Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

She throws her body uselessly in front of Clarence’s, short enough to protect nothing but his least vital parts. Well, least vital for staying alive. Tony is standing to the side, leaning on the hood of the truck and laughing. Beautiful, Louise, he says. Very touching.

Fuck you, she says. What’s going on here? She can feel Clarence shaking behind her, just a little. Jackson smiles, deadly calm. He clicks on the safety, puts the gun back down on his lap.

Nothing so much, he says. You just better tell your brother to be careful who he’s fucking, so. He shrugs.

Louise turns to Clarence, looks the wide expanse upward at his face. What’s this? Fucking who?

Clarence grabs her arm in a way that is most unlike him. Let’s go inside. Let’s just go inside.

She shakes his arm off, angry and hurt. Clarence has a secret? From her? He starts to stalk inside, tall and faster than she is, and she loses him in the hallway. What is going ON? she shouts, but he is gone inside his workroom and shutting the door in her face. In her face. This is new, too. She bangs on the door for a minute before giving up and heading back outside. She is not afraid of the man with the gun. She wants her money. But the truck is gone, and Jackson is gone, and Tony is gone.

This last is unexpectedly hard. She has no idea why it should be. Tony is a leather goon with a grin, that’s all. Why should she want him here? Why should she want him at all? But she knows, with the ache in her fingers and toes, that she does. She wants him like she wanted to fly from the rooftop when she was ten, wants to throw her whole body into that catastrophe until she is utterly exhausted and dried up. She hasn’t wanted anyone like this since Morris, and just like Clarence’s rejection, she doesn’t know what to make of it. The shape of her world is changing, off-kilter and blurred, astigmatic.

Mrs. Ralph Mattson arrives in the morning, her Little Boy Blue wrapped in a blanket and reeking already.

We had to observe the customary period of mourning, she explains. Louise nods and marches off to the freezer with the poor little dog. She calls for Clarence, then remembers about their almost-fight. She thinks she heard the car drive off last night. She wonders if he is having his love affair somewhere.

When she gets back, the old lady is wandering down the hall, examining the ships-in-bottles and sea battle dioramas. She murmurs in awe, suddenly child-eyed. This is always the way it is, here in this house, magical since Louise and Clarence were small. They preserve a world long gone in these long rooms, crowded now with dead objects and memories, long devoid of the softening gaze of cheerful people and their love for one another.

Once, when she was ten, Louise hated Clarence. Just for a day. She mixed her mother’s underglazes in a bucket, hoping for something pretty, and was disappointed when the mixture turned a flat brown. When her mother found out, she locked the door of her studio and wouldn’t speak to Louise for a week.

After a few days, Louise complained to Clarence. You deserve the silence, he said. You broke her special paints. I won’t speak to you, either.

Louise’s heart was a white-tipped, furious squall. She told Clarence this was what had happened to Mother and Father. Mother was full of silence and Father was full of guilt, and the air was so heavy with accusations between them it could never be cleared again. She spilled over with rage, spending it on lamps and tables and chairs, until Doctor Lloyd had to drive out and give her a shot to calm her down. Clarence came to see her that night, shamed and sorrowful.

I’m sorry, he said. I don’t want to fight ever again. She held her drug-heavy hand over his golden head like a benediction. She was all too ready to forgive, and she told him she always would be. I will never hurt you with my silence, he said. I will never be like Mother. He curled into her chest like a comma and let her sleepy strength wash over him, let it give him brave dreams.

The dark is heavy tonight; the stars have disappeared behind a wall of clouds. The air feels thick, like something is waiting to happen. Louise is up late because she is starting to be concerned. She is waiting with her heart hinged open for her brother to come home.

Noel calls, speaking in riddles at midnight. We’d like to create a chimera, he says. Can we do that?

Any impossible life is a chimera, Louise says.

Homer’s chimera, says Noel. Part lion, part goat, part snake. Is that impossible life, then? Impossible for you?

Louise considers. She doesn’t like the idea. It seems a mangling of nature, red in tooth and claw and refusing to be a sideshow. You know, she says, when explorers brought the first platypus back, scientists cut it apart looking for the stitches. They were sure someone had sewn a duck’s bill on.

But couldn’t you? asks Noel. Couldn’t you make something new if you wanted to? Like being god, yeah?

Like being god, agrees Louise. She doesn’t believe in god, but Noel already knows that. That isn’t what he really means at all.

She imagines the chimera breathing fire behind the wall of clouds tonight, just beyond her vision. Just beyond what she can understand. She shivers and watches the driveway for any signs of life.

Clarence arrived two weeks early, a birthday surprise for their mother, and there wasn’t time to get to the hospital. Doctor Lloyd came to the house and delivered Clarence in their parents’ bedroom, while Louise and her father watched terrified from the doorway. It took six hours for her brother to be born.

Louise’s father and mother held hands after and smiled, exhausted, but happy because they were still in love. They were so absorbed in each other that Louise was first to hold the screaming Clarence. She stroked his strange, wrinkled skin, covered in dark golden down, and he quieted, raptly absorbing her blurred face.

Looks like he loves his big sister already, said Doctor Lloyd, and Louise looked solemnly up at him.

Of course he does, she said. The doctor felt a strange sadness at that, as if he could read a prophecy, as if he could hear the warning bells, buried in the baby’s soft whimpers and in the sister’s solemn phrases.

Louise is shaping a black bear’s ears when the doorbell rings. She flicks on the security camera monitor, sees a blond young woman, very pretty in a loud, artificial way. She’s wearing a tracksuit scattered with sequins and a good bit of hair that isn’t her own. Louise considers briefly as she’s mixing Bondo and fiberglass resin, but decides not to answer the door. She’s never interfered in Clarence’s amours before, and she doesn’t see now as the time to start. The young woman is crying, thick dark mascara tracking new shadows into the terrain of her lovely young face. Louise reaches up and shuts the monitor off. She picks up her knife, makes a small opening between the skin and the cartilage of the bear’s right ear.

The doorbell rings again. And again. And then again. Louise sighs, puts down the knife. She takes the stairs two at a time and throws open the door. He’s not here, she explains to the tracksuit. It’s pink, she sees, pastel pink as a cartoon stomach.

I know, she says. Louise folds her arms. She stares, and Pink Tracksuit crumples further, sitting on the step and gasping. She is clearly in the throes of some kind of hysteria.