Spring and fall, Mella felt her heart beat. It came right up into her throat when she watched the geese fly over in their vees; she ran outside without a coat. Or she got off the bus before her stop to stand still and watch, and then she was late for school. The geese echoed something she had lived in her dreams and it hurt, a dull knife of joy probing the centre of her.
Mella’s mother didn’t allow her to walk in the woods.
“Mum, please!” Mella cried.
Her mother shook her head. “There are hunters, honey.”
“I’ll wear Dad’s blaze orange vest.” Mella ran and got it. “Look, it even kind of fits over my jacket.”
“No, sweetheart. It’s not safe during the season.”
Mella went anyway, even after she began to dream of a hard ball of pain piercing her chest and plowing through her heart. Stefan dreamed of hearing a small thunder and then watching red bloom up from a muddy grey, but he didn’t tell Mella until the next spring. They were lying in the woods eating cold roasted potatoes Stefan had brought from home. They heard a couple of high school boys close by, discussing kills, comparing guns— voices they recognized. Instinctively they stayed still, although Mella wanted to leap up and spread her arms wide to keep the boys away from Stefan. Boots crunched twigs, and they smelled a pale whiff of cigarette smoke and sweat. Then the boys passed and faded away even as Mella and Stefan’s hearts continued to pound together. In school the next day Mella smelled the same boys passing her in the hall and for just a moment she was paralyzed with fear. For a moment after that she wanted to tear at their faces.
With time, the dreams became stronger. Mella woke and found that there was a transparent stand of brilliant green reeds visible in front of the bookshelf in her room, and it took several minutes for them to fade. She was sitting in math class and became aware that her feet were in water up to the ankles; surprised, she looked down and saw her sneakers, perfectly dry. The sight made her feet feel imprisoned and she flexed them uncomfortably. Stefan was having these experiences too; he’d woken up outside the previous Saturday, rubbing mud on his legs. He told her about it as they walked by the highway.
“I wish that would happen to me,” she said. He loved the radiance of yearning in her face.
They wanted to do a cycling trip from northern Saskatchewan to northern Mexico when they graduated from high school. They spent hours planning it. They would ride through the Dakotas and spend a week in the Platte River Basin before continuing south. Mella did a geography project about the Canadian Prairies, and Stefan created a miniature marsh inside an old aquarium for science fair. Afterward it sat in his room at home, and he and Mella joked about stocking it with frogs and eating them. Stefan dreamed of it, the wriggling lumps going down his throat, one muscular contraction at a time.
In grade ten Mella got a part-time job at a bike shop. She learned to do repairs, and used her wages to buy a really good bike and panniers. She was saving her babysitting money too, for a tent, until one day she had a dream. In it, she was flying under a sky of deepening blue, then landed on a pile of sticks, gazing up with delight at a field of stars. The joy stayed with her for hours after she woke, and she decided she would sleep in the open. She dreamed of rain and it felt like having water everywhere around her and she loved it, and she was happy at the prospect of waking to it. Against her mother’s protests, she began to sleep under the horse chestnut tree in the backyard, wrapped in a sleeping bag, as soon as the ground was dry in spring. Stefan sometimes sneaked out and slept under the tree with her in his own sleeping bag— or, once it turned warm enough, in the patch of flattened grass their bodies made. They liked waking while it was still cool, covered with dew. On occasion Stefan licked a couple of beads of dew off Mella’s hair while she was still sleeping.
Especially in spring and fall, they woke with the sun and couldn’t contain the energy in their bodies. They patted down each other’s crazy sleep-hair, crammed on their sneakers, and dashed out of the backyard to run for an hour before returning to their separate homes for breakfast. They decided to join the track team and learn to run long distance, but changed their minds when they found out the boys’ and girls’ teams didn’t practice together. Instead, they just went out after school and ran, developing long muscles and strong hearts, their lungs powerful bellows.
