by Rich Horton
Sylvine shook her head sharply, then touched the spectacles, eyes squinting. “They’re just out of focus.”
“Good.” Sprokly nodded. “You’re not ready for that yet.”
“But what’s it all mean?”
“Inscribed, not inherent.” Sprokly took hold of the woman’s fingers, found them trembling. “Where some see atoms and molecules, Grampser sees letters and words, which are far easier to work with. My family, they inscribed me with life.”
“Good God almighty!” Sylvine fumbled the spectacles off, nearly dropping them. Her lower lip trembled. Sprokly’s eyes widened; the girl looked about to cry.
“It takes some getting used to,” Sprokly allowed and put the spectacles on the dresser. “Even to me sometimes.”
“But it’s not possible.” Sylvine slowly shook her head. “Unless everything Science teaches us is wrong.”
“Does Science teach there’s only one way to do a thing?” Sprokly smiled. When Sylvine’s mouth opened and nothing came out she giggled. A giddy thrill pulsed through her. She had done it. Just like Billy, she had shared a secret with an outsider.
Sylvine rose abruptly, nearly toppling Sprokly off the bed. Whirling, she grabbed Sprokly up in a great hug. “Your secrets are safe with me.”
“We’re uh, friends now?” Sprokly asked.
“Absolutely.”
“We better get to bed then,” Sprokly managed, unsure what else to say. “The bathroom is down the hall. You can change there if you want.”
“Amazing. Absolutely amazing.” Sylvine went to her suitcase. She set it on the table Sprokly had cleared and then clicked open the locks. “But the words, what do they say?”
“Maybe Billy will teach you.” Sprokly grinned and searched out her pajamas from under the pillow. She’d given her new friend enough for one night. Some things took quite a bit more explaining. “After you’re married, of course.”
“Married.” Sylvine frowned and looked at Sprokly as if she’d grown a horned toad head. With a short, nervous laugh Sylvine slipped out.
Sprokly stared at the door. Sylvine’s answer somehow reminded Sprokly of Grampser—a single word that didn’t quite mean what it should. She covered her confusion by hurrying into her own pink and yellow striped pajamas.
Should she run and ask Billy about it? No, he and Pa had taken their argument to the kitchen now. Their voices, though muted, reminded Sprokly of the sharp rasps of a tin roof in a dust storm.
Sprokly climbed into bed. The door creaked softly as Sylvine returned. Sprokly pretended sleep, listened to the padding of flesh on carpet, felt the bed give as Sylvine slipped beneath the covers.
Distant thunder growled. As the lights flickered and wound down, Sprokly glanced out the window. Nothing but night. Then lightning flashed, illuminating the arcane symbols and letters threaded within the curtains. Could Sylvine see them?
“Sounds like a storm,” Sylvine whispered.
“A big one,” Sprokly murmured, and rolled onto her side away from the real woman.
* * * *
A claw gently scratched at Sprokly’s cheek. She opened her eyes, stared into two glowing red beads that gazed sharply back.
“He needs you, girl,” the horned toad squeaked. “Needs you right now, by golly.”
“Thank you,” Sprokly whispered. She was about to jump out of bed when she became aware of the sloping mattress, the strange warmth of the woman beside her. Carefully then, Sprokly eased from beneath the covers.
Dark as the inside of a blind man’s skull, she decided, fumbling, searching out her boots and clothes as quietly as she could.
“Sprokly?” Sylvine’s voice sounded heavy with sleep. “Something wrong?”
“Call of Nature.” Sprokly couldn’t resist a grin. Dressing quickly, the last thing she did before leaving the room was pick up the horned toad. The rest of the house remained just as dark, just as quiet, until thunder pealed across the sky almost making her jump. She sat down on the front porch steps to put on her boots, placing the horned toad beside her. “Where is he?”
“Down by the river,” it replied. “He wants you to bring the engraver.”
“The engraver?” Sprokly stared at the creature. “What on earth for?”
The horned toad puffed itself and lurched, a gesture that came off amazingly like a human shrug. “Engraving?”
“Just so,” Sprokly chuckled. The engraver was one of many devices Grampser had invented to help with the construction of various mechanical entities, herself included. It allowed one to etch the arcane symbols and letters, the Inscribed Meaning that Grampser built into the Universe and so gave life to his creations.
She hurried to the workshop and retrieved the device. It wasn’t particularly heavy, but rather bulky, a boxy thing with several trays and pulley-operated arms, each with a different sized stylus. The darkness didn’t help, forcing Sprokly to pick and choose her way by lightning flashes.
