by Michelle Tea
Sophie thought she might lose her mind from it. What had Hennie said, that some zagavory changed people forever? Sophie had always known that there were bad things upon the earth, and bad people, but to know it firsthand, to feel the terrible power of mania and cruelty upon you, how it alters your mind, the chemicals in your body, the magical passageways of thought and instinct within the brain, all of it forever damaged by this indescribable sorrow that evil brings. Sophie felt people herded together to die, she felt the sorrow of bodies worked to death, she felt the regret of capture, she felt the crush of living while around you everyone died, she felt degradations and humiliations too perverse for her to comprehend, and she felt the aftermath. The broken hearts. Sophie knew now that a broken heart was not the silly red cartoon of a jilted lover. Hearts were real, and they could be crushed. And all of this was alive inside her grandmother, all this raging ache, pulses of pain beating, a galaxy of broken hearts, all of it inside this old woman as she tottered around, acting normal.
As if she were an ant that had crawled up her pant leg at a picnic, Kishka flicked Sophie from her psyche. In an instant she was in the world again, in her kitchen with its soft, worn curtains hanging in the windows, their sweet Dutch print framing the glass against which the birds again and again hurled themselves, their bodies a feathered thunk that shook the pane again and again. Sophie didn’t understand how everything was still standing. It was if a tornado had ripped through her, leaving everything perfectly perfect, unharmed. Sophie reeled. She reached for the salt shaker and dumped the entirety into her mouth, crunching on the delicious, healing paste of it.
To look at her mother was too much; Andrea still grimaced on the floor, trapped in her own private hell, unreachable, maybe even gone insane. But to look at Kishka was worse—the woman seemed to flicker now, like a television station with bad reception. She saw Kishka, her grandmother, in her lime green polyester pantsuit, bathed in her perpetual haze of cigarette smoke. But she saw other people, too: people or creatures, some elegantly, terrifyingly beautiful, like sexy villians in comic books, sleek and glossy black. She saw a young and haunted girl with holes where her eyes should be, her dress a tattered shroud. She saw what she thought was a dinosaur and realized was a dragon, a scaled and ugly thing with nostrils you could sink your fist into. She saw the terrible bird with its mouth full of worms. Sophie, dizzy already, from all that she’d felt, could not look at her flickering grandmother. And she could not close her eyes, because when she did she was overtaken by a horrible sensation of falling, an endless falling, as if some part of her was still trapped in Kishka’s consciousness, and the emotions she’d experienced echoing, ricocheting between her brain and her heart.
“How’d you like that, kiddo?” Kishka stubbed her cigarette out in the corner of her dish. Thoughtfully regarding her plate, she lifted a wing unsullied by her ashing and snapped it in half, slurping at the marrow. “So light, so flavorful,” she mused, dripping the torn bones back into her ashtray of a plate. “It’s a pity we don’t eat pigeons anymore in this country. You know, they were always good for food in the old country, in the olden days.”
The pigeons beat a tattoo on the window pane.
“What have you done?” Sophie whispered. “What are you?”
“You’ve learned all about what I am, girl,” Kishka sneered. There was a flash of something, a many-legged insect, and then the strange flickering subsided, and Kishka’s form as the grandmotherly owner of the city dump stabilized. She undid the knot that bound her scarf to her throat and used the chiffon to daub pigeon grease from her lipsticked mouth. “You best be learning what you are. Part me, that is what you are. Everything you just saw in there, everything, you felt— you are of that, Sophia. It is inside you, too.”
