What’s in the bucket, stagnant beneath a drift of freshly frothy bubbles touched with lately golden light, it’s murky, filthily grey, splashing as the sponge is dropped exruptively overwhelming bubbles, light, and warmth. She sits back on her heels, shake of her head, back of her hand the wrist to her one temple, the other, swiping, short hair glossily bleached to a fakely translucent platinum, stripped of any color that might’ve lingered to leave room for all the possible colors to come rushing somehow in. The tub before her and the encompassing surround a fiberglass shell of seafoam green all slicked and smeared with streaks of suds and residual grime, trickled and dripping, popping.
She hoists the bucket with a grunt to tip it, careful of the lolling sponge, spilling filthy water into the bowl of a toilet likewise seafoam green. Her cargo shorts of frayed and ragged khaki, bleach-splotched, the velcro’d running shoes socklessly loose on her feet.
Clunk and rattle the bucket into the tub, tilted under the faucet she levers open, fresh water a whitely foaming gush that thunders at first, modulating as it fills. Her saggy, short-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up to a collar the same dark green as the palm’s width placket, paneled to either side with a pale green almost but just enough not quite seafoam.
Shuts off the water, turning and twisting the weighty bucket to dump it, hurling water about to rinse away suds and smear but leaving, left behind touches, streaks, stubborn marring dregs. Fishes out the sponge to scrub at one, quickening, roughening, grinding with the heel of her hand to squeeze out greyly dribble and plop, but to no effect on the stain. She sits back, shakes her head, slams the sponge back in the bucket.
Up, then, lugging the bucket out of the bathroom into the bedroom without, beige carpet tightly woven wall to wall, somehow generally, vaguely grungy, though there’s no particular stain or worn, abraded patch that might be pointed out. Two queen-sized beds, headboards butted against the cream and pink striped wallpaper to the left, credenza to the right, flat black plane of a television screen hazed with dust all too clearly visible in the slice of daylight fallen through the open door, there to one side of the picture window, curtains drawn. A cart’s been wedged in the doorway, and she sets the bucket with its sponge on the lower shelf of it, then mechanically selects two folded towels from this stack, two smaller cloths from that, a mat folded square, each the same tenuous shade of much-laundered white, that she takes with her back and back into the bathroom, enclosed, windowless, harshly lit, green, to set them out, towels on the rack, cloths by the bowl of the sink, the mat, still folded, on the shelf beneath. Gets to her feet, unsteady in those shoes, one hand gripping, rubbing her other elbow, her upper arm beneath the sleeve, shifting to press the heel of it over her heart. Looks over the tub, still mottled about the length of it. Scowls.
“Green,” she says. And sighs.
Working the cart through the door, out onto the balcony lining the front here, along this second floor, the overhanging eave, the slatted railing a wornly chipped seafoam topped with a railing painted a darker forest, “Scuse,” someone’s saying, “scuse?” She looks up from the recalcitrant cart to see a woman leaned out of the next doorway down, brown hair tousled, baggy blue T-shirt, “donde,” she says, “no, wait, que es, uh, el, el wifi,” she’s waving a hand, looking for a word, “contra,” she says, but shakes her head, that hair a-flop, “el,” she says, “logios, ah,” and then, slowly, forcefully, “pass,” she says, “word? Password?”
Tugging an envelope from a slot on the cart, turning it over, she plucks a marker from the pocket of her shirt to scrawl $3@BREEZE on the back of it. Reaches leaning over the cart to hold it out to the woman who, after a moment, steps out to take it, black socks on the pebbled balcony, “Gracias,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” says Jo.
Straightening, frowning, taken aback, “Oh,” says the woman, “I’m sorry, I thought, I assumed, I mean, housekeeping, it’s usually, the staff, I mean, it’s usually, Mexicans, I mean immigrants, immigrants, I, uh, also, Honduras, but you, you – ”
“I was born here,” says Jo. “Well. Corvallis, but I, ah,” and the woman’s stepped up to the other side of the cart, “I should’ve known,” she’s saying, “I mean, you don’t really,” but “I grew up around here,” says Jo.
“Oh,” says the woman. Heel of her hand on the top of the cart, that envelope whitely twitching, tucked between her fingers as they tap tap tap, “well,” she says, “maybe, then, you could tell me,” leaning close, conspiratorially, “what’s a good place around here I could score?”
Digging in the pocket of her cargo shorts, she sits herself on a stool before the bar, then slaps on the dark wood a screwed-up twist of paper that she smooths into an oblong a bit more than twice as long as it is wide, black ink on green-tinged buff, a twenty-dollar bill. Brushing back her colorless hair with one hand, sliding the bill across the bar with the other, looking expectantly to the bartender there, who’s finishing the pour on a pint of beer with a flourish, “Jim Beam Honey,” she says, “and then after that, a well bourbon. Rocks.”
He hands the pint to a beefy young man, floridly sunned, then mimes a disapproving look at a watch that isn’t on his wrist. “You gonna get to that before six-thirty?”
“I’m ordering it now,” she says, lifting her hand from the twenty. “Bring it whenever.”
“Hey, I got it,” says the beefy young man, “happy hour, full price, whatever, it’s on me.”
Jo turns, slowly, looks him up and down, flip-flops, board shorts, amber sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, sideless T-shirt that says Do You Even Know How to Use the Three Seashells. “The hell it is,” she says.
He snorts, sloppily taken aback, and, cheerfully enough, says, “Fuck you, bitch,” before turning a little uncertainly away, beer held high, weaving around the thinly peopled tables toward his friends in a booth by the window up front.
Hunkered over, elbows on the bar, colorless head hung low over a squat glass tumbler with one last sip left of something on the golden side of amber, oily tinting the melting ice. Her eyes are closed. Two fingers on her left hand, index and middle, pressed together, lift away from the others, the bar, as she rolls her hand over, supinating her wrist. She crumples the gesture, flicks it away, picks up the glass and lifts her head to toss back the rest of what’s left with a clinking swallow. “Jo?” says someone, away off behind.
She sets the glass on the bar, slides it off to one side. Draws a second glass toward her, identically squat, but filled with something a bit darker, a touch more ruddy about the ice. “Jo,” says whoever it is, “is that,” somewhat more closely, “shit, it is you. Joliet Maguire. What the fuck.”
A hand still on the new glass, she turns, slowly, to look to her left. The woman stood there, elbow on the bar, trimly blond, sharp-chinned, crayola-yellow polo shirt with the collar flopped up on one side, thin gold thread about her throat, and Jo purses her lips. “There are,” she says, “like, three people in the world, who get to call me that.”
“Well, shit. I hadn’t seen you since graduation! The hell are you doing here, in the Strand, on a Thursday, of all places!”
“I wasn’t at graduation, Kirsten,” says Jo.
A slump against the bar, tock of that head, the eyes roll, “Kristen,” she says, a lilting lift at the end, taken aback, and “That’s what I said,” mutters Jo, turning back to her glass. “Check your ears.”
“So!” says Kristen, leaning close, a hand on Jo’s shoulder, “what are you, visiting? Beaching, for the summer? You didn’t move back, did you?”
“I’m staying, ah, with my mother,” says Jo.
“Oh,” says Kristen, “oh, oh no, I bet I know how that’s going, oh, oh wait,” that hand to her chest, fingers splayed, then twisting to point at Jo, “she still has that motel. You’re working, at that motel!”
Jo sips, swallows, “She manages the motel,” she says. “I’m helping out.”
“I bet.”
Jo turns, to look directly at sunny Kristen, leaning a touch closer. “What color is it,” she says, and Kristen’s grin slips quizzically, “What?” she says, her bonhomie stumbled.
“What color,” setting the glass down, “is the motel?”
“Green, Jo,” says Kristen, looking down to that two-tone shirt, then up again. “Like it has been, I mean, it hasn’t been painted for years.”
“Yeah,” says Jo, taking up the glass again. “I know.”
“Hey,” says Kristen, her haleness gentled. “I could see if Bex’ available, we could,” a shrug, that hand held offering up, “get some pizza, maybe? Catch up? Old times.”
Jo drinks down the rest of the bourbon, back of her thumb pressed to her lips a moment, as if to hold something in. “Another night, maybe,” she says. “I’ve got a date.”
The truly dangerous expedients, mutters the phone on a stand over there on the credenza, and the speaker pauses here, and somehow through the hiss of the carrier wave there’s an echoing sense of the space in which he’s speaking, of the size of the audience attently awaiting the next word, the next clause, of this leftist, says the phone, woke ideology, this, this cultural Marxism, and there’s a shift in the hiss at that, those words, a collective gasp to suck the air from whatever room, are camouflaged, says the phone, leaning into that word, behind a hundred and one persons! and the shouts and cries then, tinnily distant from whichever microphone, but nonetheless the next word’s shouted, clipped, movements! and the next, each syllable spitefully drawn out, or-gan-i-za-tions! and another moment, waiting, as the hubbub recedes, resumes a more quietly rapt attention, that our unenlightened, our complacent, and a shout at that, of approval, at the word, or outrage, at the notion, friends and neighbors, says the phone, never suspect, from year’s end, to “Mom,” says Jo, sat in the corner there, but the woman across the small round table holds up a hand, stump of a cigarette smoldering between her fingers, to be an adept, says the phone, and effective, “Mom,” says Jo again, more forcefully, even as she’s getting to her feet, stepping once, twice to the credenza, shirts, the phone’s saying, must have at all times in the forefront as she snatches it up, our minds as she pops a fingertip against the screen of it, shutting off the tirade, “Turn that back on,” says the woman with the cigarette, taking up the fork from beside her bowl.
“Mom.”
