The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “So, what did they do?”

  “Fuck, Swanny, what do you think?”

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  “You never had a Dignity Kit at your house?”

  “Is that—that’s for suicide, isn’t it? Mother considered them a rip-off. ‘Nothing an ordinary household grenade can’t do louder and faster,’ I remember her saying.” Humphrey and Katya, decked out in glad rags for their son’s wedding day—will they be the next apparitions to visit Swanny in one of her drug-induced stupors? It was difficult enough to make conversation with them when they were alive. “In retrospect, I wish I’d been less unpleasant to your mother.”

  “Maybe I could have talked them out of it, if I was there.”

  “Oh, Duncan dear, it wasn’t in your power to prevent. You know your father never would have valued your opinion.” Is Ripple actually crying? “I mean—err—”

  “No, yeah, you’re right. That’s the way I’ve got to think about it. They were murdered, basically.”

  “Then why aren’t you trying to assassinate Sharkey?”

  “Like I said, I killed before. I’m never doing that again.”

  The opposite ethos from Sharkey’s. Or maybe just Ripple’s lazy way of feeling superior to more decisive men. Swanny feels a surge of annoyance: who is Ripple to be playing the innocent victim all of a sudden? He wasn’t exactly sympathetic when her mother met a grisly end. At least she was super old. “Perhaps you’re just a coward.”

  “I dunno, maybe.”

  But that knife cuts both ways. Swanny perches on the edge of the bed, looks down at her pale hands folded in her lap. She speaks as if the accusation has come from him rather than her own mind: “So is that what you think of me? That I’m a coward?”

  “No.”

  “I tried to murder him, you know. I even fired a shot. But in the end I just…couldn’t.”

  Sharkey is downstairs, in his den; if a trapdoor opened beneath her now, she would tumble into his arms. It would be so easy. You want to, and you’re used to getting what you want. But is this what she wants—to spend her days slinking around the shop like a wounded cat, frequently unwashed and smelling of sex, molasses, and dry toast, which is all she’s been bothering to keep down lately? Staring into books and seeing only the surfaces of words, the serifs and kerning, and bored, so bored, but too foggy and languid to do anything about it? She loves the release, her fingers on the keys of the klangflugel, her nails on Sharkey’s hairy back, but nothing can release her from the inexorable pull of time. Chaw may not kill, but it exchanges one’s present for specters of the past. It chews one up from the inside.

  She shuts her eyes.

  Ripple sits down beside her on the mattress. “Wake up. That just means you’re a good person. Better than me, anyway.”

  “It means I’m a failure.”

  “You’re not a failure, Swanny. Trust me, seriously.”

  “What am I, then?”

  “You’re a Dahlberg.” To be a Dahlberg—it’s something quite refined. “You used to be really into that.”

  The vows, the marzipan roses at the reception, the yeti sex that followed. Swanny had hated Ripple then—had believed she would always hate him. But now they’ve lost so much. Must they lose each other too? “I suppose I’m also a Ripple.”

  “Yeah, but look on the bright side.”

  She takes his hand in both of hers. It’s loathsome with germs and soot, scraped raw from asphalt and bricks. She holds on. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m going to die,” she says.

  “Chillax. You’re probably just super high.”

  “No, I’m quite serious. I’ve seen the X-rays. My teeth…”

  “What, like cavities?”

  “It may be incurable. I’ve heard conflicting reports. You may be putting a lot of capital into a short-term investment. Wouldn’t you rather reunite with Abigail? She seems as healthy as a horse.”

  “She was my first love, but you’re my wife.”

  Swanny stiffens; she would have preferred for him to characterize the girl as a “meaningless fling” or perhaps “a regrettable misjudgment never to be repeated.” Some frost returns to her voice: “I don’t see what difference that could possibly make.”

  “I remember some fine print about ‘till death do us part.’ ”

  “I’m not certain that either of us read that document very closely.”

  “Maybe not, but we signed it. It’s binding.”

