Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  He stayed long enough to witness a curl of blond hair corkscrew out of the top of the bodice, and he saw how Mrs. Givens’ boy folded his newspaper and got to his feet; he left the paper on his stool, and he opened his wallet. Taking out a single coin, he stepped forward towards the stage.

  Jimmy didn’t go back to the fair. The fair didn’t seem safe. Everything that had happened was all the fair’s fault.

  Normally when he hid, Jimmy didn’t expect anyone would look for him, so he never really made much of an effort to hide properly. Once when his father had come home from work, he hid behind the post box down the street, waiting for someone to step out the front door and wander where he was. A dozen people must have passed him by, but he still wasn’t sure if anyone had seen him. Certainly no-one came to look for him from home, and he concluded that this was the secret to hiding successfully. You just need to be the sort of person who people don’t look for, and then you can hide where you like.

  With this in mind, he made a nest for himself behind the wheelie bins around the back of the pavilion. He curled up into a little ball and screwed his eyes tightly shut as though by doing so, he could make the world go away for a spell. But his own personal darkness was spotted with flashes of light and he didn’t want to imagine there were spiders inside of him as well, so he opened his eyes again and waited for something decisive to steer him.

  It felt as though he waited for a long time before he finally decided to emerge, but he couldn’t really be certain. No-one passed his hiding place and eventually, the music and chattering voices of the fair had dispersed. There had been some raised voices: someone shouting something about Mr. Cromwell’s allotment of all things, but they too had subsided quickly and now there was no sound at all. No people, no cars, no wind, there didn’t even seem to be any birdsong. The only thing he could hear was the heavy tukka-tukka-tukka of his own heartbeat that seemed so loud amidst the silence that trying to remain hidden felt futile.

  The stalls were all still set up on the green, but the fair appeared to have wound down completely, a flurry of drink stirrers and plastic cups from the refreshment stand cluttered the path, paper napkins danced in the breeze.

  To Jimmy’s surprise, everyone was still there, but they were lying in the grass silently, flat on their backs and staring up at the sky. Each lay alone, neatly arranged like fallen dominoes and no one was talking because everyone seemed to be asleep. Jimmy picked his way around them gingerly. He knew them all, his grey crowd of locals. There was Kim and Stan and Ben and little Susie who lived above the Post Office. There was Mr. Halter, Mr. Newson, Mrs. Givens’ boy. They all looked so tranquil, and each lay with their swollen hands, red and shiny and bright like ripe rosehips, resting gently on their chests, fingers stretched and distended like roots, rising and falling as they slept.

  His mother was still standing. She was still talking to Mrs. Moira Mercer from down-the-way and when Jimmy tugged at her skirts she looked down at him with a stern expression.

  “Jimmy, dear,” she said. “Did daddy give you your pocket money to spend?”

  Jimmy shook his head, he was close to tears, he wasn’t sure if he could say anything without making a fool of himself and embarrassing his mother in front of her friend.

  His mother pursed her lips.

  “Well there’s nothing I can do, now, is there?” she said. She gently lifted the hem of her skirt so Jimmy could see how there was a bole of knotted bark where her lovely red patent leather shoes should have been. She sighed deeply and then reached into her bag. Beside her, Moira glanced down at Jimmy and gave him a brief this-is-how-it-is sort of smile.

  “Well, if I must be the grown up,” his mother said. She fished out a pound coin and passed it down to him, then she glanced across the green to where Penny the Pocket Lady was standing alone amongst the sleeping villagers.

  “You’ll have to hurry,” his mother said. “It looks like you’re the last and she doesn’t have all day.”

  And with that she turned away again, and she and Moira talked and talked and talked in voices that were as intelligible to Jimmy as the sound of the wind in the trees.

  The coin felt too light in Jimmy’s hand. He wondered if it was even real, like one of those chocolate pennies his grandmother used to give him at Christmas. For a moment, he imagined if he were to clench it in his hand it might break and melt in the same way.

