Zel (17 page)

Zel can’t remember when it happened, but one day she ceased to ask about Mother’s latest methods of fighting the unknown enemy. One day Zel realized she had no time for Mother’s pitiful excuses.

But time is all Zel has, so much time. Like wild flowers, Zel has year after year. She used to paint the flowers’ colors. Now she doesn’t remember colors. She uses only charcoal. She draws herds and herds of stampeding horses on the walls.

She stands and walks to the wall. She shoves the stone into the crevice. Mother does not know about the stone. Zel hides it in the wall—as she hid her raw fingertips in her skirts when first she dug the stone from the wall. But she wears no skirts now. Zel laughs and spit flies from her mouth. It falls on her bare shoulder. She spits on her other shoulder. On one arm. On the other. On her breasts, her ribs, her stomach. And now she is out of spit.

She looks at her bucket of feces and urine against the rounded wall. Each month she leaks blood into that bucket. She takes the bucket and dumps it out the south window where the sun enters now. But she does not stand a second too long in the light. The sun’s seduction has to be planned against. The sun tries to make her believe in colors.

Zel puts the bucket against the wall. Mother has told Zel not to dump her bucket out the window. She says she
will empty the bucket into a hole she has dug. She speaks of cleanliness.

Zel keeps her dress clean for Mother’s sake. She steps into it the moment she hears Mother calling. She steps out of it the moment Mother leaves. She is dressed, clean, and well behaved for Mother. All out of habit. She no longer thinks about why she obeys, why she walks or sits or talks or eats.

She cannot put that dress on and take it off over her head because of her hair. When she is not in her dress, she is naked. At least in late spring and summer. For other times of the year she has a thick cloak. It suffices, for the ivy that covers the tower holds in the heat of Zel’s breath in winter. The coarse wool of the cloak rubs her skin raw. Sometimes she dances till her back bleeds from the rubbing.

Zel wears the dress one hour each day—Mother’s Hour. Mother loves this highly embroidered dress that she gave Zel for her thirteenth birthday. The dress with the generous darts and hem that Mother let out as Zel grew. It is now full in the bodice. Mother says Zel looks beautiful in the dress. Beautiful to whom? Zel laughs. Her womanhood is wasted.

Mother has never noticed that nothing on the dress frays. Mother has never guessed that Zel goes naked. Mother doesn’t know what Mother doesn’t want to know.

Rascal chatters from the walnut tree. Zel races to the window. She crosses her arms on the high ledge. “Rascal, Rascal, tell me a story.”

Rascal flicks his black-brown tail. In the winter he stands out shamelessly against the snow, but now he’s one more variation in the shades of summer shadows. Zel rests her chin on her arms.

The squirrel jerks its head toward her.

“Wait, you little glutton.” Zel laughs. She gets her breakfast roll and returns to the window. Zel no longer fashions tasty shapes. She tosses a dough ball.

Rascal catches it and eats.

This is their secret routine.

Zel and her sharp stone. Zel and her squirrel. Mother knows nothing of these pairs.

Zel unwraps today’s fruit. Her fingers make indentations in the peach flesh, but only if she presses. It is of exactly the right ripeness. Not a single blemish. Mother takes such care.

Zel smashes the peach on the hot stone of the window ledge. She bites from the mutilated side. The juices run down her chin, her neck. They dry, pulling and tightening her skin in streaks. She bites again and waits again for the juices to dry. Again. And again. The smashed side of the peach is gone. Zel sets the remaining perfect half on the ledge.

The ants march in file to her offering.

It took weeks for Zel to lure ants to the top of her tower. She held her arm out as far as she could and squeezed a bunch of black grapes until the juices landed on what she hoped was the very bottom of the tower. The next day she squeezed a new fruit, but now she held her arm not quite so far out, so that the juices fell a little higher up the tower side. Each day she made the juices fall higher. She cursed the day when Mother brought a banana—strange tropical fruit, dry to the touch. But then she pureed the banana with spit between her fingers until it dripped easily. The plan worked because the tower’s sides slope lightly outward.