The summer before senior year the dreams became powerful. Mella often woke with a heavy feeling in her head, as if there were a whole other world in there. There were also times when she woke with dread shrouding her heart, a sharp pain furrowing the muscle. Her chest contracted painfully when pickup trucks passed, dead animals tied down on the roofs or hoods. The glassy eyes of deer blocked her breath and she gasped, struggling to get air into her cramped lungs.
Stefan was working for the Parks Department, cutting grass and collecting litter. When they didn’t sleep together they met in the early mornings to run on the dewy verges of the highway, and Mella could see that Stefan’s head was heavy too; he had dark pouches under his eyes.
Mella felt good running. There were moments when she imagined she would lift off if she could just run a little faster; it was a glimpse of the receding tail of a kind of freedom, and gave her a needle-shiver of happiness. It counteracted the fear that began to silt into her sleeping mind.
She got a sharp thrill one day when, wading in their creek, she looked down at her bare arm and saw Stefan’s long claws lying there. She looked up and saw his forehead was bright red. It faded to his usual tan before her eyes, and when she looked down again she saw his fingers on her skin. Only that evening, falling asleep, did she realize she’d seen something strange.
In July, Mella woke in a nest hidden among reeds, thinking of flying off to a cornfield to feed, and even after she found herself lying heavy limbed in her bedroom she still felt twiglike legs folded beneath her, and wind on her feathers. She dragged herself out of bed and splashed her face at the bathroom sink, finally thrusting her whole head sideways under the faucet. The water gave her some relief from the feeling of weight and sadness. Then she rummaged in the kitchen, crunching some taco chips from the bag before trotting sluggishly to meet Stefan for their morning run. She wanted to spread her wings but her arms were not wings. The world was a fan that was stuck closed.
All summer Mella and Stefan were inseparable. They slept together as often as they could under the horse chestnut, and made love for the first time one night without even having formed the intention, so absorbed in each other’s skins and feathers. They dreamed together, waking with knowing smiles, having flown together or danced in a crowd of beautiful creatures. Mella opened her eyes and reached out with her clumsy, heavy-bone hand, and brushed the sandy hair off Stefan’s reddened brow, her finger tracing the line of his long beak as he slept. She sat out behind the bike shop on her lunch break and ate toasted salted corn kernels, and more than once found herself sitting on warm convexity in her nest of sticks before emerging back into her heavy body, her jean shorts and sneakers, the gravel of the parking lot dull before her. On a Wednesday in August she turned to find a dog staring intently at her, lifting its muzzle to sniff her on the wind. Mella’s heart raced in her chest. Her blood remembered something about life that she didn’t know yet.
On Labour Day weekend, Mella and Stefan knew they couldn’t wait any longer. They had entered the strange, free, windborne life as often as possible, but they always slid back into their hair-bearing, heavy-bone bodies. Now it was too painful come back. To be closed in by walls. To be bound to the flat of the earth.
Stef borrowed his dad’s car and came to pick Mella up. Her mother walked out to the driveway and handed her the blaze orange vest.
“You can’t go unless you promise to wear it,” she said, her hand firmly covering the handle of the car door.
“I promise,” Mella said.
She threw it onto the back seat. She would never wear it. What she wanted
most was to melt into a vast crowd of birds just like her, their calls a thousand bamboo chimes knocking hollowly in a damp breeze.
They drove for hours, to a river where they could camp on a sandbar by themselves. They found a clearing in a stand of reeds and collected some sticks and settled just as dark began to fall. They didn’t set up a tent; they just lay down on the damp sand without speaking. A restrained excitement pulsed in their throats. The grains of wet sand felt good clinging to their skins. Mella sat and felt the heaving of her insides and knew they had come just in time.
In the morning they woke from sitting together on their nest and found themselves in their heavy bodies. Through the reeds, they saw a large colony of cranes massed in the shallow water. Their hearts leaped toward the river of sharp faces, the vast bouquet of feathered bustles. Together they crept forward, willing themselves into exaltation, emerging into their long-necked, hollow-boned bodies. Forever, this time.
