Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  I just very nearly set my hair on fire with the candle! And then, in putting myself to rights, scorched the ruffle on my tongue. Let this remind me to keep my attention on the task at hand, instead of alarming myself with figments.

  I should explain why I chose to make this dress out of paper and not a stouter substance. For while a fiery demise could not reasonably have been foreseen, a watery one would seem eminently likely, the mouth being a soggy sort of cotillion. But I will always choose paper when I can: it is an ideal conductive medium for spirits. I must have sensed this when, as a child, I had the habit of chewing into a cud corners torn from the pages of books.

  Only yesterday, on one of my rare visits to town, the Cheesehill librarian splattered me with dung as she drove by in her motorcar, for she is grown very grand now that she is married and her husband a wealthy man.

  On the whole, I am glad you are dead; every author should be dead. When I first understood that most of them are, I was a little relieved, for the idea that they might be paring their corns or nibbling almonds while their ghosts murmured prematurely in my ear seemed not only disorienting but a little unseemly. It is hard to yield oneself fully to communion with a person who somewhere may be singing in a saloon,

  There was a fiddler and he wore a wig,

  Wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy, weedle, weedle, weedle,

  He saved up his money and he bought a pig,

  Piggy piggy piggy piggy, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle.

  I see, sir, from the jut of your beard (I have your book propped open to your portrait), that you would not have sung such a song even when in the indiscreet condition that is life, but there is no telling what a man may do in the fullness of time and under the influence of spirits—alcoholic spirits, I mean—so it is very good that you are out of the way of temptation; I have seldom known the dead to sing. (That gives me quite a good idea, however—I must speak to our Mr. Lenore.)

  But my little dress is becoming sodden and no spirits come. Do not be angry, Mr. Melville, but I wonder why you do not come? One of the ladies of the Harmonial Sisterhood chats regularly with Genghis Khan, and marvels that he speaks such good English, but I would much rather speak to you.

  Sorrowfully,

  Miss Sybil Joines

  3. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  [Extended static, several words indistinct] . . . someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity, havoc, ruin! Make things right, set things straight, mend, amend, avert . . .

  No, no, no, I must not allow myself to get so excited. Now I shall have to start all over again, trumping up a world to catch her in! Only a moment ago, as it seems, I was hurrying down a familiar road. For all its spectral dogs and rabbits, it was, as near as I could make it, the way home. The girl was in my sights! And then my heart flared up white inside me, and road and ravine and crowding hills all blanched and raveled into filaments like the thread-thin hyphae of a fungus. The girl is gone. I am alone on a blank page.

  This is not a metaphor. The white is not sand, scorching the feet of the solitary figure trudging from left to right across the otherwise unblemished dune. The white is not snow, blanketing a battlefield in soft heaps, through which the occasional bayonet protrudes like the ascender of a buried d. The white is not ash—[static, several words indistinct]. The page is the one on which you are transcribing these words. It is white because the cellulose fibers of which it is made—in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, as I happen to know—are bleached during manufacture, in a process called brightening. Nothing supernatural about that. And yet its brightness and the brightness around me are the same brightness.

  What? Yes. I exist, at present, only on this page, since I exist, at present, only in these words. What? Yes. I say I, your right middle finger strikes a key, an inked hammer impresses a letter on the void, and—mirabile dictu—I am. [Extended pause, bad static, distant howling.]

  [Word or words indistinct: possibly “Am I?”]

  Are you receiving?

  “Are you receiving?” you type, because you are. (Surely you are!) Your starched collar saws delicately at your already sore chin as your body moves with your hands. Your hair whispers against the rim of the brass trumpet to which your ear is pressed, straining to hear the faint, crackly voice rising and falling in the bell. My voice, speaking from the land of the dead, though I am not dead, as I believe, as I have reason to believe. Perhaps not reason enough. Nonetheless, it is my working theory that I am not dead.

  “Not dead,” you agree. And I remember how it’s done.

