Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  When at last she was able to, she stood. Her legs shook a little, but her workmanship was good and they held her up as well as ever.

  Will you come with me now?’ the pale woman asked her. ‘To the Land That Was Promised?’

  ‘I’ve got things to do here first,’ Betty said.

  ‘Here? What’s here, but a broth of broken things?’

  ‘A war,’ Betty said. ‘I think a war is coming soon.’

  ‘Let it come. It won’t be more of a mess than what they’ve got already.’

  ‘You’ve got a queen, so don’t lecture me on politics. My country got over kings and queens a long time ago.’

  They returned to the hotel. The doorman did not bow to them because he did not see them. They passed before him like a breath of wind, and stepped between the door jamb and the door.

  Betty let herself into her own room first. She had left the key on the stone floor of the Basilica Cistern but Ériu, who had little use for keys, obliged her.

  She went across to the door that led to the shared sitting room. With her hand on the knob, she hesitated. Her father was in there. He would be shocked to see her in this ghastly form, covered from head to foot in dried blood. But there seemed little point in cleaning the blood away, given what she was about to do.

  She reached into the pocket of her coat and brought out the metal figure. Holding it in both hands she brought it up to her face. I called you little spirit because I didn’t know you, she told it. But I think you’re bigger than you look, and I honour you. I will take the whip this time, please, if I may be allowed.

  It flowered in her hand, a supple thing full of its own tensed power.

  ‘Go to it,’ Ériu urged her. ‘And spare not.’

  Betty opened the door and stepped into the room.

  Herr Hartmann was there, and her father. Three other men were there too. They were talking volubly and happily about the future of the world.

  Betty laid about her with the whip, and the future of the world ceased to concern them. They screamed for help, and then for mercy, and then because they had forgotten how to make other sounds.

  When Betty lowered the whip at last, her arm was exhausted.

  Her father stared at her in wild-eyed terror from his chair. A lake of blood surrounded them both.

  ‘Betty,’ he said in a strangled voice. ‘That—that cannot be you!’

  ‘You may be right, Father,’ Betty said. ‘I’m honestly not sure at this moment who I am. But I look forward to finding out.’

  Adrian looked around at the carnage. A whimper escaped him. ‘They’re dead,’ he whispered. ‘Oh my dear God, they’re all dead. You killed them!’

  ‘But spared you,’ Betty reminded him. She picked up the valise, which was standing on the floor next to his chair.

  ‘You’ll have no use for money in Tír Tairngire,’ Ériu said.

  Betty kissed her father on the top of his head. Rigid with shock as he was, he could not even flinch away from her. ‘Goodbye, daddy,’ she said. ‘Thank you for all your kindnesses, when I was a child. And for what’s happened since, I forgive you with all my heart.’

  Back in her own room, she packed a few of her favourite clothes into her smallest suitcase.

  ‘In Tír Tairngire you’ll wear the wind and the sun,’ Ériu said. ‘You won’t be needing these fripperies.’

  Betty closed both latches on the case. She closed her eyes and concentrated, turning the blood on her skin to warm water and then to steam that wisped and corkscrewed in the air and was gone. She was already more adept at this than she had been at the Basilica Cistern, and more confident.

  ‘Shall we go now?’ Ériu coaxed.

  Betty put down the case, and the valise, and turned to face her strange benefactor. She let herself acknowledge what she had known all along: that the thin, pale face before her was the most beautiful she had ever seen.

  ‘Is the heart always drawn to its own opposite?’ she asked, tracing the line of Ériu’s cheek with one finger.

  ‘Or its likeness,’ Ériu said. ‘Or its complement. The heart is the heart. There are no rules for such things.’

  They kissed as women, and then as men.

  They walked on two feet, and then on four. And wings and tails and fins they employed too, each in their place and in their measure.

  They did not go to Tír Tairngire, or at least not directly. They went to war. Ériu was inclined to scoff, and said it was only a game Betty was playing, but still they taught some hard lessons to bad men, turned a few rivers and dammed a few more, and altogether had a great and glorious time of it.

