Melanie Thon - First, Body - Stories

Now I climb the steep slope. With every step I’m slipping. The distance between them and me keeps growing. I know I’ll lose them. I know the place it happens. I know the hour. Dusk, the edge of the woods. The white elk takes flight as an owl in absolute silence. Wings open a hole in the sky, and a man and a woman walk through it.

No one says, Go back . No one says, You’ll die here . But the cold, I feel it. My own body, I’m back in it.

I can stay. I can lie down. Let the snow fall on my face. Let its hands be tender.

Or I can walk, try to find my way in darkness.

I’m a grown woman, an orphan, I have these choices.

ELENA SEES HERSELF as the boy did: a woman on the Ave., alone in the U District. It’s late afternoon, January. He’s hunched in a doorway. After a half-hour watching women, he chooses her. She’s the one in the red raincoat, easy to track, light-boned and skittery.

He strikes hard, punches her left kidney. Slits the strap of her purse. Kicks the backs of her legs.

She twists, staggered; glimpses a boy in a black jacket sprinting down an alley.

Someone touches her shoulder.

Someone asks, Are you okay ?

Elena’s on her knees. She feels little hands still pressed against her ribs. Short fingers. Wide palms. He’s a tough boy. She remembers the extra push, the second kick. He wants her down. He leaves her there.

This is the bridge on the West Seattle Freeway.

The only way home.

Elena’s stuck in traffic. There’s been an accident again, third time this month: another car crushed into the guardrail, another woman standing stunned in the rain.

Home at last but not safe, Elena Brissard doesn’t tell her husband about the accident or the thief. He’s too comfortable, listening to the cheerful flutes of his Vivaldi. Eating olives, drinking Tanqueray.

And she doesn’t tell her daughter.

Iris lies on the bed in her basement room, dead poet crying in her skull. She loves him above all others, this wailing boy who pulled his own trigger: heroin first to ease the passage, shotgun to be sure. Through the windows of his greenhouse, he watched clouds and mountains grow very small.

Elena’s guessing. Iris uses headphones, always, so the bitter riffs of his guitar are only vibrations buzzing in the kitchen floor.

Elena flicks the light on the stairs and waits in the hallway. These are the rules. She’s forbidden to enter her daughter’s room or knock too loudly.

Iris lifts one headphone.

Is she hungry?

No, never mind .

She’d rather stay here, with him, than sit at the table with Elena and Geoffrey. Elena doesn’t know why she keeps inviting. Iris is the hunger artist. She hasn’t eaten with them since she disappeared for eight days last July. Not stolen. She ran away. These kids just vanish , the policeman told them. Fall into cracks in the street . He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He said there was a jungle under I-5, tents and shacks hidden in trees, a city beneath the city. You want my advice ? he said. Pray .

Elena lights tapers while Geoffrey pops the cork on a bottle of pouilly-fuissé. A boy looking through these windows could mistake them for lovers. They eat cold salmon dipped in hollandaise. Pale green hearts of artichokes. Brilliant raspberries.

So polite, husband and wife, each asking, How was your day ? He’s gotten a shipment from Cape Dorset: musk ox and caribou, whales scooped from whalebone, a green owl carved by a blind man who listens to the stones until they speak their shapes. Geoffrey says, A perfect piece — you have to close your eyes to see its wings . But Elena knows it’s old work he loves most, yellowed ivory: a hermaphrodite with walrus tusks, a bear with six legs. The Inuit say, There are things in nature man must not explain . He can’t sell these. They belong in museums. Behind glass. Safe. He stuffs them in socks or rolls them in pillowcases. His rooms are full of strange creatures. Open any box in any closet and you’ll find one, wrapped like a little mummy.

How can Elena judge him? She lives in his house on the hill. Drives his blue Mazda. Drinks his Courvoisier.

There should be bars on these windows . That’s what Iris says. Iris says, You’re a hostage — just like me .

The boy who snatched Elena’s purse is fifty-seven dollars richer tonight and still soaked, still shivering, looking for a place to sleep. But tonight, thanks to Elena, he’s not hungry. He’s gorged himself: three burgers, a chocolate milkshake. He can smoke all he wants, one cigarette after another, no rationing. He has money for a second pack and a third one in the morning. Tonight , Elena thinks, he almost forgives me .

This is the totem pole, Pioneer Square, two days later: raven and otter squat one on top of the other, mindless in the wind and rain.

No wild children here, just trembling men with broken teeth. They have hands like Elena’s father’s. Unsteady. They drink from bottles in paper bags. Leave green glass splintered in the street.

Elena sips cappuccino in a warm Café. Three-dollar cup of foam . That’s what Iris would say. Iris makes her want to leave this place.

Outside, they’re starving.

Outside, the sky’s gone yellow.

Elena leans into the wind because she lacks weight. In every stoop she sees an old man’s face.

Do the men with cracked skin care how she wastes her money? No. Do they sputter or beg? No. They murmur. Three dollars. Nothing.

Then she spots him, the boy again, her little thief. He’s found her already, miles from the Ave., here at the other end of the city.

Not him, but one like him .

Just another boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a black jacket .

He crouches in a cul-de-sac. Drenched. He’s been expecting her. He grins. Yes, it’s me , he says. Not out loud. Not in a way that anyone besides Elena hears. Tiny hands slip through her ribcage. Wind blows through her chest.

They hate us .

All these lost kids .

She walks fast. Cars spray water from her ankles to her neck. She catches her own reflection in wavy glass, listens to her own heels click on cement.

At the car, she sees how stupid she’s been. Her door, unlocked. She’s asking for it. Years ago, before Geoff, there were boys in her father’s orchard, brown hands on white wrists. Their tongues in her mouth were the only words they shared.

She married Geoff to stop all that. Her dangerous self-forgetting. Her accidents.

Now that smell is in her car. Smoke and spit, something damp and too familiar, the leaves where she lay down, played dead. She’s afraid to check the back seat or glance in the rearview mirror. If she looks, she thinks she’ll conjure one of them. Fruit picker’s son. Migrant . Her father told her he’d throttle any daughter he caught with one of them. Throttle . When he said the word, his hands in air gripped an imaginary neck.

Elena’s home again. That safe house on the hill.

The boy’s across the water, trapped on the other side of the bridge. No one can touch her. No father will call to curse or raise his fist. She chooses when to go to him. Poor old man, lost in his own front yard. Kind nurses lead him to his door again and again. Where’s Esther ? he says. He forgets his wife is dead. Sometimes he calls and calls, then weeps when she won’t answer him. He thinks three nurses who come in shifts are all the same man. They have skin murky as nights in the orchard. You could disappear in them. Daddy’s nurses have big thighs, thick chests. The better to lift you, my dear . Her father’s thin but still heavy. She imagines bowels full of stones, Daddy digging rocks, eating fast. The nurses call him Baby. Cut his meat in tiny bits. Change his soiled pants.