by Amber Sparks
The stigmata, as she explained to the police, were merely sketches for a project she was working on. She saw the chance with a (near) live model and took it, though of course no blood was flowing through the body at that point. All the neighbors were outside on our perfectly manicured lawn, watching police put her in the patrol car, when FB and I came back home from school. She nodded toward us, her hair knotted over her skinny neck. She pushed her hands and eyes up heavenward. She’s praying, said FB, but I shook my head. She was flying away, dissolving into wing and cloud and air and light. She was becoming her own miracle.
WE SPRINKLED BITS of Hollis over the Western Auto Parts Inc. branches in Muncie, Gary, Terre Haute, Elizabethtown, Hammond, and Bloomington. FB whispered under his breath during the service that Wendy’s men seemed destined to become eternal punch lines, universal jokes. I told him that was because there was no god. Only wronged saints like Wendy.
My brothers came back for the ceremony, blamed me perfunctorily, and then dispersed again, bound for the real world. Wendy’s lawyer got her into a nice minimum-security mental institution, and I visit her there every third Thursday of the month. She’s allowed paints and paper and is still working on a massive mural of her favorite, Saint Joan. Wendy says now that she has firsthand experience of a trial she feels ready for such an undertaking. She likes the simplicity, the enforced quiet and structure of her small bare days. FB visits with me whenever he’s home from Hollywood, which is less and less often these days. He is very busy working, and the gossip magazines tie him to all manner of glamorous ladies, but I know the truth: we swore never to love another as long as we’re both alive. We can’t be lovers—Wendy told us why—but we’ll be together in our shared loneliness. It’s a good vow, almost as holy as a religion.
I spend my days in the fields behind the house, missing FB and Wendy, picking wildflowers. At dusk I bring them home to Wendy’s studio—my studio—and I get to work. I’m making a diorama of Saint Urith of Chittlehampton; her stepmother had her killed by harvesters with scythes. The flowers line the spots where her blood soaked the earth. Legend says that red gave way to white, to great blooms of yellow, of green and pink and palest blue; legend says spring itself was born of Urith’s suffering. Life blossoming out of the long dark stain of winter.
We Were a Storybook Back Then
EVERYBODY KNEW ABOUT OLIVER. SOMETIMES SHE WOULD leave the house in her sister’s ballet costumes, pink tutus and pearl-colored sequins. It was easy to believe that she was a princess; she was fair and pretty and hazed through the world like soft smoke. She wasn’t anything like the rest of us—she didn’t like video games or flag football or frogs or fireworks. Oliver would steal our mothers’ scarves and put on shows for us, hand-lettered signs sprinkled with glitter announcing her Dance of the Seven Veils. Our G.I. Joes and Barbies sat on the grass in silence, enchanted troops at a USO show. We made a small kingdom for ourselves.
The thing about Oliver: she was under a spell. She was really the princess of a far-off land but her father the king had remarried, and her wicked and terrible stepmother had turned her into a small boy out of jealousy. And then this wicked stepmother cast her out for good. She was exiled to the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska.
Of course we believed it was a spell. It was easier to understand than the grunts and eye-rolls our fathers made when they saw Oliver, when we mentioned Oliver, when the thought of Oliver crossed their minds. Our big, bearded fathers seemed afraid, though we didn’t understand how they could be afraid of anything.
All through childhood, through birthday parties and recesses and snowball fights and school dances, we tried to help Oliver break the spell. We tried spitting in the holy water, we played our Monkees records backwards, we consulted the Ouija board and tarot cards and Carly Manley’s psychic aunt. We even tried hypnosis, chanting light as a feather, stiff as a board, while Oliver lay awake and sighing in satin. We expected to break the spell soon; all that was needed was a certain flower, a certain word, a certain gesture performed on a moonlit night while humming a certain tune. We read fairy tales to find clues. We waited for Oliver’s fairy godmother to show up, wise and plump. We waited for the king to ride to Omaha with his royal retinue, seeking his cursed daughter. We waited up many midnights to watch the illusion dissolve, Cinderella in reverse. We waited for glass slippers to appear.
