Every page, he frowned, dammit, he was so close.
Silver agreed. Not what did she do but who was she. Forget events. Who. Why. Take her to war.
Defiant, he stepped into her. Challenge her. Why is a challenge. Why did you flatten the fields around Weatherhead with fire?
Not fire, hail, she scoffed.
He refused to relent. You put me in the dungeon. Why?
She shrugged. You were caught in the grove. Anyway, I didn’t do that. I was away, begone, in yon idiotic place full of muzzle-flash and fatal geography.
No you weren’t, he insisted violently, you were there. In our old house.
Yes. You thirst for me, I see now. Love gives me the power of telepresence. I can be Here and There. I can be and be remembered. But I cannot be hurt. She pulled open her tunic. Beneath he saw her Randy Johnson jersey. She called it “chainmale”, which made them both laugh insanely, antagonice as they were in that moment, wary and watchful, because in that instant he and she, Both, knew how much he wanted to sink his hands in around under her armpits, feel this fabric pressing against his skin and hers, draw her to him, it being the only thing in the whole, whole world separating them. She was bleeding from her side.
“Remember those scoliosis tests at school?”
“What? Hurry—“ He peered over the top of the dressing room door.
“When they made you bend over in front of whomever that lady was—a doctor? And they’d check the curve of your spine?”
He nodded with not a little panic, but he couldn’t help shooting a glance at her trace-ready vertebrate poking out of her skin as she tugged off her sweater, interrupted only by the shut-jaw of her bra neatly bisecting her back. He caught her odor, potleaf and freshly shaved legs—“Your spine’s fine. I’ve bent you over plenty of times.”
She made a cooing, laughing sound and slid the jersey down over her red. “Why don’t they make these for girls?”
“Does it fit? Does it fit?” A clerk had wandered dangerously close.
“I hated those tests. I hated doing that,” her voice was crumble-muffled under the jersey’s collar as she worked it down over her face.
The clerk paused by their door. In a flash he seized her roughly, tucking her up into his arms, knee-backs in elbow crook, nape on the other, like the dressing room was the church, clerk the threshold, and their newlywed empire just beyond—the mall.
A hand cracked across his face. His emptiness snapped to. The ruler of Weatherhead narrowed her eyes at him: You suddenly seemed quite distant and far-pantsed.
He rubbed his cheek where she’d struck it. Were there skin there, it would’ve reddened. No—I don’t think I was actually. Bold as stupid, he reached out and tapped her chest. Where did you get this shirt?
She drew her duster tight over her bosom.
My wife had the same shirt. Where did you get it?
Venom weighed down her words. I was born with it, the way we are born with clapping hands, biting jaw, and—
Shut the fuck up for a second. No nonsense. He stood up and reared over her. Fantastic, she shrank back under his over-cast. What black magicks men possess, her face seemed to want to cry, but she could not. Where. Did. You. Get. That. Shirt.
Fury took her eyes down to her clenched fists on her knees, bent her jawline this way and that, until finally she answered, I’ve always had it. Maybe it was born out of my sweat? She caught his eye and smiled coldly. Fine. I found it, found it in a cave empires away from Weatherhead. That is my story of the giants made out of backbones and how I escaped from their clutches—I was too small to rape and too big to use as a Q-tip—
No. I bought it for you. World Series—
Violence became the fuck-sheen behind her eyes, I don’t want to hear you from you.
Shut up and just listen, Weatherhead. Do you know what that shirt means? She paled. Randy Johnson was a baseball player, a—a pitcher. Her ears turned red. A pitcher. He was a giant. My wife—she thought she could—best him in—battle. He’d bought it for her one day—the clerk, the security guard who thought they were fucking in the dressing room—All those men you fight in the circle—it’s this guy. He stabbed his finger into her heart.
Enough. He fell silent. She raised a thin finger. This dungeon—what is it like?
Taken aback, he stammered. It was an eye exposed to the elements. A stolen daughter’s eye, he called it. He’d been mere mote in it. Show me this eye. She flexed and unflexed her fingers.
