by Eugen Bacon
The vessel that appeared was serpent-like, but it had legs. It grew large as it neared ground, and the military men sprang. They grouped, advanced. The craft’s surface grew more luminous. A door slid and soldiers on the ground fell back. A staircase dropped in a trail of light from the doorway. It lowered until it touched ground.
Cluck! Cluck! Tweet! Tweet! Sound from the spaceship.
A brain with eyes emerged. It floated at the top of the stairway and regarded the ambush.
“Identify yourself,” the brigadier shouted from a mike behind a car.
Garblegook. Garblegook.
The brain floated downward along the carpet of light.
“Step back,” the brigadier. “We’ll shoot! Step back. We’ll shoot!”
Light bounced off the brain. Compound molecules within translucent skin squirmed and shifted.
“It’s radioactive,” somebody cried.
Garblegook. Garblegook.
Vida watched the proceedings from his room.
“I know what the alien is saying,” he said.
His mother, now in the room with him, began to say something, but before she could utter the first consonant of her word, Vida grabbed the tablet and ran out of his room.
Sirens. More cars and choppers arrived. The helicopters circled the luminous craft.
“Final warning. Step back,” the brigadier. “Warning, we’ll shoot!
As boots advanced, just then, on the edge of eruption, Vida snapped the door open, jumped down the porch. He raced at his best to the brigadier.
“Please. Wait. Don’t shoot.”
The brigadier stalled the launch with a hand.
“Boy, you crazy?”
“I know what the alien is saying.”
The sentient being had almost reached ground on the staircase of light.
Garble. Crack. Gurgle.
“Salom,” translated Vida. “Bring no war.”
Garble. Garble. Crack. Crack.
“Lower weapon Earth being. Bring no war.”
Crack. Google. Garble. Garble.
“In Universe we accommodate together. We no war.”
The brigadier gripped Vida’s arm.
“Ask it,” he demanded. “Ask what it wants.”
A new wave of light fell from the craft.
Crack. Crack. Click. Tweet. Zip. Zip. Gurgle. Gurgle.
“What is it saying?” the brigadier.
“Give game back please.”
The brigadier stared.
Vida drew his hand from his back and showed the tablet.
Crack. Crack. Click. Click. Tweet. Zip.
“Give chessboard back please.”
• • •
Vida stirred from sleep, rubbed his eyes. His mind felt torn between dreaming and reality. He looked out of the window and there was no brigadier or spaceship. His parents when they emerged from the bedroom were their normal selves, unstirred.
That same year of the spaceship, a great-uncle Vida had never met died and left Ken his carpentry business. Ken drove the truck all the way to Middle Creek and the family settled into the uncle’s two-tiered weatherboard house surrounded by a thicket of trees east in the valley.
Middle Creek had such amenable air; it made possible remarkable improvement in Vida’s health. It was only a matter of time before Margo made an unshakable decision to prod him out of homeschooling and into the local community school.
But other children did not allow their play to touch him. They circled him and left him out. They treated him like an alien.
“Malformed species,” said Dale Hocking. She was a divine little girl with russet tresses and rosy lips that curled like half a ribbon.
When she said it, called him misshapen, and an alien for that matter, the other children laughed. It didn’t take Vida long to figure out the children put up laughter like walls. Each time they wanted to insulate themselves from his oddity or fragility they laughed. Once, Vida tried laughing with them. He pulled his lips and let out a sound. He chuckled with them and tears ran down his cheeks. Someone clapped him on the back and another roughed his hair, but his laughter did not shatter the walls. Vida did not belong. He was still the outsider.
Yet oddly it was the children’s laughter that sounded alien.
Garble. Crack. Gurgle.
Garble. Garble. Crack. Crack.
And this alien speak was in a language Vida did not understand.
Crack. Crack. Click. Tweet. Zip. Zip. Gurgle. Gurgle.
