“Is there something I can help you with?”
Although he’d been sitting behind the register, I hadn’t seen the tall, elfin man until he spoke. He had a pale, small mouth that reminded me of somewhere I could fold myself away and sleep. A tawny mole cheered his neck, and I moved between it and his lips while the old woman repeated her blood pressure out loud.
“Medicine,” I said. “For a man.”
Finally he asked, “What kind of man?”
“He has the flu.”
The woman prowled closer to us and pretended to read the ingredients on a packet of lozenges. She cleared her throat a number of times while the pharmacist went around a second counter and came back with some nectarine-coloured powder. “You may need to come back for more.”
“No. I can only come once.”
“In that case, give me a moment.”
He walked to a third counter, behind and lower than the second. I glanced up and saw a warren of ledges and shelves that were connected at parallel, perpendicular, and even acute angles. Time flowed in a cool circuit, lost and found itself again in eddies that swirled off the rims of counters. Nobody grabbed the back of my neck, forced me to stare into a triggered leg hold, and asked me to describe what I saw.
The pharmacist returned with a vial of iridescent green foam. “If you mix this with the powder it will turn red and taste like fruit. Keep giving it to him until you see a change.”
Later, after my father recovered and we had made our way back to our house on the lake, I stared at my palm, where the pharmacist had given me my change, and found a thin, smooth line, like a kitten’s claw mark. His eyes were the watery colour of shore pebbles. My eyes had no colour until I mixed ash into round discs of wax and fastened them on.
One day that spring, I looked up from the raccoon brain on the end of my pliers and saw my father wobbling under the weight of his axe. In another flash of silver he’d righted him self and resumed chopping, but the fact was unmistakable – he had begun to shrink. A few weeks later he met and married his wife. She was a long, German woman named Ilse, beautiful in a flat, angular way, and he adored her. I could under stand his loneliness, but his sudden ingratiation to this old-world woman confused me.
A few months before she’d been married to the Algerian baker who owned the patisserie next to the apothecary’s. My father stole her with promises of fur. The Algerian tried to win her back with her favourite delectations: ladyfingers, baby delights, grand-mere’s thumbs, but she preferred the furs. She loved browns the best: beaver, bear, and even fox, if it had been caught during the transitional period between sum mer and fall. Our living room became cluttered with mirrors and skins she wanted to try, until it looked like a lady’s boudoir in some gothic fairy tale. She delighted in finding new combinations and I think even convinced herself that she was an aspiring stylist, though she lived apart from everything there in the woods. She draped her torso with back and her waist with torso, made little hats out of beaver teeth, and framed the straight bones of her jaw with frenetically combed mink wraps. My father trapped, I gutted, and she brushed and braided the dressed fur, then unbraided it.
A week after their wedding, she waltzed into the skinning shed wearing a wolverine tail, stroked my father’s slightly narrower neck as he taught me how to rinse marrow from claw sockets, and sighed, “One day I want you to make me another like this weird girl.”
April’s abundance was diabetic. Bears travelled from lea to forest to lake, sucking grubs out of mulch and indulging in a sublime wanderlust. My father planted a clot of raspberry bushes outside our kitchen window where the view was good, and of course our fixed-frame hives stood along the back tree line amongst the sunflowers we’d seeded at random to attract bees. At least one bear per season lingered around the honey for too long. My father called these bears Winnies, and he said they yielded the nicest fur. Whereas the berries harassed me with thorns I would only find days later in my cheek or the back of my arm, the hives brought me comfort. It wasn’t strange that I’d think of those bees as my oblivious, slavish mothers. Sometimes when the days were long and I’d finished all the tasks he’d set out for me, I stood among the hives. If I stuck my tongue out for long enough, worker bees would land on it – and once the queen!
The mother and her two cubs came for our honey on the rarest day. I’d hung two muskrats in the smoking hut, warmed some red berry compote, and whisked the batter my father and Ilse liked to lick off each other’s hands before spooning it into our electric waffle maker. As I set the table, Ilse meandered out of their bedroom wearing one of my father’s winter parkas and nothing else. She draped herself over my shoulder and linked one of her feet through my calves.
