by Paul Pen
“You wouldn’t see them even if you were out there.”
“Why not?”
“It’s impossible to see everything. People know about things through books. Like you do.”
Mom had taught me to read and write. With my sister’s help I also learned mathematics. Geography was my dad’s thing.
“So the fact you don’t actually see these bugs,” Mom said, “doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If they exist here”—she put her finger on my temple—“and here”—she moved it to my chest—“that’s all that matters.”
I smiled.
“Up there, there are people who die without seeing the sea,” she went on. “And many of them live very close to it.” She rested a hand on my chest. “If we lived outside, right now we’d be no different. I’d still tuck you in at night, you’d be reading your insect book, and I bet you’d be asking me why you’ve never seen any of those strange butterflies.”
She ran her thumb around a corner of the book and opened it at one of the first pages, where there was a light-green moth with two long tails on its lower wings. Actias luna.
“Who has actually seen one of these butterflies?” Mom asked. “Look, it’s like a kite. I can promise you I never saw anything like that out there. Do you think anyone has seen them?”
I shrugged, pushing out my bottom lip. “The person who took the picture did,” I said.
Mom laughed, curling her lips, and she managed to make me laugh, too.
“Why are we here?” I surprised her with the question, and knew she’d heard me by the way she looked at me, even if she tried to hide it by laughing for longer.
“Why are we here?” I repeated.
“You were only meant to ask one question,” she finally replied. “And you’ve already asked a few.”
“Why are we here?” I said for the third time.
The laughter died in her face. She closed my book and got up to put it on top of the chest of drawers. Then she came back beside me, but this time didn’t sit on the bed. She just crouched down to give me a kiss on the cheek before heading to the door. From there, her head against the frame, she said, “Because we can’t be anywhere else.”
She turned off the light. The glow from the television in the living room silhouetted her from behind. Before leaving, she added, “Same as everyone else.” She closed the door, leaving me in total darkness.
17
The next evening, before dinner, Dad picked up a knife from the middle of the table. Mom left all the cutlery piled there so we could help ourselves. Grandma always stroked one side of her knife along her forearm to know which way to point the blade. Dad now took one of the big ones, one with a brown handle, and spread his other hand out on the table, his fingers wide apart, the palm pressed down on the tablecloth.
“Look, son,” he said to my brother, “like in the movie last night.” Dad began to stab the tip of the knife between his fingers. At first he did it slowly, but he gradually increased the speed until the noise of the knife hitting the table sounded like a horse galloping like they did in the Westerns.
My brother’s laughter got louder and louder, with guttural spasms that almost made him choke. He was rocking in his chair and banging on the table. Twice he tried to clap, but his hands missed each other, and he ended up hitting himself on the shoulders. My sister stared down the hall to detach herself from the spectacle.
Mom brought the soup bowl. The white steam danced in front of her face before disappearing. She put it down at one end of the table and caught my father’s hand in midair as he pretended to be some dirty cowboy gambling in a saloon.
“Done?” my sister said when she couldn’t hear the cutlery trotting on the tablecloth anymore. She waited a few seconds to make sure.
Then the white mask turned on her shoulders.
And it was just then that she started to bleed.
The blood appeared suddenly.
A dark red stream, as if the orthopedic material were bleeding. My sister was the last to realize. She stretched out her arm to reach the soup as if nothing had happened as the blood emerged on the edge of the hole she had as a mouth.
“What is it?” she asked. She must’ve seen the surprise and horror on our faces.
She screamed when she saw the blood spots on the tablecloth. Little apples on the branches of the trees printed on the material. Dad dropped his knife. He pulled his other hand away before it could stab him.
“You’re bleeding,” my mother said.
My sister felt the mask with her hands. Searching for the source of the flow, with her fingers covered in her own blood, she made fingerprints all over the white plastic.
“Bleeding?” Grandma asked, moving her head in several directions. She felt for my sister’s artificial face with both hands. When her fingers met the liquid that covered the mask she snatched them back as if they’d touched something hot. Then she held them to her nose and smelled them.
“It’s blood!” she yelled.
My mother went to help my sister. She made her stand up and then examined the contour of the mask. Twenty fingers touched it like a colony of ants with their antennae cut off.
“We have to get it off you,” said my mother.
Dad’s hand shot out from wherever it was and caught one of my wrists.
“Come on, come with me,” Mom said as she guided my sister toward the kitchen sink.
“Do you have to do it here?” my father asked.
Mom didn’t answer. She just positioned my sister with her back to me. I could see the strap running from one side of her head to the other. Despite my mother’s precautions, Dad’s warm hand pressed against my eyes.
He closed them for me.
I heard a chair scrape along the floor.
“You don’t have to go,” said my father. I knew he was saying it to Grandma.
“What’s happening to me?” my sister asked.
“Let’s take a look,” Mom replied.
“It’s this basement,” added my sister. “It’s going to kill us all.”
Although I couldn’t see anything, I assumed that my sister had taken off her blood-soaked mask, showing Mom the face the fire had made. And that Mom would be examining her old wounds to find the source of the hemorrhage.
