eatnanowrimo

I was eighteen; I was in Roumania, and I’d just saved enough money to visit my cousins in the old country, the summer before I started my scholarship at a prestigious East Coast university. I was taking math; I liked the way things worked when they summed perfectly, into sense.

My cousins — I didn’t think much of them, when we met; I thought they were bumpkins, and they told me stupid stories about how I should stay out of the woods because they were cursed. They plied me with drink and tried to fix me up with one of their friends, a girl from the city who turned her nose up at me, and flicked lint off her gleaming viscose coat.

Of course I went into the woods. I figured I would get a story out of it all, maybe make some friends at college by telling it, maybe keep some friends. Instead I took a turn down a path I was told not to go, and there I met a woman, flaxen-haired and beautiful.

She told me she was under a curse, and she asked me to stay with her for exactly one year. No more, no less. I was a product of cell division and genetic strands, everything reducible, explainable. Yet when I looked into her soul, through her eyes, something quickened in me, and it was wholly illogical. I gave her my heart. I gave her my soul, and drenched in sweat and lust, I understood love. I gave her her year. Almost.

The woods and the wilderness became home to me, and I thought a year was nothing, a paltry thing, a collation of days that segued into seamless seasons.

It was the penultimate day that broke me. I saw a girl, running in the moonlight, her ankles turned to me, her viscose coat swaying in the wind, the strips on her running shoes silver in the shredded light. It all flooded back to me. My scholarship, the bustle and crash of cities and dream machines — I set my foot down the path that led away from my witch woman, back to life.

But it was my woman who stepped out. She caught my hand.

‘One more day,’ my wife said (she was my wife, even if no paper ever told us so) — ‘one more day, and we would have been free forever.’

And she told me the curse had passed from her; it was on me now, to make a choice, to pick between my life, and that of our unborn son.

I was eighteen, and at eighteen you never realise how you will come to love something you made of yourself.

I chose to live. I left her. I went to school. I lost myself in calculus and figured I had my life worked out.

Nine months later, a rapping sounded on my door.

My erstwhile wife stood in the hall, something pink and mewling in her arms.

Our son died when he was eighteen. I told myself curses were nothing, coincidence, but that day he died, I started to see my life as a dream, something that had ended when I told it to start. I sat at his funeral, folding his shirt over and over in my hands, cubing it, as though I could reduce a lifetime into something solvable, into a simple matter of statistics.

No number will ever equate the death of your child. No equation will ever tell you how many long nights end up spent, rocking alone in lonely chairs.

His mother, long since back in Roumania, posted me letters, and pictures — our boy, growing old as I grew older. He was dead. I knew.

One day, at fifty, fifty-five, what does it matter – the letters stopped coming. I went to her. The cottage where we made love was empty. Empty, or void; I turned back the sheets, and there they lay, tangled bleached bones. Looking closer, curled up on her hand, I found it; the tiniest bones, foetal, a thing so small I breathed out and it was gone. I looked at my hands; the age spots had faded away, and I was eighteen again, and I stood and thought about love, and life, and death, and loss, and where I would go, and what I would do, and into whom I would, eventually, grow.

Now, at sixty, I wait for the dream; there are no letters, there never were. I wonder how it will end, but I already know. I go through the motions, but I have not been alive since I was eighteen, and everything fades, perfectly, to zero.

Every night I got myself in a different girl, but in a small place like Shadford you run out of fresh meat fast. I got bored and tried to get them two together, but I think those days you had to go down to the big cities for that kind of thing. ‘Least that’s what my friends were saying.

I understood Shadford, I liked Shadford.

“I never saw the likes of it.”

“Don’t know what the young girls are wearing these days.”

“Not enough!”

There was that new store just opened up across the road. From the grimy pub window I could see the storefront. There was a girl’s face printed on the big glass window, or stuck to it, however they do it. Her face was sharp and elegant, like a proper magazine girl. She was not at all like the soft round simpering girls I spent my nights in. I wondered if her hoity-toity sneer would break beneath me.