Rain started as she stumbled along the path to the river. Sprokly topped the final rise where the chaparral gave way to sand, and halted.
“Grampser!” she shouted. He stood atop the wooden frame of the old windmill. Rain lashed at him as the wind picked up. Too dark to see more, but Sprokly could feel a tingling on her skin, the air charged and willful like a young stallion.
“Take your time, girl,” Grampser shouted and bent to adjust a glittering contraption. Sand clutching her ankles, Sprokly surged forward.
“Hey, watch it!” a voice squeaked.
“Oh!” The next flash showed the horned toads massed around Grampser’s tower. “Sorry.”
“Big foot,” the horned toad rasped.
Sprokly ignored the creature and hurried on. Thunder slammed across the sky and the clouds opened up. Wind slapped her. The tower top sparkled in the lightning, hazing the hunched shape of her grandfather in ghostly silver lettering. Cogs by the thousands, more than Sprokly had ever seen.
“Just set it on the ground, girl.” Grampser shouted. “Damn it, there ain’t no hurry at all!”
“Yes sir.” Sprokly clambered up the first three steps of a rickety wooden ladder to hand the engraver up. Grampser snatched it out of her hands so quickly she almost lost her balance.
“You’re clumsy as a goat with boxing gloves, and blind as a bat with its head in the sand,” Grampser snarled. “Besides, you haven’t got a clue what to do with this thing.” He latched hold of her arm and dragged her onto the platform.
Sprokly knew what he meant; her young fingers and young eyes were better than his. Before she could answer, his next words drowned beneath a roar like the mother of all express trains. She glimpsed the funnel outlined in jagged yellow flashes as the tornado descended.
Clutching the tower against the wind, she crawled to the engraver. Grampser rose, staggering beside her, hands reaching for a crank that Sprokly recognized from Ma’s old washing machine.
The cogs hummed beneath the storm, and, with a slowly increasing speed began to turn. Even with the wind, Sprokly felt the wash of their spinning as they picked up speed.
“It’ll never work, girl,” Grampser cackled. “Never in a million years! Hee, hee, hee!”
The next flash lit the whole world. The towering tornado swirled black and silver, mesquite trees flung like tumbleweeds, sand and rain mixed together, blasting Sprokly’s face. Another flash—words replaced the world.
Hebrew words, ancient Babylonian, hieroglyphics along with jagged sizzling symbols that made her eyes hurt and her brain throb.
Wind is Life! Storm is life! How good to shred the trees. The delicious sweetness of swirling sand. To roar and dance with the river. Live and die in the cloud’s eyes! The tornado’s very being, its savage joy threatened to fill her up until Sprokly closed her eyes. Swirling pictograms, which were somehow horned toads, glowed beneath her eyelids as they cartwheeled into the sky.
The tower shuddered as the tornado neared. Sprokly tangled her legs in the flooring struts to hold on. She scrib
bled for all her life. Words washed over her, through her, and down, smaller and smaller, etched upon a little glass lozenge Grampser had locked into the engraver. She bit her lip, clinging to the device with one hand, working the levers that inscribed the tornado’s consciousness into the glass.
The tower rocked wildly, tilting, then with amazing slowness toppled. Lightning flashed across Grampser’s face, and she was never certain whether she heard, or read the letters on his lips.
“Aw shit!” Which came as close to saying what he meant, as she’d ever heard. Sand and water and wind slammed against her until the world of words vanished into blackness.
* * * *
Her hand hurt. Sprokly opened her eyes and saw red. Focusing, she stared into the rising dawn. A cloudless sky brightened to a rosy blue. Sprokly squinted and a shadowy figure eclipsed the sun.
“Girl,” Grampser reached out and shook her. “You still with us?” He pulled Sprokly gently into a sitting position. “Everything broken?”
“I’m all right.” Sprokly looked down at herself to be sure. Enough sand clung to her wet clothes to start a small garden. Nothing else seemed amiss. “Except maybe my hand.” She held it out for Grampser to inspect. “I can’t open my fingers.”
“Couldn’t be some strut or joint damage.” Grampser took her fingers and gently folded them back. “Now that don’t beat all,” he breathed.
For there, centered in Sprokly’s palm, raising more than a few splinters in the finely inscribed wood and lodged beneath the filigreed metal that formed her heart line, lay the glass lozenge, its surface cloudy with tiny letters.
