Gary A. Braunbeck - Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

"Oh God, when I hear them going on about their love lives, how it's so hard being in a relationship because they don't agree on...on what kinds of toppings to get on a pizza or who should make the first move or how truthful they should be or why they don't feel comfortable making a serious commitment just yet...when I hear all this, I really want to slap them sometimes, you know? They have no idea how it feels to be the 'nice' girl who's always there, always willing to listen, the girl you can call anytime because she's always home, who's friendly and reliable like an old dog or five bucks from Grandma in your birthday card every year. I know I'm not the most stunning woman ever to walk the face of the Earth, but...." She reached into her purse for a tissue to wipe some of the perspiration off her face. Unable to find one, she kept searching around while she spoke.

"It's amazing how relaxed a man can be when he's in the presence of a woman he thinks doesn't need or want passion. I don't know how many times I've had a guy I know make a mock pass at me, then we'll both laugh like it was no big thing. I'm not feeling sorry for myself, that's too damned easy, and I know that I'm plain, but the thing is, because I'm plain, I'm safe. And safe means being rendered sexless."

She took a breath, weighing the truth of that word.

"Sexless. And sometimes I'd like to pull all these people aside who are so overwrought about their shaky sex lives and whisper that word to them, because it's a feeling they'll never know. Because with all their whining and crying and bitching and all their melodramatic romantic suffering, they'll always be able to find someone who wants them, even if it's just for one night. And I'd like to know how it feels from their side, just once. To be wanted that way just once, to be that beautiful for just one night."

She looked toward the small tinted glass separating her face from the priest's, caught sight of her face, saw the azure eyes, and remembered the other woman's screams.

"It hurts, Father. Sometimes it physically hurts! I don't know how but I...I did something tonight, caused something to happen. I didn't mean for her to get hurt, to suffer like she did, but I—" The words clogged in her throat when her hand brushed against something inside of her purse. Something small. Soft. Moist. And round. "What is it?" asked the faceless priest. Amanda couldn't answer. She opened the top of her purse wider, then slowly looked down inside, tilting it toward the dim light. Then she saw them.

Saw them and gasped and snapped closed her purse and leapt from the confessional and ran down the aisle sobbing, the sound of her grief echoing off the wide arches above as she kept running, wanting to rip the purse off her shoulder and throw it away and never look inside again, wanting to close her eyes—not her eyes, not hers at all, just different eyes in her head—close them forever and not have to face her reflection or see the way other people looked at her, close the eyes and make everything go away, deny that what had happened was real and make everything better by that denial but she knew it was true and didn't understand why, and now she was outside the church, running down the stone stairs, the priest following and calling for her to stop, please, stop, but she couldn't, she was too frightened as she threw herself in the car and flung the purse into the back seat, slammed the door, and pulled away, the houses and street signs blurring as she sped past, lights melting, images flowing into one another like paint on an artist's canvas, blues into tears into yellows into aches into reds—

... Talking of Michelangelo ....

—into greens into curses and back to blues, signs guiding her way, STOP, YIELD, ONE WAY, ROAD CLOSED AHEAD, rounding the corner, finding detours, familiar trees, lonely trees and this empty street, dark houses, dirty fences, take a breath, there you go, calm down, take another breath, slow down, breathe in, out, in, out, that's good, that's a good girl, slow it down, pull it over, close to the curb, there ya go, here we are, home sweet, ignition off, keys out, all stopped, all safe, alone, alone, alone.

She stared at the front of her house, then turned around and lifted her purse as if she had only—

—only—

— only one way to know for sure. She took a deep breath, exhaled, then opened her purse and looked inside. Silence; stillness. She calmly reached in and took them out, holding one in each hand like a jeweler examining uncut diamonds. They were still quite moist, sheened in corneal fluid. No sparkle now. But still a striking enough hazel. She felt a pang of remorse, for until this moment she'd never realized how pretty her old eyes had been. "God, I'm gonna miss you," she whispered.

Then looked up into the night sky, into the depths of a cold, unanswering, indifferent heaven, where no angel of the plain-faced looked back down.

4. Discards

One afternoon, shortly after moving back home, she had wandered down to a local flea market and found a table covered with dolls. Among them was a set of mismatched nesting dolls (" Matryoshka dolls," said the old woman sitting behind the table. “You must always call them by their proper name."); the largest was the size and shape of a gourd, the second largest was almost pyramid-shaped, the next was an oval, the fourth like a pear, and the last resembled an egg. What surprised her was that each of them, despite their disparate shapes, was able to fit neatly inside the next, and the next, and so on, until there was only the original matryoshka holding all the rest inside.

She carefully examined the largest doll, somewhat shaken that its face bore a certain resemblance to her own. The artist had captured not only the basics of her face but its subtleties, as well: the way the corners of her eyes scrinched up when she was smiling but didn't want anyone to know what she was smiling about, the mischievous pout of her mouth when she had good news to tell and was bursting for someone to ask the right question so she could blurt it out, the curve of her cheekbones that looked almost regal when she chose to accent them with just the right amount of rouge—all these details leapt out at her, impressive and enigmatic, their craftsmanship nothing short of exquisite, as if the hand which painted them had been blessed by God.

She looked away for a moment, then looked back; no, she hadn't imagined it. The thing did look a little like her.

As she was paying for the set, the old woman behind the table told her, "The old Russian mystics claimed that the matryoshka had certain powers, that if a person believed strongly enough in the scene the dolls portrayed when taken apart and set side-by-side-by-side, then it would come true. A lot of old-country matchmakers used to fashion matryoshkas for the women of their village who were trying to find a husband and start their own families. It's said that someone created a set for Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt that showed her marrying Nicholas II and having several children."

"Wouldn't it be nice if that were true?" said Amanda.

"But this set here, I have no idea what someone would want with it. Especially a young girl like you. None of the dolls resemble one another. It's like a bunch of riffraff, discards. Though it's odd, isn't it, how all of them fit together so well?"

"I like discards," Amanda replied. "It's nice to think that even the unwanted can find others like themselves and become a family." "But these're all women." "Then they're sisters. A family of nothing but sisters." The old woman nodded her head. "I like that. I like that right down to the ground." Amanda smiled. "Me too."

5. Galatea and Pygmalion

Once back inside her house after fleeing the church, Amanda quickly put the eyes in a large-mouthed mason jar containing a mixture of water and alcohol, then set the jar on the top shelf of the upstairs linen closet. She stood for a moment, watching them bob around, turning this way, then that, one eye looking toward the front while the other glanced behind it; finally they looked at her, then slowly, almost deliberately, turned toward each other.