Abby put her crutches together, began to use them for support to lower herself to the ground beside the rug. Reflexively, I reached an arm to help her. Reflexively, she took it. She knelt beside me, peered at the rug. She ran her hand over the rows on the outside, still empty of birds. She cursed and pulled her hand away. She sucked her finger. “How’d you do this?” she asked me. “How long have you been working on it?”
“Just this evening,” I replied. “The last two-thirds of or so of it, anyway.” Brie exclaimed, “No way, Mak! There’re about two hundred birds here!”
“No,” said Abby. “More like thousands.”
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “Maybe if I finished it, added more birds to the empty rows—”
“Run your hand along the empty rows,” she told me. “Carefully.”
Brie’s face was a picture as he watched us. I did as Abby said. “Ow! I got a splinter!”
“Not a splinter,” Abby replied. She gave Brie a measuring stare. “You heard something, too, right?”
“Not exactly heard.” His eyes were only for the rug. “More like I felt it somehow.”
Abby began to hum. The metal birds resonated with the notes, vibrated back at her. She added a second tone, a third, more. The glass birds picked up the pitch and echoed it back, like when you wet your finger and run it along the edge of a crystal glass filled with water. Softly, Abby looped higher and higher tones into her humming. A tickle began in my ears. Yoplait leapt to his feet, bristling and hissing. Brie’s eyes went wide.
The empty edges of the rug were vibrating.
I clapped my hands over my ears. “Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop making fun of me!”
Abby hushed. She looked at me. “I’m not.”
“There’s nothing there! The birds aren’t singing! It’s just you! Or Brie!”
“Not me,” said Brie. “It’s like you put hundreds of invisible tuning forks on that thing!”
“It’s Abby’s voice, then. She’s always doing things like that.”
He shook his head. “It’s not coming from her. Though I dunno how she gets multiple notes like that. She was just finding their pitch. The pitch of whatever it is you put into that blanket thing.”
“Twenty-two birds and a handful of scrap. That’s all.”
Brie looked puzzled, but he didn’t contradict me. He just shrugged.
Yoplait poked his nose at the rug, then leapt backwards, his ears flattened and his fur bristling. Abby had her hand held over the rug, a look on her face that I couldn’t interpret. Was that what respect looked like? “How could I make something like this?” I asked.
Her voice weirdly calm, Abby replied, “I don’t even know what this is.”
“Am I learning to… you know, do the thing?” I didn’t want to talk family troubles in front of Brie. I switched to our sister tongue. “Am I learning to work Dad’s mojo?” Brie, hearing the unknown language, politely became very interested in the unfinished windup toys on my workbench.
In English, Abby replied, “I don’t know. Help me up.” I got her standing. She plopped herself down onto my only chair.
Brie was holding a limbless plastic doll. “What’d it feel like?” he asked. “Making that rug, I mean.” There was reverence in his voice.
I’d gone light-headed, as though I wasn’t exactly in my body. I deliberately stared at the doll, not at the rug on the floor between us. I was afraid that I’d look down and it’d be gone. I pointed at the doll and said, “Someday, I was going to build her a tin army tank, put her inside it with only her head sticking out. Make her a spiky helmet out of curls of tin.” I was trembling. Not with fear. I looked down. The rug was still there. The aluminum wings of some of the birds flickered in the slight flow of air through the space. They were set on thin springs I must have found from somewhere. Light twinkled off the shiny metal, stabbing into my eyes. I laughed, a short, hysterical bleat. “If I can do something like this with some yarn and patio lights, I’d better be careful when I make myself a sandwich!”
Making it had felt like the trance I went into when work was going well on one of my tinker toys. Except to the power of one thousand. It was like the difference between snorkeling and what it must feel like to dive, naked and gilled, right down to the bottom of the deepest, bluest ocean. No matter what fate might be rolling down upon me like a freight train, I would know that at least once in my life, I had made magic. It was lumpy, funny-coloured and misshapen magic, but it was whole, and bigger than the sum of its parts. It had come from me. It existed because of me. It made my heart full to look at it, to remember the divine trance that had come upon me and taken me out of myself as I wove it.
