A Fistful of Sky (10 page)

“Okay!” said Beryl. She dived at the box and grabbed six sticks of chalk. “Every piece is a different color. I dibs these first!”

I sat on the steps and watched my siblings as they knelt on the walk

with chalk in their hands. We were all supposed to be grownups, or at least young adults. Everybody jumped at the chance to get down on their knees and play with sidewalk chalk. We never let dignity stand in our way. It seemed to me that my family didn’t know how to grow up; we weren’t much like other people our age I knew, and it wasn’t just because of the magic.

Or maybe it was?

“Draw safe stuff,” I said.

We had had a lot of practice drawing and painting. From the time we were four or five, Mama and Dad had treated us to art and music lessons with a variety of teachers, and when most of us were ten or under, Mama read aloud to us before we went to bed. Dad gave us stacks of scratch paper generated by the University, and later our own sketch pads and lots of pens, pencils, felt-tip markers, and crayons. While Mama read, we illustrated the stories. Opal was really good at it, and Beryl was too. Jasper could draw a decent picture. Flint never showed his sketch pad after he turned eight, so I wasn’t sure what he was doing these days.

I liked art, but had lost confidence in my own ability when I was about fourteen.

Beryl drew with the tip of her tongue sticking out. She drew big. From the porch steps it looked like giant flowers.

Jasper stroked in a few lines, then sat back to study what he was doing. He slapped at the chalk dust on his hands, but it didn’t come off.

Flint had grabbed orange, yellow, pink, white, and powder blue chalks. He drew really fast. He glanced up at me. “Why aren’t you drawing?”

I was still trying to figure out what I felt about all this. I had been plodding along, looking for a direction to take, a normal life I could stand to live.

I liked tutoring English, and this semester I was taking Introduction to Teaching & Learning in K—12 Contemporary Classrooms. If I wanted to pursue a teaching certificate, though, I would have to switch schools, and I was so comfortable at STCC. I could take anything I liked.

I liked to sing, but I hadn’t done anything professional with it. Sometimes Jasper let me sing with his band for a song or two. People said nice things. But if I wanted to be a professional singer, I was pretty sure I should have committed myself to it already. On the other hand, there was that late bloomer thing.

Everything would be different now, wouldn’t it? Whatever my magic turned out to do, it was going to change everything else.

“What are you, chicken?” Flint said.

I grinned. “Gee, I haven’t heard that in a while.”

“Hah! Get used to it. Maybe it’ll be fun to tease you again.”

“Better watch your step.” I’d had a couple of miserable years after Flint transitioned when he had teased me a lot, even though I couldn’t fight back. Jasper had reminded me to carry the protect stone with me. That was good until Flint figured out how to hide it so I couldn’t find it. Mama said, as she always did when things like that happened, that in her family, it was customary to let the kids fight it out. Dad said maybe that was why she hadn’t spoken with her two older sisters since they were teenagers.

Now … something else that was going to change, apparently.

I got up, looked in the shoebox, picked some pieces of chalk, moved along the walk past Beryl, and knelt on the grass, a big blank sweep of walk in front of me.

Tobias had told us to be careful what we drew. No monsters, I guessed; maybe it would be better if I didn’t draw animals or people. So what, then? I sneaked a peek at Beryl’s work. She was still drawing giant flowers.

She saw me looking and sat back on her heels so I could see what she had drawn. “This chalk is great, Gyp. It goes down really fast and easy, and the color smears great. Look.” She had drawn hibiscus flowers the size of her head in Hawaiian shirt colors, blue, red, orange petals, bright green leaves, purple pistils with little fuzzy orange flower-bursts at the tips.

“Wow. You’ve been practicing. That’s great.” “I’m taking life drawing at school.” She rubbed her hands. “This chalk makes my fingers tingle.”

“Huh.” Should I be worried? Jasper and Beryl thought my curses wouldn’t hurt them. Wait and see.

It felt weird to draw with gloves on. I couldn’t feel the chalk’s texture between my fingers; I only knew I held something small and round.

I leaned over the sidewalk and laid down a curving line of bright pink. Beryl was right. The chalk was soft and smooth. It didn’t leave cracks and wrinkles where the pavement was rough, but wrote solid lines, almost like a felt-tip. I put a line of emerald green beside the pink. I’d try abstract stuff. Maybe that would be safe. I crosshatched in some baby blue, then stroked a line of gold nearby.

