Summer 2007 (30 page)

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Nels.”

He didn’t ask me my name, but I didn’t mind.

“This is a good invention,” I said holding up a spoonful
of ice cream. “Chocolate and ice cream and cookies all mixed up in the same
package.”

“It’s not new. They’ve had it for ages.”

“But it’s still good.”

“Mmm.”

“So what happened to the old woman who lived here?” I
asked.

“I didn’t know her,” he told me. “The realtor brought me
by a couple of days ago and I liked the place, so I rented it. I’m pretty sure
he said she’d passed away.”

So much for her being happy. But maybe there was
something else on the other side of living. Maybe she and her ghost boy and her
daughter were all together again and she
was
happy.

It was a better ending to the story than others I could
imagine.

“So,” I asked Nels, “are you happy?”

He paused with a spoonful of ice cream half way to his
mouth. “What?”

“Do you have any ghosts?”

“Everybody’s got ghosts.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I suppose one of the measures of how you
live your life is how well you make your peace with them.”

My bowl was empty, but I didn’t fill it up again. I
stood up from the table.

“Do you want some help unpacking?” I asked.

“Nah. I’m good. Are you off?’

“You know me,” I said, although of course he didn’t.
“Places to go, people to meet. Things to do.”

He smiled. “Well, don’t be a stranger. Or at least not
any stranger than you already are.”

I laughed.

“You’re a funny man, Nels,” I said.

And then I stepped away into the between. I stood there
for a few moments, watching him.

He got up from the table, returned the ice cream to the
freezer and washed out the bowls and utensils we’d used. When he was done, he
walked into the hall and picked up a box which he took into the living room,
out of my sight.

I could tell that he’d already forgotten me.

“Goodbye, Nels,” I said, though he couldn’t hear me.
“Goodbye, Ghost Boy. Goodbye, old lady.” I knew they couldn’t hear me, either.

Then I stepped from the between, out onto the fire
escape. I unfolded black wings and flew back to the Rookery, singing loudly all
the way.

At least I thought of it as singing.

As I got near Stanton Street, a man waiting for his dog
to relieve itself looked up to see me go by.

“Goddamned crows,” he said.

He took a plastic bag out of his pocket and deftly
bagged his dog’s poop.

I sang louder, a laughing arpeggio of croaking notes.

Being happy was better than not, I decided. And it was
certainly better than scooping up dog poop. If I was ever to write a story the
way that Christy did, it would be very short. And I’d only have the one story
because after it, I wouldn’t need any more.

It would go like this:

Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after. The
end.

That’s a much better sort of story than the messy ones
that make up our lives. At least that’s what I think.

But I wouldn’t want to live
in that story, because that would be too boring. I’d rather be caught up in the
clutter of living, flying high above the streets and houses, making a joyful
noise.

Fiction:
Stone Shoes by C.S.E. Cooney

Jack Yap was his Marm’s good boy, maple-syrup mouth,
toffee-tongue, such sweetness, wasn’t he? His Marm’s pride was Jack Yap, so
Marm told her neighbors–so she told him every day.

“Jackie, love,” she said into his muteness, “such a
laddie, such a cuddlewump! Always smiling, aren’t you? Always helping your poor
old Marm around the house.”

Jack Yap’s duties, which he did each day with seeming
cheerfulness, were to bake the bread in the morning, bring his Marm her tea,
unchain his brother Pudding from his bed and then take him to the outhouse.

Once Pudding did his sprinkle-and-splat, Jack Yap would
guide him back to the hen yard in front of their cottage, where their Marm
waited, and together, they would help Pudding on with his stone shoes.

This always took some doing.

“Them’s your special boots, Pudding dear,” said Marm
when Pudding balked. Pudding always balked. He didn’t like the stone shoes. He
sweated when he saw them, and made squeaking noises. “See how special? Made of
crystal they are, diamond boots. Real seven-leaguers, like them giants of old!”

