Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

When they were small, Louise and Clarence would put their sleds in the back of the car and drive with their father to a hilly place where the mountains started to rise. Louise watched the earth dash by under her sled, arms around her father, trusting that the ground would eventually come up to meet them. She loved that feeling of flying. She loved how everything seemed to sharpen in that moment; how the sled’s shadow seemed inked onto the snow. How the soft edges of the pine trees could cut their cheeks like razors as they flew by. There was something about that moment that seemed to stamp the hardness of nature into everything — not in a cruel way — only in the cleanest, most Darwinian sense. It was the nature of avalanches, of hard, icy snow and buried footpaths. The nature of the wild dream before man.

Louise remembered how Clarence was always frightened of the initial jump. When they shared a sled he would hold her waist so tightly she felt her lungs close a little, her arms tingle, and her vision blacken at the edges. She would often return to this memory after her parents’ death. She wondered if there was that same strange sense of euphoria, if the world seemed so perfectly black-and-white in those last several seconds. She wondered if the last thing her father saw was his own shadow, flying impossibly over the snow.

Louise as a child eventually learned all she could from Thumbelina. She then took to the parlor, sketched the stilled bobcat, the snowy owl, the dancing mice with their little legs akimbo. She would sit there for hours with her drawing pad and her pencils, sketching the fine lines of whiskers, the wet-looking noses, the curved claws, the tufts of hair in the ears.

Other children would have been terrified, alone in that great dark room with its heavy wall hangings and wine-colored carpets, surrounded by once-living shapes caught in endless predation. Not Louise. Her mother said she didn’t suppose Louise could be frightened by anything, that Louise was the only child she’d seen born without fear. Her mother crossed herself as she said it — it seemed unnatural.

But Louise’s father used to smile and nod sagely toward his daughter. I’ve taught her never to be afraid, he would say, and she isn’t.

He needed a child who would remain impartial in the face of accurate observation, for without it, what did we have but the terrors of the imagination? It wasn’t that her father had no use for imagination — indeed it was essential to his work, to creating the final spark of life. But he also knew what a terrible dictator imagination could be, given unbridled freedom. He had seen it destroy the outer life of his wife, her whole being focused now on what she could dream in her head and keep for her own, the self a prison: just the woman, her pottery wheel, and her stilled and silent tongue.

Shortly after the funeral, her father’s uncle asked Louise for a portrait of her parents. Instead Louise sent a violent, angry sketch, the paper almost torn through in places from her heavy crosshatching. It suggested a car, a vast mechanical wreck. Two shapes were crumpled in a heap of what looked like twisted metal, gears, wheels. Clarence was very unhappy when she folded it crudely and stuffed it in an envelope addressed to the uncle.

Well, she said. He asked for a portrait of the two of them.

Louise, he said gently. She was her father’s daughter but she’d inherited her mother’s black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable. Clarence had no choice but to watch and wait until his sister had cooled into some new shape, until she emerged from the fire patient and calm and even harder than before.

Their mother was always a beauty, tall and fair and well-made. But the lovely brow concealed a deep hurt, a void where pain replaced love, replaced joy, replaced even sadness. Their mother had been a locked box for years.

But every now and then when even she felt the pull toward other people, it was Clarence whom she sought out, Clarence to whom she gave her love and her talent and her self-sufficient steadiness. Louise belonged to their father; she had the same scientific curiosity, the same dancing-but-dogged mind. She had her father’s merry eyes and dark hair. So naturally her mother gravitated toward her own mirror, the pale, delicate Clarence, with his bright hair and great gawky height. He was the only one allowed to use her pottery wheel. He was the only one allowed to kiss her good night. He was the only one allowed to love her.

To create life, one must be a keen observer of faces. A raised eyebrow, a crooked laugh, the width of irises. The lines that snake away from the eyes like tributaries, the shadows of cheekbones slicing backward. The way the mouth holds itself just so.

Louise sleeps, dreams of feathers and wings and wild flight through darkened skies. Someone is singing. She sees a flock of pigeons overheard and she remembers something about a town square and December 2nd. Then she wakes, head on the pillow buried in down and feeling wrecked and confused.

Oh. Noel’s pigeons. Noel’s exhibit is opening in a few months and he needs pigeons. He needs a hundred of them, some installation in a public square. He’s hoping he’ll be arrested. She needs to get the eyes right, those terrible pink eyes, slick and toxic as rainbows in an oil spill. She’s been putting these off because she hates pigeons. She hates to work with something she hates. But Noel does pay her. So she must become again the impartial scientist, immune to any human notion of what is beautiful. She must make a dream of the homeliest birds.

The adults at the funeral watched the young teenagers holding on to one another’s hands and were glad to be anything but them, despite their youth and beauty and brilliance. There was something waiting to go rotten in them, everyone could see it in the tableau they made. Everyone could see the future would be difficult to find.

But brother and sister found the past instead. They’ve kept the memory of their parents alive. In the sightless visages of animal corpses, in the slick wet surface of clay, they create memories of their parents. Gargoyles with their father’s grin and their mother’s long gaze. Monkeys and cats and turtles with their father’s broad nose and their mother’s way of tilting her head back just a little, as if to take in more of the world. Clarence works his clay on the wheel, digs his thumbs into the earth, while Louise preserves skin, stretches it over new bones, molds the clay eye sockets and paints the details of claw, of tooth, of pupil and iris. Everywhere the faces of their own creators. Every day they are burying their parents; they have created a forever cemetery for those lost and broken faces.

At Noel’s for dinner. Teesa, his wife, parks a pair of lamb chops in front of Louise and Clarence, and Louise finds she can’t quite get her teeth through the blackened meat. Teesa is a horrible cook.

Oh, is it hard for you to eat animals, then? asks Teesa. I suppose it must be. I didn’t think to ask.