Clockwork Phoenix 5

by Brennan, Marie

  It is not; all know this. Before an ecclesiastic court the claim will be needled and picked at, perhaps the length of rule cast in question. But the office itself will stand uncontested.

  Ystravet Dal, now only that—not the Finch nor conjoined to a statue of ice—stirs in Anjalin’s arms. Skin still ravaged and too close to bone, but that will change in time; that will heal.

  Looking up, Anjalin holds her wrist out to the intended. “Commander Anjalin Vihokrasi, representing Fallbright aubade, offers you greetings.”

  “Indresha Suleiha.” The betrothed touches a salt-damp wrist to Anjalin’s. “As the Finch of this monastery, I give you welcome.”

  * * *

  The rites proceed and conclude; by the end of it, Indresha and Ystravet are joined in matrimony, and the rest of the commanders give Indresha their courtesy—if some are more grudging than others, they know better than to show it. Dessert comes in the form of honeycombs glittering like citrines and the promise of sunlight long unseen, and cups of honey freshly sung into the color of new frost on seafoam.

  After, they gather in the apiary: the new Finch and their new wife, two Fallbright officers, a bewildered judge from Galetide. The hive smells of industry and ozone, underlaid with passion fruit and wisteria nectar. Workers go about their routine; hunters perch, stingers sheathed, and through their eyes the queen observes. A payload of insectoid attention.

  Anjalin doesn’t ask Sarasad if he played a part: without his help, Indresha couldn’t have achieved this. He bides at her side, impassive. Some of the bees alight on him, turning his shoulders to wintry slopes.

  “You will have what you want, Commander.” Ystravet sits straight, her hands at rest; if her cheeks are not yet flushed with health, there is more color in them than before, more clarity in her eyes. They turn to Indresha and Lisvade standing within the hive’s embrace, heads close together. Lisvade seems torn between fury and relief. “And so, I suppose, do those two.”

  “While you are, for the first time in decades, not dying. That is something, Revered, and Indresha surely did it for love of you.”

  “Did they?” Without the annihilating cold, Ystravet’s lips are deep bronze and thin, nearly disappearing into her expression. “They would have succeeded me, with full rights, in a handful of years. A part of me will always wonder: did Indresha get impatient? This way, of course, they can have Lisvade, too—now that I’m no longer oracle, I can reinstate my marriage with em. But perhaps I need to stop thinking as the Finch. The post that I was. The post I’d have died to keep. You, I expect, have no intention of changing.”

  Anjalin lets that pass. “Could Indresha be ousted?”

  “No. Even if this is brought before a court, their jury will be other oracles, and none of us likes choir interference in matters of succession. The lottery is sacrosanct.” Ystravet takes her cup of honey, dips a finger in, and gives an experimental lick. “It’s been awhile since I could taste anything properly. Being part statue kills your palate sure as anesthesia. Once, I would have said Indresha incapable of such a play, but earnest affection can be a formidable force, and they’ve always closely studied the bylaws of birds. They will do well as my successor.”

  The commander gazes into the honeyed depths of her flute, where residual music swirls like shifting cartography, plotting the change in national boundaries, reflecting victory and loss. “When I have what I want and my work there finished, perhaps my course will be amenable to a new direction. Until then—”

  “Until then you will not bend.” The former Finch lifts her cup to Anjalin. “Of all people, I won’t criticize. When I was younger, perhaps I strived as idealistically—but that was long ago. Shall we join them? It’s time.”

  Lisvade and Indresha stand hand in hand, waiting for their third. The ground ripples, sinusoid, monastic heart-map blooming through hive frost. A shift, a murmur, and the view brightens with spider bridges and flower-cities, where orchid temples and hydrangea libraries rise from porphyry fields: Therakesorn. Above that, the Song gleams absolute, ever-living, all-encompassing.

  Anjalin’s pulse quickens. Their privacy is at an end: a broadcast channel blooms for the new verses, the cast of fortune. The choirs watch.

