The crying baby emerged from beneath the draped blankets of the fort. He was not the same race as the other two children, Karen observed. The older kids were white, pasty even, and the baby looked African American, but maybe not, as Rosette was always assumed to be Spanish or Brazilian when she was in fact from the Azores. Rosette felt these distinctions mattered a lot but Karen had read that race wasn’t even real so who cares. This baby was cute, for sure, with round mournful eyes and a loaded diaper about to fall off his little hips.
“He fucking smells. Change him,” the middle brother instructed his older sister, who groaned as she hauled the baby into her arms and carried him down the hall.
“Dennis is in there,” the girl said to Karen as she went, kicking at the second door of the hallway with her foot.
Karen followed the girl down the hallway and tapped at the bedroom door. “Hello?” she said softly, and turned the knob. Another giant television—this one flat and new—occluded the only window in the room, and towels and black trash bags were tacked to the sill, covering what little light might sneak in from the edges. A video game stood idle, the crosshairs of a gun’s scope trained on a blank expanse of desert. The sand shimmered like the great sea that had once covered it. Karen recognized the game immediately. Jared, the Sunday overnight counselor, liked to play it. Karen knew the game’s pause music all too well. It was intense, like a beating heart over an electrical storm of guitars. The volume was up so loud and Dennis—her Dennis—was fast asleep in the bed. He lay on top of the blankets, a jumble of pink comforter and sheets, the joystick a few inches from his inert hand. He had a large round belly lopping over his boxer shorts, his face covered by a bunched-up sheet. Karen remembered, when they were together in the apartment as kids, Dennis would hide his face inside his shirt when he cried. Even when they were alone. If he wasn’t wearing a shirt, he would pull a pillowcase over his head. Once he’d used a paper bag. If she touched him in these moments, he would slap her, but that had never stopped her from doing it again. She hated when Dennis cried. It hurt more than when she cried.
“Dennis?” Karen whispered.
With the controller she turned the volume of the TV down to just one bar. She knelt by the side of the bed and peeked under the sheet. His breath was hot and smelled polluted. It was too dark to get a good look at his face. Karen stroked his ear with her fingernails. Dennis did not move. He was breathing, his swollen belly expanding and contracting in an even rhythm, but he did not wake up.
Under the bed was a pile of magazines. Pornographic and amateurish, full of poorly reproduced snapshots of young, not very pretty women. The sheer number of magazines was staggering to Karen; there were maybe as many as a hundred.
“You can’t help it,” Karen said to her sleeping love. “You’ve been so lost for so long. So have I. But it’s okay now. I’m back. I’m here.”
She decided to let him sleep and get to know his children a little better. They would be her children soon, in some way or another. She would be their stepmother. Or step-aunt? She kept tossing herself back and forth between the two roles, hoping one would choose her rather than the other way around.
Karen closed the bedroom door quietly and took a seat on the living room couch. The boy was staring at the TV now, his eyes lulled by a violent fight between cat and mouse. Their scrambling bodies rolled into a cloud that bounced across the screen.
“Excuse me,” Karen said to him, and he jumped into alertness. “What is your name?”
“Miles,” he answered.
“I’m Karen.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Do you know what today is?”
“It’s Last Day,” Miles said proudly.
“That’s right. Do you know what that means?”
“God doesn’t love us anymore. He’s sick of our bullshit. He said we can either act better and not hit each other and not say swears or he will get rid of us all and start over with new people.”
“What?” Karen cried.
“He goes to kindergarten at Catholic Charities,” Miles’s sister chimed in. She was leading her baby brother by the hand, his diaper changed. “I go to Centerville. Because I’m gifted.”
“No, Tianna. Sit on the floor.” Miles swung his legs out over the empty cushion beside him so that his siblings could not share the couch with Karen and him. It was a transparent display of dominance that thrilled Karen more than she was comfortable admitting.
“Do you know the story of the Selfless Knight?” Karen asked.
Tianna picked up her stolen magazine and began copying pictures of famous people in a thick spiral notebook. “I know it.” She licked her palms and tried to smooth down her thin, straight hair. A very white, disciplined part was combed down the middle of her scalp, bisecting her head with astonishing precision. “But you can tell the story to Miles. I don’t care. Hopefully it will shut him up for five friggin’ seconds, so I can get some work done for once.” She slumped down on the floor at Karen’s feet and shaded in the jawline of the actor slated to play Zeus in the newest mythological blockbuster franchise.
The girl was gifted, Karen admitted with a jealous pique. The likeness of her portrait was incredible. The baby, whom no one bothered to call by name, found a dusty remote control under the couch and began gnawing on it.
“Once upon a time…,” Karen began, skipping over the pre-Gregorian-calendar history of the tale, in part because she only knew the broad strokes of that history: that once upon a time, Last Day was a populist response to the second Sacking of Rome and the barbarian belief that the old gods of antiquity took better care of their people than the one true Christian God, and that the tradition had blossomed and spread for a thousand years, surviving suppressive orders from the time of Augustine to the Knights Templar, the latter being the involuntary sire of the tale’s protagonist; but mostly because she loved the invocation of those words—once upon a time—and the way it lulled children into a spell. “…there was a selfless knight who lived in a kingdom far away.”
