Steve Tem - Onion Songs

“I don’t know what I believe. I don’t know that I know anything. I don’t know how people find each other in the first place, or how they stay together. What do you really see in another person? A few surface traits, the way they present themselves when they know you’re looking, and then those times they’re losing it, dropping the mask. And when things start going bad, those mask-dropping moments are what you focus on—you find yourself running around trying to catch them in the act, you’re just sneaking around looking for evidence that they’ve failed you—I swear, you’re collecting their worst moments, and you’re thinking that that’s what’s really true, that that’s all there is. To life, I mean. You can’t see what it adds up to other than a list of things, a list of words, objects purchased, things consumed. A long list of disappointments.”

She finished up wondering if she’d been spitting. Did she just lose her mind in front of Angie and that peculiar little Harry?

“Oh, honey, you’re just upset. You get all upset and then you get all complicated. None of us know. It’s in God’s hands, finally. There’s somebody for everybody, you just have to let God make the arrangements.”

“Angie, you’re on your third marriage.”

“And God had a hand in every one of them.”

Trish gazed at Harry, whose face split into an even wider smile. She felt warm, and wanted to leave, but didn’t know how to get out of there without being rude. The corners of Harry’s mouth began traveling in opposite directions then, until the line of mouth completely bisected his head. Harry leaned back and eased open his mouth. Trish got up and left before the top of his head had the opportunity to fall in.

When she got home she could hear Martin moving around upstairs. Low murmurs rising and falling. Snaky sounds. Reality TV. Which, she thought, must be the most despairing phrase in the current vocabulary of the world.

She couldn’t bring herself to go upstairs so she looked around downstairs for something to fill the time. She’d never had that problem as a child. Her mother used to say, “Trish makes up the world as she goes along.”

She sat on the couch in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t a real fireplace, actually, although there had probably been one, or several, in the house when it was first built. But the old chimney was at the other end of the house. This fireplace had a pretty, but plastic-looking, mantle and a painted optical illusion of a firebox with lavender gas flames.

She and Martin had redecorated this room multiple times over the years, each time to something prettier (according to the fashion of that year), and a step further away from reality, so that stepping in and out of this room was like traveling to a different… hallucination. Some day, she was sure, people would buy huge environmentally controlled boxes to live in, and video and 3D technologies would provide the decoration. Home and Virtual Living. The world outside the walls of your newly purchased skull could just go straight to hell. Why should you care?

Whisper whisper whisper. She also didn’t care if their house hated her new attitude or not. By this time it probably realized something was up, that it was quickly losing its grip on her. Some of these things—that side table, the small Victorian lamp—had been her grandmother’s, and some—that art deco desk chair, for example—her mother’s. The rest were things she and Martin had purchased at fancy department stores, garage sales, out of a catalog (from pictures which never exactly matched what was delivered). Today there seemed no solid reason for any of it to be here. Window dressing was the phrase her mother used to use.

People never stopped playing house. What was this place but her biggest dollhouse ever? People created their worlds within worlds driven by whim—so what substance could there be to any of it?

The walls of the room suddenly faded into a child’s wavering crayon lines, a lopsided oval of red crayon sun showing through the broken drawing. It smiled down at her crookedly.

Upstairs Martin continued to whisper. It might have been her name he was saying or it might not, but she decided to imagine it was. She staggered to her feet and made for the rough box that delineated where the staircase should be.

Stair steps shuffled beneath her feet like a random stack of narrow rectangular cards. The world didn’t clarify itself again until she opened their poorly drawn bedroom door.

Martin lay on his back in the bed, his chest rising and falling aggressively. A large something stood or crouched on the floor by his feet, wings spread into a crucifix, head the size of a buffalo’s with a huge black beak the sheen of metal, cow-like eyes bright with realization, and behind those eyes, blending into the long blonde hair that flowed down its feathered and scaled backside, a pair of flaming, multi-colored gills.

Judging from the size of the breasts Trish supposed her to be female, although visual cues seemed hardly reliable.

Martin whistled and bucked, in the throws of an oddly controlled seizure. Although Trish could see no trace of it, she felt something pass between Martin and the thing, this other she. She took something. He took something.

The whole process lasted less than a minute. Finished, the creature turned slowly toward Trish, and froze, only light moving across the eye. Trish felt as if she would completely dissolve in its greater presence.

Sweeping its wings, the creature moved again toward the window. Trish thought that such a large thing could not possibly pass through that size opening, when it faded into the air. A brief smell passed through her mouth and nose, scouring, then evaporated with a slightly salty aftertaste.

She sat down on the floor and remained there for some time, peering now and then at Martin who appeared to be breathing easily, resting peacefully. Eventually she crawled onto the bed beside him, staring at the ceiling, barely touching his side with her little finger, but touching him deliberately just the same.

She kept listening for the flap of wings, waiting for a change of smell or shadow. To her great disappointment, nothing came.

Trish walked through the downtown shopping district with a forced, determined step. She hadn’t brought her purse; she had no plans to buy. She did have a few dollars stuffed into her bra, because she did want to eat. She enjoyed eating these days—she was always hungry. Food becomes me , she thought, and smiled, the way she remembered Harry smiling.

Around her the narrow lines of the buildings swayed. Threads of various colors floated together briefly, becoming patches of sky and patches of store, power lines and sidewalks, streets, the momentary smear of cars moving with one or more occupants inside. Then the fabric warped and folded, hours passed, the sun tumbled through the sky like a half-eaten fruit tossed languidly into the trash, and there she was again, continuing on her merry way.

She bent down and picked up a thread—once part of a sidewalk, perhaps connected to a person’s leg or the side of a tree—gave it a yank, then she smiled as the world tightened and leaned over slightly, before returning more or less to form, rumpled like a worn out sweater.

When she was a little girl her grandmother had knitted her the most beautiful sweater. It had at least six colors knitted into a series of intricate, irregular patterns, as if from some sweater manufacturing machine gone wild, but Trish knew it came from her slightly addled grandmother and her imperfect way of knitting things. Trish had worn that sweater proudly every day until one day one of the threads had come loose, a strand of yarn some two or three inches long. The sweater now looked shabby. Not knowing what else to do, Trish had pulled on the thread, and pulled, until it became a long line of bright color, and, reluctant to ask her grandmother to fix it, Trish had kept pulling, and kept pulling, until after an hour or so the actual shape of the sweater was gone, as if it had never existed, and instead she had this pile of shapeless colored yarn.