  The Finch begins the Psalm of Verity, matching their voice to the Song as only an oracle may. It is schooled; it is practiced. Ystravet has taught her betrothed well, chiseling them for this post.

  Indresha’s voice rises and the Song speaks.

  Squeeze

  Rob Cameron

  Gone: two stolen “I messed with Texas” shot glasses, photos of us at your niece’s graduation, seashells you found in the middle of that parking lot in Great Neck, my empty Red Hot Chili Peppers CD cases, your panties under my bed. High on grief after your funeral, I took everything imbued with your essence and shattered it against the wall or burned it like witches at the stake while the smoke detector screeched in short bursts.

  I stopped speaking to people. In the morning I would dress myself, chin to chest, fumbling with buttons, head bowed like the lilies on your casket, and take the 7 train from Times Square to where you used to live in that ancient duplex on the corner of Cherry Avenue in Flushing, last stop. That’s where we had chilled on your landlord’s bleached porch swing with our feet up, drinking Red Stag whiskey in every kind of weather. That’s where, in your own quiet way, you had tried to prepare me for the inevitable.

  Since you weren’t there anymore, there was no reason to get off the train. So I’d wait for it to fill with bodies and ferry me back to Manhattan. Unable to move forward or go back, this became my life for maybe a hundred years (time moves differently on the 7). Passing under the lethean waters of the East River eroded my memory until I couldn’t remember your face or the smell of your hair. Terrified, I listened for your voice, but it was lost in the dull roar of rush hour.

  * * *

  One morning, as the train emerged at Vernon Boulevard in Queens, a stinging sensation struck the crown of my head, forcing my starving mind to aggressively adhere to the smallest, most perfect details which, while still of no interest to me, now could not be ignored.

  At Queensboro Plaza, light traveled broken paths through the scratched, stained window and became prismatic, oscillating streamers of blue, purple, and gold. Bruised tangerines scattered through space like cooling stars born from the bursting scarlet plastic bag of an elderly Chinese couple at Roosevelt, bloodying the air with their tart flavor. Squat graffitied rooftops were a fast-moving dream coming into focus while neck muscles tensed against the subtle pull of gravity as the train came to a full and complete stop at Junction Boulevard.

  The platform was crowded. Plump Ecuadorian children played soccer as their parents pressed shoulder to moist shoulder for position by my train car door, weighed down by toddlers, baby carriages, and carts. The doors shushed open and all of Queens flooded in, eager to escape the sharp briars of a New York summer. Everyone had an unhealthy metallic sheen to them, beaded with mini vernal pools. The sudden influx of heat and mass made my teeth ache with stomach-turning vertigo. As my vision doubled, a little ghost boy slipped under the turnstile and appeared on the train.

  The doors chimed, shushed together, and we moved. The MTA kept the cars cold enough to retard the ammonia-producing chemistry of so many bodies. The chilled spot I heard you’re supposed to feel around poltergeists didn’t even register.

  The ghost child blinked in and out of existence. Every time he reappeared, I had to remember him all over again, like catching the tail of a fleeing dream. At first I would be watching a square of light crinkle and color like tinfoil as it drifted through the car. Then a child would cry, and the light became the boy, going through people’s bags or sitting on old women’s laps.

  He pulled the pacifiers from beautiful sleeping brown babies and tried to lift them from their seats. He finger-painted messages from the dead into the grime on the window. Sometimes he used his face. He danced around the pole singing at the top of his lungs, which soun
ded like the screech of the train wheels going around a turn at incautious speed.

  It’s easier to imagine the ghosts of men than “ghost children.” The two words in juxtaposition cry out for a comma between them or a period, a division of ideas in the same way there should be a barrier between life and death. That lack of imagination is why people don’t see him.

  In the same way, it is difficult for a young child to understand death. So sometimes they do not die.

  Although calling it a child might be misleading. The ghost looked right at me, one eye glaring white, while the other was a hole, impossibly deep. But I was not afraid.

  I wondered why I could see him when nobody else could. Then I remembered near-death experiences can shift your perspective. Losing you had almost killed me.

