Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  Michael feels his face flush. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He didn’t sleep well.” She seems to be attempting to drown out her own voice by clattering pans and beating eggs in a chrome bowl. “Your grandpa has bad dreams sometimes, and when he does he wakes up very cranky and fidgety.”

  “Oh.”

  When they sit down to eat Michael wrestles to find what he hopes is a clever method of interrogation. He needs so badly to know. . . .

  “Does grandpa ever talk about what his bad dreams are about?”

  “No.”

  “Do you ever have bad dreams?”

  “Almost never, dear. I think the last time was a couple years ago when there was some bad business here in the village.”

  “What happened?”

  “A girl went missing.” She speaks the words more into her coffee cup than to Michael, but even muffled they stun him.

  “Missing?”

  His grandmother nods. “She was one of the summer people, came up here with her family. I’d see her walking to and from the beach almost every day by herself. Then one day she went down to swim but never came back. Must have drowned, poor thing. They dragged the lake but she was never found. A terrible event. Felt so bad for her mother and father. That’s why your grandfather and I never let you go to the beach unsupervised.”

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  She shrugs. “Thirteen-years-old or so. Blonde hair, I recall that much.”

  Michael excuses himself from the table. His jimmying open of the phone jack is masked by the noises of his grandmother washing the breakfast dishes.

  “Think I’ll go for a ride,” he tells her.

  “Be careful, dear. Have fun.”

  Throughout his race to the gravel pits Michael senses that the village is somehow made out of eyes. He passes no one, but is terrified by the prospect of encountering his grandfather at the pits.

  The area is equally abandoned. The cavern of redbrick sits snugly locked, illuminated by a hot dappling of sunlight. He enters the breach in the fence and fishes out the pair of keys from his pocket.

  He marries the one labelled Tuff Lock with the padlock that bears the same engraving. The lock gives easily. The clunking noise startles a murder of crows from their nest. Michael cries out at their sudden cawing, wing-flapping reprimand. He quickly looks about, terrified of being caught.

  The gravel mounds are as ancient hills, silent and patient and indifferent to all human activity. Michael removes the padlock and struggles to raise the corrugated door. It rattles up its track, revealing the musty, cluttered darkness.

  Like an ember, the orange light of the freezer gleams from the back of the shed.

  Michael feels about for a light switch but finds none.

  With great care he makes his way to the light. He is like a solider crossing a minefield. Every motorized tool, every stack of bagged soil, is a danger.

  He reaches the freezer. Its surface is gritty with dust.

  He sees the metal clamp that holds its lid shut. It is secured with another padlock. Before he’s fully realized what he is doing, Michael inserts the smaller key and frees the open padlock from its loop. He can hear the freezer buzzing and he wonders if he is truly ready to see what it contains.

  You’ve gone this far, he tells himself. He pulls the lid up from the frame.

  Frost funnels upward, riding on the gust of manufactured arctic air. Like ghosts, the cold smoke flies and vanishes.

  A bundled canvas tarp reposes within the freezer’s bunk. Its folds are peppered with ice, its drab earthy brownness in sharp contrast to the white banks of frost that have accumulated on the old freezer’s walls. The tarp is secured with butcher’s twine, which Michael cannot break, so instead he wriggles one of the canvas flaps until his aching fingers can do no more.

  But what he has done is enough. Through the small part in the bundle the whitish, lidless eye stares back at him, like a waxing moon orbiting in the microcosmic blackness of the canvas shroud.

  Michael whimpers. All manner of emotion assails him at once, rendering him wordless.

  A shadow steps in front of the open shed door.

  Michael spins around, allowing the freezer lid to slam down. His grandfather has caught him. Michael sees his future as one encased in stifling ice.

  But the figure in the doorway is too slight to be his grandfather.

  Michael then sees the ghost-eyes staring at him from the dim face. A face that is brightened by rows of teeth as the girl grins. She bolts off into the woods.

  “Wait!” Michael cries. He stumbles across the littered shed, but by the time he reaches the gravel pits she has gone.