“I was listening to that, turn it back on.” Spearing a last bit of tuna from the detritus of her salad. “It’s a podcast, Mom,” says Jo. “Play it later. With headphones.”
“I don’t like headphones. They hurt my,” a couple-three wet coughs, “my ears.” Glaring through drifts of smoke. “Turn it back on.” She bites the tuna off the fork.
“He hates immigrants,” says Jo, “and black folks, and women, and queers and trans people and Jews, and by God he’s gonna do something about it. There. You’re all caught up.”
“There’s no need for attitude.”
“What we need,” says Jo, “is to talk about the tub in two-seventeen. Whatever bullshit, fly-by-night, cleaning supplies falling off the back of a truck joint you get your shit from, it cannot make a dent in whatever it was whoever it was did in that tub, however long ago it was. I,” shaking her head, pushing away her only partially depleted bowl, “we might have to,” she says, “refinish the fucking thing, I don’t know.”
Her mother, with a wince for the angled gerund, draws her cigarette in and up for a drag. “And you know,” she says, blowing out more smoke to disturb the sargasso’d shoals between them, “how to refinish a tub, do you,” the last couple of words hacked up with more coughs.
“There’s got to be how-to videos. I can figure it out.”
“And you intend we should, what, leave the room out of circulation, while you figure it out? And the, the smell, the noise? The disruption?” Coughing, again, she stubs out the butt in her bowl. “Has someone, has someone complained.”
“Mom.”
“Wait until someone complains! Until then, it’s fifteen minutes per room.”
“Mom.”
“Twenty-seven rooms! Fifteen minutes per room. That’s what you have, to get through the day.”
“Mom, I’m not there to spend fifteen minutes in a room. I’m there to clean the room. It takes longer than fifteen minutes, then it takes longer. Twenty-seven rooms is too many for just one person, I told you, you never should’ve, you never should’ve fired Griselda.”
“We must live, and work, within our means,” says her mother, plucking a fresh cigarette from a crinkling pack.
“I,” says Jo, but, shaking her head, she looks away, to the brief kitchenette that lines the back wall of the room, the cabinets, the sink, the narrow stove. The bowls, the two of them, on the table. She gets to her feet. “I’m gonna go sleep in one of the empties.”
“Jo,” says her mother, lowering the cigarette she’d been about to light.
“Nobody else is checking in tonight! You could, might as well, send Andy home, you want to save some fucking, money,” headed around the table, bumping into a chair, “Joliet!” snaps her mother, “you turn the Captain back on,” coughing, “right this instant!” but Jo’s seizing the knob, she yanks open the door, she’s out, across the walkway that lines the front of the low, one-storey wing, into the mostly empty parking lot, a couple of sedans, a truck there, she turns about, catching her breath, a hand to her chest, just below her clavicle, to the left of the sternum, pressed tight. Up and out, past the meagre slope that drops from the lot, the five-lane highway below, past the lit-up lot across the way, spread to skirt a big-box store, Grocery Outlet, says the high sign brightly red, past the low roofs scattered and the scrubby tangled trees, a glimpse, so far beyond, so flatly empty, metaled gold at once so dull and terribly, painfully bright beneath a bronzely lurid sky, the onerously burning sun efflorescing daylight in such richly brilliant streaks of falling yellow, of failing orange, of umber and white to ripple, pierce, to shadow and define the thinly vaporous scrim of cloud above the unseen shore.
Another, deeper breath. She lifts her hand away from her chest, fingertips lingering, pressing for just a moment more.
The office, cramped and dimly lit, a young man sat behind the counter, intent on the glossy black book in his hands, Cyclonopedia, it says on the front in thin white letters, Complicity With something obscured by his fingers. “Hey,” says Jo. “What do we got tonight. How many available.”
“Down to seven,” he says, turning a page. “Weekend’s kicking off, heck. Maybe you’ll get to turn on the No in front of Vacancy tomorrow.”
“I doubt it,” she says. “Go on, I’ll spell you a bit.”
“I’m good,” he says.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, you must have something you want to go do.”
He lowers the book. “What about Wendy.”
“Captain Kemp’s Hour of White Power,” says Jo.
“Make it thirty,” he says, getting to his feet.
“You drive a hard bargain,” says Jo, letting him come out before she slips behind the counter, settling onto the crooked office chair with a squeak. “Oh,” he says, “Ricky’s already called once about the girls in two-fourteen, the noise.”
“Ricky the Fence hasn’t got a leg to stand on, in that particular department. I know what he’s talking about, I’ll keep an ear out. Go on. Get.” Smiling, until he’s turned away, out the door, closing it up behind him, and then the smile is gone.
She yanks open a drawer halfway down the stack of them to one side, riffling through with a crinkle of paper and plastic address windows a handful of narrowly business-sized envelopes, all of a blue-tinted cream, Havelok Sogge Hospitality, each of them says, a black logotype above the return address, all to tug out an older, much-used manila envelope, softly wrinkled, looking about as she wriggles the flap of it open. Works her fingers within among the loosely sheaved bills to tease one loose and out, closing up the envelope and slipping it back into place, all by touch, nudging the drawer shut with a knee, and only then does she look down to see what she’s retrieved, a single bill a bit more than twice as long as it is wide, black ink on green-tinged buff, 20, the numerals in each of the four corners. She crumples it suddenly, squeezes it into a twist, stuffs it into the pocket of her cargo shorts. Kicks off those loose shoes under the counter and draws up her legs to rest her bare feet stained and specked with grit on the cushion, folding her arms about herself, forehead against her hiked-up knees beneath that colorless hair.
Sits up of a sudden, on the one side of one of the wide beds in that dark room, curtains drawn and no light lit, breathless a moment before a slow soft exhalation, deflating her back to her pillow, curled on one side beneath the whitely rumpled sheets.
“No,” she says, quite loudly.
Sat up, bent over, she fishes something up from the floor, an item of clothing, a shirt indeterminate in the darkness. Looks over her shoulder to the nightstand between beds, the suggestion of a lamp there, but lets the shirt drop as she stands up off the bed, heads around the foot of it past the other toward the back of the room, a shadow among shadows, toward the deepest darkness there.
A moment, and then the bathroom lights flick on.
The bowl of the sink, bolted to the wall, the tiles lining that wall, the toilet, but most of all that tub and its encompassing surround, fiberglass touched by, streaked with dregs that mar its finish of dusty rose, the selfsame rosy color of the toilet, tiles, the sink.
Back out into the room now half-lit past the one bed neatly made plunging headlong over the other to snatch up the shirt from the floor, wind it about herself as she gets back up, buttoning the wine-red placket once, twice, yanking open the door, a third button done as she barrels out onto the balcony lining the front along this second floor, the overhanging eave, the slatted railing a wornly chipped dull rose, topped with a rail of dark brick red, she turns back about, the door there, the window framed in the same dark red, sat in a siding of rosy planks.
“Pink,” says Jo. And sighs.
Jim Beam™ is a trademark of Jim Beam Brands Co., part of Suntory Global Spirits Inc. Demolition Man, written by Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, and Peter M. Lenkov, ©1993 Warner Bros. Cyclonopedia, written by Reza Negarestani, ©2008 re.press and Reza Negarestani.
“Ladies!” he says, into the microphone, “Gentlemen!” his voice self-consciously warm and rounded with a bonhomie belied by his focused concentration, his blinking eyes looked down, away, concerned, “Those otherwise addressed! by orientation, inclination, definition, affiliation, identification, sheer discretion, or just plain bloody-minded cussedness, welcome!” He sits back, only to immediately lean in close again. “Top of the hour, so I’m obliged to remind you all you’re listening to KOCC, the Voice of the Oregon Coast, nine oh point five on your FM dial, listener-supported community radio broadcasting at a strength of thirty-two watts and a stated radius of nine point three miles, but hey, when it’s a lovely Saturday afternoon like it is out there today, y’all can hear us all the way up in Lincoln City! Or anywhere else in the world you might have wandered, Kay Oh Cee Cee dot org on any interweb-enabled device,” looking up, that grey-flecked hair long enough in back to lop the collar of his blue and black plaid shirt, “from the Rez in Siletz to all the ships at sea,” tipped back down, lips close to the bright blue pop filter canted from a flexible clip before the gleaming mesh of the mike, “this is Billy Breaks, your host on the coast with the most, no boast, here with you till two, and then Jackie Shen’s coming in with her in-depth look at just what the heck’s been going on with the Aquarium’s expansion plans, you’re gonna want to stick around for that, but up till then it’s just li’l ol’ me, me and my exquisite taste for what might be made from nothing but vibrating waves of air and your ears. Before the break, that contemplatively textured caterwauling was Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic, by a band whose name I can’t even mention in front of a live mike due to certain FCC regulations, yes, even a PG-13 movie gets to drop one eff-bomb in the course of business, but we public stewards of the broadcast spectrum have to keep it clean for the sake of all you kids out there, you know who you are. Eff Buttons, we’ll call them, Talking About Magic, before that yeule, I think I’m saying her name right, fantastic artist, covering Broken Social Scene, Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, and fronting that run was of course King Crimson, the Great Deceiver, off Starless and Bible Black,” leaning to one side, reaching for the switch at the base of one of the turntables, “and now,” he says, “kicking off another, here’s the inimitably impish mind behind Kittenhead, a rare track off a SuperStump vinyl compilation,” flicking the switch, leaning forward to the board before him, fingertips now to the bulky headphones over his ears, “a glitchcore rendition,” punching a button that lights up white, “of Nardis, yes, kids, you heard me, the old Bill Evans standard,” punching another button that lights up red, then goes dark as he releases it, leans back, lifts off the headphones to release a squiggle of ecstatic synth sounds and a popping crackle of percussion from the cans. Hangs them from a hook on the front of the board. Lets out a gust of a sigh, turning about in his chair, one eye on the silently spinning turntable. That plaid shirt of his hung open over a black T-shirt that says SCP Secure, Contain, Protect in faded, anachronistically rounded white letters, stretched by the swell of his belly. A red light’s blinking, up at the top of the board, and when he sees it he spins about in the chair to face the equipment across from the turntables, taps a button on a small console haphazardly wedged beneath an enormous reel-to-reel tape deck that doesn’t start spinning, just a small light there, winking whitely on, as he snatches up a dull green Bakelite handset, “Hey,” he says, into the mouthpiece, “you’re on with the Breaker, hello.”
