Belisama

Jack walks back in the trailer with a little box of gentle blue; larger than your usual eggs, richer too, he says. Says hen's eggs are for any old farming domesticate no matter how freckled brown and soul-wholesome they look, but the duck egg is reserved for the true children of the wilderness. Magical dawn-blue shells. I remember hearing once that folks in the middle ages would smash up their eggshells to powder 'cause otherwise witches take them and sail away. Mighty small witches they got in those parts, I remember thinking, and then I remembered Baba Yaga; fierce initiator of the Slavs riding through wolfish pine-needle teeth in her mortar and figured witches can be any damn size they want.

'You want eggs, Boo?' Jack calls out real gentle 'cause Boo was deep in her colouring and you didn't want to disturb that beautiful bubble expanding around her head like a halo of blown glass. Strawberry field girl, smile like a new moon. Jars of meadow flowers all around her little altar of personal peace; arterial spray poppies and cornflowers and the dandelion heads ready to Cinderella into a thousand wishes at midnight.

I'm busy stitching up a sleeve torn up bad on barbed wire. Red and blue checked squares sacrificed to sweet corn we browned up on the grill, watching Boo while Jack is cooing china blue babies out of his feral harem by the pond. She don't need an eye on her all the time as such, but sometimes she breaks the chain of her long dreaming and lifts up her contradictory body to go dancing by the river, and Jack's blood goes cold every time because she can't swim and the river means she is in a sad place. Sometimes she is up a tree and he hums to himself gettin' his hands in the greening vegetable soil of their patch because his girl is making a nest up there; talking to birds he'll never know the names of. The sky means she's happy as a woman can be trapped in the changeling baby brain of an old car accident that scythed her mind away.

Even her hair is a dandelion. So soft and corn-blonde wispy, like a breath would blow it clean away from her skull in Rumpelstiltskin reels of spinning gold, leaving just that valley of indented flesh where they took the smoking pieces out. She wears white dresses stained at the hem with smudges of bleeding grass, and no other colour. Jack finds careless summer shifts at the thrift, shed like snakeskin by girls ripening into autumn and buys them for her, armfuls of calm, cloud white.

'These are some coin of the realm,' I say, my mouth still working at the yolk explosion, my mind on Boo and soft colours of duck egg and cotton worn thin by limbs tumbling in sunlight. The eggs are lavish protein and I listen to the weary cells of my morning body say grace. Hallelujah.

Jack places a plate of eggs by Boo, her wrist is a swan's neck nodding over the paper for all ages to colour in by number. He jerks his head towards the door and I follow him with thread dangling off my arm into a sun slipping off the noose of early morning; roaring off the sides of the trailer, frying the grasses dry. We sit by the ashes of the night's fire and Jack twists the heavy metal ring he forged himself for their wedding round and round his finger.

'She's a little funny about food right now, can't tolerate a lot, but she loves the eggs.'

I have some vision of Boo pushing away plates of anything that ain't white and yellow. Anything that isn't her pale tranquiliser or her lover in the sky. Belisama, Jack calls her now, the wife of some old Celtic sun god; the Fair Shining One. He breathes in and looks hard at the ground and I get one of those psychic little earthquakes in me like I'm a rat or dog about to flee the streets.

'Good for the baby, duck eggs,' he says.

I go dead-sand hourglass still, like the whole of my being has to be suspended for this telegram to be pressed into my hand. Suddenly I've got a black hole where my mouth used to be so I decide to see how much matter it sucks in.

'You think I'm sick, huh?'

I think of Boo, half-brained honey-sweet thing, swelling like one of her dandelion heads. I think of her transcendent nun's face, and the heft of Jack's body that two seconds ago was as dickless as some tonsured novice. Thought that was how they lived. Thought they lay together in their doll's house trailer like smooth peg dolls, if I thought about it at all.

'It wasn't...like how you're thinking.'

'You don't know what I'm thinking.' Twisting the red thread hanging from my sleeve over in my fingers like I'm plaiting a thin dribble of blood.

'No, I do, see, I know what anyone who sees her would be thinking. But it wasn't like that.' He picks up a half-burned stick, pokes the ashes. 'She'd come down from one of her trees, and she was singing. She pushed her dress up and smiled at me, and her face, Natty,' he looks up at me then and his eyes are wet watercolour hazel. 'Her face was like...like a star had fallen to earth. She was so happy.' He stares off toward the riverbank, where the sadness lived. 'So happy.'

'Baby?'

Behind us there is a vague angel, weightless in prairie cotton, and Jack rises from that circle of sour and dead fire and holds her 'cause Boo just wants to reassure herself there is one solid thing left her in the world. And then I know where the grey pieces of that surgical valley went; to the hands of a man who molded them like butter, heart-shaped.


Written by: Natty Mancini
Photograph by: Karen Zhu

The Guardian Angel

 

The scream comes from the cottage, and I knock over my lemonade. Thick shards of clear glass float in a sugary puddle. I'm torn by which mess I should clean up first - the lemonade or the source of the scream. When I hear the door slam, I know I won't need to choose. Shawn will be here soon, so I focus on the sticky, dangerous mess on the old hardwood floors. This won't help the resale value.

