by John Klima
By the second night, the designs were fixed in my head, and I worked more quickly. I chiseled harsh lines into one pillar, softer curves into the other. They looked, at that point, like fire and water, anger and calm.
The next day I sat in the plaza and watched. Several streets cross there, and the crowds are always plentiful. Even the blood of history can’t stop people from passing through. The number of people who never so much as glanced at the pillars shocked me. Were so many of us truly that unaware? Have I ever been so unaware? I willed them to look, to see.
The soldiers saw. City officials came to examine the damage, as I’m sure they called it. They poked at the lines, looked around the plaza for the culprit. They didn’t suspect me, dressed beyond my years, an old man out for the sunshine on my feeble body.
More people noticed the pillars, then, drawn by the sight of so many officials. Passersby began to speak of the art—or vandalism, depending how they saw it.
That night the soldiers watched the plaza more closely. They waited for me to carve some more. Only just before dawn, as the early risers were already trudging to their jobs, did I make my way to the pillars. Leaning against the stone, as if to catch my breath, I managed a surreptitious slash on the water pillar before heading on.
Throughout the day I added new lines to the carvings when I could, when the crowds were enough to give me some cover, the officials over-worked and distracted. Each time I disguised myself and my actions. The grocer pausing to adjust his armload of goods? Me. The young mother carefully positioning her infant’s pram in the pillar’s shade. The messenger boy stopping to pick up a stack of papers that had fallen. The banker taking a post-lunch constitutional. All me.
True carving requires more time and care than was possible, the rock stubborn and the tools delicate. I made do, though, and gave the carvings the rough grace of a master’s sketches. Over the course of ten days, the lines took full form as the leader and the child from my earlier painting.
The regime covered the pillars in swaths of dark cloth, which only serve to remind people of what lies beneath. Where the pillars before had been ignored, now everyone looks at them in passing, and no one can fail to recall the reason for the dark shrouds; no one can forget the regime’s atrocities.
#
I wrote a poem. I daresay it was not the greatest poem ever written in our city’s hybrid dialect, but it was our own dialect. That was key. None of the official language imposed on us by our rulers and the random accidents of history. I used the familiar slang and bastardized my own new words according to our city’s patterns, making the poem entirely of our home. Not of city officials or soldiers, nor cruel leaders, nor any outside sense of propriety.
The poem was an ode, of sorts, to the blood-stained plaza, a celebration of its cobbles and a lament for an imagined family of monkeys killed by a passing wagon wheel. The wheel ends up punished, discarded in a distant field. Monkeys from all around come and take over the city.
I handed out the poem in the streets. I printed handbills and posted them on walls. I stood on a hidden balcony of the cathedral’s steeple and shouted the words into the streets.
When the opening line of the poem was banned, people began quoting other lines to each other at random. I can cross the city and hear nearly every line I wrote, quoted back to me. All but the first line, which I speak aloud to myself whenever I return to my studio.
#
I danced through the streets naked. Well, not entirely naked, but unclothed, wearing only the straps and shackles of a slave. My dance was slow, a halting waltz, a stumbling parody. I crossed from one side of the city to another. The next day I crossed again, intersecting the earlier route at the plaza.
Each day I chose a new route: some that twisted in kinking curls; others that knifed straight across. My dance could take me all day or only a single hour. Each route, though, took me through the plaza.
I refused to speak. People questioned, shouted at me as they covered their children’s eyes, offered me lewd suggestions. Our honored officers tried to accost me, but I danced from their grasp, and fearful of appearing silly, they didn’t pursue me.
Soon others danced with me, a parade of rag-wearing indigents and revolutionaries. Finally, our leader ordered our arrest, and we ceased our dances, joining once again our clothed comrades. The dance is over, but not truly suppressed.
