Harmonious Hearts 2019--Stories from the Young Author Challenge

by Ryan Almroth

  That was four questions, she responds, her grin improbably white.

  WE SIT cross-legged on the kitchen floor, and over a package of Oreos, María tells me that writing’s even easier than signing or speaking, just letting her thoughts flow out through her skin, but God, she gets so tired of going through notebooks like a fire through kindling. She tells me that she literally cannot use pencils or paint brushes. When she tries, they explode, and she has to spend hours picking splinters out of her hands with heavy-duty tweezers. She tells me that science and math and computer teachers assume she’s too artistic to care about their classes and that humanities teachers either assume she’ll be the best at everything or assume she’ll think she’s the best at everything. She tells me she wishes she could sing, but without a tongue, she can’t even play an instrument. She tells me, I want something that sounds like a voice. Is that too much to ask? To have a voice?

  I open my mouth to offer a dozen suggestions—she could take up the guitar, the harp, the violin, the piano—but before any of them can leave my lips, another idea sparks in my head. Something hazy and risky and so impossibly tempting that I’m racing upstairs in a blink, tossing a hasty “Be right back!” behind me.

  Even though she can only practice in her room, Serena still manages to leave her sheet music all over the top floor. When I come back down, holding the first composition I could find, María is standing at the foot of the stairs. What are you doing?

  “Can you read music?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Okay. That shouldn’t matter. You can still copy it onto me. Right?”

  Her eyes go wide. Explain.

  I could tell her that when I was born, before I cried, I sang a chromatic scale. I could tell her that as a child, I had no need for lullabies; I sang myself to sleep every night and woke up warbling. I was the whole family’s alarm clock. I could tell her about switching kindergartens six times, my parents searching for teachers able to accommodate a kid who couldn’t hear the alphabet song without repeating it for hours, until they finally decided I was going to have to adjust to the world instead of the other way around. I could tell her about learning to flatten my voice and dampen my resonance, undergoing exposure therapy until I could overhear scratchy notes on the radio without bursting into song, biting my lips bloody to keep the music inside. I could tell her that for the past eight years, the only place I’ve heard a song the whole way through is in my dreams, and I miss it like nothing I can explain.

  Instead, I hold Clair de Lune out to her, press my wrist into her palm, and say, “Please.”

  María’s ink flows onto me, warm as sunlight. The notes shimmer on my skin, and as they dissolve one by one, the melody begins to ring out bright and true between us.

  Author’s Note

  FOR EASE of reading, all American Sign Language in this piece has been rendered as if it were Signing Exact English.

  ABIGAIL FITZGIBBON was raised to experiment with, seek out, and revel in every form of art. When she’s not reading or writing—both things that can occupy up to 80 percent of her waking hours—she enjoys acting, baking, and embarking on grand gay adventures with her best friends. Though she was born and raised in Alaska, she currently attends college in California, where (to exactly no one’s surprise) she plans to study English.

  The Secret History of the Fighting Gallaghers

  By K. Noel Moore

  Shay Gallagher is a runaway living on the streets of 1970s New York, the drummer in a punk band… and a death walker. The Gallagher bloodline allows Shay to cross into the world of the dead and speak to ghosts. When Reggie, the ghost of an ancestor Shay has never heard of, appears, it opens the door for Shay to see the Gallagher family--and her own life--in a whole new way.

  THERE WERE three cardinal rules to being a death-walker. First: do not reveal yourself to the dead.

  Second: if they happen to see you, do not speak to them.

  And third rule, which should perhaps have been the first, because it was undoubtedly the most important: do not ever, ever let the dead touch you.

  There were other rules, of course. There were rules for what to do in the world of the dead. It was just that the instructions on what not to do vastly outnumbered them.

  Shay crept through the living room, where she found Felix curled up on the couch. He had fallen asleep watching Shoot for the Stars, and by the sound of his snoring, he would remain where he was until morning. She paused to switch off the television, now playing only static, and cover her roommate with a blanket. “Sleep tight, Lucky,” she whispered. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  She padded into the garage, where her shoes and messenger bag waited. She slung the bag over her shoulder, then stepped into her boots.

