nudge her any time out of the door and into the world. So a night market was a big deal.
Myra took her hand, and led her.
“Leave the parasites out the door when you get back,” said Tonk. “And don’t hesitate to fumigate yourselves.”
It was then that Myra knew she wouldn’t pee on him if his entire body was on fire.
Salem brightened at the sight of oil lamps and lanterns that lit the market. Stalls competed with lights: paper lanterns, hanging lanterns, battery charged lanterns, light-in-a-box lanterns . . . Some attractions were more popular than others, like the man on stilts who was swallowing knives. Toward him banjos got louder, crowds rippled like tidal waves. There were bodies every which way, a slow churn of performers and watchers. Trick entertainers bamboozled gullible folk like Salem, but never Myra who nevertheless allowed herself to be impressed by their efforts.
Coming their way was a throng of dancers, a shimmer of glitter on their bodies, a sway of plumes on their heads. A young woman in tights took Salem’s hand, pulled her to join the gyrating. Salem’s resisting feet found motion. Her body sway swayed to the banjo and drumbeat. She switched, swaggered and stepped. She was light on her feet, at ease with the infectious throb of music. She was still laughing when Myra tugged her sleeve, dragged her from whirling bodies, from reviving melody to a calming of cool air.
By then Salem had opened up enough to sample smoked sizzles on a stick, to nibble offerings of mushroom and partridge burger that Myra otherwise wolfed. Salem’s opinion, timidly offered, of the sweet corn and saffron ice cream was favorable. But it was Myra who stuffed her face with the ice cream, then peach pudding and banana hotcakes. The market offered an itinerant feast of all kinds: leafed food, sizzled food, scooped food, poured food, balled food, fried food . . .
At the oil stall, Salem really loved the wild rose, even bought a cosmetic jar for herself. But massages were too big an ask, and she stepped away from the girl with a box haircut, big shorts and athletic legs that ended in boots, when she offered cheaper rates than announced on her placard.
Myra did not volunteer advice that the seaweed soap and gum soap that Salem handpicked for Tonk were both a waste of effort, as were the sandalwood scented candles. She and Salem spent a good chunk of time in the homeware stall, where Salem fingered cooking pots, ladles, dinnerware, cushions, rugs, linen and throws but bought none. Nor did she take away any of the bark, wood, cloth and glass ornaments or animal figurines from the arts and crafts stall. Somewhat to Myra’s surprise, her mother did choose invitation cards, brushes, gold foil, bags and ribbons that were just right for hosting activities when Tonk invited townsfolk to his manor. Salem, dear shy Salem, did care about the hosting.
When Myra’s eye caught an array of glassed islands (real plants and soil inside blown glass) Salem let her pick. The pottery stall did not inspire Salem’s interest but the jewelry one pulled out a giggle. She ran fingers over necklaces, pendants, earrings, rings, bracelets and watches made of shell, coral, gold and amethyst.
It was the fruit and vegetable stall that won hands down. Salem came alive and haggled with the short man and his scowl for the best pearl onions, teardrop aubergines, butternut squashes, plums, elderberries and quinoa. She judged quality by the gloss on a fruit or a vegetable’s skin, and the item’s hardness or sponginess to a gentle press of fingers. She tapped the butternut squash and sniffed it, and settled for the right shade of yellow.
Naturally, Myra carried the whole lot.
Back home, Tonk’s brow rose at the new bracelet on Myra’s arm.
“Beads only a troll would wear,” he said.
Salem showed him her glass jewelry box with a mirror on the inner lid.
“It has compartmented shelves c-cushioned with v-velvet,” she said.
Tonk rolled his eyes and said, “You can’t patch foolish. The both of you are dumber than a box of hammers. Can’t see jack shit through this nonsense. I’m going to look for a bridge and hurl myself from it.”
And he stomped out of the house, slammed the door.
Myra harbored rude thoughts of what she’d like to do with Tonk’s food before he ate it.
Tonk had nothing to worry about in relation to frequent visits to the market. Where initially stalls could only sell iced tea, spiced milk, lemonade and cola, they were soon allowed drink licenses and began to serve mulled wine and hot cider. It was the alcohol that attracted the ruffians Tonk had predicted. The louts’ pattern was to stun the crowd and slip away with something, and their presence made the market unsafe. Benign pickpocketing graduated to malignant muggings where perpetrators brandished weapons albeit crude: clubs, handhelds festooned with nails, slingshots. Beneath the softness of dusk inside shadows of bordering stalls, someone managed to stun a mother enough to let go her child’s hand, and thugs slipped away with the child. The mother was never the same, and the tot never recovered. Inside a month, the music, bubble and itinerant feasts were gone. Government shut down the market.
• • •
Past the pocket of land, Salem, who had started off withdrawn, came out of her shell enough to casually say, “Is this a f-forever trail?”
She was lighter on her feet, but slowed and went cautious once they entered the forest. Perhaps it was the brush of arm-high grass that bordered the new trail just before grass went knee-high. The trail was one some creature had made. Salem pulled up her skirt, clutched it in a fist.
