Interfictions (11 page)

If she flies, will he fly with her?

Can he still hear the heavenly music?

Chloe looks across at the artist, and she hears the call of the sea. She looks at the brush, at the canvas, at the glistening oil paint, at the artist's moist, parted mouth, and Chloe's arms rise of their own accord to smooth the marks from her white skin. The crashing of the surf increases to a thunderous roar, and she tastes sea foam on her lips as she strips away the wisp of silk to stand naked at the window. The wood floor is as smooth as shell beneath her feet. She raises her hand to the artist, and she opens herself to Ocean.

Somewhere a clock strikes noon.

Chloe-Bear does not wear a bathing suit while she splashes in the waves. When her mother is not looking, she strips it from her body and flings it into the sand before plunging into the surf like a quicksilver fish. When she dives wearing the old patched suit, the sand tumbles down the neck and collects in a clump between her legs. This makes her itch, so little Chloe swims in her skin whenever she can get away with it.

Today she's playing dolphin, with much diving and breaching, and so the suit has to stay on the beach, where Mama is flipping through her notes like a crazy person. While Chloe-Bear dips and bobs in the warm waves, she wonders how much the little mermaid hated the prince because of the knives in her feet. She pretends to have a fish tail, and then a whale tail, and then flippers like a sea turtle, which is so funny she pees, but just a little. But it's the ocean, not the pool at the Y, so it's fine. Fish pee in the ocean all the time.

Her hair looks like carrots when it's wet, and that's fine. When she's done swimming, she's alone on the beach because it's Monday and it's not tourist season. She forgets all about her suit, and finds a long stick, because the rat's nest of her mother's gray hair rolling in the breeze makes her think of a poem. Naked, Chloe drags the stick along the edge of the surf where the sand is as wet and gray-brown as the belly of a seal. With her tongue hanging out, she writes a long poem in loopy letters, and dots all the i's with stars, even though that makes teachers mad. That kind of mad isn't the real kind of angry, especially when people like the words you write, with annoying little stars and everything.

When she finishes the poem Chloe signs her name in time to see the bubbly-white sea foam drag the first lines into the sea. After another surge of surf, the poem is gone, but it was kind of a dumb poem anyway, she thinks, so she takes a breath and lets the buoyancy take her. A wisp, a bit of beach fluff, Chloe drifts on a gust of salt wind, and her dragging toes leave long creases in the wet sand. Gathering the ocean spray around her like a cloak of invincibility she floats toward the far horizon, and then blasts off like a rocket into the high noon sun.

There has never been a boundary I didn't want to smudge. As a child, I wanted the ice cream with the gumballs stuck in it, and books with soft or crackly swatches of things to stroke. Later, I sculpted, played with geometric proofs, rode horses, acted in musicals, and read novels about kids who crossed into Faerie. In college, forced to choose a curriculum, I stumbled on classical studies and plunged my thumbs into a dozen pies. I gobbled ancient philosophy salted with classical mythology. I savored Roman art and architecture steeped in the pickling spice of three dead languages. When I wrote “Pallas at Noon,” I meant to crack open Athene's myth and transform the stuff of epic poetry into personal prose. I stargazed with the telescope pointed the wrong way around, married poetry with physics, and wrote muses into the mop water. I wrote half of the story backward, and I had a blast.

Despite my best intentions, Chloe Larroway is not a boundary crosser. She is a boundary
sitter
—a boundary
watcher
. It's in Chloe's silent watching, I hope, that the borderlands in her smallish life are invaded, and her vast inner spaces illuminated.

Joy Marchand

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The plate in the display-case is worked in a lovely indigo underglaze. It is quite the darkest I have ever seen, and has the most saturated color; but the pattern is not as I recall it—the little faces of the lovers are fearful as they run across the bridge, their hands barely touching. Behind them the whip is held at a lower angle than the one I keep in memory, and there is no rope flying from its end. The rest of the scene is tautly still. Even the birds above the bridge seem locked into place, drawing the viewer's attention down to the figures below them.

