by Peter Wright
Kayla slides off the stage. “Guess I should, huh?”
She’s the last to pick. She holds up Betty’s trench coat. The hem past her knees, a surprising weight, a ticket stub in the pocket. The trench coat slung over her arm, she sifts through the pile’s layers. Then the flash of blue and a furry cuff. She slides the coat from the pile and holds it by pinched shoulders. A coat identical to the one she’d worn the last two winters. Same fake trim. Same deep blue. This one with a patched elbow, a gray stain on the collar. She slides her arms into the sleeves. The zipper full of catches. The lapel held to her nose, the smell of smoke. A size too small, and the zipper pushes against her chest. She runs her hand over the front and hears the whisper of sleet against the smooth material. She sees the pellets cradled in the blue folds. She rubs the collar’s fur against her neck and steps back onto the riverside path. Her father by her side as he shared the beauty of ice. The shelved alcoves. The teardrop coatings of fallen branches. The shore-to-shore stretches that moaned as the current pushed beneath.
Linda in an aviator’s hat, earflaps secured with a tie beneath her chin. “Is that the one you’re going with?”
Kayla steps back, a pose struck. “What do you think?”
“Oh, it’s nice,” Chris says.
“Very,” Linda says.
The sisters’ beds pushed together. Betty tossing and pillow-punching before her snoring drift. All with their new coats laid atop their blankets, the room colder by the night. Kayla’s gaze upon the ceiling. The windows’ reaching light and the darkness above. The warp of hours and the tangle of unmoored thoughts. Her eyes closed. The machine’s purr a stream, a tide to the worlds she’s left behind. Her team. Fran. Chestnut. Her mother. Her father. She conjures their faces. Dresses them like paper dolls and arranges them in storybook settings. Her body floating, then falling like a stone. The horrors she can’t stop seeing. The drift evaporates into panic. Kayla desperate not to be a witness. Not again.
Sirens, the frequencies with which she’s become familiar. The police cruisers’ wail, the fire engines’ bleat. The ruckus approaches, but unlike other nights, the calls don’t fade. Kayla opens her eyes. Stabs of red and blue across the ceiling. The flicker of orange. Kayla whispers: “Heather?”
“I see it.”
Kayla slips on her coat. Her socked feet, the cold floor. Pulses of red and blue in the windows’ dirty glass. The cage’s webbed shadow. The sirens louder than morning’s piped-in music, and beneath, the faint thread of drums. Kayla passes the sisters’ beds. Linda’s sleepy voice: “Kayla?”
Chris sits. “Kayla?”
Betty and Kayla reach the window together. The sisters next. Flames shoot from the second-floor windows of the brick double at the corner of the first cross street. The police block the intersection, their cruisers like boulders, and around them, the crowd’s push, a flow bristling with rifles and bats and waved flags. The mob chants. Bricks smash the house’s windows. A man climbs atop a mailbox and twirls a noose over his head. Ash on the breeze. Old John and the Deacon in the courtyard. Their fingers twine the fence, a conversation with the policeman on the other side.
“Fuckers,” Betty says.
Then the bursts from the house’s first floor windows. Blossoms of starshine. Glass shards tumble to the sidewalk. The pop-pop-pop of the firecracker strings Kayla’s uncles lit at summer barbecues. The girls flinch, Linda and Chris in an instinctual embrace. The Deacon and Old John scramble to the loading dock.
The burning house’s front door flings open. Two men and one woman, figures lit by fire and strobes. They rush forward, rifles leveled, their pop-pop-pop sharper. Kayla and the others with their heads just above the sill. The crowd turns upon itself, the motion of a wave pushed back from a sea wall, the drums replaced by screams and cries for help. The mob’s fringes melt into alleys and shadows. Bodies in the intersection. A cop. The man atop the mailbox who held a noose now face-down. The men and woman on the corner, guns blazing, the police and crowd returning fire as they stagger back. In Kayla, the recognition of justice. The satisfaction of blood from the blood-seekers.
One man from the house falls, then the other. The woman still squeezing off rounds as she lies bleeding on the sidewalk before a shot rips off the top of her head. The police step forward, guns raised. A spasm in one of the men’s hands, and the police respond with a barrage. The fire pokes through the roof. A torrent of sparks and smoke.
“Fucking hell.” Betty rests her elbows on the sill. “If I get my hands on a piece, that’s how I’m going out if it comes to it. The fuckers.”
