by Mark Teppo
Augustus Clementine
— Liz Argall
Augustus Clementine was a less than ordinary roller skate. He was an it’ll-do-for-now roller skate. An I’m-not-sure-but-I’ll-give-it-a-go roller skate. A damn-well-this-will-have-to-do roller skate.
Augustus was one of many tan suede roller skates in a middle income, middle suburbia roller skating rink in a never-quite-closed-down but had-never-quite-thrived kind of place. Augustus was known only by his number, 8, and he was for a left foot. He flopped in silence amongst the rows and rows of his brethren, waiting to be grabbed, jostled, and to live briefly on the sweaty foot of some beautiful girl or boy. He strived to be the best possible skate for them, but always, always was returned to the walls of beige. He longed for a person to call his own, a place and a specialness that could be his. But he was a skate for hire and was always something visited on the way to somewhere else.
Years passed in this way. His bearings grew gritty and non-spheroid. Sometimes he was serviced regularly—sometimes bearings and wheels were replaced and rotated with military precision. Sometimes his suede was cleaned, though never enough. He was often deodorized with a talc-like powder that also scared away fleas. Sometimes he grew so rough without love that a bearing would burst, causing his wheels to seize up on the skater. The skater would hurtle face first to the ground as he watched helplessly.
Parts of him broke off: eyelets, laces, and stitching. Sometimes they were repaired with love and care. Sometimes he was repaired in a rush of rudely tied knots that meant he would be the last to be chosen. After one nasty accident he spent six months in a dark broken skates bin, uncertain if his next move would be into rubbish or repair bench. He watched skates more beloved than he cannibalized to fix younger models as he waited in the dark. If he could he would have wept with joy and sadness when he found himself on the repair bench as the recipient, not the unwilling donor of parts.
Augustus knew many feet. He knew how feet changed shape and smell and size over the space of an hour or day. He knew who would settle comfortably into him, matching to his leather as momentary soul mates. He knew who would slip and fidget, readjust and never quite be happy with him—their natures clanging against each other, though he loved these as much as his more comfortable wearers.
He felt soft feet sensitive to the rough edges of his insides. He felt club toed feet battered from always living in shoes a size to small. He felt toes of bunion, callous, splayed, and pointy, attached to feet flat-footed or high arched. It was rare to experience the same foot twice. Every now and then, for a heart lifting month perhaps, there would be someone who recognized him and requested him as a special favor, but those times were rare and diminished as he grew older.
Eventually Augustus felt his plate break, the spine running from his heel to his scuffed thin toe, snapped in two, and he was thrown in the repair bin. He knew he would never see the track again. His wheels were stripped from him immediately. To be stripped and left wheel-less did not hurt him as much as he thought it would, numbed by the inevitability of death. His wheels were close to new and might find many years on another boot. Wheels lived a firefly life compared to a skate, and he wished them well. Losing his laces was a greater wound. His laces were not new, and together they had held many feet. His eyelets drooped hollowly, and his suede upper flopped as part of himself looped through someone else.
Eventually his suede tongue was cut off with scissors. He never found out why, they just took it and dropped him back in the box. Augustus lay in the dark, raw from intimate cutting. He lay there for a very long time.
One day, when the dust on Augustus had turned his tan suede grey, he was thrown out. His upper was torn off him, his body disassembled, his consciousness clinging tenuously to a few scraps of metal that were then melted to slag.
He thought that was the end of him and was surprised to wake, dizzy in a new form and hybrid consciousness. He had become a prosthetic for a young girl who lost her leg in a car accident. He felt her vestigial limb slip into him, padded into his socket with socks and gel packs.
Together they learned to walk, they learned to run in motions so strange and yet familiar. He was her one-and-only, not just on the track, not just on smooth sidewalk and parking lot. He was her one-and-only whenever and wherever she wanted to go. He moved on stairs, in forests, on muddy paths—a few times he even ended up in the bath. The breadth of his world, the delight of motion they gave each other left him breathless. Sometimes breathless with joy, sometimes he felt crushed by the responsibility, intensity, and constancy of his work. At times he remembered what it was like to spin carefree along the smooth polished boards of the rink as a thing of fun and play.