He led her there. She stared at the eye for a long time, she knelt by it for a longer time, then she spoke weird, warding words that he couldn’t make out. Finally, she stood and dusted off her trousers. She had a thoughtful look. No, I didn’t put you here. Or this jailor-eye. But I’ll tell you what you saw in the grove since I mean more to you than I mean. She took his hand and drew him down a narrow street, away from the eye, away from the trembling, wolfen crowds, quivering with her victory. With an outcast’s grim glance back, she made sure they were alone, and then spoke:
With the moon I make red—red ink. Do you know ink? It’s the scream and laugh of a story—I mean the part that keeps it told. She saw he understood and continued, What you saw—it’s the ink for the story of Weatherhead. I write the history of the city with it. I use the red, I feed the city with it, because it’s easier to see at midnight. Black ink, of which there is no small abundance here, but I keep it hidden in the frowns and eye-darts of the people here—they don’t even know it!—black ink cannot be seen unless there is light. The same is the case with the reds, to a certain degree. I illuminate the margins with the light that you saw, far from the public suffering. If I did it in the city, who knows what they’d read in the inks in their mouths and eyes! Suspicions and talks of revolutions, probably.
He considered. There was talk of revolutions, her head on a pike. How had that happened, then? Was it him?
He felt again the wolf-like traces of near-death that terrible revelation puts into one’s side like splinters. She went on: What you can’t know is the thrill of the presence of a kind of third creature—in my blood. It might be a story—
He took a step towards her. Or a child?
She took a step back and scowled. Children are forbidden in Weatherhead. Every gutterpuncher and his brother knows that.
That’s your rule.
Children aren’t the howsit. It’s sharper than that. I make mother’s-blood because it keeps the story alive. I bleed for Weatherhead, bleed without a knife, unsuicided. It’s what we use here instead of that call-ender you told me about. The goodbye to the year pages. A year is just a why whispered in an ear anyway, see? As to the third creature, the grove is where I keep my inkwell, my sex. The grove is the source of the wood for my—what do you call them?—my “bats”, but it is also the place where I keep secret from all of Weatherhead its own well-spring. A city should never know the magicks that made it, so I keep it apart, keep it illusion and allusion. It’s where I write, my making-place. You should not have gone there.
He felt sad on a sudden, listening to her. Why do you look so sad, demoness?
The first time you tell a secret is also the last time, stranger.
He wanted so badly to take her hand. You made that sun for me there in that place.
I thought—it’d make it easier for you to read my bleeding—
In my country, I once heard, there were people, First Peoples—they were almost completely wiped out in wars— but I read once that the bleeding women were kept away from the rest of the tribe—the city—because they were too powerful, their magicks.
First peoples, she murmured, I wonder who the last people will be.
Us, prolly, he softly said. Intimate with torment, he made to leave her be.
She caught him at the end of the alley and blocked his path. Do don’t go. She looked down. Sometimes I wish that you’d remember her quiet, your dead-wifely-woman, relieved about something. Was she really so daunting? Did she daunt? Was she always such a bad thing about to
happen? An imminence and not an eminence?
He sighed and studied the top of the building behind her. She could daunt and dangle and take a strange form and make it square. She did everything louder than anyone else I’ve ever known, was the thing. She played music louder, she smoked louder, she didn’t laugh louder, but she wore dresses louder. I think, in the end, everyone in the world feared her. And how he judged his failure now, in Weatherhead, with these words, was the first time he’d told this secret, too.
You must’ve loved her very much.
He felt the slow, blue burn of her roving jails on him. You think a thing is not there—but it is. It’s as simple as that. I do.
You told me once or twice—I look like this wife. She drew a circle in the street’s sweat with her bat.
Now, a cracked and withered voice said inside his head, show her what she is. She’s brutal-fragile. The space between her ribs hungers for a blade’s unbetraying slip-not. I like what you’ve done with this city. So now will the other city, the one you just sacked, will it fare as wonderfully as Weatherhead?
She ignored his taunt and he knew something just then: she could raze and smash, but she could never rule the other cities. Why? He thought better of inciting her and didn’t almost ask. He had her by the ankle. Some things are billy-bat here, though, he elided, like, why are there dinosaurs in Weatherhead?
