by J. C. Sasser
She looked down at her skinny breasts and acknowledged her nipples, hard beneath her green dress. “I’ll show them to you naked,” she said, steadying her gaze on him as if he didn’t threaten her at all.
“Now, now, Gradle Bird. I don’t want to give you a bad name.”
“I’ve already got one.”
“Alright. If I was you, I’d bet on the blue,” he said.
Ceif limped over and stood by Gradle’s side. “Bet on the red,” he said under his breath.
“Which one’s most popular?” she asked.
“The red,” Ceif said.
“I’ll bet on the blue.”
“Naked nipples on the Halfmoon,” he said, and he poured the two fish into the jar sitting in the middle of the table.
Gradle knelt eye-level to the fish, pushed her glasses up her nose, and watched with unwavering intensity as the blue and orange Halfmoon slowly swam toward the Apache. She didn’t seem to mind the crowd of males shoving her chest hard into the table as they fought to get the best view.
The Halfmoon momentarily paused. The Apache glided its way, and they circled one another in a poetic ball of color. They broke apart, and their gills bloomed around their faces like the flowers of a pansy. Their fins erected. Dorsal. Ventral. Anal. Caudal. They were at their fullest, most colorful, most brilliant state. The Halfmoon deflated its gills, turned broadside, and beat its orange tail. From above they came together in the shape of a letter T. They exchanged positions, alternating from top to base, as they circled around the jar like lovers.
The Apache attacked. It bit the tail of the Halfmoon and spat out a shred of orange fin, which floated in the jar like a piece of confetti. The Halfmoon butted the Apache and nipped its ribs. The Apache fought back, taking bits of the Halfmoon’s fin and making gashes in its side. The fish locked mouths, clenching each other’s jaws. They twisted and tugged as they slowly sunk together to the bottom of the jar where they remained mouth locked for over a minute before they broke apart and swam up for air.
The fish repeated the sequences of threat and attack until suddenly the Halfmoon fled from the Apache who kept in close pursuit. The Halfmoon’s fins became flaccid. Its colors bleached, and two dark horizontal bands appeared on its sides as it hid motionless in the far right corner.
Sonny Joe had been watching Gradle through the jar the entire time. Although the water distorted her image, he could see her magnified blue eyes spark as the fish began their sequence. He wondered if the fish could see them too and if their color had in any way stimulated their aggression, causing the Halfmoon to fight harder than expected. He could sense her intrigue. He could sense her understanding.
As Ceif paid out the winning bets, Gradle continued to stare at the two fish in the jar. The Halfmoon had swum to the surface and assumed a vertical head-up position while the red Apache continued to display behaviors of threat. He could have made it easy on her. He could have agreed with Ceif and convinced her the Apache would win, but where was the game in that?
“That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, rising to her feet. Her eyes were wet and crystalline.
“Boys and gentlemen, leave us alone,” he said. The crowd dispersed, all except the butcher who didn’t leave until he finished his cigarette.
“I spared you an audience, but it’s time for you to pay up, Gradle Bird,” he said, plucked the slow dying Halfmoon from the jar, and tossed it to a white cat with serpent green eyes that was starved enough to leave the dumpster’s shelter and sprint out in the rain to retrieve it.
She climbed across the table and moved into him, as if what she agreed to pay him with came easy. He could smell bread on her breath and the tangy, sweet stench of her armpits. A pain surged in his groin, and he swelled.
She crossed her arms at her knees and lifted the hem of her dress. It rose above her thighs, above the mouth of her Fruit of the Looms, above her tight stomach’s button.
He grabbed her hands and stopped them from rising further. “I don’t want to see your nipples.”
She slid her fingers from his grip, brought her dress over her head, and laid it gently on the table as if she cared for it more than anything in the world. She unlatched her bra and paid no mind to the photograph that dropped to the ground. Her breastplate was rippled, her waist swerved fast and inward, and her hips were dangerously sharp, as if her body had been bred for violence. She was so stunning and so threatening he couldn’t bear to look at her.
