by T. Wyse
It was on one of the two balconies of the top floor that the slippered foot met the ground once more. This time the landing met with a rough stumble, polished tile giving little dignity to damp slippers.
The gemmed frost decorating the dress had become weeping wet splotches across its surface. Their tears could not harm the proud fabric in anything but the most temporary sense, every enduring stitch held fast against the strains and weather. Her hair however had been left a rebellious and frizzled mess, the touch of even this tiny amount of water evidently so repulsive as to cause strands of it to writhe out of the tight clasp of the wooden tie.
The only lingering trace of that celestial being were the two strips of fabric rising from her back, still reaching towards the sky with lapping desperation.
Those fingers now tried to silence the pouches, but fumbled. She glanced at the strings that were woven into the dress, around a fingerless glove pattern that allowed her control. Nothing was wrong, nothing out of place, just the fabric being a child refusing to sleep. Again with deliberation she closed them, and finally they obeyed, and with them quieted her shoulders slumped down, now she fully bore the weight of a terrestrial beast.
She walked now with the careful gait of an earthbound bat. She fumbled blindly to open the door, but only managed to smack her knuckles hard against it. She focused bleary eyes down at the handle, and caught it with hands clenched hard enough that her nails dug into her palms.
The door slid open without much real effort and stilled air puffed out with little enthusiasm. The scent of familiarity, of home, wafted over her and then the air was still once more. The circuit of the room’s blinds had been more and more difficult to place recently, leaving the room a disconcertingly stagnant pool in her sight.
The still and dead atmosphere of the room popped her ears as she crossed the threshold, the smell was tired, a tomb of yesterday’s air. That feeling was enough to distract her, and her old nemesis reared itself. Her feet caught on the frame, and she fell nose first into her carpet yet again. The carpet was as soft as ever.
She didn’t cry out in frustration or even surprise, only the muted ‘thud’ echoed in the room, and then a gentle rustle of cloth on cloth. She lay there, holding in a great sigh, but turning her head so the carpet tickled and prickled her cheek instead.
The band-aids had peeled away in the wind some time ago, the bruises and cuts vanishing too.
She focused out and backwards, and finally felt frustration. The dress lay snagged, thankfully not torn, on the latch of the door. With care, but little grace, she slowly backed herself up, scraping her cheek against the floor the entire way. The slightest rip in the fabric would snatch it away from her and into her mother’s hands for a week or more.
She allowed herself to sit. Sore and frustrated she focused her attention and her eyes on trembling hands, and willed them to the snag. With surgical fear she simply unhooked it, and finally closed her eyes again in relief.
Eyes dear, eyes. Her father’s words, a mantra she had heard so many times that it rubbed her worse than bad cloth. She forced her eyes open, and glared at the flag flapping on the balcony. Yellow, she thought to herself. Yellow.
For the most part the space she called her own was impeccably neat. It could have been said that a clean and clear floor was important to someone with unsure hands and feet, but it was more disinterest that kept it clear. There were no dirty clothes across the floor because when given the option she never wore any but the dresses with the pouches. There was scant furnishing in the room because they would simply constrain the airflow throughout. There were no objects on the floor, because the things that fascinated her were expressed differently.
There was a bed, of course, which lay smack in the centre of the room. The miscellany of clothing lay hidden behind a gently curved screen in one corner, and a desk sat opposite that.
It was the desk where the first hints of the frightening oddities of the room were apparent. A chaos of wires and of boxes of things: ugly things, broken things, dirty things lay on its surface. The desk had no apparent order, though each of the projects involved hooking wire into some bauble or another.
Large and seemingly misshapen objects, sat broodingly in the corners of the room. Behind and to the left of the bed stood a smattering of building blocks, forming into a tower as high as the girl herself. The tower was designed completely oblivious to the harmonies of body or colour and branched out in such a way that it had needed to be braced against the wall to remain whole. Two oversized vats of the bricks sat beside their creation, one of them blocking an ill used closet.
In the opposite end of the room, past the pit that housed the stairs down, stood an odd thing shaped entirely out of modeling dough. It was, at least in overall concept, an equivalent to the sculpture of blocks, though its colours melded together with a softer contrast. Like the tower of bricks it lacked any aesthetic value to light-bound vision and it seemed to reach towards the open screen door beside it with a frozen lurch.
The house’s eccentric architecture was apparent even from this scene, as though it was a bedroom there were three exits branching from it. The first was the rather mundane flight of stairs down to the house proper. The yellow carpeting, perhaps intent on infecting the rest of the house with its garishness, wrapped the steps in an ugly cascade.
On either end of the room sat the screen doors which lead to the unconnected balconies. She used them for little else but a point of takeoff, but they served the greatest purpose of the overall room, what made it home to the little girl. The two made such a perfect circuit of air, at least with a little maintenance day by day, that it seemed the room could have only ever been made for her. Even the wooden slat blinds that each door featured seemed perfect for allowing her the discretion to control the wind flow as desired.
These were all the most normal features of the room however. The feature which had horrified every single one of her friends who had come to visit, the thing that kept any of them from ever spending the night here, was the ceiling.