“She shouldn't be there!” Shawn begins. He has the cool, confident charm of all great pretenders: Jay Gatsby, Tom Ripley - hell, even Don Draper. “I'm trying to entertain a guest.”

Shawn's guest glides across my lawn: short shorts, barely-buttoned blouse, and unruly red hair. She's a knock-out, and possibly out of his league.

The source of the commotion follows her. My angel skips through the grass, her black hair spiked like an anime character. Her sundress has a rainbow of stains, and she has only been playing outside for five minutes. Her giggle cuts through the humid air, and I smile because she's my baby.

“Lauren,” Shawn continues, oblivious. “We've talked about this. Cici needs to stop snooping. It's creepy.”

Shawn was the only person who contacted me about renting the cottage. It was a long shot, being so far from campus; I thought maybe I could snag a grad student, solitary and focused. Listening to the blossoming undergrad track star describe how he would “just, you know, run to campus every day,” I had my doubts. There was something sad in his voice, and I pitied him for being the popular kid no one liked quite enough.

When he showed up on my doorstep, I knew it would be a problem. The full, pouty lips. The small bump in his nose. Eyelids so heavy I don't know how he kept them up. Smooth skin. The clumsy beauty of youth.

Like I said, I pitied him.

“You knew about my daughter when you agreed to rent the cottage. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Make her stop looking at me!” Shawn says.

“Well, that's never going to happen,” I reply without thinking. Shawn stares at me with a look of repulsion and confusion. I sigh. “House trip. Let's go.”

Normally, “house trips” involve the grocery store or the buy-in-bulk warehouse a town over. Normally, Shawn and I make awkward small talk over our lists, dividing up territories of mutual interest and annexing aisles. We bond over efficiency, and the fact that he doesn't mind shopping in the aisles I fear taking Cici: the ones with cookies, chips, and cleaning supplies.

This trip we are quiet, except for Cici's regular chatter from the backseat. My answers are short but soothing; Shawn's are terse and harsh.

“You're taking me to campus?” Shawn finally realizes we're driving his daily running route. The brick buildings loom ahead of us. “Lauren, I mean, we just need to figure this out – I don't have anywhere else to live – ”

“You think I would kick you out and keep all your stuff?” My laugh falls into the same rhythm as the turn signal. “You need to see something in the Sculpture Garden.”

“Oh,” Shawn visibly relaxes in the passenger seat. “There's an easier way, if you go by the English Department and – ”

“No, I like going this way.” It's the last thing I say to him until we arrive at the Sculpture Garden.

“Go play over there, Cici,” I point to a couple of polished metal pieces that I know she likes. With her distracted, I lead Shawn over to the sculpture. She’ll be here soon enough.

“I've never really looked at the stuff here,” Shawn says.

“I brought Cici to campus one day. It wasn't a good trip. She was so excited to meet him; I thought maybe he might change his mind. She’s not used to feeling unwanted,” I look away before Shawn can see me stiffen. The memory still leaves me angry and embarrassed.

I stop in front of a small stone sculpture.

“We were both upset. I brought her out here to cheer her up. She danced through the garden, laughing and twirling. She stopped at this one and started whispering, like she was telling it a secret.”

The full, pouty lips. The rough bump in the nose. Eyelids too heavy, even for stone.

“We come here on her birthday. We can't leave until she's seen this one.”

“It looks a lot like me,” Shawn says.

“Her guardian angel,” I say. “Stories you tell your kids...you never know how they'll play out later.”

“Does she think I'm her guardian angel?” Shawn asks.

“Yeah, I think she does. In her little world, that's how you fit.”

The trip back is silent. Exhausted, Cici naps in the backseat.

“Why wasn't it a good trip for her?” Shawn's question interrupts the still serenity of the ride, and it surprises me so much I almost drive the SUV into the guardrail.

“Wh-what?” I stammer.

“You said the first time you were at the Sculpture Garden, it wasn't a good trip for Cici. Why not? Does it have anything to do with not wanting to go near the English Department today?”

I do not answer. I don't want to. I don't know how.

“You don't have to say anything, Lauren, but people talk. I'm not interested in spreading gossip; who would I tell? But – well, I have Professor Lowell this semester and, uh, I'm going to give him really bad eval scores.”

I burst out laughing. Bad eval scores? Like that matters or makes a difference, or undoes any of what happened, any of the denials and fights and lonely, aching nights.

Who is this kid to think he can make a stand with a shitty survey?

Cici lets out a little whimper in her sleep, and her leg spasms. I smile, because she's my baby.

“Thanks,” I say to her guardian angel. “Say he didn't have that 'academic gravitas' you expected from a man with his pedigree. It'll drive him crazy.”

“Yeah?” Shawn says. His smile is so bright that for a second, I see what Cici does.

“Bonus points if you can work in 'esoteric.'”

Written by: Erin Justice

Photograph by: Chris Boyles