Magic for Unlucky Girls

by A. A. Balaskovits

  Mother and Father stared at one another for a long time while my brother twittered on the table. It was strange, for surely they remembered what one another looked like, even after such a long separation.

  Our son is hungry, my father said.

  Is he? My mother asked. She did not move.

  My father snapped the cigarette in her hand and drew her up. I curled down the wall when my father tore the dress from my mother’s shoulders and squeezed her breast in his large hand. My own breasts, barely there, felt sick.

  You think you’ll find honey in stones? she hissed.

  Father held my brother up to her chest and wrapped her arms around the boy. The filth dribbled out of his diaper where my father held him against her. When my brother put his lips on her breast my mother dripped and dripped and dripped, and she went pale and clenched her teeth.

  In the morning the fruit my father had bought my mother was red, that deep red that is the ripe about to turn.

  Every morning and midday and night I watch my mother unbutton the top of her dress and hold her breast to my baby brother. He used to push his little hands against her but now he only opens his mouth and lets his arms drop away with his fingers splayed. Young though he is, he understands that she does not like it when he touches her with anything other than his mouth. He is a very fat baby. His pink skin bunches in rolls around his creases. Mother has to hold him with both her arms.

  My own arms are sticks and my legs little more than bone. Mother tells me I am beautiful, with skin as white as snow, hair as soft as a blackbird’s wing, and when I cry and bite my lip, my mother says it is as bright as an opened tomato. As I grow, she tells me, I will be beautiful, and everyone will fall in love with me. My mother is kind, but I am old enough to know that I will no longer grow. I do not mind being small. I am quick if I do not run too long, and my fingers stretch and curve farther than my parents’ can. When my brother’s toys fall under the bed or under the cabinets, I am the only one who can retrieve them.

  My brother cries, but not his usual soft twitter. He wails and screeches like the fox with its paw in a steel trap. My mother is no longer in the room, and I know she will not go to him, no matter how long or how hard he worries himself. I climb down from the tree and sneak past my mother, who is cutting tomatoes again, and go into my father’s bedroom.

  I coo and trace his faint blond eyebrows. He is such a beautiful, fat boy. Usually when I speak to him he will be silent and listen to me, but he only wails and wails, the baby bird fallen from his nest, sobbing for any mother. By his thigh under the blanket, his round, bulging thigh, I see a spot of red. My mother must have stained his blanket with the tomato.

  Quiet now, I tell him. You mustn’t carry on like this.

  He cries until my father comes home, even though I have whispered every song and poem I know into his ear, and even though I conjure his future: that one day he will be a big boy, bigger than me, and we will play together under the tree where he was born.

  I set the table for dinner—spoons and knives, for we are having soft bread and soup. My mother heated up the chopped tomatoes until they were soft and pulpy and stewed them in a broth with onion, and little sprigs of basil. She puts the old jar of salted berries I picked long ago on the table. My father and I greedily pile them onto the bottom of our bowl before my mother pours the soup. I dip the bread and chew.

  It tastes tangy and sweet. I add more berries.

  Mother eats only bread and watches my father as he darts out his tongue to lap up his bowl three times.

  Best I’ve had, he says.

  I’m glad, my mother says while chewing slowly. A drop on her bread is stained brownish-red. She must have cooked her tomatoes too long.

  The wailing of my brother does not disturb either of them, but he is softer now, his yearning broken by exhaustion.

  When it is dark, Father plants a big sloppy kiss on my cheek, which I think is too wet and wipe off. He laughs at me and flips my hair onto my face. I tell him to quit it, but I too am laughing and try to pull on the thin hairs at his arm, but even though my fingers are small, his hairs slip through my touch. Mother watches us and smokes.

  I slump onto the couch. My father shakes his hips in front of my mother. He holds out his hand. She gives him hers. My belly happily gurgles and I feel drowsy, but I keep my eyes open to watch my parents dance around the small living room. Sometimes my father purposefully bumps into the couch or a table, and says, my oh my how clumsy I am. My mother laughs, real big kind of laughs, the kind you can’t keep inside and don’t want to anyway. He puts his hand on the small of her back.

