Feral Boy Meets Girl

by William Jablonsky

  Langforth stood. “Go home, Milton,” she said, gently shepherding him out the door. “I’ll check on you in a few minutes.”

  “You see what happened to poor Milton,” she said once he was gone. “This has to be dealt with.”

  Sherman indicated that, considering school would be ending in a few weeks, it would have to be soon.

  Langforth moved to vote on Pitkin’s plan; Sherman seconded.

  Measure was passed, 4-1. Pitkin will call brother-in-law at earliest convenience.

  Reese got up, slammed fist down. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “You can’t.”

  Metzger rose as well, placed hand on Reese’s shoulder. “The decision’s been made, Mark,” he said.

  Reese shoved him. “That’s crazy,” he said.

  Reese headed for door, indicating he intended to report Board for even contemplating such a thing. Before he could leave Langforth cleared throat. “Doesn’t your daughter take the same bus? You should probably tell her to be careful.”

  Reese lunged across table at Langforth as if to strike her, was restrained by Sherman. “God, you’re a cunt,” he said.

  Reese threw Sherman’s arm off him, leaned over in front of Secretary. “What about you?” he said.

  Sat motionless, trying to think of something to say.

  “Come on,” Reese said. “You can’t agree with them.” Sound of Reese’s voice pierced Secretary’s ears like needle.

  Looked up at Reese, finally spoke. “I just want it quiet around here.”

  Pitkin and Metzger escorted Reese out of conference room. On way out, Reese shouted that we were all lunatics.

  Metzger suggested plan be enacted as soon as possible, and that Board begin to look for a new delegate from Building D. Metzger then ordered Secretary to erase all incriminating passages from minutes. Attempted to inform Metzger that charter explicitly states only Board President may authorize deletion of minutes, but was again reminded of role.

  Meeting adjourned at 6:34.

  Addendum

  5.17

  9:07 a.m.

  Complex is finally quiet; ambulances have left, red lights no longer dancing on bedroom walls. Received voicemail message from Reese at 8:15; Jacob had been hit by Schwan truck, was still alive when paramedics came. Peered through blinds and watched as Pitkin’s Acura screeched out of parking lot.

  Received text message from Metzger at 9:04; he will be by shortly to make sure compromising information has been deleted. Ten seconds later, received message from Reese; he will come presently, with a flash-drive, and Secretary should not dare erase minutes.

  Since then, have sat at dining-room table, highlighting and un-highlighting minutes, finger hovering over the “delete” key. Will wait to see who gets here first, savoring last few moments of peace before everything goes straight to hell.

  The Witch of the West Branch

  It is a river town in midsummer, at dusk, on the flattened floodplain where the poor people live. The air is thick, heavy with the smell of silt and peat moss. Tiny beige river moths circle outdoor lights like halos. The river is tinted dull brown, with pockets of industrial foam floating on top, and moves slowly through its course. There is a vacant lot near an eddy where someone used to live until the ice jam of ’93, when the river sent chunks of ice the size of small cars through the fences and walls. Now there is only the rotted, gutted corpse of a house, an enclosed porch the only part intact. A rusted lawn chair still sits on the shredded, moldy indoor-outdoor carpet, an empty beer can in the cupholder. Paper wasps have made a nest underneath, as big and wide as a beach ball. Approach them in the day and they are deadly. But it is dark and humid, and they are silent.

  Footsteps stir the crabgrass and pigweed, slosh in the moist soil. The moon is full and low in the sky. It’s time to see the woman who brings back the dead.

  There are about twenty this time, somber, quiet. Sometimes there are only two or three; others there are many, many more; after the tornado of ’03 tore through town like a weed-eater and gutted the middle school, there were so many crowded onto the little lot that a small, thin child could not have moved his elbows. Not that there were many children left.

  The crowd gathers, and waits until everyone who’s coming has come. There are consequences to leaving someone behind.

