BLACK STATIC #42

by Andy Cox

  At family gatherings and at church, conversations dropped to silence when she passed, and her people smiled deep as wells when they met her eye. Tanta tried not to revel in the contradictory joys of being sanctified by her declaration, but as yet unrelieved of her sacrifice. It was a temporary state. It held no harmony, no deep truth.

  2: Do not set down teacup on the left side of desk.

  Work at the train station went on unaltered, being much bigger than Tanta, as big as the circulatory needs of the city.

  Tanta had to resist the temptation to confess the coming milestone of her life to the other station officers at Nunsin Street. One day she almost confided in Pauly, the kindly custodian, when he asked her how she was doing. Apart from the occasional tabloid exposé, her people kept a low profile. No one who did not need to know about them was trusted with the details of their practices and beliefs. Amputations were explained away with vague gestures at diseased veins, septic blood, car accidents. Even so, Tanta would have told Pauly everything, if not for the incredulous questions she was sure he would have – that she wasn’t sure she could answer.

  3: Lower all shelves in the kitchen. Hang a long hook in the bathroom, to tumble toilet paper rolls down from rafter storage.

  The date for her sacrifice was chosen to fall on an important holiday – the Little Matron’s birthday – and Tanta began a month-long countdown.

  Some days she counted the pages of her desk calendar with anticipation, imagining the purity of her lighter self, breeze and sunlight almost singing through her. Some days it seemed unbelievable. She would roll up her sleeve and examine her elbow from every angle. She would stick her nose right up to her knuckle joints and pretend her fingerprints were labyrinths to get lost in.

  Mostly, though, she was nervous about the pain and the shape of the world, afterwards. Despite her embarrassment, she forced herself to examine her nude body after every shower. Her intelligence knew that it was incomplete, unlightened, but her animal brain registered none of that. It saw vitality and youth. It saw health. Tanta worked assiduously to hold a rational frame to the nerves that buzzed at low frequency almost all the time now. She was free of them only when she slept.

  Asleep, she found comfort and peace, except for the small, subdued dreams of Gui. These she woke to like an alarm, her faith stalwart against where they might lead.

  4: When hugging mama and papa, grab left elbow with right hand for a tighter grasp.

  A week before the chosen day, Tanta saw a familiar face in the queue for her ticket desk. She served two confused tourists with an increasing tremble in her voice and hands.

  Gui approached the perspex screen, spoke into the microphone.

  “Hi Tanta,” he began awkwardly. He cleared his throat as if preparing to recite lines from memory. “I am leaving forever. I am going somewhere new. Somewhere everything is new, all the rules are different. Somewhere no one knows us or what we do.” His voice was far away and electronic through the microphone.

  “Come down to the platform with me, please.”

  Tanta shook her head, but couldn’t shift her eyes from Gui’s beautiful face.

  “My mother told me about your decision. But I cannot believe you want this. Listen—” he put a hand on the perspex, smudging it “—I have not told Rosa. I cannot. Her mind is full of things I do not understand. Listen, I know, I know how you feel. About me.” Tanta’s entire body lurched upside-down on an invisible roller coaster.

  “Come down to the platform just for a few minutes, please.”

  5: Maybe I just do it. Maybe I just learn to live that way. Maybe I just do it.

  Flipping the ‘Position Closed’ sign, Tanta made for the staff door and exited onto the platform. Guillermo was there, shouldering a single piece of luggage. He lived as sparely as any of them.

  He held out his right hand to her. She took it with her left. They were born twelve days apart, but they had never touched each other this way before. It made her queasy.

  In the mid afternoon commuter lull, Guillermo walked her to the edge of Platform Three.

  He spoke quietly into the void shaped for a train. “There is a service in four minutes. It goes east and connects to another train that goes even farther east. That train connects to another, also headed east. I bet the world is really different at the end of three eastbound connections.” He pressed her hand tight. “I have two tickets. Come with me.”

