Chiral Mad 3

by Stephen King

  But when I sit on my cement balcony, watching my girl with her hairbrush, my questions don’t seem to matter so much anymore, don’t weigh on my wings or once-arms or whatever it is I have. Warm rooms and loud conversation have a way of driving off the doubts that live raw in your heart.

  I notice, when I perch on my balcony, that the girl’s eyebrows permanently turn in, that she fiddles with her glasses and worries at her fingertips. Come to think of it, she looks a little lost herself.

  I don’t suppose it matters what you are: human, crow, ghost. No one, nothing, wants to be lost.

  Don’t become lost, girl with hairbrush, I whisper (maybe my breath would have fogged the pane, once upon a time). Don’t become lost like me. Stay in your palace of white wainscoting and oak floorboards.

  And open the window. And let me in with you.

  I’m flying down Boddinstraße, almost at the girl’s window, when everything goes wrong. The space between the trees and buildings before me flutters with hundreds and hundreds of black wings, the same color as the night but edged in silver so I can see them, heading east out of the city.

  I don’t know where they are going but I can feel where they are going and it makes me colder than the balcony’s cement or the winter’s nights or the people who yank their curtains shut when I approach their windows.

  But I need to see the girl. And so I soar into the crowd, battling against them, beating the air as I fight towards her flat. Wings scrape against me and for a second I’m suspended, not going backwards, not going forwards. Then the force of their crowd carries me away from the window, back down Boddinstraße, east, away from the girl, away from the warm lighted window.

  I struggle, but their current sweeps me past the blocks of buildings, over warehouses, towards billowing smokestacks and over the Ringbahn’s train tracks that hem the city in an arc marked by construction cranes and dirt pits. I push myself against them again—what if the girl misses me? What if someone else takes that perch on the balcony?—but then I realize the crowd is slowing, and dropping down towards the earth.

  We are in a part of the city ravaged and then left untouched by humans. Below us stretches a wasteland of an empty lot, a pit really, a gaping maw in the earth full of jagged hulking shapes.

  The flock around me holds its breath, waiting. I look down, look closer, and then I feel it: this is the Place of Lost Things. This is the place that’s ached deep in my bones or feathers or whatever it is that I have. Full of rusted-out cars, refrigerators built during a fallen regime, empty bottles and shredded trash bags—but besides the unwanted things, it’s full of creatures like the horde that brought me here. I can see them, their silver wings percolating, seething beneath the debris, or maybe I can feel them, but it really doesn’t matter how I know, because I know: this is the place where unwanted things end up.

  The pit doesn’t smell like garbage, or graveyards or cellars. It doesn’t smell like anything at all.

  The horde rustles around me, and then a rush, and it dives towards the pit, lighting up the air around me like a moon for a full thirty seconds. Then I am alone in the dark.

  Questions tug at you more insistently, when you’re hovering over the Place of Lost Things, watching a horde of creatures that are just like you diving into its depths. Questions like: is this where I belong too? Am I a fool to think that the girl will ever let me in? Perhaps I am nothing but a curiosity to her—a glassy-eyed animal trapped in the Zoologischer Garten, and nothing more. Perhaps I’m a bit stupid to put so much stock in this lost-looking girl, with her dirty hairbrush and bent-frame glasses.

  It takes strong wings to about-face and fly back to the city. I flutter up Boddinstraße, dodging sulfurous streetlamps and angry black tree branches. I alight on the cement balcony and immediately I see that everything is different. Light, warm light, floods onto the balcony. I press myself to the window. The girl leans there, hanging something that emanates light. She lets it fall and my eyes sparkle and pop and readjust. It’s a Froebel star, white, many-pointed, made of paper but glowing with a reddish-gold light from inside. The girl readjusts it, then steps back, and I swear she sees me. I do not know if I have form. I do not know if I appear as a crow, or a smudge of shadow, or just a blank space that inexplicably causes the heart to beat slower. But she sees me, she senses me, and a tiny smile spreads her lips.

  And I know: she put that star up for me.

  I lunge away from the window and soar into the night. She put that star up for me. She cares whether I live in the light or the dark, whether I go to the Place of Lost Things or stay here. It’s my star and my thoughts jump to the next step. Will she open the window? Will she let me in? Will I behold that pointed star from inside, rather than from the balcony? I will, I will. She saw me. She knows I am out here.

  I loop round the jagged steeple of a broken church and then cut towards the river, a tapestry of former warehouses and empty rail yards and construction cranes jutting every which way. I soar towards city lights and darkened gardens.

  I’m not going to be lost anymore. I’m not going to be lost. I don’t have to go there, to that place. Giddy, I fly past the windows of the people who didn’t let me in: the hinterhaus flat where a woman frowned and jerked aside her curtains. The gleaming white house with so many windows, but none of them open. The boat on the river where young people clink bottles and laugh too loud. I don’t need you, I don’t need you, I don’t need you. I found my home. I’m going to be let in.

