Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions

by Molly Peacock

  A mandorla of optimism began to surround her.

  “I’m dating a zero!” she texted Mom and Daddy-O. On the phone she told them, “He’s thrillingly airy inside and clear.”

  “What joy!” they said. A zero was a zillion times better than a lasso.

  0 had the lightest of touches, tender, every contact a whisper from his nothingness to her being. It was not a matter of fitting. It was a matter of melodious proximity. Like two balloons inflated to perfect shape, they float-bumped, kissing at every opportunity. And as they lightly collided under the covers in her dormitory room, they entered the oomph of omphalos—an uroborian circle where O came into her own.

  The Poet

  As P strolled the path around the pond, he sniffed the humid air. His kimono brushed the parched ground. The metals of the earth rose up in traces of dust and hints of lightning: a waft of petrichor, the smell before the rain.

  Beyond the pale hills of his peaceful land, scores of horse soldiers prepared their armor. Soon the soldiers would sweep across the plains, and the dry politics of princely maneuverings would be as rice paper soaked with blood. Instead of petty policies—immensity. Peaceful farmers would be impaled, paltry officials imprisoned—twisted, screaming, then praying. There on the dusty path the young poet P was just perceiving the beforeness of it all, the pre-.

  From his masters he had learned that immensity makes the small crucial. A little poem before a big war becomes a necessity.

  And like a small poem on a long scroll, a lily pad appeared on the pond. P stopped to peer. He puzzled through its pattern of green inside green on water.

  A poem began to perfuse. It was inside P, but it was also on the lily pad.

  At … On … At first only prepositions came to him.

  He stared into the water, seeing the silvery clouds reflected. Then he leaned at an extreme angle and noticed the pattern of his gown wavering in the reeds. A pinpoint of a poem stabbed him, like the sharp scent of earth before the rain. Petrichor: before, before.

  Then drops pelted the pond, pipped at the pond, plunged toward it, plummeted into it, driving P to take refuge beneath the deep tiled eaves of his house.

  Inside the sliding paper doors were a desk and a futon. On the desk lay a brush. On the futon lay a lover in uneasy sleep on petal-printed silk.

  He chose the desk. He lifted the brush while looking down at the restive slumberer. In a mere matter of stopped time he had his poem, written from the very tissues of an arm and hand that could plunge a sword.

  Silver soldiers mass

  on far horizons, but here,

  silk pools on the bed.

  The rain rained; moisture curled the edges of the paper. Seventeen syllables, an epic of energy, made him drowsy and hungry. His lover still asleep, he rose, ate leftover peaches poached in soy sauce and ginger, and, with the rain a drizzle, thought again of his poem. How could he have loved it in the instant after he wrote it, but now be so unsure?

  He sat at his desk again. Another one? This time he drafted:

  Poppy? Penis up.

  Prow into periwinkle.

  Peony behind.

  After he calligraphed the puzzle of passion across the page, he woke the one in the pond of pink silk, and they proved it on the futon. He heard the pluvial patter on the eaves, while they angled and slipped, perspiring on silk. The stamping and snorting of the horses sweating in their armor was far too far away to be sensed by P, but he heard. He felt the pond muddied and the roof cracked and the poems scattered. How far was he now from this picture in his mind? He worked to make his pleasure stay, pitiable and small against the portents rising, for P was afraid this afternoon would never be remembered after the bloody conquering.

  But later the barbarians would bivouac in this house, the pond saved for drinking water, the path roughened by horses, and the reverse of P’s scroll used for another man’s military diary, his afternoon’s foreboding and pleasure a preparation for the future, and in the future, a stay against another’s view of the past.

  Q’s Quest

  Some quests begin before a person ever learns to walk. Q’s began at the foundling home, when he was still in diapers. They’d kept anything pointed from the Quonset hut where they housed the orphaned newbies, and later the house mothers forbade the children all but scissors with round edges, even table knives.

  “Mind, now stay in the queue,” they said, when his fingers reached for a safety pin or a paring knife or, once, one of the razors they kept (usually under lock and key) for the older boys. Q slipped back in line.