  Tanta grasped for an eastern world with her and Guillermo in it, and her left arm whole. She thought of their healthy, vital bodies impossibly close, entangled, confusable. She thought about her mother and her father, the icebox purring for her in the basement, her officiant’s duties. She thought of Antonietta Meo measuring her as she stood on the platform with an apostate.

  Still distant, their train squealed. Gui rubbed her palm with his thumb, reassuring her, or reassuring himself.

  Overcome all fear.

  Be light.

  Be pure.

  Be close to Heaven.

  Gently, Tanta pulled her hand free. Guillermo did not restrain her.

  Her legs felt wooden; an amoeba of emotion coloured her neck up to her ears. But Tanta knew what she had to do. She only had one chance, one trembling moment. If she didn’t act decisively, she would soon dissolve into something that wasn’t the self she knew, the way mama’s molasses instantly transmuted a pot of bubbling apple pulp.

  When Tanta stopped at the lip of the platform away from other travellers and lowered herself down into the recess beside the track, Gui began to call her name, curious, then wild with terror.

  Her timing was tuned to perfection. She had the vibrations of trains in her bones. Her instinct told her exactly how long she had left. Guillermo was running, others were running.

  She extended her arm onto the track palm-down, flattened herself in the safety of the emergency crawlspace. She had thought often about the room for a body that that recess afforded. It was large enough to shelter a nineteen year old woman. The train approached, sounding a distress horn. Guillermo screamed wildly.

  Tanta did not quake, her phobia rooted in her bowels, but dispelled from her heart. The metal beast would not flatten her. It would take only her left arm, at the elbow, and give back everything else.

  ***

  Sara Saab loves crunchy nougat, crowded cities, and the sound boxing pads make when you punch them dead centre. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon, near the lighthouse, but now lives in North London. Her flat houses one wonderful human boy, two giant Lego heads, and a silk carpet as ornate as the ceiling of a cathedral. Sara’s fiction is forthcoming in The Dark, Cicada, and Betwixt. You can find her on Twitter as @alixanaeuphoria.

  SCARECROW

  ALYSSA WONG

  Illustrated by Richard Wagner

  On the morning of his funeral, you wake screaming from nightmares of Jonathan Chin, your mouth crammed full of feathers. A craving for sky sKY SKY electrifies you from pounding heart to fingertips. Your hands are empty and twisted like claws, the body of a ghost boy slipping from your grasp.

  You see him as clearly as if he’d been cut from your mind and pasted on the walls in front of you. Jonathan Chin is a fixture in your room, etched into every shadow. Jonathan Chin is in your mouth, your belly.

  You choke, stomach heaving, and vomit all over yourself. Blobs of sticky, tarry feathers, the drier bits slicked with a green sheen, spatter your lap and sheets.

  Eli, Eli. Your name is a tender caress, mapping your spine with phantom fingers.

  You have to get out.

  You tear away your blankets and stumble from bed, feathers spilling out onto the floor. Under your pajama top, a budding itch crawls beneath your skin. As you shove the window open, the sweltering night air sweeps in, clinging like a second skin and reeking of magnolias. You haul yourself out the window and onto the roof.

  The climb is steep, made harder by the rictus your fingers have locked themselves into over the past three days. You dig your hardening fingertips i
nto the cracks between tiles. The shingles’ edges scrape against your bare feet.

  Eli, the dead boy breathes in your ear, but when your head snaps back, he’s nowhere to be found. A laugh hacks its way out of your throat as a sob.

  By the time you scrabble to the flat top of the roof, your hands are lanced with needles. You lie down on the flattest part of the roof, tiles digging into your back, arms spread. It’s not comfortable, but you will not sleep again tonight. The dreams of falling, trapped in someone else’s skin and terror, won’t let you.

  “Goddammit,” you croak. If your mom heard you, she’d wash your mouth out with soap for blaspheming, never mind your seventeen years of age and your foot and a half of height on her. But she’s sound asleep and won’t be up until five in the morning. She’d been talking last night about leaving early to get lilies for the funeral. “Goddammit! Leave me alone!”