  A straggler arrives: a girl of nineteen or twenty in loose, pale blue pajama bottoms and a pink camisole. Her belly is just beginning to bulge. She is barefoot, her hair black but dyed red at the ends, an homage to some singer she used to like up until two months ago when she stopped liking anything at all. In her hand is an old T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The smell of sweat and cigarette smoke still wafts up from it. She is careful not to let it touch the ground.

  She looks around to see if she recognizes anyone. She does—this is a small town—but doesn’t know their names. Some of the people are dressed up in Sunday church clothes, which she did not expect, because the nice lady in the therapist’s office told her not to worry, to come just as she was. Though no one is staring—no one does here, those are the rules—she turns slightly away, moves to cover her body and make herself as indistinct as possible. The belly bulge does not help. Finally a bald grizzly of a man with big warm eyes and a bushy white beard comes over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder.

  She is afraid for a moment, but his voice is soft and low and disarming. He looks like a teacher she once had. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You’re fine the way you are.” He looks at the sharply dressed people and smiles. “Some people just do that.” She looks at him: he is wearing only a blue tank-top and plaid pajama bottoms. Dangling from his hand is a suede throw pillow; in the moonlight, the girl sees the glint of a few white hairs clinging to the fabric.

  The man smiles, looks at the T-shirt in her hands. They look up at one another and nod. Then he says, “Showtime,” and heads into the crowd.

  “Okay,” he calls to everyone, “let’s do it.”

  The crowd moves; she follows.

  Next to the husk of a house is a small boat launch that seems to belong to no one. The concrete is cracked in places, crabgrass blooms erupting from the fissures. A line of small boats, a mix of old, rusted flatbottoms and canoes, lies upside-down on the grass beside. They climb in, three or four to a boat, strap on ancient orange life jackets older than most people there and push out into the slow current. The bald man waits until everyone is in, then pats the space beside him in the last of the boats. The girl watches, nods, slips in quietly beside him.

  They row. The flat metal seat is uncomfortable. The girl fidgets.

  Around a small bend in the river, where it opens up wide, is a permanent sandbar covered in tall cattails and wild daisies, one of those places where teenagers go to smoke weed and get drunk, away from the eyes of the cops. The boy whose T-shirt she carries used to joke about paddling out and seeking out the witch to get her to tell the future, because he’d heard she could do that. The girl is glad they never did.

  Rising up from the brush is a tiny house, held above floodwaters by thin stilts. It tilts noticeably, as if one mild storm will send it toppling into the river. But it has been that way as long as anyone can remember. The paint used to be lavender, the girl remembers, but it’s long since peeled away. When she was a small child, her father took her out to skip stones pulled from the riverbank and pointed it out to her at a safe distance.

  A witch lives there, he said, and she believed it. Everyone believes it.

  The boats near the sand at the water’s edge. The girl looks up at the window and sees a face under a paisley bandana, large drooping eyes staring down at her in the faint light of a candle. The girl is sure she has seen this woman before—at the bus stop, in the back row at church, smoking cheap cigarettes on the bench outside the supermarket. She sees no boat anywhere on the island, and wonders if the witch walks on water to get to town. She thinks of asking the big bald man, then thinks better of it. No one else is speaking; she presumes it is one of the ru
les. Someone should really have explained it to her.

  The girl wishes someone would say something. But the only sound is the oars gently sloshing the water. Then, a thought: this is stupid, and she doesn’t know what possessed her to come here, and maybe she should just jump out of the boat, let the water take her. But the big bald man would only fish her out. He’d think he was doing her a favor. She looks long and hard at the island, smells the decayed leaves, the rotting wood of the house, and her chest begins to feel heavy. She can breathe fine, but each breath seems to take in less oxygen than the last. And then she isn’t in the boat anymore; she’s back in the little apartment on the edge of town, and the blue lights are shining in her window, and the two cops are in the doorway, in shadow because no one’s bothered to change the porch light bulb in months. Her head is a balloon, her body the string, and she is about to float away.