#
The facades of power began to crumble. I gathered the evidence of this, images of the regime’s decline. I found a discarded police badge washed up beneath my bridge. From a lamppost I tore down two papers, one announcing a new edict and a second, subsequent one that had been placed beside the first, a notice that immediately rescinded the edict after public outcry. I gathered what small weapons I could find, weapons that might have come from anywhere but certainly called to mind those of our soldiers. At first I was unsure what to do with these symbols.
Only when the debris covered every bit of free space in my studio did I come up with a plan for using it all.
I had an artist friend who had worked in collage. She’d stopped, opened a cloth-dying shop when the city’s officials started taking more interest in her work, but she gave me the recipe for the cement she’d used. I tweaked the ingredients, adding some luster and gloss to what had been unobtrusive. Then I took the cement and debris out to the plaza, piled high in a child’s wagon I had salvaged. The guards no longer bothered to watch the area so closely, once they’d covered the pillars with cloth.
On my way, I broke a chunk of the grand old courthouse off one corner of the building and laid it in my wagon. I had to walk backwards and strain to bring the wagon with me, but at last I arrived. I started with the piece of the courthouse as my base. Then using the cement mixture, I glued the other debris onto the base: the badge, the weapons, the handbills, old stationary, devalued currency, the characteristic hat of a city tax collector, its brim jutting out with a sense of fatalistic nostalgia.
I didn’t get far in my labor. Crumbling though the regime might be, that only made it cling more tightly to its rigid rules. The soldiers came, and this time I had no disguise, no partner to take the blame, and no dance to shame them. I want to say I stood defiant before my creation as they dragged me off, but the truth is that I crumbled beneath the first blow and felt nothing after the fourth. Now I am imprisoned, as I always imagined I would be.
#
Imagining prison and experiencing it are not the same.
I toyed with the mud in the corners of our communal cell, but I couldn’t turn it into art. I tried to picture the cobwebs as art, revolutionary and incendiary, but the regime didn’t fall and the jail didn’t burn.
It took the art of the other prisoners to bring me back from despair. Stories. Tales told in the dark—it was always dark in our cells—and whispered where no guards could hear. Soon I joined in with my own stories to add to theirs, tales of the regime’s worst atrocities, pleasant memories of acts of protest and anger. Most of all we reminded ourselves of the plaza, of what the regime had done there and what it meant to us, even there in prison. We were sure, or at least I was, that our words would bring about the overthrow of our leader simply by their sounds and rhythms. The resonance of stories, told and heard and imagined, must send out the shock waves of change.
When it did not collapse, our certainty dissolved. Stories, what were they? Mere fizzle in a world of violence. Our voices grew husky and ragged.
Slowly the regime did fall into ruin. We were not yet free, but the rumors came to us, and we told stories of the days to come, of the just society we would build on top of the ashes. We crafted our future out of words, and in those stories, words like regime and plaza and atrocity only existed in the past tense and conditional future, a subjunctive that must never be. Our stories today ensure that the conditional never returns to present usage. It is, admittedly, an unwieldy language, one forever tipping into the past, a frail language built from the shards of events we wish had never happened. I ca
nnot say if it will last, but I tell stories as if it will. By paint and song, carving and poem, dance and sculpture and story we craft, however briefly, today’s city-that-is-not-a-regime.
THE END
Cloth Leaves and Wire Vines
by Gillian Daniels
In my newest temp job, I am hired to be wallpaper.
This is less exciting than working reception
and a little more exciting than making cold calls for surveys in West Virginia.
The employee director trains me and a team of five from the agency for fifteen minutes
during which we are spray painted beige.
“Office decoration had to be cut this year,” she says. “We have to hire outside.”
She asks if one of us would mind being part of the bathroom wall for the day
and a broad-face boy earning his master’s degree volunteers.
With care, he is stripped and sprayed in powder blue,
shrinking back when the artists ply him with delicate brushes
and map out a grid of gray lines on his skin.
The rest of us, hair flattened with paint, are ushered into the offices
in a service elevator that smells of stale air.