He knew it wasn’t always easy for his little girl. He knew the ways of limbs and knew when they squeaked with discomfort or clamored for escape. Sometimes she cursed him for the pain he could not help but give her oft-blistered stump. She was always straining to do more things and go more places. His little girl was strong and because she could and would try anything so would he. He adored her, and, for the first time in his life, he felt loved and needed in return.
Time passed, and, as the little girl grew older, Augustus noticed her vestigial limb didn’t fit into his socket as easily. His little girl would find excuses not to use him, hopping or using crutches, taking him off as soon as she could. Augustus knew that once more his life was coming to an end.
One day his little girl came home with a new leg, a leg that fit her growing body better. Augustus was put up on the shelf to gather dust and occasionally play pranks on high school friends. His little girl was not little anymore and no longer just his. Augustus was still her first limb, and she would say he was her favorite, but the way she walked around on other appendages undermined that truth.
His no-longer-little girl marveled at how small he was, swinging him in her hands nostalgically, and he felt very small indeed. His no-longer-little girl grew out of other legs, and these bigger creatures sat on the shelf with him for a short while. He was intimidated by their size and superior joints, and burrowed deeper into the shelving. He adjusted to the frightening presences on the shelf next to him, but only in time for the new legs to be whisked away. And he would be alone again, gathering dust.
One day, his-no-longer-little girl took him out of the cupboard. His no-longer-little girl had been through many changes. Her hair had grown long and short and bald and long again. She had got glasses, got rid of her glasses and then got them back again. Her wrinkled hands seemed enormous as they wrapped around him; she could hold him between two fingers and watch him dangle.
Today his no-longer-little girl looked sad. Her bedroom didn’t have any of her normal things, though that too had changed over the years. Her room was full of cardboard boxes, newspaper and packing tape. Everything that had made the room her room had been taken down and was being sent away.
The woman who was his little girl cradled him like a baby, and she hugged him. She wrapped him in newspaper, and she said goodbye.
Once again Augustus thought he was going to die, and once again he was delivered into a new life.
Augustus Clementine was shipped to a hospital that struggled to do much with very little. The hospital was one place in the war-hurt parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas were children came after they lost body parts to land mines. He stayed in that country for a long time and was used by many children.
Augustus clomped through mud, fell into rivers and was dropped from trees. He was used, abused, abandoned, banged back into shape, and put back to work.
Sometimes he missed his old lives, but that was past. He gave himself to the present as best he could with what he had, and there were always children that needed new legs. He lost count of the children who wore him, loved him, hated him, and grew out of him. He was always just-for-now and always-grown-out-of, but his now was enough, and his now was important. He was part of their bodies, for just a little while as they found ways to walk ag
ain, laughing and crying, dancing and playing.
And when Augustus was done, his body so metal-fatigued and worn that there was nothing left to him, he was welded into a sculpture with many other limbs to speak of greater truths he did not understand. And only then, never to be worn again, did he fall asleep and not wake up.
And that was his life, and that was enough.
Pretty Little Boxes
— Julie C. Day
Boxes surround us.
Every night Barry builds more walls, fastens more lids. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I slip down the hall to his workroom and watch. His eyes remain focused on the contents of his bench: the wood, the pulped flowers, and all those dying insects—the grasshoppers, the damsel flies, the hissing cockroaches—that will eventually make up the lining of each petal-and-limb box. Little pools of haemolymph, the fluid he collects from his crushed arthropods, rest in jars, waiting to be mixed into the glue.
Most Gray Witches know only two things about Barry. They know he is one of the best craftsmen in the city. They also know he’s the child of a Gray Witch, one of the few children they didn’t manage to train.