Oliver’s family moved away from the neighborhood just as we were struck with our own terrible curse: puberty. We were too self-absorbed to say goodbye. We were sad, though, because Oliver was our only link to something beautiful, a strange sort of magic that was otherwise lost to us.
Rabbit by Rabbit
THE GIRL IS DRINKING RED WINE IN THE NURSERY. SHE IS pregnant. She is languid; she is huge and hazy and full of vague hopes for the future. She is populating a dollhouse for her child, figure by figure, family member by family member. The house is a painstaking replica of her own, built by her husband before he marched off to battle. The dolls are her dreams, each room a tableau of future children and future wishes. None of which will exactly come true. The father of this baby has just been shot for desertion, and will not return from this war or any other. She will go into labor with her hands round the letter, ink smeared in soft smudges over her swollen palms.
Many years later she will ask her grandchildren, Was that one or two wars ago? A husband or several? She will be possessed, by then, of the magic of forgetting. Rabbit by rabbit, the past will go into the hat.
In will go husbands, children, lovers, friends, streetcars, swimming, low-heeled shoes, high-necked dresses, strawberry pies, fortune-tellers at the fair, hay bales and harpsichords and half-baked schemes she dreamt up when she was a little girl. In will go lamps and doorstops and baking bread and chimneys and pipe smoke and paintings and symphonies and stars. In will go all the words for these things, or most of them, anyway. By the time she meets her first great-great-granddaughter, she will not even remember the word for love. But she will still have the dollhouse, worn through and tumbled, dolls with no faces and walls dark with handprints. She will spend the most of her time with it, moving room to room as if she were a doll, forehead pressed against the clouded glass windows. She will wait and dream instructions from the dolls inside. She will wonder at their threadbare clothes and understand the memory of love collects here somehow.
Rabbit by rabbit, into the hat: pictures, people, machines—all will accelerate and eventually pursue one another with frantic, herky-jerky stop-starts, flickering in and out of range. Start in sepia tones, progress to perfect Technicolor saturation.
Next, the memory of traumas; self and the world’s. Everything that burns: grass, forests, skin, aircraft, cities, crops. Her second husband to smoke. Her two sons to fever. Her daughter: a strange cult and a series of feverish marriages and too many children she didn’t quite love. Maps, too, gone, so no path can be left to trace through the wreckage.
The good young life: spent tan, spent cycling, spent golfing—tennis lessons at Biarritz from the nice young pro with the pet spiders. A neck, long and swanlike. Her admirers, astonished, a beige blur behind the sudden brilliance of her boyfriend. He, the soldier in scarlet. She the grieving widow, beautiful and child-laden, the Madonna in black brocade.
Then childbirth, always a swollen breast, always a husband somewhere off in the middle distance with a paper and a pipe. A lake house, a black lace dress. Then he her favorite husband. He’ll teach her to shoot, to jump nude into a fountain and swim in jazz, to fly from a window, fly into a needle, to squander, squander, squander joy until you’ve used up all your teeth and hair and laughter. All flown, all gone, all stuffed like colorful crepe streamers into the magic hat.
After, the world gone gray at first, then faded to silver, still mechanical in its new and dreamless age. Her first glimpse of the Great Structures; she’ll shimmy up in denim overalls and stand at the vanishing point. She’ll pity the world below, pointillistic, vague and undefined. Into the hat, the flying machines.
To be dissolved: the visits from grandchildren, hesitant and shy. The smell of young skin, too much memory in that downy scent. But always enough love, always hands in the dollhouse, more figures always needed.
Finally tragedy, finally weeping. Finally the memory of man’s hubris. Finally the iceberg, the bomb, the burn always lurking to fill the trenches, the beaches, the ovens, the jungles, the deserts. The hubris that will eat up trees and children and even the dead with relish; the way man will peel history like an onion, or sometimes drill a hole right through.