  He glanced up at Penny the Pocket Lady who was waiting for him on the green and he wondered if he might use the coin to go somewhere else instead. Somewhere on a bus maybe, or on a train. But she was as beautiful as a flower in bloom, and the dress was as colorful as a rose garden, anywhere else would seem black and white and empty in comparison.

  Penny looked down at him as he approached her, and she smiled her lovely, lovely smile. Up close, she smelt like freshly cooked currant buns and custard and tea.

  “A pound in my palm, a prize in every pocket,” she said.

  Jimmy smiled at her.

  “I’m tired,” he said and her smile widened, her sympathy genuine and unaffected. Her hand found his and her long, elegant fingers gently unwound his fist, claiming the coin buried inside like it was a seed hidden in a gnarled burr.

  Jimmy looked down at the pockets in her apron. They gaped at him hungrily. They were bright and inviting, their throats glistening with something slick as tree sap. Jimmy chose the green pocket, the one in the very middle. He reached into it, unafraid.

  It was so deep, so dark, so full of life.

  Reasons I Hate My Big Sister

  Gwendolyn Kiste

  #17: She always embarrasses me. Especially when we’re in public. I wish she would act normal for a minute, but I might as well ask the sky to rain free lipstick because let’s face it: she’ll never change.

  We’re shopping at the mall when the first flap of flesh sloughs off Elise’s arm.

  “How strange,” she says as if her body comes undone every day, and it’s all a minor inconvenience.

  Next to us, a woman picking over a bin of discount makeup nearly faints at the sight of the skin as it ripples and falls from my sister’s arm. One customer shrieks and another and another after that, the screams going right down the line like keys on a piano scale.

  The shop empties, all except me and Elise and the staff behind the counter.

  I sigh. Today was the first time Mom and Dad let Elise borrow the car and take me with her, and it’ll probably be the last time too.

  Because I don’t know what else to do, I squint at the remnants of my sister’s flesh, curled like lace ribbons at our feet. The mountain of tissue looks oddly beautiful. Everything about Elise looks beautiful. Even the way she lifts her arm curiously to the light and inspects her new wound has an elegance to it.

  I move in closer to see what she sees. From her wrist to her elbow, all the skin has peeled away. There’s no blood. Beneath the places where skin should be, there’s something tough and iridescent—a casing of armor over her bones.

  Outside the store windows, a few spectators gape and point and whisper about Elise and me. Red-faced, I back against a wall of tacky bangles and wish I was someone else.

  #29: She’s the center of attention. I’m invisible anytime she’s around. She was born first, so I guess she’s had more practice at getting people to notice her, but it would be nice if someone would pay attention to me for once.

  The doctor shines a light in Elise’s eyes while my parents and I gather next to her hospital bed. Dad left work early, which isn’t a good sign since he always says he “doesn’t believe in taking half-days” as though they’re as mystical as elves or something.

  “I got to ride with Elise in the ambulance,” I say to him and Mom when they arrive at the emergency room, but neither of them care. All they’re worried about is the diagnosis.

  “We need to keep her here to ensure she’s not contagious.” The doctor makes notes about my sister. Lots of notes. He types in an electronic file for a
lmost ten minutes. My parents don’t notice how he smirks to himself, but Elise and I see that goofy expression on his face, and we know what he’s thinking. Elise is an anomaly, and white coats live for anomalies. She means publications, case studies about a brand-new ailment, trial and error experiments no one’s ever done because no one knew a girl could swap skin for scales. If what’s on her arms are scales. I hope not. Scales are for reptiles, and my sister’s not a lizard. At least I don’t think so.

  I fidget. “Will I be quarantined too?”

  “Your younger daughter is not yet showing symptoms,” the doctor says to my parents, and though he’s answering my question, he speaks as if I’m not in the room. “But keep her out of school for now. We’re recommending everyone who came in contact with Elise stay at home until a normal incubation period has passed.”