"It won’t be easy," his mother said after Barry introduced me as his fiancée. We stood in a workroom somewhere deep inside the Gray Witch Union’s granite walls. The room was filled with benches and scurrying creatures. No windows. It was when she stared at our intertwined hands, that I finally noticed her eyes. They were exactly the same shade of gray as Barry’s. "A Sadness Carrier and my son," she continued, turning those gray eyes in my direction. "Well, I hope you didn’t traipse down here expecting a Witch’s blessing."
Barry’s fingers tightened against mine.
"We know Gray Witches only bless each other," he replied.
"Of course you do," she said. "You’ve always been a clever boy."
Blessing or not, Barry and I married the next day.
The photographer Barry hired snapped picture after picture as our few guests moved through the receiving line. These were our neighbors and coworkers: students still in their first apartments, urban gardeners with calloused hands, women from the alley off of Market Square where I ran my stall.
"Congratulations," they said. "Best wishes." They even toasted our happiness.
The wedding photos, however, are focused on something else entirely. My hair, in frame after frame, is long and glossy. My cheeks are glowing with foundation and rouge. In some of the pictures, Barry’s hand rests on my waist, heavy against the stiff silk gown. I still remember the feeling of heat as the side of his body leaned into mine. Yet each picture shows the same thing. My face is strained. My lips turned downward.
Just two days into my vacation and already I was falling apart. I’ll be lucky to last another day; that was what I was thinking as the photographer snapped his shots. Along with the photographer, officiant, and cake, Barry had also booked a honeymoon. I’d be away from work for over a week.
I didn’t love my job, but I damn well needed it.
"Barry?" I wiped the tears away with the back of one hand as I stared into Barry’s workshop, careful not to get in the way.
Barry was scrubbing one of the large mesh screens with a stiff metal brush, readying the tray for the next sheet of paper. He’d been making a lot of paper lately, spending long hours in the studio. Perhaps the Gray Witches had given him an extra commission. I glanced at the carefully stacked rectangles. Not worth getting distracted about. "We paid them all that money, Barry, so my sadness wouldn’t grow back."
"At least we can make up the money now that you’re working again," Barry replied, his back still turned to me as he scrubbed the screens.
"That’s not the point."
"I’ll make you some more boxes." Barry’s brush made a scuff-scuffing noise as it moved across the fine mesh screen.
"No," I said. "I don’t want—" I grabbed the workshop’s door, rattling its loose metal handle.
Barry was silent as he dipped the wire brush into a pot of boiling water. He shook the brush off and poured the contents of the pot across the screen, sluicing off the cellulose and chitin. He didn’t even glance in my direction.
Sadness Carrier is the only job I’ve ever held.
We Sadness Carriers are licensed for only one thing: sadness. The most important tool is the box. Too little space inside and the feelings might morph, condense into the heavier moods. A dangerous thing, carrying a box like that. Most likely thing in the world that it’ll be tagged as a Gray Witch offense. And then the boxes can go entirely the other way, the size just too big, the walls meant to hold more than you can offer. With a box like that, the mood might escape entirely, leaving nothing but emptiness and air.
When business is good, it feels like an honorable service. You never know who your next client is going to be: perhaps it’ll be a West End climber with his new money and not much else, making sure he has some back-up during Madame Butterfly. I get clients like that all the time. What if they can’t wait to check the game scores until the end of the performance? What would people think then? One of my little boxes gets rid of all that anxiety. I get other types of clients, too. One afternoon that nice waitress from over on Ninth Street might stop by my stall, looking for a bit of sincerity while she breaks up with her summer fling.
But the box has to be exactly right. There’s nothing worse than listening to a neighbor describe how she’s seen that Eaton’s waitress laughing hysterically while her boyfriend wept or overhearing the story of a man who committed suicide at the opera. Those pretty little boxes are important. And, before Barry, they were tough to find, tough to afford, anyway. Anyone who’s any good sells to the Gray Witches.
