Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26
Page 7
I put on my ppg and begin flange welding the Bel Air’s fuel tank, the whole time watching her watching me watching her.
We move onto brazing the radiators on a pair of Skylarks, Grim Reaper and Cashing In. It’s hard keeping up though because of all the helmet lifts and flips I have to do.
We work through lunch. By late afternoon, I feel frying panned; I take a break and offer her some of my coffee and sandwich, but she says no thanks.
I miss the way Aida slurped Liebfraumilch on the job.
My arms and legs are stiff, but I’m back at it, single v-grooving a Corvette, Lights Out, until evening. I’m having sudden freezing spells but luckily the shed’s so dim, Deidre can’t tell. I want to return to the men’s trailer and phone Dad, check on his burns, ask about his glass replacements. But if I call it a day, will Deidre call me a shirker?
She squats under a Maverick, Meet Your Maker, for a double-jointed square butt-weld, so I bend myself over a Gremlin, Peter Out, for a triple-jointed vertical lap-groove.
She brazes. I solder. She plugs, slots. I multi-pass, corner joint. I’m a Duster, Custer’s Last Stand. She’s a Challenger, Down for the Count. We’re racing. She’s winning.
“Slow down,” I say and drop to the floor, perspiring a sweat angel. My brain has the runs.
“Go ahead, rest,” she says. “I’ll weld whatever you can’t finish.”
No study nurse comes in.
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Sleep
Carlea Holl-Jensen
If you’re tired, I will dig you a bed in the soft dirt of a field, so that you can lie down and sleep. The fertile earth will be a cool pillow beneath your cheek, and I will sing to you, an old curse-canceling sort of song, she will not die but only sleep awhile, that kind of thing. Once I’m sure you’re comfortable, I will kiss your forehead and then I will pile the earth over you with my bare hands.
Ritual sleep is the best kind, I’m told, for the genuinely weary. When all diagnosis fails, sleep will heal you. During ritual sleep, the whole world hangs held-breath for you to wake. Your promises are not broken while you sleep, your plans wait patiently to be kept. You will sleep for ten, twenty, a hundred years, and, when you’re ready, you will get up again.
I will miss you, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I will not forget you while you sleep. However much the world twists on its string, I will keep the memory of you close to me always. When I am working a steady job, married and paying off a house, I will take my daughter to see your sleeping place, and I will put my hands on her shoulders and say, “This is my friend Michelle, she’s resting.” And maybe the sound of my voice will trickle down through the earth to reach your ears, and maybe you will dream of me.
Your dreams will only be good ones, and the fruit of your sleep will be extraordinary in its richness. The soil will be strengthened by your sleeping, and new trees will grow up, bearing long skeins of white silk and small, semiconductive ornaments that fit neatly on the lapels of women’s jackets. Migrating birds will pause in their course to circle above you because the air will be sweet with your sleep. It will always be the peak of spring around your sleeping place, and small yellow flowers the shape of stars will grow up amongst the grass.
This is the sort of rest you deserve. If I could ask the world to lie down and wait for you, I would. I would still the sea to give you time to find your secret home inside your heart.
So lie down, my dear. The wind is just right for singing lullabies. I’ll watch over you as long as I am able, and in ten, twenty, a hundred years, you’ll get up again. When you’re ready.
Three Poems by Lindsay Vella
The Way to the Sea
Because mercury is always moving, because
sandwiches are best when they’re cut
in half, because if something is beautiful,
it will poison you, I have made my decision.
For seven years, we lived in a house sewn
together with black stitches. A circus tent. The
sound of quarters against knuckles, the heft of
two bowling pins in the left hand, one in the right.
Listen. I woke up one morning with a pocketknife
in my hand. I dreamed there were lions in my house.
Now, the smell of your hair is caught in my nose.
My lullaby to the moon, my how you have grown.
Spit Out the Seeds
In hindsight, we will all say
that we didn’t know what to expect.