Once Zel had a colony of lice. Her impeccable searching led to their discovery in the paper covering her boiled eggs. Mother must have set the freshly gathered eggs near the paper before she cooked them, for these lice were of the kind that live on hens. Zel kept the lice rolled up in plum skin. She fed them daily, a drop of blood from her tongue, which she would bite. She invited them onto her head. If they would only have taken up residence in her hair, she could have persuaded Mother to shave her head. But they preferred her tongue blood. She tried denying them blood altogether. They waited patiently. One day she dropped them into her crimson ink. Zel, who had once considered all life to be admired, wiped out the lice colony.

The ants eat the peach. Zel could throw the peach
with all her strength. Then she would be an ant killer, too.

Zel and the sharp stone. Zel and the squirrel. Zel and the ants.

And that’s not all. Zel throws her head back and warbles deep in her throat, passionately like a pigeon in love.

Pigeon Pigeon flutters to the window. Her graceless body bounces heavily on stick legs; her eyes are stupid. Her gray belly matches the stone, but her head is white with brown speckles. A thoroughly unattractive creature. “I love your ugliness.”

Pigeon Pigeon warbles.

“Ah, you’ve been sitting on the roof, have you? You heard the horse stomp inside my room. You swooned in the horsey air.”

Pigeon Pigeon warbles.

“Oh, you were so excited you almost plummeted from the tower like a stone, you clumsy creature?” Zel steps back. “Are you trying to make me envious, talking of plummeting?”

And now Pigeon Pigeon is silent.

But Zel knows the bird will speak again soon. Pigeon Pigeon is a chatterbox. They used to argue over matters of import, like what the alm must look like on a May morning, or the smell of the cottage kitchen at dusk, or the thickness of Zel’s rabbits’ fur in winter. But Zel no longer listens to that sort of talk.

Pigeon Pigeon was the one who taught Zel to warble, to bob her head forward and backward. In turn, Zel taught Pigeon Pigeon to say, “Who? Who?” to the moon. Who is it that stalks Zel?

The moon is Zel’s last friend. The moon listens to Zel and Pigeon Pigeon’s questions, but she never answers. This is a deep kind of friendship, a union of cores.

Mother doesn’t know about the moon. But she knows about Pigeon Pigeon, and she is repulsed by her droppings. Zel puts her finger in a fresh dropping now and draws a chalk-white pigeon head on the back of her hand. She does not yet think about how she will conceal this drawing from Mother. She is titillated at the danger of leaving the drawing on her hand.

Once Pigeon Pigeon built a nest on a window ledge. Mother swept the twigs away and rubbed spores of toxic mushrooms on the stones.

The mountain girl Zel was loves those windows. The mountain girl she was knows the world beyond the windows is not a dream.

Dreams are full of horses. And a youth.

Pigeon Pigeon coos.

Zel coos back.

Pigeon Pigeon never tried building a nest on any window ledge again. Zel took to cleaning up Pigeon Pigeon’s droppings with bread crust. She throws them in her waste bucket. Friends can be intimate.

Like dreams.

Zel and the sharp stone, Zel and the squirrel, Zel and the ants, Zel and the pigeon. Zel and the moon.

Sometimes Zel hates them all. They come and go as they please. Even the moon seems to have ways to control her appearances, contriving special events with the clouds.

Zel thinks again about the youth with the horse. He had mixed feelings about her, feelings she saw in his eyes, feelings she often dwells on through the long hours. Their memory makes her warm when the whole world is frozen.

The youth has dark hair. Zel has light hair. The youth is rich. Zel has only her papers, quills, paints, brushes. The youth travels the world on a horse. Zel makes a world of a tower room. That they ever met was an accident. That she remembers him is but the result of her inexperience. She has no reason to picture the high curve of his eyebrows. She has no reason to yearn to put both hands on his face and let his eyesockets leave their imprint in her palms.

Zel looks at Pigeon Pigeon now with a fierce and sudden need. Fat Pigeon Pigeon can fly. But thin Zel cannot even move freely within the tower.

Zel’s hair lies in braids coiled in the center of the floor. She walks around the room with just enough braid uncoiled
to allow her to stand at the windows. When Mother comes, Zel lowers her braids out the window. They reach clear to the bottom. Once they were long enough to touch the ground, they stopped growing. That’s when Mother took to climbing Zel’s braids to the tower room.

Zel has asked Mother to cut her braids. After Mother has climbed in, Zel’s temples ache horribly. And, oh, after Mother leaves, Zel’s head pounds. Once she tried to gnaw through her braids, but her jaw wouldn’t do as she told it. It snapped dryly at the air.