  “What’s normal?” I wonder aloud and already know no one will answer me.

  “Maybe we’re all supposed to shed our skin,” Elise says, running her fingers over the new flesh. “And everyone else has forgotten how.”

  En route to the hospital, she shrugged out of the skin on her other arm too. Now she reclines in bed, two sleeves the color of moonstone peeking out beneath the sheets.

  “Were there any early symptoms?” the doctor asks.

  “There was an itch,” Elise says. “Mom told me to leave it alone, and it would heal. Guess she was wrong.”

  Our mother stomps one foot, her eyes squinted and fists bunched up like a child who skipped a nap. “Did you leave it alone like I said? Or did you keep picking it? You probably did this to yourself.”

  Elise laughs. “I gave myself scales? That’s some trick.”

  My sister’s words lilt in the air like raindrops against a tin roof. I love to hear her voice. Some nights, at bedtime, she croons me to sleep. I tell her I’m fourteen and too old for childhood things, but she keeps on singing. And I let her.

  But tonight there will be no lullabies. As they drape a clear plastic shell around Elise’s bed and usher my parents and me down the hallway, I fear there will never be lullabies again.

  #48: I’m no one because of her. I have no name, no identity of my own. I’m just “Elise’s little sister.” Without her, I don’t exist.

  Twenty-one days—that’s the incubation period the doctors choose for a disease they know nothing about. I curl like an inchworm in bed, my arms around my ears so I can’t hear my parents arguing. Across the room, Elise’s mattress feels emptier than anything in the world should.

  As long as she’s in her cocoon at the hospital, we can’t see her. No visiting hours, not even a phone call. She’s far away from me now. That voice of hers might as well be in another galaxy.

  Three weeks pass, and I slink into homeroom, chemistry and algebra textbooks withering in my arms. The solemn gazes tell me everyone already knows about my sister. Her picture hasn’t been on television or in the local papers, but after the scene at the mall, it shouldn’t surprise me they heard. But it does surprise me. Because even though Elise is still in the hospital and my parents can barely look at each other without crying or screaming, I want so badly for everything to be normal.

  At lunch, a boy I don’t recognize sidles up next to me. “So what does she look like?”

  I nudge a mound of coleslaw with my spork. “I don’t know,” I say. “We haven’t seen her since the doctors put her in quarantine.”

  A second boy materializes on my other side, and sandwiched between them, I feel trapped.

  “But what did she look like that last time?” This boy is also someone I’ve never met, but he’s speaking to me like we’re friends. Maybe he thinks I’m desperate for him—with his football shoulders and wide grin—to notice me. Maybe I am. But not like this.

  “Well?” the boys say in unison.

  I don’t answer. I leave my tray on the table and walk away. They’re too slack-jawed to follow.

  In the girls restroom, I hide in a corner stall and sob. The tears are silent. These last three weeks, I’ve learned to cry without making a sound.

  After school, my parents pick me up, and it’s not until we’re halfway to the hospital they tell me about Elise’s operation scheduled that evening.

  “It’s risky,” they say without inflection, “and the doctors aren’t sure she’ll make it until morning. But it’s the only way.”

  “The only way for what?” I ask.

  “For her to have a normal life.”

  Outside, the buildings bleed past like melted oil paintings, and I wonder if it’s already too late.

  #86: She gets all the breaks. If I had only half of her good luck, I sure wouldn’t waste it like she does.

  We don’t speak in the hospital waiting room. My father does the New York Times crossword puzzle, and my mother watches a trashy talk show with a bunch of women gathered in a circle tittering like hens on the way to the slaughter.

  I sit alone, waving my feet back and forth in the chair and staring at my scuffed black Oxfords. The shoes are hand-me-down from Elise. My whole life is borrowed from her.

  Fourteen hours later, after my feet no longer wag and the newspaper’s retired to the trash and the television plays only midnight infomercials, a solemn doctor with lines around his mouth shuffles through the double doors and tells us the operation was a success.