  Only the blunt was available to him, nothing to question, naught with an edge. Best pretend to be dull (though that was hard with a high IQ) and never query:

  Why hide the scissors? Why hide the razor? Why speak so sharply? Why no mums? No dads? At night in his bed, listening to the breathing of all the other boys in the long room, he also asked himself, Why me?

  When the house mothers changed shifts, there were always some unsupervised minutes, and that’s when the boys sprang into swashbuckling. Q loved leaping from bed to bed with an imaginary sword in hand. En garde!

  At sixteen, with a razor cut on his chin from the new trial of shaving himself, Q stood at the doors of the Royal Flower Hall. He was quaking. This was the very first day of work in his life. He’d been supposed to be a shop assistant, a quotidian job like those of the other orphans who were all sent out to live as apprentices—to return only if found unsuitable. However, the Royal Flower Keeper had stepped in and demanded to know the name of the boy meant to be sent to the local florist, and now young Q was called to prep flowers for the Queen.

  “Can’t someone else do it?” He quailed as the Flower Keeper handed him a quilloned silver thorn knife. Q didn’t want to be found unsuitable.

  He quivered as thousands of roses arrived—he was supposed to separate their long, tangled stems, cut off the thorns, and queue them up straight on the tables for the arrangers.

  “But I’m new!” Q cried. He couldn’t quell his horror at the prospect of lifting a real blade to cut the thorns.

  “Look, dear, no quibbling. If you work here, you’re qualified,” the Flower Keeper said. Her knuckles bloomed out of the crooked stems of her hands. “Hold the knife with two fingers behind this little crossbar, that’s the quillon, and snip under the thorn.”

  She did it with elegant speed. One thorn gone.

  “It’s like swordsmanship,” the Flower Keeper joked, wielding her knife, fencing in miniature mime. In Q’s head rang the orders of the house mothers, “DON’T TOUCH!” But in his fingers lay his imaginary weapon come alive.

  “No time to be quiescent,” she said. “Equipoise is all.”

  Don’t quit now, Q said to himself. If he quit, he’d have to slink back to the orphanage, a failed apprentice, instead of going home to his newly found haven, a cold-water flat with a coin-operated heater, all his own. There he’d store the new paring knife his paycheque would buy, the pointed scissors … So Q quashed his fear and set to work.

  He began to duel through the roses.

  “En garde!” he whispered, lunging toward his petaled quarry.

  Soon there were thorns everywhere (some a bit bloody), but he did not make any big mistakes. He wasn’t perfect, like the Flower Keeper, but he was catching on. Like quicksilver she flashed her knife, each stem quickening with the sharpest cut.

  Instinctively Q used the quartata maneuver, a quarter turn to the inside, protecting himself as he flicked each thorn into the quagmire of floral detritus on the floor. With each toss of the thorn he added to what appeared to the Flower Keeper to be his nascent gift.

  As the lorries loaded with rose baskets and vases and bowls roared off to the palace, he quietly pocketed a thorn. Then the first question he’d ever spoken aloud curlicued to his lips. And because he’d had to save up this query for sixteen years, he posed the essential one, previously mouthed only to himself at night in bed:

  Why?

  “Pourquoi
?” said the Flower Keeper. “For the Equerry, of course. And he for the Queen. You know who she is.”

  “Just a flower of a figurehead,” Q quipped.

  The boy’s quick-witted, the Flower Keeper thought, and said, “We’ll require you tomorrow.”

  And for quadruple tomorrows after that and after that, until Q began to accumulate expertise. Know-how defines a person, especially someone who’s grown up watching his Ps and Qs. He no longer quavered, quadrillions of roses now quasi-ordinary, royal waste a quiddity.

  I’m not a quitter, he’d said to himself, and each night went back to his cold-water flat where he had enshrined that little thorn in a matchbox.