  I say the words: “dirt road,” “ravine,” “small wooden bridge.” You take them down. On the page, a world springs up. It is this world. It is as real as I can make it. Real enough to bear my weight, or how could I cross its quags and torrents to the girl? I don’t look down at the planks, the cracks between the planks, the white streaming below. This is where experience tells. Describe the white and I will fall in. Describe the planks and I will be naming nails for all eternity. Itemizing splinters. No, it is enough to say “bridge” to cross it. Say “steep and winding road” to make my way.

  [Rustling.]

  If only I were sure that I am not making you, dear listener, as well!—and all your accoutrements: your stockings, for example, black, pilling at the knee, bunching at the ankle, sagging into the heels of the regulation shoes that are always a little too big, when they are not too small. If only I were sure that I did not imagine your ears, upon which so much depends, standing out a little from your skull, but delicate, the satin skin stretched over the cartilegi cartilaginous form, two coracles, one a redder brown than the other, hot from the trumpet against which it is pressed. Your hair, ultra-fine, black, kinky, scraped into braids, exposing the elegant shape of the skull and the thin neck, the part a line like a scar, as if someone had once tried to cut you in half. Your nose a little pinched with concentration and perhaps annoyance, for I am talking about you instead of about the land of the dead, or even the girl Finster, and you do not approve. You are all business. It is what I like about you. Little dents form on either side of your nose. Small nose. Small nostrils officiously flared.

  Are you receiving?

  Through the trees the blank page shines at the head of the rise. The gradient is steep, but the footing is good, and I need only hitch up my skirts to step over the rivulets of white that cut through the road on occasion, as if to remind me to keep my mind on the—

  Officiously flared, did you get that down? I shall keep talking about you until you remember your duty, which is, one—to take dictation; and, pursuant to that end, two—to exist. Because if you don’t— Your neck: Is there a scarf around it? No. A crucifix? A locket would be better, on a thin gold chain, not real gold, gold-plated, the gold worn to gray. And in the locket? Let’s say a tuft of fine brown hair, straighter than your own, and possibly not even human, the hair of a dog, perhaps, or a donkey, or a goat, or a [word indistinct]—

  A child is missing, a child is lost—

  But there is nothing to be gained by panic. We are making what haste we can. Already I have put the ravine behind me. In front of me I have put the road, of course, and a muddy field where thistles mutter and twitch. Meanwhile it steadies my mind to think about you, phlegmatically typing “phlegmatically,” and without even needing to check the spelling. You wear a ring on the thumb of one small but wide, rather rough, dry hand, and it sometimes rings like a bell against the frame of the typewriter, as now—ding! Your ring, unlike your locket, is true gold, though worn thin in some spots. It was probably your dead mother’s ring, unless your mother still lives, let her live, why not, though much altered, for the worse, by the syphilis.

  You half rise. Then you regulate yourself and sit back down. I suppose you think I am wasting my time baiting you when I could be describing wonders heretofore unknown to science. The silhouettes wheeling high above me now, for instance, of the greatest of the many birds seen here, if they are birds, which they are not, and yet they are not
anything else either. They gyre around a single point. Naturally it is myself, or rather a point directly above me. They are almost stationary in flight, despite their huge, ungainly bodies, and though you would think such large birds would have to beat their mauve, fleshy wings in a frenzy just to stay airborne, it is not true, they oar the air almost haphazardly and at intervals between which they hover as if sustained by a constant updraft. Only occasionally do they—adjusting the angle of their wings almost imperceptibly—dip and slide into a descending curve.

  Here comes one now, its eyes like the glass heads of hatpins, a crescent of dust on each globe. Remarkable detail, but I would disabuse you of the notion that there is anything intrinsically more marvelous in that bird than in the way your shoulders draw together as you shift in your seat, feeling the coarse linsey-woolsey of your school pinafore fret your shoulder blades, or your hard ankles crossed beneath your seat, flexing rhythmically, so that the soles of your shoes knock against the wooden crossbars. I have not even forgotten to account for your oversized and rather scratchy underpants, loose about the waist, slightly damp in the crotch, or for the pocket in your dress, the inky handkerchief in the pocket, and the dime in the lining.

