Beneath Ceaseless Skies #126

by Tobler, E. Catherine

  Issue #126 • July 25, 2013

  “Artificial Nocturne,” by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Last Rites for a Vagabond,” by Justin Howe

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  ARTIFICIAL NOCTURNE

  by E. Catherine Tobler

  Rosemary and mint drip from the impossibly long fingers of Maman Floss as she spreads cooling bat grease across my shoulder. I keep my eyes closed, her voice wrapping around me in a contralto so soothing I forget the constant pain that radiates from shoulder to fingertips.

  She tells me: If I had broken you earlier, chauve-souris, you would not feel such agony. I should not have taken you, but sometimes you see a thing and cannot resist. You can see what it should be and make it such. Her fingers slide down my arm, to the elbow where the bones have been separated. One bone is angled down, to support the silken, umber skin Maman Floss stretched into my wing. She holds me by the hand and stretches my wing until I whimper. Only then does she release me. In the right light—the gauzy light at the edge of the sodden marsh that spills above the steel train track—the edges of my wings flare with gold.

  Maman Floss was broken before she can remember, changed from what she had been born as to what she would become. Her fingers were opened, spread, and lengthened when young muscles and bones still allowed such ease of puzzle-making. Her legs were unknotted, pulled like the taffies she sometimes brings home from the city.

  Her great oblong head brushes the ceilings as she moves through her house and she bends through every doorway, honeyed curls catching at cobwebs. Her figure is perfect, retaining the shape of the hourglass that molded her throughout her youth. The fragments of that hourglass fill a jar that sits on the topmost shelf in the room I like least.

  When the body is older, she has told me, it becomes more difficult, less flexible. Flex-e-bull, she says, voice thick with an accent from over the ocean. She wishes every day that she could spare me the pain as she does others in her collection, but she cannot, so we go forward as we are.

  She tucks my winged arm against my side and I open my eyes, quivering after the rubdown. Gliding still exhausts me; my muscles are still developing to their form. Maman Floss twists the lid onto the jar of grease and wipes her pale fingers clean on her skirt as she crosses the room. She studies the casks and jars upon the shelves, the forms inside. Small hands press against the jar walls, palms traced with little lines that will never grow larger, grins warped by the ripple in the knee-high glass. Kage raps on his jar lid and Maman Floss goes to him, unscrews the lid and lets him pop his head out . She talks to him in a soothing coo and then it’s back into the jar he goes, content, still adapting his size to its glassy walls.

  Of the dwarves, Gordon is my favorite. Maybe it is because I’ve known him the longest. Maybe it is because he holds my hands and dries my face when I am done crying. He doesn’t tell me not to cry but lets me have a proper bawl, understanding the pain that comes from transformation. He’s twenty-nine years old but smaller than even me. I can reach the counters in the kitchen; he has to climb up the stepstool to perch on them, which he has done now, bringing me a pineapple.

  He sits beside me, parting the fruit with a knife well suited to his smaller hands, offering me a gold crescent when it breaks free with a wet slurp. Sweetness bursts through the rosemary and mint, obliterating it.

  * * *

  Maman’s father, Lucien Delaunay, requires the best things, even if it means making them himself. He often smells like paints and solvents from hours in his studio painting and creating. He paints our likenesses on broad sheets of crisp paper. Everyone in the house gives him a wide berth but for Maman Floss. He didn’t have to assemble his car, but we treat it as though he did. When the car isn’t being used, it rests under a cloth that reminds me of Maman’s dresses, dark and soft between my fingers.

  We don’t do many things together as a family, so when Lucien says we are going to the city, there is a small explosion of excitement in every room of the house, even from those who aren’t going. A trip into the city means we will return with unusual things: caramels, pomegranates, fresh coffee. Solomon whose face has been remade into the likeness of a fish, wants a train; Harriet who looks like she could fold her ears around her face to hide away, wishes for a yoyo. Maman Floss has Gordon make this list, as she cannot write so well with her long fingers.