For the entire day, I stand at one corner of an office,
halfway between a basketball hoop over a waste paper basket and a potted plant.
The office is separated by a wooden cubicle maze with tiny plexiglass windows.
The potted plant has cloth leaves, branching wire vines like firm, little veins,
and brown Styrofoam instead of potting soil.
I look at it all morning as I stand very still.
Any job worth doing is worth doing well, I remind myself,
especially if there’s a paycheck on Friday.
I will buy my own paint, mermaid greens and purples,
and be my own wall all weekend.
As the afternoon crawls, I make up conversations between myself and the plant.
He tells me—because he’s a he—that he’s from a factory in West Virginia
where he sat all day and watched the owner’s wife
as she put together fake roses and fake orchids and fake peonies and fake lilacs.
He fell madly in love with her.
At 5:00 pm, the director comes back to take us to the door.
The master’s student looks pale, his neat rows of tile grit now blurred seismograph readings.
The conversations I make up between the potted plant and I
are washed away as we’re all hosed down at the door.
We came to an understanding, though,
that we are both replacements,
stand-ins for real things.
The Coronation Bout
by Lisa L. Hannett
Mother was the seventh of nine born to my Nan, but the only one to survive infancy. ‘This chick’s a fighter,’ the midwife had said, helping the town’s next Chanticleer latch onto the current one’s breast. And when Nan felt the newborn’s gums clamp round her nipple, when she heard strength in the little hen’s snuffling, she was compelled to agree. ‘A real fighter,’ she’d said, so named the baby Claude—not after the girl’s father, Argent Attell, but after Claude “One-Shot” Kilbane, the man who KO’d Argent at the coronation bout, securing him the district’s featherweight title—and Nan’s respect—once and for all.
Claude Jr lived up to expectations. Her tongue was quicker than Pop-Pop hitting the canvas, her singing voice rich as the champion’s purse. She was lithe and feisty—a real pugilist child—and when it came time to take Nan’s place, she did it with her namesake’s surefooted grace. Claude governed with a loosely clenched fist, as liable to wallop a person as she was to chuck him under the chin. Her timing was down-pat: she knew when to act pretty, when to strong-arm, when to bed men into boxing for her causes. Wily thing also knew which situations called for all three.
Most seemed happy with Mother’s version of even-handedness. At least, any who weren’t hadn’t the stones for an open challenge. But whether they loved Claude or not, everyone played sad after the bloat took her last week. Her gut swelled so big, seemed she was starting a new round of life, not hearing the clang of its final bell. Ballooned as she’d been two decades earlier, when she’d brought me and Nettie into this world. What luck, all had agreed then, having two hens at once. What a feat. She’d pushed us out in the swelters of August—barely breaking a sweat—and was back tending her garden that same afternoon. She was a force, our Claude. Prevailing and permanent as the elements.
#
Nettie got Mother’s looks. Plump in kissable places, lean everywhere else. Right iris the colour of sunshine, the left one dark as Jim Gallant’s homebrew—and one pupil horizontal, like a goat’s. My sister had no trouble with her sideways-slit eye, but Mother’s wept constantly. At dawn each May Day, we’d find a basket of hankies on the stoop, stitched with roosters, rings, nosegays; finery that would spend the next year getting scrunched into the Chanticleer’s canthus one after another. In her final hours, steady streams had trickled down both of Claude’s cheeks, but even through the blur, Mother still saw more than anyone.
On the first of three funeral days, people remembered this all-seeing orb, hidden now beneath blue-tinged lids. They dissected Claude in tributes, raised gourds of Gallant’s best, and tied giblet garlands around her wrists and ankles. Remember how tight she was in that swimsuit, way back when? Small but curvy—fitter than other ring-girls. And the length of those legs! The span of those far-reaching arms… Mother basked in the compliments silently, death locking away her voice but not her get-up-and-go. You’re full of it, the lot of you, she seemed to say with a girlish flick of her hand. Then she’d grin and pinch cheeks and bottoms, her brittle fingers rasping on denim. Even lying on a cold hard bier, Claude knew how to rub warmth into rough-bearded fellows.