She remains at the window. The sisters return to their pushed-together beds. Kayla sits on the edge of her cot. Heather still beneath the covers. Her back to the window. Her body curled, a child’s pose. Kayla crouches by her side. “You OK?”
“I hate them all,” she whispers. The shadows not deep enough to mask her glistening cheeks. Kayla picks up her cot and sets it beside Heather’s. She piles her blankets and jacket on top of them and waits for the warmth to find her. Heather’s eyes closed. Her hand reaches for Kayla’s. Her grip tight, as if she’s afraid she’s about to fall.
Whispers in the common room. Gunfire on the city’s north side. Conjectures about the evening’s surprise auditorium meeting, the white wing just escorted down, the reds wondering if they’ll be next. The younger girls play board games, the missing pieces replaced by pennies and bottle caps. A few read paperbacks with tattered covers. Others watch the wall-mounted TV, a government station they can’t change. Pre-Shut-In sitcoms, families with troubles that belong to another time. All the girls in their winter coats. Snow piled on the windowsill. Kayla’s pod in the room’s corner. Chris and Linda on the floor, facing each other and smiling as they play another round of Rock Paper Scissors. Betty shuffles a deck of cards, cursing to Heather about their dwindling deliveries, her mistrust of Zach and Donna.
Kayla at the couch’s end. The cushions sag, the fabric’s embedded cigarette stink. The couch, like all of them, with a before-life. Kayla’s cheek rests against her fist. Her body tight with a chill that has nothing to do with drafty windows or tepid radiators. She felt fine until dinner. Then a breaking wave, an ache in the meat of her thighs, the veering between chills and sweat. She rubs her palm over her cropped hair and covers her eyes. The room’s voices pull away. Kayla on an island, just her and her pain.
Panda Bear strides across the room. The TV light blue on his shaved scalp. “We’re heading to the auditorium.” He turns off the set and tucks his hands into his sweatshirt pockets. “We’ve got a visitor. Deacon says you all need to be on your best behavior.” He points at Betty. “Especially you.”
Betty sticks out her tongue. “Especially you.”
Kayla pulls herself from the couch. The soreness spreading, her back and neck. The motion a putrid wave beneath her skin. “You OK?” Linda asks.
Then Chris. “You’re really pale.”
“Just tired.” The girls arrange themselves in a ragged line. The stairs, Kayla’s grip tight on the handrail. The first-floor hallway. Betty in front of Kayla, Heather behind. The nurse’s office. The PURITY banners. All of it passing like images from a dream, as if she’s being pushed on rollerblades through an icy chamber. Panda Bear holds the auditorium door. “Watch your language. Remember we got—”
“We got a visitor,” Betty says. “We know, we know.”
The whites already seated. The auditorium warmer—or perhaps not—Kayla can no longer tell—hot and cold, shivers and sweat. Old John helps Mr. James push an upright piano to the podium. In Kayla, the vertigo of overlapping voices. The scraping of chairs and shoes. Echoes, discordant notes. Kayla worries she may vomit. Her eyes unable to rest, the room vibrating, undulations of noise and motion. Heavy Metal and Nurse Amy straddle the aisle’s center line. “Looks like all hands on deck,” Betty says. The Deacon by the flag-flanked podium, his hands clasped before him, a conversation with a squat, broad man in a blue cap and matching uniform. Epau
lets on the smaller man’s shoulders, a single gold braid. His back to the incoming reds. The Deacon’s gaze flits between his visitor and Betty.
Kayla shuffles past, the waiting salvation of slumping into her seat and shutting her eyes. A glance as she passes the Deacon. Then the crumble of recognition. The current carries her; she has no other truth to explain her forward motion. Each step a stumbling miracle. She reaches ahead, an anchoring grip on Betty’s shoulder. The current fades, and she enters a balloon, its skin stretched. The distortion of faces and sounds, her struggle to keep on her side of the aisle’s taped line. Kayla lost within the balloon. Everything filtered. Everything veiled, a dimming at the edges of her vision. The last row’s salvation, and she slumps into her chair. Her gaze on the gym floor. The bellows of her lungs. The balloon’s stale air a poison she can’t escape. The Deacon speaks, a call to attention. Kayla covers her eyes. She thinks of death, and for the first time, she doesn’t imagine fear. Only peace.
Heather touches her thigh. “You OK?”
“Just dizzy.” Her mother’s voice—breathe.
