by Amber Sparks
And
I Do Not
Forgive
You
STORIES AND OTHER REVENGES
Amber Sparks
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
This one’s for the ladies.
A curse from the depths of womanhood Is very salt, and bitter, and good.
—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, “A CURSE FOR A NATION”
What I want is to sleep away an epoch, wake up as a girl with another kind of heart.
—LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO, “EVOLUTION”
Contents
Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy
You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women
A Place for Hiding Precious Things
Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park
A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier’s Wife
We Destroy the Moon
In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling Her Father
Is the Future a Nice Place for Girls
Our Mutual (Theater) Friend
The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
The Eyes of Saint Lucy
We Were a Storybook Back Then
Rabbit by Rabbit
Through the Looking-Glass
The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs
Our Geographic History
Death Deserves All Caps
A Wholly New and Novel Act, with Monsters
When the Husband Grew Wings
The Language of the Stars
Mildly Joyful, with Moments of Extraordinary Unhappiness
Tour of the Cities We Have Lost
Acknowledgments
And
I Do Not
Forgive
You
Mildly Unhappy, with Moments of Joy
IT ENDS WITH A TEXT, FRIEND TO FRIEND: I’M OUT. IT DOESN’T end, because the other is not.
They become best friends in their late twenties, both new to the city in the same year, the same sodden winter month. They meet cute, staking out the same spot at the dingy corner coffee shop to plug in a laptop. They both cling to the tail end of journalism, that ugly, scaly thing shrieking for clicks and shares. They laugh about developing a brand; they share each other’s sad little pieces about lifestyle products and uninformed wellness tips. They publish fiction no one reads, and in between, they get married to perfectly lovely people and have three babies between the two of them. One gets divorced, but it’s not terrible; the ex is an involved dad and he still comes to birthday parties and makes everybody laugh in a nice, self-deprecating way. The other stays married and stays home, eventually, to raise the two babies-turned-children. She is still hustling, though, because this is the city, and everyone is hustling here, whether it’s writing blogs about regional pizzas or selling homemade scented soaps to retailers—which is what the still-married friend is doing. She makes the soaps in her tiny half-bath while her wife half-watches the children.
They understand one another, these two, these best friends, because they know everything there is to know. They know each other’s weight, and height, and real hair color, and how often they have sex, and which smells they can’t stand. The married one knows the reason for the divorced one’s divorce, and she is the only other person on earth who does. The divorced one knows the married one wishes she’d only had one child, and she is the only other person on earth who knows this. They are both mildly unhappy, with moments of joy, in the unexceptional way of most people who live in the city, and they see each other as often as they can these days.
And then, the text. The divorced friend, the receiver, immediately calls. No answer.
Alarmed, she calls the wife. The wife is perplexed. “She’s right here,” she says. “But she won’t speak to you.” Then the wife hangs up, having clearly been instructed.
She tries to text her friend again, but her texts are now blocked.
She shows up at her friend’s apartment, shouts up at the window, tries to persuade the doorman. Can she throw rocks? It’s a fourth-floor apartment, so it’s doubtful. She’s never had any upper body strength. And she might be arrested. Can she make a scene? And where? She considers her options, as a friend. Scenes are for lovers. Friends are supposed to move on. Friends can be ghosted. But best friends?
She feels she’s missed a beat, a line. A scene has been left accidentally on the cutting room floor.
After a long time with no posts, her friend’s social media accounts are all deleted. The scented soaps website comes down.
She sits at the dingy coffee shop day after day. She stares at the brown and green tiles, picks wider holes in the ripped vinyl chairs. She is hoping to catch her friend stopping by the coffee shop, in nostalgia or apology. It would be very like her friend, except, of course, it isn’t.
She calls the wife again; no answer, and then, months later, the number is changed. She stops by the apartment, and the doorman is always apologetic, sympathetic, if embarrassed. Eventually, her friend has moved. The doorman is clearly relieved; he is all but washing his hands of her. The white gloves move imperceptibly.
The doorman thinks (he heard from another tenant) that the friend and her wife moved uptown.
During the school holiday concert, her ex tells her (he heard from a co-op cashier) that the friend and her wife moved to a small Midwestern town. He has dyed his gray hair a dark, obvious brown, and his terrible beige pants match the terrible beige chairs, and with sudden tenderness she wishes they were still married.
The butcher tells her (he heard from another customer) that the friend and her wife moved to a suburb of the city. She has not asked the butcher to volunteer this information. She grabs the crisp white paper and heads home to cry over the pork loin wrapped inside.
She calls all their mutual friends. She has been too ashamed before to do this, feeling sure they will blame her for the break, but now, six months on, she is too distraught to care. The mutual friends have not heard from the friend, or the wife, in months. The mutual friends have not seen the children in their children’s Montessori school. The mutual friends have not seen the homemade soaps at the usual retailers lately. Her sweaters always smelled like lilac and jasmine and sandalwood after visiting her friend; now they smell of exhaustion, of thin threads. She does not, she realizes, has never known, the family of the friend; she cannot call or email them to ask. She is not a lover, so she cannot track them down with some great passion.