I walked home one night after everyone had gone to bed, and stopped outside her window and looked up at her. She sang of cities and plate glass and invisible barriers and love and neverending nights. I wondered if I could keep up with a girl like that.

Next night I passed the girl in the window again. She wore a smile that brimmed over with promises and meaning. I put my hands on her dew-fresh lips, under the rain and vicious wind, and I felt warm and wet and quite content.

I didn’t get a village girl and I didn’t go to the back of the car that night. I stayed with her a while and then I went back home and got in bed and thought lots of thoughts about her.

Then I was looking at her so long my hands turned blue and I went back into the pub and gazed at her, and before I knew it the sun was up and Mr Morson was asking what the hell I was doing still there and to get the bloody hell out and get some bloody rest.

My girls got mad because I was never out with them anymore, and one of them waited outside the pub one time and saw me mooning at my stuck-up love. She was Oriel Morson, a pretty name dressed up in a dumpy girl. I had been with her enough times that I was beyond bored, and I told her so. That bitch gave me one hell of a look, but I didn’t give her any back, and eventually she went off.

Night after, I found the glass in front of my girl covered in black spray.

First I scratched all the paint off her with a cloth and scrubbed her until I wore my nails all the way down and my fingers were all black and wouldn’t get clean.

Then I went to find that bitch and I blacked her face with my knuckles until she said she was sorry. I told her I wasn’t sorry and I would do it again, mark.

That night I was a bartender no more. She told on me.

I went back to my girl and I told her that would never happen again, and there in the glow of the sodium lamps she closed one eye and winked at me, and her smile got a little bigger.

And I did not imagine that, because the next night I was back there looking at her again and she was still winking at me.

And her shirt, her pretty silk shirt had slipped past her shoulder a little, and her red lips smiled knowingly at me.

I put my lips on hers. The glass was cold but her lips were warm, warm and soft as the rain fell all down around me.

“Mate,” they said, and I turned around, mad ’cause they ruined my moment.

Five of them all standing there, and that Morson slag standing right behind them looking all smug with her covered-up black eyes.

“I’m busy,” I told the lot of them. “Can’t you see?”

They looked at each other. The one with the bat said, “Is it alright, beating up nutters?”

“Look what he done to my face,” cried the damn girl, pointing at her sockets.

“Improved it,” I declared.

“What you waiting for! Ain’t you men?”

I figured it might hurt quite a lot, and I didn’t want that, so I balled my fists up in front of my face like a shield.

The song started right around then, low and alluring and full of dreams and broken promises. I looked out from under my hands. One by one they ran towards me, and I put my hands up again, but when I heard the first thud I put my hands back down. One by one they ran right at the glass and smeared on it like jam streaking down a kitchen wall.

It was an amazing sight, and I wish I could bring it back from time for you. Anyway, I went and got the girl who was shaking over there, and I best not tell you what I did next because maybe you wouldn’t think so well of me.

Then I went and got the bin and smashed it against the glass until my lady love finally floated free.

She came to my arms, an angel in two dimensions. Her paper arms wrapped tight round my turgid heart, which slowed to beat in time with hers.

I kissed her flat lips and the flat curves of her fat breasts, and hey I took her back to Morson’s where the fire gyrated in the grate and the spirits were calling to me. Long before I knew I would do it, I grabbed the bottles and threw them all over and took the longest swig in my mouth. And I put my Zippo in front of my face and sent my lungs out so it all went up, all went up around me and my lady love.

I’ll say now the saddest part; she vanished in the fire, not me. In the hospital I lie with my face all gone and my body weeping like my eyes would if they could and this is it, the whole story, the real story. They want to keep it alive, this ruin of me.

I turn my face to get the sun from the window. Under the bandages it burns again. I dream she comes. I did it all for love. I did. I did. The door opens and it’s the doctor come to run his tests on me. I dream she does not forget I dream I dream she knows I gave this all to set her free.

.

Time went by. He married, but not the girl in the window.

I came across the photograph the other day. He had his arms around her. Her lips engulfed him, incarnadine and timeless, yearning.

It went to a girl in Connecticut who’d stepped on a cherry bomb, and Francie felt good, for a while.