  Hark to the bird! A sound like tearing paper as it stoops. I fling myself at a sheltering brake. [Rustling.] A mistake: My fichu is caught fast—my skirt; the snickering thistles pull me down. Thorns rip through my petticoats. Talons rip through my hair.

  Then the bird beats back up and is gone. After smaller prey, perhaps—save her—I surge up—but no, if I am right, Finster is the falconer here, not the prey, Finster herself in the intemperance of a child’s will conceived and sent these birds. Attagirl!

  Unless I am. The falconer, I mean, though if I am that, then I am prey and falcon too, throwing my own self off the glove, scaring me up, striking me down.

  “A puppet show!” the thistles jeer. “A humbug!” Flecks of page-white writhe across the landscape. It is disintegrating again. And I went to so much trouble over it!

  [Static, hissing; two or three sentences indistinct.]

  —rely on, at least. Which is fortunate, because I depends [sic] on you. And yet I am almost sure I made you up. Why? You are too real. Too detailed. The crease at your wrist, for instance, usually to be seen in one of what I suppose to be your age—no more than sixteen—only in conjunction with considerable baby fat, though not in your case, it is just that your skin is unusually dry. You have matching creases at your ankles and your knuckles are calloused and fine lines are already forming at the corners of your mouth. You yawn, and a shining thread of saliva joins your uvula to your tongue. A dot or two of white suggest the incursion of streptococcus into your left tonsil, which, slightly swollen, resembles in shape and surface texture an overripe fig. With the tip of your tongue you test your lower lip, in which a crack has opened, salmon red.

  I suppose I love you a little. It is easy to love what one has invented.

  The girl Finster is not lovable.

  Save her!

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  “Wake up!” The Intake Coordinator, if that was what she was, was shaking me. “Wake up at once! There’s no time for malingering around here; I hope you don’t think you’ve come here just to take naps at the school’s expense!” I sat up and hastily worked my feet back into my shoes. “We need to enter your information into the rolls, we need to conduct a placement exam, we need to assign you a cot, a hygiene kit, oral tackle and yoke, and all this before evening calisthenics. We simply don’t have time to lie around, however much some of us would like to!”

  Though I burned at the injustice of this remark, in which I may or may not have been right to hear a sly echo of that unjust epithet shiftless, I nodded and rose to my feet. A moment later I heard a scrabbling sound under the daybed, and then a skinny white cat shot out and across the room, raised his somewhat dingy tail against the wall, and, vibrating, sprayed it with musk.

  “You may call me Mother Other,” said the woman, not appearing to notice the activities of the cat, who now composed himself and began industriously washing his whiskers. She pulled open a drawer in her desk, then hurriedly banged it shut again, poked inside another with a ruler, then employed the tip of the same ruler to slide it closed. Then in rapid succession she yanked out two or three other drawers and pawed through them, muttering to herself. Papers cascaded out, planing across the floor.

  Mother Other? What kind of name was that? (For that matter, what kind of name was Miss Exiguous?) Perhaps it was not a name so much as an honorific and in the fullness of time this Mother Other would retire to be replaced by another Mother Other, not so red-faced or resentful, but destined to become so. Perhaps here there was no such thing as a proper name, only a position to be filled by whatever spirit happened by. Hadn’t every one of the conversations I’d had since I arrived been a little strange? Like the conversation of people who remembered talking, but didn’t know what it was for?

  She picked up a page, scowled at it, dropped it again. “Where is your paperwork?” she demanded.

