InkStains January

by John Urbancik

she would have painted, and her paintings would have been lost to the ravages of time but would still, today, in just the memory of them, inspire artists across the world. Had there been kings, she would’ve been the very first.

  A girl like that is not easily impressed. So the youth appealed to the gods. Three of the gods heard and were generous.

  The first god gave the youth a net, with which he could catch fish, and a knife, or something like a knife, with which he could clean his catch. And this youth was first of all mankind to catch a fish, prepare a fish – with some salt and pepper – and serve fish grilled. He fed the village, if it could be called a village at so early a time in history.

  The girl ate the fish, and liked the fish, and thanked the youth. But nothing changed.

  The second god gave the youth a sack of seeds, which he planted in a field, the first seeds ever to be planted in all of time. Plants burst forth, first as stems and vines and bushes, until overnight they blossomed in every color imaginable, and many colors that, while we take them for granted today, had never before existed.

  The girl ran through the fields of flowers with all the other girls, the children, and the animals. They made garlands and necklaces and filled stone vases. But by the time the blooms faded, nothing had changed.

  The third god gave the youth fermented grapes, from which he made the first wine. Like everything else, he gave this to everyone, and though it was deliriously delicious, still nothing changed.

  Despite the three gifts of the gods, the youth had failed to win his love. He wandered hopelessly through the woods until he came upon a river, and there he sat on a boulder and wept. They were brilliantly intense, those tears, and the skies cried in sympathy.

  After some time, he looked up and saw the girl. She had come after him into the woods. She was smiling.

  “You brought me dinner, and that was nice,” she said, in the language of their time so the translation is approximate. “You gave the whole world flowers, and I know that you gave them to me. You brought us wine, and I don’t think we’ll ever celebrate anything quite the same as we did before. Did you think I wanted these things?”

  “I don’t know that I was thinking at all.”

  “You weren’t,” she agreed. “And you aren’t now. I appreciate those things, but they are not what I want.”

  “You want my heart,” he said.

  Her smile grew larger then. “I want your heart.”

  “It’s yours,” he said.

  But the girl shook her head. “It’s not so easy. Convince me. Tell me. Use every word you can imagine, and make up new ones, but to show how much you love me.”

  And that is how poetry was created.

  9 January

  She gathered all the things she thought might be necessary: an assortment of spices, a candle and matches, dried rose petals, wine, a bottle of ink and the right pen, a small silver mirror, a tiny bell, two Russian thimbles, and a photograph of her grandfather.

  She didn’t actually need any of those things, but she clung to ceremony. She lit the candle, she spread the spices and the rose petals, she even served herself tea. She filled the thimbles with wine and rang the bell and said a few ancient words in the proper order. Then she waited. She was prepared to wait a long time, and he made her wait a very long time indeed, past midnight, until the clock chimed three the next morning.

  The third chime hadn’t finished its echo when he bent down, picked up one of the thimbles, and drank the offering. “Hello, my little Mouse.”

  He looked nothing like the young man in the black and white photo, but he still looked strong and solid.

  “Grandpa,” she said, drinking her thimbleful.

  “You’re getting to be quite the talent,” he told her.

  “I’ve been sitting here three hours,” she said.

  “I had a long way to go.” He sat in his favorite rocking chair, which of course was still in the living room. It creaked gently.

  “I’ve been studying,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I brought the rain.”

  “I’m proud of you, Mouse.”

  “And I’ve met a man.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “No.”

  “But he’s good to you?”

  “He is.”

  “And you want my help?”

  She got suddenly shy. She looked away, lowered her voice. “You promised you’d come and help when the time came.”

  “I expected something different, my little Mouse, but of course I will help you.”

  “Thank you.”

  So her grandfather told her the things she needed, the precise measurements, the order of inclusion, the method of consumption. “Best in a hot drink,” he said, “but not tea. Chocolate.”

  “I can do that, Grandpa.”

  “Of course you can. I taught you well.”

  They got up and hugged goodbye. Her grandfather stepped sideways, out of sight, to begin his journey back to the place from which he came.

