“And I’ve never given you any headaches at all, Papa, have I? Ever since I was small I never wanted to add to your burden of Mama’s early death. I’ve stayed out of your way; I’ve done my best in everything. Have I done well in school, Papa? Have the nuns ever complained to you?
Santiago shook and nodded his head, in response to Pilar’s questions. The crux of it was that he agreed that Pilar had never given him any problems.
Now Pilar addressed her grandmother, “Lola, I’ve loved you and obeyed you. I bathed, ate, slept, did chores as you told me to, Lola.”
Maria Christina nodded her head.
“Papa, Lola, I love both of you very much, but it’s no longer the 1800s, it’s now 1909. It’s no longer the “Spanish times” it’s now the “American times.” Things are different now. We have to move with the times. We can’t get stuck with how things were twenty years ago. Now, a girl and boy can be by themselves to talk. That is all we did. Carmen was in the house, Lola. Don’t be angry with her, but she was asleep. Andres came over with Mario and Jesus. Jesus played the guitar and they sang a few silly songs. Afterwards, we had something to eat and drink, after which Mario and Jesus left. By this time, the rain had stopped, and Andres and I wanted to see if the stars were out, so we went out to the verandah and looked at the sky. And we talked. And that was all that happened.”
“But my Pan de Sal, propriety is a necessity of civilization,” Santiago said.
“Papa, what is propriety?” She paused and looked at Santiago and Ines. “You two have been so busy fighting each other, and everyone in Ubec knows about this feud. Andres and I have had to sneak around so you two won’t know we’re seeing each other. Yes, Papa, I’ve been seeing Andres for six months now, ever since his class and my class went on a field trip to the leprosarium. We were there to give the lepers clothes and food.”
It was so quiet that everyone heard the tinkling of the overhead chandeliers when a breeze blew into the living room.
“Papa, you have done everything you can to hurt the parents of Andres. And Tiya Ines, forgive me, but you have been hostile to my father and me for as long as I can remember. You always look so strict, I’ve been terrified to greet you.”
Ines lowered her head. She felt angry that this young girl would talk to her in this way, but at the same time she felt shame. Deep in her heart, Ines had to agree with the girl—she was strict. She had always been that way, and she didn’t know where that trait had come from.
Pilar’s voice grew louder as she continued, “You have no idea, either of you that Andres wants to be a lawyer so he can work for real changes in our country. And I, Papa—” She gave her chest a little thump — “I want to be a doctor so I can help our people. I want to help the lepers; I want to help pregnant women, and little children. Are you aware, Papa, that half the children of our workers die?”
Then Pilar sat down, looking exhausted. Shaking her head, she said, “No, no, you do not. You don’t even know their names. All Andres and I want is to make life better for our people. Can’t you see how poor people are compared to us? Have you looked at our workers? At their children? Have you asked yourselves why they are poor and we are not? No, you haven’t because you’re all too selfish. I don’t even know why I have to explain to anyone what Andres and I did that night. You will never understand.” And then tears started falling down her cheeks. Her little body quivered as she wept silently for a long time.
No one moved or said a word. Some sparrows that roosted under the eaves of the windows started twittering, and the sound must have brought Pilar back to the room and she took several deep breaths. Using her lace-trimmed tea napkin, she wiped away her tears. Even as she struggled to control herself, she addressed Ines in an honest voice, “Tiya, I will get the document needed on Monday. The Notary Public will be open then. And Tiya Melisande, I will help you with the carnival. I’m sorry I have to go now, but the nurse at the clinic is expecting me.”
And with more grace than an adult woman could muster, the seventeen-year-old girl left the room, leaving everyone mortified.
Scraps
by Michael Haynes
Kelly signs for possession of the fireproof box and wonders what her mother had felt the need to protect. No jewelry, that all would have been hocked years ago—cigarette money. Back when they still talked, Kelly always told her mom the cigarettes would kill her.
She hadn’t imagined it happening so suddenly.