  Eli, repeats Jon.

  “Go away.” You’re afraid of what you’ll see if you close your eyes. “Please, go away.”

  He doesn’t, of course. For the rest of the night, you wait for the sky to brighten, punching your arm to keep from falling asleep and rolling over the edge, and try to ignore the ghost of the pastor’s son muttering in your head.

  ***

  Long, plastic tables line the lawn outside the church, covered in jugs of sweet tea and an army of home-cooked dishes. A handful of women, fanning themselves with paper bulletins in the July heat, hover around the food to keep the flies away. Each is dressed for the funeral in head-to-toe black, including large, netted Sunday hats.

  You trudge past them in your own ill-fitting suit, your father’s old shoes pinching your feet with every step. They would have felt fine on you three days ago. It’s the recent transformations your body has undergone – the sloping curve of your spine, bringing your shoulders forward and making it harder to stand up straight; the gnarling of your hands and feet; the tiny, sharp quills budding all over your skin – that have the suit’s material stretching in some places and sagging in others.

  The scent of pulled pork and heating barbecues nauseates you. You haven’t been able to keep food down for the past three days.

  A greeter – someone’s kid, too young for you to remember her name – presses a folded leaflet into your hand at the door. “Thanks,” you mutter. There’s a printed lily on the front cover, along with the words memorial service for jonathan chin, sunday, july 20, 2014.

  Inside, the pews are packed with farmers in old suits and their sullen wives. New Hope Baptist Church isn’t big, but the whole town has turned up for the pastor’s son’s funeral. Especially since it was a suicide, how deliciously terrible. A life-sized bronze Jesus, pinned to a cross at the prow of the church, presides over the congregation like a suffering, glowering figurehead. Wreaths of white blossoms festoon the walls, washed in multicolored light from the stained glass windows. A large, hideous arrangement of roses, lilies, and chrysanthemums bound together to form a cross stands at the front of the church, right before the altar and casket.

  Jon would have hated it. At the very least, he’d have laughed. That’s my dad, always putting God ahead of me.

  Your parents are already there, packed in near the front. It’s the first time in recent memory they’ve stood so close to each other, almost like a unit entire. As you shuffle into their pew, you catch a glimpse of Jon’s parents. Pastor Chin stands a few pews from the first row, next to his sobbing wife. When he turns to comfort her, pressing a tender kiss to her forehead, his eyes are dry and swollen.

  “Posture, Eli,” your mother murmurs as you settle in next to her, keeping your head down. She stares straight ahead as the choir filters in. They’re throwing nervous glances at the casket in front. “We should have gotten you a haircut, you’re getting shaggy.”

  You catch a glimpse of Randy’s red hair through the crowd. Your friends are up front, crammed in tight among a flock of grandmas; Brett rises above the cloud of white hair and elaborate hats like an awkward skyscraper, and Michael is lost somewhere below. You duck your head as if praying, your stomach churning. If you’re lucky, they haven’t spotted you.

  As the choir begins a quavering rendition of ‘Be Thou My Vision’, you jam your hands into your pockets, too ashamed to sing along. It’s probably your imagination, but you feel like the bronze Jesus won’t stop staring at you.

  That’s when you see him standing in the pews behind his parents, swaying in time to the music with his eyes closed. He’s dressed in the same dark jeans and old black hoodie he used to wear every day to school, his clothes hanging off of his skinny, lanky body. His glasses are shattered. Purple bruises mark his skin, from the ring of finger-shaped stains around his neck to the swollen cheek and eye on the left side of his face. His lips are split down the middle, caked with a thin line of dried blood. His hair is incongruously perfect.

  As if he can feel you staring, Jonathan Chin glances back at you, dark eyes flickering with amusement, and mouths words that you hear in your head even across the church.

  Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

  Your budding feathers bristle, standing on end. You shrink back.

  Why have you abandoned me?