  Last winter, Maman Floss made me a new square-shouldered cape and she drops this over me as the list grows, helping me arrange arms and wings beneath the hound’s-tooth fabric. Coconuts, ropes of garlic; Miriam wants a rocking horse but Lucien says no, absolutely no, because she is being made to tumble not ride, her legs and arms already loose, without joint. Gordon doesn’t add it to the list, though he skips a space, as though it is there.

  The grill of the car looks like long chrome teeth in a yawning mouth. Gordon said that once, but Lucien didn’t like it, so Gordon has never said it again. Still, I can’t stop thinking about it as the soft cloth is drawn back. The night-black of the fabric whispers away to reveal the metallic ruby curves and the thing I can never stop looking at, the small naked silver woman who perches at the apex of the hood. She is bent with the wind and a shiver runs through my whole body. I’m still looking at her when I crawl into the backseat. She is a bright speck through the windshield.

  I call her Birdie and she sees us safely to the city, even though after a while I cannot see her for the way Maman Floss leans into her father and he wraps his arm around her narrow shoulders. I watch the way his fingers stroke the long line of her neck and the way she stretches in response, a cat about to purr. Her head brushes the ceiling of the cab, honey curls rioting, and I am reminded of the way her mouth moved against his skin in the room where she keeps the fragments of the hourglass that once enclosed her. I feel carsick and look at Gordon who folds his list into triangles, back and forth, opened and closed, like a small blooming flower.

  Marshland abruptly gives way to the city, building after building of wonder. Houses, markets, workplaces spreading out in precise rows. Some windows are hidden behind wood shutters whose faded paints have begun to peel from too many scorching summers. Other glass has been fashioned into long rows of thin doors that reflect twisted iron balconies clinging to stucco and brick alike. The two-story balconies with their iron arches are my favorites. Many are hung with gold-trimmed flags: scarlet, grape, the blue of Maman’s Friday dress. These fluttering flags taught me my colors.

  I don’t go to the city often; my cape makes little sense in the summer and I cannot go in public without it. It hides my wings, which Maman says will alarm the common folk. They have never seen a wonder such as me, she says, and would hurt me in their excitement. Gordon is less troublesome, she also says; he is only small, often mistaken for a child. People look right past his ordinariness. But Maman Floss knows I love the city and so takes me in the cooler winter nights. It will be Mardi Gras soon, but already the city is illuminated.

  We park at the end of the long market. When Lucien sees that I’ve nose-printed the window, that I have left a round of fog from my gaping mouth, he clicks his tongue. He snaps his hand as if he means to hit me but only pulls his handkerchief from his coat pocket, to wipe all trace of me from the glass. Gordon clasps the edge of my cape and we trail after Maman Floss, quickly forgetting Lucien. He will find us or not, but either way, we are already in the market bathing in the scents and sounds.

  The market has its own language, a blend of Creole, English, Spanish, French. My first time here it was overwhelming, but now it’s a comfort, a music that rises and floats into the night where I imagine
lightning bugs suck it up and glow. The air coming off the river is cool tonight and it smells like mud, the kind I want to squish my toes into, but Gordon is already pulling me toward the heaps of produce. Maman Floss has a basket which we fill with coconuts (three), sausages (four links) and soft apricots (seven, but she gives me one now and I rub its soft hide against my cheek before biting into it). A group of nuns streams past us, black cloaks and white hats that seem to fly up onto the wind.

  The earthy scent of mud gives way to fruit and vegetables the deeper into the market we go, but even above that, there is something else. It’s not the boats that line the river docks but the long shadowed train on the tracks in front of them. It smells like a normal train, like oil and coal, but it smells like animals, too. Like lions to start, but then other things I’ve never smelled before. Things that smell like cloud and sky, and only when Maman Floss strokes her fingers down my nose do I realize that I’ve stopped walking and am staring.

  She can smell these things, too, because her majestic head turns that way as if she’s following my stare, but I can see the flare of her nose, the rise of her chest as she breathes in the air and knows something unusual has arrived. She continues down the row of vendors, ever closer to the train and its cargoes.