 

When Francie tried to give away her other foot, the doctors started to get antsy.

You need help, they said.

Francie said the only help she needed came at the end of a rotary saw.

They ran the full gamut of tests on her, but couldn’t disprove her sanity.

So Francie gave her other foot away, took it off at the knee. It went to a lady who’d slipped on the edge of a crowded train platform, who sent Francie pictures of her smiling children.

Still, Francie found herself lying awake at night, staring at the last limb. It burned, without burning. Not a single doctor would agree to help her with the one thing she needed. She couldn’t afford it anyway, because nobody would sponsor her.

 

He appeared on her doorstep one morning, all Hollywood with his sharp cheekbones and sharper suit, and deep hollows under his sallow eyes.

‘I just want to thank you for my daughter. Elina. You know what you are, Miss Faucer? A national hero. You are.’

Francie had never thought of herself as a hero, much less a national one. She felt awkward and unclean, sitting under the glow of his perfect white teeth.

‘You’re a hard woman to find,’ he said. He smiled the smile they plastered across all the magazines.

Francie said she had never expected anything, and she wasn’t doing it for anybody but herself.

He didn’t believe her. People never did.

She asked timidly what he would like from her.

‘I just want to thank you,’ he said. ‘I want to help you.’

‘I’m quite happy,’ Francie said. Then she looked at her arm.

He looked too.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Francie Faucer said.

 

It went on a long time, and each time the lines in Smithe’s face deepened. He always asked her the same thing.

‘Are you sure?’

And Francie said, ‘Just one thing.’

 

But Francie Faucer did not belong to herself, not even when she’d given away her eyes, that itched and burned and wept.

‘Are you happy now?’ Smithe asked, somewhere in front of her..

Francie’s eyes would have seen the deep line that furrowed Smithe’s neat brows.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Francie Faucer said.

There was a long pause. Then Smithe’s feet broke into a rhythm of taps, and Francie realised he was walking slowly away.

‘Mr Smithe?’ she called.

But there was nothing but silence in her house.

Francie Faucer opened the mouth, and then she had the worst thought; that all along, it had been the body that belonged.

Somewhere, Francie Faucer screamed. 

 

Clarence fiddled with the elaborate poesy for the sixieth time in six minutes. Six hours he’d spent on it, and he was on the verge of scrapping it again. A rose loomed from the centre of the myriad flowers, threatening to spill out. Clarence shoved it back in and wiped the sweat from his forehead. 

He forced himself out of his groaning chair. The hour drew near, the hour that Clarence Cobb’s life rotated around every month; seasons changed, but Clarence lived his life by the calendar of Alicia Corval’s coming.

 

The Corval residence was lively that afternoon. Clarence’s heart had sunk to his feet when the time had come for her to leave for college; it had risen to the level of his stomach when he realised that she was no longer a child – and now, looking at her vehicle parked in the drive, his heart leapt and pounded against the upper bounds of his throat, threatening to sing.

‘Today, Alicia, I’ve come to tell you I have loved you all your life,’ Clarence said to the empty air.

There were voices coming from the living room window. Clarence caught his breath. He could see two figures through the lace curtains. A girl. A boy.

He stopped just outside. ‘I won’t disturb them,’ he said, ‘he must be a cousin, a childhood friend, perhaps.’

Yet he found himself creeping closer.

 

‘…But he proved too strong. What else could I do? I ran forward and snatched the sword from Helmston’s gut, and with a snick and a snack I took his head from him! Then I turned, and… there it was, coming at me from behind — but you know I’m faster than Helmston ever was.”

‘And I took the jewel from the very heart of the beast,’ the young man said.

 ’Oleander, you are such a liar.’ A giggle.

‘I brought it back for you,’ the young man said, and through the curtains, Clarence heard her gasp, and saw him sink on bended knee.

 

I would have done that. I would have stood under an avalanche for her. I would have fought beasts and dragons and gods. Clarence stood rooted at his spot outside the window, holding his wretched clump of flowers. 