So one more time Vida resigned himself to his dreaming, or reality. This time he took to sitting by a river and watching its tides rise and fall. Unlike the tree this river was not a friend. He was too frail to swim in it, or out of it, if he fell.
One day he saw a naked girl with topaz hair swimming in the river.
MYRA
• 22 •
Silhouette . . .
I watched Salem in her wooden soles. She stood at the bus stop facing a howling wind. She held the hand of a child whose hand needed no holding, or was it the child holding Salem’s hand? Some people are ancient before they are young. T-Mo lived in that child. Salem stood helpless and needing rescue, bait to a prowler, even as it began to rain. It rained hard that night, churning waters, almost viscous, that rose to their shins. It was a yellow night, moonlit. As it gushed relentless, a flattening rain that was also blood-warm, it was the child who finally tugged her mother’s hands, who led her through the rain, through shimmering waters, away from the bus stop, to . . . where? To a clock whose hands moved slowly. To the nearest place out yonder.
Salem picked the first prick she saw, a cashed-up prick, in the first car that threw mud in her face. It was drifting at speed, all four wheels sliding. Prick drove it like he stole it. The wet road roared as the car took a corner, as it drove past, stopped, reversed, and pulled up alongside mother and child pushing through the torrent. Perhaps it was the heart wrench inside Salem’s eyes or the sense of a crushing pressure inside her head or her stance of guts like concrete . . . whatever it was, it took ill meaning from the driver.
“Headed someplace?” he said.
“W-waiting’s a bitch,” said Salem. Her face was wet with tears or rain. “If it’s not too m-much to ask, could you, would you—”
“Hop in.”
He was a skinny man with cut jeans and oily hair. His name was Tonk. Must have been fixing to score a wife because Salem, at that moment, was no unfolding beauty. She wiped her nose with the back of a hand in the passenger seat, her child alert at the back seat, but still Salem must have looked very shiny as a possibility. And Tonk staked his claim. He drove mother and child away from spitting rain, from the liquid and roar of foul weather, from roads turning into rivers, into a canopy of trees. Red, the potted plant, never stopped singing. “Tonkie wonkie dastardly prickie!” it chimed. “Skinnie mannie cashed-up drinkie!” They drove into a dark world that finally found starlight. Trees cast flitting shadows into the car as it raced, all the way inland past Fortrose, Shaving Point, Crotchety . . . to Middle Creek.
Middle Creek was new suburbia from what was once rural and bordered the towns of Sheepwash Creek up north, Coulthird and Lockwood to the west, separated from Middle Creek by the steep falls over rocky ledges of Little River. A new bus line ran all the way from Passings Lane, Seal Rock, past the community school—with its focus on integrated student learning, problem-solving and a range of support programs for its youth—and traveled all the way to just short of the Forest of Solemn further south. But Middle Creek still wore on its landscape remnants of wheat, rice, cotton and cane. It was in panic not fondness that Salem allowed her knees to be softened by a rich chap, a tart meanie with a comely face. Should I have cast a magic barrier to protect her from evil? But Tonk wasn’t evil; he was just arrogant. Polished too, other than the torn jeans of their first meeting
. His world was dressed with money, with charm if and when he chose to. But his choice of charm was rationed, his shoulders mostly stiff, and his eyes at most times level with disdain. His humorless countenance must have made him incapable of wooing anybody sensible or unburdened.
Not that Salem was insensible, but she was burdened. She was still uncertain how her world had so changed. She was forever uncertain of everything. Oh, the tragedy. Tonk offered possibility to a heart driven with survival. A new marriage was sealant for the rip in a woman’s soul, a woman whose stammer for weeks before the altar had got more and more pronounced. When Tonk first took Salem in his arms and asked her hand in marriage, she pulled from his embrace, looked past him to a point somewhere in the distance and said, “Y-Y-Y-Yes.” Having spoken to the shadow, the one in the dance, and announced her intention, then and only then did Salem sag back into Tonk’s arms.