  It’s my mother I’m saying goodbye to, Betty told herself. But it was her father too, and that might be why it took so long.

  ROYAL GORGE

  FRANK TURNER

  THEY SAY IT’S THE HIGHEST BRIDGE IN THE WORLD. Twin towers carry wooden planks one-thousand-two-hundred-sixty feet across a gorge, with Colorado’s Arkansas River a thousand feet below. The bridge cuts through the clean, dry mountain air like a bold streak drawn by an artist, a line drawn under the obstacles nature throws in our way. The sky is shockingly blue over and around the red and grey rocks. Route 50 lazes its way up to the drop like a sketch, and at the roadside there’s a tourist center and a gas station.

  Route fifty. 1950. A new year, a new decade, maybe a new start, for me, for America, for everyone. Mary and I saw in the New Year at some dive motel on the drive from Des Moines to Omaha, out in the middle of the snow-smothered prairie, in a place the world forgot a long time ago. Those are the kinds of places we have to stick to now. We’d bought the car for cheap a few days earlier in Davenport. The old guy gave us a deal because it was coming up on Christmas. Plus we were paying cash.

  That was a while back, several thousand miles away and a few directionless loops around the Midwest. I haven’t actually seen a calendar for days, I’m not sure what the date is. Behind the defeated old Indian guy at the counter—Cheyenne, Comanche, whatever—there’s one stuck to the wall with a picture of some wild horses and the days crossed out laboriously, one by one, down to today: August 27th. Huh. The summer is further gone than I’d thought. Next to the counter, a rickety wire stand leans to one side and offers up postcards without much enthusiasm. They’re all of the bridge.

  The postcards cost a nickel. That used to be nothing, but now it’s something. I glance out of the window to the car. Mary is filing her nails nervously in the passenger seat, checking out everyone who walks past. It’s ridiculous. We’re in the middle of nowhere, nine hundred miles from Gilmer, Texas, and time has been steadily passing. But I sympathize, I’m doing the same thing. The Indian guy eyes me warily. Sure, I’m white, but I’m dirty, sweat and nerves and suspicion caked on my skin, running deep in lines on my hands, buried under my fingernails. He doesn’t know me from Adam, but like with everyone else, I’m terrified that he will know me, terrified he’ll ask the one question I don’t want to be asked:

  What did you do in the war?

  What the hell. I buy myself a postcard.

  An army family in Gilmer, Texas. A nowhere town, a stop-off for traveling salesmen between Shreveport and Dallas. Stinking hot all year round, oppressive with the weight of the weather and history. Traditional families, traditional values, patriots all. Pop shipped out in 1917 and came back, if such a thing were possible, yet more granite and buttoned down than when he left. I never had much idea of what I wanted to do with my life, but Pop certainly did. We limped through the Depression; it was almost as if Pop was waiting for another war, for the old world to fall back into itself and its ancient hatreds. When FDR started talking conscription again, he leapt at the news like a hunter springing a trap. He dropped me off at the army storefront in town the following morning.

  It’s a strange thing to feel like you don’t belong in the only place you’ve ever known. But I was always a square peg in the round, gaping hole of suburban Texas. It wasn’t even that I had a different set of values to subscribe to, that
I could make punctures in the watertight worldview of my parents. It just didn’t quite fit, like a hand-me-down suit from the older brother I never knew, the brother who coughed all the blood out of his infant lungs before I was born. That shadow fell heavily on all of us, a patch of shade on an August day that offers no respite from the heat. Grandpa told me that living in East Texas was like living inside a dog’s mouth. Grandma dropped dead on Pop’s 16th birthday, and he decided to stop feeling anything then and there.

  He didn’t have much to say when he met Mary. A cold stare, an overly-firm handshake, then a squalid looking away, a retreat into the darkness of the house, leaving both of us standing confused on the porch. I’d tried to explain to her in advance how he was, his strong views on different sides of the tracks and the kinds of blood that ran there. She slipped the end of her dusty left sandal between the toes of her right foot and said nothing. We retreated ten feet back to the car like we were eloping. Mary knew about the war, of course, everyone could feel it coming, a distant rumble in the rails. That night, over cheap coffee and waffles, I told her that I had to leave Gilmer. She understood.