  “It isn’t your duty to ‘save’ me, Duncan.” Although Swanny does seem to recall a stipulation about unconditional support through drug rehabilitation in the emotional non-abandonment clause. Her mother planned for every contingency during those negotiations. When it comes to ink on paper, it’s either there or it’s not. “Even if it is—I absolve you of it. I’m neither your property nor your responsibility, regardless of what some piece of paper states. Obligation is a peculiarly nasty way of making sense of one’s relationships.”

  “I know. I’m just trying to trick you into taking me back.”

  He’s never sounded so sincere. “Why couldn’t you have behaved this way before it was too late?” she asks.

  “Just stupid, I guess.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Swanny, come on. Please. Swanny.” His forehead scrunches, as it did that first night, when he struggled to sound out the words printed in her book. But this time it’s her heart he’s trying to read. You strange, otherworldly thing. “Lemme love you.”

  Close enough. Swanny kisses him. He tastes of water, of air, of nothing at all, and she realizes how strongly she’s flavored herself with the chaw, but he doesn’t pull away. Did they even kiss before? If they did, she’s happy to forget it. This is the first, the only time that matters. The clock starts now.

  She gasps, yanks herself away from him. They’re not alone.

  “Swanny? What—” Panicked, Ripple scans the room. But he doesn’t see what she sees.

  “Oh,” she says, “oh no, no, no…”

  “Damsel, hey damsel, it’s OK. What is it? Did you hear something?”

  Swanny points with a single trembling finger. Across the attic, atop the trapdoor, stand Grub and Morsel, glowing in translucent grayscale.

  “Maybe you’re hallu—”

  “Be quiet, I don’t want to frighten them.”

  “We’re not scared,” says Grub.

  “We’ve been here the whole time,” says Morsel. “But we was hiding.”

  “Better than we did last time.”

  “We sure learned our lesson last time.”

  “You poor children, you must hate me,” Swanny murmurs.

  “What for?”

  “You didn’t wring our li’l necks.”

  “That was Sharkey!”

  “But I placed you in the way of danger. I never should have attempted…”

  “Every fem in this city is bonkers,” Ripple observes. Swanny shushes him.

  “We’re not mad,” says Morsel. “We got something to tell you.”

  “We know the Way Out,” Grub supplies.

  “That’s very kind of you, but my husband and I”—she tries to put it as delicately as possible—“we’re looking for a different route than the one you took.”

  “No, we don’t mean you gotta die!”

  “Honest we don’t!”

  “I’m listening,” says Swanny, cautiously.

  “You gotta talk to Duluth. Tell him Sharkey killed us.”

  “Show him proof.”

  “Show him the slingshot.”

  “It’s still in the shop.”

  “If he knows that Sharkey killed us, he’ll get real mad. So mad that he’ll—”

  “—that he’ll show you the way to the limo. The way to Sharkey’s Magic Garage.”

  “The Way Out!”

  Swanny scrutinizes the kindlings for a hint of the sinister, but they’re still as scruffy and adorable as e
ver, even as disembodied spirits. “Pardon me if this sounds suspicious—I don’t mean to question your motives—but how do the two of you stand to benefit from all this?”

  “We don’t.”

  “We’re dead.”

  “But we’re s’posed to help you.”

  “Duluth said.”

  “And at least this way he won’t look for us every day.”

  “He looks everyplace.”

  “It makes us sad!”

  “Because he’s not gonna find us.”

  “Because we’re dead.”

  “And we like happily-ever-afters.”

  Morsel picks his nose. “Even though we didn’t get one.”

  32

  A BONESONG FOR FLYING MACHINES

  Abby dreams that she sheds her skin. In the dream, she wriggles to and fro, inching her way out of a ripped seam that stretches from her collarbone to her ear. She rises from the crumpled envelope of flesh, the blond hair splayed on the floor, and walks across the laboratory floor to the Drive. There, she sees herself reflected in the black glass. Her body, naked now as never before, is like the Drive, glittering with copper and diodes, networked with wires. An electric city in the shape of a Girl.

