He should have seen it coming, should have taken her recent darkening looks and bizarre questions more seriously. Before the divorce they’d fallen into the quick-fix trap, hoping a child would make everything better. But Shauna’s birth solidified and affirmed nothing. Instead, she became a wedge further dividing them. Whatever remnants of love Mary might have had for Guy were gathered up and given to their daughter. There wasn’t enough left for him.
Maybe there never had been. Whatever mask she’d worn in the beginning had shattered in the cries of their newborn baby. Her true face was harder, more brittle. And, apparently, she didn’t want to share the love, his and hers alike, for their daughter now that Guy was out of her life.
He should have seen the ultimate crack jagging its way towards him from the other side of the city. Mary’s recent questions seemed to serve no purpose other than posturing. What are you feeding her? Why aren’t you taking her outside more often? He would cast these aside with disdainful silence as he embraced his daughter on those too-infrequent weekends. When she asked if Shauna ever woke up with night terrors when she stayed with him, he lied and said no. At the most recent visit, she pointed to bruises on Shauna’s legs and arms and demanded an accounting for each, as if the bruises were a map of a more ominous story. Guy knew his we were playing horsey and she fell off my back and she ran into the doorjamb when I was chasing her and she’s a normal five-year-old with lots of energy, who bumps into stuff and falls, but always bounces back up sounded inadequate.
He should have acted sooner, but that meant getting a lawyer. Third-shift paychecks still barely covered the rent and electricity, especially after Shauna’s child support. In the silence of the apartment Guy focused on work, or slept, and tried not to miss his daughter. His world was shrinking, like ice melting in a whiskey glass, pressing him into a single point on the couch.
Then the letter came, and when he read it he raged through the apartment, crying, bellowing, smashing dishes and glasses and punching the walls. It came yesterday, only a day after his daughter had clambered back into her mother’s Camry and out of his arms for another two weeks. For her part, Mary had been civil, eyes downcast. She’d known then what was coming. Known it would be the last time his little girl came to visit her father. The letter lay open now, on the table beside the door. Full custody. Child endangerment. There were many more words in the court summons, but these four were the ones that made his eyes sting and fists clench.
The only good thing in his life was going to be taken from him. Even before Mary and the courts could prove anything, the letter made it clear he had lost Shauna. He would become a monster in his daughter’s eyes. How could he possibly live with that?
Sleep still weighed his lids as the world squeezed in on him once again as he left the apartment, drifting along the hall towards the back entrance. Melting. Almost gone and he didn’t have the energy to do anything about it but go to work, hope everything worked out and went back to the way it was. Every other weekend seemed like a dream compared to what was coming.
Guy absently twirled his key ring around one finger and stepped outside, squinting in the late afternoon sun. The building’s hush would dissipate soon when the other tenants of Blue Rose Estates returned home from their day jobs. Already the parking lot was partially filled with cars. He moved down the walk towards the mailboxes clustered together at the corner. His Jeep was parked three spots away, its top down. He’d been too tired after his shift to bother putting it up.
Halfway to his box, Guy saw translucent shadows dancing on the pavement, sunlit shapes like the jellyfish Shauna thought were so beautiful at the aquarium. So many trips they took, adventures to replace the lost comforts of family.
He looked up. No magic jellyfish above him, but Guy stared, openmouthed, at what appeared to be glass statues hovering forty feet above the parking lot. The afternoon sky burned a distorted blue through one of the figures—a full-sized impression of a woman in a business suit going through her purse, left foot slightly forward as if caught midstride. Another floated above the edge of the building, catching the sun. He had to squint to make out any details. An old woman, hunched over, sorting laundry? The lower portion of her leg was missing.
Farther down, a crystalline man, long coat blowing in some unfelt breeze, hovered above the mailboxes, key in his right hand. His left forearm gone past the elbow.
Guy shuffled forward, turned slowly, looking for the strings that must be holding these figures—these statues—aloft. No strings, no ropes, only the sharp lines of sun reflecting off glass. Up the slope of the parking lot, a mother with two children in hand, fingers eternally melded together and scurrying toward a minivan waiting forty feet below them.
Glassy shadows drifted over him. Above the building the old-woman statue swayed in a breeze he did not feel. He thought of his daughter looking out of her bedroom window across town, seeing these people made of glass, floating . . .
What’s happening here?
The door to the building opened. Something scuttled outside, righted itself. It stood no higher than Guy’s waist. Skin the color of wet pond muck. Writhing Medusa appendages crowned its head, gnarled and distended like old tree roots. Face puffy, featureless except for button-like eyes and a long, wide mouth. It smiled obscenely, each pointed tooth fitting together like a trap.
Then it laughed, a sound between hyena and madness. Teeth clicked, spider arms reaching out for him along the walkway.
Guy didn’t know what to do. His pulse galloped. The creature’s long arms lifted skyward. It opened its mouth wide and loosed a stream of gibberish, hard clucks, consonants.
Something changed in the sky. Guy looked up, and the statues plummeted down.