The glaze on the rare Ming version in the next case is a soft buttery yellow, and makes it hard to see the pattern. There is, however, a button you can push for a special light to increase the contrast. When you do, you can see that the foliage is antique in appearance and that the reptilian heads of the creatures, as they turn toward you, are remarkably distinct; the more so, considering the usual slight looseness of the brushwork and the odd effect of the lighting. From time to time the case seems to fill with a thin fog.

I look at the greenish-black glaze of the plate on its stand. The stream is choked with weeds, and the house dilapidated. One of the birds falls from the sky, feathers everywhere, as the old man fires a warning shot. His face is grim. The lovers on this plate are in a panic, not even touching each other, flying headlong down the endless bridge toward the path they will never reach.

Here the glaze is palest sky-blue on a dark ground. Our experts have concluded that the figures are indeed aliens. Possibly they come from the far West, or they may be hairy people from the most Northern of the islands off the coast. They are, nonetheless, engaged in the statutory activities—scourging one another with whips, and casting their victim from the bridge onto the rocks below. The wind is rushing everywhere, and you can see their little hats in the sky, along with a few sickled leaves from the tree-ferns or cycads that almost obscure the low dwellings to either side of the bridge. The dusty texture of the glaze is singularly appropriate.

The glaze on the plate is red-brown. The figures are tumbling from the bridge into the stream, as if from the lightning-struck tower. It is hard to tell whether they are yet alive, or have been felled by the blasts from the shotgun—their faces are not visible, and their limbs, tossing randomly, give no clue. The face of the Father is almost obscured by the cloud of smoke billowing from the gun; but one eye, huge and bloodshot, protrudes through a gap—.—.—.—it is clear, from the positions and angles of the elements of the scene, that he has shot his daughter first.

This [disk] is the largest of its kind that we have yet recovered, and emits the most intense radiation from its glaze. The base material appears to be [granite?], some ten [untranslatable unit] thick, and has withstood repeated firings, possibly including one or more to test or anneal it before the glaze was applied. Some earlier units of this type, presumably made before the technique was fully developed, have cracked; this one, in contrast, is in splendid condition, with almost no flaking or spalling. It retains nearly all of its details, from glaze pattern to makers' insignia to the highly distinctive tooling marks in the surfaces of the rock, which are visible where there is no glaze cover. The inscription on the central boss of the underside translates: “It is estimated that [untranslatable, name] spent 17 [time unit indicating long cycles, possibly “years"] at the desk [?] and bench, toiling to conceive and produce this flawless record of the events of [untranslatable (Place-name?)]. [Name, honorific form] went on to produce only one further object of note before succumbing to [?] in the [untranslatable phrase] times of wanting."

The plate is still hot in my hands, its glaze ashen-gray. There are no leaves at all on the trees, and the bridge is missing, though I can see the bases or abutments on which it once stood. The house at the left side is canted at a crazy angle and will surely fall in the next windstorm. The ancient man sitting patiently in the doorway looks at me and then at the gun in his hand as he points it toward himself, but when he pulls the trigger nothing happens. He ran out of ammunition long ago. Presently he will try again, however, and perhaps this time it will work. The streambed is dry except for a few pools of mud, and the plate falls from my hand to the smoking earth as I try to inhale the thick acrid air. There is nothing more for us here; we have ruined it all.

A Great Idea (if such a thing comes to you) will fill your entire life. Almost nobody can sustain several; I don't seem to be capable of even one. Instead, perhaps partly as a result of my having so-called Attention Deficit Disorder, there's this huge swarm of little ideas flittering around in my head like butterflies and rarely alighting in one place for long. Two other possibly AD[H]D-related issues: I don't parse time in a linear manner and cannot plot worth a damn; and I am perhaps just a tiny bit Aspergerish, so I don't parse humans as well as I might. The net result is that I'm essentially incapable of writing fiction of a more standard or usual sort; in fact, I find it difficult to write fiction at all. The pieces that I do manage, at long intervals, to produce are typically shorter than 1,000 words. (I do write a certain amount of nonfiction.)