  What do I do? Michael keeps thinking as he locks both freezer and shed. He needs help.

  His confusion blurs the ride back to his grandmother.

  It also makes him doubt what he sees once the house comes into view. His grandfather’s pickup is once more in the driveway. Beyond it the entire house is engulfed in flames. Neighbours are rushing about the property, seemingly helpless. Michael speeds up to the lawn, jumps off his bike and attempts to run through the front door.

  A man stops him. “No, son! We’ve called the fire department. Stay back, stay back!”

  Ushered to the edge of his grandparents’ property, Michael can see the window of their bedroom. The lace curtain is being eaten by fire, allowing him a heat-weepy view of the figures that are lying on the twin beds inside.

  He sees his grandmother, who appears to be bound to her bed with ropes. Next to her, Michael’s grandfather lies unbound, a willing sacrifice. The large can of gasoline stands on the floor between them. The pane shatters from the heat.

  Michael feels his gaze being tugged to the trees at the end of the yard, where some kind of animal is skittering up the limbs with ease.

  In the distance, sirens are wailing their lament.

  KNIFE THROWING THROUGH SELF-HYPNOSIS

  Robin Richardson

  To pass as a strong man, move boulders through

  inflated pores, black lumps stiff as good scotch. Watch

  the rolling of your Rs, too often soft, unworthy of the

  buckle’s brass eagle just above the cock. The cock

  is paramount. No hero hides his bulge—blue worming up

  the thigh like high-wires. It’s not enough to fuck

  the daughter of a dragon, her claws gone through your

  waist. You must undo whatever noble airs she claims,

  maintain your status with the slitting of a tooth-white throat.

  YOUR FIGURE WILL ASSUME BEAUTIFUL OUTLINES

  Claire Humphrey

  I spent every day of my first decadi in Savaurac staring at the likeness of a girl on a notice for corsets. I figured she was long dead of the clap, or maybe she only ever lived in some garret artist’s absinthe-blind eye, but she was a very pretty girl: deep bosom, low waist, and the sable hair shared by most of her people.

  “Your figure will assume beautiful outlines.” That was written below her picture, along with the name of the corset-maker. The paper was pasted on the wall beside my Da’s special table, where he sat to score the matches. I sat there to labour over our application for residence, listening to the thump of fists on the training bags and running my fingertips over my knuckles, where the fight calluses were already softening.

  The fight club used old notices for wallpaper because it was a poor sort of place, same as why they strewed the floor with sawdust and the shells of nuts, and most of the tables had one leg shorter than the others. The owner, though, Mr. Karinen, had promised work for Da if we came to Savaurac, and so we had.

  The day I finished our immigration paperwork, Benno Karinen, the owner’s son, was going around the walls with a whalebone scraper, taking down the stained notices and pasting up fresher ones. When he got to where I sat, he went by me like I
wasn’t anything, and set his paste bucket right on my table and his scraper to the top of the notice for corsets.

  “Leave that one,” I said.

  Benno looked down all haughty and went right back to scraping.

  “I said leave it!”

  His whalebone tore right through the ribboned curls on the girl’s head.

  I stood up then. Benno was just above my height and three stone heavier. I hit out straight for his nose.

  Two decadis at least since I’d been in the ring last, what with packing up our things in Kervostad and getting set up here in Savaurac, and my fist had been getting thirsty for a face.

  I pulled Benno’s cork for him, blood raining down into the paste-bucket. I laughed out once before I could stop myself. Benno did, too, like he couldn’t believe it.

  “Da!” he said. “Da, come and see the straight on our Valma.” It came out a bit thick. He spat into the bucket and grinned at me with blood outlining his teeth. “Da, you didn’t tell me she was a fighter.”

  “Didn’t know it,” Mr. Karinen said, tossing his towel down and coming out from behind the bar. He eyed me from under a tangled ginger brow. “Well, little lady? How much do you weigh?”

  “I’m a welterweight, sir.”