Miles inched closer to Karen and began sucking his thumb.
“The knight was in love with his king’s only daughter, but she was betrothed to another prince in a kingdom very far away. Do you know what betrothed means?” Karen asked.
“It means get married,” Tianna said.
“Oooh,” Miles squealed. “She’s going to show him her penis and boobs.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” His sister rolled her eyes. “Girls don’t have penises.”
“Yes they do!” He stood up on the couch and lifted his T-shirt up to his neck, slapped the rippling bones of his chest, then yanked his shirt back down, sat back on the couch, and hid his face in Karen’s arm. She could feel his eyelashes fluttering against her skin.
Karen decided not to address the outburst, which triggered too many of her core issues contained in several social contracts drafted by Nora, so she continued as though nothing had happened.
“The princess was going to get married and go so far away that it would be impossible for her to ever come back home again. They had no technology back then.”
“That’s not true,” Tianna piped up. “Technology doesn’t mean computers and stuff. A wheelbarrow is technology.”
“Yeah, but in olden times, once you went away, you went away for good. Right?”
The girl rubbed her eyes. She sighed. “Yeah. Fine.”
“So, the morning of the Last Day, the princess fell ill and everyone thought that she would die. The Selfless Knight loved his princess so much that he rode for miles and miles to a sorcerer at the edge of the forest to ask for help. At first the sorcerer argued with the knight. He said, ‘Once she is married and gone, she will be as good as dead anyway, so there is no point in saving her. And if the sun does not rise again tomorrow, there will be no one left, not even you, Selfless Knight, to mourn her. Go, my son, go back t
o your parents and eat one last meal at their table, drink with your brothers, enjoy these precious hours that you will never have again.’ But the knight insisted. Do you know what insisted means?”
“I don’t care!” Miles said, his owlish eyes delighted.
“Okay.” Karen smiled a toothy, subservient grin. “But the knight cared a lot. That’s what insisted means. He cared so much that he said he would rather spend his last day on Earth in service to his princess. If she died because of his selfishness, he did not want to live anyway, he told the sorcerer. And if he was able to save her, and the world turned again tomorrow, then he would be happy knowing she was alive in it, even if she was betrothed to another prince in another kingdom out of his sight. The sorcerer was so touched, he shed a single tear that he wiped with a handkerchief. Then he dropped the handkerchief into a boiling pot of soup. Sparks of purple and gold light flew out—”
“That part is from the movies, the purple and gold,” Tianna interrupted. “It’s a modern part that we only just started including. In the olden days, the colors didn’t matter.”
“I like purple and gold,” Karen said.
Tianna rolled her eyes and noisily flipped the pages of her magazine. She was finished with Zeus. A pop star who had recently gone to rehab was her next subject. She was a bleach blonde with dramatic, black eyebrows and a fake mole above her lip. The actress was feeling better than ever, her picture’s caption asserted.
“But I guess you’re right,” Karen conceded. “It doesn’t matter.”
“And it’s a cauldron of magic potions. Not a pot of soup.”
“I know that,” Karen said. “I just wanted to help Miles understand.”
“I hate soup!” Miles cheered. “I hate doctors and soup and doo-doo diapers and my sister. I like you, though.”
He took a fold of Karen’s Easter dress into his hands and stroked it lovingly.
“I love you, too!” Karen wasn’t supposed to say that to strangers. It was a direct violation of Nora’s provisions in another of their personal and emotional safety contracts. But it was a holiday, possibly the last holiday ever, a day that stood outside of the temporal world and so should not count under contractual agreements.
“Tell him what happened next,” Tianna said. “They don’t get to learn this stuff at his Catholic school. They don’t learn anything over there.”
Tianna sat up on her heels and gently removed Miles’s glasses from his face, which she cleaned with spit and the hem of her purple T-shirt. When she was finished, she cleaned her own glasses. Her eyes were tiny and dark without them, the color of burnt wood, and her sockets were ringed with addled, exhausted shadows.
“The sorcerer agreed to help the knight but said that first the knight must fetch him three important things. ‘Anything you ask,’ said the Selfless Knight. ‘Bring me a flame from the fire at the top of Mount Elder,’ instructed the sorcerer, ‘a leaping frog from the Lake of Days, and a stone from the Great Wall of Dreams.’ ”
“Those things change in other countries’ versions of the story,” Tianna said. “Sometimes it’s the feather of a special wild chicken. Or a fish or a mushroom protected by an ogre. It just shows what’s important to people in different places. Like farming or mining or forests or fishing.”
This girl was a lot older than Karen had guessed. Or maybe not. She was staring at Karen with her ancient-looking eyes. How old are you? Karen wanted to ask, but she was afraid of the glare cutting through those thick glasses. What came out of her mouth instead was, “How many freckles do you have?”
“That’s a stupid question,” Tianna answered.