Maybe there was no other place for them to be extinct, she snapped.
Death’s just a rumor ‘round these parts, he spoke in a mocking drawl, her drawl.
She rolled her eyes. She held up her five fingers, anger now put legends into her bared teeth. She bent them towards her palm, all joints in. Even the rumor of rape is congenital. See my fuck-feral claws? With her chin she indicated the city outside. See the bite on the shoulder of this city? Do you think I don’t see the poem of your foot pressing on the back of my neck, pressing it down into the snow? You can drown, that way, oh, yes you can, down in the snow, chin-deep in freeze, or hung on a noose of flurries, back-throttle fucked by winter until the cold becomes part of your All, like a corpse. This explains why cold bodies are so erotic, I wager. Ask the hunters that wander outside of Weatherhead. For them there is nothing more rabid and seductive than the corpse freshly-drawn out of life and stretched out on beds—
Stop it, he muttered, she was mocking him now.
I don’t care about these other people here. Tell me, stranger who wrangles ghosts, she crossed her arms, tell me why I should pardon this city—unpunish them? You are the despot of a forgotten, foolish passion and for some reason, you bring your madness here and try to make me part of your fools’ parade. And to think I almost laid with you once. She stuck her tongue out and made a funny face. She took her leave of him, left him a cold-crawl of foreboding at his back.
⧜
Then there was that time when she tried to shoot him with his own gun.
She was bent over a crossword puzzle.
“What’s your favorite word?”
She put her arms around the page so he couldn’t see it. She hated help. “Aus-aus-cultation,” she told him in pieces, “but no one ever listens.”
“Huh?”
“Here: what’s a four letter word for crying fowl? It ends with U-C-K.”
They’d driven through so many puddles getting here—brake lights made them look like blood welling up out of the street. Maggie was rapt, hypnotized by the quiet ravings of a beefy, blonde young man sitting across from her. She regarded him with a sliver of her sight across the top of her crossword book. As his mother was ignoring him, reading a magazine dedicated to the ritual abuses and molestations of a host of invisible and false gods and goddesses, the focus of his calm, vein-opener was Maggie and Maggie alone. Almost as if he knew.
Like many of that age, he took huddle in the cuss: “I cut ‘im, that mothafuckah. Ain’t nobody gonna argue with that. Thing is, know, nobody ain’t askin’ me why ‘til now and thas on the order of the judge n’ all.” Maggie nodded imperceptibly. “S’why I’m here, cuz I try to kill that mothafuckah. N’ wasn’t outta anger or nothin’, thas what I tell the doc. I knews—I knew what was goan down. I even took tha time, so I could weigh the knife in each hand. Know, which fucker is heavier. Ting is, I doan mean the knife—I meanin’ the hand—which hand was heavier. Ain’t the knife thas the thing. Knife weighs the same no matter how it’s goin’ in between dem ribs. So’s the doc wants to know, what were you thinkin’ the whole time—‘bout takin’ up this knife n’ shit and goin’ ta fuck up that other fella, he’s always askin’ that shit—knife goin’ from hand ta the otha—whas in my mind—what the fuck am I thinkin’ ‘bout—killin’ the dude? He wants to know why’s the thang. Tryin’ ta dig in and find a reason, dig up reasons outta me, find out why I did it. I tried ta tell ‘im, it was like—it was like a goddamn little steel bird trapped in my hand, knowwhatI’msayin’? That knife—like a metal bird in my hand, stuck there? Know?”
She pursed her lips. It was if they were two captives alone comparing notes on the jailor’s treatment of them. “Naw, not a bird. A butterfly, maybe. I don’t like birds. They have flutter-byes that’re softer’n wings.”
The knife-boy scooted his chair closer to Maggie. His mother flung a glance over the top of her magazine. “But you knowwhatI’msayin’, right?” He’d leaned forward and was crushing the bill of his ball cap between his cage-hands.
“No,” she shot a glance to him, “yes. But—“ she cupped a hand to the side of her words, “—but for me it’s ink in the ends of my fingers.”
“Blood, you mean, little girl.”
“No.” She cleared her throat. “Yes.”