I was vibrating with excitement. I met Brie’s eyes. I said, “It felt like magic.”
He smiled uncertainly. “Because magic exists.”
“Don’t bullshit me. You know that it does. I’ve heard Soul Chain perform.”
He gave me an odd look. Abby made an unhappy sound, then said, “You do realize that Dad would hate that thing.”
Her words were like a blow to my solar plexus. “Fucking hell, Abby! I finally work one little piece of mojo, and all you can do is tear it down?”
Now my shaking was from fury. I held a hand up for her to stop for a sec. “Brie,” I growled, “Abby and I need some time alone.”
“Yeah, I get it. Should be turning in, anyway. Catch you later?”
I was so consumed with rage that it took me a second to realize that he’d asked me a question. “What? Oh, yeah, right. Later.”
“I can let myself out.” He padded over to the door. A second later, I heard the soft click of it shutting.
Abby got in first licks. “I’m sorry, but don’t you get it? Those birds are still singing, right now! Everything about that rug sets my teeth on edge. It shouldn’t be able to exist, shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Can’t you feel it? That thing is the entire opposite of jes’-grew! Dad would call it abomination.”
“Yuh rass. You just jealous.” Resentment was sour in my belly.
“Not a bit of it,” she snapped back. “You’ve used Dad’s mojo to make a thing that can’t be. And you’re proud of it.”
I stood there for a second, stunned. Then I went and got my jacket, shrugged into it. Abby watched me, perplexed. I came back. Bent and started rolling the rug up, trying to avoid the myriad pointy bits that I couldn’t see.
Abby yelled, “What the hell are you doing?”
It took me a couple of tries to pick the mass of the rug up. It was scratchy and smelled like wet wool. It weighed a ton. I wouldn’t be able to carry it for long. “I need you to give me a lift somewhere.”
“Where?”
“You’re right, OK? You’re fucking right.” The words wriggled like worms in my mouth. “So you gonna take me, or what?”
She sighed. “Oh, screw this. Screw you and your sulking.” She stood up. “Come on, then. I’ll take you.”
Yoplait scooted out the door with us. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d stayed behind when Brie left. He padded down the stairs alongside me, nearly tripping me a couple of times. “Open the front door, please, Abs.”
“Won’t the cat get out?”
“He has ways of getting back in. Just please open the bloody door.”
Abby squinted through the windshield at the slushy freezing rain that was splatting down onto Toronto’s nighttime streets. It was pretty. A part of me noticed that, even though shame and anger were making my blood roar in my ears. Streetlights and lit-up shop signs threw smudged light through the fat, wet flakes. The snow muffled the usual harsh city sounds, giving the whole thing an urban fairy landscape quality. But it made the roads a slippery bitch to drive on, and as it froze on the windshield, it made a thin scrim of obscuring ice. Abby flicked on the defogger to melt it. In the close quarters of the car, I could smell the lanolin in the wool of the carpet I’d made. I said, “Turn left here.” With an exasperated sigh, she did. I still hadn’t told her where I was going.
I didn’t trust myself to speak much to her right now.
We were nearly there. I unclipped my seat belt. Abby glanced over at the sound, but said nothing. I turned and wriggled over my headrest to the backseat. “Hey, watch it!” said Abby. “What the fuck, Maks? What’re you doing?”
The afghan hadn’t fit in the trunk, so I’d stuffed it into the backseat, where it took up most of the room. Couldn’t sit on it; I’d get a bird bite, or epoxy burn, or something. So I eased myself down into the tiny space left beside one door. I reached over and yanked up the lock on the opposite-side passenger door. Abby eeped and locked it again from the driver’s control pad. “You’re gonna make me crash the car!” she shouted. The car slewed about in the lane. Drivers leaned on their horns.
“Unlock the door. Right now.” A tsunami of anger washed over me again. I didn’t bother to tell her that we were only feet away from where I wanted her to take me.
“But—”
“Now, Abby, or I’ll fucking kick the window out!”
“All right! Just let me pull over!”
“By that dump bin over there.” The bin was one of those tall steel ones with hollow ridges at the side so a dump truck could pick it up.