It was as if any and all potential chaos in the room of a child had simply flipped from floor to ceiling. Little objects hovered thick, dangling in an angled madness above. Some swayed gently with the freedom to flow within the invisible breeze while others stood restrained and lifeless. The baubles were a chaotic mishmash of colours and shapes. Any normal observer would find no commonality to their forms, no logical link to the things but the simple fact that they were clearly part of an overall work.
A feather twirled gently, dangling from a wire piercing its quill tip. A crude bauble of clay stood pointing a blowing mouth towards the slow dancer.
A dirty piece of some mesh wire hung at an odd angle to the blowing bauble. Spaghetti stranded gusts gently puffed through the filter. Further on the gusts sourced from a delicate tube of glass, its end half shattered.
This pattern of seemingly random objects of myriad colours and no logical connection continued up and down the arcing ceiling in a bewilderingly static chaos.
This was the ceiling of the girl who knew the wind.
She dropped her backpack gently upon the bed, and from it produced the paper of the day’s work, and the somewhat loathsome green uniform. The rigid and ordered fiber of the thing was uncomfortable to hold, even to put away in the hamper.
Finally she produced that thing, the skull of the tiny mouse, from one of the pouches of her dress. Again she closed her eyes with it in her fingers and felt the way the wind brushed its surface, saw in her unique sight the way it jutted and flowed through the holes in the bone. It was a fascinating discovery, a treasured new companion, and in such an odd little place too.
She set it down on the desk with surgical care, eager to get it with the rest of the mobile, to adjust it perfectly, and to bring back the life of air to the entire work. Before she could even begin this task she heard the voice of the inevitable calling her down.
“Amelie, dinner soon.” Her mother’s voice, not yelling o
f course, but with just enough force and volume to alert the girl.
So with a defeated reluctance carefully watched footfalls lead her down the yellow stair. The last lapping animation of her dress ceased as she crossed the threshold into the house below.
That apricot smell was immediately apparent even halfway down the stairs. It was the smell of home. It was a smell she had never become acclimated to and found a subtle comfort in that. Even the aroma of the near finished food couldn’t overwhelm that lingering chemical.
Brown cases, made of solid wood and slick lacquering were stacked from floor to ceiling of every room of the house, every hallway, and even sets of them on the lower stairwells. They were of varying sizes, giving an illusion of being inside some time forgotten wind swept canyon, layer upon asymmetrical layer carving guiding pathways to each of the chambers beyond. They were neatly organized, or so Amelie had been assured long ago, each box stacked so perfectly that she had never seen any of them so much as tremble even when grazed. Each box too was carefully marked with a coloured flag, a system that she didn’t quite understand, but she knew that it somehow indicated the origin of the contents, and the urgency of their eventual curation. Upon each flag was scribbled a series of letters too, in old typeface.
She slipped through the canyons with a serpentine ease, navigating through towering chokepoints, ducking and swaying instinctively away from jutting boxes. The air in the canyon was tight, the edges crisp and unwavering, the currents clear and at her back.
She came finally to the ground floor and into space used primarily for her parents work. It also served as the dining room on the almost unknown occasion when they had unfamiliar company. The place was a maze of boxes rather than a linear canyon, the stacks of this fortress ending just below her parent’s eyesight but well above her own. The air here hid no secrets from her, the ebb and flow of the first floor gave her an immaculate picture of the entire space, blurring only at the finest details such as the textures of the floors and walls. There was nobody at the workspace today, no lingering work to keep the bodies occupied. She slithered finally into the kitchen to join them both.
The kitchen too served as host to clarifying winds, but it was a dizzying flurry of drafts and currents. Hot air intermingled with steam in a storm of motion that swept over the surfaces of the stove and the figures of her parents, carving them out in a glowing and smooth yellowed marble in her sight. The form of her mother hovered over the epicenter of the storm, hunched over in contemplation. Her father sat stoically sneaking in some notations before dinner.
Victoria had often said that it was a shame Amelie hadn’t inherited much of her mother. The woman was tall, slender and had smooth skin. Though each of these traits tipped the scale, giving her an unwarranted projection of fragility rather than grace. Her fingers were intricate, almost spidery in length, her nose perhaps a little too sharp, her eyes perhaps a little too soft, often seeming to choose to focus on things far away. Her hair was long and silken stands of gold, but dangled with such a length beyond her waist, that they seemed only to add to that crystalline brittleness.
Amelie’s hair had once been that same colour, but it had slowly faded into a homely brown over time though it still lingered lighter than her father’s earthen tones.
The most glaring trait that they hadn’t shared came in terms of grace. Amelie struggled with every moment to interact with the simplest things, every material object seemed to wither away from her touch, to slither off with malevolent glee from her frustrated fingertips. Her mother’s hands were hypnotic, the smooth movements of a dancer who had redefined grace itself. Fuzzy memories long ago, of watching with enough fascination to calm her chaotic infant mind, of her mother working on that funny loom in the basement. It was one of the few things she had understood with her eyes early on, and something that still stunned her with its beauty. As Amelie grew however, so did that trembling clumsiness, and in the recent years seeing her mother with such infinite and unshared grace caused the girl’s heart to ache.