  “I d-don’t know if I have any p-p-paperwork yet,” I said, chagrined. “I haven’t—”

  “Quiet!” she said. “Did I ask you a question?” I opened my mouth. “Quiet, I said! Can’t you see I have enough to worry about without your prattling on and on until a person can hardly think? No, it’s really too much, I don’t know why they always give me the difficult cases, unmannerly children from God knows where, who don’t even make an effort to look decent. Where on earth is your uniform?”

  “I don’t have a uniform.”

  “Absurd! Every student has a uniform. If you have no uniform you are not a student and should not be here. Go down to the supply room at once and sign one out. I shouldn’t have to talk to someone who can’t abide by even the most basic social niceties, let alone the dress code of the school. It’s enough to . . . I ought to . . . No, I just don’t know . . .” Her chin was trembling violently.

  “Please don’t be upset,” I said. “I know it’s no excuse, but I only just got here, and nobody told me to pick up a uniform. Probably someone else wasn’t doing his or her job, it’s just too bad that it came down on your shoulders! I can see that you’re someone who has to bear more than her share, and that’s not right!” Again I spoke with unusual clarity and ease. It’s as if the school is helping me say the right thing, I thought, pleased. It wants me here.

  Mother Other nodded and put her head down on her hands, her shoulders shaking. “I’ll go right away,” I said. I turned at the door. “I’m going now . . .” Mother Other did not look up or offer to tell me where the uniforms were kept, so I tiptoed out. The cat slipped out after me.

  The hall was empty now, except for the sparrow. The cat stopped with one paw raised, only his eyes moving back and forth, back and forth. Then he seated himself to give one leg three quick hard swipes with his tongue, rose again, and trotted lightly and purposefully toward the stairs. Feeling that I ought to stay close to anyone who knew where he was going, be it only a cat, I followed. At the landing, he passed neatly between the balusters and composed himself on the edge of the drop to stare abstractedly into the void.

  “Down there? All right,” I said.

  The light in the foyer had changed, perhaps the rainstorm had come upon us; it was into a dim and gray-green space that I descended. There were closed doors to either side; I chose the one on the left, but my hand was arrested above the doorknob by the sound of someone moving around inside.

  Behind me I heard the opposite door open. The red-haired boy I had seen before stuck his head out. I felt oddly pleased to see him. “Ha-ha-haven’t you left yet?” he said. I saw that he was now wearing a sort of bag like a feed sack, made of cheesecloth and stretched over a wire frame that held it open under his chin.

  “I’m looking for the storeroom,” I said, and added hastily, “I was told to find a uniform, and by no less a person than Mother Other, so you’d bet
ter help me, and fast!”

  He slid out through the door and closed it behind him, though not before I caught a glimpse of ranks of glass-fronted cabinets and, suspended from the ceiling above them, some balsa wood and paper constructions that might have been kites or models, though whether geometrical, anatomical, or cosmological I could not have said.

  “Mother Other? Well, then I really had better h-help you,” he said, though there was something sarcastic about his tone. Maybe Mother Other was not as important as I had thought. The disregard for formality evinced by her untidy papers, her tears—her nap!—could mean she was the very lowest sort of employee: a janitor, or worse. On the other hand it could mean that she was very high up indeed.

  The boy led me back along the hallway beside the stairs and through a plain, narrow door into another, wider hallway that resembled the one upstairs, except that it was darker and dingier.

  “Once I have a uniform, will I be shown to my room?” I remembered suddenly that I had left my suitcase upstairs in Mother Other’s room.

  “Your room? You’ll be sleeping in a dormitory like the rest of us.” Then he seemed to reflect: “Unless the Head decides that you need a room of your own; though she has never done so it’s certainly in her power, and certainly, too, there are plenty of rooms here, and you wouldn’t bother anyone, tucked away somewhere under the attics, or even in one of the many really good rooms that are still empty. But that doesn’t mean you should get the idea in your head that you might as well have a room of your own; what’s good enough for the rest of us is good enough for you, unless of course the Head decides otherwise, but that would surprise everyone; not that the Head is incapable of suddenly changing her mind, and for reasons seldom clear to the rest of us, but—”