  She wakes up back in her body again. She lets the morning pass. The rats prepare her a breakfast feast, little chunks of cheese on platters made from bottle caps, flat soda in thimbles and shot glasses, strips of jerky on chipped saucers, a lone cheese doodle on a beer coaster: everything they’ve saved for this special occasion. They carry the dishes out one by one into the TeamWorkSpace, placing them before her. A veritable smorgasbord. Hooligan eyes the tiny portions, glances at her in concern, but Abby isn’t hungry anyway. She lets the apehound eat her share. Only when the rats bring her a Sin Bun, still in its cellophane wrapper, does she finally take more than a single bite. The pastry’s taste brings her back to her first night in the Ripple mansion—to Katya, to Duncan. Everything was so new then, new and so strange. Now this world seems very old to her. Old, but even stranger.

  —Seer?

  —yes, my child?

  —I have to go up to the sky. I have to talk to the dragons.

  * * *

  The HowFly is on the roof of the laboratory complex, a company ride emblazoned with the word ABECEDARY. Small and white and boxy, nothing like the dark, gleaming, crablike HowLux that carried Abby from her Island into the sky. Seer points at the craft with her bedazzled tongue depressor. Today the sky is as cold and blue as a sea, frothed with clouds. Abby pulls the lab coat tighter around herself, her hair tossing in the chilly wind.

  —I don’t know how to drive.

  The door slides open at Abby’s touch.

  —the flying machine will listen if you tell it where you want to go.

  —I’m scared.

  —of the dragons?

  —No.

  Abby thinks of the years spent on her Island, among things discarded and unnamed. The worst thing isn’t up there in the sky. The worst thing would be to come back down alone.

  —a path of cinders has brought you to this place. you know your name. where you are going you will not be alone.

  —Goodbye, Seer.

  Abby climbs inside the HowFly. Hooligan tries to clamber in after her, but she pushes him back.

  —Hooli, stay.

  —stay with you.

  —No, stay here.

  —till you come back?

  —Stay here till I’m gone. Then go find Dunk.

  She seals herself inside the machine. Hooligan flaps his tail, once, gazes at her with his luminous, watering eyes. Do dogs cry? He looks as though he might, but just whimpers instead.

  —Be good.

  * * *

  When Swanny comes downstairs in the morning, Sharkey is already waiting at the kitchen table, wifebeater, no hat, a mug steaming in his hand. She lingers in the doorway. He doesn’t look up, but she knows he knows she’s there. His silence is a pressure begging for release. She recognizes the book he’s reading: SLAKELESS, the paperback she found in the Chaw Shop her first day. He only has a few pages left.

  “Is it a happy ending?” she asks.

  “Depends on who you’re rooting for.” Sharkey cracks the spine, sets the book facedown on the table. “We gonna talk about last night?”

  Swanny’s breath catches before she realizes he means their quarrel in the limo. “I’d rather not. Except”—she forces herself to append—“I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want you to see him again.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “I don’t trust myself. I don’t know what I’d do if I found the two of you together.”

  Another killing offense. Soon she’ll have committed them all. “How generous of you to warn me.”

  “C’mere.”

  No reason to provoke him now; she’ll be gone by tonight. Obediently, she sits on his lap. He’s so hairy; even his shoulders, the tops of his ears, bristle with unshaven, bestial life. Only on his scalp does it recede, leaving his brow heavy, sloped, bare. Atavism: a being of the ancient type, born too late into this world. She wishes he repulsed her, but nothing will ever prickle like his stubble against her skin.

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” he mutters. “You did a number on me.”