The men. The last to go: the men, the collective men, and she will finally do the leaving for once. She’s held to them too long, given them too much place of importance in her own long life history. No more.
She will press her old frame to the rotting roof of the dollhouse, finally emptied, hollow and ready to enter. Her own old face will be nearly gone, a smear of red for lips, two smears of bleary blue for eyes. Her clothes will be simple and coarse, her head a wooden O. She’ll push and push through until those long-ago rooms are hers again; until she finds a new set of stages for a new set of lives. She’ll push until she finds herself in a child’s palm, a new small vessel for someone else’s dreams.
But now, in this moment, she puts down her wine. She lowers her huge, tired frame to the floor and smiles, puts her hand on her belly and imagines the strange small vessel inside. She tells herself: Remember this. Remember it all.
Through the Looking-Glass
IT WAS THE EMPTY JIM BEAM BOTTLE ON ITS SIDE IN THE SULLEN yellow shower, the fluorescent sign flickering on the roof, the bedsprings creaking in the room next door.
It was the stained beige carpet and way he shouted when he came in.
It was the way she lay for hours, facedown on that carpet, trussed and always with the camera at her back. It was the way the room was sometimes green, was sometimes gray, was sometimes a cheap room-to-let and sometimes a cheap roadside motel and sometimes a cheap county jail cell—but always cheap, always faded and frayed as the wallpaper that sometimes lined these walls. It was the way the men in suits filed in, talking on their handsets or their earpieces and taking notes and casting eyes back and forth, fishing for visions in the close and clammy air.
It was the way she sometimes perched at the vanity, watched him enter as a tall swift triptych through the mirrors, or as a prisoner, battered. It was the way she combed her hair, the way she put on lipstick, the way she dragged mascara through her lashes while she listened to the clock tick on and on. It was the way he said he liked her better without makeup. It was the way he held her throat, the way she didn’t scream, the way he called her Alice though that was not her name, had never been her name. It was the way they both signed the ledger, also not their real names, checking in and out each day, heading home separately, he in his car, she in worn tennis shoes, walking three miles to the bus to her apartment where she washed her face, her arms, her legs, her feet and toes, her stomach.
It was the way she sometimes left him tied up in the bathtub for hours, inches of water wrinkling his thin white skin, casting him in old man’s costume. The way his arms and legs grew thatched and scarred as train tracks, the way she always found fresh flesh to cut. The way the men in suits would take pictures, bending down, frowning at the carpet like crime scene photographers. The way her clothes were always crumpled on that carpet. The way she sometimes wore layers of clothes, the way sometimes there were never enough clothes, the way sometimes there was never enough fabric in the world to cover her over and swallow her under.
The way they avoided eye contact but every now and then their gazes would join, would lock, would jolt them apart, the third rail of desire. The way they would sometimes forget to scratch or scream or scrape or otherwise draw blood and would instead hold each other, skin and breath and damaged heart, until they fell asleep in that vibrating bed. The way they would sometimes turn off the recording devices and stash the cat-o’-nine-tails and the cattle prod and hide the handcuffs in the drawer next to the King James Bible. The way they would sometimes dress one another, he in a tux and she in a gown, the way they would bow to one another, the way they would sip champagne and smile politely over their prime rib. The way he would mention moonlight on the Seine. The way she would shiver.
The way they would finally say I love you and I love you too and the way alarms would shriek and the way the men in suits would invade in an army of red ties and bulletproof vests. The way the room would shrink and blacken the way the room would dim the way the blood would pool and churn in the bath the way their names their real names would finally echo soft but true in tune like nothing else in this cruel circus called the world when they finally shut off the lights.
The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs:
A Nightly Log
Night One
The noises are small, faint scratches and scrapes. We lie in bed and look at the ceiling, drowsy, unconcerned. Rats in the walls, you say. Maybe a squirrel.