Abby asked, “What’re you doing?”
“It won’t take long.”
Cursing a fiery mix of Trinidadian swear words and down-South imprecations, Abby pulled over and coasted till the car was just in front of the Dumpster. She stopped. The locks on the car doors thunked upwards. I leaned over to open the door. Something scratched my tummy. “Fuck!”
“Makeda, this is crazy!”
I shoved the door open. A curtain of cold rain blew in on me.
Abby snapped, “You’re getting water on my leather seats.”
I sat back down on the opposite side and pushed the afghan. Dang thing weighed a ton. Abby, obviously seething, watched me in the rearview mirror. I ended up putting my back against the door on my side and pushing the afghan out with my feet until all of it had flopped to the ground in the downpour. I kicked it out of the way of the door and crawled out beside it. Icy rain kettle-drummed on my skull. I leaned in through the open car door. Abby had twisted around to watch what I was doing. I said, “There. Since it’s such an abomination, I got rid of it. Happy now?”
Abby glared at me. “You think this makes me happy?”
“I don’t care. And I’m walking home.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Fine, then! Do what you want. And you know what? Don’t bother coming home at all any more. To our home, I mean. I don’t need the aggravation.”
“Suits me just fine.” I slammed the door shut. Abby didn’t try to stop me. Her wet tyres screamed as she pulled out into traffic and sped away.
The rug was too heavy for me to lift over my head and into the Dumpster, so I made do with rolling it underneath.
My thick hair was soaking up rain like a sponge. I brushed a hand over it. Damp snowy slush was already caking in my braids. It was going to be a miserable walk home, and for the second time today, too. I needed to find some other way of ending a fight than stalking away in high dudgeon. But tonight I’d made my exit strategy, so there was nothing to do but lie in it. I turned up my collar, stuck my wet hands in my pockets and got on with it.
The rain cried my tears for me. I wasn’t going to give the world the satisfaction.
Fucking Abby.
5
“Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?”
AH, HELL, dunno whom I thought I was kidding. I’d barely walked a block before I turned back in the direction of the Dumpster. My boots made a hollow thump on the pavement as I walked down the dark side street lined with construction lots. The rain thinned to a drizzle, then stopped. I stopped and squeezed my hair out.
Crap. My Super Soaker. I hadn’t brought one with me. It’d been raining buckets when I left, after all. The back of my exposed neck prickled.
I tried to reassure myself that usually haint attacks were few and far between, so maybe I’d seen the back of the fucker for a while. I tried not to think of the fact that it’d jumped me twice in the past couple of days. I made myself stop and turn in a deliberate circle, scanning the darkness around as best I could. Not so difficult, really; Toronto streetlights kept the city from ever being truly dark at night. Diamond patterns of tall chain-link fencing lined each side of the street. On the construction sites behind them loomed scaffolding and excavation machines, black on black against the darkness. As far as I could tell, there was nothing coming for me. Probably still too damp and drippy out for the haint’s liking. But I still felt like a mouse at a hawk convention. Looking over my shoulders every few seconds, I scuttled to the place where I’d left the rug. When I reached it, I bent and dragged it out from under the Dumpster. There must have been a puddle under there. The rug was a bit damp. I rerolled it and picked it up. I’d only walked a few steps before my arm and back muscles began to burn with the effort of carrying it. My fingers gave out and the rug dropped to the ground with a thump and a faint clinking of the metal and glass inside it. “Sorry,” I said to it. I hoped I hadn’t broken anything.
It was now the wee hours of the morning. I wasn’t going to get it home on foot. I contemplated lugging it onto the twenty-four-hour streetcar that ran along Queen Street. Not enough room. Someone would probably trip over it and damage it, or themselves. Besides, Queen Street was a good half mile away. I probably wouldn’t even be able to carry it that far. Taxi, then. Or thumbing a lift.
The street was busy enough, but I stood there in the damp for about an hour with my thumb out, and cars just kept zooming on by. It could have been usual Toronto caution around strangers, or the effects of Hitching While Black, or just the weirdness of a woman standing by the side of the road at three a.m. with a wet, rolled-up rug that looked as though it could have a body inside it. Whatever the reason, no one stopped. “I might have to leave you here after all,” I said to it, though the thought made my heart wrench. “Wouldn’t be the oddest thing that ever got dumped on this road.”