“I don’t know what foolishness everyone has been filling your head with,” Kishka said casually, oblivious to the horror around her. “Sadness is a natural part of life. Tears, pain—it’s all as natural as— what? As happiness, as eating and breathing. It is a power for us Odmieńce, and for humans, it has always been their lot. What are you going to do about it? You felt that.” Kishka motioned to the place where her heart should be. “What will you do? You will fight that? That is me. It’s you as well. Fight that, you fight me, you fight yourself, and for what?” With disgust, Kishka lit another cigarette. The curl of her lip and the curl of the smoke. “Humans, their lives are so brief. A snap.” She snapped her brittle fingers. “So they cry. They feel some pain. It is all over soon enough. Me, I am here forever. You too, if you choose to be, my little Sophia.” She pointed the smoldering cherry of her thin cigarette at her granddaughter. “I can show you more than these scabby birds and that wretch in the creek. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on. I might not be able to get inside you with your fancy shield and all that, but I can get inside everyone else.” She gave a snort of triumph. “I’m already there. Inside most everyone. Where their sadness sits, their loneliness. Their cruelty. I’m right there. You can’t hide from me, girl.”
“What you showed me, what’s in you—that’s not regular sadness. That’s evil.”
“Well, it feels that way, all roped together like that.” Kishka shrugged lightly. “That was millions of years of the stuff.”
“It wasn’t just—natural. It was war, it was torture, it—”
“All things that are totally natural for humans,” Kishka said almost kindly.
Sophie grabbed the plate away from her grandmother as she went to ash again on the desiccated pigeon. “Who was this?” she thundered, shaking it.
“Oh, no one you know,” Kishka snapped. “Calm down.”
Sophie gazed down at the food congealing in the plate. She thought of all the pigeons she didn’t know, the quieter ones who flew in Livia’s flock, the others around the city, truly everywhere there were pigeons and now they were all precious to Sophie, every one a messenger, all of them related, somehow, to the ones who had her heart. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. She moved the dish to the counter, placing it somberly. There would be a burial, there would have to be. The rhythmic thudding of the birds outside had become a kind of rain against the windows.
“I’ll let them in,” she said to Kishka. “They will tear you apart.”
“Oh, please. You think this is an Alfred Hitchcock movie?”
Sophie crouched down to her mother. She forced herself to behold her, and petted her head gently, hoping that it gave her some sort of comfort, somehow, wherever she was. “Where is she?” she whispered.
“It’s a sort of nightmare,” Kishka explained. “There’s a pack of Naw I let play with her, ever since she was a girl. Violent men who died violently, hundreds of years ago. They’re torturing her, basically.”
Andrea’s foot gave a little twitch, like a rabbit.
“Stop it,” Sophie demanded. She felt her zawolanie at the back of her throat.
“Make me,” Kishka taunted like a little girl, a schoolyard brat. “You’re so big and powerful now, I hear. Why don’t you do it yourself?”
It felt like Sophie’s heart exploded inside her chest, creating a burst of flame, her zawolanie rocketing up through the core of her self. The sound of her heart was what it was, the power and beauty of her heart, the good vibes of it, its sweetness and its pains, all of it swarmed together into a sound that tore through her body and out her mouth. The sound was so loud Sophie couldn’t even hear it. She had become it. Never yet had she allowed it to burst out of her so wild and harsh. It beat its way from her throat, bruising it, a living thing. It poured out of her, rupturing the kitchen window and filling the kitchen with birds. They funneled inside, a black swarm of feathers, and with their beaks and their claws they descended upon Kishka, who rose to greet their force. Her mouth clamped in a smirk around her cigarette, the woman spread her arms in a grand welcome, and her polyester body flickered, showing a gaping darkness inside her that the birds flew into, and were gone. And with a final smile at her granddaughter, Kishka wa
s gone as well. And a rain of dead birds fell upon the kitchen floor.
* * *
ANDREA LAY FACEUP on the scuffed linoleum. She was relaxed. Her strained jaw was soft, her limbs limp. The Naw and their agonies had left, and she remained under her daughter’s sleeping spell. Black and gray feathers wafted across the floor, skittering with the breeze that came in through the exploded kitchen windows. A heap of bodies, plump, their wings stretched into tatters and tangles, so many little bird-bones broken.
Sophie wept, sucking at the salt of her tears. She reached out to the terrible pile and stroked the chest of a bird gently, the feathers still warm.