Mother says the braids are necessary. Zel has asked her to use the walnut tree, like before. Mother doesn’t answer.

Zel walks now to the center of the room. She picks up a braid. She looks at Pigeon Pigeon.

Pigeon Pigeon warbles. The bird walks up and down the window ledge. She stops. She stretches a wing. A wing!

Zel throws the braid as hard as she can. It slaps Pigeon Pigeon from the window—
squawk
—it hits the tree, catches briefly, then falls away loose, yanking hard at Zel’s temple, radiating pain through her head and neck.

Zel shrieks. She has killed Pigeon Pigeon. Oh, cursèd is the hand that tossed the braid. Zel kneels and smacks
her forehead on the stone floor till blood runs into her eyes.

Oh, she should fall to the ground like Pigeon Pigeon. She should be smashed and lifeless on the ground.

The ground. The ground beneath her feet, dusty in the summer, muddy in the spring and fall, frozen in the winter. Oh, to run in a straight line as far as she wants. To run so fast no enemy can catch her.

Sometimes Zel is sure that there is no enemy, that Mother is not right in the head, that Mother has imagined all. But when she has tried to question her, Mother’s teeth chatter. She grows icy. Mother knows: Something out there is a mortal threat.

This day is starting badly. The morning is already slippery. Zel pulls her braid into the tower room again.

She is almost fifteen. She should be married, with child, baking bread and weaving cloth. She should not be alone.

Zel picks at the crusted juice on her neck. She goes to her bucket of rainwater and washes body and face. She looks at the drawing on the back of her hand. She washes it away roughly. She does not deserve to hold the memory of a friend she killed.

Zel goes to her stack of papers—a thick stack of fine linen paper, another sign of Mother’s endless generosity—and lays one sheet on the floor. She paints
Mother weaving a hoop basket. Mother will like it. Mother is skilled at basketweaving. After all, those baskets are made of reeds, and Mother has a way with plants.

Zel takes another paper off the stack. She knows before she begins that Mother will not like this picture. She feels her blood heat. She paints their billy goat mounting a nanny. She paints in rapid, messy strokes. Her fury fills the page. She stands and runs her hands down her body. She digs her fingers in, leaves the whitest of marks on each thigh. She bends now and crumples the paper and dashes to the window and throws the paper.

It almost hits Rascal, who chatters at her in rage. Zel thinks of digging her sharp stone from the wall and throwing it at Rascal. She could rid herself of two more friends with one throw.

Zel takes another piece of paper. She folds it down the center. She bends back the edges. The paper points, like a bird diving with wings outstretched behind. She paints on feathers, with quick, light strokes. Zel stares at the painted bird. It is not pigeon or blackbird or lark. It looks more and more like a sparrow hawk. She paints sharp, predatory eyes, extra layers of overlapping feathers. She finds she hums now, and the finding makes her almost happy. She will let her linen-paper bird sail into the pines. She licks her finger, then holds it out the window. The
wind comes from the west. From the south window, where she is now, the wind will carry the bird toward the marvelous lake of her childhood. She holds the bird out.

But no. She can do better. She puts the paper bird on the corner of the ledge, close to the inside so it cannot fall out. She stretches her arms and holds on to the outer lip of the ledge. She pulls herself up.

Zel takes her paper bird in hand and stands. She has climbed onto the ledge before, but never stood. She lifts her arms toward the skies. If a strong wind should come up, and strong winds do come up suddenly in these mountains even in summer, she would have no grip. She would plummet, like Pigeon Pigeon.

Yet she laughs now. She can see much farther than she ever dared to hope. And the sun helps today. The sun is not being evil, after all. Zel can see a great expanse of green lake. She can even see the peak beyond which she knows their alm lies. She can see the dark opening of the grotto that she passed on her way to market. She breathes so heavily, her chest rises and falls. It is hard to keep her feet from dancing.

She kisses the paper bird. “Be my soul.” She leans as far out as she dares and waits. A wind comes. Oh, merciful nature. Zel lets her bird fly. Over the pines and away and . . .

Oh! Zel teeters and catches her balance. A man on horseback has come riding from the north. The paper
bird swoops. The horse rears. The man jumps to the ground and picks up the paper bird. He looks Zel’s way. He waves the bird. He shouts words that are blown back into his mouth. His horse is Meta.