His eyes fled up and down the alley, looking for Ceif to save him, but Ceif was nowhere in sight. They were all alone, except for the white cat now hunched under the dumpster, teething the dead fish.
When he looked back at her again, she moved in closer, locked her mouth on his, and brought him down to the table on top of her. Her arms and legs wrapped around his back. Her hipbones stabbed.
Her eyes glassed up behind her goofy, rain-dropped glasses. He removed her glasses and stared deep into the marbly blue of her eyes.
“What do you want me to do?” he whispered.
“Save my life,” she said, shutting her eyes.
He buried his face in the crook of her neck and held her tight. They lay still, feeling each other from the inside out. He had been with all kinds of girls before, but she was different. Either her starvation was contagious or else he had been unaware all this time he was starved himself. He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled her underwear aside. She was hot and wet and new. He closed his eyes and swam in her, but before he could find any rhythm, he felt her knees rise to push him off.
He opened his eyes and saw her with her arm stretched out, shaking as it reached toward the photograph on the ground. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose and spanked her temple. She kneed him in the groin, rolled from beneath him, and dove to save the photograph from being beat up any more than it already had by the rain. She sheltered the photo with her pale, slick body and crawled underneath the table where she used her dress to dab the rain away from photo’s film. She put on her bra, climbed into her dress, and placed the photograph against her heart.
She crawled from beneath the table and stared at him in his disheveled state as if she had forgotten she had made him that way.
“You look pale,” she said, put on her glasses, and pushed the shopping buggy down the alley while Sonny Joe stared at the back of her brilliant green dress, feeling nothing but defeat.
Gradle pushed the rattling buggy down the sidewalk as the rain came down hard on her head. She tried to make sense of what happened in the alley with Sonny Joe. She felt like a fool thinking he could ever love her like she needed to be loved, that he could somehow save her, sustain her through what her life lacked. She had gone too far before realizing it was not his love she needed. She wondered why she didn’t feel any different, why she didn’t feel more like a woman. She would have expected a bit of weeping or lament, perhaps even a bit of blush or glow. But they didn’t finish or really start. It didn’t even hurt, and so she wondered if it counted, if technically she was still a virgin.
She ran the buggy up into the yard of the old Spivey house and unloaded the SpaghettiOs. The house looked sad in the rain. The porch frowned and the windows, like crying black eyes, shed tears that fell like waterfalls from the awnings. A can slipped from her grip and rolled down the walkway, stopping shy of the front steps, as if it was too spooked to go any further.
She bent to collect the can and saw a river of rainwater and blood splitting around her ankle. She checked her dress. There was blood on the skirt. She rubbed its fabric, but the rain was too weak to make the red go away. She grabbed the shampoo from the buggy, ran inside the house, and stripped to her underwear in the kitchen. She plunged her dress in the sink and squirted it with shampoo. She turned the faucet but nothing came out except a couple knocks of air.
She lifted the dress out of the sink, ran to the back porch, and held it under the awning where rain ran off in sheets. She scrubbed the fabric and rinsed, but the blood w
as still there. It looked as if it had already set. She shaked out more shampoo, scrubbed and rinsed, scrubbed and rinsed, and prayed the whole time for it not to be ruined. She kept scrubbing until the threads began to tear. She rinsed it one last time, squeezed the rain out, and laid it upon her bed to dry.
She lay on the bed next to the dress and spooned it as if someone she loved was inside it. She nuzzled the fabric with her nose, closed her eyes, and remembered the day she first put it on. It was four years ago, and she was alone in room 42 sitting on her bed, reading The Holy Bible that came standard with every room. The closet door was open and a shiny-backed cockroach froze mid-journey up the closet wall. She hopped off her bed, and as she chased the cockroach with the Bible, she saw a swatch of vivid green poking through a corner hole in a box sitting high on the closet shelf.