“I must have grabbed it when we fell.” She smiled. Grampser beamed down at her, weathered face split from ear to ear.
“That just don’t beat all,” he said again and pulled her to her feet. They stood there, grinning at each other, just grinning to beat the band, the dawn a velvet silence around them.
“But, uh, what’s it for?” Sprokly finally found the presence of mind to ask.
Grampser slowly worked the lozenge free of her damaged palm. He held it up to the sun and studied it.
“It sure as hell ain’t for your ma.” Grampser pulled out a hanky, wrapped up the lozenge, and carefully stowed it away in the pocket of his overalls. He took her hand and gently pressed the splinters into place. “Might as well stand here all day.”
“Surely,” Sprokly agreed. Together they started past the fallen windmill and up the trail.
“Storm is Life,” someone cooed in the high grass. “Wind is Life.”
Grampser looked up sharply. “Tarnation!”
“I know that voice,” Sprokly said and hurriedly veered off the trail.
They found Sylvine, still in pajamas, sitting in the weeds. The woman’s hands lay wrapped around her knees, head lolling to the side. Her upturned but unfocused eyes stared at the sky.
“These can’t be yours.” Grampser growled and snatched the jeweler’s spectacles that dangled from Sylvine’s ear. The glare he turned on Sprokly nearly stopped the perpetual springs in her chest.
“I didn’t know she followed me,” Sprokly began. “I mean, I only wanted her to be my friend.”
Grampser’s shoulders sagged. The lines on his face deepened with his scowl. For the first time ever, Sprokly gazed into his darkened eyes and realized how truly old he’d become—old and hurt. He swallowed once, brought his hand to his mouth as if to cough but his voice rasped weak and frail. “See to your mess.”
He tossed his tuning spork at Sprokly’s feet, and then was gone. Sprokly knelt down and picked up the device with her good hand. She’d used one before but only in Grampser’s workshop, and never, ever on a real person.
“Storm is life,” Sylvine murmured as Sprokly spun the cogs and the morning light played over the woman’s face spelling those very words in prismatic script.
“Sylvine,” Sprokly put a firmness into her voice that she didn’t feel. “Sylvine Porter.”
“Twister!” Sylvine’s voice shrilled into a giggle. Sprokly reached out with her free hand to touch the ‘T’ that glowed on the woman’s cheek. The letter obediently moved to her fingertip. She kept it there, watched it grow larger as her hand moved away from Sylvine, back to the spork until she found the cogwheel that made it. Her thumb twisted the cog and the letter vanished.
Word by word, letter by letter, Sprokly removed every last trace of the storm. The sun rose higher while she worked. A string of drool trickled down Sylvine’s chin. Motionless, her skin glowing with a thin sheen of sweat, the real woman stared at the sky.
“Let’s see what we have now,” Sprokly murmured. Again she spun the spork’s cogwheels. New patterns, new words flickered over the Sylvine’s face.
“Sylvine wants,” the woman said. “Sylvine wants to know…everything!”
Sprokly’s arm ached from holding the spork steady for so long. Yet another ache grew within as she read the needs already inscribed in Sylvine Porter and the truth reared its ugly head: The chance meeting in the school cafeteria where Billy’d told too much about his family. Sylvine’s disbelief and disdain until Billy had shown her what lay under the Plymouth’s hood. Then all the schemes, right down to following Sprokly in hopes of stealing secrets.
Sylvine hungered for knowledge the way her brother did. She loved knowing things, knowing more than anybody. She loved that kind of power, but nothing and no one else, not even her own cold father—or Billy.
* * * *
“I don’t want this anymore.” Billy dropped his tuning spork into their mother’s lap. Ma tucked it into her apron pocket. The old woman didn’t rise, but opened her arms. It took a moment, until finally Billy stepped forward, bent to an awkward angle, and allowed Ma to embrace him with a tight squeeze.
“You can always come back for it,” Ma said.
“Not with her here.” Billy glared at Sprokly. “Hell no.”
“Damn it, Billy!” Sprokly jumped to her feet, fists clenched. Her eyes blurred, but she’d be damned if she’d let that stop her. “The storm filled Sylvine up. There was hardly any of her left. I fixed her best I could.”
“Just like Pa would have fixed her, or Grampser,” Billy shouted. “You did their dirty work for them.” He brushed at his eyes, turning his back, turning away from more than just a sister, Sprokly realized.