She is tired from the overnight drive and stares at the only legacy left to her. Of course there’s no key. It seems a perfect coda to her mother’s life, until the helpful officer tells her how easy it is to pop the lock.
She thanks him and leaves the station, carrying what had been transformed from a little mystery into something mundane. Just another problem with a half-assed solution.
In her motel room she fiddles with the box until it springs open. Her stomach clenches when she sees the scrapbook, the only thing in the box. She wishes the damned thing had burned up, too.
One finger traces the spiral wire binding the book together. There are dogs on the cover. Happy, frolicking dogs completely at odds with the memories she associates with the scrapbook.
Kelly remembers that Christmas. She’d been fifteen and saved up money that year by recycling cans so she could buy her mother a new purse. When her mother opened the package she didn’t look excited, like Kelly had hoped. She looked stunned. Kelly asked if she liked it, and her mother said it was beautiful. But the words were flat. She must have known what was coming.
Kelly unwrapped her own present, easing open the green paper with silver snowflakes, knowing it was the only gift she would be opening that year.
What she had revealed was this cheap dollar store scrapbook.
The memories of the rest of that Christmas embarrass her. She’d torn into her mother like only a teenager can, thrown the scrapbook on the ground and stormed out of the house. When she came home, almost at midnight, the scrapbook was gone. Her mother was dead asleep on the couch. An empty beer and a full ashtray sat on the end table.
They never discussed that Christmas. Kelly would have bet the scrapbook was moldering in a landfill, but now, here it sits on the wobbly table of a cheap motel room. And she can’t find the courage to open the cover.
Tomorrow she’ll be making funeral arrangements, and in a few days, she’ll leave this town for good. There’s no one here she cares about. There hasn’t been for years. And now there’s no one here that she has any responsibility towards, either.
She looks at the dogs on the cover. Puppies, really, chasing a ball frozen in time. She reaches out, and whips the cover open.
The first page has a cast list from a school play, one of the few her mother ever made it to. She turns to the next page. A white participation ribbon from the third-grade spelling bee. Her mom hadn’t made it to that.
She’d promised to be there, to not miss seeing Kelly up on the little stage at the elementary school. Kelly remembers the lights and looking out into the gymnasium for her mother in one of the folding metal chairs. She remembers getting more and more anxious when she couldn’t find her mother who’d promised—promised—to be there.
They’d called her name.
“Kelly,” Mrs. Jackson said, “your word is ‘piece.’ I’ll use it in a sentence. ‘I would like a piece of pie.’ ‘Piece.’”
Sixty seconds later she walked off the stage. Bobby, who misspelled ‘target’ moments before, leaned over and said, “You dummy, that was ‘peace’ like ‘peace on Earth.’”
Kelly goes to the sink and gets some water. She washes her face, too, and wonders what other wonderful memories this scrapbook will bring back.
Back by the table, she turns to the next page. Her senior prom photo faces her. The dark blue dress that never fit quite right and the big hair everyone had back then. She thinks she looks hideous but Will looks good. Will always looked good. They didn’t stay together long after she’d left for college. That firs
t Thanksgiving, when she was home on break, they had each wanted to tell the other it wasn’t working. They’d cried, and laughed, and hugged. She came home for his wedding two years later, the only time she’d ever happily returned.
Kelly reaches out and touches the photograph. Her vision blurs and she’s facing herself in that dress, big as life. She’s in the living room of her mother’s house, the one that burned down, and she’s watching herself stand patiently as her own hands—but they can’t be her hands, the fingers are too small and the skin too rough—put pins in the dress for adjustments.
“It’s going to look gorgeous,” she says. But it’s not her voice. It’s her mother’s voice. And her thoughts now aren’t her own, either. She remembers going to the pawnshop, trading in a lawn mower and...
Kelly jerks away from the table. Her heart is racing and she has to look around the room to be sure of where she is, of who she is.
She wonders if she momentarily fell asleep. Fingers trembling, she touches the photograph again. Instantly she’s back with the prom dress, the pins, and the lawn mower. Letting go, the motel room comes back into focus.