  “Hey,” the bald man says, tapping her upper arm. In the dark, his big eyes seem like deep empty holes, like they’ll swallow her up. “Easy. It’s gonna be okay.”

  He tells her to take one deep breath, then another, and another, and when he asks her if she’s better now, she mumbles something like “Imakaynow.”

  One by one the boats slide onto the sand at the island’s edge. The girl is not afraid. The girl feels nothing.

  They climb out of the boats; they wait. After a minute or two the old woman appears in the doorway. She is wearing a puffy pink housecoat, so long the girl cannot see her feet or the movement of her legs, and when she comes down the rickety wood steps it looks like she’s floating. Her skin is pale gray with dark spots, her eyes big and dark, set deeply in their sockets, her lips so thin that her mouth is a slit cut into the skin of her face. In one hand she carries a large black thermos that looks too heavy for her spidery hands to bear. She looks out at the crowd gathered at her door, silently mouths the numbers as she counts them. The girls’ face goes hot as the old woman’s eyes fall hard on her.

  The witch bends over, picks a handful of small white flowers growing in the sand, carefully plucks off the little blossoms and scrunches them up in her palms. She closes her eyes and sways in place for a moment, as if she’s about to blow away in the breeze, then lets the crushed leaves and flowers slide into the opening of the thermos. She looks up and nods: one by one the people come up and take a sip.

  The girl goes last. The liquid is hot, mildly sweet and herby, slightly bitter like cough medicine. She looks up at everyone else, standing there in the sand, eyes closed as if they’re having some kind of experience. She doesn’t feel any different.

  Then the witch wades slowly into the river until she is waist-deep, hardly stirring the brown water as she moves. Her housecoat billows in the water like flower petals. She turns around, motions for them to come.

  The girl watches as they wade in, alone or as families, shivering as the cool water rises to their knees, their thighs. She does not know the point of all of this. But anything is better than the tiny apartment, the empty bed that seems far too big and too cold.

  Some stop a few feet from the witch, asking for a moment to gather courage. A few, who act as though they’ve been here before, give the old woman a faint nod of recognition. The witch pushes their bodies gently into the water, then pulls them up again a few seconds later. Some gasp for breath; a few try to go back down, but she pulls them back out again.

  The big bald man stays with her until they are the last two left. Then he goes. “Just do what I do,” he says, and wades out, holding the throw pillow high above the water.

  When those ahead of her are done, they trudge through the mud back to the island, and wait. They stand together and stare at the girl. The witch beckons.

  The girl wades out, clutching the ripped T-shirt; the water is pleasantly cool, and the mud is thick and heavy and threatens to trap her feet, drag her under and hold her there beneath the surface. She wonders if that would really be so bad.

  By the time she reaches the witch, the girl cannot look her in the eye.

  “Come here, sweetie,” the witch says, arms open. Her voice is a raspy whisper.

  The girl comes.

  The witch takes the girl’s hand, holds it for a minute, looking sadly into her eyes. The old woman’s bones feel as light and frail as balsa wood, but as the girl is drawn to the witch, she senses she could not resist if she wanted to. She expects the old woman to say something—an incantation, or a prayer. But the thin, rickety creature before her is silent. The old woman stands on tiptoe, reaches up and plants a kiss on the girl’s cheek.

  The witch’s lips are dry, rough.

  The witch holds out her hand; the girl hands her the T-shirt. The witch closes her eyes and raises it to her nose, deeply inhaling the old sweat and cigarette smoke. She smiles.

  The girl realizes she is trembling, feels the wetness on her cheeks, the impossible weight in her chest. She barely feels the witch’s hands on her, one behind her head, the other at the small of her back, the thumb gently stroking her hair. The witch nods, the girl leans back slowly.

  The dark water splashes into the girl’s ears and nostrils, laps over her forehead like a kiss.

  The water makes her thin pajamas billow, and instead of wet cotton she feels sweaty skin pressing against hers; feels the smooth skin of a back against her stomach and breasts, the rough bump of a spine. Soft wavy hair passes between her fingertips. The air bubbling from her nostrils smells like sweat and cologne. The sound of soft breath fills her ears. She feels the warmth of body heat and a heavy down comforter on a Sunday morning.