And who’s next? someone asked. Crass and disrespectful, given the context. Nettie or Regina?
My sister painted herself bashful by blushing, but I could see her eyeing the gents, currying favour the way Mother taught. Swishing her skirt absentmindedly. Perking her cute arse. Frumpy in coveralls, I put on my best tones and simply said, ‘Me.’
Soon enough, mournful talk and flirty gave way to touching eulogies—touching and fondling and prodding. Mother’s scalp was smooth as custard, her skull so compact it could fit inside a gutted half-cantaloupe. Powdered with chalk and cinnamon, it practically begged to be stroked; so I stood back and let them. Many had waited so long to cup that bareness in their palms, to feel its naked power. No harm in giving them a grope, I thought, letting them paw for luck.
Nan’s white crown, a faded full moon, rested on the slab near Mother’s blue-brown shoulder. It used to fit perfectly, snug as gloves. But in the past couple of months, it had started to loosen. Beneath its rim, shadows had yawned at Claude’s temples while she chewed. When she laughed, it’d slid up her forehead. Sometimes, as she leaned forward in her rocker to peer across the boxing green, it clunked against her binoculars. Mother thought doctors were quacks; flat-out refused to see them, even though her bones were contracting. Her skin obviously sagging. Her flawless half-melon withering bit by bit.
Judging by the recent trills in Nettie’s singing, she’d noticed it too. Mother’s lessening. No other reason my mouse of a twin would pipe up so conspicuously, so regularly. Asking Jet the blacksmith and the boys if she might front their band, inviting them over to practise one evening—then suggesting extra lessons alone with the blacksmith. Just like that, Jet was coming round our cabin more than the milkman, armed with a tuning fork he’d forged himself. Nope, no doubt about it: Nettie was gearing up to succeed Mother. And with her scrawny figure, she’d be stiff competition. I mean, Claude could wizen to a cornhusk and still be bigger than Nettie. Lovely, tiny Nettie.
It was a real worry, this diminishment. This dwindling. Soon, I’d thought, Mother’ll be wearing a walnut shell instead of Nan’s crown. A fine en
ough legacy for my twig of a sister, but for a lumbering oak like me? No way. No how.
I needed every inch I could get.
#
I did what I could to stall the shrinking. Plied Mother with tisanes steeped overnight, new-and-improved elixirs and cordials. Brewed teas by the bucket-load, herbals plucked from Claude’s own plot, guaranteed to stop her from wasting. Toward the end, I kept her so hydrated it’s a wonder she didn’t float.
Don’t go overboard with the sugar, she’d instruct, sicker and sicker by the day. You make it so I can’t taste anything but sweet. Give me something tart. A bit of lemon, a bit of juniper.
Handing her a steaming cup, I’d told her to hush. To watch she didn’t burn herself. To sit up and avoid spilling. To trust, for once, that I knew what I was doing.
Before the bloat stole it, her voice had been hollow; vowels blown through a reed-flute. I heard echoes of Nan whenever Mother spoke.
Blunt that tongue of yours, my hen, the two said. Like as not, you’ll cut yourself on it.
I’d pressed the cup to her lips, tilted.
While she drank, I clenched my jaw and did my best impression of Nettie. Gentle smile, gentle tune to lull the woman to sleep. Music and charm always were my sister’s forte; mine were bargaining, tactics. By fourteen, I’d negotiated trades with the Taskers upriver: six Jersey calves per season for as many bouts with our bantamweights; a brace of our foxes for every barrel of their trout; a cartload of bones for six months’ worth of darning needles. Important deals, the lot of them. The promise of continued prosperity, clinched with a Chanticleer’s cunning. That’s what a town needed in its leader. The willingness, the ability to inspire change. A firm hand when stability was needed.