“Are you joining us for breakfast?” She scraped batter off the side of the bowl and suckled it from under her nail. My father came up behind her, washed, combed, and boyish. “I told you, Ilse. She doesn’t eat.”
When I stepped outside, I found myself unwatched for the first time in my life. It was then that I realized she divided his attention, if only fractionally. Now he would only be able to notice most of me. A part would become mine to do with what I pleased. So I went to see the bees.
Sunny spotlights riddled through gaps in stagnant clouds. I stood in shade on the far side of a hive and hid from eyes at the window. When I stuck my fingers into comb, barbed sentinels swarmed my hand without laying sting, not because they were sympathetic, but because my attacking limb smelled the same as the hive. I felt sad for these guards who failed their monarch. What can a creature do when the linear drive of its instinct hits an unexplained loop? Those same bees had crafted the material I was made of. They hovered and tasted traces of themselves. Then out of nowhere, three shapes stared out from the border of the tree line. Each time I looked up the shapes were a bit more distinct, until a trio of brown heads poked their noses into the clearing, wondering at how I stood there without showing distress. The mother licked her snout. Her male cub swatted his rumbling stomach and nipped her on the elbow, egging her on, while the other cub, a female, tilted her head to one side, swivelling antennae ears, and listening to the silence of my heart.
After that the bears came three or four times a week. I would have shot them if my father had told me to, but he’d been so preoccupied with Ilse indoors, he hadn’t. Instead I watched them play. The cubs climbed trees and dived aboard their mother, who reared onto her hind legs and sent them spinning. Whoever had to wait pounced on its sibling twirling through the air, until the surrounding bramble looked wall papered with snagged tufts of fur. Each visit they came farther and farther into our clearing, until one day they stood just a few feet from the hives, waiting to see what I would do.
I broke off three pieces of comb and tossed them over.
“Hello,” I said. “You’re welcome.”
The girl cub cantered over to me, stopped, edged a little nearer, and stopped. I pinched off a large hexagon, squeezed the contents into my hands and pressed the wax ball into my forehead. I thought of moulding myself a horn. The cub licked the honey off my palm, and when it was gone she stayed. I scratched the divot between her eyes. She nibbled my thumb. When she got bored she ran back to her brother and bit him in the rear. He peed on her. Their mother sucked on a piece of comb. It was nice.
Three shots sculpted what must have been my happiness into a horrible shape. My father floated out from behind a stack of firewood piled beside the house. Ilse followed in a black and white badger scarf.
“We’ve been watching you,” he said.
“Like a chunk of beef under a deadfall, isn’t that the way?”
“Ilse’s comparisons aren’t exact,” he stroked her rump. “Nonetheless it’s been fascinating to observe. I never knew you could get so close to anything.” My cub had been shot in the leg, and she lay on the ground next to her mother and brother playing dead.
Ilse clapped her hands. “It’s like Davey Crocket out here, don’t you agree?” She flitted between carcasses and my fath
er without looking at any one thing. “You have to skin them now, helpful girl, before they go sour.”
The cub licked her paw.
“llse wants a bear rug in front of the fireplace,” my father stared at me.
“And two little rug slippers.”
He threw his skinning knife at my feet and patted Ilse’s back to shush her. When I looked back up at them, the pile of chopped wood they leaned against was at least five inches taller.
“Go,” he said. “Start with the little one. That one there.” As I knelt down I cupped her head and ran my fingers over her nose so she would know that I loved her. By that evening my father and Ilse were the size of twelve-year-old boys.
They noticed the next morning. When Ilse stepped out of bed into a larger world, she must have felt still drunk from the vats of Malbec they’d engulfed to sweeten dinner’s bear stew. Being that my body has never altered in size, I can only imagine what shrinking at that velocity must have felt like. An itchy tingle in the musculature; tightness around the eyes and in the nail beds. When she reached the sliding wainscot that partitioned their room from the hall, she might have thought that she was having a stroke. I imagine her blinking, an adolescent mole whose infant blindness didn’t fade.