  The garage had no car in it; Felix didn’t have one, and his uncle parked his outside to make room for the instruments. Shay’s own drum kit took up most of the space, since Rory was partial to keeping his guitar under his bed, and Max took her bass back to her own apartment most nights. Old show flyers and album art designs scribbled on college-ruled notebook paper covered nearly every inch of the walls. Ripped-up setlist notes were scattered across the floor, along with empty Chinese takeout boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, and gummy candy packages.

  Dead-center between the drum kit and Felix’s microphone stand, detached from anything, was a door.

  The wood of it was scuffed and dark, the knob rusted. Like the walls of the garage, it was plastered with posters, but these were so worn down by the elements that Shay could barely read them. One thing she could make out: her own surname, GALLAGHER, in big, once-bold letters. THE FIGHTING GALLAGHERS—a poster for a boxing match, she gathered, that had happened sometime in 1938.

  The door had stood in the garage for sixteen days, invisible to everyone but her. It had started as a floating brass knob, then a silhouette had formed around it, and finally it solidified. If she waited much longer to go through, it would fade, and they always faded faster than they formed. Lightning doesn’t strike twice was another death-walker rule.

  On the threshold Shay swayed on the balls of her feet, deep-breathing the way she did before a show. She crossed herself, and double-checked her bag for a saltshaker, a lighter, chalk, all the little trinkets that were said to protect her. Shay wasn’t throwing out the instruction manual entirely.

  On this jaunt, however, she intended to break the first two cardinal rules.

  She took one last breath of living air, shut her eyes, and stepped through the door.

  The smell of chalk and sawdust struck her immediately, undercut by a faint sour odor of sweat. Shay opened her eyes.

  She was in a boxing gym. The whole place glowed with an odd gold light; the space was mostly open floor, with heavy sandbags hanging in a line along one wall, crates of gloves and equipment piled along another. Faded match posters were plastered over every inch of a third, including the one with her family name on it.

  THE FIGHTING GALLAGHERS, it said, across the top in bright red. Against a yellow background was a small photo of a young Grandpa Frank, and one of somebody who was unfamiliar to Shay. Beside the photos, a date: June 25, 1938. A location. And another phrase in attention-grabbing capital letters: THE BRUISER BROTHERS OF CO. CORK GO HEAD TO HEAD!

  Her eyes lingered on the word BROTHERS. If Shay had a great-uncle, she’d never met him, or even learned his name.

  The fourth wall was mostly taken up by two spiderwebbed windows. Shay went to them; windows in Heaven always had the best views.

  This view was monochromatic, New York as seen in a 1920s newsreel. Fruit sellers hawked their wares, children chased each other with stick swords and trashcan shields, and workingmen and women gathered in corner diners for a midday meal. It was a place out of her dreams. Shay wished she could walk right out onto that street, though she knew it was impossible. The fourth rule of death-walking, almost reaching cardinal status: never, never, never leave the structure you find yourself in, unless you have a string to let o
ut behind you like Theseus in the Labyrinth. You could spend the rest of your natural life or longer, wandering the Great Grey Moor.

  Floorboards creaked—above, beside, somewhere. Years of teaching screamed for her to run away and hide, but she stood her ground.

  “Hello? Hello! I don’t want to frighten you,” she called. “I’m living. I’m here to observe. I, uh, I come in peace,” she added with a nervous laugh.

  A door emerged in the wall, a dark staircase leading up to nowhere. A figure came down the stairs into the light: a man, short and powerfully built, dressed in a simple white shirt and black pants held up by suspenders. His dark hair was graying at the edges, his glimmering dark eyes covered by a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Shay noticed a string of beads tucked under his shirt, a rosary maybe.

  He was the other man on the FIGHTING GALLAGHERS poster, and he was unmistakably a relative; the cut of his face left no doubts.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Um… hello,” she replied. “You don’t seem very surprised to see me.”