  Next time I soar to the balcony and alight on concrete and gravitate towards the glow of my star, the girl is holding her hairbrush, but not standing by the window. She’s running the brush through her hair, but she’s staring at the wall and for the first time I see her melancholy hairbrushing expression in profile, not straight on. She’s not looking at the balcony. Her shoulders are straighter than last time.

  When will she come to the window? I fidget against decomposing leaves and the butts of cigarettes. I want her to let me in, tonight.

  That’s when I see that there are two copies of the girl in the room, and that on her wall hangs a new mirror—square, rimmed in white wood—and that she’s brushing her hair while she looks at herself.

  Of course. It’s been some time since I was human, if I was ever, so I forgot about things like reflection and glass and lamplight and that when you stare at a pane of glass at night you are probably seeing your own reflection, not the crow or blank space out on the balcony.

  She never saw me at all. She saw the star. She saw herself. But never me.

  I thought it was over. The cold of these never-ending nights, the humiliation of curtains yanked across curtain rods, the endless fluttering from balcony to balcony. All this time, however long it’s been, I thought she had found me. Saw me. Hung a star for me. I thought I would land on warm wood floors, curl in white blankets, feel a hand on my feathered back, fall asleep against the girl’s plump stomach.

  But she never even knew I existed.

  I’m still lost after all.

  I lift off, flap away from the balcony over the wet gleaming cobblestones. How much longer am I supposed to fly around looking for someone to let me in? How long?

  I glimpse the broken church steeple I looped round after I thought she had hung the star for me, when I was so jubilant, so hopeful, so sure that it was over, this loneliness, the uncertainty, these questions, what was I, what am I, where do I belong …

  But those questions leap into me, bristling my feathers, if I have feathers at all, and without even deciding, I cut east. Clouds hang low and the streets are luminous with sulfur lights but there are no silvery creatures a-wing, so it’s only me slicing through the coal-smelling air, arcing over the subway tracks.

  The Place of Lost Things looms up faster than I expected. The smell of nothing, the jagged objects and beneath it all the glow of silver creatures that were once like me, the pit seething with them. I pull up to the edge and tread air and I look down and I see nothing, and feel nothing a
t all.

  This is where I belong now. I was wrong about the girl. She never saw me, she never hung the Froebel star for me. She only wanted to look at herself in the mirror.

  Sometimes it’s time to cut your losses. Sometimes it’s better to say, well, I tried, and let’s be honest, the Place of Lost Things is probably where I belong anyway.

  But as I rise and fall in the vicissitudes of the frozen air above the seething pit, I remember the girl’s face in the light of the star. I remember how she drank in its glow, how she hung it carefully.

  She never saw me, but I saw her. I saw her when she was lost, brushing her hair, her eyebrows caved in, and I also saw how she held her shoulders straighter, stronger as she admired her star. And I think—I think I can carry that around with me. Maybe I can breathe it in, on these long nights, as I resist this place teaming beneath me, this Place of Lost Things. Because I will resist it. I will. I will remember her, remember the gleaming pinpricks of light in her star, remember her small but satisfied smile as she hung it high, remember how I felt when I thought she had found me. I will turn around, heave myself away from the pit, fly left back towards the city. I will keep searching for other streets to haunt, other balconies to frequent, other windows to tap, tap, tap on.

  PRESCIENCE

  ROSE BLACKTHORN

  backwards

  chin on my shoulder

  even my shadow precedes me

  nothing follows but

  the setting sun

  crisp

  the bite of early spring

  and fading warmth

  of midday

  I cannot hear the steps

  but feel the weight of eyes

  upon my nape

  the breath drawn

  to speak my name

  crows call

  their black wings and raucous cries

  surround me with fluttering

  a strobe of sound

  last year’s dead leaves

  nearly decayed into damp earth

  whisper of new life

  yet to grow

  so I go on

  backwards and forwards

  unsure of my direction

  past or future

  I am like the old leaves

  half-returned to the earth

  yet still stretching toward the light

  a splinter

  not yet a seedling

  lost in that moment

  between the sound and the silence

  and the dancing crow-black feather

  floating down

  A FLASH OF RED

  ERINN L. KEMPER

  CLAIRE BROUGHT THE ROBIN’S wing home. The way its feathers folded and fanned as she extended the joint occupied her for hours. She held it up against light, against shadow, against her skin where it scratched and tickled. With needle and thread she sewed it there using a quick basting stitch, above her breast, where arm meets torso. It hurt. She made small looping sutures that disappeared under the feathers and held the hollow bones tight against her.