‘I say,’ a skinny beaproned girl said, prodding him with a finger. ‘Might I help you, sir?’

‘N-not at all!’

‘Ah, flowers for the young mistress,’ the girl said knowingly, and the flowers were in her hand. Clarence’s hands hung limp by his side.

 ’N-no…’

‘Very sweet of you,’ the maid said, giggling. ‘I shall let her know you stopped by.’

Trembling, Clarence watched her vanish into the house. He stood rooted to the spot.

 

‘Shall I find a vase for it, ma’am?’

Alicia Corval gave a light laugh. ‘That ragged thing? Don’t be silly, Lucy. Throw it out.’

 

Clarence’s feet dragged against the cobblestones as he trod the long road home.

The Midnight girls had been passing his house since as far back as Oswin knew. His house sat at the very edge of the world, where land dropped off into mist and nothingness, and where the hours came to die.

Oswin had been watching the Midnight girls die his whole life. Dawns glimmered away, Noons faded gently into the peace of twilight, but Midnights… They were the worst to watch, pale butterflies that cried, burned and rode ash winds into the heartless sky.

It was six in the morning, well past dawn, and the empty sky hung black and sunless. He had given his mother her water and medicine, neither of which seemed to do the least good. Oswin had long since resigned himself to the inevitable.

To take his mind off one problem, he went to visit the other. It had moist blue eyes, and paced the pokey cellar.

“Please, set me free,” the latest Midnight begged. She had been sobbing since the last stroke of twelve.

Oswin had caught her when she made the customary stop just before the edge of the furthest cliff, before she could spiral into the world’s end. He used a fine net so he wouldn’t hurt her, but she shrieked and screamed until he gagged her. He had cleaned out the cellar for her, but it was still sooty and damp, and when he turned the key her eyes flooded with tears.

Her feet were blackened and blistered, and she wept behind the barred iron door. Soot footprints blanketed the rough stone floor.

Oswin shook his head. “You don’t understand. You’ll die, if you follow your sisters. I won’t let you out until you swear you’ll stay.”

She stared at him. Oswin looked at her eyes and lost himself in a deep sea of blue.

“You understand nothing,” Midnight said sadly, turning her face to the wall.

 

The night spread over the land and did not leave. Nights became pitch black weeks. Crops shrivelled in the fields, the land withered, thieves prospered. Even the moon waned and hid her face; she had nothing to reflect. Oswin’s mother struggled feebly to turn in her bed, and Oswin clenched his teeth.

 

“You must let me go,” Midnight repeated, “or the land dies. Your mother is dying.”

“It’s her time,” Oswin said, but his voice brokered uncertainty. “Not yours. I brought you here to keep you safe. I’ll marry you, if only you swear to stay.”

At that, the girl flew at the bars and shook them harder than Oswin had thought possible. “You stupid, stupid boy,” she cried. “You know nothing!” She snatched her bowl of broth from the table and flung it at him. Oswin beat a hasty retreat.

 

“My mother is dying,” Oswin said. He was almost out of coal and food.

Midnight said nothing. She sat listlessly against the wall, her arms out by her sides. A great fear stole over Oswin, and he opened the door and stumbled down beside her. He turned her head to the dim torchlight, and his hand came away with a hank of hair. Midnight’s eyes opened, slow as twilight, and closed. Her head lolled back against his arm.

Oswin began to cry, quietly. He picked her up and carried her into the listless air.

Midnight smiled. She turned her face to the brightening sky, and the wind kited her up into dawn. Oswin watched the sun burst forth and break her into a thousand burning fragments. He kept his eyes on the sky so long that his sight was never the same; but as he was about to turn away, he saw a faint glimmer rise from the falling ashes. Only for a second.

The sun poured through the window and bathed the bed where Oswin’s mother lay. Her voice rang out loud and clear through the young morning. Oswin ran to her.

 

Oswin lived a long time.

He no longer stood at the edge of the furthest cliff. He never went to watch the hour girls. After a time, he married, and had children, and lived a life.

Yet still, on clear nights, he sat and dreamt of midnight bleeding into dawn, of wings sharping through the morning sky.