Believe me when I say this is where
we’ll all end up eventually:
six miles away from a man
whose hands only ever touch machines.
The first time he touches a pear,
he holds it like a newborn.
The second time, he eats it.
The first time he holds a newborn,
he touches it like a pear.
The second time, he eats it.
Thirst
Crayon-face, it’s so simple.
She was born in October, her hair
white as any bone. Before long,
there was an apocalypse, and she forgot
how it felt to breathe underwater. Masquerader,
her hair turned blacker than any charcoal,
and she began to remember how it felt to exhale.
If you knew what she meant when she said she was
thirsty,
would you have asked in the first place?
*
The formula is this:
pity as the price of admission, a slip,
a stone, and something as common as hunger.
Everything here is made of wood,
soaked to the grain, or stolen. Charlatan,
her story is the same in any weather.
If you should find her ankle-deep
in floodwater, please take her plum-skin hand
and lead her farther in.
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The Other Realms Were Built With Trash
Rahul Kanakia
Aldram’s glass tower jutted out from a sea of grey waste. His platform was suspended only a few dozen feet above the mass of human hair, plastic bags, shredded cardboard and other detritus.
He squinted at a distant mountain of crushed cars, hoping that Benny was about to appear with his load of human corpses. He had been gone for five days; Aldram’s assistant could usually find suitable vessels in a few hours. Perhaps he was just being more discriminating with Lord Reva’s new body.
The air was filled with a constant low thunder as lost objects winked out of the human world, materialized above the Dump, and fell. Man-sized flies filled the sky, darting down to catch fragile objects and bring them to the Recycling Tower, while giant spiders trawled the surface, looking for raw materials.
Cliff faces on either side, perhaps a mile distant, marked the Dump’s border with the Other Realms. A line of wooden pallets was floating out of the Recycling Tower, carrying the recycled goods towards unmoving figures on cliff’s edge. Beyond, Aldram could barely make out the fairy cities, clusters of cloud-piercing towers whose glass shells caught the light like a prism. He had lived within sight of them for all his life without ever coming closer than this.
In his youth, he had stared at them for hours, imagining how his world would appear from such heights. The Recycling Tower would seem like the beating heart of the Other Realms, receiving veins of empty pallets from across the ravine and sending them outwards in gushing arteries of goods. From atop those spires, he would be able to see new towers rise up all around him, planned on paper he had recovered, built with his metals, and assembled by mages who wore his cloth. Looking back at him, those artisans would nod, as to an equal, and perhaps offer just a word of thanks for making their way of life possible.
Aldram’s daydream was interrupted by a shout. A giant spider was scuttling toward him, dragging a web-sac. A man was waving at him from a saddle tucked just behind its head. When it reached the base of the tower, the spider leapt ten feet, and skittered up its walls. Aldram winced as the web sac thudded against the tower, though he knew that the bodies were cushioned by spidersilk.
The spider crawled onto the platform. Aldram could see his own squat, wizened body in its eight eyes. Benny climbed off its back, using fistfuls of hair as handholds. When he was on the ground, he waited a moment, then shrugged the assault rifle off his back and struck his mount with the butt. The spider released the web-sac.
“Did you run into trouble?” Aldram said. Benny shooed the spider off the platform, and began to saw at the web-sac with his fairy-glass knife.
“Just a few reavers in the distance,” Benny said. “But they ran off when I approached.”
“Too bad you couldn’t persuade any to come back.” Benny was the only member of Aldram’s indentured human workforce who hadn’t run off to go scrounging in the Dump.
“There were a lot more corpses than normal,” Benny said. “But they were in terrible condition. I did manage to find a few young ones. They’re in … decent shape.” He reached into the web-sac and Aldram moved to help him.
The first corpse they withdrew was a young woman, still wrapped in a blanket. Her left side was a mess of burns, blackened in some places and red underneath. Her left arm ended in a blackened curl.
