Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

put their heads through a black curtain.

  But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. Inoticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I lookedfor it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hiton the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as Iexperimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out ofthe old pictures.

  The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They lookedlike they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenirpillow on Auntie's armchair in the living room, which had whorls ofpaisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and triedto reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.

  And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappearedbehind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different waterlevels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligentlysketched. I'd seen a *Polka Dot Door* episode where the hosts showed howyou could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on asheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing theimage in manageable, bite-sized chunks.

  That's what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing mygrid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture,using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in thesurface of the photo.

  And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was,where it wasn't. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in thephotos. As I drew, day after day, I realized that I was drawing theshape of something black that was blocking the curtain behind.

  Then I got excited. I drew in my steadiest hand, tracing each curve,using my magnifier, until I had the shape drawn and defined, and longbefore I finished, I knew what I was drawing and I drew it anyway. Idrew it and then I looked at my paper sack and I saw that what I haddrawn was a pair of wings, black and powerful, spread out and stretchingout of the shot.

  #

  She curled the prehensile tips of her wings up the soles of his feet,making him go, Yeek! and jump in the bed.

  "Are you awake?" she said, twisting her head around to brush her lipsover his.

  "Rapt," he said.

  She giggled and her tits bounced.

  "Good," she said. "'Cause this is the important part."

  #

  Auntie came home early that day and found me sitting at her vanity, withthe photos and the water glass and the drawings on the paper sacksspread out before me.

  Our eyes met for a moment. Her pupils shrank down to tiny dots, Iremember it, remember seeing them vanish, leaving behind rings ofyellowed hazel. One of her hands lashed out in a claw and sank into myhair. She lifted me out of the chair by my hair before I'd even had achance to cry out, almost before I'd registered the fact that she washurting me -- she'd never so much as spanked me until then.

  She was strong, in that slow old Russian lady way, strong enough togrunt ten sacks of groceries in a bundle-buggy up the stairs to theapartment. When she picked me up and tossed me, it was like being firedout of a cannon. I rebounded off the framed motel-room art over the bed,shattering the glass, and bounced twice on the mattress before coming torest on the floor. My arm was hanging at a funny angle, and when I triedto move it, it hurt so much that I heard a high sound in my ears like adog whistle.

  I lay still as the old lady yanked the drawers out of her vanity andupended them on the floor until she found an old book of matches. Sheswept the photos and my sketches into the tin wastebasket and then lit amatch with trembling hands and dropped it in. It went out. She repeatedit, and on the fourth try she got the idea of using the match to lightall the remaining matches in the folder and drop that into the bin. Amoment later, it was burning cheerfully, spitting curling red embersinto the air on clouds of dark smoke. I buried my face in the mattedcarpet and tried not to hear that high note, tried to will away the sickgrating feeling in my upper arm.

  She was wreathed in smoke, choking, when she finally turned to me. For amoment, I refused to meet her eye, sure that she would kill me if I did,would see the guilt and the knowledge in my face and keep her secretwith murder. I'd watched enough daytime television to know about darksecrets.

  But when she bent down to me, with the creak of stretching elastic, andshe lifted me to my feet and bent to look me in the eye, she had tearsin her eyes.

  She went to the pile of oddments and junk jewelry that she had dumpedout on the floor and sorted through it until she found a pair of sewingshears, then she cut away my T-shirt, supporting my broken arm with herhand. My wings were flapping nervously beneath the fabric, and it gottangled, and she took firm hold of the wingtips and folded them down tomy back and freed the shirt and tossed it in the pile of junk on hernormally spotless floor.

  She had spoken to me less and less since I had fixed the television andbegun to pick up English, and now she was wordless as she gently rotatedmy fingerbones and my wristbones, my elbow and my shoulder, minutemovements, listening for my teakettle hiss when she hit the sore spots.

  "Is broken," she said. "*Cholera*," she said. "I am so sorry, *lovenu*,"she said.

  #

  "I've never been to the doctor's," she said. "Never had a pap smear orbeen felt for lumps. Never, ever had an X-ray. Feel this," she said, andput her upper arm before his face. He took it and ran his fingertipsover it, finding a hard bump halfway along, opposite her fleshy bicep.

  "What's this?" he said.

  "It's how a bone sets if you have a bad break and don't get acast. Crooked."

  "Jesus," he said, giving it another squeeze. Now that he knew what itwas, he thought -- or perhaps fancied -- that he could feel how theunevenly splintered pieces of bone mated together, met at a slight angleand fused together by the knitting process.

  "She made me a sling, and she fed me every meal and brushed my teeth. Ihad to stop her from following me into the toilet to wipe me up. And Ididn't care: She could have broken both of my arms if she'd onlyexplained the photos to me, or left them with me so that I could go oninvestigating them, but she did neither. She hardly spoke a word to me."

  She resettled herself against the pillows, then pulled him back againsther again and plumped his head against her breasts.

  "Are you falling in love with me?" she said.

  He startled. The way she said it, she didn't sound like a young adult,she sounded like a small child.

  "Mimi --" he began, then stopped himself. "I don't think so. I mean, Ilike you --"

  "Good," she said. "No falling in love, all right?"

  #

  Auntie died six months later. She keeled over on the staircase on herway up to the apartment, and I heard her moaning and thrashing outthere. I hauled her up the stairs with my good arm, and she crawledalong on her knees, making gargling noises.

  I got her laid out on the rug in the living room. I tried to get her upon the sofa, but I couldn't budge her. So I gave her pillows from thesofa and water and then I tried tea, but she couldn't take it. She threwup once, and I soaked it up with a tea towel that had fussy roses on it.

  She took my hand and her grip was weak, her strong hands suddenly thinand shaky.

  It took an hour for her to die.

  When she died, she made a rasping, rattling sound and then she shatherself. I could smell it.

  It was all I could smell, as I sat there in the little apartment, sixyears old, hot as hell outside and stuffy inside. I opened the windowsand watched the Hasids walk past. I felt like I should *do something*for the old lady, but I didn't know what.

  I formulated a plan. I would go outside and bring in some grown-up totake care of the old lady. I would do the grocery shopping and eatsandwiches until I was twelve, at which point I would be grown up and Iwould get a job fixing televisions.

  I marched into my room and changed into my best clothes, the littleAlice-blue dress I wore to dinner on Sundays, and I brushed my hair andput on my socks with the blue pom-poms at the ankles, and found my shoesin the hall closet. But it
had been three years since I'd last worn theshoes, and I could barely fit three toes in them. The old lady's shoeswere so big I could fit both feet in either one.

  I took off my socks -- sometimes I'd seen kids going by barefootoutside, but never in just socks -- and reached for the doorknob. Itouched it.

  I stopped.

  I turned around again.

  There was a stain forming under Auntie, piss and shit and death-juice,and as I looked at her, I had a firm sense that it wouldn't be *right*to bring people up to her apartment with her like this. I'd seen deadpeople on TV. They were propped up on pillows, in clean hospitalnighties, with rouged cheeks. I didn't know how far I could get, but Ithought I owed it to her to try.

  I figured that it was better than going outside.

  She was lighter in death, as though something had fled her. I could dragher into the bathroom