  Crates of apples and long strings of bananas lead us toward smaller stands of instruments and books, toys and trinkets. Maman Floss finds a palm-sized train and a yoyo, and there is a rocking horse with a brilliant blue saddle but we leave her there, rocking under the force of a five year old who tackles it with glee. Miriam’s horse, I think but do not say.

  We creep toward the train, basket filling with items as we go. I can tell that Maman Floss is distracted when she buys more apricots, when she doesn’t notice that I eat two more and pocket the stones, and I strain to see around her. I think at first that a long string of bananas are somehow sitting on top of the train, and how strange that is, and of course it would catch Maman’s attention, but it’s not bananas. People in the market shift, allowing the light to spill upward, and I easily recognize the line of a wing.

  The great bird sits atop the train, its back to the market. It is impossible to tell the color of the wings in the play of light and dark, but they are beautiful, perfectly folded one over the other to mimic the shape of a heart against its back. I have never seen a bird so big; nor likely has Maman Floss, who stops in her tracks. Gordon, watching a line of monkeys being led past on a leash, runs into Maman, and I reach out to keep him from falling.

  Scrolling text decorates the train’s engine, gold curling into red and blue. Jackson’s Unreal Circus, it says, with Mobile Marmalade scribbled below. I picture marmalade oozing from the train’s wheels but see instead a small kiosk set up with row upon row of gleaming jars. They are stacked gems in the night, catching all available light, turning it to orange, gold, crimson.

  Before I can ask if we can get some marmalade, Maman is moving that direction. It’s rare that we are allowed this treat too, but Gordon and I love marmalade spread on croissants, on baguette, on anything. We would eat it off our fingers—and have.

  The bird has eyes as golden as some of those marmalades. I belatedly realize this means the bird is watching me the way I watch it—the way I watch her. As I linger behind Maman Floss, hugging our full basket of purchases against my chest, my eyes are drawn upward to that large shadow which becomes less shadowy as she turns to watch us. It is with a soft cry I realize the bird has no bird’s face.

  She— Oh, her face is a human woman’s, as if she has been made the way I have been made, a girl turned into a flying thing, but I can tell she has not been. There are no arms, no legs. From the neck down, she is bird and bird alone but for that face. In this light, no longer blocked by the market stalls, her feathers glisten, seeming black but being red under that, blood trapped under ink.

  Maman Floss reaches back, a comforting hand sliding over my shoulder and then away. She murmurs, but it’s the marmalade lady she’s speaking with, buying a jar of lemon and what I hope is cherry. These come into the basket, a solid weight, but I can’t stop looking up at that bird. That beautiful bird.

  Lucien finds us eventually and we leave the market as we came, Maman and Lucien exploring the shops she hasn’t yet, me and Gordon trailing behind. I keep stopping, to look at the train and its bird. And strangely, that bird is watching me, head tilted as though she is listening to a song only she can hear. Her immense talons curl against the metal of the train and I am captivated in a way I never have been before.

  It’s Gordon’s small hand and whisper that gets me to look away. He pulls my cape hem, guiding me toward a column plastered with papers and posters. Lucien and Maman are haggling over the cost of grapefruits, so we are free to stare at the bulletins and to find amid them our own faces. Gordon’s hand strokes the likeness of my face, my spread bat wings. I last saw this image in Lucien’s studio, paint still gleaming wet. Now, there are words below.

  Winter evenings, it says in a careful hand, French Market.

  These posters are common in the market; people selling what they will, how they can. And I realize now that while Maman and Lucien might be talking about grapefruits, they look at me and Gordon and to the shop owner again, as though we are the tart round fruits in a bin, ready for inspection. But the shopkeeper says something Lucien doesn’t care for and then we are gone, scooped into his arms basket and all, carried up and out of the market, bundled back into his beautiful car, Birdie guiding us home.