I think it’s the ceiling, not the walls. But I defer to you at night, because never in any way am I getting out of bed and investigating things.
Night Two
The noises are a little louder, scuffles and thumps, like someone moving furniture. Christ’s sake, I say. Are they moving or what?
Who moves out at midnight, you say, but come on, plenty of our neighbors have. Remember the couple across the hall? You went out shirtless and bellowing, and scared the shit out of a perfectly nice pair of newlyweds.
Hopefully they’ll be out soon, I say. I fall asleep half-listening for the outside door to slam shut.
Night Three
I’m up late tonight, on deadline. It’s a profile of a celebrity I hate, but I need the money, and so I’m already pissed and ready to fight when the bowling ball falls overhead.
At least that’s what it sounds like, a fucking bowling ball, dropped from a great height in the apartment. I grab a broom and I jab at the ceiling. Three times, with intention. What the fuck, I yell. The neighbor next door yells back and pounds on my wall. Shut up, he says, barely muffled by the paper-thin barrier. He throws loud parties every other weekend, smokers on the balcony till 3 a.m., shitty country music, he should talk. Another bowling ball slams, and I instinctively cover my head. Can the floors take this? I have no idea how my apartment is built. Every fix is half-assed, every surface slathered with too much white paint. The floors could be rot underneath, for all I know.
You emerge from our bedroom. You have your emoji underwear on and also nothing else. I pray to the patron saint of people scarred by nudity that you don’t start up the stairs in a fury, not before I can stop you. What the FUCK, you say.
I KNOW, I say. That’s what I said. What the fuck.
A third bowling ball drops. A dog barks. I fling myself onto the couch. I’ll tell building management tomorrow, you say, and I breathe a sigh of minor relief. We don’t get much sleep.
Night Four
I am hitting you on the shoulder, Wake up, wake up. Does our neighbor have dogs, I ask.
No dogs allowed, you say, sleepy and annoyed. You can’t have dogs in the building, you know that.
I do know that. We wanted a dog, a little one, but your sister got kicked out of her building when that dumb Chow Chow barked all the time, and we can’t afford an eviction. Not right now. We can barely afford pizza. So do you hear that growling?
You listen. You frown. Yeah, you say. I do. What is that? It sounds like . . . a bear or something. It sounds big.
We lie in bed and joke for a while about what the neighbors might be doing upstairs. Running a canine bowling alley? Smuggling Russian bears to American circuses? Darker thoughts, too—a dog meat supplier?
What if it’s human trafficking, you ask. It happens everywhere, you know. We both lie still for a moment, frowning, worried, possibly complicit. The
n we laugh.
Oh for fuck’s sake, I say.
Night Five
You wake me this time, and your hand is over my mouth. I smell toothpaste. My heart flops over. Shhhh, you say. Listen.
I can hear it right away—crying. Someone is crying upstairs, a woman or a child. Or is it a dog, whimpering? Oh my god, I say. What should we do? We made all those jokes. We laughed! What if somebody’s really in trouble up there?
Before you can answer, there’s a new sound—a snarl, and another sound like a crunch. Teeth in bone.
Shit, you say. You sit up fast. I’m still lying there, chin under the covers even though it’s hot tonight. I still believe in under the covers.
It might just be a really big dog. Eating a raw chicken. Or a wolf? Maybe they have a wolf. SLAM. SLAM. SLAM. Now it’s like a basketball, now like ten basketballs, now it’s like it’s raining basketballs up there. Basketball hailstorm, with a chance of—there it is—bowling balls. Crunch. Slam. Smash. Why isn’t the whole apartment awake?
Then silence. Serious silence, the eye of the nightmare.
And then, a growl, like nothing I’ve ever heard in my life, weird and raspy, and a scream. A scream, I swear it. Then the crying again, soft but insistent, like rain on skin.