She hovered behind her father’s back, he hadn’t turned to greet her, not even the usual minimalist nod. The fluttering numbness of dread returned in a singular rush, but with fist clenched in resolve she stumbled to her father’s side, grabbing his chair to catch herself.
“Just ask them, I want you to just ask them for once, instead of forcing me to. You want to come, you said so, and I want that too.” Victoria’s voice whispered in Amelie’s ear.
An invitation, one through a confusing chaos of the strange social politics that seemed to saturate school. An invitation to the cottage of her friend’s family, and the first real chance to be away from the city without her parents.
She took a heavy breath, her lungs burning bright with fire and courage. “Dad, I wanted to ask…”
“One moment.” He scribbled furiously, the pen scraping the paper with an overabundance of force, the jagged inked lines forming with a fervor bordering on abandon.
“Dad…really I…” Softer now, deflated, she backed away towards her chair, the fluttering now a cold burning.
“Shht.” He cut sharply, finger whipped up, cutting the air.
And with that she let go of his chair, and sunk down into hers. “I didn’t ask much, now did I?” She predicted Victoria’s words come the next time they spoke.
She sensed the wind of his breath, hoping for an opening while her spirit was still animated, her eyes focused down onto the matte finish of her plate. His breaths came, shaped by his nostrils puffing out with a rapidity and force that she recognized quickly. He struggled to hold in the air but there was a lingering glow to his lungs. She remembered the patterning two years ago, the aftermath of a series of fights that they had tried to conceal from her. The finer details were still obscured from her now, but that had coincided with her voiced desire to attend a ‘real school’ as she had put it back then. It had been the second time she had ever truly asked them for anything, ever stood with insistence on her own feet, a miracle as she hadn’t even known Victoria back then.
She focused behind her, on her mother’s form, her figure against the fiercely blowing air. She could have probed her mother’s breathing as well, but it was mostly hidden inside the fierce currents of the stove. Her mother’s lungs weren’t quite so bright, but that stress was there, a lingering ember in a normally cooled hearth. The face was a funny sort of pattern, fleeting strips of steam caressed the woman’s features, creating glimpses of a porcelain mask. It was however unlike her not to have even glanced back when Amelie entered, unlike the mask to look so strained and sad.
She found herself standing and carefully approaching her mother, perhaps to force a hug from behind, to wrap her hands around the green apron strings. That’s what Amanda would have done, the sort of thing she did with her mother and father. Amanda would have been able to ask such a simple thing though, wouldn’t have had her voice drowned out.
Her mother stirred the pot, slowly, gently, a dreamlike rhythm applied to a dark wooden ladle. Without even moving her face to look, her unoccupied hand wove upwards with arcane grace, retrieving a platter from the cupboard, and placing it on the counter without so much as a clink.
Amelie caught herself frozen in awe of the movements, so simple, so beyond her. Her hands had been half poised, trembling from the pause, to act out her silly little plan but her tiny and silly paws fell to her sides instead. If those had been her hands surely the platter would be broken now, surely the dinner would be splattered everywhere. She slunk back into the chair, the last remnants of that energized feeling seeping away.
Her father’s scribbling reached an even tighter pace, and the stove began to spew forth another jet of steam from one of the pots. The tension was still on their breaths, that feeling of a distant argument.
She waited there in silence, palm to cheek, and admired the caked bits of dough that had splotched themselves upon his roan sleeves. A pile of steaming flatbreads waited in the centre of the table for the meal to begin.
She wondered what they would taste like today as his recent tinkering with his recipe had yielded some interesting results.
Tinkerers, that’s the sort of people she supposed they were. With few exceptions every tool, every single thing in the house simpler than a toaster had been constructed by her father and his never-ending quest to explore, dissect, research, and perfect. From the beds they slept in, to desks, to the very dishes that waited for her mother’s curried stew, all survived only by his satisfaction with their forms.
Her mother was every bit the explorer too, though her specialties were of elegance and grace. She wove cloth from base materials, going so far as to have a secret mixture. They each had some purchased clothing, when society dictated the necessity of formality, but they were never truly relaxed unless they were in the clothes that her mother had woven and stitched on practiced hands and aged loom.
It had been Victoria who had been brazen enough to call them odd, but then that was what she was like. The girl had never been afraid to speak her mind, of the things she wanted especially, both for herself and for others.
Amanda had done her best to cover her feelings about them with ‘appropriate’ words, deeming them ‘unique’, ‘interesting’.
Different from their families certainly. Amelie’s eyes focused on her father’s clothing a moment, attempting and failing to meet his attention again, and clumsily falling back into her own thoughts.
“Good.” He nodded finally, breaking the silence, and let his pen drop to the papers even as he shuffled them into a single neat pile. He stacked them away upon one of the larger cases that sat upon the floor, and thumped one of the slim cases in their place at the table.
She met his eyes, large and brown, the wear of time showing slightly in and around them. His expression was never truly stern, but it changed with crisp efficiency, his moods and intentions switching with strict momentum.