One of our art teachers, a wild old woman named Petra, used to make us close our eyes and draw big squiggles on giant pieces of butcher paper. Then we’d open our eyes and look for a shape. Once we saw something in our squiggles, we could draw to bring the thing into focus. Opal hated that exercise, but I had always liked it. I couldn’t make things look much like real things, but I loved finding order in chaos.

Now, though, every time my picture started to look like something I could identify, I scrawled some other line to destroy the reality. A different kind of challenge.

“Gyp,” Beryl squeaked.

I sat back and looked sideways.

Beryl scooted across the lawn on her rear as the flowers she had drawn pushed up out of the cement.

THE bush was vivid and garish, the leaves and flowers huge. The petals pulsed open and closed, and the large pistils swayed, bristling with pollen pompoms, reaching like fingers.

“Uh,” said Jasper.

I jumped up so I could see past Beryl’s bush.

A head stuck up out of the sidewalk in front of Jasper. It was the size of a small sheep, and had coppery, curly hair. It had Trina’s face. “Jasper?” it said, its voice too loud for conversation. “What happened? Is this a dream?”

“Uh, Gyp?” Jasper said. He glanced at me, and I shrugged.

“Hah.” Flint stood up and stared down at his patch of walk with a satisfied smile. I checked, though it was hard to look away from the head in front of Jasper—giant Trina turned this way and that, peering through the night.

Flint had drawn a big sheet cake on a fancy crystal platter. At least, I had to assume he had drawn it; now it looked real. The cake had white icing with blue and pink flowers on top. “For your celebration,” Flint said.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. My throat tightened.

“Gyp?” Jasper said.

“What’s wrong with me?” Trina asked so loudly it made me wince.

“Where am I? Why do I feel so strange? Where are my hands?”

My own drawing rippled on the walk. An edge lifted free. No identifiable image, it was a stretch of color. It flapped another edge.

“Jasper?” Trina said in her giant voice.

“Yeah, Trina?”

“What happened?”

“Gyp!”

My sketch lifted free of the walk, whipped through the air, and splattered itself across the front of my dress. Its colors bled down into the fabric; soon it was flat, meshed into my best I-am-a-businesswoman outfit so that I now looked like a refugee from a bad fabric sample book.

I sighed and went to Jasper.

“Gypsum?” Trina cried.

“Yes?”

“Why am I looking up at you both? Why are you so small? Where am I?”

It was strange. She really looked like Trina., but as she turned I saw the blur of crosshatchings shading under her brow and cheekbones and chin, umber, sienna, ochre; Jasper’s technique, excellent, like most things he did. Her copper curls shone with spots of white highlight.

“What is this?” Jasper asked.

“Why are you asking me?”

“It’s your chalk.”

“Yeah, sure, like I’ve ever done any of this before.”

“Is Trina really here?”

“I don’t know.” I shook his arm. “How should I know?” My voice sounded desperate and scared.

Jasper knelt. “What’s the last thing you remember, Tre e?”

“Sitting at the Bismarck with a beer in front of me, waiting for the music to start, wondering where you were. Did I fall asleep? This is a really weird, uncomfortable dream.” She glanced coward Beryl’s bush, which was growing bigger by the minute. It sprouted curly tendrils. Some of them had already clamped onto the porch; the plant spread across the front of the house, its giant flowers budding and blooming like ink dripped into clear water. The plant reached toward us, then sprouted new branches closer to us.

I held my hand out to the plant. A tendril curled around my gloved palm, a strange cool clasp, and a branch sprouted above it; a huge pink bud swelled, opened right beside my face. Its pistil brushed pollen across my cheek with sticky little fingers. I smelled exotic perfume: Hawaii, whorehouse. The pollen sizzled against my skin. The giant flower wilted. The plant shot out another tendril, gripped my other arm before I could back away, grew more leaves and flowers across my front. The branches curled around me, weaving me into a basket, but they weren’t tight. It was only when I tried to move that I knew I was trapped. They reached past me toward Trina.

“Gotta be a dream,” she said. “So surreal.”

“Beryl, go get some branch cutters from the gardening shed,” Jasper said. Beryl ran. Jasper batted branches away from Trina’s head, but tendrils locked around his arms, too, and then his legs. More and more of them, until he couldn’t move. Flowers burst out all over him.

