Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions

by Molly Peacock

  Then came the echoes of self-recrimination. She would not have a fellowship because she hadn’t even given herself a chance to be turned down. She’d run away like a rabbit. R had a fleeting mental picture of her island school classroom where the rabbit reversed to a duck. I’ve … she thought, ducked my goals. Just gone off my roll toward the top and curved out and reeled back down to where I started. She resolved never to pick up her pencils again.

  The resolution didn’t last. Even if she was a bad bird artist, it was the only thing she wanted to be.

  R wrapped her sketchbook in plastic and fled the tall buildings for the sea-level island, putting on her waders to go out to the field station. The swamp resounded with the racket of rills and rough calls.

  She found the station unlocked, but empty. Still on the wall flapped the familiar reversible image of the old woman and the girl.

  Below the observation window, among the reeds, stood a great white egret. She could not step outside and risk disturbing it, so she flipped her sketchbook open and drew, her hand taking a line for a walk around the profile of the bird.

  The professor silently appeared in the doorway. “Having regrets about the city?” he asked, his voice as whiskery and rough as his face. There was something blurred about him, something undefined.

  She began to weep.

  “Regret doesn’t mean you’d change what you’ve done,” he said. “It’s a place. The negative space a choice leaves.”

  Her sobs quieted as she took this in.

  “Yes,” he said, “you see what you did and what you didn’t do. Both of them before your eyes. A reversible image.” His hand hovered about six inches above her head almost seeming about to pat the feathered cap of her hair, then withdrew.

  R blew her nose and looked down at her sketch. When she had let her hand walk around the bird’s profile, she had also made an outline of her own profile, reversing it to the avian silhouette.

  “My ‘Great R-Egret,’ ” she said.

  Below, the real great egret dipped and flew toward the roiling ocean.

  The Sister Sailors

  S sailed on her ship from the land of sparrows. S sailed on her ship from the land of swallows. S, a spouse and mother, sadly parted from her husband and child for this deployment. S, a solitary woman, left her distant siblings with sweet abandon. They were both about to serve overseas. Their ships sailed toward the shores of war, where their countries combined their forces, depositing troops on the same beaches.

  Though the two women could not have been more different (S was homesick, S unbound), both were scared. The smoke of danger slithered beneath their respective cubicle doors. Neither was new to combat. Sheer experience stirred their fear. The struggle for each was to control an alarm inside, a wakened panic that took the shape of insomnia.

  As it happened both came up with the same solution. They angled for nighttime guard duty on shore, where small boats secretly brought rebels to hide in the caves among the shoreline boulders. Thus it was at low tide in the pitch dark and cold that they met for the first time.

  In tandem they were to patrol, armed, in buggies with searchlights. But, where the buggies couldn’t roll, S and S had to go on foot in the night. S was stocky; S was slight but strong. Both about the same height, the two found it easy to assist each other as they slid, in full gear, on the seaweed and lichen-covered rocks.

  It was lost on neither of them that the word ship sails beside the word friend. Just having someone at your elbow is a basis for such friendship, especially as fear sluices with every wave’s slash at the shore. They feared for their limbs and their brains, for their necks and their lungs and their every organ—and staved it all off because they were seasoned, and because they weren’t alone.

  At watch breaks, when they crept into a beach hollow to pour coffee into their battered cups, S and S kidded and told each other stories. S teased that swallows were superior to sparrows, and S claimed the opposite. S described the stay-at-home dad and the sterling child, S the snake-in-the-grass siblings.

  Night after night, with an elbow, a glove, with covering fire, or a suddenly gunned motor, with a strong arm for an unpredictable insurgent dug in the sand, they saved each other’s lives. They were supposed to rest onboard in the daytime, and their sheer exhaustion did plunge them asleep, but they were always woken up, if not by the sailors on other schedules, then by the dreams neither volunteered to describe.

