Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (5 page)

It is in one of these two places I find the tortoiseshell, flip it over. The underside coated in dust, not just-settled yearly dust, but the dust of ages: from generations spent in an attic, in a forgotten museum storage closet. A tortoise that is endangered, extinct, harvested and disappeared years before my time. And in the dust is written, in my finger letters, “I was here.” It is like the card tricks, that—had I the hands—I would have taught my son. Always producing the ace of spades. Pulling silver coins from his ears. “We are like you, too,” I whisper. But I know it is not the same, because we are playing. Here there is no playing.

When you leave, my son, remember what I have told you of islands:

There are bodies of rock, some small as your hand or this bed. Some large as this house, or larger. Some that seem solid but are not, give them a day, give them a month of walking towards the sun. They are alone in the water. Not like a boat, not like a piece of wood, bobbing up and down. They are grounded. They do not sway in the storm. The waves beat over them. It will take years to wear them down, to carry off their shell. You can find them by accident or the stars. The way your father found me. When you look to the horizon, there is nothing but water between you and the sun. The sun is your enemy, the sun is your only friend. That, too, is like your father.

When you leave, my son, I hope you find an island. I hope you take a boat and head into the sun and never come back. When you find a tortoise, a unique rock, leave your mark. Pile up flat stones into a tower to mark the way, like Hansel and Gretel. On sheer cliffs leave your mark. Carve it in with your father's knife, your father's knife that bears my blood, your father's knife that seals us together. Decorate tree trunks with your scroll, and they will petrify. On spires of lava, on arches of limestone, leave your mark.

When I return, I will find you. I will go swimming in the lake of my childhood, fishing with my father, diving along the rock face and see your name carved on the cliff under my pale leg; I will be unloading gravel in the corner of my garden and read the first two letters of your name; I will be touring a museum and find a bit of your cloak, the ragged stitches recognizably mine, on an Indian tapestry. I cannot promise the means, only the end: leave this place, never come back, you the better for it.

The Way to This House

My son, my son knows what it is to be a child, to belong to something. He holds it aside, a strangeness. Here, nothing belongs to anyone if it is not nailed down. But nails are too solid, too tangible. Too obvious. If the children here kept diaries, the ones with little golden locks, they would be fakes, full of puppy poems and meal lists. If the children here kept diaries they would have the golden diary with the golden lock hidden under the mattress, and it would be full of realistic-sounding lies that looked like secrets. But if the children here kept diaries, the real ones would be thin and strapped next to their hearts under flesh-colored bandages, or buried under a rock under a rosebush in the garden, only removed on moonless nights, or securely cradled in the razored-out bed of another, larger book. Their secrets would be written in blood and it would kill a person to read them.

And everyone knows this. So the children here do not keep diaries. My son always knew I was not like them, but he did not always know that I was not like him. He remembers, puts it away inside. Before. It is his secret diary. He, at least, has a lock.

My son will come to me, I know. He will come in the dead of night, a child again. He will carry a silver knife and say nothing. I read the last page of the book, then burned it. Between then and now I do not care, I am not here. I can sit in the library and sneak down to the kitchen and sleep in my husband's bed. But one night you will come to me, and hold out your hand, and in it they will lay, small and fragile, no longer pale but darkened with age and air. What your father took from me.

I followed the path for days until I came to a house, a cottage, really. An unlocked door like a welcome, that was how foolish I was. I did not know that the walls would own me, a bit, and that open doors are like bear traps, so I stumbled in.

I went inside. I had a knife, from the blond boy, from the village. And who else who have me?

There was a great fireplace, and a wooden floor. A table. Cupboards were bare, dishes were clean. I climbed up the ladder to the loft. A pile of blankets and furs, heavy with lingering smoke. I hid myself in the dark and slept. When I awoke, the room was filled with men, the fire roaring. They were drinking and celebrating. Like at the parties my husband gives now, when he says, “My wife,” and I rise, hold a cup aloft. The only bit of silence the whole evening. The visitors can see that only three fingers circle the silver stem. And I smile, and bow, and sit. Then food is served. But I was not there, so there was no moment of silence in the cottage.

"How sad,” he said. “I was to have married her.” And then he tore the garnet baubles from her ears, red hair covering her white neck. The dead were at this party, dancing, flung about like dolls, heads flopping back, blood lace at the throats. The men would not grow tired of their games. I crawled back to my corner, buried in the blankets. A knife under my pillow. I slept like a baby. I was already dead, you see, that is what I told myself.

And I awoke in the morning and they were all gone. But their things were there, and I looked through them for some reason, a clue, a map. Bread and cheese and meat. A pile of jewelry, coins on the table. Other objects which I did not know the use for, although now I do. And I ate their bread, like Goldilocks. I had slept in their bed. There was a trapdoor, and under it were the dancing partners, the dead. I was down there when they returned, feet stomping above.

There was nowhere else to go, so I hid myself in a pile of bodies. And again they sang and drank. Plink of metal hitting the table. Coins falling between the cracks in the floor, landing like raindrops on our outstretched hands.

"More dancing!” one of them cried. And down the stairs they came.

I did not cry out, when your father took his knife. He thought they had missed one, and cursed his blindness. I did not cry out, when he took my ring. I had worn it so long that I had forgotten it. Cheap gold, dusty amethyst. A gift to my grandmother from her father. I had already lost it myself, dancing. When I came here it appeared on my finger. The only thing from there, from the world I tell you about, my son, the world I told you about. My proof, if not for anyone else.

Thrown in a pile with the others, I watched him dance like a dervish. Like a barracuda attacking. Like an anemone, poisonous. Along with the pile of dead, waiting to be chosen, waiting for one last twirl around the fireplace, they did not know I had a special secretion on my skin. That I was impervious and would slip through their waving arms. Your father was the beauty of a thousand escapes, of months of silent journeys through darkened fields. Your father was the coldness of silver and the bite of a blade, the warmth of pain.