  Life since leaving has felt like a dream, like it was happening to someone else and I was simply perched on their shoulder, occasionally offering words of advice, more often ignored than heeded. For Pop it must be stranger still, something he just can’t understand, like one of those modern art paintings they put in the paper sometimes. Gilmer gave him little boxes to slot things into, like in a mail room. My decisions were a ticking time-bomb landing in the sorting office. Above all, the movement without direction seems unnatural to him. I remember him kicking rocks in the scrub in the yard, muttering, ‘This is Texas, this is the way things are.’

  Men grow up from the earth they’re planted in. Sometimes they’re planted in the wrong place—a fir tree struggling up in the desert, parched and sickly. Sometimes they get their roots cut or damaged when they’re young, and the wound spreads up through every part of them, right into the canopy. And sometimes the soil is just no good.

  I stalk back out to the car, careful where I’m placing my feet. The summer heat out here is different from Texas, it’s clear and precise, the air is so open it feels like it’s barely even there. The car is a battered old heap, the best we could get with no questions asked. Mary has been emptying the towering ashtrays in the trash can at the side of the gravel lot. Flecks of ash trail her back to the passenger door, dancing around her cheap dress like snow.

  The last time I spoke to Ivor he said I was being paranoid now. Five long years have passed since the war, and though the world seems to be gearing up for something cold, not letting the high of hatred pass from its bloodstream entirely, things have calmed down a lot. He said he seriously doubted that anyone would still be on the lookout for me, especially not out of state, not out here in the open skies of the West. All the same, it’s not just them that I’m running from. There are things I’ve done that stain me indelibly, that I’m trying to outrun with all the success of a dog trying to escape its own tail.

  Ivor made his peace during the war. The CO board sent him up to Montana to work with the Forestry Commission - ‘work of national importance,’ they called it—when he told them he couldn’t carry a rifle. Like Pop, like everyone, he doesn’t talk about what happened up there, but I’ve read the stories in the papers, tales of camps full of Japanese civilians kept locked in like cattle. Call me naïve, but I thought we were on the side that fought against keeping people in camps. That’s what the preachers said on the radio. They wouldn’t have been able to keep me up there in that kind of work.

  I slide into the driver’s seat and exhale as I place one dirty hand on the wheel, the postcard held in the other in my lap. Mary raises a weary eyebrow as she spots it. ‘A postcard?’ she asks, incredulously. ‘For who?’

  I don’t reply for a short while, breathing audibly in the confined space of the car. Eventually I turn to face her, lock eyes with her, and ask the question that’s been eating away at me for a long while now. ‘Don’t you think it might be time? It might have been long enough now. We could just let them know that we’re alive.’

  Mary sighs. ‘That’s on you; it’s always been on you. You’re the one leading this crazy…expedition. We’re not Lewis and Clark, you know. We can turn back anytime we want.’

  I know, even before each individual word leaves her mouth, what she’s going to say. More to the point, I know she’s right. Even out here in the West, in the open spaces of our great United States, a man can’t run forever. Sooner or later you have to face who you are and what you’ve done.

  Even my father did, in his own fashion. Pop never, ever spoke about the first war, about what happened to him back in the old world. But again, I read the stories, saw the photos, read the poems. I could read the names of foreign battlefields on the medals he kept in the kitchen drawer—Cambrai, Amiens, the Hindenburg line. When I close my eyes, I can see the shrieking horror of mud, rain, rage and pain, see cleaved flesh and burning buildings, see Pop’s face twisted in hatred as he twisted a bayonet. He never talked about it, but when he got home, I could see him stalking the yard, kicking the rocks and the roots of the trees, making sure that Texas really was there under his feet, that he was home, that this was the way things really were.

  The Flanders mud had seeped deep into my father’s skin. The dirt in my skin is of a different kind. Despite everything, in ’41 he expected me to go, without asking questions. I’ve never been good at not asking questions.

