Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (35 page)

“
No, no,” I said, clutching her to me. “No, Jilly, you are going to school next year.”

Mrs. H regarded me. We’d had this argument before. She thought I should tell Jilly, but I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let her know she was dying. That would make it too real.

“
No,” I said, and pressed a kiss onto the top of her head. “It’s all right, Jilly. It will be all right.”

She let herself be comforted, but all through that evening, I felt myself angrier and angrier at Miss Andersen’s words. Going outside, I looked at Jilly’s pigs. Fat and happy, while my sister lay inside wasting away.

I went inside and fetched my tattoo kit. I was tired, but too angry to sleep, and I could tell I’d be up for hours. Mrs. H. came out and waved goodbye to me as she revved her tiny Civic and drove away, her headlights cutting swaths in the darkness of the farm road. Overhead, the stars were bright and distinct in the fathomless sky. I opened the door to the pen and Jilly’s tame pigs followed me into the barn.

I set up shop in an abandoned stall, and when I was finished with one pig, it would walk out to the others to be inspected proprietarily while another one came in.

I gave them wings.

It was the finest work I’d ever done. For Celeste, there were a phoenix’s wings, flame bright,coiling red and yellow. Patience’s skin displayed a dove’s wings, muted in color, browns and grays that showed like bruises against the white hide. A blue jay’s wings for Rutabaga, a vivid iridescent blue striped with black. Bill got green plumage like a parrot’s, touched with scarlet and indigo at the tips. Princess Ozma’s were gold and silver, a metallic sheen that reflected light and cast it across the pen. And Wilbur had black wings, black as night. Black as death.

It took hours as they stood patiently beneath the buzzing needle, letting me etch the lines into their skin, wiping away the blood that welled up beneath the images. And when I was done, I was so tired I could not stand. Instead, I sat there on my stool, looking at them.

One by one, they circled in front of me, like some ritual. The Inspection of the Pigs by the Artist, I thought. I debated going to sleep where I sat or somehow, impossibly, hauling myself up the stairs and into my own bed. The pigs shuffled around each other, and admired my bright-inked creations on their backs. And I found myself dreaming. I dreamed that I sat there watching while Wilbur went to the door and nosed it open, the pigs slipping out into the yard and making their way to the house, where Wilbur repeated his performance and one by one they slipped inside the door.

And then I shook myself awake, and stumbled to my feet. The door was wide open and the pigs were gone, so I scrambled out to the yard to see it empty as well. Up on Jilly’s balcony, movement caught my eye and the French doors shuddered open. A shadow lifted from the balcony, an impossible boxy shadow that floated across the sky, blocking out the clouds that outlined it in pearly tones.

As the moonlight struck it, I saw what it was. Jilly’s brass bed, the frame supported on either side by three flying pigs. Their wings beat the air in tandem while she sat upright, her face moonlight bright with wonder as she gazed forward.

Did she notice me, did she wave? I’m not sure, because clouds obscured the view as she rose higher and higher into the sky. I’d like to think she didn’t—that she knew Mrs. H. and I would take care of each other, and that she didn’t need to look back. I like to think that every inch of her attention was focused on the journey, on that marvelous moment when we both learned that pigs could fly.

I wrote “Magnificent Pigs” in the fall of 2005. It owes much of its inspiration to my classmate Kris Dikeman, who both suffered through a tattoo while I was watching (and was irritated that I was writing down the names of inks while she was in pain) and contributed the idea that Charlotte (and by extension Jilly) remains alive through fiction.

“
Magnificent Pigs” originally appeared in
Strange Horizons
in November 2006. It has been reprinted several times and appeared in audio form, read by Matthew Wayne Selznick, on
Podcastle
.

Grandmother's Road Trip

The sound of the car wheels whispering along the road meshes with Grandmother's snores and the faint noise of my mother's humming as she drives. She prefers not to have the radio on during long trips.

Inside the car, it’s cold as a mall in midsummer. Cold as a clinic, a hospital, a morgue. I can’t quite see my breath, but I’m wearing a sweater, while outside it’s 97 degrees -- according to the dashboard gauge. The air conditioner roars its displeasure as we roll down the highway.

We are traveling with my reluctant grandmother from Mullinville, Kiowa County, Kansas, where she has spent all her life, to a West Coast nursing home near the neighborhood where my mother and I both live. Behind us are: her house, now up for sale; her Chrysler, also listed in the local paper; and her possessions, which my mother and I will return to sort through in a week.

The landscape spreads out with the pancake flatness of Kansas around us. Cottonwoods trace the edges of a meandering creek and its unseen waters. Irrigation sprinklers spread out green circles only visible from above, where a ribboned contrail shows a plane’s progress. Shimmers of summer heat prelude our arrival, as though we chase an oasis that never manifests.

My mother glances over at me. "Can't sleep?"

"I thought you might want company."

"I appreciate it. Though I can't say that the silence hasn't been welcome." She rolls her eyes expressively towards the back seat.

"I heard that," my grandmother says. It is unclear whether she is talking in her sleep or responding, so we wait. More faint snores come from the back seat, so we go back to talking quietly.

It is August, the worst possible month to be driving through Kansas. It is a cicada year as well, and every night at the motels we hear their music swelling. Last night we stayed in Garden City, Kansas, home of feedlot after feedlot; the room was full of flies. A cheap red flyswatter on top of the television said that this was not unexpected.