“She loved me,” Billy’s voice grated harsh in the summer sun. “And you killed that in her.” He started for the car, back ramrod straight, arms and legs stiff as boards.
Sprokly opened her mouth, started to speak, then let her jaw sag. The truth would only hurt him.
“Give him some time,” Ma said quietly, a hand touching Sprokly’s wrist, easing her back into the porch swing.
Billy stopped behind the vehicle, stared for a moment towards the paint-worn barn that was Grampser’s workshop. Sprokly followed his gaze. Was that the barest flicker of a curtained window down there? Billy’s fists clenched, he shook his head and got into the car where Sylvine waited.
Billy said something to Sylvine. The real woman ignored him. Billy spoke again, and even through the dull gleam of the windshield, Sprokly saw Sylvine’s idiot stare, blank as the inside of a blizzard. Her brother’s shoulders slumped and he started the car. The tires kicked up dust as the vehicle veered a circle and bumped along the dirt path.
“They gonna be all right?” Sprokly asked.
Ma smiled and squeezed Sprokly’s hand. Sprokly marveled at the strength of her mother’s grip. It was hard to realize the old woman had been bedridden only yesterday.
“The girl will be fine by the time she gets to school. Won’t remember us, of course. You did a pretty good job on her.” Ma paused for a sip of moon tea. “Billy’s heartbroken. First true love and all, but he’ll get over it.”
Sprokly nodded. They sat awhile longer, watching the horned toads play in the yard. “I guess I should get down to the workshop. Grampser and Pa will want help.”
“Stay a while yet.” Ma shifted in her sea
t and regarded Sprokly with a warm generous smile.
“Heartbroken,” Sprokly tested the word in her mouth. She thought of the arguments and stony silence during the last day, Billy’s final stare, cold as a Seven Year Norther. She knew what heartbroken meant now, from the inside out. Her vision blurred again but she forced a laugh. “That’s kind of like you, Ma. Your heart was broken too.”
Ma glanced down at her chest, at the small glass lozenge, all cloudy glowing gold, suspended on a string. The life and energy of the tornado inscribed within the old woman, had written the inherent heart problem away.
“Tarnation, Missy,” Ma rasped in gentle imitation of Grampser. “You ain’t learned nothing that won’t fix all these broken tickers?”
Sprokly frowned and thought for awhile. Looking up into Ma’s dark brown eyes, she grinned and took her hands.
“There’s a secret. The Secret of Broken Hearts is to make them strong. Toughen and test them so that whatever happens, they heal quick and a body can get on with life.”
“Now how would you do that, young lady?”
Sprokly turned her gaze to the cloud-smeared sunset. Finally, she laughed. “Storms.”
Ma leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “You make me proud, girl. Happy birthday!”
ON THE BLINDSIDE, by Sonya Taaffe
I’ll tell you all my secrets, but I lie about my past
So send me off to bed forevermore
—Tom Waits, “Tango Till They’re Sore”
The alley was full of late afternoon shadows, and the bricks were scattered with frost.
Stooping for a closer look, fingers hesitant over the cracked wall, she knelt among dead leaves and splintered plywood, the remains of fruit crates that late October rains and chills had gnawed on; stripped branches overhung the wall, out of reach and so brittle to the eye that they might snap under even the weight of the pale sunlight, the sky wind-polished to a fervent blue. Her eyes were beginning to cross, from staring. Newspaper rustled like the black-and-white ghosts of the leaves, and she felt colder inside than the dying wind.
Harder every time, to force her vision through: worse than staring a 3-D design into focus, Sam thought, and refused to blink. More like finding the trick to an optical illusion; pinning down the blind spot in her sight. Which eye do you see me with? Chion had asked her that, boy’s dauntless voice more than twenty years gone: thin, ragged as autumn, a glancing quick-copper ease in his movements as he circled her; and she, who knew the fairy tale, held still in sick terror of the needle stabs, blind darkness, blood. Behind him, a pair of slender figures put hands up to identical mouths and giggled as Sam whispered, shaking, Both… Within a week, she would not fear them, Mimiko-Remembrance and Mimiko-Regret, their white-peach faces like two halves of the same moon, angular bodies that interlocked like jigsaw when one leaned on the other or wrapped an arm around a skinny waist. Then, she had closed her eyes against their merciless laughter and only opened them—fear suddenly dissolved like honey in tea, alchemized comfort—when she heard that Chion had also begun, much more startled and much more wryly, to laugh.