Small Wonders

by Courtney Lux

  Copyright © 2015 Courtney Lux

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-45-0 (trade)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-941530-46-7 (ebook)

  Published by Interlude Press, New York

  http://interludepress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Book design by Lex Huffman

  Cover Design by Buckeyegrrl Designs

  Cover and Interior Illustrations by Elizabeth Vest

  Epigraph quotation, Written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. Narrated by Cecil Baldwin.

  “The Candidate,” Welcome to Night Vale.

  Episode 12. December 1, 2012.

  http://commonplacebooks.com/

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Janice Lux.

  If you were still with us today, and I told you I wrote a book, I know exactly what you’d say: “Of course you did. You’re the best writer I know.” Despite never having read a word I wrote. Thank you for always believing in me.

  Contents

  I.

  One.

  Two.

  II.

  Three.

  Four.

  III.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  IV.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  V.

  Eleven.

  VI.

  Twelve.

  Thirteen.

  Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you.

  The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore.

  And while the future is fast coming for you,

  It always flinches first,

  And settles in as the gentle present.

  This now, this us, we can cope with that.

  We can do this together, you and I.

  —Welcome to Night Vale

  i.

  At first, people called me a miracle. Well, some people did anyway.

  My mama didn’t even know she was pregnant until one fine Sunday morning as she was walking to her car. You’d think after having had five babies already, a woman would know a thing or two about what a pregnancy feels like, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure if her having no idea says more about my mama or more about me.

  Story goes that my mama and a pack of my brothers were walking to the car with some groceries when it happened. The twins were hollering about a shared bottle of Coca-Cola and Gid was crying over a sore ear, so my mama turned to tell him she’d leave both his ears hurting if he didn’t stop his crying. As she turned, she caught a toe on the sidewalk, tripped and then, just like that, her water broke right out front of Christ Fellowship Baptist Church.

  I came so fast, she had me right there in front of that church with a whole crowd watching and Pastor Jimmy Welk in charge of delivery. Pastor Welk was pretty damn proud of him­self, and I think he felt sort of responsible for me after that because he was one of the only people who stayed real nice to me during that time between when things were kind of bad until right before they got really bad.

  Anyway, I was born out there in front of the church and the pastor called me a miracle, but my mama took one look at me and had only one thing to say.

  “There’s something the matter with his eyes.”

  You ever seen a newborn baby? I think they all kinda look the same, if I’m being real honest. Especially their eyes—how the hell can anyone tell when a baby’s got blue eyes or brown ones or gray ones when they’re that new? I sure can’t.

  I guess I was special or something, or maybe other people really are just better than I am at telling new-baby eye colors apart because apparently people talked about nothing else in that fucking town for weeks except that Mallory-Beth Morgan had a baby on the steps of the Baptist church, and he’s got two different-colored eyes.

  For the record, there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I mean they move normal and work normal and neither of them is twitching or lazy or nothing. One’s just green and the other’s brown, that’s all. Good fucking luck trying to shrug that off in Bekket, Alabama, though.

  I came into my life in that little town with a reputation before I could so much as crawl. That reputation stuck so hard that when someone made the teasing suggestion that my mama and my daddy ought to call me Trip on account of how my mama’s water broke and all that, that’s exactly what they did, and no one’s called me anything different for as long as I can remember.

  It’s not my official name—there’s a birth certificate some­where with the name Trevor James Morgan printed on it. And I suppose if I’d ever gotten my driver’s license, it’d be on there, too, but Trevor James Morgan is a boy I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone else does either, so, as far as I’m concerned, that name has never been mine.

  I am Trip Morgan, the would-be miracle who’s got something the matter with his eyes, and I am meant for greater things.

  one.

  Today is a good day until the rain. In the early morning hours, Trip plays Springsteen and Dylan and old country songs he remembers hearing on staticky radio stations in his younger years.

  People like Trip, with his plastic sunglasses and wicked smile and nice voice, the same way they like the sunshine and the park and the shopping bags on their arms. He’s an aesthetic, a piece of the park, a wind-up music man. Drop some loose change in the cleaned-out coffee can at his feet and watch him go.

  He doesn’t take requests, but he’s perfected the art of know­ing what people will respond to. He trails after pretty NYU under­grads through Washington Square Park and sings the Beatles and Billie Holiday songs until, baffled and charmed, they fish a few coins from their bags and offer them up. He provides pretty boys with the same treatment with mixed results.

  Tourists are the best, and Trip Morgan can spot a tourist five miles away with his eyes closed. He grins at them and pushes his sunglasses up on his head to meet their eyes. He sings them Sinatra and Broadway tunes and any New York song he knows. The tourists are the ones who offer cash, pleased that they’ve funded some interesting-looking park musician.