She let the cockroach have his life, brought the box down from the shelf, and swept off its dust. The masking tape came off with ease, its glue old and no longer good. She plunged her hands into the box and took hold of a bundle of green chiffon. As she lifted it from the box, the skirt unraveled to her shins and dropped a pair of cat-eye glasses, an old photograph captioned Leonard and Veela 1972, and a corsage of dried flowers that broke to dust when it hit the floor. On the dress’s bodice above the heart was a piece of torn paper stabbed with a straight pin and signed with a dedication: For Gradle, my little bird.
She brought the box and everything it had in it into the bathroom and locked herself inside. She brought the photograph up to her nose and studied it and all of its detail. The photo was proof she had a mother and proof that at one point in his life Grandpa was happy.
Gradle put on the dress, stared in the bathroom mirror, and compared herself to her mother. She didn’t need a mirror to see her reflection or a family tree to explain her lineage. She was an exact replica of her mother, down to the streak of grey hair growing from the top of her head.
She heard Grandpa come in the room and drop his tool bag to the floor. She smoothed the skirt of her dress and walked out of the bathroom door.
“How do I look?” Gradle asked, while Grandpa fiddled with the belt of his electric sander. When Grandpa turned to see, she spun around, and the dress’s skirt bloomed out like a flower.
Grandpa stood, removed his glasses, and stared at her as if he was trying to figure out who in the world she was. He came toward her, cautious at first, but his pace soon quickened. He dropped to his knees, bundled the green dress in his hands, and sunk his entire face into it. He drew in a deep long breath as if that air was the most sacred thing he had ever put up his nose.
“Veela,” he exhaled in a whisper.
He held Gradle’s hands and pulled her down into him. He wrapped his arms around her, palmed her shoulder blades and kneaded the bitty bones of her back. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d hugged her or the last time they’d touched. He’d never been one for affection, and she always thought it was because he didn’t know how to handle a girl, but on that day on the floor of room 42, he handled her with the perfect amount of strength.
He cradled the back of her head, buried his forehead into her neck, and rested there long enough for what felt like warm tears to seep through the chiffon of her dress.
“You wanna go fishing?” she asked, and he let her go just as fast as he held onto her.
He got up from his knees and went back to fiddling with the belt of his sander.
She ran back to the bathroom and stared at the photograph of Grandpa and her mother. If her mother was dead, she knew she couldn’t raise her from it. If her mother had just run off somewhere, she knew she couldn’t call out her name and make her come home, but maybe, if she could look enough like that day in that photograph at least she could bring Grandpa’s smile back from whatever dark place it had gone. If she could look enough like that day, maybe, just maybe, he would hug her again. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, grabbed the blunt scissors from the motel’s complimentary sewing kit, and cut her bangs crooked and too short. When she was finished, she put on the cat-eye glasses, and practiced her mother’s smile.
Gradle took the dress away from her nose, opened her eyes, and rose from the bed. The rain drummed gently on the tin roof, and moonflower buds had started to bloom. She turned on her nightstand’s lamp and sat in front of the vanity. Her face drew in close to the mirror, and she studied her first-kissed lips. She pressed her fingers into them, feeling to see if they had changed, and noticed a small square of paper stuck to her cheek. She pulled it away and cradled the stamp in her palm. A tear rolled down her cheek as she stared at the vine-covered ceiling and listened to the dwindling sound of music and the shuffling of Grandpa’s feet upon the attic floor.
THE GRAMOPHONE’S NEEDLE skipped, and Leonard’s steps slowed to almost nothing. Annalee welcomed the change in tempo, for she was worried about his heart’s speed and the bleeding blisters he’d danced into his feet. He had come up to the attic as it had started to rain and had caught her staring out of the window as she so often did.
“Why are you crying?” he had asked.
She found it peculiar he could hear her cries when she had no tears to cry with. She hadn’t shed a tear in years no matter how long and how hard she had mourned.
“Why find me now?” she had asked, but Leonard had not answered.
Instead he had cranked the gramophone so hard he broke off its handle and then had forced her to dance when she really hadn’t felt like dancing.