Now, Jack Yap knew, and so did Pudding, those boots were
not diamond, or crystal, but hard gray granite, boots hewn of boulders by
Marm’s mason friend from down the road. Still, Jack Yap kept his mouth shut,
kept his teeth closed tight. Many years ago, he used to talk like lightning,
like hummingbirds darting, like hares hopping, earning him his second name
“Yap.” He even used to talk back to Marm–especially where Pudding and the
stone shoes were concerned–until she sewed his mouth shut one morning
with goat gut and a darning needle, and left the stitches in for three whole
days, and ever since then, Jack Yap didn’t talk much around Marm.

So Jack Yap helped his brother Pudding into his stone
shoes, smiling encouragement when Pudding made a pout, whispering words like,
“Think of giants, Pudding Man! Now you get to be a giant!”

Marm called her eldest son Pudding, “on account his head
was soft,” and it suited him, with his flat, blank face, blob of nose, tulip
lips and eyes as round and red-brown as pennies. He was only fifteen and
already balding, but what he lacked in wispy blond curls, he made up for in
height. Pudding was taller than the lintels of the cottage, and still growing.
He was wide, too–not fat, merely the solidity of one who has spent his
boyhood wearing shoes of stone.

They were, his Marm always said, for his own protection.
He was such a lummox he couldn’t be trusted to leave the yard. Them stone
shoes’d keep a hippo put.

Unlike Pudding, Jack Yap was as tall at twelve as he had
been at nine (which wasn’t very), had plenty of hair, fox-fur colored, thatched
like the roof over their loft and almost as full of vermin. His eyes were sharp
and narrow and very long–and glinted more red than brown. Because of the
scars on his mouth, he always seemed to be smiling.

He smiled that morning when Marm told him, “Jackie, pet,
my wee wooly rufus, your old Marm has errands to run today. So you keep to the
hen yard and watch your brother close so he don’t step on the eggs. Ta, now!
Ta, Pudding, my little spongy brains!”

And with that, she kissed Jack Yap first on one smiling
cheek then the other, and patted one of Pudding’s long-muscled thighs. Like her
second son, she was small, and couldn’t reach Pudding’s head, or even his
shoulder. After making the requisite half-hearted croonings, Marm set off to
see her friend the mason, whose company she preferred infinitely to that of her
sons.

Soon as she was gone, Jack Yap turned to his brother.

“Come on, Puds. Let’s go creature-killing.”

Pudding grinned. He had never lost his baby teeth; so
there they were, like tiny seed pearls in his vast, wet, pink flower mouth.

Grabbing up a walking stick, Jack Yap planted the butte and
vaulted, hurling himself through the air to the top of the chicken coop. Within
the fragile wire cage, the fowl trembled and clucked. Jack Yap stood tall with
ease and grace, and from the coop climbed atop his brother’s shoulders,
settling there.

“Now,” said Jack Yap, firm of voice, “who’s the strong
one, Puds?”

Pudding craned his neck and grinned and made a damp
murr
sound.

“Who’s the brave one, Puds?

Murrrrrr.

“Who walks like an earthquake, even wearing his stony
stone shoes?”

MURRRRR!

“Yeah!” cried Jack Yap, lifting his stick and pointing
to the hills beyond their cottage, their vegetable garden, their outhouse and
their chicken coop. “Yeah, King Pudding, walk on! Two feet of stone and a heart
of oak! There’s creatures in the hills need killing, howlers and skinchangers,
and you and me is the boys to do it, says I!”

Murrrring and chuckling, Pudding lifted his massive
right leg, encased in its boot-shaped boulder, all the muscles in his body
straining, rippling, but
moving,
moving, first one foot then the other,
as he set out, with his brother on his shoulders, for the hills where the
creatures were hiding.

And the great egg hunt was on…

#

Now, the hills were stiff with woods, and the woods were
grisly-bear brown as the hair on a witch’s left breast. But there were bald
spots, too, where the white skull of the hills showed through. In these places
of stone, the same gray granite as Pudding’s boots, where the village mason
made his quarries, in these places the hill creatures laid their eggs.

Jack Yap liked eggs.