She flips back to the previous page and looks again at that ribbon. She touches the page, just the paper. Nothing happens. She slides her fingers up to the edge of the ribbon...
The kitchen of the pizza parlor is blazing hot.
“Frank, I told you I’ve got to go. I promised Kel.”
“And I told you that if you don’t finish getting those pizzas ready for this order then you can go find another damn job.” Her boss walks away without another word. She thinks about telling him where he can put his pizzas but it’s an empty thought. Already her hands are spreading sauce and sprinkling cheese. What’s one more promise broken, if it lets you keep putting food on the table?
Kelly can’t stop now. She goes to the first page, the cast list from a middle-school play, watered down Romeo and Juliet. She touches it and is relieved to be happy. The children take their bows. She applauds and gives a little whoop when Kelly takes her turn at the front of the stage. The mother in the next chair grins and they exchange a little high-five. Both their children made it through the play.
Kelly keeps turning the pages and touching the mementos. They’re all jumbled up in time, no rhyme or reason. A letter from Kelly’s university, saying she is on the Dean’s List brings back pride mixed with a sense of loss. A handmade birthday card, crayon on construction paper says, “Happy Birthday, Mommey!” It comes with pure happiness and breakfast in bed, burnt toast and orange juice.
There’s a program from a high school band concert, the one where she had a solo. Kelly remembers that concert, how perfect playing that night had felt. Her mother had been there, had even taken her out for soft-serve afterwards.
Kelly reaches for the program, ready to relive that moment, even from another’s eyes.
But she’s not watching a concert; she’s back in the living room of the house. High school Kelly plays the same few notes on her flute, over and over, practicing for that solo. Wind gusts through the house and blows her music to the floor. She watches herself bend to pick it up. Her eyes flick across the room and catch Lee—son of a bitch—leering at her daughter’s ass.
She orders Kelly to go practice upstairs, says she has a headache and needs a break from the noise. Kelly rolls her eyes but goes anyway, stomping up the steps. The music starts again soon, a backdrop to the argument that rages. Lee hits her in the face. God, it hurts. He says something on his way out the door, but it’s lost to the ringing in her ears. She wonders how she’ll pay the mortgage without him.
The memory ends and Kelly, today Kelly, is still touching the program. She remembers the bruise on her mother’s face. It was there when they went to the Dair-E-Cream after the concert. What had her mother said about the bruise? She tries, but can’t recall.
Kelly puts her face in her hands. It’s all too much, but she has to know what else is in the book. Making sure to touch only the corners of the pages she works her way towards the back. So many memories—her own memories—come back just looking at them. There are some things she’s tempted to touch, but the memory of Lee’s punch is fresh and there’s no guarantee what any of these artifacts will reveal.
Kelly gets to the last page of the book and, oh God, green holiday paper with silver snowflakes. A small piece, a literal scrap, is taped into the book. She stares at it, mesmerized, feeling as if she’s falling into the snow on the paper.
She can’t touch it. She can’t.
Kelly closes the book carefully. Someday she’ll have to touch that scrap of paper. Someday she’ll go back to that Christmas. Not today.
She touches the cover again. And she does the one thing she didn’t expect to do on this trip. She cries.
Freeborn in the City of Fallacies
By Andrew Drilon
HIS WEARY HEART surfaced a question.
“Valle Paradox,” answered Freeborn.
Valle Paradox: where shamed academics live on in feudal chaos, debating their flawed theories ad nauseam, casting misshapen temporalgorithms into the cubic ether and warping actuality with every barbed, non-canonical entry into the world’s spatialgebra. Valle Paradox: the anus of hypotheses, the blasphemous academy of the failed postulation, filled with polygauchos, parallellamas, and concaverines locked in tedious, eternal debate. Valle Paradox: home of the Nimble Riddles, as far from the pool of knowledge as one can get within the country of Logic, shaded by twin mountains that flank the northern gate from the lands of Reason. When good sense falters, it enters Valle Paradox.
“And so shall we,” he said, “for La Sphinx’s implication points here. This is ‘where one and one adds up to nothing’.”
