by Michelle Tea
Kishka’s apartment was frozen in the era of Carl’s vanishing. Nothing new had entered, nothing old was discarded. The place held the stillness of a museum. Andrea doubted her mother even slept there anymore, choosing instead to sleep inside the cluttered Airstream trailer that tilted on the side of a hill at the dump. Sophie had glimpsed the Airstream’s interior during the Fourth of July barbecues Kishka threw for her workers; the tight space was a havoc. A giant television sucked a bounty of channels from a satellite dish perched in a nearby tree. Great glass ashtrays overflowed with lipsticked cigarette butts. Mess scattered the capsule, including a couch so heaped with sheets and pillows it gave the impression of a bed. A desk held piles of papers, and more paper poked from the slammed drawers of file cabinets, as if trying to crawl from their habitats. Air conditioning chugged from a hulking machine jammed into a window. Sophie wasn’t permitted more than the briefest peek inside.
“See?” Her grandmother would flap open the door, then shut it before Sophie’s eyes had the chance to adjust to the dimness. “Just a hangout for an old lady. Nothing fun in there for a little girl.”
Sophie always hated the cookouts at the dump, but as it was a holiday, Sophie and Andrea’s presence was insisted upon. The glare of the sun was unrelenting and carcinogenic; the stink of charcoal and lighter fluid barely masked the putrid stink of the summertime trash. Her grandmother’s employees were self-conscious and obligated, the occasional city official dropped by, beaming their fake personalities onto everyone. If she had been allowed to roam the grounds perhaps it would have been interesting, but the dump was off-limits to little Sophie. Again and again she would stray toward the heaps of fascinating junk-stuck muck, only to be called back by Andrea, her mother’s voice raw with annoyance and repetition. Well, not today. Now that Sophie wanted nothing to do with the putrid piles, it would almost certainly be required of her to touch it. Why was life so mean?
As she approached the crooked, wooden building Ronald had pointed toward, Sophie became aware of a steady, powerful rumble. If she’d lived in a different part of the country perhaps she would have stopped and braced herself for the rolls of an earthquake, but Massachusetts didn’t get earthquakes. They got blizzards in the winter, a sheet of frozen white that canceled school and turned the rules of the road upside down—the streets teeming with sleds, and the cars, buried under mounds of snow, now things to climb upon and slide down. They got hurricanes sometimes, winds that could blow you down, that beat the trees until their branches snapped, until their trunks tumbled into the street, the giant snarled mat of their roots upended, dripping dirt. But no earthquakes, no volcanoes, nothing that could explain this jumbling, rumbling sound—so loud Sophie could feel it like the bass of very loud hip-hop blaring from the supersonic car speakers of a Bellingham Square lowrider. It grew louder as she neared the building and its ringed fortress of tall, round buckets. The vibrations climbed her bones. As she came upon the barrels, she saw that they were shaking, and was stopped by the tremble of what they held inside. Jewels? Jewels. Jewels! Like a cracked geode, each rust-scabbed, dingy barrel was brimming with rough sparkle. Millions of pebble-sized chunks glittered blindingly in the sun. One barrel contained bright green jewels, the corners smoothed to touch. The next, deep blue jewels, like droplets of some Caribbean lagoon. More barrels held cold, dark green jewels, the hard color of the Atlantic at winter. She picked up a handful, half expecting to see angry waves trapped inside, like bugs stuck in amber.
There were red jewels—rubies?—and so many barrels full of crystal clear jewels, each cut into different sizes, that the abundance of sparkle hurt Sophie’s eyes and caused her to gasp in excitement. Diamonds? She plunged her hands into a bin, slid them deeper and deeper, until she was up to her elbows in diamonds! They felt cool against her skin. She lifted her hands and let them rain from her cupped palms, falling between her fingers, a chunky waterfall. A neighboring barrel of milky white jewels stopped her. What would this be? She wracked her brain for a gem that looked like this, solid and white and smooth, like the bumpy, antique lamp her mother kept by her bedside; milk glass she called it. Milk glass. Glass.