They stepped over fallen bark on hardened soil. Tussocks of grass struggled to climb between rocks. They went past an ant nest. Trees around were so old they had developed hollows but still had leaves that wore a glint of moonlight.
Salem picked a gnarled wildflower that curled into itself.
“L-like a fetus,” she said.
They came to a place where trees stood tall and thin, where light filtered in shivers through leaves, and currants shone under the stars. Myra halted with an elbow grip Salem’s slip over a fallen branch.
Finally, they came to a clearing that was picnic ground before the killings, unused after the killings. A memory of death haunted it. The wind carried a howl of fear. Ground trees broken to logs had served as benches and tables. Here, people had once sat to eat sandwiches on good weather days. Not anymore. No one else visited the Forest of Solemn. A bird screamed. Another creature cawed, or laughed. Somewhere behind, the sound of water falling. It was smoggy out yonder, but here was moonshine.
They found him leaning against an undead tree under a low cloud. A dusting of leaves coated its hardened trunk. Salem’s curly as a poodle’s hair shook as they neared, even though she had needed no convincing to come. Soon as she heard T-Mo would be here, would be waiting, she did not ask how or why. Simply agreed on a pickup time. When Myra returned for the fetching, Salem took Myra’s hand and they walked to the forest.
T-Mo cleared his throat at their approach. He lifted a finger, whirled it in the air. A twi
rl of leaves rose off the ground in a cloud.
“Care for a spin?” he said. His tone was tender, conciliatory.
Myra didn’t think those were rightful words with which to start a conversation after all those years. She said nothing. She glanced at Salem whose neck was flushed, who fidgeted: wrung her hands, dug her toes. There was tension in her shoulders. Her chest rose and fell fast.
Myra laid a hand at the small of her mother’s back. “Don’t have to do this, you know.”
It was as if she hadn’t spoken.
“Such a s-special effort,” Salem said to T-Mo.
“Say jeepers creepers still?”
She nodded. “Holy moly too.”
She looked less afraid. She glanced at Myra. “B-be alright.”
Myra walked away from the clearing, but stood where she could watch them. Sometimes Salem stood with crossed arms, made little or no eye contact. Sometimes T-Mo made progress. Myra couldn’t hear what he was saying but now Salem raised an eyebrow, glanced at him. Now she was nodding, understood something. T-Mo spoke in earnest. Salem answered, opened her hand to explain her own thing. T-Mo replied. Now Salem was relaxed, smiling.
She had seasoned with years. T-Mo didn’t look a moment older than Myra’s memory from when she was four, when he disappeared. The T-Mo inside the stepping was again different.
T-Mo moved forward, now he was too close. He said or whispered something. Salem nodded, then laughed.
The heck, worried Myra.
She thought she saw a woman gliding in the air. She was riding a flamingo. Behind them, a flying squirrel stayed close. And just overhead was another woman perched on a tree. She had one vivid eye and another one bold. The telescopic eye filtered, turned inward and came back at Myra without translation. The bold one blazed blind.
The woman on the tree pressed a finger to her lips. Not yet, she said. Not now . . . floated her memento. Not yet . . . adrift in the wind. Not now . . . She also said a word: Silhouette . . . Silhouette . . . And Myra remembered a conversation:
“Is that a shape or a color?”
“It is a name. Silhouette.”
Myra chided herself to stop hallucinating, particularly now when T-Mo’s nearness to Salem had gotten dangerous. His touch was intimate, palms on Salem’s elbows.
“The hell?” Myra wanted to yell. “You’re right on top of her.”
Now Salem and T-Mo’s hands were entwined. Their foreheads touched. They stayed like this, minds and hearts connected—how long? At first, Salem resisted the kiss. She was yielding when, just then, a blast went.
It was the woman with the telescopic eye.
• 58 •
Silhouette . . .
Salem was responding to the kiss when Odysseus emerged. His hands reached for her neck. My magic hurled a missile that caught him on the head. He staggered, recovered. He grabbed Salem, used her as a shield.
Myra, impulsive thing, her feet had already set running before the blast settled. Onyx eyes alight, she broke Salem away from Odysseus. She ran wide from him as another fireball rocked him.
He lunged, swerved, dodged. He rose in his sprint as he rushed at me.
“Oo-mmea paralyso!” I cried. “Di Blasta!
The blast seared his chest, opened it. Odysseus fell. His expression was one of disbelief. Unlike Achilles, whose strength and weakness was in his heel, or Samson, whose stayed in his hair, Odysseus had put his in a common place: his heart. Hate had strengthened it, the more of it he stored, the stronger his heart became. Now he put his hand in the hole, hunting the heart, its strength and the weakness I had destroyed.
He stretched a hand. “Mother.”
My heart kicked. “Sorry. Son,” I spoke gently. “I was never your mother.”
He started to rise, got to his knees, collapsed.
The sound that came was not Myra’s.
This time it was Salem’s face that went all wrong. Her sound, like the one Myra made years ago in Grovea, was animal. She wrenched from Myra’s grip with unnatural strength. Ran, fell to her knees, cradled his head the same way she had done those many years back in Grovea.