The Deacon speaks, and she opens her eyes. His hands on the podium, his body leaning forward. The pose of a bird of prey eyeing an open field. A few words penetrate Kayla’s balloon . . . duty . . . vigilance . . . pride. The rest crumble, and their dust joins the balloon’s haze. Kayla’s attention on the man beside him.
The cap. The mustache. The preening stance and bully-boy’s girth. The shoes that could pass as a child’s. His dimpled chin nods through the Deacon’s introduction.
“Our guest this evening is Mr. Robert Slater, our sector’s newly appointed Director of the Bureau of Culture and Tradition. He’s here to talk about the Purity Project, not just about our humble efforts, but also what’s going on throughout the sector and state and all across this changing nation.” He steps back and offers a sweep of his arm. “So please join me in welcoming Commissioner Robert Slater.”
Slater approaches the podium. His swaying arms angle around his girth; his chubby, chopped strides—motions that betray him more than his mustache or glistening brow. Feedback as he adjusts the podium’s microphone. Kayla rubs her brow. Her eyes masked, her head hung. A shiver as Slater begins to speak.
“Thank you, Revered Blake.” Kayla looks up, a reflex, her movie’s most horrible scene. He takes off his hat. In Kayla, a flood of tangled impulses. The yearning to shout. To flee. To storm the podium, grab his fat face, and dig her thumbs into his eyeballs until she feels the orbs’ pop. Until his blood warms her hands. A hundred short-circuit cravings. A paralysis of fear and rage and sickness. Each of Slater’s sentences falls upon her like a shovelful of dirt. Kayla in the grave, fading, suffocating . . .
“ . . . I was your age long ago, almost too long to remember. I was in chemistry class, and we were conducting an experiment. We held a crucible over a flame. The powder inside bubbled and smoked.” He chuckles, a pause and smile as premeditated as his comb-over. “The smell wasn’t pleasant, but in the end, we were left with a beautiful silver liquid, a substance so shiny it actually glowed. What we’d done was burn off the impurities. The filth. What we were left with was a substance purged of contaminants. A substance that was pure.”
The lights glint on Slater’s medals and buttons. In the balloon, the rubbery echo of his words, an overlapping until his voice falls a beat behind his lips. He gestures to the surrounding walls. “I see your banners and they fill me with pride. They fill me with hope. This is what our campaign is all about. We are on the journey to a pure society. It’s the rarest of opportunities. A new dawn. A new way.”
He nods and the guards hand out printed papers. A classroom’s rustle. “Starting next spring, a new song will be sung whenever we play the national anthem.”
Heavy Metal reaches their row. “You’ll need to share.”
Heather hands the paper to Kayla, but she shakes her head. “Sure you’re OK?”
Kayla nods. A lie she can’t live without, the fear an uttered word will break her into a thousand pieces.
Slater blows his nose. A jangle from his medals as he stuffs the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Your Mr. James will play the piano, and I’ve been told—” He looks at his notes. “—Donna DiBetto has been practicing for the past week to sing for us tonight.”
Donna stands and joins him. Slater’s hand rests on her shoulder. “You all know Donna’s story. I, myself, was humbled to learn of her family’s sufferings and heroics. And she’s here, like all of you, making the best of her situation. Improving herself because she knows that soon she’ll move on and join the crusade that’s changing our nation and the world. She’ll bring her sense of purity—”
“Ha!” Betty blurts. The sisters lower their heads, their hands clamped over their mouths. A glare from the Deacon, Slater too, and Kayla ducks, the charade of tying her sneaker. Slater returns to talking, and Kayla sits up. She considers the paper and rubs her eyes. The letters black minnows in a white sea, their sounds and meanings lost within their splash.
The piano’s first chords. Mr. James’s playing cautious, a prelude before the Deacon gestures for all to stand. The wooziness in Kayla, the sway she felt high in her old oak on a windy day. Her fingers rest on the back of the chair in front of her.
A pause then the piano’s opening bar and Donna’s accompaniment. Her voice beautiful, startlingly so, full of light and calm. Kayla closes her eyes and stands riverside, mesmerized by the finches, their turns through the gnat swarms. The birds swirl faster, and their calls and the flap of their wings alchemize into Donna’s reaching alto . . . tribulation . . . triumph . . . purity. The song finishes only to begin again. The Deacon gestures, imploring all to join. The Deacon with his pulpit’s boom. Slater’s lack of range countered by his sweating vehemence, his puffed cheeks, his mouth’s fishy oval. Kayla cartwheels through the balloon. The solidness of bone fades. Her surroundings dissolve into mist.
