Mercy, A Gargoyle Story (6 page)

"Yes,” I say.
 
And then, "But we could do it together."
 

My belief in our togetherness was so big, but my voice was so small, it was all flushed away with the sick.
 
I pushed myself up from the toilet and stumbled past him to the sink.
 
"Maybe I'll just do it by myself."

"What's that supposed to mean?"
 

I ignored him.
 
Rinsed my mouth.
 
I could tell by his face that he still didn't see how much I loved him.
 
He couldn't see that I would work all day and all night, I'd risk everything, just to bring another speck of his love into my world.
 
My mind went wild then, trying to pull together the image of what our life could look like, but I knew that I couldn't make the picture of us work by myself.
 
With him still standing there, it seemed like a deception to imagine the picture that came more clearly to me, of just me and the tiny seed of him, growing strong in my arms.
   

"If you do that," his voice trailed as he stepped away from me.
 
I thought then that it was the smell of the vomit, but it wasn't.
 
Now I see that it was because in that moment, I was a matador, with my sword drawn and poised to slit the thick veins in his neck, and he was afraid.
 
I was going to make his whole future bleed out on the filthy floor.
 
His voice frayed and it echoed off the tile walls and the metal, toilet stall doors.
 
"If you go ahead and have it, then I want you to know that we're over."

The sudden fear of losing him fluttered up in my chest.
 
I never expected he would think of ending this.
 
We were
us
, as if that could never change.
 
He’d say things about my body and how he couldn’t believe I wanted to be with him and I’d pull him to me and tell him how stupid that was.
 
He was everything to me.
 
Wanting him had become such a
 
habit that the thought of being without him made the sour knot of fear beat against my ribs and climb into my throat.
 
The lonely sick was more powerful and rancid than the little one in my stomach.

"Don't be mad,” I pleaded.
 
"I was just thinking that maybe..."
 

"There is no maybe.”
 
His voice was rooted again and he stepped forward, his fists balled at his thighs, his stare as pointed as a bull that had escaped the ring.

I looked away, at my own face in the mirror instead.
 
I had to stare to see myself the way I'd never be again.
 
To remember who I was, what I looked like, before I did this thing.
 
Before knowing if I'd already taken, one step too far to ever get him back anyway.
  

"I'll get rid of it,” I said.

He stepped close behind me then and wrapped his arms around my waist.
 
He curled against my back, a heavy useless heat.

"I'm sad too, you know."
 
The strum of grief in his voice seemed off tune.
 
"I guess I can come with you when you do it."

The vomit came up so quickly; I shoved him away to lean into the bowl of the neighboring sink.
 
The tips of my hair floated in the sick and I started to cry.
 
I didn't think I could keep on standing there on my own, but he grabbed his nose, laughed, and stepped away.

"Peeee-uuuu!"
 
He waved a hand in the air.
 
"I bet you're gonna be happy when you're not doing that anymore!"

I swallowed down the hot fist in my throat.
 
My arms trembled and my knees buckled, but I snapped them back into place.
 
I didn't think I could keep standing there on my own, but I did.

***

The rain doesn't seem to ever want to come again.
 
It is bad enough to have no other voice pairing with mine, but it is worse to have sunlight haunt me.

The first day without clouds sends me scuttling into the square loaf of shade made by the staircase enclosure.
 
It is fine, until I see that the sun means to push me into a corner and set me on fire.
 
I poke a skin into the sunlight and sure enough, the heat licks at my finger, petrifying it to a chunk of useless cement.
 
I pull it back and the heat fades, the returns skin slowly to ruined leather.
 
Even wanting to die, I am too much of a coward to allow it to happen.
 
The finish line of my life was only an inch of shade left and instead of running over it, I press back as the sunlight creeps toward me.

The shade dwindles to sandwich size and then further, to only the cut crust and I have no choice.
 
I scurry across the blazing rooftop to the discarded tar buckets, my feet turning to stone slabs that
kerchunk
with each weighted footstep.
 
I turn the two buckets over in a panic, trying to lodge my head inside one.
 
A bunched pile of white canvas cloth drops out of the other.
 
My wings turn to cement on my back and I fall with an
oomph!
 
onto my belly.
 
I can barely lift my arms, let alone breathe, beneath my own appendages.
 
I fall on the canvas cloth and roll as well as I can,
kerthunk! kerthunk! kerthunk!
dragging the cloth with me until I am rolled into a gargoyle-and-tarred-canvas burrito.
 
The cloth is morbidly hot, but I am finally covered from head to toe.
 
Tar that had once slopped onto the fabric oozes back to life just like my body does, sticky as chewing gum and perfumed like death.

I lie there for hours, thinking of how ridiculously desperate I am not to die, while death is the only thing that continues to occur to me.
 
When the door casts its shade again, I scuttle out from under the hideous tar cloth and press myself against the hot siding of the enclosure.
 
My cement-shoe feet and stone wings return to chalky, gooey-gray wrinkles of skin after some cooling hours in the shade.

The next day, I hide until the door shadow is only as thick as a bread crust and then, I retreat beneath the cloth and think of how much more pleasant lying in a grave would be.
 
How lucky the ones are whose minds are given to the worms.