  One night S stumbled, then S reaching for her, tripped. They slipped toward the waves, neither being able to help the other. It was only experience and the padding of the gear that stopped them on the last ledge where, half concussed, S called for S, and S heard S, and they hauled each other back over the rocks. At last up on the sand, soaked, they checked each other for injuries. S seemed to have a broken rib, and S’s jaw was bloodied and bruised. They were lucky.

  In a state of fatigue that neither would ever be able to explain to another living being, all they wanted to do was sleep. Yet they could not. They’d lost their waterproofed communicators, they had one gun, and they’d have to keep each other awake until someone woke to their absence and came out to pick them up.

  As they huddled shivering and waiting that night, the flick of a common fact between them solidified their bond even more than their injuries. It was smaller than a tiny pearl of Krazy Glue.

  “What silly thing do you miss most?” S asked S. “Not a person, a thing.”

  And S replied immediately, “The dishwasher.”

  “The dishwasher,” S murmured.

  “Yes, after everyone’s asleep,” S said. “I turn it on the last thing before I go to bed.”

  “I turn it on last thing, too.”

  Their favorite sound was a swoosh, a slap-lap of foamy water, not surging into the shore, but quite contained, an ocean in a metal and plastic box. Of course their bedtimes were entirely dissimilar; one tucked herself in with a book, the other tucked in a child, then slept beside a man. But both turned the lights out, and beneath the covers on a peacetime mattress at midnight with the curtains closed against the lights of their cities, both heard the same sound. Instead of mollusks jostling in the undertow of a depth bomb, plates rattled in the swoosh of their dishwashers, S-curves of waves from the whirling sprinklers inside a kitchen appliance, the tide heated from the dials.

  Slung into the sand, they found this sameness—their saving of one another shared inside a homesound’s singing.

  T’s Diary

  Truth is the job of a tree, especially one of a noble taxonomy like T, descended from the Family: Aceraceae, Species: A. saccharum. Like all in her genus, she became a diarist: reporting what happened every year in a ring inside her trunk. Ever since she was a little seed, twirling on an updraft, a maple key traveling through the tangled latticework of branches, the arms of her grandfather and grandmother trees, she commanded herself to tell the daily truth.

  And she has done just that for two centuries. At ninety-five feet tall and a mother tree, T has tremendously deep roots—two-thirds of her is underground! And a good thing, too, given the heat. A fungus ravaged her branches one terrible year, but after a great storm came and pruned them off, she became magnificently lopsided, and her rings tell the tale of it all.

  As a sapling T recorded the teaching growth (learn to surround an obstacle), and then as a slender sugar maple with a brilliant red head she told the truth of survivor grace (always bow in a storm). But there were tons of trees back then, soaking up carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, nourishing legions of tanagers and trilliums and generations of those who walked among her family. Then came the ones who canoed in and cut her great-great-great-grandparents to build forts, and later the drivers of horses who chopped down her friends—calling it “clearing.” But when the drivers of vehicles came, they visited terror upon hundreds of thousands of her family in a centuries-long holocaust of trees, all just to wipe their derrieres.

  It was a miracle T had survived the threat of the ax and the turbulence
of the blizzards and the toxicity of the rainfall, not to mention the terrible year a noose hung over her outstretched branch … If it wasn’t the ice storms, it was the hurricanes, and now the heat and drought. T wasn’t a journalist, or a historian, or a meteorologist—she just recorded what happened in her diary. It was a self-portrait, really. Locked inside her central core. They’d have to chop her down to get at it.

  But luckily they wouldn’t do that unless absolutely necessary, for the long-gone forest has become a park. Now the foot traffic of the teeming metropolis sweeps past her, for she watches over a diagonal path that many walkers discover as a short cut. They are not aware of what she does for them. As they leave the cement and see her, they spiral down into themselves just the way a maple seed twirls down to the ground to root. She sends oxygen their way, just as she sends carbon to those younger trees. T settles a calm around them—ataraxia, the sense of well-being named by the ancients, and pretty much guaranteed to be felt by anyone who even looks at a tree.

