“Yes, he is, isn’t he?” Really, he was perfect.
“I’m quite certain he’ll keep those nightmares away,” the pixie said, patting Dirk’s sharky head. This was especially sweet, considering that the pixie had no idea what a nightmare was. They never slept, not when they were just allotted one day. There was too much to do and see.
I lay down next to Dirk and the pixie. “So tell me,” I said, pushing his hair back with one finger. He seemed to enjoy this and leaned into it. “Are you happy with your life?”
He seemed surprised. “Why, of course! What a wonderful existence! I opened my eyes and there you were, and we’ve never left each other’s side.” He smiled at me fondly. “I’m so very happy that I got to spend my entire life with you. How many people get to say—”
He never finished. His time had run out.
Disposing of pixies was never easy. I used to pick them up with a tissue or the dustpan and toss them in the outside garbage, just another routine added to my day. But lately, it’s been getting harder. I picked up the pixie and set him gently in a tiny cardboard ring box. I tied it with a cheery orange ribbon and set the entire thing in the garbage.
Tomorrow would be a new day and a new pixie. Already I could see the beginning of a blue and green pearly pixie egg forming in the corner of the window frame. I wondered what this pixie would look like, if she’d have long pink hair or if he’d be afraid of spiders. I wondered if I’d miss his entire formative years when I went out to get the newspaper, or if she’d be fascinated with Dirk the Hammerhead, and whether he would develop a crush on Judge Judy while watching TV. I wondered if he would die peacefully like my little pixie tonight did, or if she would just drop to the ground mid-flight, like so many others.
I wondered what it would be like to have the same friend always be by my side, your whole life long.
I wrapped my arms around Dirk, turned my face into his gray fur, and waited for the nightmares.
AVA
She knew that she was disappearing, that much was certain. It wasn’t the same as dying, not quite, and so she naturally treated it in the manner that it required.
Ava slipped her pictures out of the frames at her mother’s house. She crept quietly into the homes of her friends and old lovers and did the same. Her first boyfriend still had her senior year picture in a shoebox with a few love notes from her and the girl that he had cheated on her with. She burned those, too, for good measure.
She ceased to talk those last few weeks, because she heard once that sound never disappears but bounces off the planets, deep in space, forever and ever. She wanted the sound of her voice to fade away so gradually that nobody would miss her. She erased her name out of everybody’s letters, their conversations, their minds.
It took some time, but she eventually managed to erase her face from their memories as well. Zack B., the boy who sat next to her in English for four years straight, was the hardest. This was surprising, since they were never really close friends, not in all that time, but his brain had wrapped around her blonde hair and he refused to let her go. It was kind of sweet, actually, but in time she won out.
Her hair grew lighter and lighter. She forgot to eat and her body thinned and her stomach stuck against the bones in her back. When she gazed at the world around her, the color drained out of her eyes until they were perfectly clear.
It was a Wednesday, her last day. She hadn’t worn any jewelry in weeks; it was too heavy and she wanted to be weightless. She breathed in once, twice, three times; the wind fluttered the curtains and there was a soft sound, a rustle of white beach sand that fell chiming to the floor, particles that were too small to be anything of consequence, to be anything at all.
SHE CALLED HIM SKY
There was a boy. And there was a girl. Many stories begin this way.
The boy was a sad, beautiful boy. He carried something small and bruised in his hands. The boy stumbled through the forest, tripping in the ivy and knocking his head against the trees. He staggered through the desert, falling down and walking on his knees. He crawled through the arctic cold, blowing on the slight, battered thing in his hands.
One day the boy met the girl.
She was passing through the cornfields when she saw something pale amidst the green. She stepped closer, and realized it was a white hand, palm upward. The hand belonged to an arm, and the arm attached to a very-much-asleep boy. His other hand was fisted tightly.
“Boy,” she said, and pulled on his outstretched hand until his eyes flew open. They were black as night with no white at all and shone as though he were crying. His oil slick eyes roamed around a bit wildly until they landed on the tan face of the girl.
