by Alex A King
Cyndi Lauper grabs her song and leaves. Kriss Kross, those kids with the backwards pants, take her place. The bumper cars die with Cyndi. Time to refill the attendant's pockets or make way for paying customers.
Effie is all out of spare change, but she wants to have fun. She's all itchy on the inside and she knows why: it's Apostolia—she's begging for a slap. One of those heartfelt strikes, where Effie pulls her arm back almost to its breaking point before letting it fly.
But it's late July and it's the second night of Agria's Fisherman's Festival, so she's supposed to be happy. And when you're happy you don't hit people.
Effie isn't happy, Effie is employed. Six days a week. Seven hours a day, which usually bleeds into nine. The extras go uncompensated.
Long, long days for a seventeen-year-old girl who should be in school.
That's what happens when your father dies when you're fifteen, and there's only you and Mama to make money. Leave school, find work.
Tell me, she thinks. Tell me about how girls just want to have fun.
"I'm going home," she says to her friends. "Work in the morning."
"See you," they say. Not one of them tries to convince her to stay.
Some friends.
Her mother always says that friends are fickle; there is loyalty only in blood, and even blood will betray you when there is money or a dead relative's jewelry involved. Still, it would be nice to be wanted. Effie wants one friend who'll beg her to stay.
She threads through the crowd, looking for Mama. So many people. The festival pulls everyone into its celebration. Locals, out-of-towners, tourists. They all flood into Agria for these two nights, out of … she can't remember how many nights in a year. Only that is sometimes changes. Normally Agria is small. Everyone knows everyone. But tonight she only recognizes one face in twenty.
She finds her mother with her friend (and their neighbor) Thea Elektra (who isn't really her aunt), eating a tiropita near the wooden stage set up for dancing. It's packed tight. No one can pull out their best dance moves because there's no room to swing a dead chicken.
Mama is on the round side of chubby. Dora's not fat, but she expects to be, someday. Even jokes about it. Effie's grandmother was fat, her mother will be fat, and one day Effie will be fat too, Mama's always telling her.
Effie won't let that happen. She's bony now, in that seventeen-year-old way. A cute girl, but Effie never really sees herself in the mirror. She's too distracted by her father's dark hair and his big mouth. They look funny on a girl, she thinks. And not a good kind of funny.
"Effie!" Thea Elektra says. "Are you having fun?"
Effie shrugs. It kind of started out that way, but the return is diminishing the closer she gets to opening time at the Very Super Market.
"Can we go home?" she asks her mother.
"Effie, my love, go home if you want to go home. I will see you later."
Effie goes, the unwanted girl. Back toward home.
The night sky is a sheet of black glass, cracked in places so that the yellow winks through. In one corner, the moon is paddling toward morning. It's not a long walk between the promenade and home. Seven minutes if she walks fast. Longer if any of Agria's people throw questions at her.
How is your mother?
How is your father?
What news of your aunt in America?
No news about Thea Eleni in America, or Effie's two cousins, Vivi and Christos. Her aunt almost never calls and Effie's mother almost never calls her.
Yet Mama can never shut up about them.
No one ever says, "Effie, how are you?"
Agia Eleni—Saint Eleni—is how Effie thinks of her aunt. Everything her aunt and their children do is brilliant and miraculous. Effie has never met her, or her gifted cousins. Her aunt threatens to come, then never does.
Down at the bottom of her street sits a forgotten house. Two stories, mostly concrete and rebar bones. The owner ran out of money somewhere between the roof and the walls, so now it's an oversized jungle gym or playhouse for Effie and the other neighborhood kids—when she was younger, anyway. Keep walking past it and you'll hit the high school's hidden back gate in about a minute. The road is dirt and stones, but Effie's street is pocked and pitted concrete.
Effie stands at the T where dirt meets concrete. There's a noise coming from inside the abandoned frame. It's small beneath the throb of the festival's music, but definitely present.
It could be trouble, but this is Agria. There's no trouble, unless someone is stealing a chicken.
"Who's there?" she calls out.
A man steps out of the dark into the slightly lesser dark. There's one streetlight here, but the light loses its way before it touches the ground.
Thirty, thirty-five, she thinks. Old. Black hair that might be brown in the light. Built like a chicken: skinny legs, chubby belly. Face that makes her wonder if his mother had relations with a ferret. Effie doesn't know him, and she knows pretty much everyone in town. Agria's that kind of place. Everybody knows everybody, and anyone they don't know, they know of.
The guy says, "Hey."
"I don't have any money," she tells him.
He shrugs like her empty pockets don't matter. "What's your name?"
"Effie."
"You want to see something, Effie?"
"Is it money?"
"No."
"Is it chocolate?"
"No."
"I don't want to see it," she tells the weirdo. "I have to go home."
"Come on," he says. "It's something worth seeing."
Effie doubts it. He doesn't look like a guy with anything worth seeing.
"I don't think so."
She turns away. Two steps up her street she hears him say, "Hey, pretty Effie."
That's new. Pretty isn't an adjective anyone ever hitches to her name. For a girl who never hears she's pretty, he has thrown out a shiny silver hook. It's bright and it speaks to her the way no one ever has.
"What?"
"Come look."
He's standing there not doing anything. Not dissolving into the shadows, not moving toward her. Inside her head there's a small alarm ringing, but she slaps it aside. She's pretty, he said so. How bad can he be? Bad men don't shower girls with compliments—the TV says so. Bad men get right down to the being bad.
"Show me from there," she says. "And I'll decide if I want to come closer."
The man shrugs. "Okay."
He turns around for a moment. A zipper whispers. When he turns around something about him is different, but it's not light enough to see what.
"What?" she says. "I don't see anything."
"Really?" Disbelieving.
Now he moves closer, just a few steps. Effie holds her ground.
"See it now?"
"What is it?"
"My best friend. It could be your best friend, too, pretty Effie."
Yeah, no. "It looks like a tiny penis," she says.
"It's not tiny! It's a big, brave soldier!"
Effie picks up a rock. It's no empty threat. Effie can pitch a rock, thanks to her older brothers.
"Put it away," she tells him.
"Do you want to touch it?" Another step closer.
It's not the first penis Effie has seen. Europe is nude-friendly. A few years ago, Italians elected a porn star into their parliament and nobody blinked, even when she was naked on the news. A penis is nothing. They're on the beaches, filling up the late-night TV screens, dangling from Greece's most famous statues. But Effie's starting to feel like this old guy shouldn't be waving his stick at young girls.
So she throws the rock. It sails through the air, makes a soft landing.
He screams.
Effie runs, leaving him bent over the ground, making a thin mud out of dirt and tears.
Read Freedom the Impossible today!
About the Author
Alex A. King is an American author (by way of several countries, including Greece), who divides her time between writing, thinking a
bout writing, and reading Seuss's HOP ON POP for the millionth time. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
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