Beautiful Sorrows (14 page)

PIXIES DON’T GET NAMES

I was buying a six-foot one-inch stuffed shark from FAO Schwartz. A hammerhead. It was quite charming.

“I need it,” I explained to the cashier as he struggled to find its price tag.

“Umph,”
he answered me from somewhere under the shark’s belly. I couldn’t be quite sure where.

“You know. To help me sleep. I have nightmares,” I confided, sliding my credit card and signing my name. The cashier handed the shark to me gingerly. I could barely fit my arms around it.

“You have nightmares so you’re getting a
shark
?” he asked me. I peeked around from behind one of the hammerhead’s wide eyes.

“Well, yeah. Sharks are tough and ferocious, right? Don’t you think they’d keep a good eye on nightmares?”

The cashier battled the urge to roll his eyes, I could tell. “And what, pray tell, do you have nightmares about?”

“Pixies,” I said, and the cashier threw his hands in the air helplessly.

“I don’t think he believed you,” the pixie sang from my shoulder.

“Most people don’t,” I said. Then, “I wish that you were bigger and could help me carry this shark to the car.”

“Me, too,” the pixie said wistfully. He ran his tiny hand down the shark’s fur. “It’s a beautiful shark,” he said graciously.

“Thank you. I think so, too.”

Carrying the gigantic stuffed toy was no small feat. I dragged his tail on the floor and tripped over it. He got caught in the doorway twice, in the escalator once, and I nearly knocked a gangsta wannabe to the floor.

I heard him shout something about disrespect, and watched some baggy pants dancing around, but I couldn’t see any more than that over the shark.

“Huh? What?” I spun around a couple of times, but when I failed to ever see the guy face to face, I just gave up and left.

“Whew,”
I said, after stuffing the shark in the backseat of the car. “That was tougher than I thought it was going to be!” Of course it was. My car is a blue Geo Metro.

“I love you,” chimed the pixie. He patted my cheek gently with his tiny hand.

“Well...thanks,” I told him, and hopped into the driver’s seat.

He flew from my shoulder to the top of the steering wheel. “No, I really, really love you. You don’t act like you believe me.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a pixie pout, but it’s hilarious. Their pointy ears droop and their entire bodies sag like their bones have just dissolved. This particular pixie was practically oozing from my steering wheel in distress. I managed to keep the smile off of my face and I leaned in close to the suffering pixie.

“You know what?” I asked him. He tried to act uninterested, but he couldn’t hide the shine in his eyes. “I believe you,” I said, nodding to show my sincerity. “I do.”

Instantly he straightened up and zipped into the air. “It’s settled, then!” He shimmered his wings with joy. “Let us speak of our wedding!” The stuffed shark peered over the back seat with glassy eyes, but for the pixie, he was a fine audience. “First we shall have the most exquisite of foods,” he informed the shark, “and then, dancing!”

I backed the car into reverse and maneuvered carefully onto the street. “Watch out,” I warned the pixie, and then the little Geo shot onto the freeway. There was a tiny “woo-hoo!” and we were battling the traffic back home.

The thing about pixies is that they have an astronomically short life cycle. A day, actually. So this little pixie had been born at dawn, hit puberty by lunch and now that it was twilight, he was more than a little past his prime. In short, his biological clock was ticking like crazy, and he knew it.

“Your hair would look lovely in braids,” he said, and grunted as I swerved out of the way of a drifting semi. He paused, his lovely green hair blowing in the breeze of my air conditioner. “Have you ever worn braids?”

“Yes, two days ago,” I said, and his face lit up. “Two days ago! Was that the fashion back in those times?”

“Sure,” I said, concentrating more on my driving than his words. I caught a glimpse of his wings drooping out of the corner of my eye. Quickly, I said, “So tell me more about what you’ll be wearing?”

“Oh, it shall be glorious!” he began, and zipped around eagerly in the car. Even the shark looked bored.

“Dirk,” I said aloud.

The pixie stopped in his tracks. “Beg pardon?”

“That’s what I think I’ll name the shark. Dirk. With...some sort of Russian last name, maybe. What do you think?”