We all shared the same hotel room. It’s cheaper to do it that way, and my grandmother insisted on paying all the motel bills as part of her martyrdom. She sleeps alone in one bed, while my mother and I share the other.

It’s strange being with them on this trip. We all look alike – I can see myself twenty and forty years down the line, unless I take some drastic measure. We even smell the same, although my grandmother’s scent is masked by perfume and cigarette smoke.

Waking, my grandmother leans forward, patting my shoulder. Her eyes are uncertain behind her thick glasses. “Shayla, you know what’s always bothered me?” she asks.

“
No, Grandma, what?”

“
When you were eight, we went to the K-Mart, and there was a toy there, a stuffed black kitty doll. You wanted it so badly! But I didn’t want to buy it for you because it was a little shop worn. You cried and cried.”

“
I don’t remember that,” I said. It’s the truth. I remember trips to the K-Mart as a child. I bought my first album there, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s “Talk to the Animals.” I remember the bank of coin-operated vending machines dispensing gumballs, jawbreakers, and wonderful trinkets. I always asked my parents or, on occasion, my grandmother for nickels and dimes, knowing that they’d balk at a quarter. But this cat, somewhere in the shelves of toys K-Mart held, a magic section that expanded like an unfolding poinsettia blossom during the holidays, was not something I remembered at all.

“
You cried and cried.”

Beside me, through the glass, row after row of wheat undulate, golden as Barbie doll hair.

“
I really don’t remember it, Grandma.”

“
Was that at Christmas?” my mother says.

“
Yes.”

“
I remember that. You cried all evening.”

I shrug. “I still don’t remember it.”

But looking back at my grandmother, I see it for a moment in the rear window: a small stuffed black cat, made with real fur, the eyes luminous green marbles. The retreating roadway framed in the glass behind it shimmers; I blink and the toy is gone.

My grandmother lapses into silence, and my mother begins to hum again. At the sound, Grandmother speaks.

“
What do you girls plan on doing for dinner?” she asks.

“
I don’t know, Mother. Is there something you would like?”

“
Oh, I don’t know.” She pauses. “Maybe some place we could all sit down and get a nice salad.”

“
How about the Outback?” I suggest.

There is silence from both of them. I sigh in admiration at the way I’ve been drawn into this game.

“
There’s a Roy Rogers just ahead,” my mother counters.

“
Oh, there,” my grandmother says.

“
They have salads.”

“
Not nice ones in bowls.”

I watch the highway signs as we zip along. “There’s a Chinese restaurant coming up,” I cannot resist saying.

“
That would be nice,” my grandmother says, and I know, somehow that this has been her plan all along. She looks out the window. “Do you girls know, this is my first road trip? It’s like a movie, just the three of us.”

I can tell she’s seriously jonesing for a cigarette.

We get in another hour of driving after dinner, but don’t want to push on too long. Pulling in at a nondescript motel, $39.95 for a night with privileges to a faded blue swimming pool, we check in and conduct our evening rituals. My grandmother watches “Survivor” in her bathrobe and goes outside on the balcony to smoke during the commercials. My mother pages through a murder mystery, fingers flicking through it in a steady rhythm. She has a tote bag filled with paperbacks; she’ll work her way through them methodically, like a sugar fiend devouring candy bars. The two of them ignore each other for the most part. They have never gotten along, although my mother does not hold the same childhood grudges that my aunt does. My aunt has refused to have any part of this trip besides funding it.

I love my mother, but I feel a great deal of fondness towards my grandmother as well. She is stubborn, and manipulative, but she’s earned that right by living to a ripe 95. Even so, I had to agree, despite her protests, that a nursing home would be better for her than the solitary and sometimes fragile existence she’d been leading until then.

“
She drives to Wal-Mart, out on the highway,” my mother had said on the phone, recapping one argument. “I can’t get her to see that it’s dangerous. I can’t imagine what the other drivers think.”

“
They’re probably used to the occasional senior citizen,” I said. “Can someone be paid to take her to the store twice a week, or something like that?”

“
It’s not just that,” my mother said. “I’m worried she’ll slip in the bath. Or on her front steps, or the basement steps. She’s getting very frail.”

“
But she likes it there.”

“
I know.”

“
What does Aunt Rosie want to do?”

“
Oh, she’d put her in a home tomorrow if she thought she could get away with it. Probably has one all picked out.”

I would have laughed, but it was true.

“
I’ll come out and help you talk to her about it,” I said.

“
Thank you, that makes it bearable,” my mother said. “I don’t think you want to get too much in the way of all the discussions, but I know I could use you for moral support.”

Now, together, half a state away from her home, we say our goodnights and go to sleep. Both my mother and my grandmother snore. Outside I hear mourning doves lamenting, the sigh of wind through the telephone wires, and the whisper of tires, rolling down the darkened highway, moving through the pools of light that define the night’s blackness.

Bathrooms at night have always freaked me out a little. For one, I’m nearsighted, but don’t usually take my glasses with me when stumbling there out of bed. For another, a thought of someone or something reaching up from the toilet to grab my crotch haunts me, even though I know it’s silly. But as soon as I sit down, I think about avoiding thinking it, and then I’m done and standing up while reaching for the toilet paper, not looking at the bowl.