Each day, as noon approaches, I battle my cowardice to just let my skin burn and each day I find myself flattened beneath the tarred blanket, gasping, as I cling to my miserable, dead life.
 
Those hours, in which the shade becomes a sliver too slight to hide in and those afterward when the shade is desperate to reclaim its footing, I lie beneath the drop cloth and wonder if there is some easier way to cease being.
 
If there is ever an easy death that actually offers finality.

The rest of my time I spend squatted beside the lion, trying to leach some companionship out of his motionless figure.
 
I scan the horizon, looking for clues to what he must see and find rooftops too far to leap to, a sky too far to reach, and life carrying on below us without ever glancing up to see the hideous creatures gaping down at it.
 
There are a million things to see and I make lists in my head to suggest to Trickle, during the next rain.

And once, in the seven days, I try to fly.
 
It is a miserable attempt, off the height of a tar bucket, but it convinces me well enough, as I crash down flat on the roof, that I am not meant to fly.
 
These wings are flabby inside.

Despair, day after day, weighs me down.
 
On the sixth day, I crawl out from beneath the drop cloth and shake it out, flipping it to its slightly cooler side and replacing it in the same square that it has made of shade all afternoon.
 
The rest of the rooftop will be too hot for walking for a few hours yet, so I sit on the square of white canvas in the shade of the closet stairwell and think of death, as usual.

And there is a rumbling behind me, from the depths of the closet.
 
It sounds like a stampede of indoor rain at first and then the voices come, sharp and cheery and laughing, voices of excitement and hope and energy.
 
Voices that are the wiggling bodies of life itself.

The door rattles and swings open and three children flood the roof in their rubber-soled sneakers, oblivious to the hot tar beneath them.
 
They come charging out with trucks, chalk, and tiny, metal cars.
 
One of them yells to stick the boot in the door.

I am frightened to be seen.
 
I assume I must not, but there is not a place to hide and moving now would certainly give me away.
 
Instead, I freeze near the roof ledge, plunked down with the talons of my hands curled under.
 
There is nothing I can do about my feet.
 
I am spotted in seconds.

A dark skinned boy with tadpole eyes halts the moment he rounds the door cubicle and spots me beneath the cloth.
 
A second boy with thick, black glasses plows into the back of him.

"Whoa!" the one with glasses whoops.
 
They pull the tarp from me.
 
A red headed boy pops up behind the first two.
 
Behind my mask, they cannot see my eyes slide toward them, counting the three of them.
 
The last one on the roof, a girl twice all the heights, comes to stand behind the small crowd of shorter heads.

"Wow.
 
There's an ugly thing, huh?" she says, knocking on the edge of my curled talon.
 
"Wonder who put this one here?"

***

She is not beautiful, this girl, but what I always loved about her was that she never knew it.
 
Her tiny pot of a pierced belly shows from between her cut-off lime tee and her frayed, cut-off shorts are stretched over her thick behind.
 
Her hair is tied up in a ponytail and she fans the back of her neck with one hand.
 
She's always moved with the unrehearsed grace of a swan.

These boys - I recognize them only from her descriptions - are her foster brothers.
 
Even though I've never met them or been to her house, it doesn’t change that I always believed Ayla was my best friend.

The bright sun shades the stunned blinking behind my mask.
 
I'd forgotten that I was someone to her too.
 
When I went to the pier with his boat, she didn't know.
 
I wonder how many nights she waited for me at the coffee shop to come, before she heard.
 
Or before The Boy thought to tell her.

The kids stand back from me, not so brave, and throw questions at her:
 
Where'd it come from, Ayla?
 
Who's is it?
 
Is it ours?
 
You think it's a present?

She walks in a circle around me, inspecting me, but there's no part of me that she will be able to recognize anymore.
 
The questions turn into a small war:

Who dumped
that
here?
 
It's a piece of junk.

Do you think somebody wants it back?

What, you want it?

Maybe.

God you're dumb.

It's on our roof.
 
Who asked you anyway?

And who the fuck asked you?

The last comment comes from the boy with a firework burst of freckles across his cheeks.
 
It's his profanity that stops the girl's examination.

"Where'd you get that mouth from, Cletus?”
 
Ayla's voice is the side of a pointed icicle.
 
"Because you ought to get rid of it, before Selene makes you pay for it."

Cletus, of the freckles and fuck words, shuts his mouth.
 
But the kid with the glasses, the one Ayla used to call Nerdiac, opens his.

"She ain't my mom," he says.

"She's not mine either," Ayla says, which is funny, because Ayla used to call her foster mother
Mom
.
 
She was vehement about it until about three months ago, when Ayla realized that on her eighteenth birthday the state child care system would cut her loose.
 
Ayla kept waiting for her foster mom to invite her to stay, but the last I knew, Selene had not.
 
From Ayla’s response now, it doesn't look like anything has changed.

The door to the stairs opens and does not shut, as the boot must still be in place.
 
From around the corner comes a woman that looks as worn as a sixty year old sneaker.
 
Her hair is gathered up in a large bun on the top of her head.
 
She looks like she was very fat once, but now her skin is just a withered, translucent balloon.
 
Her bones move inside it like tiny, trapped birds held together with string and she moves as if it all hurts.
 
The moment she spots me, the soft furrows of her face deepen.