“Hello,” she said, and studied him seriously. Then she smiled. “I think you could use some help.”
She took the boy home, gave him a bath, and gave him a name. She called him Sky because he always looked so sad, like the stars look sad. She thought of how the moon was always alone, never invited to tea, an eerily beautiful voyeur. Sky was just the right name.
The girl didn’t have a name herself, and it didn’t matter because the boy couldn’t speak. He just held whatever it was tightly in his hand, careful never to drop it.
“May I see what it is?” she asked him, and after thinking it over, he slowly opened his fingers.
It was a heart made out of red crystal, only now it was fissured and tender to the touch. The fire inside the heart had almost gone out, and even as the girl watched, a small bit of it crumbled to dust and fell away.
“Oh,” said the girl. She looked at the boy. “Sky,” she said, “I might be able to fix this. It could take me a while. May I try?”
He watched her with his strange eyes and then he nodded. The girl gingerly took the heart into her warm hands.
“I will take it into my shop where it will be safe. I will bring it back to you when the moon is the same shape it is now. All right?”
Again the boy nodded. The girl held the heart close to her chest and ran back to her shop. She carefully set the heart on a scrap of blue fabric, and surveyed her many tools. Then she got to work.
Every evening she worked on repairing the red crystal heart, and every day she spent time with the boy. He pointed at the birds and she told him their names. He pointed at the water and she showed him how to wash. He pointed at the honey-haired girl who lived down the lane, and the girl’s eyes stung a bit.
“Yes, she is very pretty. And very, very kind. Her name is Asphodel, which is a type of lily. Me? I am not called anything.” She smiled at the boy. “The sun is going down. I shall leave now to work on your heart.”
She worked so hard that she didn’t see the sun for days, but the time had come. The moon was fat and heavy in the sky. The boy’s eyes pulled away from Asphodel’s home long enough to see that the girl was walking toward him, something carefully cupped in her hands.
The heart was beautiful, shiny and full of burning life. The fissures had mended, the broken edges had been smoothed and polished. He held his hands out for it, and the girl let her fingers linger on his for a second when she passed it to him. Then she pulled them away.
“It is good, Sky. It is strong and able to withstand much, I think.” She watched his liquid eyes drift toward Asphodel, a compass to True North. Her lips turned upward. “I believe it is strong enough to survive if you give it to Asphodel. I think that you should try.”
He looked at her then, gave her a brotherly kiss and sprang to his feet. His footsteps were whispers.
The girl picked her way through the flowers on the way back to the shop, but she never made it. She fell, silently, and her hand found its way inside her shirt to the hole where her plump, healthy heart had been. The boy’s small ragged heart was still wrapped in fabric on her table, resistant to filler, resistant to files. Buffing didn’t warm it, fires didn’t fuse it. Sometimes, something so broken can only be replaced.
The flowers were soft. There was no sound.
BIG MAN BEN
He was almost seventeen, but not quite. She was nearly ten years older, but again, not quite.
He was out in the park, doing clumsy boy things with his clumsy man-boy body. Riding bikes. Chasing squirrels. Searching the shrubbery for things that had fallen out of other people’s coat pockets, like pocketknives and pictures of old girlfriends.
She was bundled up in a lavender coat, her legs pulled up to her chest against the cold. A tiny thing with dark hair and large, expressive brown eyes. Her eyes were always brimming, but he didn’t know that yet; didn’t know anything yet.
He looked at her. Once. Twice. Pretended he was looking anywhere but there. Stared at her hard. Turned his head her way every four or five minutes. Every thirty seconds.
“Excuse me,” she said. Her voice, like the rest of her, was frail. He was afraid the condensation from her breath would freeze and do her in. She’d fall to the ground and he’d try and rub the warmth back into her hands, breathe life into her body.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Please don’t call me ‘ma’am’. I’m not old enough for that yet.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He wandered over to her, too casually. Tripped. Caught himself and skulked the rest of the way to the bench in embarrassment. He hovered a few feet away.
