The Journey Prize Stories 25 (6 page)

Here is how it happens:

You catch it from somebody.

Maybe because you’re always sitting in a hospital where people are sick sick, dying. Anyway. You catch it. It drifts into your nose, probably, and then seeps through the soggy tissue-paper skin in your sinuses and dissolves in your blood. Then your blood goes blasting hot and happy through your skull and your arms and your guts and your legs and this whole time it’s just floating along and waiting.

It has to wait. It’s got to wait for a chance to get stuck inside a tiny, tiny hole in one of your bones. It can wait seventy-five years, sometimes.

But then, one night when you’re lying dead asleep in your bed in the dark with your bones dangling and your brain fizzling, it catches at last in that tiny, tiny hole
          like a tiny metal ball bearing careening finally into the
          punched-out pore of a
               plastic toy maze
and then it digs.

You won’t notice at first. Nobody will notice. If a doctor X-rayed your skeleton she might not even notice unless she looked close, close, close at the film with a magnifying glass under a microscope, and then if she had one-hundred-per-cent perfect 20-20 vision then she would
maybe
see it,
aha
.

By the third month you can start to almost know. If you have an inkling, you can do this: turn on all the lights in a room that has a mirror. Make sure you can stand right up against the mirror, so this means bathrooms might be bad because the counter or the sink seems to get in the way unless you can climb up on them, which I recommend. You have to be able to hold your face about a centimetre from the glass.

Now if you have your face in the right position and the lights are on bright and your face isn’t shading itself (be careful of that if the lights are behind you because the light will probably not be able to beam around your head) then if you roll your eyes down at the one-hundred-per-cent correct angle and look at your cheekbone reflected in the mirror

you will

see

honeycomb. Through the skin like yellow sponge candy dissolving under your pores and under your muscles and blood.

You understand that the lights must be bright bright bright and your face must be close close close or you will just see skin. Even then you have to keep turning your head and straining your eyes, and sometimes you’ll think that maybe if you had a second hand-held mirror, or a kind of miniature periscope,
or something, you would be able to see it better, or that of course if the skin weren’t there and the flesh were gone then you would see it perfect, no problem.

And if you stretch the skin with your fingers a little bit that seems to help, but be careful not to do that too often, because eventually you start rubbing the skin off and getting pimples and little scabs and then everyone starts going
Emily there is something the matter with your face, are you sick

And you can try saying

take me to the regional specialist in acute juvenile osteoporosis and virulent pathological foramina for a probative bone biopsy and a regimen of aggressive biphosphonate administration

and feed me exclusively on dairy products and broccoli

and as a preventative measure have my body encased in porcelain and have my skeleton pre-emptively remodelled in titanium alloys

and prepare the hip replacements knee replacements elbow replacements maxilla replacement rib replacements tarsal replacements mandible replacement cranium replacement et cetera et cetera

      
to fill the spongy hollows left when my bones are cobweb rolls of nothing, someday

And you can try saying all that

but you won’t say it, not really

because you are six years old and your father is dead of cancer and it has been a strain even to hold
diagnosis
in your mind

or
sarcoma
.

––

No one could see the child lying face-up under the altar. It was a poured concrete slab lain across two poured concrete pillars and the child’s body beneath it crossed it midway like a small T. Chips and chinks in the poured concrete like hieroglyphs and braille spoke down at her from the table’s underbelly, spoke Joshua Samuel David Isaiah, spoke Hungry, spoke Camel Puppy Pony Elephant, spoke Jesus Christ Nazareth Nazareth, spoke Toothache and Daddy and Sleep. The child stuck her finger in her mouth and chewed it while her brain lay aching.

The purple frontal hung across the altar made the child invisible. The cloth made the grey purple, made the white-grey purple, made her skin purple and the shadows purple. Her feet poking out beyond the frontal, she knew, were not purple but somehow still invisible, for the men and the women out beyond it were going, He was so young and Thank you for coming, and never, There are his daughter’s feet.

So the child with a hole in the middle of her middle made a purple duck come out from a purple concrete crack, waddled it across to the middle of the stone pavement hanging over her, and said to it, My bones hurt.

The duck said, Try drinking some milk.

She chewed her finger and told the duck that they were all out of milk and also that this was a church and a funeral. The duck said, Later, then. And she turned him into a mouse and then an airplane and then she made the whole altar into sponge candy in her mind and closed her eyes and dissolved it in dark.

Outside her cave there were men and women going Hum in a lake of sound. The child, behind her closed eyes, saw a white hand and then a smear-coloured curtain and a mouth that
could not shut, but then she sent those things away into the dark where they could dissolve into nothing, into the nothing of nothing. In their place she left a yellow dog, shining.

After the mother with pearls lifted the purple cloth, the uncle who was with her reached underneath and took the child into his arms. He carried her sleeping past the nodding priest and the sad-eyed grandfather and the hatted aunt dabbing a handkerchief under her eyes and saying, Oh Herbert, dear Emily.

And the uncle took the child to his car where he spread her out sleeping on the back seat, and when the child awoke the uncle was sitting behind the wheel in the parking lot with the radio on. The uncle said something warm and handed her a cube of the yellow sponge candy.

She lay on her cheek and pressed the nougat between her palms until the sweat melted it into sugary glue, and the uncle hummed with the radio all the while weeping, Oh my love, my darling.