Standing there at the altar in a fishtail gown and a choker—her fatherless child a sweet-smiling assassin in an open-backed cape dress (according to Tonk, who disliked Myra)—Salem seemed the kind of woman who was lovely but useless on most counts, too fragile for meaningful companionship other than one of a protective nature on his part. Nevertheless her exquisiteness was unmissable and, strong and stubborn as Tonk was, he had an eye for beauty. Tonk was a moneyed man with a penchant for drink, but no patience for complications. Yet Salem was a complexity he could simplify. He waited until she stopped looking at the end of her shoe eight hours straight, until she no longer woke fragile and wide-eyed from sleep with T-Mo's name on her lips, until her stomach appeared to stop dropping and her heart was less littered with scars. When her deep grief appeared to ebb, he figured she was ready to move on from T-Mo. His natural tartness, the ill manners that a silver spoon from birth encouraged, mellowed enough to permit wooing and the asking of Salem’s hand in marriage. And she said yes.
It’s not like she forgot. She missed the disaster of T-Mo’s cooking, how he cooked something and it smelt and tasted like a truffle a dog had spewed. The badness of his cooking was the very thing that made his efforts special. She missed how her stomach dropped and when her eyes opened she was high above the contours of Yellow Trek and the topmost tower of the pick and shovel museum down Fisk Street was nothing but an ant. She missed how he loved lollipops and remembered the day he put a hand in a jar at the craft shop and pulled out a blue and yellow lollipop, unwrapped it and his eyes shone like a shooting star before he closed them when he popped it in his mouth. But out on the street his brow curled, his skin darkened and he spat the lolly into a bin. That night he told her about Miss Lill and how she used to say “Little Poetry come to visit, bless those eyes,” in her sing-sing way, all cultured like. Sometimes Salem remembered T-Mo differently and she couldn’t filter her memories, which ones were real and which were dreams, or perhaps longing. Especially when she saw T-Mo in her mind like how he wasn’t, head bent at the kitchen table as he read the morning paper, slowly chewing toast.
With Tonk’s money, Salem found a penchant for hosting other people as this brought escape from being alone, from time that did not forget. Poised like jewelry on Tonk’s arm—wearing gold, pearls, emeralds or sapphires in tiered rings, cluster bracelets and bib necklaces that Tonk generously gifted without stupefying his wallet—she swallowed her panic as guests entered the house up the hill, a manor that climbed, open to the stars.
• • •
The lens of time remained undead eleven years after the fragile beauty and unstained simplicity of a pastor’s spawn astonished a man who wore a rainbow smile, a magical man with gator skin whose teeth were pretty as baby ivory. His blood was still alive, never fragile or simple, in a wild girl named Myra. By and by, young, mutinous Myra caught the pubescent eye of a boy named Vida who later became a tutor and a Cosmo scientist, but was best as a dad.
• 23 •
It started with a name. And ended in a swim.
Russet tresses framed Dale Hocking’s face. Smile lines formed a faultless triangle from her nose to the corners of lips half curled in a ribbon. So young, bewitching: Dale was divine, no doubt, Vida Stuart knew. But he was drawn to Myra Lexus. Myra was blazing, unreachable; her kind of beauty rarer than a comet. She electrified him, stirred things in him that bewildered. And it was not just the sapphire hair splashed with light, or skin ever so fluorescent to behold; it was her secret.
That spring morning when Vida saw Myra naked as dew in the river, hair roped with weed and dripping wet, he knew she was a river child. He watched from the crag as she glided back and forth, hundreds of miles just about. Each blade of her hand cut smooth and powerful against the white tide, her swim far different from his splash and furious paddle. He watched even as it began to rain, a slow clap. It swelled into a pounding storm, mightier and mightier swirls that loosened pebbles. Myra swam deeper, further out. Water closed over her head and he panicked.