And then, “Billy Breaks, KOCC, hello.”
And then, turning away, looking over to the turntables opposite, “Still shy?” he says. “I am recording, but only if, y’know, something interesting happens. It’s the job. Say the word, I’ll shut it off.” Looking back, leaning over, he taps that button again, the white light goes dark. “There,” he says. “Off. Scout’s honor. Whaddaya got for me. Why’d you call.” Sat perfectly still for a moment, two, looking to the headphones on their hook, to the turntable arm a-wobble with the wobble of the turning disk. “Hey,” he says. “I’m gonna have to swap out the music here in a minute. I’m gonna have to hang up, but, call back whenever, okay? Drive time, Mondays and Wednesdays, Saturdays one to three, or just, leave a message. Billy Breaks. But you already knew that.” Leaned back, inclining his head and the handset, “Okay?” he says, and then, a moment, he shrugs, lets the handset fall home with a clatter. Spins about, busy of a sudden, reaching for headphones, punching a button that this time sets the reels turning, one hand on the board to deftly work two slides at once, one down from the top, the other up from the bottom, even as he’s gently lifting arm from vinyl, switching off the turntable. Sits back with a creak, stilled, again, for a moment, one hand on the headphones, listening. “Okay,” he says. Leans over, reaching for a milk crate in the shadows under the board, filled with album jackets, edges feathered with much handling, and here and there a corner bent, and all of them of a size.
“Oh my God!” she cries, Jo’s hand caught up in both of hers on the table between them, “you have got to take better care of yourself. All those industrial strength cleaners. Bad for the skin,” as Jo draws her hand back to herself, the tumbler there before her filled with ice and a finger of something ruddily brown, “Trust me, Kirsten,” and a flick of a glance to the woman across from her, trimly blond, sharp-chinned, unconcerned, “industrial strength they ain’t.”
“Well, still,” says the blond woman, lifting a coupe of something pink, “I have this apricot scrub, exfoliates like nobody’s business.”
“Oil of Olay,” says the woman beside her, glossily dark, the glass before her tall and slender, filled with ice and something fizzily clear, topped by a translucent slice of lime. “All I’m saying, grandma knew the score.”
“I’m fine,” says Jo. “I’m fine. I don’t–”
“You’re fine?” says Kirsten, incredulous. “You’re fine. Where the hell have you been?”
“Portland?” says Jo, brow cocked, why are you asking.
“No, I mean, what, what,” that blond head irritatedly shook, a hand lifted, frustrated, “what were you doing, how were you, it’s been, forever, and not a fucking word, but, but, here you are now, back, again, finally, so, so,” whoops and cheers from the crowd at the bar, intent on a baseball game on the television above, “where were you?” says Kirsten. “Where have you been?”
“Well,” says Jo, sitting back, “like I said. Portland. Had an apartment downtown, and then I got a, a,” lifting her tumbler, “roommate,” she says, “we shared a really nice little place in Southeast. Had a couple jobs, made some friends,” she sips, “what’s to tell?” Her saggy, short-sleeved shirt buttoned up to a collar that’s the same royal blue as the palm’s width placket, paneled to either side with paler cornflower. “I mean, you were setting up to be a hotshot lawyer, how’s that working out.”
“Delay is not defeat,” says Kirsten, and the woman beside her snorts. “Pre-law takes time, and money. But U of O is a very prestigious, a lot of judges came up out of U of O, okay? So–”
“Go Ducks,” says the woman beside her, a wry twist to her smile, top locks of her black hair tied back in a single thin knot, but otherwise hung loose. Her T-shirt, green, says H&R Stables in faded blue. “I’m just working my way through Carlson,” she says. “Once a horse girl,” lifting her glass to sip through a gleaming silver straw.
“Yeah?” says Jo. “Gary still there? You could tell him I said hi, but, I don’t know if he’d remember me, it was only for a couple of summers,” but “That was high school,” Kirsten’s saying, “and we aren’t talking about Bex, we’re talking about you, and we’re talking about Portland. What kind of jobs? Details, Joliet. Details make a story sing.”
“Well, first,” says Jo, “I was, I called people, on the phone, and asked them, you know, if they liked stuff. Market research,” she says, quickly, “not telemarketing. Not sales. But then I, ah. Found, something else. Sort of, ah. Middle-management type of deal. A couple-dozen direct, what do they call it, reports. It was,” she shrugs, “challenging. But I had to quit. So,” spreading her hands, “here I am.”
“Managing, ah, retail?” says the black-haired woman, probing. “Fast food?”
“Oh my God!” erupts Kirsten, “fast food! What was it, Burgerville? Louisiana Kitchen? Dave’s Hot Chicken? What!”
Jo lifts her tumbler from the table, drinks off what’s left, sets it back down with an icy chime. “I,” she says, “was a shot-caller. We ran a drug so obscure they hadn’t figured out how to make it illegal yet.”
Kirsten, frowning, looks to Bex there beside her, “Wait,” she says, but then, “right,” and a shake of her head, turning back to Jo, “as if.” Jo’s lifting a hand, slowly, palm forward, fingers up, scout’s honor, “For the Queen of Portland’s underworld,” she says.
“Queen,” says Bex.
“I was also her button man,” says Jo. “Woman. Person. Whatever.”
“Button man?” says Kirsten, and “Hitman,” says Bex, leaned toward her, and Kirsten stifles a scoffing guffaw. “Okay,” she says, “so,” gold thread shining about her neck, her polo shirt a charcoal grey, “killer,” she says, “what’s your body count. How many you murked.”
“Sixteen,” says Jo.
Kirsten blinks. Bex, rolling her eyes, looks away, turning back as Jo’s shoulders start to shake, the grim thin line of her lips curl into a smirk, laughter leaks from her eyes, a snort of her own, and “Aw, geeze,” says Bex. “Fuck you, Jo.”
“Maybe later,” a scrape, Jo’s pushing back her chair, lifting her glass as she gets to her feet but, eyeing the ice that’s left, thumps it back to the table, “I’ll be back,” she says, and squeezes through the space between their table and the next too close beside, out in the middle of the floor, the couple sat there, poking at plates of popcorn chicken and tempura’d zucchini batons. Something of interest happens in the game on the television, and the crowd’s ebulliently cheerful.
Two sinks in an alcove beneath a mirror, white tiles, beige paint, chrome trim tinted gold in the reflection, despite the fluorescent light. Water crashes in the one basin, interrupted by her hands beneath the faucet cupped, lifted to splash, and again, reaching to yank, dripping silence. Straightening, looking, up. Those eyes, the color of mud. That nose. Her hair, she shoves it back, translucent, on the brink of any possible shade. Her shirt. A hand to her breast. The collar and the palm’s width placket, the cuffs of those short sleeves, all of a dull but warmly orange, the loosely sagging panels and those tails a creamy eggshell. “Stop it,” she whispers, to herself, her reflection, her hand pressed tightly enough to crumple and twist the fabric.
There he is, in the tightly brief hall when she steps out, loose poplin shirt in a vibrant madras untucked, only a couple-three buttons done up, dirty blond hair just long enough to manage unruly, it’s been a few days since he’s shaved those cheeks, “oh,” he says, “sorry,” pressed back against the wall to make some room, but Jo, a moment, and Jo steps closer, close, “I,” he says, shifting to one side, he’s smiling, not so much trying to get out of her way as to make his own, but she presses even more closely, and looks from his eyes, to his mouth, and back again, “do I,” he says, but he shakes his head, but he smiles, “know? You?” and the slightest shake of Jo’s head in return. She’s looking to his lips again, she’s lifted her chin, tipped back her head, he’s still smiling, he’s stopped sidling, his one hand finds her shoulder, his other her hip, he looks to her lips parted, smiling, closer, to her eyes, the lids of them drifting shut, she’s smiling, but all in a quiet breathy rush she says, “Get me the fuck out of here,” and kisses him, hard.
“Okay, Let’s talk about Magic,” written by Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, ©2008. “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” written mostly by Emily Haines, ©2002. “The Great Deceiver,” written by Richard Palmer-James, Robert Fripp, and John Wetton, ©1974. “Nardis,” written by Miles Davis, ©1958. The SCP Foundation has been associated with the SCP Wiki since 2008.
Take it off, he’s saying, maybe, the staggering thumping walkabout drums, the sludgy drone of the guitar, hitch-stepping along, the whining, sneering vocals, golden apple mind, all so thick and loud as if they’re laid out in the very heart of the song, nowhere it could get any more, but here he is, pawing at her, gripping fingers slid ineffectually off the slippery gloss of her saggy short-sleeved shirt undone at the bottom tails of it lopped loose over his slopping belly, about her hips rocked forward, back, forward, and back, but the rest of the buttons fastened all the way up to her collar dark about her throat, forward, and back, his one hand slapping at her flank, reaching for her buttons, his grimace obscured by the dark, his other hand more definitely placed, gripping the pale seam at her shoulder beneath the ghostly sway of her hair, c’mon, he might be saying, the dim shapes made by his mouth, shake it? take it off, Ilanna be you. Olive, too, all of you.