  Mary taps her chipped fingernails on the dash to bring me out of my reverie, and asks a question of her own: ‘What about Kansas City?’

  A full day’s drive back East, we’d stopped in a nondescript suburb, somewhere in the northeast end of Kansas City. An old school friend of Mary’s, whose address she could remember, had surprised us both by still being where she’d been before the war. She kicked open the screen door and showed us into the house, straight into the front room. It was a single story box on a nothing street, almost remarkable in its unremarkableness. The crossed street signs outside told us the house was on Elmwood Drive—a tree, a good sign—and St John Avenue. John the Divine. John the Revelator. Not the best omen for two people trying to hide. But then the fact we were even looking at a house suggested that maybe we both knew our hiding days were running out.

  Mary was tired. Tired of changing where we slept, using fake names, swapping out one wreck of an automobile for another every couple of thousand miles. Tired of scraping by in the margins, taking seasonal work for small change, sleeping in parking lots, avoiding anyone who might have known us before the war. And in truth I was tired too. Nine years on the road, nine years running away from Gilmer, from twisted tree roots in the back yard of my childhood, from what I did in the war.

  Pop spent a year drowning in horror in some foreign land, and then he came home and buried that in the Texas earth. My Odyssey was different. I spent one day in a recruiting station in town, and then found myself starting to run. Ivor and I went to a different office across town. The words ‘Conscientious Objector’ were heavy with disdain and sarcasm even on my lips. They took Ivor seriously, but they didn’t buy it from me. My objection was without conscience. It was just a feeling. I wasn’t answering to my God, and I wasn’t specifically trying to run from my family history. I just couldn’t picture myself in a uniform, dumbly clutching some rifle, some piece of a tree hollowed out with metal and made into an instrument of killing. When they asked me why I couldn’t serve, I barely mumbled an answer, and they sent me back across town, to man up, to be like Pop, to ship out and get some of that same dirt rubbed into my cowardly skin.

  That same night, Mary and I started running.

  The war years were the hardest. Questions asked in every glance in every small, out-of-the-way town, wondering why this boy wasn’t in some sandy trench in Normandy, or on some godforsaken Pacific beach. Was it cowardice? I’d like to say no, but then maybe I’m the wrong person to ask. I
t felt more like disgust, and like exhaustion, suffocation in the dog’s mouth, a desire to just get out of the entanglements of my native soil.

  Once peace came things got easier, externally, but inside I’d gotten used to running, so we kept on the move. In the quiet of crumbling motel nights I’d often wonder if jail could really be worse than this, but I wasn’t just escaping the law. The fury, the disappointment that I could place so easily on Pop’s face in my mind, followed us both like a curse. Pop had been carrying a burden of something he’d done. Mine is nothing.

  Mary liked the house. It was just fine, it was real, it was fixed into the earth in a way neither of us had been in a long while. Her friend said we could stay there for as long as we wanted for fifty bucks a month, it used to belong to her mother, but she’d knelt down in the garden a month back and never got up again. I wrote down the address on a scrap of paper and told her we’d think about it, but that we still had some more miles to cover. Mary’s eyes stayed fixed on the place as we pulled out of the driveway, yesterday morning, and headed West again. Maybe it was time to stop running.

  Mary rifles through her purse, her tongue poised between her teeth like a new idea. From the depths of the chaos she produces a pencil and a one cent stamp. She gently takes the postcard from my hand in my lap, rests it on the dash, and starts to write.

  ‘Dear Mom and Pop,

  I think we have finally decided to settle down for a while. Our address is 110 South Elmwood Drive, Kansas City MO. Write soon,

  Ozzy and Mary.’

  There were so many things I would have thought to write—too many, a lifetime of possibilities, nine years of words unsaid, spreading out like an endless sea of roots, routes, from the tip of the pencil. But Mary makes it so simple, and this makes our decision for us. Pop will clutch it in his mud-stained hands and read it with silent, focused emotion, and then he will do whatever he will do, whatever Gilmer allows him to do. He could reach us now, if he wanted.