The pixie eyed the shark. “Dirk the Hammerhead. With something Russian. Yes, it’s perfectly lovely! He can attend our wedding!”

Pixies can’t live without love, so they find it wherever they can. Usually that’s me. It’s seldom that two pixies will hatch out at my house on the same day, although it’s happened twice. The first time, they were a lovely couple who asked me to be Godmother to their child. The other two were women who sat around writing mopey poetry about beautiful pixie-men.

“Why so sad?” I had asked one of them.

She had shaken her head in disbelief. “Imagine going
your
whole life without ever seeing a boy!”

She had me at that.

I was relieved to pull off the freeway, toward home. Once there, I grabbed Dirk-Something-Russian the Hammerhead out of the backseat and clumsily carted him up to the house.

“I’ll always love you,” the pixie said, eyes shining. “Until the end of time. Until absolutely forever. I’ll never stop loving you, not until the end of my days.”

I smiled at him. That last bit was partly true: he would love me until the end of his day. And that would only be about half an hour more. My smile faltered a little.

“Come on,” I said to my jubilant pixie. “Let’s go throw Dirk on the bed and see how he likes it there.”

The pixie grinned and sat on the top of my right ear. This way I could hear him, but he didn’t have to fly around. He was getting tired.

I sloppily made the bed and set Dirk on top of it. He took up almost the entire thing.

“Quite imposing,” said the pixie. He sounded faintly out of breath. I took him from my ear and laid him gently by the shark.

“Yes, he is, isn’t he?” Really, he was perfect.

“I’m quite certain he’ll keep those nightmares away,” the pixie said, patting Dirk’s sharky head. This was especially sweet, considering that the pixie had no idea what a nightmare was. They never slept, not when they were just allotted one day. There was too much to do and see.

I lay down next to Dirk and the pixie. “So tell me,” I said, pushing his hair back with one finger. He seemed to enjoy this and leaned into it. “Are you happy with your life?”

He seemed surprised. “Why, of course! What a wonderful existence! I opened my eyes and there you were, and we’ve never left each other’s side.” He smiled at me fondly. “I’m so very happy that I got to spend my entire life with you. How many people get to say—”

He never finished. His time had run out.

Disposing of pixies was never easy. I used to pick them up with a tissue or the dustpan and toss them in the outside garbage, just another routine added to my day. But lately, it’s been getting harder. I picked up the pixie and set him gently in a tiny cardboard ring box. I tied it with a cheery orange ribbon and set the entire thing in the garbage.

Tomorrow would be a new day and a new pixie. Already I could see the beginning of a blue and green pearly pixie egg forming in the corner of the window frame. I wondered what this pixie would look like, if she’d have long pink hair or if he’d be afraid of spiders. I wondered if I’d miss his entire formative years when I went out to get the newspaper, or if she’d be fascinated with Dirk the Hammerhead, and whether he would develop a crush on Judge Judy while watching TV. I wondered if he would die peacefully like my little pixie tonight did, or if she would just drop to the ground mid-flight, like so many others.

I wondered what it would be like to have the same friend always be by my side, your whole life long.

I wrapped my arms around Dirk, turned my face into his gray fur, and waited for the nightmares.

AVA

She knew that she was disappearing, that much was certain. It wasn’t the same as dying, not quite, and so she naturally treated it in the manner that it required.

Ava slipped her pictures out of the frames at her mother’s house. She crept quietly into the homes of her friends and old lovers and did the same. Her first boyfriend still had her senior year picture in a shoebox with a few love notes from her and the girl that he had cheated on her with. She burned those, too, for good measure.

She ceased to talk those last few weeks, because she heard once that sound never disappears but bounces off the planets, deep in space, forever and ever. She wanted the sound of her voice to fade away so gradually that nobody would miss her. She erased her name out of everybody’s letters, their conversations, their minds.

It took some time, but she eventually managed to erase her face from their memories as well. Zack B., the boy who sat next to her in English for four years straight, was the hardest. This was surprising, since they were never really close friends, not in all that time, but his brain had wrapped around her blonde hair and he refused to let her go. It was kind of sweet, actually, but in time she won out.