  She realized, then, her mistake. In Seattle, she was three hours ahead of her grandfather’s Florida home. He had made the journey at precisely midnight, his time.

  The next night, she prepared a special dinner for the man she’d met. He was gentle and courteous and complimentary. He was smooth and cool and he did all the right things. At the meal’s end, she broke out the homemade hot chocolate, two steaming mugs of it. They shared it by the fireplace, the crackling of the fire the only sound. She waited for the chocolate to have its effect.

  They both became sleepy. She suggested they sleep there, in front of the fire, warm and close together. By midnight, they both slept soundly, and the fire died down.

  She woke at dawn, still in his arms. The potion had worked. She was in love.

  10 January

  When the night is darkest and coldest, long after midnight but far from dawn, when even the cat’s asleep, they arrive. There are nine this night – perhaps more or less on another. They enter through a hole in the wall, like mice, or a break in reality, each from another direction, each reaching the bed in their own way. They pull themselves up the sheets hanging over the edge. They scale the legs of the bed. They drop down from the dresser or the ceiling fan. They surround the sleeping girl, then crawl closer, across her ankles, over her stomach, up her forearm. One climbs onto her face and feels the gentle rhythm of her breathing. And one by one, they slip under her skin and into her consciousness. They are Mares, the wranglers of nightmares, and why should tonight be any different from any other night?

  Abruptly, her breathing changes. Her eyes snap open, catching, in the murk, one quarter-foot tall Mare standing on the bit of skin between her upper lip and her nose.

  It’s barely 3am. The nightmares had already started. She’s not really awake, not really asleep. And the Mare, so unused to being caught in the act, freezes.

  She opens her mouth, perhaps to yawn; but like a cat, she snatches the Mare in her maw and swallows him whole.

  She coughs and gags, but it’s too late. She sits up, suddenly quite awake, trying to dislodge the wriggling thing in her throat.

  The other Mares, eight of them, find themselves quite forcibly ejected.

  The Mares try to scatter, but she’s too fast for them, still embodied with a bit of dreamland strength and agility. She catches them all and puts them in a shoebox. They yell at her, they curse her, they shake their tiny little fists.

  She shakes her head. “No more,” she says. She closes the shoebox and puts a heavy book on top so they can’t get out.

  She gets a glass of water in the bathroom to better wash down the Mare she’s swallowed. Then she goes back to sleep.

  It’s blissful, uninterrupted, without night terrors or dark landscapes or wicked dreams. When she wakes, her tummy is a little upset, but it’s not too bad. She checks on her captives in the shoebox. Since the sun has risen, they’ve gone dormant, and they can barely protest.

  She says, “Sleep, littl
e ones.”

  Over the next few days, she feeds them bacon strips and lettuce leaf and a saucer of milk, which the cat finds disconcerting. When she walks down the streets, she sees the shapes of strangers’ fears. Spiders here, public speaking, falling, rejection, clowns. In a bar, she touches a man’s arm as he flirts with her, and she sees the walls closing around him, the swell of darkness, the crush of a constricting ceiling. He runs outside, seeking space and air. She laughs, but not too loudly. At night, she sleeps deeply, though the sun seems to tire her and the moon mourns the hours without her.

  The fifth night, before midnight, she opens the shoebox and looks down at her captives. She says, “I’m hungry.” She catches one by his leg and pops him, without salt, down her throat. A little bit of whiskey helps him go down more smoothly.

  She goes out, and now doesn’t even need to touch her victim. A random young girl breaks into a fit of screaming that ends with hyperventilating and tranquilizers.

  The next night, she opens the shoebox on seven Mares and licks her lips. She takes two, one after the other. The family down the hall all wake up simultaneously and flee a burning building that never burned.

  The next night, she eats three. They’re harder to swallow in such a quantity, but she’s gotten used to the taste. They’re quite potent, flavorful and thoroughly frightening. In the city, she doesn’t just create vivid, overwhelming nightmares for the sleeping and the wakeful, she gives them form and substance. Knife-wielding clowns run rampant in the streets, some riding on the backs of reptilian raptors.

  The next night, only three Mares remain. She dips them in