“Kayla?” Heather whispers.
Kayla opens her mouth. The balloon bursts. The mist rushes to claim her, a sinking deep in her lungs . . .
. . . the fog upon her. Within her. Time has passed, she understands this, but she can’t say whether it’s a minute or an hour or a day. She understands her thirst, understands that she’s lying down, a bed beneath her, the ceiling above. She understands the rawness in her throat, the ache in her back and legs. The room dim. She closes her eyes and the fog returns. She’s safe—Slater and Donna nowhere near—she feels this deeply, a notion as true as her pain. A voice from the fog’s edge, her name, soft, concerned. A cool cloth pressed against her forehead. Kayla opens her eyes. A shadowed form leans close.
“Mom?”
The girls by the window. Winter coats and a passed cigarette. Flurries in the exhaled smoke. The wind puffs back, calm then a gust then calm again. Kayla just returned from the infirmary, two days of fever dreams. A drag on the cigarette and a cough she fights to suppress. Below, the loading dock, the pickup’s bed loaded with snow, a plow rigged to the front. Across the street, the burnt house. A husk of collapsed brick. The rubble picked through for wire and pipe.
Betty closes the window, and the girls sit on the floor. A rolled towel under the pod door. The blowback smoke kept in and the hallway light snuffed. Linda and Chris shoulder-to-shoulder. Each holding a side of the assembly’s handout. Linda flicks the lighter, and the flame illuminates the paper.
“Don’t waste that,” Betty says.
Linda lifts her thumb. The flame extinguished. “But we need to remember it for tomorrow. Deacon said—”
“Fuck the Deacon,” Betty says.
“Fuck the anthem,” Kayla says.
“That’s right.” Betty snatches the paper and crumples it into a ball. A swat of her palm, an upward tap. Heather next, the paper batted from Linda to Kayla to Chris. Their smiles growing as they keep the wad aloft. Finally, an errant pass, and the paper falls in the circle’s center. Betty leans back. “Maybe I’ll take a page from Oakmont’s book and p
ass out next time they ask me to sing.”
“You’re lucky Heather caught you, Kayla,” Chris says. “You were going down hard.”
Kayla raises her hand. A slap of Heather’s palm. “I owe you.”
Linda hugs her knees to her chest. “Know what I could use tonight? A little sip. Just a taste before bed.”
“Zach’s coming this week, right Betty?” Chris asks. “At least he brought some pens last time. And a pad.”
“He’s screwing us,” Betty says.
Chris smiles. “Maybe that’s because Donna’s screwing him.” She and her sister giggle into gloved hands.
“Purity, my ass,” Betty says.
Heather unwraps the balled paper and rolls it into a thin tube. “Got to admit she has a nice voice.”
“Fuck that.” Betty shakes her head. “What’s gotten into you?”
Silence. The rattle of the window. The wind picking up. “Hard to believe it’s almost Thanksgiving,” Linda says.
“Nurse Amy said she’d going to bring in Christmas stuff we can hang up,” Chris says.
“Christmas in here. I can’t even begin to imagine the joy.” Betty stands. She rests her elbows on the windowsill, her reflection in the glass. She speaks, her voice softer. “I’m tired of always being scared. Always knowing I’m going to have to make due with less. Always hoping like a fool that tomorrow’s going to be different.” She turns to the others. “Ain’t nothing here that’s fair. There’s only shit waiting to be taken. Well, I’m tired of being taken from. Tired of getting what’s left after the whites have had their say.”
A click and spark, a new shine. Heather holds the lighter’s flame to the tip of the rolled-up anthem. The flame catches, a wavering light across Heather’s face.
“Shit, girl.” Betty opens the window. The flame convulses on the current.
Linda waves her hands, the smoke pushed toward the window. “Old John will smell it.”
Heather steps to the window. The flame thicker. “Old John’s drunk or asleep. Or both.” She sticks the tapered end through the wire. The others draw near. Heather holds the paper, the flame’s dance wider. Drips from the metal’s ice. A push, and the paper lifts on the breeze. A circling, consuming flight. A yielding to ash. She closes the window, the smoke and cold lingering. “Betty’s right. It’s time we got first dibs on something around here. And I’m guessing we all know where to start.”