“Gene!” she screamed.
My father, always up before dawn, still slept. He opened his eyes, saw Ilse splattered against the door like a starfish on tiptoe, and roared, “That girl. She’s a curse!”
After their initial panic they spoke in whispers. They must have decided that as I only had an artificial sense of the world anyway, and was more or less forged to obey, the best thing they could do was pretend that nothing had changed. As they marched into the kitchen, hips level with the wall sockets, I was already ladling compote into a freshly whisked batter. Ilse hoisted herself onto her chair and kneeled at the table. When she couldn’t reach the butter dish, I walked over from my stool in the corner and moved it closer as though that was a politeness I performed every morning. Aside from the fact that they were now three feet tall, everything was the same. Occasionally my father turned to glare at me, spooning fruit into his mouth while I stoked the fire through a protective leather drape.
It wasn’t long, two days and another ten inches at most, before they hatched a plan to kill me. The afternoon was grey and slow, so I took a lighter into the bathroom and sculpted myself a doe head with a single fang that jutted from my cleft.
“Stop it, stop it now!” Ilse howled when I brought them mugs of gin ger beer.
Thinking it was the fang that bothered her, I returned to the bathroom and cleaved my face to look exactly like hers. They were eerily silent as I set down their bowl of nuts. Ilse could have been a tiny, quiver-lipped child. She pulled her knees into her chest and dropped her head down the space between them. Suddenly my father erupted off the set tee, grabbed my hips, and plowed me down the hall. “What the hell are you doing?” He pressed me into the wall. “Suddenly playful, are you?” I stared down at the top of his head. The oily, bald circle smelled like a rabbit two hours after dying. He shoved me into the bathroom and slammed the door. “Get yourself back to the way I made you.”
After all the crafting and reshaping, I glided into bed and fell into a deep sleep. No image brooded behind my eyes, no image ever does, but I felt a warm nose breathing wetness onto my hand.
In the middle of the night I awoke and discovered that my forehead was strapped to the bed with fishing line. Ilse and my father stood eye level with my toes, holding up a storm lantern they’d smashed apart on one side so the shards of glass looked like little girl teeth. My left foot sat melting in their makeshift oven, held taut with a belt they’d looped round my ankle and were using like an elephant hook.
My father was a master trapper, and I had difficulty tearing out of my snare. Wires wrapped around tacks and pinned to the mattress at crucial geometrical nodes transferred the force of my struggle off the lines and back to my body. I bent my joints, thrashed, snarled, gnawed on wires that cut into my gums. My father tugged on the belt so hard he was standing horizontally off the side of the bed. All the while Ilse yelled, “Shut her! Gene! Shut her noises!”
Eventually, instead of trying to raise myself off the mattress, I attempt ed to shimmy out from under the wires lengthwise. I’d avoided this ma noeuvre because it meant kicking my foot even further into the lantern, which was spitting out constellations of flaming palmitate that hazed the back of Ilse’s head, igniting her hair and boring black holes into the skin on her arm. With a yowl, I thrust my leg straight through the blaze and knocked Ilse into the wall. The lantern dropped off my foot and sent currents of molten wax pulsing across the floor.
For a moment midst the fire, I calmed. My father didn’t yank on my ankle anymore so much as use it to prop himself off the ground, panting like a mountain climber who’d run out of steam sooner than expected. Ilse screeched in the corner and batted back the blaze with a decorative pillow. The scene must have looked even more terrifying to them than it did to me, given our differences in size.
“Put it out!” my father bellowed.
“How?” I asked.
“That one,” he pointed to one of the tacks, which I unpinned. “Now that one.” In this way he ciphered my escape. I limped to the bathroom, wet some towels, and sloshed out the scattered fires.