  “Oh, I’m surprised all right, but I’m not frightened. I had the gift too. I keep a sharp eye out for death-walkers. Never thought one would just waltz in and announce herself, though. My name’s Reggie, Reggie Gallagher.” He didn’t offer his hand to shake, which told Shay he knew the rules, and understood their relative importance. “Are you a Gallagher too? Or is there another bloodline of death-walkers I don’t know about?”

  “I’m—my name’s Shay Gallagher.”

  “We’re family, then.”

  “We’re family,” she echoed, hardly believing it. How come she’d never heard of him? Surely there were reasons. Maybe he died long before she was born—he looked relatively young—and there had never been a reason to bring him up. Or maybe he died right before she was born, and the subject was simply too sore to touch during her childhood.

  “I’m….” She hesitated. “I’m looking for Franklin Gallagher. Is he around?”

  Reggie shook his head. “Frankie’s not here, kid. He decided to hang around in the world of the living for a while.”

  Shay’s heart sank. Her beloved grandfather was a ghost, and she had crossed over for nothing. Broken the rules for nothing.

  “Well.” She took a shaky deep breath, and straightened her spine. “In that case, I’m sorry for disturbing you. Thank you for your help.” Her vision blurred with tears. She reached up to wipe them away, wondering if there was a rule about not letting the dead see you cry.

  “Seems like you two were close. I’m sorry, Shay. I wish I could bring you better news. And you didn’t disturb me at all, you know. With Frankie out haunting God-knows-where, and Mags—my wife—still among the living, this place gets pretty lonely. Is your name just Shay, or is it short for something?”

  “It’s….” The truth, that she wasn’t quite sure of her name yet, seemed too complicated to explain, especially to someone from a time before. “It’s short for something that didn’t fit.”

  Reggie nodded. “I know all about names that don’t fit,” he said. “At one point in time, mine was Regina, and my God, did that name feel like a straitjacket.”

  Of all the responses he could have given, that was about the last Shay expected to hear.

  He looked her up and down, carefully. He analyzed her, but—she could tell—not in the vicious way that people on the street analyzed her. He wasn’t looking down his nose at her. In fact, she thought, he might be the first person who looked at her truly eye-to-eye. As an equal. Understanding.

  “Do you want to sit down, stay a minute?” he asked. “I think you and I have a lot to talk about.”

  “IN MY Father’s house, there are many mansions,” said the Book of John, but to Shay, a more apt description of the afterlife might be found in Impressionist paintings, or art-deco views of the future. It was a maze of structures, each one a maze of rooms in itself, scattered across the empty space the Gallaghers had always called the Great Grey Moor. The rooms were built from memories, each one based on places the person who dwelt in them had loved in life. The concept of space within these structures was loose enough to make your brain ache, so it was generally thought best not to think too hard about it.

  One of Reggie’s rooms was some kind of pub, empty and quiet. Memories clung to every surface, every bit of furniture, every glass. Shay ran her fingers over the surface of the bar—

  “You’re the boxer, aren’t you?”

  Flash of blue eyes, flush of strawberry cheeks, my God what a beauty. “You saw me fight?”

  Nodding, “I followed you here. I mean, I don’t follow you as a habit! I’m not a reporter, or a private eye, or anything. Seemed like the fun went where you went, that’s all.”

  “I guess you already know my name, then.”

  “Mm-hm. Mine’s Mary. Mary Magdalene McKinney.”

  “That’s a mouthful. Can I get you a drink, Miss McKinney?”

  “Call me Mary. Or don’t. I hate the name Mary, actually.”

  “I could call you Maggie, if you’d like. Mags. Something like that.”

  “You know what? I think I do like that.”

  “Do you want a drink?” Reggie asked. “By the looks of you, I can’t quite tell if you’re old enough, but I think we can blur the line a bit.”