So now the bread crumbs, few as they were, have been eaten. The trail is tundra-cold. Her friend, it seems, has left the city; or at least, she has left the parts of the city she formerly haunted.
The divorced friend drifts for months, a year, watches old movies during nights filled with half-sleep. She hasn’t been this dumb, this ghostly, since she was pregnant. She mourns and does not mourn. She wonders but does not search. And then one night, she makes a decision.
She deletes her texts from the friend who is gone. She deletes her emails. She deletes the photos on Facebook and Instagram. She erases her voicemails. She tells her small daughter that Aunt Friend was imaginary.
Then the coffee shop closes.
In her late thirties, the friend is a little more unhappy than before. But no matter, and no more than most people who live in the city.
You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women
AFTER THE ATTACK, WE PULLED OURSELVES SHUT LIKE HOSPITAL curtains. Snap. They out there, we in here, pain distilled through tiny wires and tubes. Pain concealed and compressed until someone has great need of it, until it becomes a gift.
History wi
ll tell you we made quick peace with our rapists, bore them children, married them. History will tell you how we launched ourselves into the battle like burning arrows, how we landed between kin and assaulters. History will tell you we united Rome.
History likes to lie about women.
What really happened was this: when we saw our men at war, we almost went out like candles. It’s easy to shrink yourself down when anger burns through you, hot-fierce, like a grass fire. It sucks the oxygen out; it eats up all but the most essential parts. Heart, lungs, brain, blood. Everything else diminishes, shadows itself, clears out disease. To shrink after anger is such a relief. To run toward oblivion a slaking of dark thirst.
And Demeter saw us scrambling in her fields like mice, and took pity on us, for had she not been assaulted by Poseidon, forced despite all her powers to bear his twins? She knew what it is to carry the weight of so much rage. And so she pulled us into her arms, up with the soil and grass, and she scattered us through the skies as stars, shimmering and immortal in the night skies. And for thousands of years, when men looked at the skies—our husbands, our sons, our grandsons, and so on for many generations—they saw us, and were filled with remorse and remembered what it meant to be a woman at the mercy of men. They built us a temple, with statues of ivory and gold, and every seven years the daughters of Rome wove new dresses for us, from the finest cloth on earth.
Now we are forgotten. We’ve faded in the sky, and no men remember us. They tell our stories the way they never happened, and though the women can sense that something is wrong, the feeling is too vague for resolution. The halo of lights from the city and the haze from the cars keep us almost hidden from human view.
We are growing jaded, sadder. We can only speak in whispers now. But we still remember our power, what our whispers can warn of, if we aim them at the right ears. Our choice is coming to a head: finally unleash our vengeance, or forget we were ever here.
We cannot destroy man alone. We lost the ability to do that ages ago. We are so much stardust, and only a little earth still anchors us at all. But it is that little bit that keeps us interested, keeps us watching over the women of this world, waiting, hoping for ones who will say our names. They have only to summon us. They have only to say they’ve needed us so.
We would swoop down like hawks then, our pain finally put to use, propelling us to the foot of the earth. We would eat evil men like mice. We would rebuild the world in our image, in our glory, in our dazzling beauty and brilliance. Then, only then would we do the thing they say we did long ago: rid them of their wars and bring them peace beyond dreaming, beyond the imagining of any living thing.
A Place for Hiding Precious Things
ONCE UPON A TIME, IN ANOTHER PART OF NOW, THERE WAS a girl.
She was graceful and talented and pretty—though no more than she ought to be—and she was lucky enough to be the daughter of a very minor king, rich but provincial, with few real responsibilities. She was delighted with life, and with her own way of living in it. She loved stories, and music, and most especially, painting. She loved to create small strange worlds on paper and had set up a gallery in several rooms of her home for her art: the royal version of the family refrigerator. And she had a fairy godmother, because magic in this part of the world was stronger than it is in ours, and it lived out in the open and fed on the fat ripe sun and the clotted cream of moonlight.
Her mother, in the way of most fairy-tale mothers: dead.
Her father, in the way of most fairy-tale fathers: dreadfully flawed.
The girl herself: naïve; or, charmingly innocent, if you prefer. The girl herself, in the way of most humans: unready for unhappiness.
This fairy tale, in the way of most fairy tales: a warning disguised as a wish.
WHEN THE KING’S DAUGHTER WAS YOUNG, he cared little for her, for her drawings or her songs or her stories or her good heart, or for anything at all beyond the alliances her marriage could bring him. Indeed, he was almost a stranger to her. But the girl was not sad; since she’d never known any parent’s affection, she didn’t miss it. She was raised by nursemaids and governesses and loved by her fairy godmother. She had three cats and two dogs and four turtles, six fish and two ponies, and an enormous library full of books and blue velvet drapery. She had royal playmates and a private lake. She had expensive paints and pretty dresses and riding lessons and music lessons and was probably happier than we’d like to admit a motherless child could be.