As quickly as Sophie had been sucked into the rich fantasy of junkyard treasure, so quickly did her imagination spit her back out. Glass. She felt about as intelligent as Ronald, whom she had left up the hill with a stool stuck to his pants. Of course there were not bins and bins of precious jewels being stored at her grandmother’s dump! What a lunatic, to think so for even a moment! Was she a child, after all? Sophie burned with private embarrassment, and was glad to be alone. Certainly in all her wonder, she would have blurted something about the diamonds and rubies and emeralds that were now, clearly, the rubble of beer bottles, the smashings of jars, and the glass of shattered car windows tumbled edgeless and smooth.
Sophie crept deeper into the space behind the barrels, observing rows of smaller buckets filled with jagged glass shards ordered by color, waiting to be tumbled. Shelves made from scrap wood held bottles that looked tremendously old; words and designs rose from their surfaces. Sophie ran her hand over one, feeling the word elixir roll beneath her fingers. She divined an order to the mess, a system: which barrels held finished products and which were next to be tumbled, empty shelves waiting for more raw bottles to come in, and shelves holding bottles too precious—antique?—to crush and crumble into ornamental debris.
Once she accepted that the shining nuggets were nothing but unexceptional bits of broken glass, Sophie’s wonderment returned. Nothing was precious here, but all of it was pretty. Buckets and buckets of regular, everyday glass somehow bashed into dazzle. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. There was something about a piece of smashed windshield tricking you into thinking it was a priceless diamond that conjured a sort of respect for the glass. She was proud of it, as if it were a living thing that had pulled off a clever feat. It still felt nice to plunge her hand into the cool bin of beads, felt just as cool on the sun-hot skin of her arms as when she’d mistaken them for jewels. Sophie felt relaxed among the glass. They were all equals here.
She found a bucket containing chunks of multicolored, rounded beads that looked like a giant bin of candy. Her mouth watered. She’d forgotten to eat breakfast, and her hunger for salt lingered. Would her grandmother feed her? She had never seen the woman eat, only smoke. Even at the Fourth of July cookouts Kishka would sit with a cocktail in a plastic tumbler, knocking the melting ice against the sides, and take drags off her dramatically long cigarettes. Kishka liked charring marshmallows over the burnt grill, but after she blew out their tiny fires and plucked the blackened crackling of the skin she threw the rest of the candy away, half-melted and sticky in the grass, to be scarfed up by a junkyard dog.
The rumbling sound faded as Sophie plucked her way through the barrels and bins. The vibrations had settled in her bones and now felt natural. She climbed atop an overturned bucket to reach a row of shelves stocked with those charming, antiquated bottles that had been spared from pulverization. The height of the bucket increased her view of where she was—Angel’s place, whoever that was. She could see Ronald up the hill, his head plopped onto his chest, unconscious on his stool in the brutal sun. The glare of the day on the great heaps of trash was too much to look at. It burned a wall of light onto Sophie’s eyes, she had to blink it away to see again. When she could, she noticed the pigeons. A wide flock of them, assembled on the roof of the crooked building, staring at her with their small, orange eyes. Sophie felt that she’d been caught, but doing what, and by whom? A gang of scabby birds? Rats with wings, her mom called them, throwing handfuls of uncooked rice into the gutter outside their house as if someone had just been married, but no. Supposedly the rice expanded in the greedy birds’ stomach until their insides exploded.
“Really?” Sophie had asked, skeptical, disapproving that her mother was wasting perfectly good food this way.
“You do what you can,” her mother said, resolutely, upending the plastic ba
g, shaking out the final grains. Sophie never even saw the birds come for the rice. They stayed high above, their scabby claws clutching electrical wires, and the rice grew grimy in the street below, carried away by insects and rain.
Once she noticed the pigeons, Sophie could hear their coo, a breathy whistle beneath the steady locomotion of the rumbling sound. The roof was dotted with wide glass bowls of rainwater, and some of the birds bathed in them, their wings stretched surprisingly wide, creating an upwards splash with their scrawny bird legs. Sophie, already in a state of enchantment from the heaps of crystalline glass, found her senses unexpectedly pleased by the pigeons. Their coos were delicate and steady, like a room of devotees chanting Om. The architecture of the wing was magnificent, wide and strong at the base, a flying muscle, tapered at the tip. The perfect stripes of the feathers, lightest gray to charcoal, the iridescence of their heads, the fuchsia and green of it matching the gleams of certain glass in the barrels below. Sophie watched the pigeons bathe like a hunter who’d stumbled upon a nymph in an old myth. She moved carefully, as if her activity would startle them into the sky, but they had been watching her for longer than she’d been watching them. As they kept up their murmured coos and shifted their plump bodies, Sophie spied an appendage, bulky and odd, jutting from the rear of one bird. She squinted in the sun.