As they approached, their smell carried on the breeze, the cranes nearest them turned and looked. The birds stood and raised their wings like avenging angels and leaped at them, their long ungainly black legs folding and unfolding as they splashed around. As the cranes made their aggressive display, because these two new birds were interlopers, Mella was joyous. She knew they were dancing to her sinuous neck and sharp bones and muddy feathers, and her heart danced back because her true life was beginning, and it was like being the biggest flower in the world, unfolding wings in all directions. She stepped forward, the angles of her long black legs picking a way through the reeds and the water, her claws finding purchase in the muddy bottom, and she knew she never had to go back— to what, she couldn’t even remember. She could let the dreams of that other world fade for good because she was herself now, and her mate was behind her, and that strange smell disturbed her but she didn’t know why; all the cranes were ruffling into the air now but Mella was still snagged on the memory of her other world and she turned and heard the small thunder and felt the pain rip through her chest and, turning her long beak, the last thing she saw before her heart was shredded was her two still-warm, brown-speckled eggs.
* * * * *
Elise Moser lives in Montreal. She also spends time on a river in Wisconsin, where sand hill cranes spend part of their year too. Her YA novel, Lily and Taylor, appears in September 2013 from Groundwood Books.
The Ripping
Vincent Grant Perkins
Monday, Donna Sampson hurried home with the latest prize she had scavenged from a pile of junk on the west side of the city. It was the annual cleanup week, and she never missed a chance to add to her collection of trinkets and knickknacks. This, though, this was something else, something you just didn’t come across everyday. Donna knew as soon as she saw it that she had to have it for her collection.
She draped it carefully over her arm and scurried from her truck into the house with it, not even stopping on her way to her bedroom to say Hi, Haven’t got time, or Kiss my ass to her husband Rick, who was sitting gargoyle-like on the couch, playing World of Warcraft. He never looked away from the TV as she walked by.
“‘Bout time you got home!” Rick called out. “I’m starvin’ here!”
Donna’s anger flared. Rick’s desire to be all but absent from their life together had ripped their marriage apart, but now was not the time to re-examine that wound. She quickly calmed herself and strode purposefully along the hallway, knowing she needed to get her newest acquisition into its own special place.
When she opened her bedroom door, the evening sun slanting in through the mini-blinds sent motes scattering in the air like fireflies. With a couturier’s grace Donna arranged her prize “face up” on the bed, and stepped back to admire it.
The hollow of her neck became suddenly itchy. She reached to scratch it and a shivery warmth spread through her shoulders. She undid three buttons of her blouse, scratching over a wider area as the itch travelled. The warmth dispersed down into her chest as if it were melting wax flowing between her ribs. Her breasts felt flushed, her nipples suddenly and enticingly erect. The thing on the bed seemed to stare up at her through the holes where its eyes had once been. Donna brushed her fingertips across her hardened nipples.
“Donna— what are you doing?”
Rick’s voice from the bedroom doorway was an icy needle puncturing her reverie, instantly deflating her balloon of warmth. It was as if she had walked into a spider’s web, with the sticky residue of webbing still clinging to her head and limbs.
“I’m just… changing my shirt,” she told him. She pulled roughly at the blouse and a button snapped off. She felt like she had relinquished a tiny kernel of spite that she had been playing with in her mouth.
“Well try not to be much longer, okay?” Rick said, giving her a look of scorn as he turned and left.
With her husband gone, Donna looked again at her prize. It was definitely a human skin, a man’s human skin. Whose it had once been, or how it had come to be set out on a heap of discarded items put out for cleanup day, Donna had no idea. Nor did she care. She cared only that it was now in her possession: a unique and valuable addition to her collection.