She quickly found it.
“It’s nothing,” I heard Mom say. “Just a nosebleed.”
Dad’s hot breath whispered in my ear, “If you can call it a nose.”
I heard the water come on.
“Wash it until the bleeding stops,” my mother instructed her.
“She should tip her head back,” Grandma added from the table.
“That’s a really bad idea,” Mom answered.
“I did it with your husband every time he fell off a sled or got hit by a ball,” she responded. “I know about these things.”
The water fell in a different way in the sink. My sister was taking Mom’s advice. “Keep going, until it stops,” my mother said. “It has to stop sometime.”
I heard my sister rubbing her face. A very similar situation to the one I’d experienced two nights before, when Dad made me sleep in the bathroom. When she’d snuck in to wash. When I remembered that, Dad’s warm hand on my face made me recoil.
The water was still running.
“It won’t stop,” my sister said after a while. “The blood won’t stop coming.”
“Then plug your hole with your fingers,” Dad said. “Do whatever you want. But we should eat, the soup’s already cold.”
My grandmother’s chair scraped against the floor.
“I said you don’t have to go,” repeated my father.
This time she ignored him. I heard her short steps approaching the kitchen.
“Get one of those cloths we keep around here,” Grandma said, “and press it hard to her face. The pressure will make it stop.”
There were a few noises I couldn’t identify.
“That’s it,” said my grandmother. “Now let’s eat.”
“You can’t eat here without the mask on,” he told my sister. “The boy’s here.” He moved my head with his hand, as if that was necessary to prove I was there.
“Who is it who my face really bothers?” my sister asked. “The kid? Or you?”
A piece of cutlery hit the table. The high-pitched screech of a chair’s legs against the floor was followed by the muffled footsteps of someone heading to the hall.
“How are you going to eat your soup without a spoon?” my mother asked.
“I’ll make do,” my sister replied. She slammed her bedroom door shut.
“You can eat now,” my father said.
As he took away his hand, the air dried the veil of sweat with a cool feeling. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my sister’s mask on the table. A bloody, empty face looking up at the ceiling, praying to the One Up There, perhaps.
My sister didn’t come out of her room to return her bowl to the kitchen. It was my grandmother who fetched it, when she went to the room to bring out the baby. She sat on the sofa beside my mother. She was humming a song and rocking him in her arms. She was about to change him, and a big bottle of talcum powder sat on her lap. The smell was even stronger than the dirty diaper that she’d set aside on the floor.
I climbed onto the sofa to sit next to Mom. I saw that she had something in her hands. It was my sister’s mask. She was wiping it with a gray cloth. The smell of ammonia told me she was cleaning off the bloodstains. She’d wedged the orthopedic mask onto one of her knees, and was holding it in place, rubbing the forehead hard. The brown color of the dry blood gradually dissolved, fading to an orange and then a pinkish cloud, before finally making way for the white. The corner of the cloth was stained brown. She turned it around a few times to find another part of the material that was still clean, and did the same with the nose bump. It was as if her knee were looking forward.
“What is it?” she asked me. “Are you going to sit there watching me all night?”
I shook my head. “I came to give you a kiss goodnight.”
“Go on, then,” she said. “And another for your grandmother. Then go to bed. Dad will want to watch a movie.”
She waited for the kiss as she continued to handle my sister’s mask. When I gave it to her, she was going over the false lips.
“Why does she have to wear it?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why does she have to wear the mask all the time and you don’t?”
Mom’s hand that held the cloth stopped. “She doesn’t always wear it,” she explained. “She sleeps without it. She washes without it.”
“But here,” I said, waving my finger around the living room. “She always wears it here. When I’m around.”
Mom sighed.
“The fire affected us all differently,” Grandma broke in. While she said it, she stroked the baby’s pink face.
“It wouldn’t do you any good to see what her face is like,” added Mom. “It could frighten you. She doesn’t have—” Mom ran a finger over the curve of her nose. “You know.”
Then I touched Mom’s face. I stroked the creased skin around her eyes. “Your faces don’t scare me,” I said.
Her nose whistled. She seemed touched.
“I want to have a face like all of you,” I added. “I don’t want to be different.”
Mom suddenly snatched my hand from her cheek. “Don’t ever say that. You have a face that people would like to look at, with those two beautiful moles.” She touched one of them, then the other, under my right eye.
“What people?” I asked.
Mom took in a deep breath.
“There are no people here,” I said. “Just us. It wouldn’t matter if my face was burned.”
“No, son, it would matter.” She continued to stroke my face.
“It would matter,” she said again.
Grandma wanted my attention.
“Come,” she said. “Come over here.”
I went around the back of the sofa to the other end and sat by Grandma. She rested the baby on her knees and put her two hands on my face. She kneaded my flesh with her fingers as if molding it. I felt my eyelids stretch, my lips contract. One nostril opened wider than the other when she pulled the tip with her thumb and forefinger. She also pinched my eyebrows and bent them out of shape.
“There you go,” she said when she’d finished her work. “Now you’re just like us.”