Barry changed everything. That’s why I married him.
"Honey," he said on that first night. "Let me help you."
And God forgive me, I did. I let him help me. In the end, I did much more than just open that apartment door.
Everyone has a "how we met" story. Barry and I are no exception.
I was holed up in some corner apartment on Fifth Street. Barry had just moved in next door. Even on that very first night, he found me hard to ignore.
"Tears equal money," I kept muttering as I kicked the small pile of misshapen containers against the wall. Some of the boxes broke apart on impact. Not surprising. The entire batch was nothing but cheap balsa wood and a couple of staples. Cheap balsa wood I’d dropped my entire month’s rent on. I had no more cash and now, with these rip-offs filling up the room, I couldn’t even work. I lifted my foot, crushing another of the misshapen rectangles. Meanwhile, my tears kept flowing.
That bastard box-builder, Francoise, had stiffed me. No liner paper and, even with the stapled edges, the joins were so bad the contents poured right out. Now, not only did I have nothing to sell at tomorrow’s market, I also had nowhere for my tears to go.
I slammed into a pile of boxes with both feet and then screamed. That’s when I heard someone pounding on my apartment door.
Of course, I didn’t answer. I had no idea who it was. Still, Barry must have known I was standing nearby. He must have heard the snuffling as I tried to stifle my sobs.
The pounding eventually stopped. That was good. But I could still hear him breathing. Eventually, that first sheet of paper slid under the door. I watched as it wafted above the floorboards and then settled against my feet: thick, textured fibers twisted across the page, an almost unbroken wing like a translucent rainbow in one corner. I’d seen paper like this before in the glassed-in display cases at Gray Witch Union. I’d even seen this paper once in my own childhood home, wallpaper tight against the sides of that pretty little box my mother had emptied her savings to obtain after Daddy left us. Not once had I ever seen it written on.
I stumbled back a few steps, but the notes just kept on coming. Fern fronds and grasshopper antennae flying from beneath my door. Three pages had fluttered through.
"Go on. Pick them up," Barry said. "Don’t be afraid." His voice was quiet now. I could almost feel h
is hands press against the other side of the door, his breath warm against the fading paint.
I bent down, glancing over the papers.
It’s all right, the first note said. I’ll just listen, said the second. Trust and faith are fine, said the third. You should try them. I dreamt about you last night, not even knowing your name.
A fourth sheet of paper followed. I caught it before it even had a chance to settle. Perhaps, I can tell you my name, it said. Would that help?
In the end, I opened the door, just an inch or two, and peered into the hallway. Tears were still leaking from my eyes. I think I even hiccupped a time or two.
"Barry," he said. He held a wooden box in one outstretched hand. "My name is Barry." I noticed his gray eyes even then, stormy-ocean gray. I noticed the box as well: a pattern of beetles with half-open wings burned across its surface, a musky smell rising from the wood. Beautiful. Yet, Barry’s box was sized all wrong. It was the kind of box that would sit empty by morning, the contents dissipated instead of contained. It was the kind of box a Gray Witch might carry if she was so inclined, a personal disposal unit, a place to stop the drowning. No way could I afford a box like that.
"Barry," he said again. He continued to hold out the box. "Consider it an early birthday present."
I kept my own hands at my sides. "But you don’t even know when I was born."
"That’s okay."
"What about—"
"Go ahead. Open it."
The edge of my right hand grazed his palm as I lifted the box toward me.
That’s when he smiled. Turns out he’s the kind of man who likes to see his boxes used.
Turns out, in the end, I’m no different.
Earlier this evening we sat across from each other at the dining table. My eyes were fixed on Barry and his computer, the way his fingers flew across the keyboard.
"Barry, we paid all that money."
Barry stayed quiet, reading the contents of the screen.
"We should ask for it back or maybe ask for a new spell. The first one didn’t even last half a year." I fiddled with my untouched pasta. It was already cold.