Shut up, she says, without much of an affect in any direction, forward, and down, and close, and then up and back, away, and again, through and against and inside all that sound, the guitar still sluggishly belling but splintered within and above a wriggling carillon, she lifts a hand from where it’s been braced on the grimy carpet shifting her balance to compensate but still she’s forward, and back, and forward as she slaps his hand from her shoulder, stop it, she says, or no, or wait, let go, something, something, coming back, he’s saying something, pale fringe of his beard ruffling brushing his chest, his shoulder working twisting with the effort, see, be, me, “I wanna see,” he’s shouting in the sudden vasty silence, and hearing himself he slams his mouth shut. There’s footsteps in all that space left by the vanished music, sluff and squeak of a floorboard but also a heeling thump, she jerks up, alarmed, a shadow clunking passes rustle of rough cloth someone still behind her’s saying “Kept her warm, Hobie?” as she twists about still knelt there knees to either side of the man laid flat on the carpet. A low and warmly yellow light flicks on, clink and chime of a swaying pull-chain, a man’s sitting himself in the chair beside it. Darkness clings to the stiff denim of his jacket and his jeans, his head shaved bald and his cheeks, shook slowly, side to side. “I don’t know,” he says, a rumble.
“She’s,” says the man laid flat on the floor, but her hand cups his mouth, fingers tangled in that beard. “This is not,” she says.
“Hey,” says the man stood behind her, “you want, he’s got.” His hair just long enough to manage unruly, shirtless, narrow arms folded up about himself, washed-out red sweatpants hacked off just below his knees. “That wasn’t,” she says, and he shrugs.
“Hobie,” says the man in the chair, “you come in her yet?” His elbows rested companionably on the arms of that chair, wide and flat, like maple candies. “Fuck you doing, girl, fucken a geezer like Hobie?”
She lifts herself forward, pushes back down, a slow, deliberate stroke, teeth glinting as she bites her lower lip, “Got something better?” she says. Hobie squeaks, her hand still over his mouth. The man in the chair unfolds a chuckle in rumbling, indulgent stages as he sits himself back far enough to reach into a pocket of his jeans, then leans forward, on the edge of that chair, hand held up and out, and pinched between fingers and thumb a tiny silvery crumple of foil. She snatches at it, but he folds his hand back just enough, she lurches for it, a gruntled “hey” from Hobie, she seizes that hand in both of hers, bending it to her against his show of resistance, prying at his fingers till she can pluck at the foil he holds tight, “You want to party,” he says.
“I want to get fucked up,” she says.
“That’s a couple points there,” he says, with a nod at the foil in their grip. “You got fifty bucks?”
“You’ll get your money’s worth,” she says, wrenching the foil free as he lets her. “Damn straight,” he growls. She’s twisting the foil, peeling it open, careful of the stuff within, white powder tainted with a thinly chemical yellow that she brings up and in to herself, “Hey,” says Hobie, uncomfortable below, “you wanna,” between them both, “can I, could I,” as the man in the chair says, “Greedy bitches,” shaking his head, “greedy, greedy bitches.”
“It, it soaks up, I don’t know,” she’s saying, “whatever it can, whatever I, because it, it has to build a shell, he said,” frowning, where was this going, “it is a shell,” she says, “a husk, but it has to build a shell, of whatever it,” smiling, here it is, back on track, “whatever it takes, from, from the,” looking down, frowning, it’s gone again, her bare shoulder, her breast, there it is, the thumb-sized nodule of darkness set in a pucker, there, “what,” she says, “where, where’s my shirt?”
“Get that off her,” says the man in the chair, only he’s not in the chair, he’s squatted before her, dark knee over Hobie’s beard, “Hold still,” he says, though she isn’t moving, “hold her still,” a hand, clamping her shoulder, crimping her shirt there, not his hand, “there were,” she says, looking behind her, “fuck that’s cold.”
“Get that off her,” the man squatting before her is saying, jangle and clink as he undoes his belt, “hold still, hold her still,” as she’s flinching jerking up and forward, away from the shirtless man behind her, intent on her buttocks, his other hand stroking, smearing, working, “stay put, girl,” the man before her’s growling, “I ain’t goin in after Hobie,” hunched toward her, over her, “now,” he says, cupping her colorless hair with one of his enormous hands, “let’s see what you got.”
“Fuck,” she says. “That’s cold.”
“It’s dark,” says Hobie, a fingertip hovering, not quite touching that nodule the size of a thumbprint, set in a pucker of flesh on the upper slope of her breast. “It’s really, really dark,” he says, but she’s already saying “Yeah, yeah yeah, that’s, that’s new, like, in the last month or so new, but, I mean, I guess, I’ve only had it for, had it for, uh, what, December-January-February, March-April-May, June, what is that, seven? seven months, more or less, so, what is that, half? is that half? a third, less than a third, since, don’t, don’t touch it, don’t. Don’t.”
“Good shit, huh,” says Hobie, a grin lurking in his pale beard.
“It’s, it’s, a while, it’s been a while,” she says, “I’m not, not usually so, so, so what’s the word, for, for words? The word for words?” but the question runs away in a skitter of laughter, “the guy,” she says, tamping it down, “the guy who, who, the guy that was in that movie, he had a limp, he had a limp and a coffee cup, and it turned out the whole time he was really, really, really bad, the whole Keyser, Keyser, Keyser, I’m, I’m,” a deep and shaky breath, she swallows, sat there by the low yellow lamp, the only light, sat in that chair with the arms like glossy maple candies, naked, knees drawn up, arms about herself, and Hobie crouched solicitously beside her, he’s pulled on a ratty grey thermal undershirt, “I’m thinking too much,” she says, “for a while there, for just a little bit,” looking to the carpet before them, greenishly greyly beigely stretched into shadows, strewn with litter and trash, peppered with filth, her knees there specked with dirt and sand and bits of bark, a pebble, “I was,” she says, “I wasn’t, thinking, at all, but now,” shaking her head, faster, more viciously, that colorless hair whipped back and forth, Hobie’s hand held over her shoulder now, her back, not touching, not daring to touch, “hey,” he says, “hey, what are you, hey,” but she lurches back suddenly, suddenly still, “I’m thinking too much,” she says, “too much. Are those skis?”
She’s pointing, there, in the gloom stood up in a corner are lengths of a darker solidity, curled at the tips.
“Yeah,” says Hobie, “Scottie, he’s a packrat. All kinds a shit up in here.”
Looking down, frowning, her bare shoulder, her breast, the blackly empty nodule, “What,” she says, “what happened, where’s my shirt?”
“You know,” says Hobie, “they’re coming back.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m cold.”
“Get it off her,” he snarls, shoving the shoulder the man behind her’s got a hold of, “hey,” she says, abrupted, as the man beneath her grunts, a hand up, batting away her loose shirttail, “hold her,” the man before her’s saying, “hold her still, stay put, bitch, you ain’t gettin up offa Hobie just yet,” looming toward her, shadows peeling from his big bald head, her eyes widen as the man behind her yanks himself close, “come,” she grunts, “come on,” as leer lit up the man before her clamps his big hand about the back of her head twisting to wind those colorless strands about thick fingers tightening, her eyes glaze over, his other hand, he’s lifting the tumid head of his cock, he’s lowering her unresisting mouth to meet it, “okay,” he says, “okay,” guttural, rough, “let’s see,” as the whole assemblage of them sets to, herking and jerking in sprung and interfering rhythms, “what you got,” he says, “I,” she’s saying, Jo says, “I,” she says, “I need my shoes,” as she’s buttoning up her shirt.
“The fuck is that,” he says, lifting his big bald head so the hand that had pillowed it can point, “that thing,” he says, “on your tit. What is that.”
“Shoes,” she says, sat up on her knees. Falling forward onto her hands, bent low to pull from under the couch a pair of cargo shorts. “The fuck I took them off.”
“Seriously,” he says. “What is that. Cancer? Is it a tumor?” Sitting up, elbows on those glossy armrests, “Scottie,” he says, and again, “Scottie,” looking past her to the man slumped at the other end of the couch, legs splayed in those washed-out red sweatpants, bare feet stirring in the filth, struggling for the leverage to lift his unruly head. “Did you know this bitch was defective?” says the man in the chair.
“Where,” says Jo, back up on her knees to tug the shorts up to her waist, “the fuck,” nimbly doing up the fly as she pushes up onto her feet, looking about, “Christ,” she says. “Could be anywhere in this mess.”
“What’s your hustle,” says the man in the chair. His denim’s gone, jeans and jacket, his T-shirt, underpants, only a pair of bright white socks, “party ain’t over,” slapping his chest with those big wide hands, pap-pap-pap, “this is just a, intermission.” The lamp beside the chair has been switched off, the only light seeps low and dim from somewhere else to lick along his chest and shoulders, about his upper arms, to illuminate jagged loops and angles slashed, blued tattoos, illegibly occult. “Hobie can fetch us some coffee,” he says, “maybe some breakfast burr-i-tos,” relishing that middle syllable. “I bet you want sausage on yours.” Chuckling, at his own joke. She drops the shirt she’d been peeling from the carpet to turn, lifting away a colorless lock to look at him directly, blankly, those piercing eyes of his in turn beneath brows as hairlessly bare as the rest of his head. “I have to go,” she says, turning back to that scumble of discarded clothing, “it’s, whatever time it is,” she kicks a drift away, clearing space along the paneled wall, looking, looking, “morning o’clock. I got work.”