He jumped to the pavement and rolled under an SUV parked next to his Jeep. Glass shattered on blacktop and car roofs. When the woman with the purse landed next to him, Guy covered his face. Instead of a hailstorm of shards, he felt a molasses-thick splatter against his arms. He pulled his hands away—blood, bright red, its odor thick and pungent. Another statue shattered, the sound echoing in his head. Like the others, a red explosion.
Blood ran downhill, under the car. There was too much. Guy slipped sideways in the flow, the ground slick as he moved to the opposite side of the SUV. He knocked into the wheel well of his Jeep, struggled to his feet. A red tide under his sneakers. Guy wiped his eyes and frantically looked around the parking lot. Cars dented, stained.
A flash of movement at the side of his building. The creature scuttled along the facade like a tick, then jumped to the street corner. It crossed the road, scaled the side of the building across the way.
There were others, now. Some crawled the buildings, others gathered over broken statues, scooping the jagged remnants into their mouths.
Guy thought only that he had to get to Shauna. Thinking anything else would send him further into madness.
I promise, sweetie . . .
The interior of the Jeep was wet and pulpy in spots, as if smashed with dozens of tomatoes. He slid into the front seat. The keys were still in his hand, slick with the statues’ blood. Fingers slipped and fumbled until the right key finally turned the ignition. The engine roared to life.
Something dark scuttled behind the Jeep. Guy was tempted to back over it, but instead shifted into Drive and rolled up the curb onto the blood-wetted grass. Creatures scaled the buildings in his peripheral vision, but he stared ahead, pressing the accelerator. Rear tires spun across the lawn until they found pavement.
He felt in his pocket for the cell phone. Not there.
He hit the dashboard. “Shit, shit, shit!” White noise from the radio’s speakers.
One hundred yards ahead, one of the things waited, blocking access to the main road. Each arm was an elongated appendage, reaching across the width of the street. No going around. It screamed more nonsense as he approached. Guy pressed the accelerator.
The creature met the Jeep’s grille and burst apart as if filled with sawdust. A dusty cloud smeared the windshield, Guy’s eyes, coating the Jeep’s bloody seats. He turned sharply onto the main road. Tires chirped and the rear fishtailed.
Driving down Route 146 now, towards the center of the city. Most of the dust from the thing blew off the windshield, sticking in smeared patches of blood. He didn’t dare use the wipers.
Cars and the occasional truck were stalled between lanes, broken and discarded. Obsolete toys. A cracked utility pole was a dead arm bent over a Honda. Above, everything glittered, the former drivers sparkling in the sun, swaying from their invisible tethers.
Guy veered around each vehicle, scraping past the top of the fallen pole. Each time he slowed, the engine shook, sputtering as if to dislodge more sawdust from its throat.
He screamed. Staccato bursts of fear and frustration.
A mile down the road he noticed the clump of wet dust on the passenger seat. The puddle of blood was gone, soaked up like spilled oil. The clump beat and writhed, a malformed heart. Guy looked away, swerved past a milk truck lying on its side.
No one left alive—only life-sized glass figurines hanging above the world. He didn’t count the scuttling, babbling creatures moving along past the deserted gas station pumps and the Irish bar with its peeling red and green paint. These things weren’t alive. They weren’t real.
A tiny arm stretched from the growing lump of putty beside him, then another. Guy didn’t notice. The ramp to Interstate 290 was a clogged artery of ruined machines, the air above a mass of glittering bodies. Glass arms reached for steering wheels lost far below in a miasma of twisted metal and steaming radiators.
The Jeep bucked and choked when Guy slowed. He pressed the accelerator too hard, veered left onto the last side street before the ramp. Red lights illuminated the dashboard, the Jeep stalled.
When he reached for the key, something grabbed his arm. Twin appendages, reaching from the passenger seat. Talons squeezed. A head emerged from the lump of putty, its features riddled with pox-like bumps and craters. A rip in the doughy face, wider, a mouth, crying like a foghorn.
Guy opened the driver’s door and dragged his passenger across the seat. It did not let go until he slammed the door on its thinning membranous arms. Its mouth opened wider, loosing a louder rendition of the foghorn.
He had stalled underneath the highway overpass. Above him creatures flittered across the ironworks. Wasps in the eaves of this nightmare landscape.
The driver-side door opened.
Guy ran, a dulled arrow aiming in the direction he hoped was Mary’s house.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry. It was just an accident. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
They silently watched TV. Shauna left her seat and climbed into Guy’s lap. His heart broke with relief. She’d taught him that there were many kinds of heartbreak.
“Can they talk in real life?” Shauna said. She had red hair, cinnamon freckles of a doll framing curious green eyes.
“What, those things?” he asked, nodding towards the television. On the screen an octopus spewed a cloud of ink to escape a predator. “No, honey. Only people can talk.”
“But they talk to me in my dreams.”
Guy laughed at her pixie voice, her matter-of-fact delivery. She was back to herself. “Well, what do Ollie the Octopus and his friends say?”
“I don’t know. I forget when I wake up. I think they say your name sometimes.”
“Dreams are like that, kiddo.”