“I have a freckle on my bum,” Miles said.
“Don’t,” Tianna said with a quiet ferocity that hushed the boy, body and soul.
“Okay.” Karen laughed nervously. “Where was I?” Her stomach hurt badly. She’d noticed an array of pill bottles on top of the bureau in Dennis’s bedroom. Maybe he had something good. “The knight went to fetch these things for the sorcerer. He learned a lot of lessons along the way. To keep the flame from Mount Elder alive, he had to ride slowly on his horse, because if he went too fast it would blow out. To collect the stone from the Wall of Dreams, he had to wait for gravity to release one. If he pulled one out himself, the whole wall would come tumbling down and crush the village of elves living beneath it. The frog could only be lured from the Lake of Days, because the water was so cold that if he touched it, his hand would freeze and fall off. So the Selfless Knight sat on the banks and sang frog songs until a frog hopped out and joined him.”
“It’s about patience,” Tianna added.
“Yes, thank you.” The child’s intellectual gifts were starting to annoy Karen. “The knight delivered all these things to the sorcerer, who had fallen asleep. When he woke up, he’d forgotten who the knight was, and what the whole task was about.”
“This is my favorite part in the movie,” Tianna said, sitting up tall. “The live-action one. Not the cartoon version. The cartoon version is stupid.”
“I like the cartoon version,” Karen said. It was older than she was and illustrated in a palette of Day-Glo colors popular in the era of its production. Watching the animated Selfless Knight always made her wish she had been born sooner.
“I like the cartoon version better, too,” Miles said.
“He’s never seen either.” Tianna shrank back down and twisted little curls in her glossy hair, which unwound immediately. “His attention span is too short for movies.”
The story itself bent time in a way that was allegorical, as it would be impossible for the knight to complete even one of those tasks, on horseback, in the span of one day. It begged questions of time and relativity, calendars and clocks, a leitmotif of a holiday that compressed the whole spectrum of human emotion into an amorphous span of hours, not quite one day, not quite two, a fact of the tale that Karen and the children took for granted.
“What happens next is funny,” Karen told them. “The sorcerer tells the knight, ‘Look, I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing with this rock and frog and flame, but if your princess is sick, feed her a bowl of porridge made with cold milk that is one day old.’ ‘That’s it?’ cries the knight. ‘Are you crazy? I could have done that ages ago! I thought you were going to use all these things I got you as ingredients in your magic potion.’ He was furious. That means very angry.”
“I know what furious means,” Miles said.
“Of course you do, sweet boy.”
“Get to the end!”
“Sorry,” Karen said, meaning it more than ever now. “ ‘My son,’ said the sorcerer. ‘You can yell at me all you want, but the sun is rising on the Last Day and the world may end at any moment, and you yourself said you wanted to spend your last hours in service to the princess.’ ”
“And the knight says, ‘So you do remember!’ ” Tianna yelped. “Sorry. I can’t help it. It’s my favorite part.”
“It’s everyone’s favorite part,” Karen said. “The sorcerer smiled and poured himself a drink from a certain bottle into a certain cup and said, ‘I always drink wine from this bottle in this cup at the dawn of Last Day.’ He offered the knight a drink, but the knight refused. Instead, he dashed for the door, hopped on his horse, and rode like lightning back to the palace. It just so happened that the handmaid of the princess was a friend of the knight’s from childhood, and he told her how to fix the porridge that would save the princess. The handmaid made the porridge and spooned it into the blue lips of the princess, who was very near death. The princess got out of her bed, vomited, and stood up tall. She was all better. The castle rejoiced. The king put out a banquet for the whole kingdom. Everyone ate and drank and danced all day and into the night. The next day, the sun rose again, as it has done every day and every year up until now. The world did not end, but the princess set sail for her fiancé’s new land soo
n after. The Selfless Knight, along with everyone else in the kingdom, went to the port to watch her ship set sail. The princess waved from the bow, crying and smiling. A gust of wind blew the handkerchief wet with her tears out of her hand and into the air. It landed in the knight’s hands. As he walked home that day he saw an old hag squatting beside a fire, struggling to keep it burning. The knight dropped the princess’s handkerchief into the fire. He was sad to see his princess go, but knew she would always be a part of him, that he didn’t need her handkerchief to remember her. He also wanted to help the old hag keep her fire burning. He was, after all, a selfless knight. Just then, purple and gold sparks flew out of the fire and it grew warm and strong. The hag turned into the princess, his princess, and they kissed at last before the beautiful setting sun. The end.”
“Wow!” Miles leapt into the air and fell into Karen’s lap, his forehead banging hard into hers. “Wow wow wow!” he said.
“You don’t even understand what it’s about,” Tianna scolded.
“Yes, I do!” He turned his face into Karen’s stomach and screamed, “You’re a motherfucker, Tianna. And a meanie!”
He began crying and kicked the sofa with his dirty feet.
“I’m sorry, Miles,” Tianna said, offering her hand to her brother, letting him slap it repeatedly in penance. “Want to make cookies? I’ll let you lick the spoon.”
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