A new clock had begun ticking inside her; she was due at the creek tonight, she would leave. She knew it. Her whole body wrapped around the knowledge with dull acceptance.
Sophie remembered how Hennie had cleaned up the mess of Sophie’s graceless zawolanie with a simple magic. Sophie rummaged around in her magic, once a muscle dormant, now full of flex. Not very hard to clean up glass, to replace the windows with clean, shining panes. She barely sounded her zawolanie, allowing it to come out as a whisper, a blessing of sorts. The gritty sparkle and shards vanished. Sophie’s kitchen had never seen such clean windows; she had to lay her hands upon the smoothness to know that they were there. She brought her face close and breathed upon the glass, gusting a small fog upon it. She traced a heart into the mist with her finger, then wiped it with her hand. The smudge made the window belong in the run-down apartment. I made that, Sophie marveled. What was glass? It was sand, wasn’t it? Sophie regretted the time spent ignoring nuns when she could have been learning about the earth. Her planet! What was she thinking? Why did she think she wouldn’t have to know such things, know everything? Sophie knew nothing. If this glass had once been sand, sand heated and melted and reconfigured into this hard, transparent substance, where had it all happened? How had Sophie done it? She backed away from her miracle. She had to take care of the birds, and her mother.
Sophie tenderly folded their outstretched wings, tucking them back into themselves, restoring their grace to them, sprinkling them with her tears as she worked. Sophie thought of fairy tales—were her salty tears magic? Could they bring the pigeons back to life? What about a kiss? She puckered her mouth and brought it down softly on the beaks of her friends. Nothing. Sophie cried harder. What kind of magic was this, then? To be able to build glass from nothing but the dead stayed dead. A stupid magic, a useless, troublesome magic. Sophie tidied the pile of the dead, collecting stray feathers and sticking them into her hair, now more ratted and snarled than ever before. Her face was fevered with fury and regret. She would send the pigeons’ bodies back to their flocks. She did not know how to do it, but the birds knew, and they were in the air all around Sophie, guiding her as she dug into her bag and pulled forth a fistful of something silky. She threw it onto the pigeons and let a bubbling caw fly from her mouth, and there was a flash of pure blue fire, and the pigeons all were gone.
Now she had to awaken her mother.
At first Sophie struggled to lift Andrea, to bring her to her bed and break the zagavory there. It would be much nicer, Sophie thought, for her mother to come to in the comfort of her bed, the late afternoon light hazing through the edges of her window shades. Maybe she would just think she had fallen asleep. Maybe Sophie could hide from Andrea the fact that she’d been the victim of her own daughter’s sorcery.
But Sophie was a weakling. Her efforts to heave her mother only made her more frightened of hurting the woman. Some part of Andrea’s body was always lolling dangerously beyond the girl’s grasp—her head, a leg twisting in a strange direction, an arm dragging along the linoleum. Sophie feared for her mother’s neck, her spine. She laid her back down, gently. She reached back into the pouch dangling from her hip, heavy with the fat, golden bar. She set it on the kitchen table. It looked so out of place among the empty coffee cups, the coffee-stained unpaid bills, the old salt and pepper shakers, you barely noticed it. Your eyes skipped over the bar, unable to comprehend it. Sophie stuck her hand back in her pouch and felt around for the powder, milled by Hennie with her mortar and pestle. She pulled the dust into her fist.
Sophie let loose her call. She knew she needed one fuller than the mess-cleaning, window-replacing zawolanie, yet one softer than the call that had banished her grandmother, if that’s what she had done. As she opened her mouth and sounded her howl she could feel the reins of her consciousness on it, like a harness on a wild beast. It sounded its fierce, feral noise, all the charged grace of a lightning storm but contained, crackling up and out from Sophie’s wide mouth as she flung the powder onto her mom. Andrea’s eyes opened to the spectacle of her daughter standing above her, her mouth cranked open, the last of her zawolanie curling up and away, gone. Her daughter, the witch.