It was one of many moments when I wished like hell I had a camera.

“Flint,” Jasper said, turning his head to dodge the kiss of a flower, “do something, will you?”

“Like a time twist?”

“No!” I yelled.

“What, then? Hey, I drew plates and forks and a cake-cutting knife. They worked out great the first time. How surprising is that? Boy, this cake tastes great!”

“Don’t eat that,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. It’s your celebration. I should have given you the first piece.” He brought me a plate with a huge piece of frosted cake on it. “Here’s a corner. Hey.” He realized that the plant had handcuffed me and grown around me until the only thing I could move was my head. He cut off a bite of cake with a fork and held it out to me.

I shook my head. “Flint, you made a knife?” Jasper said, his tone exasperated. “Could you maybe bring it over here and do something with it?”

“It’s really good,” Flint told me, “almost as good as cake you make.” He ate the bite.

“But it’s cursed,” I said.

“I don’t get that part.” He ate the rest of the cake. “It’s an expression of power, right? You did the chalk, I channeled the power of the chalk and

drew the cake, what’s not to like? Tastes fine.”

“Flint!” Jasper struggled, but the plant had wrapped all the way around him. He had no more mobility than I did.

Beryl came back, carrying pruning shears and flower clippers. “Should I cut it?” she asked.

Branches reached for her.

Weird, but none of them were interested in Flint.

Beryl dropped the pruning shears and unhooked the safety latch on the clippers. The blades sprang apart. “Don’t come any closer!” she told the branches, snipping the air with a harsh noise of metal sliding past metal. The branches curled away from her.

“Hah. Come threaten the ones on me,” said Jasper.

“You look so cute!”

Jasper groaned. “My mission in life.”

I glanced at Trina’s head. Huge red, orange, and blue flowers wound through her curly hair. She looked like spectacular topiary, or maybe the drowned Ophelia floating downstream with her herbs around her. Her half-lidded eyes looked dreaming and drowsy.

“Check Trina, Beryl,” I said.

Beryl knelt in front of Trina. “You okay?” she asked.

Pollen dusted Trina’s lips. She licked them. “I don’t understand the symbolism of this dream,” she murmured, “but it tastes good.” Her eyes closed all the way. Her mouth smiled. Faint snores came from her nose.

Beryl looked up at me, a question in her eyes.

I shrugged. In a way. Kind of hampered by plant arms around my shoulders.

Beryl turned to Jasper. She held the clippers toward the branches that snaked around him. The branches shivered but stayed where they were. Her mouth firmed. She opened the clippers and placed them around a tendril. She closed her eyes and the clippers. Snip! The tendril dropped to the ground.

The whole plant shivered. I felt like a salt shaker above a bad steak.

“If you don’t let them go,” Beryl told the plant, “I’ll cut right above the root.”

Tendrils shot out and curled around her wrists. “Yiiiiii!” she yelled.

Another branch shot out and knocked the clippers out of her hand. The plant took its time wrapping around her. Not the slow deliberation of real plant time, but somehow leisurely, artfully, a flower at each of her joints, a belt of flowers at her waist, a corona of flowers around her face all blooming at once, then leaning over to lay stripes of pollen across her cheeks and down her front.

For a while we stood there as Beryl’s bush grew denser around the three of us. It seemed satisfied with its hold on Trina and left her face alone. It left all our faces alone aside from dusting them with sizzling pollen, but it seemed to view the rest of our bodies as nice trellis space. As flowers bloomed and wilted a few inches from my nose, I figured out that each color had a different perfume.

“Well, okay,” Jasper said eventually. “Thanks for this instructive experience in what it’s like to be part of the landscape. We get it. Could you let us go now?”

A flower brushed pollen across his nose.

“Okay, how about you attack Flint too?”

Flint sat nearby. He had eaten about six pieces of cake. I wondered when the cake’s curse would kick in, and how it would manifest. Would he get sick to his stomach? Throw up all night? Change color?

“Okay, wait. I’ve been thinking about this. I finally figured it out!” Flint smiled and grabbed the shoebox. “I know what it wants.” He went past Beryl’s plant and flopped down on his knees, pulled colors out of the box and started sketching.