  The witch’s hands release her, and she hangs suspended in the water between the surface and the black spongy bottom. The air in her lungs begins to thin and she feels giddy. She could stay here forever. She will. No one who’d been here could blame her.

  Then her lungs start to burn. She looks to the silver light on the surface, but forces her eyes shut. She cannot leave here.

  Something twitches inside her.

  The girl reaches for the surface. The witch pulls her up, and she sucks in air in long gasps. She tries to go back down, but the witch’s grasp is surprisingly strong.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” the witch says. “I’m proud of you.”

  The girl nods, lets the witch guide her back to the sand and grass. Her skin is buzzing, like the blood within her is swirling in its vessels.

  No one moves until she reaches solid ground. A woman she has never seen before hugs her. Someone else hands her a towel. They wait until the witch steps out of the water and heads back up the steps into the rickety old house, then climb back into the boats. No one says thank you. No one says anything. As the little flatbottom moves through the water, she dips her finger in, watches the small wake it leaves.

  Once they climb up and scale the steep dock, a few stand there looking at their feet; one or two run giddily down the street. The girl does not feel like running. Her legs are heavy, and the stones on the dock hurt her feet. The very nice bald man offers her a ride home, because the night air is cool and she is wet and tonight was rough on her.

  “Thanks, no,” she says. He wanders off, glancing behind him every so often to make sure she’s okay. She isn’t.

  The girl stands at the water’s edge, plunging her toes into the soft mud.

  She looks at the island, the sliver of pink at the bottom of the stairs. She could slide her whole body in, right there, and just drift out to the mouth of the river and beyond, wherever it ends up. She crouches down, dips her fingers in the water. It washes over her hand; it’s cold, much colder than before. Though it is dark and the island is far away, she swears she sees the old woman blow her a kiss. Then the pink sliver disappears.

  The girl feels another twitch in her belly, and she remembers there is something warm and alive inside of her. It feels as though it’s dancing. In her head she pictures it, a little tadpole pirouetting in her insides. Its warmth spreads.

  She whispers goodbye to the lapping waves and turns around, facing awa
y from the river and toward the houses on the bluff, with their warm lights and dry sheets. The muck at the river’s edge is thick, and she strains to lift her feet. One step, then another, then her feet find firmer ground. Sharp stones embedded in the soft ground hurt her toes. Still she walks, from the moist ground at river’s edge to the firm grassy lot, past the streetlights and out into the night, toward something like home.

  Michigan Avenue Lullaby

  Earth-1

  Park Ridge, Illinois

  Jan. 19, 2014

  12:57 a.m.

  (Note: The Authors of this Study recognize the arrogance of referring to this reality as “Earth-1” and do so only as a point of reference.)

  Mitchell Delgado, 32, comes home after a late set to find Kaylee George, 29, on the ancient white leather couch the two procured at a yard sale two years prior, still in her work scrubs, hands folded in her lap. The TV and radio are off, and there is no book or magazine by her side.

  “Hi,” she says, attempting a smile.

  “Why are you still up?” he asks. “Everything okay?” He throws his black leather jacket over the dining room chair, though continuous observation of the household suggests that this irritates her.

  In seventeen of the fifty-eight realities thus far mapped by the ethereoscope, Mr. Delgado and Miss George are or have been romantically involved; in most of these realities this conversation has occurred much sooner, usually with disastrous results. Mr. Delgado has been aware of a tension for some time—in his application he expressed an interest in knowing if there is a reality in which they are both happy, and in the interests of science, we shall oblige.

  He sets his saxophone case on the floor by the lace-covered card table they are using as a dining-room table and sits down next to her. “Everything okay?” he asks, resting his hand on her thigh.

  “Yeah,” she says, though she is clearly lying. She brushes her red hair from her eyes. “I just wanted to talk to you about something.”