“My love,” over and over she said.
She pressed his head to her breast. Her head was tilted, her eyes fixed to a distant place. Time stood. Stood as the blast that had put a hole in his chest began to spread and disfigure the skin on his neck. It rose to his face, burnt his skin to crisp, separated it from his frame. He disintegrated, thickened to a porridge that slimed through Salem’s fingers.
She stared at her hands. Even as she stared the porridge flattened, became cloudy and then clear before it evaporated into smoke. It drifted in the air away, away . . . and was gone.
Salem looked lost. Myra came to remove her from it, all that awfulness, but Salem again screamed that terrible sound. It was finished. Odysseus, T-Mo . . . was gone.
In the love for our children, for each other, we three—Salem, Myra and I—had in our own ways ousted darkness. On this day, we won. Yet in winning, we had lost a precious being. Tragedy blackened this victory.
• • •
But wait . . .
Crystals—molecular things with corners—crystals with faces were forming on the ground. They stacked, interlocked into aggregate forms that scattered light, the dazzle of moonlight. Red fire radiated from the crystalline mass. The crystals softened into granular flakes that started molding into a shape.
He lay once more in her hands, his skin smooth as a baby’s heel. The gator skin, all its lattices and weavings, was fully gone. Salem ripped her skirt, only the petticoat left, and covered his nakedness.
He opened his eyes.
“T-Mo?” whispered Salem. “Is it r-really you?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Is Odysseus. G-gone?”
“I think, yes.” He studied her face. “You do,” he said in wonderment.
“D-do what?”
“Love me still.”
“C-could I stop?”
She was after all the one for all of him. Even death could not keep him away.
As for Tonk—whatever would happen to him? How would he account for the impossibility happening and live with himself?
I saw a flutter in the air. There was Miss Potty, all this time in the horizon. She was riding a companion. A flying squirrel trailed them. The length of Miss Potty’s face exactly the same all these years; the brooding still in her mouth. There it was, the bring-the-hut-down laughter. She was wearing a batik gown full of flakes that became starbursts.
I waved. “I found—”
“The color of language,” she finished my lines, same as she always had.
“My soul—”
“Is now learnt. No more isolation.”
“Yes! Yes! The key—”
“Is balance. Allow yourself to receive as much as you give.”
“I’ll be true—”
“To you always,” called out Miss Potty, flying onward with her companions. “You must think of yourself too!”
Myra saw all this, heard all this, and was astonished. Perhaps she made a sound. Salem, who had seen, heard, none of it, looked up and saw me.
“Y-you?” she said.
What-am-a-say? She remembered me from the bus stop.
T-Mo turned, saw me. He smiled.
I remembered how it had taken three whole nights for him to emerge that day in Grovea when he was four and Odysseus had done that terrible deed. How when he surfaced, his twinkle for me was back, his eyes full of poems. Same smile was on his face now when he rose from the ground. He took Salem’s and Myra’s hands, held them in light clasps, and tossed important words over his shoulder: “Walk with us, Mamma, let’s walk.”
In time he will forge his own connections with Tempest and Amber, walk with them too. When they are healed, from Odysseus.
T-Mo. Now I can claim him, my son. Can’t wait to bring him home to Keera. K, K, K, my tongue stops air at the back of my throat. The sound is voiceless—K. I smile, long for her scent of a tree—oaky yet soft. Long for her smile—a mirror full of flowers. Long for . . . such beauty on an elbow. Mine . . . enchantress.
T-Mo and Peaches should get along just fine. Peaches with his white as white eyes full of snow. He is grown, one and a half size my length. No more plays monsters: “Rawr!” But still a bird whisperer: “Koo-wee-oo! Koo-wee-oo! Gwa! Gwa! Gwa!” Same big laughter, one that finishes with squeals and a hiccup. One time he left his mother’s house, came back with a girl from Sic’defi. As Moth used to say, “Far more than Earth is and sun is and wide cloud is.” She has freckles on all her skin, baby-soft hair that catches light.
Acknowledgments
To Associate Professor Dominique Hecq, my PhD supervisor and mentor who guided my journey, and who stays close as we continue engendering knowledge while creating art. To my generous reviewers who studied my work seriously with an open mind. To my wonderful publisher Meerkat Press—how so privileged that I met you! To you dear reader, I entrust you with a personal experiment gone public. Riding shotgun on this road trip with the characters of my novel, smell their rawness, taste their normality in the otherworldly, touch the rise and fall of their chests . . . magnified by language.
About the Author
Eugen Bacon is a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She has published over one hundred short stories and articles, together with anthologies. Her stories have won, been shortlisted and commended in international awards, including the Bridport Prize, L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, Copyright Agency Prize and Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards. Her creative work has appeared in literary and speculative fiction publications worldwide, including Award Winning Australian Writing, AntipodeanSF, Andromeda, Aurealis, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and New Writing (Routledge). Eugen’s latest books: Writing Speculative Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches from Macmillan International, May 2019, and her debut novel, Claiming T-Mo, from Meerkat Press, August 2019