  “Pay attention,” your mom snaps quietly, elbowing you. The choir moves on to ‘Abide With Me’, stumbling over the key change. The organist plows on gamely.

  “But Jon’s right there,” you stammer.

  For a moment she softens. “Maybe an open-casket funeral wasn’t a good choice.” She squeezes your shoulder. “You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

  She thinks you’re talking about the corpse lying in his coffin, not the one grinning at you across the church, his eyes agleam with cruel amusement. Jon crooks his fingers in a sardonic wave, and the music is swallowed by overwhelming shrieking coming from outside the church.

  The choir halts, the organ stuttering. Pastor Chin whips around, staring straight through his son as his eyes dart to the sanctuary doors. The windows go dark as large, feathered bodies pelt past, beating their wings against the colored glass. You gasp, your own blood singing with that nighttime craving for open air. Your feathers prickle, pushing further out of your skin. Is the twist in your stomach revulsion or ecstasy? You want to fly. You need to fly, to soar, to peck and tear and shred—

  You’re pushing through the crowd, heading for the back of the building. There’s a stairwell there; you need to be up in the air, feeling the wind under you, wiping you clean from all of the disgusting humanity tying you to earth. As if taking your cue, the rest of the congregation stampedes toward the exits in a flurry of hats and panicked people.

  Someone opens the door, and a horde of huge, filthy crows explodes into the church. They bang, screaming, into the walls and windows, knocking down the flower arrangements and shitting wildly over everything. Your Sunday School teacher faints and disappears beneath the trampling mass of escaping parishioners.

  Someone grabs your arm and you snarl at them without thinking, yanking your limb back. “You’re not getting away that easy,” growls Randy. He’s clawed his way to you, a poisonous look on his face. “We’ve been calling you nonstop since Friday. Why the hell have you been blowing us off these past few days?”

  The call of the sky crackles in your veins and you almost bite him. “Why do you think, asshole?”

  Dark, violent rage flashes across his face, but Brett and Michael are suddenly there, filtering out of the crowd. “Not now, you guys,” Brett snaps. He focuses on you. He’s gotten paler, lost weight. “We need to talk. All of us.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” your traitor mouth says.

  “Someone’s brave today,” sneers Randy. “I liked you better as a fucking coward.”

  He’s standing between you and the door, you and the outside – you lunge at him, but Brett grabs you and holds you back. “Calm the fuck down, Eli!”

  “Get out of my way!” you shout.

  Michael steps in front of you and silently l
ifts up the edge of his own shirt. The words dry up in your mouth. His stomach is covered in ugly red lines and a darkened rash of budding feathers.

  “It’s happening to all of us,” Brett yells, barely audible over the howling crowd. “So you can come and help us sort this shit out, see if we can stop it, or you can keep turning into a fucking bird alone.” He lets go of you. “Your choice. If you’re in, we’re going to Elmo’s Diner in my pickup. If not, you’re on your own.”

  You glare at Randy and shove past him to the door. Behind you, Jesus’s face and body are streaked with a patina of crow shit. “I’m in.” You have been from the very start; there’s no turning back now.

  Outside, the sky boils with screaming crows, blotting out the clouds, the magnolias. People stream down the front steps, past the picnic tables set up on the lawn. The food is ruined; crows are in the casseroles, gorging themselves on pork belly, tearing through the food and soiling the linens. Discarded programs are strewn like flower petals all over the grass, trampled into the dirt.

  ***

  Elmo’s Diner is all warm yellow tiles and children’s colored-in menus, but the cheery atmosphere doesn’t make you feel safe.

  “I’ve been having nightmares since Friday,” Brett says hoarsely. The four of you are sitting in a booth by the window, keeping an eye on the sullen sky. So far, no birds in sight. “I keep dreaming I’m being buried alive in crows. Just…just suffocating under all the feathers and scratching feet, tearing my lips to pieces. This stinking mass of crows.”

  “Do you dream about him?” You fiddle with your straw wrapper. “About Jon visiting you at night?”