“You ain’t got nothin,” says the man in the chair. “Scottie! Go kick Hobie up or somethin.” Sat back in that chair, bare knees wide, he lifts a hand, index and middle fingers upright, and pinched between them a shining twist of foil. “Baby want another fuckin bump.” The hair on his forearm, dark lashes curling down to his elbow a converse of the hair upon his unsunned thigh, that thickens to a thicket in his languid lap. “Get over here,” he says, to her. She snorts, shaking her head, turns away, headed past the end of the sofa toward the doorway there, and daylight somewhere beyond. He lowers his arm. Those big hands clamp the glossy armrests of the chair and pull, lifting himself to his feet already in motion.
“Shit,” she spits, scrambling hands and knees as that big swung hand whips back above his head to counterbalance a mighty kick that only half-connects, he’s stumbled by his over-extended followthrough, but it’s still enough to knock her over on her side, curled tight as she crumple-rustle rolls on her back away and up on her hands and knees again, scrabbling, his balance regained he hikes up his knee to drive a stomp of a kick, his heel, her hip, a resonant thunk and her grunt and she’s back on her side again bare feet skidding through clutter for purchase on the carpet to push herself up, away, “Fucking bitch,” he snarls, aiming another kick, his socked foot, her skull rocked sideways, a gasp of a sob, “look at me like,” he’s growling, dropped to his own knee, it rattles the room, and he clamps a big hand about her wrenching head, “one thing,” he snarls, spittle bubbled over his lip, his other hand seizing her shorts at her hip, yanking, shaking her against her throes, “better wise,” and the carpet beneath lit up in a sharply sudden flash of too-bright light. Startled, he sits back, sat up, blinking, befuddled, her head loosed from his grip. She rolls herself over onto her back, her arms lifted up, hands come together a doubled fist from which there sprouts the stubby barrel of a pistol.
“You,” she says.
But he’s swung that hand again, a slap to collide with her bundled hands, a meaty pop to knock them aside, that barrel askew, “You!” she shrieks, but that hand a fist on the backswing catches her cheek her nose a flatly thump. His other hand’s caught up hers, jerking twisting yank he’s got the gun by the barrel, butt of it canted up and back. Jo’s half over on her side turned away, hand braced on the cluttered carpet and her elbow pushing a struggle up to turn and look at him, colorless hair a-dangle, blood an ugly bloom below her nose, about her mouth. He snorts, once, derisively, passing the pistol from the one hand to the other, turning it over, pebbled metal frame, handle wrapped about in black tape. Tosses it away, thunk and clatter.
“Fuck me,” mutters Scottie, curled up there on the couch.
He balls up the one hand, lifts it high, but then opens it, lowers it, lays it almost gently over her bloodied mouth, pressing, leaning, pushing against her, grinding her twisting straining head into the carpet, “Oh,” he growls, hiked up on his haunches lurching from one side to another as he holds her, “this is gonna be fun,” he says, hefting one knee up and a twist to straddle her but squirming she shoves a foot up into his groin to smash testicles against a bracketing thigh to skew that swelling cock, her head slipped free from his loosening hand as howling he topples, felled. She scrambles again, not so much away from him as after what he’d tossed, sweeping junk and laundry clink of bottle flimsy clang of aluminum cans “bitch you bitch” he’s sputtering thickly, “fucking cunt,” overbalanced as he tries to stand himself up, falling back again. More carefully pushing himself upright, his chest his shoulders bellowing with great rough heaving gouts of air hauled in, flung out, socks planted, hunched forward protectively, those big hands held out before him, primed, “You,” he says, and spits out a cough. Her scrambling’s stopped, her back to him, bent low, head hidden. “You’re dead,” he says.
She looks back at him, over her shoulder, then springs.
It’s a twisting, turning thing, that leap, low to the carpet, the clatter and rattle of stuff fell away from what she’s lifted, the one end held in both her hands, the other pointed tipped a gleam that even in this dim light sparks and runnels down the rushing mirrored length of it held straight and true to punch a spurt of darkness slipping inches of it swallowed sunk those eyes of his too wide to pierce look up forlorn the low stained ceiling as his head rolls back now swivel suddenly down his head rocked forward as the weight of her slams into him, shoulder to chest by the blade stuck in her hands held back the hilt of it pushing screaming crying stumbled kicking knocking him loosely flailing back into that chair a skid a thunk a splintering crunch. A gurgle beneath her, a straining rasp, not quite a word, one of those big hands clenching the wide and glossy arm of the chair. She pushes the blade another groaning clenching inch. A white sock kicks once, reflexively.
Gulping air too quickly pushing up and off, uncertainly back, she lets go of the hilt of the sword that stays there, immobile, thrust half the length of it or more through the back of the empty chair before her, white stuffing leaked from the hole it’s punched through the dull red corduroy cushion of it.
“Wait,” says Jo.
Scottie screeching “What the fuck!” he’s burst up off the couch, she starts, violently, but he’s past her, leaned over that chair, seizing the hilt and yanking, to no effect. “You have a sword,” she says, flatly.
“The fuck did you do that!” He yanks the implacable hilt once more. Heads around through the doorway into the kitchen beyond, “You stuck it through the goddamn wall!” Looking out over the bar to her stood there on the carpet. “Hobie’s gonna be pissed.”
“Why do you have a sword,” she says, laying a hand on the hilt. It’s wrapped in some seamless matte black stuff, soft, softly but regularly ridged. “What is this.”
“That,” he says, coming back through the doorway, “is a Honshu tactical broadsword with the ten-sixty high carbon steel and the ergonomic grip, you,” he says, “you crazy, fucking,” shaking that unruly head of his, “bitch.”
“It’s so,” she says, squeezing the hilt, pressing the stuff between fingers and thumb, “it’d be like,” she says, “fighting with an oven mitt on.” Letting go. Turning away.
“Hey,” says Scottie. “Hey!” Stepping up and out to grab the hilt himself, pulling once more, fruitlessly. “You gonna help me with this?”
“I need my shoes,” says Jo, sourly, kicking her way through the trash.
“The White Worm,” written by Jason Simon, Steve Kille, and Mark Laughlin, ©2001. Honshu Swords founded in 1968 by Masamune Honshu.
“The heck is that,” says Jo, absently rubbing her chest.
“Where have you been,” says her mother.
“Out,” says Jo, her hand still on her chest, just below her clavicle. “Where did that come from.” She’s looking at a cardboard box on the floor before the counter there between them.
“Your father brought it by, last night. You might’ve said hello, if you hadn’t been, out.”
Jo looks up at that, frowning. “You told him.”
Her mother looks away from the laptop, looking Jo up and down, the cargo shorts, the saggy, short-sleeved shirt, cornflower framing royal blue. “You slept in that, didn’t you.”
“You told him.” Jo kneels by the box. The grime splashed up past one knee, marring her thigh. “I didn’t know it was a secret,” says her mother.
“I didn’t know you guys were talking.” Jo’s peeled back a flap of the box, wornly soft with age, printed with a red capital R offset in a red circle. Another, an ancient shipping label too faded to read still clinging to it. “We talk about important things,” her mother’s saying. “Our daughter comes home after seven years away, we’re going to talk about something like that.”
“Ma, it was not–”
“You left before your–”
“Which was not–”
“I simply cannot understand,” her mother’s voice, rising, “why anyone,” a deep, recalibrating breath, “would do a thing like that,” she says, her tone restored.
“I can’t talk to you,” says Jo, slapping the flaps shut, gathering up the box and herself to push the both of them, “I’m gonna,” she says, on the way up, “go and wash, everything. Thoroughly.” Turning away, the box in her arms. “Then sleep,” she says. “Till I wake up.”
“There are rooms to clean,” says her mother.
“It’s Sunday,” says Jo, testily limping away. Her mother’s lips purse, her brows pinch, “Where,” she says, “are your shoes?”
“Good question,” lilts Jo, without looking back.
Into the washing machine those shorts, clang of the buckle of the webbed belt still threaded through the loops. The shirt she wriggles up and off, over her head, swoop of her arm to toss it in after, she immediately knees the round hatch shut, chunk, leans a thumb against the control panel, twisting and pressing until she finds the angle that clicks. The machine gurgles into action.
A plain white towel grabbed from the stack on the table that takes up an inordinate part of this narrow room. She shakes it out and wraps it about her waist, tucking the one end under the other. A second towel shook out to roll and drape about her shoulders. She sits herself on a pink plastic chair in the corner and with a third white towel sets to rubbing the grime from her thigh, her knee, her shin, and then, lifting up the one foot rubbing, brushing, stroking, blackly smeared with grey and brownly tinged with hissing wetly ruddy touched with darkling red.
The box sits there, on the table, by that towering stack of towels.
The timbre of the machine’s operation shifts as it begins to slosh and tumble, and she gets abruptly to her feet, biting her lower lip as she opens the cabinet across from the table and wrestles a large translucent tub from the bottommost shelf. Kneeling, she lifts the blue plastic lid of it to reveal a sheaf of neatly folded shirts, the collars of them and the wide plackets almost maroon, paneled with peach.
She looks over her shoulder to the washing machine, but only a hint of churning suds can be made out through the dark glass of the hatch. She lowers the tub’s lid. Lifts it again to reveal a sheaf of neatly folded shirts, the collars of them and the plackets of a deeply regal purple, paneled with lavender. Snaps it shut again.
Stop, the word, not voiced, shaped only, by her lips.
She lifts the lid of the tub again. Collars and plackets of charcoal, paneled in heathery grey. Snapped shut, and lifted, bark-brown and ochre. Stop it, shut, lifted, candy-pink and pale rose. Dull olive and eggshell. Saffron and canary. Stop it. Stop. “Stop!”