The assault did procure one redeeming effect: the next night, as I ladled melted beeswax onto my dwarfed foot, I had occasion to stare at my hands, and I rediscovered the tiny scratch the apothecary had left on my palm during our minute transaction. While waiting for my new appendage to solidify, I fit my fingernail into the fine groove and slid it back and forth, amplifying the line.
Ignoring them became simple when they reached squirrel proportions, excepting the few times I had to disengage a coil spring trap they’d set at the bottom of the stairs, and once under the welcome mat outside the door. They didn’t know it, but I liked guessing where the trap would appear next, and even made bets with myself on the back of the pharmacist’s receipt, which I rolled into a scroll and kept in a chink between two log beams. After the trap became too heavy, I found them lurking together behind the toilet wielding corn-on-the-cob skewers, and I snatched them up, threw them into a garbage sack, and carried them down to the water. When I got there, I ran in up past my knees and then quit, with bag in one hand and skewer in the other, to stare at a duck floating on the inanimate water under the dock, while the mallard she hid from skimmed back and forth a few paces off, squawking for her. Without much ado I went back to shore and let them go. The duck stared at me with silver eyes while they scurried up the granite slabs we used for stepping stones and let themselves in through the cat flap.
Finally the day came for journeying into town. I scoured everywhere for them, in all the usual places, behind the fire grate, on the bathmat, aboard a dust ball I’d left in the corner of their bedroom so they would have somewhere to sleep. Eventually I gave up the search and hobbled off on my own. I had nothing to trade except some raspberry tarts. The cub paw I kept for luck.
MICHELE SERWATUK
MY EYES ARE DIM
Sister Eavan kneels down and scrabbles through webs of dirt, looking for her new eyeglasses. There is no diesel for the generator and the batteries in her flashlight are dead, so she places a spluttering candle on the ground. She gropes around in the dark, sifting through clumps of sand and splayed concrete, and finds them lodged in the shattered roots of a calabash tree. In the muted light of the candle, the lenses appear scraped and the right frame is bent, but they are intact. She brushes the filth and debris from them with her fingertips, puts them on, and pushes herself into a standing position.
The last time that she needed new glasses was years ago. She remembers sitting in the common room with René and Antoine. They were watching the new television that Father Dalcour had bought for the school. Unsure of what was happening on the screen, she thought that she saw the bald Irish singer, the O’Connor girl, who came from the sa
me Dublin neighbourhood as she did, ripping up a picture of the Pope. She adjusted and readjusted her lenses, and yes, the Holy Father, John Paul ii, had indeed been dissected. René threw her a sideways glance, trying to gauge her response, but she simply took off her glasses, wiped them, popped them back on the bridge of her nose, and kept her views to herself. Now, with this new prescription, she sees the birthmark on Father Dalcour’s neck in a much higher resolution than before. It is true, what they say, that they look like maps. Something topographical, birthmarks and moles, she thinks. This one looks like County Fermanagh.
“Sister, are you listening?” he asks. “It has been three days and most of the children are asleep. We must either find a way to bury them or pull them out.”
At first, the blood was a blinding crimson, like a matador’s cape, and gave off a strong metallic scent. Now, as it has pooled in the ruts of the soil and turned a rich russet colour, it reeks like the cancer of someone rotting from the core.
Sister Tallie had offered to go back into the classroom for Eavan’s guitar during the picnic. Serafine followed to round up the rest of the students. About twenty of the younger children, who were giggling and quite fidgety in anticipation of the sin-galong, had already assembled in the courtyard. She had asked them to choose a song.
“La chanson Quartermaster, Evie. Cette chanson,” Gaétan, a small boy, sitting cross-legged on the lawn shovelling rice and beans into his mouth, announced with conviction. This was the song that Tallie had taught them during her first week at the school, announcing that it would be a fun way for the children to improve their English. Eavan led with the first line, and the children joined in without bothering to wait for musical accompaniment.
There are apes, apes, eating all the grapes
In the store, in the store,
There are apes, apes, eating all the grapes
The Journey Prize Stories 23 Page 9