  “Strapping girl, you have here, Igo,” he said to my Da. I tried to take my arm back, but he was still waving it. “How about it, Valma? Would you like to fight?”

  He held up an open palm for me to punch. I smacked my fist into it hard enough to make him wring his hand after.

  “Spirit, Igo,” he said, “she’s got your spirit. Let’s put her to spar with the lads tomorrow, see what she can do.”

  “Which I thought girls weren’t allowed in the ring here, sir,” I said. That much, Da had told me before we left, though I thought he only meant I would stop fighting before audiences, not that I would go without sparring or even bag-work.

  “By law, no,” Mr. Karinen said. “But there’s ways. For a girl raised by Igo Topponen, there’s ways.”

  My Da had taken the Kervostad Heavyweight Belt twice, when he was young. I could just barely remember: my Da with a lean-carved belly, sweat shining on him like oil under the galvanic lights of the ring. Someone holding his arm up high. Everyone shouting.

  He wasn’t a fighter now. He was an old man with both ears cauliflowered and his hair razored close to his scarred scalp. He had given me his salt-rotted wraps and gloves and sent me up between the ropes while he watched from outside.

  He came past Mr. Karinen and took my other arm and raised it, proud as if I was a winner already, and with his mouth smiling wide I could see the two teeth he broke on Selmo Voroven’s fist the year I was born.

  I felt the muscles in my arms knotting up with eagerness. I was his daughter, no doubt of it. Maybe I’d end up with teeth to match his after all.

  “How’d you like a match next decadi?” said Mr. Karinen. I’d been sparring with his lads since Plum-day, my knuckles scuffing open and seeping into my wraps. My Da poured vinegar over them until they finally healed over into dark pink scars.

  “Yes, sir!” I said. “Which I’ll do you and Da proud.”

  “No doubt of it, Valma, no doubt of it. There’s one thing, though, you see. The Provosts, they won’t allow lasses in the ring. There’s lasses among the Provosts, not that you can tell them for such without a hair on their heads. Why they can do magic but not fight, I don’t know, but it’s the Provosts’ law to make and ours to live under. But I know just the fellow who will help.”

  Hanno Jalmarinen, charm-master, lived behind a copper-worked door at the end of a long alley. He measured me up and down with his little pale eyes and then made me stand still for a half-hour while he did mysteries about me, and then he went to his workbench and muttered over a bit of metal for a moment. Two hundred soldats, it cost Mr. Karinen, and I thought it a vast sum indeed, but when I put on the charm Mr. Karinen said it was excellent work.

  The charm was a fine copper ring to go about my littlest finger, flat enough that it would not be felt beneath my wraps, let alone my gloves. “Mind you never take it off,” Mr. Karinen said. “And keep it secret. The Provosts have laws on everything.”

  I did not feel any different with it on, but when I took it home and showed Benno, he stared and stared.

  “Shut your mouth, you downy idiot,” I told him. Only my voice came out a bit lower, and cracked halfway.

  Benno didn’t shut his mouth.

  I looked in the mirror we used for shadowboxing. “I look the same,” I said, disappointed. Maybe my face was a bit more square, my neck thicker. I stood sideways and craned at myself.

  “No, you don’t,” Benno said.

  “What’s so changed, then?”

  But he only shook his head and punched me in the shoulder and told me to get my wraps.

  My first match fell on Madder-day, in a basement club on the poorest street in the Quarter. I fought Luko Vannen, who weighed four pounds less than me and had both eyes blacked from a previous fight. I blacked one of them for him all over again and laid him out at the end of the third round. My own eyebrow was cut and blood spattered the front of my singlet, and the crowd roared for me, such as they were, a double handful of factory workers and a few all-day drinkers. For me. I had not heard the sound since leaving home, and it was as sweet to me as the taste of water washing the metal-sour spit from my mouth.

  I fought again a half-decadi later: a fellow with hands like granite already and heavy muscle twining over his shoulders above the torn neck of his singlet. I walked in thinking I was a fine gritty fighter, and I walked out with my tooth stuck through my inner lip.