Forest green and pale green. She shuts the lid once more, and lifts it. Collars and plackets of forest green, paneled in almost but just enough not quite seafoam. She doffs the towel from about her shoulders and wriggles into one without once looking down to the nodule on her breast, as emptily clear as glass.
Jolts awake in the pink chair when the washing machine announces the completion of its work with an insistent burring buzz. She opens the dryer stacked above the washing machine and tosses in the shorts, plap and clang, and then, the shirt she had been wearing, the wet colors of it blue and dim-soaked white, much like the drier colors of the one she’s wearing now, “Cut it out,” she mutters, and tosses the shirt in after.
The dryer blowing and rattling behind, she opens up the box, folding back the soft flaps one after another, the logo of the circled, offset R, the ancient shipping label, a deep breath before she reaches within to pull out an unwieldy paperback book, the cover a half-dozen branches laid on a white field beneath the words Murray Bookchin, and she lays it aside with a ghost of a laugh. Another paperback, this one smaller, creased across the cover of it, a cartoon of a bespectacled boy, a red and yellow scarf about his neck, staring perturbed at a bright red locomotive that says Hogwarts Express, and taken aback she looks about, the washer and drier, the pink chair, the cabinet behind her, the buff sack of laundry under the table, striped sheets, soggy towels, there, in the corner, by the door, she chucks the book, whuffling thump and clang, a bank shot off the wall and into the garbage can. A couple of cassette tapes next, set aside without even looking them over, gotten out of the way, Essential Songs Vol. 3(A), says the handwriting spiderly precise on the slipcover of one of them, she’s pulled out a composition book, the cover of it starkly marbled black and white, 10th Grade, it says in a different hand, exuberantly round, and beneath that, DIARY. She folds back the cover, no longer stiff, turns an empty page, another, there, in the middle of the next, written with the same cheerful orotundity, Things I HATE About This Place, No. 1, It is too QUIET, and beneath that, at an angle, in green ink dark with what might once have been glitter, GO CUBS. She’s folding the notebook shut, setting it aside, by the tapes and the book, she’s pulled out something else, a limp handful of cloth, tiger-striped, those are stubby legs a-dangle from her palm, and there a black-tipped tail, a round head drooping, and those black tufts are ears, and the whiskers of it strands of translucent line, she turns it over, gently, to trace there the belly and the throat, patched some time ago with scraps of yellow toweling. Steps back from the table, back to the pink chair, sinking into it, the oversized blue-and-white shirt, the white towel about her hips, bending low her head, her colorless hair a curtain, cradling that little tiger in her arms.
The box, dropped on the foot of the nearer bed, clack and thump of its contents. She sets the tiger atop it. Dressed once more, those cargo shorts of bleach-splotched khaki, the saggy short-sleeved shirt still blue and white, one hand up, the heel of it pressed to her breast. The further, empty bed, white comforter smoothly laid, tucked up to the neatly piled white pillows. The shadowed alcove beyond, the bathroom. She steps out of a dull red Croc, toe of it scuffed, striated by intricate creases, sets her bare foot streaked with grime, a bright red line of blood there, where a recent cut’s cracked open, careful not to set it, that, directly on the carpet, a distinctly unpristine
Spitting the last of a mouthful of something slickly transparent into the pale blue bowl of the toilet, gripping the rim of it, hack and cough as she draws herself up, sits back on her haunches, blinking, blink. Lifting a hand to the toilet’s upraised lid, laid back against the tank, she presses a fingertip, her middle finger, there, against the unmarred blue of it, pressing, leaning her weight into it, twisting her hand as she does so, clink of the lid of the tank, shifted by the force of her push back away from the toilet, up onto her feet, looking over her shoulder, distracted, someone’s knocking.
“Housekeeping,” she calls, stepping out of the bathroom, but the knocking continues, “Occupied!” she calls, raising her voice, stepping out by the beds, “Ocupado! No molestar!”
“Jesus, your grace,” says whoever’s out there on the other side, “would you open the fucking door? It’s only me!”
One uncertain step toward the door, another, past the Crocs abandoned on the carpet, lit up in a sudden rush of daylight as she opens the door. “Yeah,” says Sweetloaf stood there, his brown bomber jacket, sheepishly adjusting the leather-and-brass goggles pushed up on his forehead, “I know, I know, I’m trying to watch my fucking language.”
It takes a couple of tries before Jo’s able to work her mouth to form the word “What,” and then “are,” and “you doing,” and, finally, “here,” her tone uncertain, is it a question, an ending, or just, just waiting, and his response is to reach into his jacket and draw out an envelope, the paper of it lushly thick, of a honeyed cream, and intricately calligraphed loops and angles of deep blue ink say in and amongst a thicket of ornament Duchess of Southeast, Huntsman to the Court of Roses, Widow of the Hawk, Jo Gallowglas Maguire.
“What,” says Jo, “what is that,” without reaching for it, without lifting a hand.
“It’s from herself,” says Sweetloaf. “She only had me bring it all the way out here to you. Well. Out to wherever it was you were, that took some fucking doing, I can tell you. Go on,” shaking it at her, and then, “Lady?” he says. “Your grace? Are you all right? Hey, hey, is everything fucking okay? Shit, your grace, what should I do? What do I do?”
The Ecology of Freedom: the Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, written by Murray Bookchin, ©1982.
My dearest Huntsman
My darling Jo
Dear Jo—
I find myself with pen and finally a bit of unmarked paper, and an almost overwhelming urge to write to you. Of course the urge is not to write to you, no, the urge is to see you, to hear your voice, to speak with you, Joliet, to hold your hand, but instead I am left to take what I might from the shape your name makes in this ink, Jo, Jo, Joliet, Jo.
Jo.
Blast and rot your pride.
Yes, your pride. As if that scrap of qelippa could hurt Me. Me. It ate me away once before, out of the world, you said, yet here I am. I came back. You brought me back. You could have stayed.
You could have stayed.
You should have stayed.
Marfisa is
I beg your
I do not know why I should feel as if I must apologize for or even explain any interruption. It’s not as if you’d sense any hesitation between one line, and the next, or even one word and the next. For you it will all be of a piece when I am done, and this is folded up and sealed away and sent however it is I’ll have it sent to you, and when you open it, and read it, there will not come a moment when you must set it aside and attend the whitterings of your Outlaw as she frets over your use of paper as yet unused, and freely available, but of course now that I’ve gone and written it all down in this letter it can’t help but interrupt, not your reading of it, no, for that is entirely in your hands, of course, to set down and take up again this letter as you like, or need, or to read it straight through in one go, but of the train of my thoughts that I’d meant to set in motion, now sidelined, by Marfisa’s fretting, and then, also, next, by my setting it down, here, in lieu of what I’d thought I’d meant to write. How easily the words flow from this pen. Like ink.
When I do fold this up and seal it away to be sent to you however it might I shall also enclose what is left of your portion of our last turning. I fear it is not the full amount. I have not turned any more since that night, and of course there was little enough left when I had
If you were here I would turn more. It seems unseemly to trawl for someone else to attend me in your stead. Almost as if it would be a betrayal of you. How odd, to feel this way, and yet.
You should have stayed with me, Jo. But not because of that.
That morning, the morning that you left, is it really only two weeks gone? Two weeks, but an ocean of
Why that word? Why did this pen loop its way into ocean just now? It is a vast and a yawning gulf of time, between then, and now, far more it seems in the weight of its passage than two mere weeks, than fourteen
thirteen fifteen
fourteen days, it was a Saturday morning, ninth June, that you left, and today it is Saturday morning, twenty-third June. Fourteen days, even though it was not until late that night, the night of the ninth, that I found out you had gone.
I was in a mood, that day, I admit. I was rash. I should have said something. I should have tried to say anything, but I felt if I were to open my mouth that the sound that I’d make would splinter and shatter everything and everyone around me into a million million pieces. I should have come out to wake you again, to tell you where it was I was going, what it was I decided to do, but even if I had been able to say anything, anything at all but some wordless howl of anger and rage, what would I have said? What could I have said? That I meant to hit them, hurt them, strike where I could, where I might do the most damage to as many of them as
Even writing it down, now, with two weeks to have thought about it, it seems foolish, misguided, silly. Rash. What a mess would I have made had I tried to say something to you, then, in the white-hot endless moment of it all.
But if I had. If I had tried. If I had stammered out to you some scrap of a half-baked not-even plan
Would you still be here?
I’d have to think you would.
That first day, I was only there for a few hours, four or five at the most, barely half the day. I got there early, before anyone else. I dragged over one of the signs they were going to hang on the fencing they’d be putting up, to advertise their venture, so that I’d have somewhere relatively clean and smooth to sit, and there I sat me down, beneath the bridge, between the pillars, almost right where we ended up that one night
right there in sight of perhaps my favorite of the columns, the one with the lions: a single piece, stretched from the base of it up much higher than a watchman could reach. Perhaps he climbed up parked railway cars to work so high. I can imagine him, clinging to a ladder on the side of a boxcar, finishing those tangled branches at the top of the piece, those white overlapping curls and forks set starkly against whatever was used to blacken the concrete. The distant hills, more softly drawn, and the hillocks of river fog, and the differences in texture between the two, how simple, yet how clear. I wonder how he did them. Rubbing with his shirt cuff, perhaps, or his thumb, his fingertips, smudging the chalk with spittle by lamplight, and the steaming trains all a-slumber as he worked. The action, the scene itself, glimpsed through the trunks and branches of the trees in the foreground, a strikingly vertical composition, due, of course, to its canvas: two lions, one at the top, one at the bottom, and between them, the hind, laid out on her back. Not yet savaged, no. He wasn’t interested in drawing anything like that, above and beyond the limitations of his chosen medium. It’s all so stylized, and yet the hind’s distress is quite clear. Her tongue lolls cartoonishly from her mouth. There might as well be a comicstrip bubble above her overturned head. “Lo, I am done for,” it would say.