  * * *

  Once home, I cannot stop thinking about two things: the bird and the poster. I am not sure which one disturbs me more. I don’t tell anyone, not even Gordon. He doesn’t speak to me of what we saw either, but there is still a conversation there, every time we look at each other. In his eyes I see the same thing that must linger in mine. Questions and hurts. Have we been made only to be sold?

  Of course we wondered what happened to the others that used to live in this house. People as curious as us, usually children but sometimes not, would come and go; Maman Floss said they came for her expertise, and after they got what they needed, they would return to whatever lives they had lived before. I could name them all, but I don’t, because I wonder now if Miriam and Solomon will someday add my name to that list. The Curious Who Used to Live With Maman.

  I could ask Maman, but I don’t do that, either. She and Lucien are busy in the coming days and spend time in their room with the door closed. When once I would have sought Maman out for comfort, I now stay as far as I can; wandering the property, watching the trains as they speed past, toward the city and away.

  While I wander the marsh and yard, through air that has a presence all its own, the plan begins to take shape in my head. The city is too far for me to reach on my own. I cannot walk there, nor glide all the way. My wings are not strong enough for flying and may never be, Maman Floss has told me; they are artificial, primarily for show, never meant to hold an entire body aloft no matter how skinny I stay. But I could reach the city on those trains, could glide my way to the top of a car and ride until I reached the market, the siren. There are things I want to know—things I know Maman will not tell me. If she would, surely she would have by now.

  A bird like the siren? I think of those wings, and the skies, and all she must have seen. All the cities and people, the twisting rivers, some maybe larger than even the Mississippi, and the roads, and where those roads go. What does the world look like from those high places?

  Gordon does not tell me no. Much the way he lets me cry, he doesn’t argue when I tell him I mean to go. He does tell me to be careful, that if I want to go to Mardi Gras I won’t be caught, and I very much want to enjoy the parades and spectacle, so I swear to be careful. The trains run like clockwork, he says. I can go and come back and no one will know, because also like clockwork are Maman and Lucien once that door is closed, once the lanterns are lit.

  Catching the train is like catching lightning. It’s fast and hot and stinks. From the roof of
Maman’s house, I ride an updraft of cool air and ride this west to the tracks but am unprepared for the speed of the train. I think it will be a simple thing to latch onto it—how the siren sat with her beautiful talons curled against her train!—but the train doesn’t care that I am trying to land. It zips past as if I am no more than a speck of moss blown up from the track. I may as well be.

  It’s the last coal car I fall into, hard, and I lay there stunned, watching the starry sky unfurl as we move away from the house. By the time we reach the city, I’ve gathered myself enough to realize I have no cape, no protection from common eyes. Before the train can completely slow, I lift my arms to catch the wind, to let it carry me out of the coal and toward flat rooftops.

  The wind has its own language. I do not yet know all of the words, but I know enough of them until I reach the edge of the last building. There is an unexpected updraft, the rush of a competing wind from the street, and it buoys me up before dropping me. I tumble into the cobbled street near the empty marmalade stand.

  For a little while, it’s quiet. The market is closed and the rumble of that far off train stays far off. If I listen close, there is the sound of the river, but that’s not what I came for. The circus train is still there. I push myself up from the ground, arms held close to my sides to hide my wings as I run to the tracks.

  West of the market and running parallel to the river, there is a triangular open space. Circus tents fill this space, striped and not, luminous in the dark. Shadowed figures move inside some while others are still. I can smell wild cats the closer I get and see that they are not caged but prowl the fence that encloses the entire circus. A lioness spies me, a regal head I know only from the one that decorates the wall in Lucien’s studio. The eyes that appraise me are not glass. They hold a hunger I don’t want to see. Even with the fence there, I run.

  She bolts alongside me. The fence line blurs between us, my arms and legs pumping. But I am a poor runner, my wings slowing me, and if this fence did not stand between my strides and hers, the lioness would be upon me. Her snarl makes me shriek and then I am airborne. The ground falls away and I seem to be flying but I am not. Hard talons curl over my shoulders, around my arms, mindful of my wings. I look up to see who I came for: the siren.