  She flinched, ground her teeth and bled a bit. When it was done, she stood in front of the mirror. As she raised and lowered her arm the wing flared, contracted. The thread strained, but held. A warm glow spread down from her shoulder to coil in her stomach. She buttoned on a shirt and went outside.

  Every day Claire walked. Emerging from her small apartment, she squinted into the morning sun and chose a route. Through the park, slow steps on pathway and shoreline, her gaze cast down, studying the drifts that gathered between bench and garbage can, tree and boulder. She wound her way along streets, alleyways. People saw her now—smiled when she bent to retrieve her bounty, nodded as she turned and headed home. They never used to. They used to shove her aside as they rushed to board the train. They used to brush by her at the coffee shop, stepping in front of her as she approached the cream and sugar counter; she was a piece of furniture to them.

  Now, with her treasures secreted away she walked among the people of her city, tipped her head towards their nods and smiles.

  Gold and red-stained leaf, lace-fringed baby sock, gleam of wrinkled foil arranged in an incidental origami—each treasure tucked in her long coat. Her hands strayed to her pockets, ensuring her treasures stayed put.

  She had an assortment of needles and threads. Each find required its own treatment to adhere it to her flesh. With careful needlework learned from her grandma she drew a velvet coin purse against her skin in multi-hued embroidery; weaving around and through using a looping chain stitch, binding it in a web of silk and cotton. Some fell away too soon. The leaves. The flowers and their petals. But the stitching they left behind had its own magic, its own beauty and as it threaded through her tissue, inflamed lumps rose to embrace each line.

  He sat in the bus shelter with his eyes closed. Buses came and went, sucking people up and spitting them out, and still he sat.

  Yesterday at the coffee shop on the corner, where she’d picked up an abandoned dreamcatcher woven of stir sticks, toothpicks and straw wrappers, she’d watched him pour sugar into his cup. His lips moved, counting the crystals as they fell. When he realized she was watching he snapped a lid on the cup, tugged and smoothed his sleeves down, before grabbing his coffee and scuffing out into the crackling autumn heat.

  Did he smile? It was hard to read a slight twist in the lips of a stranger. Before, she would have assumed it was a sneer, a smirk of distain, a grimace of pity. But now she wasn’t sure.

  Something in his eyes made her take a breath so deep she felt some threads give way.

  Today, when she ducked in an alley chasing a flash of red fluttering in a pile of debris she saw him sitting there at the bus stop. Loose sleeves hanging down to his fingers matched hers. With his chin tucked close to his chest, he didn’t look at the buses passing. As she crossed the street towards him, the red corduroy scrunchy secured in her pocket, he still didn’t look up, but this time she was sure he smiled.

  They sat, side by side, and watched the buses. They laughed together when a blonde-haired toddler clapped with glee and pointed at the ‘chocolate lady’. The scowl-faced black woman winked at the delighted little girl, and stuck out her tongue. The little girl’s mom pulled on her daughter’s arm with such force the child dangled painfully up the steps of the #38 Downtown.

  They gasped together when an old man’s walker got caught in the space between the bus and the curb and he fell into a soft wall of office workers. No one stopped to make sure he hadn’t suffered a cracked bone or twisted joint.

  And that was the way it went for the most part. Every passenger hustled to get on with their lives, jostling their way through an invisible crowd.

  When the #27 Crosstown pulled up for the third time, he placed the pop can tab he’d been playing over his knuckles like a magic coin on her knee. He merged into the slouching line of commuters and was gone.

  That night, with her desk lamp swiveled to light her hip, she sewed the tab on, knotting it down with a fisherman’s bend, then in a web of orange and pink, she spun rays of silk across her tingling belly.

  This was what her grandma had taught her.

  Use the stitch that best suits the purpose, little rabbit. A simple chain stitch is just as beautiful as a six-petaled lazy daisy. Sometimes the thread is the glue that holds a thing together, gives it form, sometimes the thread is just there for a splash, some flair, and sometimes the thread is the art, the paint and the picture.

  Claire found him again, at the bus stop, the park, the coffee shop. She never had to look very long.

  Jeremy.

  People-watching was their favorite pass-time. Like her, Jeremy had nowhere to be, no one waiting for him to come home with the spice of autumn in his hair.

  They began to tell stories, short ones, about the people they saw.

  Lunch break, she said about the guy-in-suit texting his way across the park. Divorced, he said about the uber-fit guy doing wind sprints on the grass. Writer. Interview. Nanny. Lost. Prairie-fo
lk. Operation. Anniversary. Drunk.

  It was all you could know about anyone. No name, no occupation, no curriculum vitae. A quick category to put them in, and then just as quickly they were shelved and gone.

  In her mind those stories were full of the grief, loneliness, frustration and joy that each life should contain. With one or two words she saw it all.

  And every time they met he gave her a gift.