Donna lifted an edge of the man-skin with her fingertips. It was delicately crisp, like thin vellum or expensive parchment, with a filigree of fine lines underlying a silken sheen. While dry to the touch, it was stained in a number of spots, mottled perhaps by some of the countless and sticky fluids produced by the human body. Even though it must have been an intimate and necessary part of some person, in its freedom from a body it had become something else. In Donna’s house, on Donna’s bed, it had assumed a strange, new and evocative presence.
Donna surveyed the bedroom. Her prize needed a special spot where its fragility would be protected and preserved. There wasn’t much room, even for something as flimsy as a man-skin. Hundreds of baubles, ornaments and figurines she had picked up at yard sales and flea markets and second-hand stores covered every surface.
She knelt on the floor, lifted the edge of the duvet and pulled the cardboard guitar box out from under the bed. Though she had once played the instrument inside diligently enough to have learned a few simple songs, she hadn’t even looked at it in years. She lifted the old Yamaha from its container, set the man-skin carefully inside, replaced the cover and slid the package back under the bed.
She was standing, holding the guitar and wondering where to put it, when Rick made another appearance.
“I couldn’t wait any longer,” he said, “so I stuck a pizza in the oven.” His gaze took in the guitar and an eyebrow went up, but he said nothing and left the bedroom.
Donna set the guitar down against her dresser and giggled like a bride at the thought of her new man-skin under the bed.
Tuesday, Rick headed for work at 7:30 am and Donna left the house soon after. She headed east to avail herself of the “high-class junk,” as another scavenger had once described the pickings there.
She was a late arrival. Dedicated pickers knew that the earlier you arrived at a site, the better chance you had finding something worthwhile. And since most people put out their junk the evening before their scheduled cleanup day, a lot of collectors spent nights poring through piles of trash with flashlights in hand.
The annual cleanup carnival was a perfect urban treasure hunt. People discarded some expensive items simply because they had lost interest in them: brass lamps in working condition, French doors with all the glass intact, Persian rugs with hairline tears. Of course, proper picking required a discerning eye and a skill only acquired after many hours spent searching among mouldy pillows, rotten fruit, discarded hosiery, leaking spray cans or deteriorated plywood for that one special item that everyone else had overlooked. Discovering that one gem was the culmination of a long and tedious hunt, and a thrill like no other.
So mid-morning found Donna hard at it once again, knee-deep in garbage in an
effort to add one more souvenir to her already replete collection. It didn’t matter: she loved being here and she loved doing this.
A whoop of delight from a couple of pickers further down the sidewalk brought Donna’s gaze up from her labour. Scavengers usually worked at their tasks with a quiet efficiency, preferring obscurity to conspicuousness. It had to be something special to have caused this much excitement.
“Jesus Christ!” Donna muttered under her breath when she saw the pickers. The two of them were naked, and dancing together on the sidewalk in the ochre light of the morning sun. Touching fingertips, twirling apart, hooting and laughing like two drunken angels. Their skin gleamed with the pale brilliance of vellum.
Donna’s breath caught in her throat like a snarl. Didn’t they know she was there? Hadn’t those two men seen her foraging through the trash at this end of the sidewalk? What kind of—
(Men?)
What the hell?
A quirky fascination with this brazen display made Donna shield her eyes with her hand and take a second look. Now she saw what appeared to be two naked women dancing in the sunlight; but — like the muddle of litter frozen under thin sheaths of ice in late autumn — beneath the translucent skin of both these women was, quite evidently, the clothing of the men she had observed working that area.
Donna scrambled out of the refuse and ran down the sidewalk toward them, her thoughts focusing on two more precious skins.
“Hey!” She waved her arms in the air. “Get the hell away from those! Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The two men stopped their antics when they saw Donna charging toward them.
“Hey, lady,” said the fatter one, bullishly confronting her. “Just who the hell do you think you are, thinkin’ you can tell us what to do?”
Tesseracts Seventeen Page 22