Her hair grew lighter and lighter. She forgot to eat and her body thinned and her stomach stuck against the bones in her back. When she gazed at the world around her, the color drained out of her eyes until they were perfectly clear.

It was a Wednesday, her last day. She hadn’t worn any jewelry in weeks; it was too heavy and she wanted to be weightless. She breathed in once, twice, three times; the wind fluttered the curtains and there was a soft sound, a rustle of white beach sand that fell chiming to the floor, particles that were too small to be anything of consequence, to be anything at all.

SHE CALLED HIM SKY

There was a boy. And there was a girl. Many stories begin this way.

The boy was a sad, beautiful boy. He carried something small and bruised in his hands. The boy stumbled through the forest, tripping in the ivy and knocking his head against the trees. He staggered through the desert, falling down and walking on his knees. He crawled through the arctic cold, blowing on the slight, battered thing in his hands.

One day the boy met the girl.

She was passing through the cornfields when she saw something pale amidst the green. She stepped closer, and realized it was a white hand, palm upward. The hand belonged to an arm, and the arm attached to a very-much-asleep boy. His other hand was fisted tightly.

“Boy,” she said, and pulled on his outstretched hand until his eyes flew open. They were black as night with no white at all and shone as though he were crying. His oil slick eyes roamed around a bit wildly until they landed on the tan face of the girl.

“Hello,” she said, and studied him seriously. Then she smiled. “I think you could use some help.”

She took the boy home, gave him a bath, and gave him a name. She called him Sky because he always looked so sad, like the stars look sad. She thought of how the moon was always alone, never invited to tea, an eerily beautiful voyeur. Sky was just the right name.

The girl didn’t have a name herself, and it didn’t matter because the boy couldn’t speak. He just held whatever it was tightly in his hand, careful never to drop it.

“May I see what it is?” she asked him, and after thinking it over, he slowly opened his fingers.

It was a heart made out of red crystal, only now it was fissured and tender to the touch. The fire inside the heart had almost gone out, and even as the girl watched, a small bit of it crumbled to dust and fell away.

“Oh,” said the girl. She looked at the boy. “Sky,” she said, “I might be able to fix this. It could take me a while. May I try?”

He watched her with his strange eyes and then he nodded. The girl gingerly took the heart into her warm hands.

“I will take it into my shop where it will be safe. I will bring it back to you when the moon is the same shape it is now. All right?”

Again the boy nodded. The girl held the heart close to her chest and ran back to her shop. She carefully set the heart on a scrap of blue fabric, and surveyed her many tools. Then she got to work.

Every evening she worked on repairing the red crystal heart, and every day she spent time with the boy. He pointed at the birds and she told him their names. He pointed at the water and she showed him how to wash. He pointed at the honey-haired girl who lived down the lane, and the girl’s eyes stung a bit.

“Yes, she is very pretty. And very, very kind. Her name is Asphodel, which is a type of lily. Me? I am not called anything.” She smiled at the boy. “The sun is going down. I shall leave now to work on your heart.”

She worked so hard that she didn’t see the sun for days, but the time had come. The moon was fat and heavy in the sky. The boy’s eyes pulled away from Asphodel’s home long enough to see that the girl was walking toward him, something carefully cupped in her hands.

The heart was beautiful, shiny and full of burning life. The fissures had mended, the broken edges had been smoothed and polished. He held his hands out for it, and the girl let her fingers linger on his for a second when she passed it to him. Then she pulled them away.

“It is good, Sky. It is strong and able to withstand much, I think.” She watched his liquid eyes drift toward Asphodel, a compass to True North. Her lips turned upward. “I believe it is strong enough to survive if you give it to Asphodel. I think that you should try.”

He looked at her then, gave her a brotherly kiss and sprang to his feet. His footsteps were whispers.

The girl picked her way through the flowers on the way back to the shop, but she never made it. She fell, silently, and her hand found its way inside her shirt to the hole where her plump, healthy heart had been. The boy’s small ragged heart was still wrapped in fabric on her table, resistant to filler, resistant to files. Buffing didn’t warm it, fires didn’t fuse it. Sometimes, something so broken can only be replaced.

The flowers were soft. There was no sound.