  “No, thanks.” There was no rule against eating or drinking in the world of the dead; somewhere along the line, someone had tried it, and as they hadn’t ended up Persephone, it was written into the books as harmless. Shay had her own reasons, however. “I’m trying to go straightedge.”

  “‘Straightedge?’”

  “Oh, it’s, um… like temperance? I guess that’s a word you’d understand. It’s the temperance movement of the punk scene.”

  Reggie looked so innocently bewildered, Shay almost burst out laughing. “‘Temperance movement,’ I understand,” he said. “The rest of that, you’ll have to explain.”

  Shay did laugh at that. “All right, where do I start? It’s 1977 on the outside.”

  “Oh God, don’t say ‘on the outside.’ Makes me feel like I’m in prison.”

  “In the living world, then. There’s a new style of rock-and-roll, punk rock. Loud, fast, nasty, fuck-the-system stuff. I play in one of those bands. I’m a drummer. A lot of punks—even my bandmates, Max in particular—are hard drinkers, chain-smokers, some of us use harder stuff. Those of us who don’t are called straightedge.”

  “I guess the way you dress is part of it too?”

  Shay looked down at herself: black oversized men’s shirt, plaid skirt, heavy work boots, a necklace she’d strung together from safety pins and collected beads and baubles. “Yes.”

  Reggie poured himself a drink and sat beside her. His foot nearly knocked against her, where her skin was bared between her skirt and her boots, but she shied away. “Let’s see if we can get the story straight,” he said. “You’re Frankie’s grandkid, yeah?”

  “His oldest, Nicky, is my father.”

  “Nicky! God, I remember him as a pinch-faced baby.”

  “He’s a pinch-faced grown man.” Shay giggled.

  Reggie chuckled. “I bet he is. In that case, Shay, I’m your great-aunt, or your great-uncle. You can call me whatever you’d like. I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of me. You know the story of your great-grandparents, right?”

  Shay nodded. “They smelled revolution back in 1914 and hightailed it to America. Grandpa Frank was two, I think.”

  “Right, he was two, and our Mam was pregnant with a second child. She was so excited to have a daughter, from what I hear. Imagine her disappointment when she ended up with whatever-I-am instead.” He shook his head. “I’m surprised you even grew up knowing Frankie. Our folks wouldn’t speak to him for years. They expected him to be on their side, took his ‘enabling my behavior’ as a personal betrayal.”

  Shay began to put the pieces together. “When did you… I mean, how long have you been here?”

  “Since fifty-seven.”
>
  “Fifty-seven was the year Tommy—my older brother—was born. I guess that’s when Dad decided he would let Grandpa Frank into our lives, provided he didn’t talk about you.” If Reggie had still been around, Shay wondered, would things have been different?

  “He had to let him, and Frank had to accept his conditions. It’s only the Gallagher blood that carries the gift. If Nicky cut himself off from Frank, he’d have no one to turn to when one of his children started to develop it. You, as it turns out.”

  “Me and Tommy both. I haven’t told my parents yet; they think he’s the only one.”

  “Two death-walkers in a single generation is a hell of a thing.”

  Shay nodded. “That’s why I haven’t told them. They’d be so proud. It would make me want to go home.” And that was the one thing she could never, ever want.

  “It sounds to me like you have quite the story to tell.” Reggie finished his drink. “And that black eye, I’d like to know where that came from.”

  Cheeks hot, Shay pressed her face into her shoulder, hiding the fading bruise from view.

  Reggie slid off his stool. “I’m sure you’d like to map my little slice of Heaven, so, walk with me. I’ll show you around. We can talk as we go.”

  SHAY TOUCHED everything in reach as she went, soaking up Reggie’s story as she recounted her own.

  She spun round and round on a polished dance floor, telling him how she’d left home. “I guess it makes me a runaway, but that doesn’t quite feel right. My family knows where I am. I call them every Sunday.”

  “Sure, they know where you are now, but did you tell them you intended to leave?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Are they all right with you being there, all alone in that great big city?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Then you’re a runaway, kiddo, whether you want to claim it or not.”