  The ghost child climbed up next to some woman, knelt backward on the bench, and looked out the window while babbling. The woman had one arm. The other was gone at the elbow. I’d noticed her in the same way I noticed anyone on the subway. There was a process: awareness, speculation, judgment, and ignorance.

  Awareness: She was tall and brittle, skin made of a dark, distinctly nonnative graphite; her eyes were chips of tarnished bronze. I could tell she’d been more colorful once. Recent fossils show dinosaurs had feathers. There were imprints in the stone. Feathers meant color. She was like that—imprinted.

  Speculation: I imagined her homeland was once a happy place where everyone sang everything everywhere they went. It was Eden, it was Zamunda, it was The Lion King, but with Real People. Then disaster struck. She’d escaped on a boat that was over capacity. It tipped, and she swam to shore through the floating bodies of loved ones and strangers. She’d survived and now rode my 7 train to the last stop.

  Judgment: I didn’t like her because she would take up two seats; because she wasn’t big enough or crazy enough to deserve two seats; because I looked at her and thought, Bomber. “Nigeria is experiencing a rash—a rash!—of female bombers,” said some CNN breaking news update somewhere.

  Because she wasn’t you.

  Ignorance: After a while, she became background, and my eyes passed over her, flattening her like the ads for 1-800 immigrant legal services I didn’t need, surgical body hacks I couldn’t afford, and postcard-sized notes stuck in the seams of the subway maps, warning of a wrathful second coming of Jesus I didn’t believe in.

  I’m sure everybody noticed me in the same way.

  All of a sudden, the woman slid over and made room for the ghost child. He turned, sat, and took her hand, or where her ghost limb would have been. She squeezed her other fist, but you could imagine.

  A small sound escaped from both her and my opened lips, and her body, which had been a desert, briefly flooded with color. She looked through me, eyes glistening with tears that welled but did not fall, and before I could blink them away, my vision blurred, too.

  I realized we had been on the same commute now for years. She’d been squeezing her fist just like this every evening at exactly this time between Junction and Flushing. Of course she’d always been able see him. I wondered what else she had lost along with her arm. I wondered what else she could see. Maybe it was a trick of my peripheral vision, but for a moment she and the ghost child shared an unmistakable resemblance.

  I suddenly found that I’d walked through the crowded train and was standing in front of her.

  “I see him, too,” I said.

  “The boy?” she asked, her voice carving out each syllable with precision.

  “I thought I was the only one,” we said at the same time.

  “Is he your son?”

  I could tell she wanted to say yes. “I don’t know what he is.”

  We stood together in awkward silence, neither of us used to talking, while the train pulled into Flushing and emptied.

  “This is my stop,” she said, walking past me. Then she turned back at the door. “How sad is it that we need the dead to connect to the living?” Which is something you would have said.

  The ghost boy was gone, too, and I sat alone in my train car.

  But then it began to fill back up with people. Tomorrow we will talk again. If not tomorrow, then the next day. It will be another great adventure, like loving you, which was the same as facing death.

  A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death)

  A.C. Wise

  Instead of a suicide note, Dana’s lover left her a typewriter.

  Not an apology, not an explanation. Just a ream of blank pages and the waiting keys.

  When she closes her eyes, Dana sees Katrin falling. Fourteen floors. The rush of wind. Pavement and broken bits of sunlight casting shadows under the pedestrians below.

  She picks at the edges of the scene. Her fingertips hunt threads, any narrative she can hold on to in orderto make sense of the world without Katrin in it. The beauty of flight. The turned wing of a bird, arched open to the blue of the sky, sunlight streaming through each crystalline feather.

  Dana wipes at her face with the back of her hand and touches a single key. Lightning streams through her veins, and she gasps. There, just beneath the keys, is a pulse, a wingbeat, the drum of frantic bird’s heart spelling out words she can almost understand. Katrin is there, her story tucked into the blank pages waiting to be filled.

  If she wants a reason, a story to take the place of her sorrow, she’ll have to write her own.