“Livia?” she asked. The bird wobbled, settled into itself, its body a nest of feathers, the unmistakable bamboo flute wired to her backside. “Livia!” Sophie felt excited to know the bird—perhaps she should catch it and return it to Dr. Chen! The bird seemed to have liked her, maybe it would come to her easily, as it had walked onto the fingers of its master. Sophie like the idea of being special to an animal, even a useless, dirty one like a pigeon. It was special to have a creature so instinctive seek you out. It must mean there was something good about her, she decided, something subtle that animals, with their refined sense of goodness and danger, could detect. She started to call to Livia again, but noticed another protrusion on the backside of yet another bird. It was the same bamboo whistle the doctor had affixed to her pet. As the flock continued to rustle, Sophie realized that many of the birds had them, hollow whistles that looked like miniature organ pipes bound to their tail feathers. If any of them were Livia it was impossible to say, but certainly they all belonged to Dr. Chen. Did the woman know her pets spent their time lounging at the city dump? Would she care? Sophie stood still, her hand resting on a fat brown jug from another time, her eyes on these mysterious birds. And suddenly, the tremendous, backbeat rumbling stopped, and in its place rushed a silence that made Sophie’s ears pop, a roar of nothing. The birds, finally acting like normal pigeons, took off as if a shot had been fired, gracefully swooping in perfect formation. In the deafening quiet Sophie could hear them pulling music through their flutes, a sound like ribbons would make if ribbons could sing as they fluttered, something high and sweet and liquid whistling through the air, twirling through the clap and smack of wings. The rickety door of the crooked building creaked open, and out stormed her grandmother, with Angel, the glass artist, scuffing behind her.
“I’m telling you, I am hearing it in my dreams, and it’s giving me nightmares!” Sophie’s grandmother was waggling her hands above her head. “I feel like it’s my own goddamn head in the tumbler, getting rolled around like a rock. And then I wake up and all I hear is thu-thunk, thu-thunk, thu-thunk, and try going back to sleep with that racket! My trailer is vibrating with it, Angel.”
Kishka’s silver hair still held the stain of long-ago blond upon it, a yellowy tint. Her scratchy, chiffony scarf was knotted around her neck, the ends of the bow fluffing in the breeze of her agitated motions. Behind her stood Angel. Sophie, frozen still on the upended bucket, investigated Angel. Boy, or girl? The tumbler’s work pants were baggy and coated with dust and grit. A flannel shirt with its arms ripped off to accommodate the heat. Angel’s arms were folded across Angel’s chest. Sophie looked for breasts, felt like a creep, looked away. She hadn’t noticed any. Angel’s arms were muscled, but skinny, too. Was that a scribble of hair poking out under the arms? Was that even a clue? A knit cap was pulled over the person’s head, with choppy black hair poking out from underneath. The hair was long for a guy and short for a girl, at least in Chelsea. Angel’s face was broad and smooth.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Swankowski, we have a landscaper in Boston who just placed an order, and I’m expecting a design firm in here later this week to clear out most of the finished glass. It’s certainly bringing in the money—”
“Listen, buster.” Kishka shook her knuckly fist. “You think I’m worried about money? I make my dollars off garbage. The only thing this rotten town produces! I’m fine. But you better find a way to quiet that machine or else you’re out of a job.”