The top lion, the more active lion, that appears to have brought down the hind, has a mane, a mane that is ridged, like a fingerprint, and his distressingly hand-like paws are poised to grip and rend and tear. The lion beneath, closer to us, rounding on the hind but not yet engaged, has no mane, but her twitching tail testifies as to her interest and investment in the affair. Male, female: it would appear he intended them to be a matched pair? Husband, wife. Mother and father, busily providing for a child-cub somewhere
but I recall you once told me that male lions
is there a term for male lions? They are Kings of the jungle
spending their days, lazing about in the sun, waiting for the females, their Queens, to bring them leftovers from a kill. This King has a black face, that is quite striking
oh but I have used that word already, and for much the same sense. What word might I use instead. I have a thesaurus to hand, her thesaurus, Abby Tinker’s thesaurus, Marfisa’s writer friend, who has died:
marked
pronounced
emphatic
bodacious
screaming
garish
hifalutin
kenspeckle, how is that even a word, kenspeckle, how marvelous. Chiefly Scottish, says the wee parenthetical note here. I am not feeling terribly Scotch, but this King’s black face is quite kenspeckle, though shaped rather more like a badger’s muzzle, or a weasel’s, than a lion’s. Like an illuminating monk, unlike the supine deer, he has drawn something he has never himself seen, but only heard tell of. Tom Stefopoulos, that was his name. Tom Stefopoulos transposed these majestic hunters, dimly glimpsed, from a sunbaked savannah to a scene rather more Oregonial, those distant hills, the river fog, the tangled trees.
And they look at this, at all of it, and all the others besides, and they would tear it down, each and every one. It’s in their way. That’s all they can see.
I need you to come back, Jo. I need your help to save it all.
I have to imagine you’ve gone back to where you’re from. You’ve never really said much about where that was at all. You have a mother you do not wish to speak with, which is something we have always had in common. You’ve never mentioned your father at all that I can remember, or a brother, or a sister. I know you come from somewhere to the West of here, and there’s very little left to the West, and most of that lies along the coast, and so when I think of you now that you are gone I think of
and of course that’s where the word ocean came from. That’s why it fell from the pen. I think of you standing on a rise, looking out over endless blue water beneath a cloudless blue sky, but of course the ocean isn’t between us, it’s before us. It’s not the time between then and now. It’s some other time entirely. It’s what’s to come. When I think of you now, in what I think to be your home, I’m somewhere behind you, following after. I can’t see your face. I can’t tell if you’re happy, or sad, relieved, or aggrieved, or angry, I just don’t know.
But when I think of you, reading this letter, of where you will be when it is delivered to you, I see you, oddly enough, under a tree. I could not say what kind of tree. Perhaps an oak. Do oaks grow by the ocean, here?
I suppose there are enough small towns in the hills between here, and there, that you might well have grown up in. There must be an oak somewhere in all that space for you to sit beneath.
Jo
Joliet
my Huntsman, my Hawk
my one true only
my love
come back
“I can stay the fucking night,” he says, as the car slips to a halt, “but not any longer than that. I’ve got to be getting the fuck back. This, this is,” leaning over the wheel, looking about through the windshield, the bated chug of the idling engine, the half-empty lot under relentless sunlight, the bulk of the motel’s two-storey wing, dusty pink, the trim painted white where it isn’t a dark brick red, “not the place for the fucking likes of me. Did they,” he squints into a frown under those pushed-up goggles, “paint, the whole fucking building, while we were out?”
Jo, in the passenger seat, watches through silvery aviator sunglasses, a label still pasted to one lens, UV Protection, as he leans even further forward, peering about. She says, after a moment, “No?”
“Because it was not that fucking,” he says, sitting back, “I mean, it was the same color as your fucking,” taking her in, a cord-handled brown paper bag in her lap, weightily full, it says Fred Meyer in thick red letters, and her short-sleeved shirt of salmon, the wide maroon placket of it edged with white piping. “Huh,” he says, deflating.
“Yeah,” says Jo, hauling up another cord-handed brown paper bag, as weightily awkward, from the floorboard. “Look, if it helps at all, I can hook you up with a room, later. This place is never anywhere near capacity,” but he’s shaking his head, as if annoyed by the very suggestion, “no, seriously,” she says, gathering the cords in one hand, reaching with the other for the handle of the door. “Just come by any time after nine, I’ll get you a key.”
“I ain’t about to start sleeping in a God damned bed, your grace,” says Sweetloaf, with a wince, “there’s not a fucking thing about this fucking situation that calls for that level of, of whatever the fuck. I mention my fucking itinerary because of the implications it might present to your plans for whatever kind of fucking response.”
“I’m not,” she says, letting go of the handle, “going back,” and “I know, boss, I know,” he’s saying, “you made that pretty fucking clear.”
“It’s nothing personal,” she says, quickly, “it’s just, there’s some shit I have to, just, deal with, and it’s best for all concerned if,” but “Boss,” he’s saying, “boss, I fucking, my lady–”
“Don’t,” she says, quietly.
“This is something you really ought to fucking take up with herself, you know?”
“Well,” says Jo. “Got her number? And a phone?”
“I got you some pens, too,” he says, a flutter of a gesture toward the bags, “and some fancy note paper, what is it, stationery, while you, uh, were,” he shrugs, “so,” he says, “I’ll check back tomorrow before I go. You got anything, I can take it back with me. Otherwise, it’ll just have to fucking wait till I,” he sighs, heavily, “get back here.”
“Which is when,” says Jo.
“You think I’m fucking planning any of this?”
“Yeah,” says Jo, “well.” Yanking the handle of the door, shoving it open with a black-denimed knee, she sets a new Chuck Taylor on the pavement, black, all of it black, laces, toe-cap, sole, insignia, and braces herself to swing the bags out, but halts, looking to him over her shoulder.
“So,” he says. “Should I bother?”
“What?”
“Coming the fuck back tomorrow.”
“Of course,” she says. “What I was, what I wanted,” she looks away, then back, “you got another one of those bills you could break off for me?”
He sets the squat glass tumbler on a coaster before her, brimming with liquor brownly ruddy, and circular chips of ice. She lays a slip of paper on the dark wood of the bar, an oblong a bit more than twice as long as it is wide, black ink on green-tinged buff, a hundred-dollar bill, crisply pristine. His brow quirks as he sets his hand, his fingertips, on the one edge of it. “I have to ask,” he says. “I’m not keeping the change on this one, am I.”
Her shoulders lift, a gesture of ah, “Twenty percent of a well drink?” she says. “Best I can do. Funny, isn’t it, how,” lifting her hand from the bill to take up the tumbler, “you get even a little bit of money, you end up feeling broker,” slushy clink of ice as she twiddles the glass, “than you did when you had nothing,” and she sips.
“Hilarious,” he says, folding the bill away, turning toward the cash register down at the other end. She takes another, longer, deeper sip, turning on the stool to get to her feet, and nearly crashes into the man stood too close behind her, slopping whiskey from her glass, “Shit,” she says, switching it from the one hand to the other, shaking out her fingers as she sits herself back down, “did I get any on you?”
“Joliet Kendal Maguire?” he says, and her apologetic grin is washed away. She looks him up and down, slender and tall in a sharp black suit, his white shirt scored by a skinny black tie, his thinning dark hair closely cropped, eyes hidden by a pair of classic black sunglasses, and recognition splashes across her face, “You!” she says.
“My name is Mr. Loudermilk,” he’s saying, “I need you to,” but then, shaking his head, a quickly uncertain flutter, “we’ve met,” he says.
“You got shot,” she says.
“That’s immaterial,” he says, a flicker of a gesture, and then the recitation resumes, “I need you to come with me. It’s for your own protection, I assure you.”
“Yeah,” says Jo, “you guys, you need to coordinate better. That’s why you already put me here, for my own protection. And, ah, everyone else’s.”
His brows pinch behind those sunglasses, a frown. “We didn’t, put you here,” he says, folding his hands together, fingers interlaced.
“Upchurch,” says Jo.
His index fingers lift, steepled, “She,” he says, “isn’t,” but then, more deliberately, “she’s not,” he says, but then falters, and “Yeah,” says Jo, turning away on her stool, “you really need to get your stories straight.”
He leans over close beside her, hand braced by her elbow on the bar, “You need to come with me,” he says.
“I need,” she says, “to get my change, enjoy my drink, I need to figure out what I’m gonna say to, to, there’s a lot of things I need to be doing. None of them’s got a goddamn thing to do with you.”
“Everything okay?” says the bartender, warily close, bills folded between his fingers and thumb, and “Yes,” says Jo, “we’re fine, it’s all okay, yes,” taking the money, rifling through it to peel out a single bill and hand it back, “bring me another,” she says. He looks from her, to the glass, to Mr. Loudermilk looming beside. Nods, once, and steps away. “I assure you,” says Mr. Loudermilk, clipped and quiet, “Joliet Maguire, that whatever–”
“You don’t get to call me that,” snaps Jo, tucking the rest of the money into a pocket as she turns on the stool to glare up at him. “Maybe I don’t trust Upchurch, but you? I don’t know you at all, or your friends, and you sure as shit don’t know me. So she’s one up on you, there.”