Jon Singer

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Exactly one year before she saw the raven, Brenna began to dream of flying. Every night for a year. Sometimes she was in a plane, sometimes she was in a bird, sometimes she was just herself—surrounded by sky, clouds, and too-thin-to-breathe air. In the dark, in the light, over cities and oceans and fields, she flew.

Then, on the twelfth day of the twelfth month, the dreams changed. They ended with a crash and fire and the feeling of falling. Most nights she almost didn't wake up in time.

Exactly one year from the night the dreams began, Brenna struggled out of sleep, the phantom smell of burning metal still in her nose. She reached out for Scott—he was not there. He was never there. He had never been there. She fell back onto her pillows and groaned. Another dream of flying, another reaching out for Scott. She wished she could stop doing both.

Brenna lived in Manhattan—a small, insignificant corner of it way at the very tip-top. On an island of concrete and glass and steel she had found the one place still mostly untouched. It had a lake and a forest and a hill she could climb without ever realizing how high she was at the top. From there everything seemed far away, not far down. Not like when you're in a building. Or falling from the sky.

She had lived by this park, this forest, for two months now. The apartment, her new apartment, paid up for the summer. A graduation gift from her mother.

That morning, while the sky was still pink and yellow, she went out and up the hill to the small meadow at the very top. She thought of it as
her
place.

It was there in that meadow, amongst the crumbling remains of benches and street lamps long abandoned to the regrowing wilderness, where she first met the raven. She was meditating under a large oak tree when she heard a raven's cry. It didn't register at first, and might not have ever, if it hadn't been so persistent. It didn't stop until she opened her eyes and saw it standing on a fallen tree trunk. One black raven. It had been a long time since she'd seen one. Not since England, when she put aside her fear of flying to follow Scott across an ocean. A year ago.

"Did you follow me?” she joked.

The raven looked right at her and cawed. It came back to her then, a rush of emotion and memory, half hidden, half forgotten. One warm day by the sea, looking back over the ocean toward New York, a raven standing out on the rocks, and her plea to him.
I want to fly. I want to fly and be free and go wherever and whenever
—.—.—.—
I want to fly!
She wanted it so badly that she felt her heart would break.

The feeling had overwhelmed her then and it overwhelmed her now. Here in the forest, an ocean between her and England, and she could still feel it. She found that she was crying. The raven's call echoed in her mind, but when she wiped the tears away he was gone. Gone without a sound—or had there been wings flapping? She turned to pick up her bag and saw a feather, long and shiny and black, lying on the rock by her side. A feather just for her.

She showed the feather to a friend. The psychic one.

"Feathers are powerful messages and special gifts,” she said while Brenna absently shuffled a tarot deck. “Draw a card."

She drew the Hanged Man.

"Sacrifice."

"But of what?"

The next day she saw the raven again. He was staring at her through the bedroom window—the one with the view of the hill. She thought he was the only one, but soon there were two, then three. One day she saw them all. Twelve ravens, high up in the oak tree, watching over her.

She showed the feather to another friend. The non-psychic one.

"Crow's feather, you mean,” she said.

"It is? How can you tell?” Brenna asked.

"Because we don't have ravens in New York, we have crows."

They called to her in her dreams. She heard them but couldn't find them. Their feathers littered the floor; long and shiny and black. She dreamed of flying through a forest of black trees and shiny ebon leaves, always following the raven's song. Six nights of this. Six nights of searching and never finding. Six nights of waking up sweaty with raven feathers in her hair.

On the seventh night the dream changed again. She found herself in a little wooden cabin, fire crackling in the hearth, twelve small beds along the hall. In the middle stood Brenna, wearing nothing but a man's white shirt.

The ravens called to her from outside, but she did not want to go. One by one they flew in through the open door. And in a moment, a blink, an instant, they were not ravens but young men. The youngest of all looked a lot like her.