  And so …

  Dana drove into the desert, leaving the hot, crowded city for the hot nothingness of sand and sun. She drove until the car ran out of gas. She walked, lugging Katrin’s typewriter, until her legs gave out.

  Where she stopped, a church made from the bones of a whale rose out of the sands. Open jaws whispered sanctuary. Dana crawled inside, and the ribs arched over her, sheltering her.

  She curled against the ivory while her body curled protectively around the typewriter. Whale bone and woman flesh, both enclosing a space of absence, the ghost Dana had come to pull from under her skin.

  It was there, typing in the desert, writing her lover’s suicide note, that Dana met the angel.

  * * *

  Sparrow: She’s a psychopomp carrying your lover’s soul. Her song tastes like the first moment you saw your lover in that little café. You almost choked on your coffee. That is love, the beginning seeded with the end. That is the sparrow’s song.

  * * *

  Gabrielle sets the typed page on the desk amidst the halo of empty bottles, empty coffee cups, and empty cigarette packs. Only the ashtray is full. She’s started looking at the objects, and the typewriter in their midst, as artifacts.

  She’s an archaeologist, peeling back the layers of Dana’s manuscript, trying to understand her. The pages pile ritually beside the typewriter each evening and vanish by morning. Dana never speaks of them, and Gabrielle has learned better than to ask. The secret of her lover lies in these pages; it’s up to her to unearth it.

  She doesn’t understand anything about Dana. She’s still trying to piece together the shape of her life from before Dana appeared, seemingly falling out of the sky to occupy a hole Gabrielle hadn’t realized was there. Until Dana filled it.

  The moment of impact: when Gabrielle looked up in the café and saw Dana standing in the door. Sunlight caught in her dyed-black hair. It washed the meaning from her tattoos, leaving only the impression of ink on skin. The weight of sorrow was palpable around her. It made Gabrielle catch her breath, almost choke on her coffee. From that moment, she wanted to understand Dana. She’s been trying ever since.

  Dana doesn’t make it easy on her. Every time Gabrielle looks, the story changes. Last time, Dana took the typewriter to a cliff and wrote on pages warped by the sea while a storm crackled along the horizon. The time before, it was a subterranean cave, and Dana wrote her lover’s death by the glow of luminescent mushrooms.

  Gabrielle asked about it only once, her chin nestled against Dana’s shoulder, her arm around Dana’s waist. “What are you writing?” she’d asked.

&nbs
p; “A ghost story.”

  “Like around a campfire?”

  “Sort of. Except it’s about the way absence reshapes the world around it. Like the impression left behind on the pillow when you lift your head.”

  At the sound of a key in the door, Gabrielle starts. She shifts the notebook to cover the pages, but the door never opens. Only her imagination, her guilt manifesting in an auditory hallucination. Dana never told Gabrielle she couldn’t read the pages, but she never invited her to read them, either.

  Gabrielle drains her wine and moves from the desk. She pours another glass, and one for Dana, leaving it on the counter. She loses herself in dinner preparation, not thinking about Dana, not thinking about the manuscript.

  Fingers brush the back of Gabrielle’s neck, and she jumps. Dana must have slipped in while Gabrielle wasn’t looking. Must have called Gabrielle’s name, and she didn’t hear. Gabrielle brings plates to the table. The untouched wineglass remains on the counter; her own is stained with imprints of her lipstick.

  As she eats, Gabrielle is careful not to ask about the manuscript. She doesn’t even glance toward the desk or the typewriter. The sun sets, and shadows creep over the litter of bottles and coffee cups. Gabrielle talks about the museum and the new wing they’re building. Once it’s done, the ornithology collection—Gabrielle’s collection—will fill the space.

  After dinner, Gabrielle does the dishes, sliding everything into the soapy water, keeping only her wineglass. She hears the rattle of pills in their little plastic container and tenses, waiting for a sharp comment: See? I’m taking my medicine like a good girl.

  But nothing comes. They aren’t going to fight. Gabrielle breathes out. Either the pills are working, or the manuscript is.