“I know what you have,” he says, flatly grim. “I know it has a hold on you. I know what it can do, and what it’s already done. What it’s doing, even now. You must. Come. With me.”
“You know,” says Jo, lifting her tumbler nearly drained, “I’m actually kinda glad to see you? It means I can cross you off my list. I’m back down to fifteen. Yay, me.” She drinks the last of it down. “Fifteen what,” he says, but she’s continuing, “What that means, I’m talking to you, what it means is, if you start to get the least bit annoying, say, I just have to pull out my gun,” she lifts her hand, index and middle fingers extended, thumb cocked, “and pop! you’re out of my hair for the next little while. But,” she says, leaning close, “you really piss me off? Maybe then I let it out, this thing I’ve got,” she taps her breast twice, three times, just above her heart. “Wipe you out of ever having been. No one would know. No one could possibly know– heck, maybe you aren’t the first they’ve sent. Maybe I’ve done it already. Who could say?” He’s looking up and off by the time she gets to this point, at anything but her. “Well, Mr. Loudermilk?” she says.
“You can’t,” he says, looking down to her again. “You couldn’t possibly.” He’s shifted, drawn back, straightened his shoulders. “You should come with me,” he mutters. “Ms. Maguire, I assure you. It is very much for your own good.”
“I already got plenty of good,” she says, turning away.
“I’ll be around,” he says, and sets a blank white card on the bar by her glass. “You’ll call.”
“Don’t wait up,” she says.
“Terrible habit, I know,” says the bartender, taking up the empty glass, setting a full one in its place, “but I’m gonna ask, again, is everything okay?”
“It’s nothing,” says Jo, pushing the card aside as she lifts the new glass for a sip, then a gulp. He’s wiping a patch of the bar that isn’t noticeably damper than the rest of it. “I mean,” he says, “was he, ah, some sort of cop?”
She snorts. “You know what they say. All cops are bastards.”
“The hell is my stuff?”
Her mother sits up on the bed and aims the remote at the big screen television there on the credenza, shutting off the stern detective, You mean Mackenzie, she’s saying, and the screen goes black. “Shut the door,” she says.
Jo takes a ragged breath, then turns with a jerk to seize the door and slam it, clunk and thunk of the flip-lock hardware bouncing with the impact. “What did you do with my stuff?” she says belligerently, “all my, bags, the clothing, that I just got, that I have been, it was, I had it all still in the bags, in two-seventeen–”
“Jo,” says her mother.
Jo’s mouth snaps shut. Her arms, spread wide, drop to slap against her jeans.
“It’s all right here,” says her mother, pointing to the drawers in the credenza, “perfectly safe. As will you be.”
“Ma,” says Jo.
“When you are not cleaning rooms, or working the front desk, you will be here. With me. You will not be using any more, empties, by yourself.”
“Mom,” says Jo, slumping with a glower. “That’s not gonna–”
“You were out all night, last night,” scooting, pushing herself to the edge of the bed, “you came back in such a state,” getting stiffly to her feet, “Lord only knows what you were–”
“That’s none of your business, Mom. You don’t need to know what I’m doing every goddamn hour of every goddamn–”
“You are high, Joliet!” Her mother’s expression stonily resolved, she takes a step away from the bed, toward Jo. “Or drunk. Already. Again. It’s not even five o’clock in the–”
“It’s Sunday!” snaps Jo. “I’m a goddamn adult! I get a fucking day off, and you don’t get to–”
“Attitude!” snarls her mother, taking another step, and a deep, restorative breath. “You have no job,” she says, quietly, another step, and another, quite close now. “You have no money. You have no house. You came to me for help, and you will take that help as I give it to you, or you can march yourself right on out that door. Go back to your friend, your dealer, your, your,” biting her lip, “pimp,” she says, “whoever it was who bought you all that,” looking over to the credenza, “those things,” she says, but yelps as Jo with a lurch pushes past her, headed for that credenza, “Joliet!” she cries, but doesn’t hasten after. Jo’s yanking open one drawer, another, “Where,” she says, slamming the first one shut, “where’s the box. Dad’s box. Where’s Dad’s box,” yanking open another drawer, looking back over her shoulder to her mother, who’s wordlessly pointing, past her, past the credenza, to the unlit alcove at the back, the closet there, across from the bathroom. Jo slams the drawers shut, heads over and back to haul the closet door aside with a shuddering squeak, peering into the shadows, stoops of a sudden to yank open the box there on the floor of the closet, rummaging about.
“Jo,” says her mother, hesitant, querulous.
She stands, shuts up the closet more carefully. Turns about, a composition book in her hands, the cover of it starkly marbled black and white. “Jo,” says her mother, more certainly, but Jo’s looking past her, heading past her, for the door to the room that she opens, “Joliet!” says her mother, but she steps out, closing it gently, but firmly, behind.
The office, cramped, warmly lit by low afternoon light, a young man behind the counter who doesn’t look up from the glossy black book in his hands until Jo steps up and around to his side, opening a drawer, “the heck?” he says.
“Pen,” she says, digging into the drawer, paper-rustle and plastic-crinkle. His one hand keeping his place in his book, he reaches across himself to fish a pen from the jar at the other end of the counter, then leans over and down to offer it to her. She looks up a moment, to the pen, to him, then back down to the manila envelope in her hands, softly wrinkled.
“Jo,” he says.
She looks up once more, and down again, then tucks the manila envelope back into the drawer. She takes the pen.
“Wendy being a bit much?”
“Don’t ask,” she says.
Outside, the unseen ocean somewhere behind and the sun, angled hot and high, her shadow a sharp black stub bobbing before as she sets off up the street, the two-storey wing to her left, the one-storey stretch and outbuildings to the right, both painted a buttery beige and trimmed in umber, a couple of pickup trucks, the sedan, the minivan, sunlight piercing from glass and chrome and candygloss finishes, baking dust-clouded fenders, all of that left behind. The sidewalk ends, and she steps from concrete to dying grass, Community Acupuncture, says a low sandwich board to the right, Farmers Insurance, a sign planted there to the left, where a lawn’s been paved to make a compact lot. Beyond, the houses encrease, elaborate, retreat behind larger and thicker screens of hedgery and tree-rows, even as the verges of the macadam crumble ever more irregularly. A trio of motorcoaches parked at varied angles to the left, no, one of them’s a paneled van, Mid Coast Plumbing, it says on the side. Two nearly identical bantam-weight SUVs side-by-side before a garage, the smallish house behind beetled by a high red deck. Across another street and up the gentle rise ahead, and just past the next intersection the pavement abruptly ends, though the street carries on for one more block, a stretch of graded gravel that crunches underfoot, lawns huddling close again, a black luxury pickup, smashed taillight repaired with dull grey tape. The gravel ends with the last of the lawns, a tattered burst of ivory bobbing, Queen Anne’s lace at the foot of a utility pole, a denuded trunk lifted straight and true to uphold its corner of the web of power lines above, and more flowers all about, blue and lavender lupines, a bright red shock of paintbrushes, low white asters, each in tended, segregated clumps, and she steps over the flowers, beneath the gravid bow of a transmission line, onto the grass, then into the trees.
The trees, a screen of low but enthusiastic alders she has to shoulder among, kicking her steps through underbrush that thins and recedes as shadows softly set, alder giving way to young upstanding Douglas firs, needled branches high above that reach to heavily, greenly screen the slope below from all that blazing sun. She looks about, one hand up to brush back her sweat-damp, colorless hair, cupping a moment the back of her head, her other hand up and out to balance herself, gripping the composition book, and she sets off leftwards, angling down the gentle slope until her feet find a path, bared earth sketched through tufts of grass and tangles of vine and brush, the retiring ferns, all this rich dark green that seems to be holding its breath, a thickly patient silence broken only by her footfalls as she makes her way, houses hidden away to her left now, trees and more trees to her right, but thinning ahead where the light grows stronger, a brightness falling from glimpses of hot white sky.
Out from under, here a clearing the line of firs behind her along the slope, given way to scrub and brush and more stands of alder as the slope evens out, the wood untangling to abruptly end by the dusty pavement of an access road looped about a smooth expanse of grass, marked by lines of chalk, two great athletic fields set side by side. Beyond, an empty parking lot, a pop of color, a playground, tucked against the anonymous beige bulk of a school, low and wide, but here, this rocky knuckle she steps up onto, topped by a crooked tree, short-trunked, but with great boughs broadly spread, an oak, older by far than the firs, lofting a proudly rounded crown of glossy green. A hand on the cracked and fissured bole, she steps around, careful of those sprawling roots, smiling to see there a hunch of them forked, an accidentally perfect seat at the foot of the tree she settles herself into, looking out over the fields, the school, the wooded hills beyond.
She sets the composition book and the motel pen on the one root gnarled beside her, and works something out of a pocket of those new black jeans, a small clear glassine envelope, corner of it pouched with glittering golden dust. She works in a finger and thumb for a pinch, and as she does so in this indirectly hot white afternoon her hands, the baggie, the dust are engulfed with a radiance that is not so much brightness as clarity, shadows sharpening, colors fixing, becoming more themselves. She lifts her pinch to press a smudge of gold in the air, drawing it into a glittering ring, closing her eyes, smiling, a deep, relaxing breath. That smudge of clarity diffuses, spreads, melting before her, and when she opens her eyes after another breath there’s the singular blue and yellow and red of that playground, primarily popped against the blankly quiet wall of the school, the empty green of the fields hatched with chalk, the hush of the canopy above her, and the high white sky.
She lays the composition book open on her lap, flipping quickly through to a blank page. Takes up the pen, uncaps it. Lifts it to her lips, lowers it to tap the paper once, twice. A twist, a turn, she starts to write.