  Late one warm night a couple trysted against her trunk. They used her without thinking—a prop, inanimate they thought. When she felt against her bark the weight of their bodies, she leaned back into them as they leaned into her, an upright bark mattress. After they left, T recorded it.

  When a cat fled through the park, stopping to scratch her nails on T—ouch!—the cat knew she was alive.

  A living witness, T noted down the rainfall, the humidity, even the touch of a man who stopped to examine the initial he’d once carved into her with a penknife. I hadn’t realized my mark would scar her for so long, he thought apologetically, amazed at how deep it seemed, now that her bark had grown up around the wound.

  Should I be tracing the truth of all existence? T teased herself. But what the truth of all existence was, she didn’t know. She was an old lady maple, keeping a diary like a great-grandma who totaled up her sick headaches and wash days. To testify to the truth, she thought, you have to know what it is … And what did she know except what had happened to her? Who in this world has the talent to paint a more trustworthy self-portrait than a tree?

  A balloon and a plastic bag floated past her on a windy spring day, careful not to get snagged in her branches.

  “We’ve got to notice trees more,” said a passerby.

  “And be grateful,” his companion added primly.

  Late one autumn afternoon, A and THE pushed little AN down the path in the stroller, passing the great T. “A maple,” A said. “The maple,” THE said, “most transcendent in the city.”

  Glad for that compliment, T thought, proud that she inspired awe. But she noticed that little AN was silent. The child had yet to utter a word. T felt the parents’ anxiety reach over her treetop.

  It was time for T to give her annual survivor party. Just after she showered down all her leaves, she sent a thought-aroma invitation for a late October gathering. Little g arrived first and tussled about in T’s shed tresses, for now he collected leaves. C brought his grandson and I brought his grandson and they all joined g in his gleeful play with Jiggle on her way to the gym with J. From a crook of T’s limbs, Maugie regarded them, having made an accommodation with several squirrels. Safe in T’s highest branches, pigeons crooned.

  A and THE brought AN in the stroller, their worried expressions gradually softening. T’s ataraxia, that fortunate contentment beneath the shoulders of a great tree, settled around them all, swirling up in rustlegusts. The kids kicked the leaves at T’s base, the adults watched the kids. They all forgot to concentrate, … all except wee AN, who stared with terrific intensity up into the tessellations of her branches.

  “An amazing tree!” piped the little article from the stroller.

  “The very first words from our little seed!” THE exclaimed.

  T towered tenderly over her party, relishing her visitors and their antics as those who’ve witnessed tragedies can. Time transmogrified back from infinity, trellising into her trunk. Carrying on is character, she thought. I’m no tragedienne. That night, she wrote it all inside herself.

  Useful U

  U loved being useful. He was a guy who could clean an eavestrough of a Saturday morning and plough through handyman chores faster than a vacuum cleaner. He was neat, too. Always swept up the sawdust from the drill, wiped up the gunk from the old plumbing he coaxed into another year, and kept his beautiful wooden worktable oiled. The table was the pièce de résistance of his workshop off the garage, a utopia of neatly racked hardware and tools. It stood in the center, huge and ready as a canvas for the next project.

  Down a short paving-stone path from the garage was U’s house—also his place of business. He was a massage therapist. The former living room had become his clinic room, where stood another beautiful table, padded and of his own design. His clients (twisted from accidents or simply the accident of pulling out a bottom desk drawer the wrong way) heaved their bodies up on this table to be fixed.

  U loved his work. He was a muscular guy, but flexible. He could lift a torso from the table and turn it this way and that, returning it to the shape it was born with—until the person got injured again. Then he would lay his hands with mercy on those bones and muscles, those shoulders, that back.

  One morning he woke up in the undertow of a dream. A landscape had swelled with humanoid figures seen from a tiny vantage point below, looking up toward their undulating hillock backs. The dream made him uneasy—it was all so unreal.