  When I open my eyes I am alone in the dark. My father’s bedroom is open, and I can hear the faint whimpers of my brother. My father is not in his bed. My mother’s door is closed. In the morning, my father is late to work.

  The juniper tree has thick, rooty skin that has loosened with age, and I used to get small slivers of wood caught underneath the pink of my thumbs and fingers. Mother spent long hours tweezing them out and pressing down on the wound until it stopped bleeding. My hands are calloused now, too thick for the tree to crack through. No matter how much you love something, eventually you become thick to it.

  My little brother sleeps, and when my mother goes into his room—there is no thunder in her legs today, she must be in a good mood—she stops and stares down at him. He coos, little sparrow boy, and she unbuttons her dress and lifts him to her breast.

  At dinner that night my brother cries so loud in his room that my mother closes the door and shoves towels underneath to block the noise seeping out from the bottom. She serves my father and me pork cutlets, really juicy pink pieces, though small. She only eats bread and salad, and points to her waistline when my father asks her why she does not have any. My parents retire to my mother’s room soon after the meal, after they bend down and push kisses onto either side of my face. I can hear them laughing.

  I press my ear to my father’s door. Behind, I hear my brother’s wet breath, though he is quiet enough that I feel confident sneaking in. Brother is under a white sheet, it almost looks like a shroud, and if he were not wheezing I would have thought him dead. I peel the shroud away from his face. He looks up at me with his muddled blue eyes, the kind that my father said would eventually fade away into clear, but they never did. Brother scrunches his face into a prune, but I touch his lips and chin and he relaxes.

  I tell him a story about a witch with a candy house in the middle of the forest, and how a brother and a sister, much like us, had thrown her into the oven, and baked her with pineapple juice and mint. They probably ate her, I tell him, else why go to so much trouble to prepare her?

  I stay with him until he sleeps, and kiss his forehead. He tastes salty. I kiss him again. And again. I uncover his little toes, curled, and kiss those. Sweet. I lick them, then I cover him back up.

  In the kitchen I warm up the leftovers from last night. At the top of the shelf where my mother put the fruit my father gave her, it has burst. Its insides drip over the edge of the shelf onto the floor. I wipe it up. The towel is stained.

  My father is late again for work, and when he kisses me good-bye his mouth tastes like my mother’s cigarettes. Mother shoos me outside, and I sit on the juniper tree and sing songs to myself. When my mother goes in to feed my brother, she sees me on the tree and waves. Then she closes the blinds, but I can still hear my brother wailing.

  The house is quiet when I go back in. Mother is standing over a large pot on the stove, stirring with a wooden spoon. It smells delicious.

  What are you making, I ask her.

  Chili, she says. With beans and celery.

  I make a face. I don’t like celery.

  You can pick it out, she tells me. I’ll cook it so you cannot taste it. Don’t be ungrateful.

  Is brother sleeping? I ask her. I don’t hear him.

  She stops stirr
ing and tells me to sit at the table. She brings me a piece of chocolate cake. She covers it in strawberry yogurt and puts it in front of me.

  Don’t tell your father, she says, and lights up a cigarette and sits beside me. It’ll be our secret.

  As I eat, she strokes my hair and tells me I am beautiful, the most beautiful child she has ever seen.

  Darling, she tells me when I ask again about my brother. Don’t you mind him. He is sleeping. You know I can’t stand his screaming.

  When he gets older he won’t scream anymore, I tell her. You told me I stopped screaming young.

  My mother stares at me in a queer sort of way. She says, You’re a good girl. You knew better than to open your mouth.

  But how else will Brother let us know he’s unhappy? Or hungry. He can’t walk yet.

  She laughed at me. Darling, the unhappy don’t scream. They fester and wait. They’re very quiet people.

  Can I help you with dinner? I ask.

  Together, we cut the celery. I have to wipe my hands each time I lift them from the stalks. The smell makes me nauseous. Mother teaches me how to chop very fine, very carefully and slow, so that every piece comes out the same size, and you can barely tell there had been a cut at all.