Shauna nodded and rubbed her chin, as if pondering a deep truth. They sat and watched the end of the Discovery Channel’s ocean special. She’d be going back to her mother’s in less than an hour. Their waning time together was always the most awkward. In this last hour loomed two weeks of separation which hung over Guy like a death sentence.
Shauna grabbed the remote, jumped off Guy’s lap, and shut off the TV.
“You’ll never leave me, will you?” She put her arms behind her back and rocked on her heels in front of him.
“Whoa, where did that question come from?”
“I heard Momma telling Auntie Pey you might go away.”
He breathed in slowly, let the air out, and did not allow anger to ruin this final hour together before Mary picked her up. You might go away. How could he answer her? He wanted to have her all the time.
Shauna absently rubbed her arm and he thought maybe everyone would be better off if he left. But moving to Rhode Island could be the “fresh start” they all needed. Maybe they could work out summer visitation, or monthly. Something better than having his daughter just across the city and only being able to see her once every goddamn two weekends.
“I won’t leave you, Shauna.” Blood rushed to his face.
She jumped onto his lap and gave a hug that made him want to cry.
“You promise, Daddy?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die, stab a pointy stick in my eye. I promise, sweetie.”
“Good.”
Block after block, under legions of glass swaying in the dying light.
Creatures swarmed over taxis and storefronts and newsstands and street signs and baby carriages, over fallen bicycles with empty seats and spinning wheels.
Block after block.
Guy ran—numbed to a single purpose.
I promised . . .
Glass exploded behind him. Creatures clacked and clicked and jabbered their horrible language as he passed. Always, they moved aside but never approached.
He rested momentarily at the crest of a hill on Lincoln Street (Almost there, Shauna.) and looked back. The road spilled into an open, glass-shadowed square a half mile away in the center of the city. Something dark spread itself across the intersection and over the courthouse steps. Like the thing on his passenger seat but much, much bigger. A mound of gray flesh, details indistinct across the distance. It rose and fell like a disembodied lung. When a wide swath opened into a mouth, a long, mournful wail drifted up the hill. Long rapier arms stretched and gathered a dozen glass people from the sky. They drifted, slowly, into the maw. The line of the mouth sealed up again.
Guy turned and ran.
Up the long incline of Burncoat Street, then right after the high school, the second left, his ex-wife’s two-family home. Statues floated above the pointed roof. Guy did not look but ran through their kaleidoscopic shadows. The front door wasn’t locked.
He climbed the stairs to the second-floor apartment.
“Shauna!”
In the living room, furniture lay askew, pushed against walls. White curtains fluttered around open bay windows. Sitting in the middle of the room was his daughter with a mass of broken crayons and coloring books.
Shauna was crying and shouting, “Leave me alone!”
“It’s okay, sweetie, I’m here. It’ll be okay . . . ” Guy picked her limp, whimpering form off the floor and wrapped himself around her, held her close, felt the warmth of her face against his neck and wet tears under his collar.
“I . . . ” he said, but couldn’t find the words. He looked around the room, hoping Mary would walk in to see them like this, wiping her hands on that dish towel she always seemed to carry once upon a time.
“Where’s Mommy?” Shauna whispered. Guy already knew the answer, from the red-streaked glass hand on the floor and crystalline figure bumping lightly against the window frame outside. He couldn’t see the face, but it was her. He wondered what expression of hers was now frozen forever in glass. Forever, or until she shattered on the ground below.
Something dark scurried outside the window. Guy stepped back, held Shauna closer. He tried to take a second step but could not.
His daughter breathed in suddenly, a sound of surprise. Guy felt it too: cold, tingling in h
is legs, rising like mercury. They would turn into glass just like everyone else.
Shauna whispered, “Please don’t—”
“I promise I won’t ever leave you . . . ”
They stood in the center of the room. Guy’s eyes were closed and he imagined himself and his daughter as a merged statue, together forever. They would float above their former home then finally drift away from everyone else’s reach.
Mise en Abyme
Gordon White
Most stories are linear, moving from one beginning to a single ending. But others, more rare, aspire to function in closed systems. In places where cycles are locked in an eternal now. Wheels within wheels and the paradox of endless images of the mirrors in the mirrors are metaphors for this cyclic and most likely doomed pattern of existence. In Gordon White’s ambitious tale of the familiar totalitarian society, he examines the extremes of love and power through the eyes of two surprisingly perceptive dictators.
After a year of marriage, I told my wife that I was going to write this story and call it “Mise en Abyme”, which means “Placed into Abyss”. Of course, if she’d told me not to, I wouldn’t have, because I would do, or not do, anything for her. But she only said that there wasn’t a need, that what has happened, has happened, and what will come, will come.
We had been discussing, in a general sense, the problem of having children, and she told me that when she was a little girl, she would sometimes wake to find the outline of an old woman sitting on the corner of her bed. Neither her mother nor her father believed her, but through half-open eyes she could see the pale skin and hair. She felt the mattress move under the woman’s weight. In her room, a mirror stood beside the closet and another hung on the wall, and my wife very clearly remembered how the visitor’s reflection, and the reflection of her reflection, curved away into a seemingly infinite bow.
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