  He rose, showered, called his lively ninety-two-year old mother, who still managed to live alone, chatted with her about her aches and pains and when he would be coming next, then met his first client—and the one after that, and after that. In his break U walked out into the bright air free of the smell of massage oil and slipped into his workshop with its smells of varnish and WD-40. Around the walls were piled neatly categorized heaps of waste materials—scrap metals, fixtures, leftover lumber, cords, and odds and ends from broken alarm clocks to toaster racks that U couldn’t bring himself to throw out. You never know, he always thought, they might prove useful. The pieces stuck up at odd angles. Though U attempted to keep the twisted piles orderly, they formed an ungainly frame around the centerpiece of that oiled worktable.

  As he stood there, mesmerized by the shapes in the sunlight, he wondered where had he had seen those figures in the dream before. They seemed uprooted from a place he’d been. Time to return to his clients. But throughout the day in the breaks between treatments, he was drawn to thoughts of his workshop, and just before he went to bed, he slipped out there again. The room lay in darkness, but for the streetlight beam that illumined silhouettes. Protruding from the heaps of stretched, wronged, and wounded metal and lumber, sensuous shapes seemed to reach and surge like arms.

  An umbilicus to his upbringing tugged.

  When he was a boy, he had been required to massage his mother’s spine with old-world unguents. He had sat on the floor, while mother sat on a footstool. U would make long, long strokes with his tiny hands, up and down the monument of her spine, as if he were sanding a sculpture. He never felt more useful and grown-up than when he helped her.

  On each of these occasions she told him the source of her ailment. She’d grown up in a war where everything ugly, unnatural, and untoward had happened to her. It had pushed into her, stretching her spine like a wire, and she was never able to spring back.

  Whenever U heard this story, he felt the world falling down on him and an unbearable responsibility to heave it back up. He heard the story often, for twice a week he treated his mother’s back.

  After work the next day he went to visit his tiny mother. He brought a new unguent and tried out its greaseless healing properties. “What would I do without you?” she asked, and told him again a part of her story. “I was humbled,” she said, “humiliated. And I have never ever forgotten.” As always, she sweetly thanked her son, and she said what she always said—“But now I have U”—and he left her cozy in her bathrobe.

  The next day U felt some
thing underlying push up through him, an urge. Perhaps it was just the energy he always felt when he had an unexpected hour after a cancelation. Back he strode to the workshop to regard the hillocks of wood and metal. Was it time to undertake a rescue of this detritus? Perhaps he could make himself useful. By now his dream, seemingly forgotten, had receded into an under-universe of un-forgetting. U seized one piece of wood and sanded it into … a U. He wedged a piece of wrought iron into one of his vises and began to bend it into … a U.

  Then he returned to his house where the washing machine and dryer were always on, and the sheets and towels for the massage table were always warm and needing folding. He cleaned out the dryer trap and greeted his next client. But after the oils and flesh, he returned to the sanding in the workshop.

  It certainly wasn’t very tidy. Sawdust twirled in motes. U sneezed. What am I doing? he asked himself. But something he couldn’t question seemed to have given him an ultimatum. He made U after U, smoothing the angled, angling the curvilinear, cementing the materials. There on the worktable a sculpture was shaping up. With its little alarm-clock head and the spiraling Us of its U shape, it looked like a boy, reaching his hands up high.

  He began to spend his days going back and forth from massage table to worktable, from kneading umpteen muscles in continual misuse by ungainly people to making the unutilized into the unlikely. His dream of the figures moved sinuously through him and out his arms and hands like waves. With an urgency he never expected to feel, he also began to sculpt the other figures in the dreamscape.

  Yet this didn’t unsettle him. Instead, he settled in, something uncontrollable now, in his hands, controlled. Something abashed and humiliated in her, something undercut, now the underside of what he made.

  But it wasn’t only for her. What he began to accomplish was unique to U. Nor was it a complete U-turn from the life he had always lived. He had just incorporated the unknown into the useful.