Sophie watched this person named Angel get a little bit smaller, and nod at her grandmother. She wondered if she could do that thing she did, the thing she just did to her mom by accident, the thing she stopped herself from doing to Ronald, when she sort of pushed herself into another person, and could suddenly feel them so sharply. Was she pushing herself into them, or was she bringing them into herself? Or was she a little bit crazy, had she made herself broken and strange playing the pass-out game? Sophie could feel the pull inside herself, and gave herself over to it. Maybe it was a creepy, sneaky thing to do, like reading someone’s diary but worse, snooping in their most private spaces. Surely this was creepier than just scanning Angel’s body, looking for breasts or no breasts. Sophie braced herself against the shelf, clutched at the worn, splintery wood, lodged her hip against it, and she sent herself out into Angel. Never had she done such a thing of her own volition; the other times had been involuntary, it had come upon her like a seizure, but Sophie saw now that she could control it, and was a shocked at the speed and the ease with which some part of her sped toward Angel. She felt that first shimmer of entering a person’s sphere, a new flavor almost, one she’d never tasted, a certain shift of mood, she was about to feel what it felt like to be Angel, she opened further with cautious excitement, and that seeking, speeding part of herself smashed against what felt like darkness made solid. The collision was abrupt, like running into a sheet of glass you hadn’t known was there. Its shatter knocked Sophie from her perch, tumbled her into a bin of shining beads, sending the blobs of color rolling across the dirt. Sophie’s eyes locked with Angel’s as she tumbled, the two of them linked somehow, and as her body hit the ground two thoughts rose inside of her: Angel is a girl, and she knows I tried to do that.
Chapter 6
It was only a moment that Sophie was out, but the dream she had in the dark space of her mind felt eternal. She was clutched in the talons of a giant bird, its claws like a cage around her body, its dark feathers batting and disorienting her. Sophie tried to steady herself on the claws but her hand slid off them; she tried to grip the creature’s scaly legs but they were so terrible to touch she drew back her hand and gagged. She couldn’t breathe with the evil smell of the beast, and began to thrash and kick at the claws, bringing a shriek from the bird as it looped its long neck down and locked its terrible eyes on Sophie. A great razored beak stuck with blood and fur and skin; bulging eyes with ruptured red blood vessels streaking like lightning across the yellowy whites; a knotted chiffon scarf around its neck. It opened the knife of its beak to scream.
“Oh my dear, dear granddaughter! My little bumblebee! My tiny birdie-girl!”
* * *
SOPHIE WAS AWAKE, gasping air back into her body, the air her fall had knocked from her lungs. She was tangled in the bony limbs of her grandmother. Kishka’s feathers fluttered into her face, ticking her eyes—no, it was her scarf, the scarf her grandmother always kept knotted around her neck. Scratchy-soft, spritzed with perfume. Kishka’s smell was a deep, green smell, the smell of a lime petrified to stone. It was a hard, heavy smell, something dug from a cave. Kishka smelled of emeralds, if emeralds had a smell. The initial lightness of the perfume was pleasant
, but as you inhaled more deeply it grew darker, leaden, til you feared the fumes of it in your lungs. Sophie pushed herself away from her grandmother, and breathed deeply.
“What?” Kishka cried, insulted. “A grandmother can’t give her hurt granddaughter some care? I’m just seeing if my little tweety bird is okay,” Kishka watched the girl stand up, unsteady, like a colt just dropped from her mom. Sophie felt dizzy. She was afraid to look at Kishka and see a set of wild, yellowed eyes beneath her regular grandmother eyes—squinty eyes, always peering through a veil of cigarette smoke or against the fierce summer sun. She jumped as her grandmother’s bony hands came clutching at her chin—claws, Sophie thought, she and her mom always laughed at Kishka’s claw-hands, but it wasn’t funny now, how did Sophie ever think it was funny, nothing was funny about a grandmother that was also a shrieking bird-monster clutching at your face with her talons. Sophie jerked away but Kishka’s grip grew tighter, her fingers sinking into the girl’s skin and then releasing. All the while Sophie kept her eyes closed, afraid to look, even though the scene of the vicious bird clawing at her face was no better.
“Oh, dear.” Kishka pulled her hand away from Sophie’s chin, and Sophie opened her eyes. Kishka’s fingernails were pointy and ragged, with blotches of chipped-away nail polish here and there but the splash of red on the jagged tip of her thumb wasn’t polish at all. Sophie stared at her grandmother, dizzy and horrified, as she licked the girl’s blood from her claws. “You hurt yourself,” she said, nodding at the scrape, beading with blood. She slid her jagged nails into the knot of her scarf and freed it, quickly daubed at the cut on Sophie’s face. Sophie jumped back at the touch, but Kishka’s hands were like an iron vise upon her.