  “Oh, Howie.” Despite herself, she’s sighing the words into his ear. She knows how it feels to be jealous: a smashed vase, a shattered mirror. She has violence in her too. How can I want you so badly when I’m already in your arms? How can she even think of leaving, when his body is still so warm? She tries to remember her reasons—Duncan Ripple V, the specter of years to come whittled away by addiction, even the sodden blanket of her grief—but none of them have the substance of Howie’s arm on her back, his palm on her thigh. None of them, except two pint-sized kindlings with no substance at all: You didn’t wring our li’l necks. That was Sharkey! She pulls back, drums her fingers on the table to hide the tremble in her hands. “You mustn’t let me keep you from your work.”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna go make some chaw.” Sharkey gets up, puts on his zoot jacket. Looks back at her over his shoulder. “You chew yet today?”

  “I’ll resist till afternoon, I think.”

  He smirks. “Have fun.”

  The moment he’s gone, Swanny hurries into the shop. Her hours have been irregular of late; it’s been more than a week since she came in this early in the day. She goes behind the counter, peers into the dark space beneath the register. There’s the slingshot, waiting for her on the floorboards, as promised. She stashes it in her handbag, starts to leave the room—then goes behind the counter a second time and reaches for the jar labeled CORDIAL GOODBYE. Just a few mouthfuls for the road. She’s giving it up forever, but forever can start a little later in the day.

  She wraps herself in her chinchilla and, with pockets full of drug, proceeds outside and down the streets to her designated meeting place with Ripple.

  “Wench, I have been in this dumpster all night. Couldn’t you at least bring me a breakfast burrito or something?”

  “You’re a spoiled child,” Swanny says, and bursts into tears.

  “Hey, I’m just…kidding?”

  “Don’t touch me. It’s bad enough for us to be seen walking the streets together.”

  “Swanny, wait up, seriously. Do you know how to tell if a rat bite’s infected or not?”

  The meat locker where Duluth lives is way out near Nick’s, in a patch of Torchtown with no buildings left standing. Swanny steps over the broken bricks and charred cinder blocks into what remains of the butcher’s basement: a concrete depression with a steel chamber occupying one-third. The deep freeze. She knocks at the entrance, two quick raps. If he doesn’t answer, she’ll—what? Turn around and go right back to the Chaw Shop?

  But he does, the door opening with a refrigerator’s suction smack so immediately it startles her. She sees the disappointment in his eyes and understands why. He thought the twins had come home.

  “I
have horrible news,” she says. “May we step inside?”

  * * *

  “OK, keys, check, address, check.” Moments earlier, the two of them watched Duluth, that mountain of a man, quake and crumble, mere words bringing more harm to him than blows ever could, his boys’ names shifting the earth from beneath his feet until he could not stand. Swanny had expected a towering rage, threats of revenge, but instead Duluth could barely muster the energy to locate his keys before reclining with the side of his face pressed to the cold concrete floor. Swanny has become a destroyer of worlds; she detonated a human’s hopes and life and family with a single sentence. But if Ripple’s disturbed by the spectacle of grief they just witnessed, he’s decided not to show it. “Let’s get this show on the road. Swanny?”

  “You go ahead. I forgot something back at the shop.”

  “You’re going back there?!”

  “I’ll be two minutes, Duncan, there’s no cause for hysterics.”

  “Um, not to question your judgment, fem, but you’re wandering into serious jump-scare territory. What’re you going to do if your psychotic sexmonger’s there?”

  “I’ll tell him I was running an errand. And then I’ll promptly leave again at the earliest opportunity.”

  “What’s going on? Have you changed your mind?”

  “No—no, of course not.”

  He scrutinizes her. “Look, I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to piss you off.”

  “What?”

  “When I crashed my HowFly in that garbage dump—you know, Hoover Island, where I met Abby—I didn’t totally want to get rescued, you know? I was like, I’m getting a tan, I’m banging this fem (sorry)…it’s all good, basically. Then Osmond swooped down in his HowLux, and boom, everything got fucked again.”

  “How is this supposed to comfort me, exactly?”

  “Because I’m glad he showed up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was lost.”

  “Thank you, Duncan. You have an uncanny ability to condescend and allude to your infidelity simultaneously.”