  Southern tourists are even better. Now that he’s old enough to not have to worry about someone recognizing him from a PennySaver flier, Trip makes sure to talk to the southern ones. He turns up his accent to match theirs and nods enthusiastically when they tell him their hometowns as if he has any fucking clue where this or that little spit of a Mississippi town is. The southern tourists dish out fives and tens and the occasional twenty. Once, some old codger from Atlanta offered him a hundred-dollar bill and a keycard to his hotel room. Trip put both to good use and got another fifty and a few good meals out of the deal.

  Today, he has encountered no southerners and only a few tourists from elsewhere, and he’d be okay with that if it weren’t for the rain. It comes fast. One minute it’s sunny and lovely and easy pickings, and the next the sky’s gone black and people are running from the park with street-vendor umbrellas popping open over their heads or shopping bags held up as makeshift shields. Trip switches to catchy pop numbers and more recent music, but it’s no use.

  Some days this works. People take pity on a not-quite-twenty-something singing in the rain. Older women especially seem to take in the auburn hair stuck to his forehead and his relatively petite stature and read hungry young desperation in him. They offer him sympathetic smiles
and a few soggy dollars.

  Other times, playing in the rain has the opposite of his intended effect—strange boy with strange eyes playing his guitar as if he doesn’t know the rain is there. Those people see the darkness in him: a boy with a chip on his shoulder that makes them nervous. Those people give him wary looks and a wide berth. Trip’s not sure he blames them.

  He’s a little put out and a lot cold, so he sells his umbrella for a few dollars before shouldering his guitar and closing the lid on his coffee can to set to work at his other favorite occupation.

  He’d been a decent pickpocket in his younger years, but now, after a lot of practice, he’s a better thief and a good run­ner when he needs to be. Not that he steals anything of particular worth. He finds value in treasures scrounged from the bottoms of pockets.

  Loose change, hair binders, halves of Vicodin, broken ciga­rettes, crumpled matchbooks. All of it has a purpose, a certain sense of importance. He envies women and their big purses. They’ve got whole bags of riches waiting to be exhumed. Though, more likely than not, those little trinkets will remain forgotten and neglected in the bottoms of Marc Jacobs clutches and Target sale hobo bags.

  Other people don’t see it—the value in these things. Maybe that’s why he steals from them. Nothing they’d miss: a worn dollar here, a business card there. He keeps it all close and works out a life he could have if he could ever let some­­one keep him long enough for him to build up a treasure trove of small wonders all his own.

  For now, he will live with worn shopping lists, broken cray­ons and ticket stubs he lifts off of others. He keeps them in a beaten-up bag that is more duct tape than canvas and lets them build up stardust. Then, in those lonely hours of the night, he scatters them across the floor and works them into constellations to which he assigns stories. Some he writes down; others, he forgets before the next day. It’s not a financially savvy task, but it’s his favorite, and it passes the time as well as anything else.

  The rain makes his project easier. No one stops to check their pockets when they’re trying to get out of the rain. Hell, no one stops to give him a second glance. People are not particularly interesting today. He acquires a heart-shaped keychain, a racy note from someone’s secretary and, his most fascinating dis­covery, the shell of a bullet. He drops his finds into his bag and has to run after more than a couple individuals when he winds up with a credit card or a wallet. They’re always all so grateful, wide-eyed and alarmed by their own clumsiness when he claims they dropped it. He’s guilty of lifting a dollar or two before he hands them back. A guy has to eat, after all.

  When the rain proves to be too much and the park is nearly clear, he retreats with everyone else under the arch. He sits down out of the way with his guitar on his lap, his bag at his knees. Amused by their disgust for the weather, he watches the crowd of disgruntled park-goers.

  When he tires of listening to angry mutterings and he’s sure no one here is going to offer him money for his services, he occupies himself with his bag. He’s had to get smart about what he keeps and what he tosses. He doesn’t have the space to keep it all and he’s not sure his poor bag will last through much more. It’s not all that hard to make a decision about what stays and what goes. Some things just aren’t worth keeping: empty matchbooks, gum wrappers, dried-out pens. He disposes of those items as soon as he’s given them a careful once-over to make sure there’s no value in them. In a zipper pocket lined with plastic on the inside of the bag, he keeps his most important find.

  He unzips it now and pulls out a few things to get to what he’s looking for only after he’s dried his hands as best he can on a napkin. (See? Valuable.) It’s not as though he needs to look at this thing to know it. He’s carried it the longest and he knows it the same way he knows the colors of his eyes and the feel of his guitar.

  This item is not monetarily valuable, nor is it any more or less mysterious than some of his other finds. It’s important because it’s the reason he thought to start his collection of small wonders. He did not steal this particular treasure. Rather, he found it on the floor of a bus depot in Virginia back when he was barely sixteen. It’s a photograph. Old, worn, handled too much.