  She pulls out the meat, very fresh, very delicate, and teaches me how to cut it into small pieces.

  Careful, Mother says. You have to leave the fat on. You’re cutting too harsh. Use your fingers, like this, see?

  I go to wash my fingers, but the red on my hands looks so sweet, I pop them into my mouth. Mother is watching me, strained. Then, she smiles.

  It’s OK, lovely girl. Sometimes you want things that are bad for you. Now, wash your hands. Use soap. Use lots of soap.

  After, when all that is needed is heat and waiting, she tells me to go to my room and read. I take a collection of fables from my bookshelf. The house is quiet, so quiet. I prefer it when my brother is crying.

  Before Father comes home, my mother takes a black, heavy bag and a shovel and goes to the Juniper tree. I watch her as she digs a hole near its base and dumps the bag in. She covers the hole with dirt and pounds it down with the back of the shovel.

  Father comes home and picks me up and spins me around. I have never seen him so happy, and his happiness crawls onto me, and I laugh and laugh. He eats his chili with such force that his belly expands to twice his size, and he rubs it and belches. When he sees that my mother is not tasting her own food, he lifts up his spoon to her mouth, and she hesitates and then sticks out her tongue to taste. She grimaces and pulls back.

  I made it too sweet, she says.

  Mother tries to take my father into her room after the meal while I wash the dishes under the hot water, but he protests and says it is too far too walk, he feels so full, and his bedroom is closer.

  We’ll disturb the boy, she says, pulling on his arm.

  He won’t mind, my father says. Just like it used to be, you know?

  My mother closes her eyes. She lifts up her chin and goes into his room. Father follows and closes the door behind him.

  Before I finish the dishes, when my arms are deep in the pot trying to scrub off the sweet-burnt mess at the bottom, I hear my mother scream, and the sound of crashing.

  Though I know I cannot be in trouble, I feel sick and hide behind the couch, peering over the edge as my father’s door opens and my mother is tossed out so hard she slams against the hallway wall. Her body crumbles into itself. My father stands above her and clenches his fists again and again. She raises her head at him—her cheek red and her eyes wide—but he kicks her in her thigh, and she coughs and crumbles.

  We have similar thighs, my mother and me. Small thighs—they do not touch—and when his foot and dirty toenails strike her I can feel it. I am from her belly, and in many ways her body is my own. I hate my father’s toenails.

  I’ll ask you one more time, he tells her.

  She moves slowly off the ground. Mother is small like me, especially when she stands next to my father. Like a leaf opening up to the light, she uncurls her body and stands on her shaking knees.

  Where you got him from, she tells him. Every part of him.

  My mother languishes on the floor where my father laid her low. I hear my father outside, wailing. I shake so hard my fingers rattle against each other. From the window, I see him clawing the dirt away from the juniper tree, making holes, until he drags the black bag up and clasps it to his chest.

  He returns, the black bag tucked away under one of his arms. My mother is moaning on the floor by his bedroom. When he passes her it is if he cannot, or chooses not, to see her.

  It’ll just be us again, she sobs at him. We can turn back to how we used to be.

  He steps on her ankle, and the sound of her bones cracking is louder than her yelp. She is so loud.

  I hear my father weeping, but I only feel for my mother. Her hair, as dark as my own, is wet with sweat and matted against her forehead.

  When I can move, and it is long before I can move, I wet a kitchen towel with cold water and place it against my mother’s red face. She moans and tells me she loves me, and that it will all be OK soon enough.

  It’ll all go back to the way it was, she says. Bad things happen and they pass. Don’t you worry, baby girl.

  I can tell she believes it. I feel a sick kind of sorry for her, and then I feel a sick kind of sorry for myself, because I don’t want to go back if that means we’ll do this all over again. You can’t take back what’s already been bloomed.

  She tries to stand but she is too heavy at her top, and her back is bent and all her hair and arms drag on the ground. She collapses and lies there outside Father’s room. I put the towel under her head and kiss her and go to the kitchen.