“Dat itch dere. Like somebody done put a glove thas alive over your skin an’ that shit wants to get out—right outta there! I couldn’t help it, know? That knife—it just felt like it was partame tryin’ to get out. Thas what he keeps askin’, he’ll ask your ass, too. Whatcher thinkin’ when it happens. You know what I was thinkin’, little girl? You know what I was thinkin’ the whole goddamn time, little girl, when I cut that fuck? It was only one thing. You know what it was?”
She had at least a decade on him. This ‘little girl’ made her smile. She lowered the paper slightly and narrowed her eyes. “What were you thinkin’?”
He met her solid. “The left hand.” He flicked a glance at her ugly knees. “Why you here?”
Without looking away, she patted her husband’s hand. “Love brought me here.”
The therapist, unfortunate in his moustache, the moustache that neither of them could take their eyes off of, touched the frame. Maggie blinked, as if she’d thought it was her hand for a moment, her hand suddenly so hairy and long—other hands weren’t allowed to touch those—
“There was an interesting study I read about several years ago. In this study, a group of psychologists and neurologists and the like set out to study how culture informs our perceptions.” He tapped the frame again with his finger. In the frame was a picture of a bored-looking cartoon fox or dog or something, leaning out of a window in a skyscraper, surrounded by city.
“Asian children answered overwhelmingly that this was a picture of a city, a city of foxes. European and American children answered overwhelmingly that this was a picture of a fox leaning out of a window. Interesting? Yes? There are so many factors that inform what we see that we’re barely aware of them. How we’re conditioned—taught is probably a better word—to understand what is around us informs how we interact with everything and everyone around us. Some people see the broader context. Others see a more specific meaning to things. It’s interesting, really, how interpretations differ even with something as simple as this. Psychotherapy works much the same way. My job is to help you discover the way that you see the world and then help you understand what you’re seeing and help you learn new ways to interpret it. I’m helping you get new eyes, maybe, yes, that’s a nice analogy. Sometimes the old ones get fogged or worn out, cracked, even, maybe, yes.” He looked back at the
m. “What do you think, Margaret? Of this picture?”
Gawd, when was the last time he heard anyone call her that? This guy was good, though, using the framing device of the—frames to try and get her to open up.
Maggie smiled prettily, almost apologetic. “I think,” she smoothed down her dress over her knees, “that it doesn’t matter at all either way. The most important thing is not How or What—but Why. Why is that there?” She pointed at the picture. “That’s way more important than the what or how—“
He felt uneasy beside her, suddenly, and wanted to leave. His hands felt empty and keyless and he felt like a godless sermon for forcing her to come here. What had she said, a warning he should’ve heeded, “That I’m debatable is the most flatterin’ thing I’ve ever gotten outta you.” Except that there really wasn’t any question to her nature, he thought, as he listened to the therapist’s long-winded, practiced, and diploma’ed attempt to show Margaret Mechaine the futility of her why-shaped dowsing for more questions to drown in. She wasn’t debatable in the least, though. She sat with a sickly sweet smile on her face as her minder tried to coax acquiescence out of her. He spoke of trusts, journeys inward, ways-we-see, expressions-of-selves; he spoke like an immobile god for whom prayer is inconvenience and sacrifice the manure for the future harvest of exorbitant hourly rates; yes, Margaret, the whys and how-comes are the seeds of all things, but it is not your place, little mortal woman, to wonder, but rather, to blunder, and I to your right hand, your red right hand, though I will never boast of it, will tell you all the different kinds of pill-shaped poisons we can put in your cup as you toast your empire, your empire that’ll march right with you to the very end, the Empire of Surrendered and Sundered Psyches, the Empire of the Lacking Daisy Witch.
“Do you have any Rorschachs,” she asked abruptly, ignoring his litany with shocking aplomb, “I like to look at those.”
He stared at her in wonder. Is it for this, he wondered, that I will die?
The doctor turned to him and asked to have an hour alone with her. He gladly acquiesced. He couldn’t take any more. He’d made a grave mistake trying to put Maggie Mechaine under the needle. He swore he heard the therapist cracking his knuckles as the door shut behind him. About half an hour later, a security guard escorted Maggie Mechaine out of the building.
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