He didn’t like them to eat. No, sir. Ever since he was
his Marm’s little pink-cheeks, her wee swaddle-me-down, he refused to eat eggs,
poached or scrambled, soft or hard. Nor yolks nor whites did he allow to pass
his mouth, even after his mouth had been sewn shut and opened again after no
food or drink three days later, and eggs were what his Marm offered.

“Them’s good for you, Jackie-lad,” she said. “All good
things come from eggs.”

But Jack Yap merely bared his teeth at her, rawly
through his wounds, and she took his look for a smile.

“Never mind, nettle-rump,” she told him. “Have a gruel
then. Plenty of sawdust in that sack over there. Boil it yourself. Tonight your
Marm’s making eggs or nothing.”

So Jack Yap, practically transparent with starvation,
bleeding at the mouth, made his own gruel and drank it down.

No, he did not like eggs to eat, did Jack Yap. But oh!
The feel of them, smooth and warm and brown, or cool and white as porcelain.
How the quail laid them mottled and the robin laid them blue. The pure, bright
owl egg. The egg of cormorant so coral-rough against the skin. And how the eggs
of heron and egret were like the children of the moon.

And didn’t Jack Yap love to hold them, carefully, his
naked palm a cradle, and him barely breathing? Didn’t he love, slowly, so
deliberately, to squeeze his thin, strong fingers, ’til they cut like wires
through the shell and shattered it? Or–if the eggs were too large, dark
as lapis, green as jade, he would shake them like a baby shakes his rattle,
like a shaman shakes his bag of bones, then dash them to the ground.

This always made Pudding laugh and laugh.

“You like that Pudding?” asked Jack Yap.

“Murr!” said Pudding, nodding his great, wispy head. The
vigor of the gesture almost sent Jack Yap flying off his brother’s shoulders.

“Let’s sing the egg song!” said Jack Yap.

And Pudding laughed, his tiny pearl teeth glinting. What
he did then passed for singing in his own head, but was really more of a
forlorn baying that echoed hill to hill and sent small things scurrying for
burrow and nest.

“That’s the way to do it, Puds,” said Jack Yap absently.
His long eyes scanned for the glimmer and glitter of eggs. Best of all the eggs
in the hills, Jack Yap loved to hunt and break the skinchangers’ eggs.

These eggs were rare. Jack Yap had found three of them
in as many years. In that time, he’d broken two hundred bird eggs and trampled
countless nests of tortoise and crocodile. He’d set fire to a dozen threads of
faerie egg, which were like glass beads strung on spider webs. Each tiny egg
was a different hue; each chimed like a silver bell. Thirteen dragon eggs he’d
soaked in acid, until they were brittle and discolored and gave off the odor of
six days dead. Forty banshee eggs he’d pierced with a steel pin and drained,
leaving the shells–black as the mouth of midnight–empty.

In those hills, even the creatures that seemed to be
mammals would lay eggs. A unicorn, for example, is not a lion, goat, white mare
or rhinoceros; it is a magical thing, and the egg it lays is golden and furred
in spines.

But of all these eggs, Jack Yap yearned for the
skinchanger’s egg. And when he found one that day with Pudding, he rejoiced.

“There it is, Puds,” he whispered. “Oh, isn’t it a beaut?
Put me down.”

The egg, nestled between two boulders, was unnaturally
large, even for its type. Perhaps the others he had rooted out had been young
eggs, still expanding. This one required both his slender hands to hold it. He
gazed deeply into the shell, and it was like peering into a mirror, then a pool
of clear water, then a faceted crystal. At the heart of the crystal was a
shadow, a flame. Then the flame was gone, whisked out. Perhaps it never had
been. Perhaps Jack Yap was imagining things again; his Marm always called him a
chaff-for-brains dreamer. Now the shell was opaque as pearl, now iridescent as
opal and giving off a heat like an open forge. It began sweating beads of
perfumed oil: jasmine, honeysuckle, lavender, rose, citrus. Jack Yap sniffed and
sniffed, and never could sniff the same smell twice.