Andrea scrambled up, unsteady on her feet. She seemed too tall, an ungainly giant. There were her legs bare in their shorts. Her hair was a disaster, her throat raw; she was still ill. She looked down at her daughter, as if for the first time. She could note the outline of the sea glass, a bulge beneath her shirt. “What is that?” she whispered, and Sophie removed it, could feel its warm light shine out toward Andrea. Andrea noted the pouch dangling from her daughter’s waist, could see the bulk of things inside it. “And that?”
“That’s private,” Sophie said.
“I am still your mother,” Andrea whispered. “You show me respect. You don’t”—she motioned to the floor where she’d just been lying—“you don’t do things like that to your mother. I don’t care how special you are.” Andrea spit the word special at her, and Sophie felt the echo of all the times Andrea had spat on Sophie’s aspirations toward something special—a special outfit, a special school, a special thought. How Andrea had always come down hard on them, the lid of her wounded heart smothering it. But it couldn’t be smothered, Sophie thought. And I am so much more special than any of that.
“I’m leaving,” she told her mother. “You probably know. I mean, I know you’re not magic”—it felt bad, not resisting the jab, but it was true, also, wasn’t it?—“but I think you know everything. Who I am and how I have to go.”
Andrea’s face contorted with pride and shock and envy. “I was magic,” she whispered. “Not magic enough for my mother, but I had a bit, I could feel it inside me. You are my child. Any magic I had, I held it for you. I gave it to you. It came to you from me. If I have none it is because you have it all, and if you have any, even a spark, it came from me.” She did not stop the tears from sliding down her cheeks.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sophie cried. “If you knew everything, why didn’t you tell me?” Why didn’t you love me, Sophie thought, I was so special, why didn’t you love me better?
“I was protecting you,” Andrea said. “That is what mothers do. I was protecting you.”
“You let Nana take my sister. My twin sister.”
“Sophie. Yes, yes I did. I didn’t know what else to—”
“You could have fought!” Sophie raged. “You could have saved her!”
“Sophie.” Andrea placed the heel of her hand to her sweaty brow. “You don’t understand. Everything is a mess. It was supposed to be you Nana took. So much, so much—badness will happen now.”
“I’m going to stop the badness, Ma. It’s my work.”
“Sophie, you have no idea what you are getting into. You could have been happy with Nana. Your sister—she’s happy.”
“You don’t know that!”
“She’s fine, Sophie! She’s charmed. She doesn’t know better. She loves the flowers. She’s simple. She’s simple, and happy. Look at you. You’re already tormented. What will happen to you, Sophie? You want to spend the rest of your life fighting? You’re just a girl!”
Don’t listen to her, Sophie told herself. Listen to Angel, listen to Livia and Arthur, to Hennie and the mermaid.
“Your grandmother,” Andrea said softly. “My mother. What would she have done if I had stopped
her? Or if I had told you? Do you know what it’s like to have no magic, and her so full of magic?” Andrea demanded. “She is in my head all the time. She’s in me, I can feel her. I can hide nothing from her. Imagine it, Sophie. Imagine it.” Sophie didn’t need to. The image of her mother, weakly kicking away the Naw in her nightmare, was seared into her. It felt wrong to know something so intimate about her mother, to know about a suffering she herself did not remember. She wrung her hands at the memory.
Sophie moved toward her mother, wrapping her arms around her waist. “I’m sorry, Ma.” She knew she was apologizing for things she had no business apologizing for, for things that were and were not her fault, could not be placed on her shoulders, but there she was, alive and full of magic, about to run away with a mermaid, leaving her mother behind with Kishka. Maybe, Sophie thought. Maybe it was best that Kishka had deadened a piece of her mother’s heart. Maybe it helped her not feel everything too much.
Andrea stroked Sophie’s head, her fingers getting caught in the feathers and snarls. She lifted one with her finger, and watched her daughter’s whole head of hair lift slightly, a mass of mats and tangles.