  A full-body skin graft, they call it. Unprecedented, because even in bad burn cases, the victim has more skin left than Elise. Since the last time we saw her, the flesh on her legs has gone too.

  “Can we see her?” I ask, and the doctor nods.

  Bright-eyed, Elise sits up in bed and examines her new shoulders and elbows and knees. Her body’s a patchwork quilt of dead people’s skin.

  “It doesn’t seem right to wear them around like this,” she says, marveling at the stitches. Between the borders of the skin grafts, there’s blood seeping out, blood that must not belong to my sister, because my sister’s skin doesn’t bleed anymore.

  I scrunch up my nose as pus dribbles down her white hospital gown. “I liked your old arms better.”

  “Me too,” she says with a grin, and I realize she means the scales.

  I glare at her. “Not those arms.”

  After a week of recovery, the doctors let us take Elise home.

  “I’m glad it’s over,” our mother says.

  But the new skin doesn’t last. It falls off in clumps, and her hair goes with it. I find tufts of pink flesh and blond tresses in the sink, in the trash, in our closet.

  “Are you picking at it again?” Our parents hover over Elise, their faces soaked in sweat. “If you are, we’ll have you padlocked in bed until it heals.”

  “Won’t make any difference.” She stares out the window past the trees behind our house. “Who I really am will come through one way or the other.”

  “You can’t reason with her,” our mother tells her Rotary friends over a pot of tea in the parlor. “She won’t listen. She’s never listened.”

  All the ladies nod their heads as though they understand, but they aren’t here for scones or sympathy. They’re here for a glimpse of my sister.

  And Elise obliges, reclined in the nearby window seat, her scales showing through her lace shirt with an almost defiant glee.

  “Why don’t you commit her to full-time care?” a blue-haired woman whispers.

  “No one will take her,” my mother says, eyeing Elise who pretends not to hear. “We’ve checked. They refuse to house such an unusual patient.”

  At this, Elise smiles and digs one finger under her flesh until it bubbles up and plops to the floor like pancake batter.

  I get a broom and sweep up the mess.

  By the end of the month, the graft is gone along with the skin everywhere else—her torso, her neck, even her face.

  There’s not a stitch of flesh left on Elise’s body.

  #99: Anytime she does something wrong, I end up sharing her punishment. Is that fair? Of co
urse not, but if your family can’t trust the oldest, they’ll never trust the youngest.

  Our parents keep us home. No more school. No more trips to the mall. We even get our groceries delivered—money in the mailbox, brown bags left on the porch—so no one can see what my sister has become.

  Elise doesn’t care. She reclines in the grass, arrayed in a skimpy two-piece bikini she bought for our annual Myrtle Beach vacation. Thanks to her, we’ll never see the beach again. Our consolation prize is a fenced-in backyard where the local kids poke holes in the wooden posts so they can watch my sister. Watch and wonder.

  “Can you see her?” we hear them say.

  Blinking in the sun, I don’t belong out here where the others stare. But then I don’t belong anywhere. In the yard next to my freakshow sister is good enough.

  It’s bright and hot and sticky, especially for early April. I squeeze a sunscreen bottle, and the white goo spurts into my hand. I offer Elise a smear, but she shoos me away. Her new skin’s got its own protection, thick as a layer of mortar, so she doesn’t have to worry about sunburns anymore.

  “Do you think I’ll grow horns?” she asks, her eyes closed and toes pointed toward the willow trees that loom over the fence like towering skeletons, frail arms extended to the heavens. “Or maybe wings? I’ve always wanted to fly.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I say. “Anyhow, the doctors think your body might be done. How you are now is how you’ll stay.”

  “How about a tail? A tail could be fun. I could swing it at my enemies when I get angry.”

  “Stop!” I plug my ears and hum an old folksong Elise taught me. I hum it out-of-tune, as loud as I can, but it’s not enough. I can still hear the melody of her giggling.