It lay there, looking suspicious.
I bent and began to unroll it. I wanted to have one more look at my wondrous creation. I might not find it there when I came back, and I might never be able to make the mojo work again. I jabbed my hand on it as I unrolled the last bit of it. I hissed with pain and held my hand up to the streetlight. It wasn’t the tiny pinprick the others had been; there was blood dripping from a stinging slice along the side of my palm. I sucked on the cut, then held my thumb out to an SUV that was coming along the highway. It zipped on by me. I sighed. “Guess I’d better get going,” I said to the rug. “I’m really sorry. Tomorrow I’ll see if someone in the building has a car. Maybe I can get a lift to come back for you.” If the donations people hadn’t picked it up by then.
The rug undulated. I swear every hair on my head stood up and saluted, especially when the rug raised itself into the air and stopped at just about knee height.
“You aren’t serious.” I watched it warily. It stayed where it was. I knelt and looked under it. Nothing there but air. It really was floating. I looked around. No one nearby. The high beams of an approaching car lit the rug up. The wings of the birds on the rug were whirring, so quickly they were a blur that Dopplered into a sidewise-figure-eight trick of the light.
I murmured, “Holy flying fuck and a bag of chips.” If the visible birds were flapping their wings, did that mean that the invisible ones were, too?
A flying carpet. My heart was thrumming so hard I could feel it pushing blood through my veins. Wow. I’d made a fucking flying carpet! “For real?” I asked it. It hovered silently. I was going to step onto it; I knew I was. “Can you lower yourself back to the ground? I don’t want to cut myself on the birds again.”
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The rug sank gently back down and hovered just above the pavement. It undulated invitingly. And I was catching my death out here, and I really needed some sleep. The rug was mine, and it wanted me to ride. Would it be able to carry my weight? I said to it, “Wait till I sit down, OK?” I stepped gingerly onto it. It wobbled under me like a loosely strung trampoline. I sat down so I wouldn’t fall down. How fast could it, hypothetically, go? What would people do if they saw a chick go zooming past on a flying carpet? Feeling like many kinds of fool, I took a deep breath and sat down. “So far, so good,” I said. “You can lift up again. Not too high! Let’s say, oh, twelve feet.” Did a flying carpet know how high twelve feet up was?
Gently as kissing your baby good night, the rug lifted into the air. By my guess, I was probably exactly twelve feet up. “Holy. Wow. Wow! Uh, let’s head home, OK? I mean, go that way.” I pointed. I felt like an idiot, giving driving instructions to a rug. But without even a lurch, it smoothly took off, heading in exactly the direction I’d asked it to. Could it see? Or did it read my mind or something? Did I want a rug knowing my innermost thoughts? And suppose I hadn’t known the route? Had I woven some kind of mojo GPS into the thing while I was being so brilliant? If I told it where I wanted to go, did it consult its inner MapQuest to find the way there? Oh, man. No wonder Abby was so smug all the time, if she had power like this flowing in her.
The rug was going at a fair clip, making the crisp spring air downright icy. I didn’t care. I laughed. If Dad had been there, I could have taken him on a magic carpet ride. Maybe Abs was wrong. Maybe Dad would have loved my creation.
There was a honking of horns and a screeching of tyres behind me, then that awful metallic crunching sound you never want to hear on a busy street full of cars. “Holy shit!” I went onto my knees and turned around to see what was happening.
A car had swerved out of control. Had I startled the driver? The car was still sliding diagonally across the road. As I watched, it crashed into a tree on the sidewalk and stopped, canted over onto its two left-side wheels. The crumpled hood popped open. The second car was in the slow lane, upside down and spinning giddily. Other vehicles were slewing to avoid it. I saw three more near-misses as I watched in horror. “Stop!” I yelled at the rug. “Put me down!” It ignored me. It turned onto Queen Street, and the accident scene shrunk out of view. With trembling hands, I took my phone out of my pocket. It took three tries before I was able to dial Emergency.
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