Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

She shrugged, agreeable. She’d heard this before.

“Where do you get them?” I asked.

She picked at the point of her eye.

“I get the fruit as a trade,” she said. “There’s a buyer who likes the salt here so he brings me fruit as payment.”

“What a deal for you,” I said, “getting all this gorgeous fruit for just a little salt.”

I brought a mango up to my nose and smelled the sweetness inside its skin.

The woman sniffed. “It’s not regular salt,” she said. She indicated behind me with her chin.

“Ah,” I said. “What’s all that?”

“Those are the words,” she said.

I kept my arms full of mangoes and took a step nearer. As far as I could tell, the entire back wall of the shop was covered, floor to ceiling, with cutout letters. They were piled high on shelves, making big words and small words, crammed close together, letters overlapping.

“Go closer,” she said. “You can’t see as well from here.” She gave me a shove on my shoulder blade.

As I approached, I could see that the words weren’t just cut from cardboard. Each word was different. I first saw the word NUT; it was a large capitalized word NUT and it was made out of something beige. I couldn’t really tell what it was but then I saw the word GRASS which was woven from tall blades, green and thready, and LEMON, cleverly twisted into cursive with peels and pulp, letting off a wonderful smell, so I went right up to NUT and discovered that it was in fact crumbled pieces of nuts all mixed together into a tan gluey paste.

“Isn’t this interesting,” I said to the woman.

I found PAPER, cut clean with an X-Acto knife, and a calligraphied ORGANDY, fluffing out so frothy I could hardly read it, and HAIR which was strawberry blond and curled up at the edge of the H and the leg of the R. The man who’d left Las Vegas had strawberry blond hair so I ignored that one and picked up PEARL instead.

“This is pricey, I bet,” I said, and she gave me an anxious look, like I was going to drop it. It was stunning, not made of tiny pearls, but somehow of one solid piece of pearl, rippling out rainbow colors across its capitals. I put it back carefully on the shelf next to BARNACLE, prickly and dry looking.

“Why do you make these?” I said. “They’re so beautiful!”

And they were. They were beautiful on their own and they were beautiful all together. I thought of her in her desert studio, hands dusty, apron splattered, sweat pouring, hammering down the final O in RADIO. She was making the world simple. She made the world steady somehow.

“People like the words,” she told me, picking up her apple to shine some more. “I made them for fun and then I got rich.”

“Well, I’d definitely like to buy these four mangoes,” I said.

She pressed the register. “Ten dollars.”

“And just curiously, how much are the words?” I kept my eyes on that wall, wanting to lean my head on PILLOW.

“Depends,” she said. “They vary. Plus, you see, those are just the solids.”

“What?” I stroked the petals that made up ROSE.

“I mean those are just the solids. I put the solids on display first because they’re easiest to understand.”

“Solid colors?” I said, staring at PLAID.

“Solid solids,” she said. “Liquids are in the back. Gases are in the back of the back. Both are very pricey,” she said, “but I’ll charge you just three dollars to look. Three dollars for the tour.”

“Liquid words?” I said, and I brought out my wallet. She rang up my mangoes and the tour. I moved closer to the register. “I think I’d like to buy a solid too,” I said.

I was feeling, suddenly, more liberated than I had in seven years. I wanted to take over the store. I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles. I bit into a mango. The skin broke quick, and the flesh, meaty and wet, slid inside my mouth, the nearly embarrassing free-for-all lusciousness of ripe fruit.

“Oh!” I said. “Incredible!”

She gave me two dollars in change. I licked mango juice off my wrist and turned back to the words.

“Can I buy a solid?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Of course,” she said. “Which one?”

I wanted them all so I just pointed to the first I’d seen. “How much for NUT?”

“Interesting choice,” she said, walking over and pulling it off the shelf. “NUT. There are seven different kinds of nuts in here. Macademia, peanut, walnut, pecan, cashew, garbanzo, and almond.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed.

“Wow,” I said.

She just stood there.

“Isn’t garbanzo a bean?” I asked.

She held it out to me. “I’ll give it to you for fourteen,” she said. “Two dollars a nut.”

There was a ten in my wallet between four ones and I lifted them all out. I had another drippy bite of mango.

“I won’t eat it,” I told her, indicating NUT.

She gave me a lip smile and took my money. “You can eat it,” she said. “I don’t care.”

Scooping all my purchases into a brown bag, she lifted a simple silver key off the wall behind her and beckoned for me to follow. We stopped at a gray door. Before she inserted the key, the woman put a hand on my sleeve.

“Be careful,” she said. “These are very delicate words. Don’t drip mango on anything.”

I had almost finished that first mango by now, the most incredible piece of food I had ever eaten in my life, and I held the remains of the pit away from me. My lips were sticky with juice. I felt the horror of Vegas dissipating, clarity descending like a window wrapped around my heart. She turned the knob, and I followed her in.

The back room was a square with a glass door at the far wall. This room was full of shelves too but the words were even harder to read from far away. I walked quietly up to them.

“Don’t touch,” she hissed.

The liquid words were set up in two ways. Most of them were shooting through glass pipes that shaped the letters. This looked really neat but I felt a little bit like it was cheating. Some of the others were liquids spilled onto a glass board, forming the letters. This was less cheating but looked cheaper. I walked down the row. I was not thrilled by WATER or COKE. I was drawn to RUBBING ALCOHOL, which was done with the piping and took up almost a whole shelf. It was a good one because it looked just like the water but I trusted that it wasn’t. There was one called POISON, no specification, and the liquid was dark brown. The letters were fancy on that one, like an old-fashioned theater brochure. I found BLOOD.

“Real blood?” I whispered, and brought the mango back close to me. Licked its pulpy pit.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“From what?” I asked, voice a little higher, and she didn’t answer. It shot bright through the pipe as if in a huge loose vein.

I didn’t like that blood one. I was recording all of this in a monologue in my head and I wondered then who I would tell the story to, and for the moment I couldn’t think of anyone. This made me feel bad, so I went over to LAKE and held that and it had little tiny ferns floating in it and I thought it was pretty. It was next to OCEAN which was looking more or less exactly like LAKE and that’s when I wondered if the woman was really truthful and how would anyone know? I wanted to buy OCEAN too, I wanted to have the word OCEAN with me all the time, it was way better than NUT, but I didn’t really trust it. It seemed likely that it was, deep down, TAP.

I paused by MILK. The sole white liquid. Soothing, just to look at.

“Gases?” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure. I’d like to see the gases, why not.”

My hands were now hardening with stickiness, each finger gluing slightly to its neighbor. I wanted to wash them, but instead I dropped the gooey pit into my purse near my wallet. The woman gave me a disapproving look and brought out another silver key, this one from her pocket. She turned and clicked and we went through the glass door in the back of the back room.