They had been dancing for hours. It was getting dark, and he stunk of sweat. His feral hair hung in his face, hiding the sickles under his eyes that had turned purple from lack of sleep. His temple dropped to her shoulder, and she dipped from his slippery weight. She tried to gather him into her, but he was too much for her to hold. He sunk down her sternum and collapsed in a heap on the floor, drunk from exhaustion and perhaps a tinge of madness. He had always suffered from an addictive disorder but she had never seen him so belligerent. She had seen it in his eyes—a wild delirium as he spun her in what must have been over a thousand spins with a drive so intense, she honestly feared he would dance himself to death.
She knelt on the floor and laid his head on her lap. She combed her fingers through his hair, spreading his silver strands out to shine like rays of some dying sun. It had been decades since she had seen him, and while she would expect that amount of time would age a man, she never imagined it could be so cruel. His blonde and blues had tarnished. His lips had lost their pillows, and his wrinkles were so deep some of them needed stitches. The ones clawing at the corners of his eyes appeared as if they had been carved out by the constant rush of tears. In fact, his entire face clamped down in what appeared to be a permanent attempt to dam up grief.
She smoothed her fingertip over his lines, wondering what had caused them to become so deep, if his life had been anything akin to hers. For years she had drifted about this house, completely befuddled as to why she wasn’t picking daisies somewhere in The Promised Land. At first, she thought this place was temporary, but after years and years of wandering about, she presumed she was here to stay, for what she took to her grave was unspeakable, even to the greatest, most holy ghost of all. There are things that can haunt you until your dying days, and there are some things that can haunt you even after death.
She palmed Leonard’s cheek and remembered the last time she had seen it, tear-streaked and red from the mark of her mother’s quick hand. All this time had passed, and only in the next world did she ever think she would see him again.
They were first cousins. Leonard was her father’s brother’s son. They were born only three days apart and would have arrived on the same day if her Aunt Missy hadn’t labored for so long. Regardless, they both bore the Lee name, Annalee and Leonard Lee, after their great grandmother, Sarah Lee Spivey.
Leonard’s family lived up north and visited for two months every summer. As infants, Annalee and Leonard shared a porch crib and tugged on each other’s toes while their
parents ate tomato sandwiches and got drunk on gin.
When they were old enough to crawl, they shared a playpen, and when they were old enough to walk and climb, they shared the attic. For as long as Annalee could remember, every second week of June she perched from the attic’s window, the home’s highest point, and watched for Uncle Reece’s car to turn left on Spivey Street. She would wait for Leonard to bolt from the backseat, his eyes two streaks of blue, and his dirty blonde hair rushing back on the tail of his eager-made wind. Once she heard his feet pound up the porch steps, she would scatter to the hiding place she had started plotting in the second week of August on the day Leonard had to go back north, his blue eyes teary, his blonde hair cleaned and summer-kissed.
Over the years, summers couldn’t come fast enough. She marked the calendar, she shook the hourglass, and began incessantly running with the hope that if she ran fast enough, she could speed up the days. And when June finally came, and she heard Leonard’s feet tap up the porch steps, she stopped flipping the calendar, placed the hourglass on its side, and deliberately moved like a slug with the hope she could now slow down the days.
They dove into the wardrobes, the boxes, the chests, and turned the attic floor into their playground. They strung Christmas garlands throughout the rafters. They shuffled through tintypes of their long and gone kinfolks and spent hour upon hour role-playing in the dollhouse. They dressed up with brittle clothes, boas, and feather-pricked hats, and in the afternoons, stripped down to their underwear when the attic got sweltering hot. At night they gazed out of the attic window, counted the stars, and named their own constellations until their eyes grew heavy and their bodies grew limp. The mornings after, they woke sweaty, their mouths sopping with drool, and started it all over again, diving into the wardrobes, the boxes, the chests, both of them fueled with hope that each day would turn over an exciting and new discovery.
One afternoon during a violent storm in the summer of their twelfth year, when they had plundered through every wardrobe, box, and chest, and thought there was nothing new left, Leonard found something shiny.