“You call this decent shape?” Aldram said. He rubbed the sweat from his face, and came away with his hand coated by glistening hair. The air was always hazy with floating strands. “Perhaps she was cremated poorly.”
“They were all like this. But look at her from the right. She could have been a pin-up,” he said.
Reva would be furious if his vessel was less than perfect. Time passed slowly in the Other Realms. But injuries also took centuries to heal, and the agony of old pains could become unbearable. So the fairies crafted new bodies from human corpses.
Like all recycled goods, these bodies deteriorated. Once a fairy had changed vessels, regular transferences were a necessity, or he would eventually wither and fade away. Poor-quality vessels wore out even more quickly.
Aldram became more frantic with each disfigured body that he retrieved. Even those with a full complement of limbs were pockmarked with blisters and covered in burn scars. Some were naked, but many had clothing that was fused to the skin in places. His mood wasn’t improved by Benny’s commentary.
“This one looks like cousin Milton. He’d walk five miles to pitch in during the harvest.”
“This is unacceptable!” Aldram said. “I asked you for the young and beautiful. It would be worth my life to ask Lord Reva to inhabit a damaged vessel.”
“These were the best,” Benny said. He was blinking back tears. “Would you rather have a load of beautiful torsos? I found plenty of those. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many banged-up people. Looks like a bomb got most of them.”
“Humans and their wars,” Aldram muttered. He would have to make the best of this situation.
“I need you to get the makeup,” Aldram said.
But Benny was crouched down, staring at the corpses, “What do you think happened down there in the real world?”
“Just another die-off. They go in cycles.” Aldram had seen everything from bubo-covered bodies during the Black Death to oceans of starveling, skeletal remains more than six hundred later. “You only have ten years left in your term of service. When you go back, you can drop a letter in the trash and tell me what’s happened.”
“After a hundred years, will there be anything to go back to?”
“Go get the kit,” Aldram said. He had waited far longer than Benny’s hundred years for a chance to go home. Perhaps, after the ceremony, his wait would end.
Aldram had done his best to prepare for Lord Reva’s arrival. He had washed the bodies and covered their wounds with make-up and concealing clothes. Then he had enchanted the three males and seven females to stand at attention in the center of the transference room, which he had cleaned furiously. But to Aldram’s eyes, the scars were easily visible under the pai
nt.
At the peripheries of the room, wooden pallets heaped high with faerie goods floated up from the bowels of the Tower. The transformed products gleamed, even in the diffuse light that filtered through the dirty windows. Unlike their human counterparts, fairy goods could be enchanted by artisans in distant cities. But for all their beauty, the fairy products were ephemeral things, disappearing after only a few months or years. Without constant replenishment from the human world, the Other Realms would simply fade away.
The most important transformation was that of cold iron and steel into fairy glass, a translucent alloy that held all of its ingredients’ strength and none of their dangers. The pits that held these metals were buried deep within the tower. As a changeling, Aldram was the only fairy that was able to withstand prolonged exposure to such materials.
There was no sound or flash. There were simply more people. The guards appeared with knives drawn and fanned through the room, sniffing for iron. When they were satisfied one of them nodded and spoke a few syllables. The rest of Reva’s court appeared in order of precedence. Aldram fell to his knees as he read the rank insignia on their sashes; they represented some of the oldest houses in the Other Realms.
Lord Reva was the last to appear. He had one hand pressed to a mask that covered his mouth and nose. Reva was wearing a coat of spotless white, covered in delicate golden tracery.
Aldram’s gaze dropped to the floor. He was conscious of his stained human overalls and the hair clinging to his face. He had spent so much time preparing the corpses that he hadn’t been able to change into proper fairy clothing.
Footsteps approached, and he had to strain to hear Reva’s muffled voice. “These ones seem different,” Reva said.
“Oh, but they are very young,” Aldram said. “Good for many more years than the normal lot. I spared no effort in finding you the very best vessels.”
“You handled them yourself?” Reva said, his voice rising in pitch.