“Do I frighten you?” she asked.
He puffed out his chest, yawned. “Nothing scares me. Ma’am.”
She smiled then, and something inside his chest broke. It reminded him of when the barn cat had kittens once. Fragile things, balls of puff with miniature bones inside. The fur seemed soft enough to keep them safe, but they were still bags of bones, sacks of fragility like everything else.
This kitten girl stared up at him from inside her soft lavender coat. “Will you sit with me for a while?”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said. Such a simple thing. So honest. He had no idea of the implication. He was just a boy.
He sat. She smiled. He was afraid he was breathing too hard. Held his breath. Coughed it out. Breathed in carefully through his nose.
“You don’t need to be so afraid,” she said. She was whispering now, like they were an invisible secret. The world faded and so did they.
“Told you. I’m not scared of anything.” Said with a bit of pomp, but a lot of earnestness.
Her eyes brimmed, but he wasn’t looking, didn’t know what to be on the lookout for.
“I am,” she said.
—
Her name was Angelica. Fitting, he thought. She was so full of goodness that she glowed. He expected wings to unfold from her back then and there.
She laughed when he said this. His ears burned, but in pleasure. She didn’t laugh meanly like most girls, but was genuinely delighted.
“Oh, you sweet, silly boy,” she said, and smiled directly into his eyes. “Aren’t you delightful? You are. You’re charming. What is your name?”
His name was Ben. Something simple, something nondescript. Nothing like Angelica.
“Ben is a wonderful name,” she said adamantly. She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes, summing him up. His ears burned again. This time it was more uncomfortable.
“Yes, Ben is a fine name.” She nodded to herself. “It’s strong and straight and firm. I could very much grow to like a man named Ben. And you will be a man one day, you know. A fine man, if your name has anything to do with it.”
“I’m a man now,” Ben told her. His voice squeaked for the first time in a long time, and it embarrassed him, made him angry.
She patted his hand, but it wasn’t at all condescending. “No, you’re not a man yet, Ben. Almost, but not quite.” He bristled at this, but she shook her head. “Don’t be in such a rush to grow up. Look at you now. Your eyes are clear; your hair is too long. You don’t know whether to smile or be angry at the things that I say. You’re beautiful. You’re simply beautiful.”
Ben’s eyes rolled in his head. Beautiful? Him? Plain, sturdy Ben? He wanted to laugh. He wanted to hit her for making fun of him. He wanted to believe she was telling the truth.
She sighed then, and it was weary. The force of her sorrow fatigued him. He couldn’t carry its weight on his adolescent shoulders. It was the sigh of a woman, not somebody caught between childhood and adulthood like himself.
“Hmm,” he said under his breath. He shifted uncomfortably.
“What is it?” she asked. She looked hurt, or maybe a little afraid. He couldn’t tell such things yet.
“You sound like...your thoughts are very heavy. It does not sound easy to be an adult.”
It was a lot of words for Ben. A lot to string together. A lot of thinking that went into the intent behind them.
“It isn’t easy, sometimes. When I was a girl, things were so much more...I used to live then, I think.”
“You don’t live now?”
She shook her head, her hair falling around her cheeks like snow. “I survive.”
Ben wiggled his big toes, felt the canvas of the shoe give way on his right foot. He’d been worrying at that particular hole for the better part of the day. There was something satisfying about making the hole bigger and bigger. It was like tearing apart a heart. Silencing a crying baby.
Angelica turned to face him then and the abruptness of her movement made him jump.