  I went straight home and found Benno behind the bar and spat out a mouthful of my own salty blood onto the sawdust at his feet. “Which you might’ve tried to hit me proper!” I said, spraying a bit.

  “Eugh,” he said, and wiped at his sleeve. “What are you on about?”

  “Pulling your punches when you spar with me,” I said.

  “I never.”

  “You know I’m a lass. That fellow didn’t. And he hit me twice as hard as you.”

  “Maybe he’s just better—”

  “He’s a welterweight, Benno. You’re nearly a heavyweight.”

  “I’ve four pounds to go—”

  I punched him in the ear as hard as I could.

  He swore and shook it off. “You want me to treat you like a lad?” And he floored me with a straight that broke my nose.

  I sat in the sawdust, hands cupped under my chin, Benno standing over me. “Your Da’s had most of the training of you,” he said. “And he’s known you were a lass all your life.”

  I don’t know if Da heard, but the next time he was working my defence, he jabbed me right over my taped nose. While I tried to wipe the water from my eyes, he followed up with a couple of hooks that knocked me sideways into the ropes.

  I wanted to embrace him, but the bell hadn’t gone yet, so I bounced up and under his guard and pummelled him in the ribs until it did.

  Benno and I waited until our fathers were busy with the night’s fighters and the usual fellow had arrived to tend bar. In the green room, Benno put on his Savaurin greatcoat and gave me one of his jackets.

  I had my charm on, of course, and my hair queued like a man’s. We took a few soldats from the tip jar, Benno filled his flask with the stuff his Da kept on the bottom shelf, and we strolled over to Rue Prosper.

  The theatre had a front like a tart’s bodice, all carmine velvet ruffles. Inside it was far too warm, and the lamp-oil was scented laudanum-sweet. Men and lads shuffled in and doffed their hats and bought glasses of gin from a girl at the back. Benno and I passed the flask back and forth and I began to yawn; I’d been training in the morning and my shoulders had that pleasant deep ache.

  Benno prodded me in the side and then snatched his hand back. “You don’t even feel like a girl,” he
whispered.

  I prodded him back, in the soft flesh of his belly. “You do.”

  Then a man started playing a hurdy-gurdy, and the curtain rushed upward, and I got my first sight of Amandine Azur. She wore a plume upon her head and she danced with two great feather fans, flirting them before and behind so that now you could see only her eyes and the plume, and now a swift glimpse of her whole body.

  She gazed at me, I swore she gazed at me, but when I said so at the end of her set, Benno scoffed and looked superior and made me come away without speaking to her, and I did not even learn her name until we were out of doors again and I saw it on the notice fixed to the theatre’s façade. They had drawn her peeping sideways over the fans, and the likeness was very good, delicate lines of ink capturing the snap of her brilliant eye.

  I came back the next day. She was not seeing visitors, so I spoke with the gin-girl and left a note on one of my fight notices to come and see me at Karinen’s, and I said that she would be let in free if she wanted. But I did not see her in the crowd the night of my fight, and because I dropped my guard to look, I lost.

  I went back to see Amandine’s show, sitting at the rear of the theatre beside the drafty door. That first time, I did not speak to her; I was tongue-cursed, brave enough only to look.

  The second time, I came up to the base of the stage, and she looked down at me and flicked the feather in her hair and winked at me. Then she did the same to the fellow next to me. He was a grey-headed Savaurin with a sailor’s weatherworn face and half his teeth knocked awry. I turned and left.

  The third time, I gave the gin-girl a soldat to show me the rear door of the theatre, and I waited there for Amandine to come out. When she did—muffled in a long grey gown and a black coat, carrying a plain reticule—she saw me and checked, wary for a second, and then she came forward and touched her gloved hand to my cheek. I felt the nap of velvet.

  Amandine smiled. Her lips were still rouged. She said, “You look a sweet lad, you do, and I can see you didn’t mean to frighten me, but you mustn’t lie in wait for a lady, you know.”