  It’s not a particularly interesting picture. Three children on a white painted porch with trees reflected in the glare of the window behind them. The oldest is a boy. His hair is dirty-blond and not much shorter than Trip’s, a few inches off of his shoul­ders. He’s somewhere in his early puberty years. His legs are long and he holds himself as if he’s not quite sure what to do with all his newfound height. The second child is a little girl, smaller than her brothers. She has a frizzy blond ponytail and, scowling, she stands on tiptoe to see over the rail. The third child is the middle one. He’s caught in a laugh, bright and big enough to reveal a few missing teeth, and with his eyes directed at his brother. All three of them have bruised knees and summer tans and wild hair.

  The back of the photo tells him nothing except for a small note in the top left corner: The Kids—Summer 1996. He doesn’t know to whom the picture once belonged or where it was taken, but he knew the moment he lifted it off the ground that the photograph, almost as battered as he was at the time, mattered somehow. So he pocketed it and used the last of his cash for a ticket to New York City. The past few years haven’t been particularly kind to his photograph. It’s beaten at the edges, worn thin where he’s touched it too often. The ink on the back is all but gone.

  He’s wary of what the rain will do to the picture, so he leaves it safe and dry in a Ziploc inside the zipper pocket and pulls out a book of poems instead. He flips through the pages and ponders idly over the annotations scribbled in the mar­gins as he has so many times before. He’s hungry and tired and soaked to the bone, but the puzzle of the book is a decent distraction.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a thousand years, you asshole.”

  He doesn’t look up. He focuses on replacing his things in his bag. “I saw you two days ago.”

  “And rent was due yesterday. Ms. Melnyk is losing her shit. The only words I know in Ukrainian are ‘money,’ ‘late’ and ‘get out,’ and she used all of them. Even Dev got his share in on time, and you’re out here playing like it’s no big deal!”

  Trip does look up then. “What the fuck did you do to your hair?”

  Liam touches a hand to his bleached curls. “I needed a change.”

  “Uh-huh.” Trip offers no further comment.

  “Do you have rent money or not?” Liam taps a foot against the pavement.

  “Sorry, what?” Trip squints at Liam’s hair. “I’m distracted.”

  “Fuck you.” Liam kicks him in the shin. “I don’t need your shit, Morgan.”

  “Just being honest.”

  “Honesty doesn’t pay the rent.” Liam flaps a hand at Trip’s bag. “You make enough playing today to pay it?”

  “That peroxide go to your head?” Trip shakes his coffee can of cash. “How much do you think I make out here?”

  “Trip.” He speaks through gritted teeth.

  “Settle down, Marilyn. Jesus.” Trip pushes himself upright, grimaces when his knees pop. “I’ve got more back at the apart­ment. Come on.”

  Liam opens his mouth to retaliate, but in the end just sighs. “Honestly, you are such a fucking piece of work.”

  “You picked me out of the crowd, pal, not the other way around.”

  “And I’ve regretted the decision every day since.” Liam pops open a pink umbrella that’s bowing at one side. He shifts it far­ther over so they can both walk beneath it.

  Together, under the drooping pink umbrella, they attract more than their fair share of attention as they cut back through the park. Up close and personal, Trip is usually the more alarming figure, but, at a distance, Liam Forrester is always the one people notice first because, really, he’s almost impossible not to notice.

  For the most part, Li
am’s features are nothing particularly remarkable: dark eyes; dark complexion; dark, curly hair. He’s handsome in a generic way, with graceful hands and eyelashes so long they nearly touch the lenses of his thick-framed glasses. It’s his height that makes him stand out. At nearly six-foot-nine, Liam towers above most anyone who comes near him. He’s not tall in an athletic sort of way either. Liam is all long, thin limbs that look as if they ought to creak and groan like the staircase of an old house when he walks. Trip has always been reminded of the big daddy longlegs that used to skitter across the side of the trailer back in Alabama. And, as if his height didn’t already make him the most notable figure in any space, Liam has an affinity for doing all kinds of bizarre things to his hair, although something about his current bleached curls is particularly alarming.

  Trip tips his head back to study Liam’s hair again, but it is just as off-putting as the first time he saw it. “You really going to keep it like that?”

  “I don’t have a problem not sharing this umbrella if you’re going to keep acting like a prick.” Liam sniffles. He peers at Trip. “What the hell have you been doing all this time, anyway?”

  Trip yawns. “More of a ‘who have I been doing’ sort of thing.”

  “Based on your usual brand of customer, I’m sticking with ‘what.’”

  Trip snorts. “Nothing and no one particularly fascinating, and no one who fed me much more than a little vodka. I’m fucking starving.”

  “That’s your problem to sort out. I don’t have money to feed you.” Liam shrugs.

  Trip digs in his bag until he comes up with a cigarette. “You gotta light, at least?”

  “You’ve got everything imaginable in that stupid bag and you don’t have a lighter?”

  Trip shakes an empty brown lighter at Liam. “Not one with any fluid in it.”

  “Go find yourself a new one then, magic man. I’ve given up smoking.” Liam catches the cynical look Trip throws him and pauses to glare back. “I have! It’s too expensive.”