“Ben, I like you very much. There’s something about you that is just so honest and...you ground me. Or at least I think that you could. Does this sound crazy? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He nodded, but he wasn’t really sure. She liked him? Really? She had spent ten minutes sitting on a park bench with a stranger and she actually enjoyed his company? She was beautiful. She was broken inside somehow, he knew it, but the strength of her suffering made her shine. He wished he had somebody to tell, somebody who’d disbelieve him at first, but then would slowly realize he was telling the truth. “No way!” this imaginary friend would yell, and would punch Ben excitedly in the shoulder. “No way!” But there was no such friend, so Ben chewed his lip in silence.
Angelica’s brows drew up. She looked away. “I’m sorry. I’m being very forward, and I’m probably making you uncomfortable. Please forget that I...”
She tried to stand and Ben reached for her hand automatically. She stopped and stared at her gloved fingers in his bare ones. He jerked his hand away. Clenched his fists. Tentatively reached out for hers again, watching her closely to see if she’d scream and run away.
She didn’t. He wanted to close his eyes and bask in her smile. A lizard on a rock. A boy with a crush.
“Ah,” she breathed. He leaned in closer to hear her. “This could be something beautiful. Something amazing.”
She wrapped her fingers around his, and they were surprisingly strong.
—
Angelica had a husband. This changed everything.
“No, it doesn’t,” she insisted. It was their third meeting on the park bench. She leaned her head on Ben’s shoulder and ran her finger down his arm like she owned it. Perhaps she did. “This doesn’t change a thing.”
Ben wanted to look at her, wanted to stare her down the way a man should. But he wasn’t a man, not yet, and it had never seemed more painfully obvious than it did now. A man would shake his head defiantly and stride away. Ben wanted to cry.
“My good boy,” she said, and nuzzled her face into his neck. Ben wondered what he smelled like to her. Like soap and acne medicine, most likely. The smell of a boy. The smell of a child. He pulled away.
Angelica’s eyes started to get wet, and Ben looked down at his shoes. His big toe had emerged the victor, and he could see a white swath of sock. How terrible he must look to her now. A gangly youth in disrepair. He stood up.
“No, don’t!” Angelica screamed, and grabbed at his arm with both hands. Ben swayed in indecision, a bit shocked by her reaction. Angelica buried her face into his sleeve and sobbed.
“Don’t go,” she cried. “I don’t know
what I’ll do if you go.”
Ben stood for a long while, not knowing what to do. A jogger ran past, and cast Ben a commiserating glance. “Women,” it said. “Always so emotional. What’s a man to do?”
A man. A man stays, Ben thought, and he sat back down, put his arms around her awkwardly.
“There there,” he said. He had heard that this was the thing to say to a crying woman, but he had no idea why. “There there.”
It worked. He had found the magic words, and as Angelica’s tears dried to a sniffle, he repeated these wonderful words until they had become a mantra. “There there, Angelica,” he said. “There there, Angie. There there, my girl. My love.” He tried the endearments on. Did they fit? Would they hang on her thin frame? Would one of them truly make her his?
Angelica smiled then, into the front of his coat. He could hear it in her voice.”Call me anything. Call me everything. I like it all.”
Did she?
“Do you?”
There was something behind her eyes, something watchful and weary. It sighed and gave itself over, disappeared. “I do.”
“What...does your husband call you?”
He was trying to wrap his head around it. A husband. A man she told secrets to and ate dinner with and made love to. Ben felt lonely. The muscles in his left arm jerked and then quieted.
She watched his face carefully. “He doesn’t call me anything, anymore. I’m just a warm body. I’m furniture. I’m art.”
She was beautiful. She could be hung from the walls like a Picasso, he believed it. She would dress up the room simply by being there.
“You’re the best kind of art,” he said. He blushed. He looked at the trees.
“Ben.” Her voice was close to his ear. He scuffed his shoe against the ground. “Ben, I’m going to tell you flat out. I’m never going to sleep with you. Never. I won’t betray my husband that way.” He was silent, thinking. Angelica started moving every part of her body at once, like a bird. A snake. Something that was dying a piece at a time. “Ben? Does this change things?”
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