Something caught his eye in the direction of the Forest of Solemn to the west, behind shrubbery just before the valley. He could have sworn it was Dale but she couldn’t be here. It was insane to imagine Dale might be watching him and Myra in the wet. The imagery and thought fizzed from his mind, turned to vapor by panic for Myra under the tide still. So he hurled stones into the bobbing water.
Plop. Plop. Plop.
As his fear grew, so did his hail of stones.
Plop, plop, plop, plop!
Then there she was, stepping out from the deepest belly at an impossible coast, beads of vicious waves and rain, fresh still, on glowing skin. And his heart staggered.
She climbed (dressed) to the crag and sat wordless beside him. He had seen her nakedness; now he was discomfited by the watching of it. But she didn’t care. And it didn’t seem to matter that he uttered no word.
Plop!
Her stone.
“So you come here.” She spoke without turning.
Plop!
“Some.” He wondered at the scratch in his voice.
“And you swim?”
Plop!
“Don’t mind a chill now and then,” he said and hurled a pebble. “Why?”
“I hope you chill better than you throw.”
“Nothing’s wrong with my swimming, and chucking pebbles is a breeze.”
“Course,” she said, sly.
Her stone whizzed and bounced twice in the waves.
His dropped short.
That was all they ever spoke – until the day Dale Hocking brought up a name.
• • •
Prep. The class hummed. Myra’s head was bent as her pencil moved on drawing paper. Dale turned from the front row, ringlets of her mane tossing.
“Your dad—” she said jauntily. “Is his name really Tonk?”
Myra, pencil moving, ignored what had been building at the small community school for a while now.
“His name really Tonk?” Loud.
The pencil stilled.
“Oops,” said Dale, tone syruped. “I forgot. He’s a fake dad. Your stepfather, isn’t he? Your real dad’s a Grovean.”
Humming died. Dale had said the unspeakable—talk of otherworldly beings on Earth.
The class stood on nails, many curious, some discomfited, most seeking a glint in Myra’s eye. Vida sensed impatience around him, a serpent-like eagerness for something that had been growing like an infection. But he wanted no part in it.
“My father’s dead,” Myra said with impossible calm. “Leave him out of this.”
Dale looked unruffled. Her mouth pushed ruthlessly on: “Let me see: Grovean father, human mother—that makes you a hybrid.”
Vida cringed, for he too had been called a hybrid, and not for Grovean reasons. Malformed species, divine Dale had said. Her digits determined the conduct of her behavior. She looked at her nails and became horrid.
“Hy-brid,” she was saying now, rolling the word. “Know what that means, My
ra?” Her toss of mane followed nervous giggles in the class.
“Ha bloody ha,” said Myra. Her voice did not shift an octave.
“See, Myra. It means that I don’t like hybrids.”
“You’re stupid.”
“Blooming heck,” Dale, syrup making her voice softer. “Not stupid like you; spindly legs here”—chin indicating Vida—“for a boyfriend.”
The class roared. And then they were yelling, jostling, surging forward for prime view, for Myra had shot straight at Dale. The two girls rolled a meter, rolled and rolled again. A teacher weaved through the sizzle and snatched Myra and Dale apart. A bubble hovered in the class still; Mrs. White calmed it with a hand. Heads lowered and eyes turned downward.
“No more of this nonsense, now,” she said. “And you two”—hail in her glance—“with me to the office.”
Nothing more was said of the incident, even when Dale returned surly to her seat, and Myra with a quarter smile. Both had been punished. But Vida remembered the laughter long after it settled; long after the chair that had swallowed him released him, and the burn of crimson left his face.
• 24 •
The first peal of bells went. Bustle, as people moved. The class streamed out. Vida walked, as did Myra.
She fell in step alongside him.
“Ta,” said Vida, awkward. “What you did for me—”
“Were you hanging out the whole day to say that?”
“N-no . . .”
Icicles turned on him. None of the magnet that drew him; these ones glittered with tones of bad temper.