I tried to smile but my grandmother’s fingers were clutching my face and it was impossible.
“Am I handsome?” I asked, but I hadn’t mastered the different shape of my lips and pronounced it with an odd lisp. “I talk like my brother!” I joked.
“Very handsome,” said Grandma.
“You can’t see me, that doesn’t count,” I responded. “Mom, am I handsome?”
I could barely make out an unevenly colored blob when she leaned over to look at me. A form lit from above by the bulb that hung from the ceiling. My stretched eyelids meant I couldn’t see much.
“Am I handsome?” I repeated.
“Let go of him, will you?” my mother said. “I don’t like seeing him like that.”
My grandmother took her hands away from my face and my features went back to normal. Like the new skin of a caterpillar after it sheds its old one. Back to how it always was.
“You were lucky enough to be in here on the day of the fire,” my mother said, indicating her belly. “Don’t wish that away.”
I crossed my arms as my only response.
“Anyway,” Grandma murmured beside me, “you’re not different, in actual fact.” She lifted the baby up from her lap. “He’s the same as you,” she said.
I heard Mom’s nose whistle.
I looked at my nephew. At his little face full of light and shade. A pink face, smooth and uniform like mine. He blinked as if he knew I was looking at him.
Dad returned then to the living room dragging his brown slippers, which already had a hole in the bottom from the rubbing.
“You, the house ghost. Don’t you have a book to read? Or some experiment to do with a lemon?”
I didn’t answer.
“Or even better,” he continued, “go find your sister. Get her to come take the boy. I have to speak to your mother and grandmother.”
I got off the sofa. Halfway down the hall, I heard one of the kitchen cupboards opening behind me. “We’re having everything we’re meant to have,” Dad said.
“Yep,” Mom replied, “all the essentials.”
Then I remembered something. I retraced my footsteps. Dad stopped talking when he discovered me in the living room.
“Didn’t I tell you to go look for your sister?” he asked.
“I can’t,” I answered.
“And why not?”
“Her mask’s here,” I said, pointing at the sofa.
“I’ll go,” Grandma said. She felt for the mask with her hand until she found it. Then she got up from the sofa, knocking off the bottle of talcum powder. A white cloud rose for a second over the basement’s floor. Grandma trod in the powder and left two white footprints on a tile, but luckily she dodged the baby’s dirty diaper. She continued down the hallway.
“Are you planning to stay there all night?” Dad asked me from the kitchen. He was resting his hand on one of the cupboards, the one where Mom kept the tons of pills she made us take. “Can you go, for goodness sake?”
In our bedroom my brother was whistling his song. I took the opportunity while he was in his trance to say goodnight to my fireflies. When I went to get into bed, the legs that hung from his bunk blocked my path.
“Out of the way, Scarecrow,” I said.
He laughed with a heehaw, separating his legs to form an upside-down U. I passed between them while he continued to laugh. His bedsprings squeaked with each spasm.
Then a train’s clatter rea
ched me from the living room. Along with the high-pitched whine of a harmonica. Dad had put on his favorite movie again. My brother stopped laughing and jumped down from the bunk, making the floor shake. He left the room in the direction of the living room, where he would sit to watch the film with Dad.
I lay looking up at the mattress I had as a ceiling.
Repeating the movie’s lines one by one.
The dark around me became denser when the same old melody started up, the unhappiest melody I’d ever heard. My eyes moistened when the orchestra’s sound swelled and the singer hit the highest notes of her sad song.
I was forcing myself to stay awake. I had to ask my sister something, and I had to ask it that night.
Mom was the first to go to bed. The floor creaked as she went past my door. The bathroom pipes whistled when she turned on the water and then emptied the cistern. I heard her close her bedroom door. My grandmother closed hers a few minutes later, making as little noise as possible.
My brother was the total opposite. As soon as the movie ended, he got up from the sofa, making it scrape on the floor, and ran down the hall, not caring whether anyone was asleep. When his shadow dimmed the light that came in under our bedroom door I covered my face with my sheet, ready for the earthquake. The bunk’s metal frame shook as he climbed the ladder. Dozens of springs squeaked as they took his weight. Then the frame vibrated for a few minutes. The trembling got more intense as my brother’s breathing did. He groaned just before the movement stopped. Straightaway he began to snore.
Later it was Dad who was moving around in the bathroom. I heard him brushing his teeth and then opening his bedroom door with his key.
The house was silent. Except for the cistern’s dripping and my brother’s snores.
Only my sister hadn’t gone to bed yet. She was still in the living room.
I stayed in bed looking into nothingness, trying to hear any suggestion of movement in the living room. I listened so intently that I could hear the fireflies’ legs climbing the colored pencils inside the jar.
After my brother had changed positions a few times, I got out of bed and tiptoed down the hallway. Luckily the floor didn’t creak like it had with Mom. My eyesight adjusted to the dark, and the colored pilot lights on the television and video, those dead fireflies, were almost as bright as lightbulbs. Before going through the entrance to the main room, I closed my eyes, in case my sister had decided to take off her mask.