His heart, still bleeding from the arrow, quivered with anticipation. The descent of the mountain had posed no problems, once Freeborn had assessed the angular geography and its petitio principiices (though not its fauna, which had caused no small degree of annoyance, especially the pentadragons). His armor—the black-silver suit his mother had given him, that which sheathed a thousand icy daggers—had been invaluable on his journey, even now as it ran low on supply. He traced his finger along the eighteenth breastplate line, counting five remaining filled slots. He would need to be frugal henceforth.
“Thirsty,” he said. “Do not worry. We are almost there. We should point out that you are still very weak from our fight with the existenebrae, so you must try to keep calm.”
The beating in his chest evened out. Using the endless silk rope (which he’d won from the dualist spiders during a necessary spelunk through Cueva Gnosis), Freeborn abseiled down the final vertical drop and beheld the sprawling mishmash of shanties that formed the slum settlement of Valle Paradox. Somewhere in this tatterdemalion city was a black, transient house. It was invisible now, showing no signs of movement, but Freeborn knew it was there. It was Emy’s house.
Emy: silver-haired, almond-faced holy grail of his heart, the bane and vein of his existence. A maiden of omens, she had divined in her youth that her true love would cause her to forsake her cherished House of Forever, a precious artifact of transience, of which she was appointed sole guardian. Freeborn had caught sight of her in the waters of Rio Historia, fallen madly in love, and had been courting her ever since. Heart displaced from mind, he had given chase across the country, from Selva Thesauri to Grim Castillo to Lingua Aride and now Valle Paradox. She left him letters with every escape, which told him of the pain she felt at running from him, of how she couldn’t forgive herself, to stay. Freeborn’s task was clear: he would find her, convince her of his love, and they would together guard her house forevermore.
Find me before I foresee your coming, she had written, and perhaps we might have a chance.
MIDNIGHT LIGHT FILTERED faintly through the mist, shedding white flecks on Freeborn’s helmet, as he crept through a narrow alley between two derelict houses. Beyond, in a small, vacant plaza, stood a square well made of glistening white stone. A conic bucke
t lay flat on its side, affixed with a rope to an axis-in-peritrochio, next to a rough-painted sign which read: Hearty minds, drink freely.
“A simple well,” he said, “though odd in construction. Luck’s Lantern shines upon us tonight. Give us a moment to quench this thirst of a hundred leagues, and we shall resume our search forthwith.”
Freeborn raised his helmet, lowered the bucket into the yawning darkness, and drew up a cone of water. No sooner had he lifted his head to swallow than his heart tromped and rolled, causing him to spit.
“What are you telling us?” he said. “Are we not thirsty?”
“And who is this man who speaks to himself,” said a voice from behind him, “all dressed up in gleaming, and alone in the dark?”
Freeborn spun around to face the speaker, a dagger from his breastplate poised to fly.
There in the plaza stood a bespectacled stranger in a blue turnback gown, bearing no apparent weapons save a sharp, raised eyebrow on his prominent forehead. The man raised his hands, waving away any perception of ill will.
Freeborn frowned but gave him a customary bow. “We are Freeborn Galawain,” he said, “of the Bosky Nostalgics in Rio Historia. Is this your well, good sir, and might we drink from it?”
“It is everyone’s well,” the stranger said, smirking, “and you can certainly drink without permission. But I caution you: all wells in Valle Paradox are poisoned. It is the way of things here.”
Freeborn put a hand to his lips, considering his narrowly-avoided death. His heart gave a knowing shrug, and he thanked it in silence.
The bespectacled man took a careful half-step, lowered his arms, and began walking circles around Freeborn, keeping the eyebrow raised and the smarm on his pale face. “Cat got your tongue, young man? A moment ago you were speaking like an emperor. You are an emperor, aren’t you? Logic tells me that if you speak like it, then you must be it.”
“We are no emperor, good sir. We are afflicted with plurality; a parting gift from Lingua Aride, where we last sojourned.”
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 32