  I pick through the drawer where mother keeps all of the spatulas and wooden spoons and the extra knives she doesn’t want me to touch because they are too heavy and too sharp. I take out the largest, the one she uses to chop up tomatoes, and carefully place it against my finger and slide it across. I lick the blood, and it tastes sweet. Too sweet. I must be candy inside, all sweetness.

  The fruit my father gave my mother is no longer bleeding. I scramble up on the kitchen counter until I can reach it. It’s stuck in its own juices and when I lift it, it leaves a piece of itself behind on the wood. It is gray again, hardened stone. I break off a seed and lift it to my mouth but it disintegrates away before I can put it on my tongue. I lick my fingers. Ash, just like my mother said. I climb down and throw it away. What a miserable present, one that dies and lives and dies again.

  I am a small girl, and in the night my long hair covers the part of myself, my bright red lips, that I cannot keep silent or dark. I bite my hair. I creep quiet. My mother does not move when the floor slightly creaks under me and I stand still, watching her, making sure she does not waken.

  When something dies, it should stay still. And it should never be allowed to hurt anyone again.

  My father’s door opens without noise, and though I do not know how he could be, my father is asleep in his bed, curled around the black bag. I look in the crib where my brother used to be and see only the white shroud, stained brown in places.

  When you are small and quiet you can get anywhere you wish to be, and see anything you wish to see, though often you see exactly what you wish you would not. My feet, just skin covering tiny bones, barely makes an indention on the bed when I stand over him. Outside, the Juniper tree looks lonely and bare, only its bark visible, even though I know everything beautiful about it is still there, outside of my view, dragging on the ground. Why did my father never plant anything around it? Why did he leave it alone for so long?

  I close my eyes and rest the knife along the soft indent of his throat. I count to three. I am weak, little girl weak, but even I am strong enough to get the knife down all the way to the bedcovers. He bleeds like the fruit he b
ought my mother, except worse. The fruit smelled like rot. He smells like salt metal.

  Even a man without a throat can make a lot of noise. He opens his eyes and flails and gurgles and I know, when he saw me bent over on top of him, that he no longer thought me beautiful. I push the knife in deeper and he throws me off. I crash down to the ground, next to the black bag.

  I saw Brother’s fingers, little more than pink stubs poking out of that black nothingness. Mother must have drained him quite a bit. His skin is wrinkled, like a grandmother’s, and at the tip of his pinky is a dollop of blood, just a drop, and I feel want in the back of my throat. I wait to see if he moves, but he no longer moves. Good, Brother, there is only suffering here.

  I should have closed the door. My mother inches her way into the room at the noise and watches my father until he, too, is stillness. She calls his name. When he does not move, she whines his name like a bitch does for its master, that long pitiful whine. Then she sobs his name. The water slumps out of her eyes like big, fat mucous slugs. She beats her arms against the ground so hard she must be hurting herself, but she keeps doing it, and she keeps wetting her face, her clothes and her broken ankle.

  Outside, the juniper tree began to uncurl its spine.

  All Who Tremble

  In a cold, gray city to the North there lived a family made of ragtag parts. The denizens all thought them strange, and when the townsfolk passed by the house the men and women pushed babushkas across and hats over their eyes to hide their faces from the windows. They plugged their ears with little blocks of wax when they passed, because there was a whirring from the basement that crawled up their bones and shook them until they were freezing. They always wore heavy wool coats as they passed to starve the chill as best they could.

  The whirring, clunking buzz always emanated from the bottom of the house, no matter the time of day. The braver of the citizens complained about the noise in loud whispers from the street, but none dared complain near the door. There were stories of those who lived inside, a mother, her older daughter and young son, and the grandfather whom none had ever seen but whom everyone delighted in telling terrible stories about, but they were never entirely sure of any of them except the daughter, who bought cheese and bread and milk at the market, and who drank cold beer in the corner of the tavern. The brother and mother might be spied, sometimes, fluttering at the windows, moving too quickly to really see. When they asked the daughter about her family she gave them such an awful look that they felt their pricks and tits shrivel and dry up.