If only I hadn't bled, they never would have known. Dancing around the room. I play the dead well, had the half-opened, unfocused eyes. My neck like a baby's, my feet dragging. I had not cried out when the knife bit into my finger, did not cry out when the table leg bit into my shin. They could not tell the difference, but for the thin trickle of blood on your father's back. They had danced with me, you see, and I was theirs. I was dead not dead. I would not say how I arrived. They might have sent me back.

My husband, you never ask me if it was love, you never ask me if it was love. Or if it was blood. Or if it was my silence. Like bunnies sitting in the lawn, still, like a fawn, I was hiding. Did you know all along? Could you smell me, alive, in the basement? Does metal have a tang when wrapped around the living? When you crawl into my bed, you slide under the brocade, reach tentatively across. A continent. An island. Do you have islands here? I have told our son of islands, while he nods sagely. We speak in riddles, we speak in metaphors. Husband, I have learned your ways.

One You Have Left

The girl I lay against had beautiful red hair. Her eyes were open. In them I could see your father, I could see you beckoning behind him. The holes in her ears ragged. I will remember forever the way those bodies felt, cold and impervious, against mine. That my heat and ability to play dead were my only advantages. I can sit like an island, I can stare like the stars. My love and hate can burn like cold ash, finished, empty, still. Do not resurrect me outside of these walls. Do not come back to this house, with its silent dark halls, and covered portraits.

Once you have gone I will tell your father the story of a poisoned dress.

There was a woman who was scorned in love. She had followed her husband to a distant city, far from her people. She had maimed and killed to be with him. And when he left her for another, she made a poisoned dress of beaten gold. Alone, in her house, empty of servants, empty of children, empty of love, she put on the dress. And disappeared, leaving only the smoldering dress.

The first gift that he gave me was a silver amulet, off the neck of a dead girl, but I did not understand this at the time. The same girl with the beautiful auburn hair. How was he to know that was the body I hid under, the neck I bit into when he took my finger? I do not tell him these things, but there were other poisoned dresses. An angry wife, spurned and burning jealous rage inside, pretended calm and kindness. She sent a beautiful dress, spun of the finest metals.
The glint in the silver thread to drown you in a pool
. The sweetest poison in the world, the faster the new wife danced at the wedding feast, the warmer the new wife's body, the quicker the poison seeps. Its taint spread quickly through the young, would tinge the eyeballs and veins of the self-possessed. But in the end they all die. I wear her like that rage.

The first gift I gave him was my grandmother's ring, to put in his bag of bones. He must never tell me, he must not let me see it again. He would be undone. This is why my husband does not speak to me. Why my son does not tell his father he speaks to me, and why he will leave, one day, and never come back. My son knows these stories are true because they are not like the stories I read him, or the stories I tell him of my world. These stories have no ending.

Our house is lined with portraits of people waiting to happen. Their eyes beg me to look away, to take my cold stare and return to my room. They ask my husband why he picked me, why he brought me here, when they knew I would only send you away.

[Back to Table of Contents]

(the backdrop for a fairy-tale)

Michaela Kahn once, this place was under the sea.

only quiet fish swam here, salt in eyes, sea horses trailing through silt like skeleton fingers...

in the village of wolves, no one speaks at night.

there are eyes in the houses that blink on and off, leaving pale green marks where they've opened.

in the village of wolves there is a man who rents himself out to the villagers. they take him home and stand him in the corner of their kitchen. he watches the family eat potato soup, spinach, and bread, serve coffee with milk to their guests. he watches the children dance around the table with small golden packages of sweets in their hands. when the meal is over, his job is

done and he leaves through the back door, his payment, a bottle of sweet red wine.

in the village of wolves if you smell pine on the air, it's only Mr. Kanahan, opening the doors of his balsam oil factory. if you smell rain, it might really be rain—but it could be the dream of

Mr. Sark, who circles the town square each night, singing “Rex tremendae majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me fons pietatis..."

in the village of wolves, the last wolf was shot in

1894, but there are still a few coyotes.

Once upon a time....

[Back to Table of Contents]

Yoon Ha Lee

White shapes fell from Mei's hands: here a narrow triangle, there a half-ripped crescent. A shadow cut across the pile of scraps on the floor. Mei stopped, her scissors gaping wide and bright. She did not look away from the blades.

The voice came, not from the TV. It said her name once, twice—a third time, stopping short of four. The words fell upon her like snow, individual sounds lost in the voice's inflections. The hands took away her scissors.

Mei understood what the words wanted. The paper shadows she had cut out were safe in her sleeve, a frail, itchy presence against her skin. She would have to finish the last one later. The white fragments she swept up and scattered into the recycling bin. The voice lowered in pitch, intensified. Mei opened and closed her hands, making them into scissors. Those shadow-blades could not cut her.

The moon curved across the window and over the sky. Night followed in its wake. After the hands tucked her in and the feet took the voice away, Mei brought her family out from under the pillow and laid them across the blanket, over her lap. Mama and Dada and her laughing, laughing big brother.

She remembered the smoke in her lungs, the hot gritty cinders. She remembered a bed that was not this one, with a lumpier quilt, and her brother across the room. She remembered.

The only one missing in the family was Mei. She did not have scissors to finish cutting out the last paper doll. If she tiptoed out of bed, the feet would come and the hands would hold her until she pretended sleep again.

She had her own hands. Folding and refolding, wetting the edges with her tongue, Mei freed herself from the shapes of paper and fluttered next to them, white, flammable, together.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Republicans & Chihuahuas Edition

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Now that you've been married for a while, do you have any new and startling insights into the male brain?