But one day, her father happened to look out the window, and he saw his only child riding her bicycle back from the village. He saw her long legs, pedaling gracefully. He saw her long arms, balancing a basket of bread and wine between the handlebars. He saw her long neck, so like her mother’s, and he decided (because of course) he must marry her at once. We are to assume, maybe, that he was senseless with grief? Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps the father felt himself entitled to all the world’s beautiful women, even his blood relations. This too is not uncommon, in fairy tales or otherwise.
In any case, the girl was properly horrified. She cried until her fairy godmother arrived in her sudden way and hugged the girl tight till her breath was flown. (Fairy godmothers aren’t all lacewings and dew, as everyone supposes. They are quite substantial, sturdy as stout trees and deep as rich dark earth, and their love is as good for you as vitamins and vegetables.) The girl’s godmother told her not to worry, that she must ask her father for the impossible before she agreed to marry him. But what could be impossible for a king? The fairy godmother—magical but not inventive—deferred to the girl and her artistic imagination.
A dress, said the girl.
Hmm, said the fairy godmother.
But not just any dress.
Hmm, said the fairy godmother.
A dress the exact color of blood, said the girl.
Ah, said the fairy godmother, and smiled. That’s very good.
BECAUSE THIS IS A FAIRY TALE, the dress is made, and made perfectly. The dress is the exact color of blood, is a bright, saturated wound; it is a monstrous heart made of tulle and lace.
So the fairy godmother suggests a second challenge. The girl goes to her father, who is now impatient as well as incestuous, and demands a dress the color of bone. If the father had not already lost his mind, he would surely have expressed concern at such morbid selections. But he is already lost, and so he demands that the sleeping seamstresses awaken at once and begin sewing the bone dress. The girl begins to pack her trunk, her faith in the fairy godmother diminishing just a little.
AS SHE’S DREADED, the dress is the color of bone, a dingy yellow-white shot through with streaks of pink. She models it for the king-her-father, and he closes his eyes in pain. I can’t think, he says, why you would want such a thing; it’s as though you’ve turned yourself inside out.
She thinks she could say much the same of him, but she doesn’t. She curtsies and waits to be dismissed with a wedding date. Then she runs to her rooms to finish packing.
Where will you go? asks her fairy godmother. And how will you get there? With his horses? His carriages?
I don’t know, says the girl. She understands that she has been ill-prepared for life in the wide world, and she regrets that now. But what else can she do? She won’t sleep with her own father, no matter how gone he is. It’s escape or death. She doesn’t mean to sound so tragic, she says, but it’s true just the same.
Okay, says the fairy godmother, and she puts her wide arms round the girl. Her shawl smells of cinnamon and sourdough. (Imagine Cary Grant’s housekeeper in To Catch a Thief—the one who strangled Nazis with her bare hands—and you have something of the idea.) Okay, she says, here is what we’ll do. We’ll ask him for a dress the color of death. How could he possibly achieve that? Death is so subjective that no matter what he has made, we’ll simply disagree with it. Yes?
Yes, says the girl. And she asks for a dress the color of death to wear at her wedding. I may as well be dead, she says to the king, if I have to marry you.
Most suitors would be somewhat or very put off by that, but not our father. He simply shrugs, and agrees, and somewhat ominously adds: This is the last such request I will honor.
When the dress is presented, the girl screams and sticks her hands up over her eyes. It is indescribable, but nearest to a deep black pooled with scarlet and vermilion and mustard and loam—it is the color of rot, the color of flesh in the earth, the color of dust to dust. It is the color of the last bit of tallow before the candle is snuffed.
She cannot disagree that this is death; the seamstresses have done such masterful work. She cannot disagree at all. I will be married in this dress, she thinks, and then I will throw myself from the castle turrets. It will be a fitting shroud.
Oh, come, says the fairy godmother, who is lounging on the girl’s lace and lilac bed, prosaically eating a leg of lamb. (And who, by the way, decided fairies were dainty? Spenser, perhaps? It takes a sizable constitution to carry all that magic around, after all.) Wasn’t your original plan escape? Let’s pack that trunk, then, and get moving, she says, mouth half-full. Your father will want to be devouring you (and she has the good grace to shudder here) by nightfall.
THE GIRL STUFFS HER TRUNK in a hurry. Pack light, says the godmother. Bring a little gold, your paints, the three dresses, a toothbrush and some extra underwear. And we need to disguise you, since your father will have his men and dogs out looking for you.
Disguise me how?
The fairy crosses her arms and frowns. She is formidable, even deep in thought. When you run from your father, she finally says, come straight to the stables first. I’ll be there waiting. Then the fairy gives a sharp slap to the trunk and it vanishes, WHOOM.