  Well, he didn’t live in a cold-water flat now. Now he lived in a sunlit house with a stash of razors in the marble bathroom and, in the drawers of his magnificent kitchen, a motherlode of paring knives, bread knives, steak knives, bird’s beak parers, boning knives, cheese knives, chef’s, clam, and carving knives, filleters and mincers.

  Now Q was Senior Keeper of the Royal Flower Hall, walking across a stage toward the Queen herself. He had kept the talisman thorn from his very first day with the roses. Just that afternoon he had taken it out and dropped it in the pocket of his tuxedo, anticipating touching it for luck before he received his award from Her Majesty.

  But when the Queen posed her standard question, “Have you come a long way?” Q was quite bewildered as to how to answer.

  Sometimes a simple question cuts into an aromatic world of mysteries. But we must learn to answer, to cut. Q, his distinguished silver hair perfectly trimmed, his neck properly shaved, looked down at the curls on the Queen’s forehead and remembered his first unspoken word, Why.

  A quixotic word, an essential thorn. It had pricked him awake, into manhood.

  Arrangements of roses passed through his mind—how those magnificats of magentas quenched his imagination. How the choral crooning of pale pinks calmed his qualms. Among roses he had reached his quintessence.

  Yet, is it a large enough life, to arrange roses for a Queen? When the whole world out there hurtled toward famine and war? He hadn’t intended to stay, to make a future in flowers, taking people’s breath away with something so spectacularly unnecessary as his rose floats. He had been a thorn in someone’s side, spectacularly unnecessary himself. He’d been sent out into the world alone, blunted by the unknown facts of his identity—his search for his parents rewarded only by locked doors, locked cabinets and, later, graveyards.

  Patiently Her Majesty waited for his answer. In physical distance he had come a short way, but he’d swashbuckled miles to reach the end of his quest.

  “Only from Kew Gardens, Your Highness,” Q answered simply at last.

  Then she put into his palm the royal thank-you, in a quilted sleeve: a silver rose wreath made from an ancient mold that gave it stylized petals, prickly leaves and, cut in at the bottom of the circle, a thorn.

  R and her Great Egret

  R had loved reversible images ever since she saw her first optical illusion. It was hanging on the wall of the art room in her small island school: the duck that was also a rabbit. R regarded the bird reversing into the mammal and the mammal reversing into the bird every time she went to art class. She loved drawing animals with her crayon lines.

  When she was older, she discovered the famous white vase that reversed to two black profile silhouettes—a roller-coaster ride for her eyes. And the illusion that most resisted her perception was the one of a young woman in a hat that became an old woman in furs.

  R was surprised to encounter the baffling drawing in tatters on the office wall of the pithy, rumpled, renowned ecology professor, head of the Nature Centre where she applied to intern. The ramshackle field station sat on a rise at the edge of the wetlands, home to those magnificent fishers, the great egrets. She was determined to learn to draw their round white bodies and black stalky legs. The professor saw she was rigorous in this desire and took her on.

  Every Saturday she rambled out there—wearing waders to get to the place. She would unpack her rucksack and set up to draw at the observation window. After muddled attempts, she would remove herself to the rickety deck simply to watch them, standing on one leg, unconsciously curving the other behind her.

  The professor corrected her drawings not as her art teacher did, but from the ready observations of the scientist who knew more about these radiant water birds than anyone. “Never apologize for an honest mistake,” he would say when she muttered, “Sorry.”

  R revered her weathered and recondite role model—who was quite a cryptic raconteur if she caught him in the right mood. Sometimes he’d gesture to the optical illusion and say, “That’s my reminder.”

  “Reminder of what?” she’d ask, regarding the old woman/young woman on the wall, now so familiar her eye untangled it, just as she’d begun to untangle the lines in her drawings of the egrets. Yet the illusion was still mysterious. “Reminder of what?” she’d prompt him.

  Then he would sum up: “Life’s reversals.” And, quietly singing Non, Je ne regrette rien, he would announce that soon he would kick her out because it was time for his weekly stiff Rob Roy, which he intended to savor in lonesome splendor as the sun set over the swamp. Then he would say, “How I relish my solo rut!” And R would be dismissed.

  Over the two years of drawing and watching the great egrets, R grew taller but no less gawky. She cut her hair in a feathery cap, got better at sketching—though nothing about drawing the great egrets was straightforward; at first they were animals, but then they became lines raveling and shadows reaching and ragged radials raking the water as they lifted their heavy bodies into the sky—better at watching, and no better at all at reconciling the professor’s contradictory remarks.

  “What does ‘Je ne regrette rien’ actually mean?” she asked one day as she finished a vivid version of another spiky head.

  “I regret nothing,” the professor said, approving of the sketch. But by young R’s lights, the scientist seemed to regret everything. Quickly and stealthily, as a fishing bird might snatch its dinner from the water, she resolved never to regret.

  After graduation, she moved to the city. Then she shot straight up to her goal of Never Regretting with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Master’s degree in Fine Arts. She began to earn design awards. Often she imagined the professor behind her, toasting her with his Rob Roy and a quick nod of approval, but she hardly ever went back to the island.

  She was working up her courage to develop a portfolio for the Rare Bird Fellowship, which, like its name, was given only rarely. This was the year. She might not get the award, of course, but she would regret not trying. When the portfolio was nearly prepared, she visited the RBF Headquarters. No one at the front desk, she ventured into the nest of offices behind. There she found a formidable woman leaning over a drawing table, standing on one high heel, the other dangling off the foot curled behind her.

  When the woman turned around, she peered regally over her chic glasses, regarding R’s painter’s pants and thick-soled sandals. “May I help you?” she said, passing a manicured hand through her dramatic white hair. Her silk suit disguised her figure in a most sophisticated way, emphasizing her long legs in black tights. She carried her age beautifully.

  R, who couldn’t summon words to respond, presented the half-completed portfolio. The woman pursed her very red lips.

  “Yes, I see some talent,” she said. “Come next week with more, R.”

  “How did you know my name?” R marveled.

  The woman sneered. “From your huge, adolescent signature on these egrets.”

  R scampered out of the office and went all out on the portfolio. When she brought it back the following week, she encountered a receptionist at the front desk.

  “I’d like to see—” R suddenly realized she didn’t know the woman’s name. After she began to describe her, the receptionist said in awe, “You must mean Madame.” After a considerable wait and several tentative-sounding c
alls, R was led back to her.

  Madame imperiously perused the drawings. “With whom have you studied?” she demanded. R rattled off the names of her teachers; hoping to bolster her credibility, she even ventured to name the professor. A distinguished scientist might help.

  “Monsieur le professeur,” Madame purred, “so, he is still at the Centre de la Nature?”

  “Well, I think he is,” R said.

  “Keep going,” was all Madame said. R did. She brought in her third attempt just before the deadline.

  “This is getting a bit boring, don’t you think? Why you are pestering me?” Madame lowered her glasses and smoothed her startlingly white hair.

  “I didn’t mean to pester you,” R ventured, “but the Rare Bird Fellowship deadline is this week.”

  “Do you not think I’m aware of that?” Madame snapped as she opened the beautifully organized, complete portfolio. “You do not really mean to apply for this award, do you?”

  R’s silence conveyed that, of course, she did.

  Madame slapped the portfolio closed. “Surely you’re not serious about this application. You are too young; your work is too undeveloped. It is simple.” She continued with exquisite rancor. “It is not rich. Not sophisticated. It affects old-fashioned principles. You will only be rejected. Don’t do it, ma petite R. You will regret it.”

  At that R was dismissed. Undeveloped? Not serious. Too young? Too simple? Not rich enough? Unsophisticated? Redundantly out of date?

  R went home and regarded her images. Revolting, all of them. Risible. Rotten. Rejectable. NON, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN! she tried to roar alone in her room, but couldn’t. Her lovely long neck hung in defeat. She regretted every heron, ibis, kingfisher, crane, stork, pelican, spoonbill, and egret she had drawn since she was a child. Of course she did not apply for the RBF.