Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (5 page)

The World Was Clocks

by
Amanda Gowin

for Heather

Descending the staircase as one, four legs in perfect time, the light was blue on four black braids.

Clasped hands parted with an electric pop as Tilly paused on a creaking stair. Her knuckles whitened on the rail. Rocking, she repeated the offending creak. Her eyes widened, cheeks reddened.

Tabitha, one stair lower and suddenly one plane removed, widened her eyes and laid a hand to her cheek. 

Nothing.

Tilly said: “One day this place will fall in, and I will not be under it.”

Symmetry disappeared.

Tabitha scratched the palm of her hand, scratched the itch of a phantom limb to see Tilly’s half of the room stripped bare the following morning.

The oak tap-tapped at the window in sympathetic Morse code, but the sun and tree were too bright to be trusted. Finding Tilly’s imprint on the bare mattress, she folded herself against the light and pressed the concavity of her sister. What tomb?

Sixteen years old, Tabitha was astounded at the world through one set of eyes. Pausing on the judge and jury stair, her parents’ twinspeak crept up to her, peppered with words and phrases for the first time.

Tabitha stepped into their world.

A faded set? She stared. At five, the twins smiled from the sandbox and the mommy and daddy smiling down were vivid and flushed with youth.

Suddenly time was everything.

“I must acclimate myself into this world,” she whispered into the mirror, into Tilly. Forehead to the cool glass she remembered their hatred for Alice—Alice didn’t know. On the other side was another—where else would a twin come from? There had been much debate as to who belonged to this world, and who had daringly climbed in.

The tears her reflection gave back were a comfort until breath obscured the face in fog. Tabitha pressed, but the glass did not yield.

Ill-equipped, with naked eyes and thoughts, school whipped around her in a flurry of bodies, voices, and bells. Without Tilly the world was clocks. They hovered with round faces and she scurried away from their pointing hands.

“Their world.”

Other girls began to fascinate Tabitha. Peering from around her melancholy, studying them, a picket fence of red lockers lit a vertical path to the circle they made. Deep breath and sense of falling, one big step. Surrounded. She searched the eyes of a redhead, murmured into the ear of a brunette, smiled at a dark girl so different and perfect as to almost be unreal—this girl flushed and broke her gaze.

“We are—no, I am beautiful,” she told her conspirator in the long bedroom mirror.

Late nights in cars drinking gin from the bottle with a shy blonde who had never done this sort of thing. Tabitha kissed the girl’s palm and placed it flush with hers, admiring the differences.

The ghost of Tilly itched and Tabitha cried, palms pressed to their cold reflections in the mirror, an aura of moisture welding them.

Tabitha blinked, the bell of her skirt had paced her. She opened her eyes and high school was over, the girls disappeared. Again, she was expected to recreate the whole world.

Tabitha studied her parents—aged turtle doves—and envied their stasis.

She discovered males.

Clumsy and oppressive, they lacked softness. But she rested in the crooks of their arms while they confessed the same fears as the delicate girls she had loved.

And what was love? Yellow urine on a stick turning pink, pails of blue paint obliterating the room she and Tilly had known. Her parents asked who it belonged to, their brows furrowed.

“Me,” Tabitha answered, puzzled, hands on her warm belly.

She grew fat as the tree out her window unfolded tiny green hands. Love was color in the world. Her laughter drew laughter from the mouths and eyes of her parents—rusty notes that became well-oiled and silver, and came easily. Tabitha browned in the sun.

Her reflection no longer resembled Tilly’s. The mounting wire snapped as she took the mirror from the wall, and mourning for her twin ceased.

Movement and rush, laughter and tears as they piled in the car. Headlights slicing through the sheets of rain, tiny green suitcase on her lap, Tabitha was too happy to scream. Palms flat on the suitcase of carefully folded nightgowns and handmade baby clothes, and two worn bears exactly the same.

Color grows slowly but disappears in an instant—in a click of teeth hard enough to make the tongue bleed. Alone in the hospital, the color and motion were sucked away into the fluorescent lights above, leaving only the drone of the doctors’ voices.

Tabitha remembered nothing but the taste of pennies. She woke from the dream into this ugly grey world to hear about ‘the accident’ from a stranger. A story as preposterous as the TV ones her mother watched in the afternoons.

“So I dreamed it all?” She saw only her suitcase, tiny and insignificant in the corner.

The doctor didn’t understand.

“Where’s Tilly?” 

All efforts to reach her sister had been unsuccessful . . . 

Rolling to the wall, the better to forget the little suitcase, she cried without the comfort even of a mirror.

The clocks stopped, or spun backwards and forwards in apathetic bursts. The lights marked a forgotten pattern, off and on. Beeping machines, murmurs from the hallway. Scratchy, drab sheets around her and under her hands. Interrogations were called ‘evaluations.’ Armed with clipboards and scowls, white coats floated in like vultures, made their faces into question marks and scratched at their boards before leaving.

Finally, the word she longed to hear: Release.

The sad box of a room ejected her. A woman with careful hands tucked her into a car and followed familiar roads. ‘Social worker’ the woman was called.

Tabitha rubbed her eyes, waking, planted in the living room with the suitcase at her feet.

Not one clock dared tick. The house was a tomb.

No pain in the crescents her nails made in her palms, but the rage was consuming. She dragged all the mirrors into the painted room. Her father’s hammer was found on the porch rail, laid to rest after hanging a wind chime from the rafter. She gripped the handle tightly as dragonflies spun and tinkled, leaving spots in her eyes.

Her heart swelled. Running up the stairs, the fateful step creaked and she released a howl that scratched her throat in its escape, blurred her vision, but did not slow her ascent. She raised the hammer, watched by a thousand overlapping Tillys and Tabithas, and did not put it down until the pieces were too small to reflect.

Yawning, she dismantled things little by little to know she was awake. Time was marked by Social Worker’s visits—the woman arrived periodically to wear a face both worried and confused.

Mainly it was the dolls that worried Social Worker.

The project had been time-consuming—taking them apart and hanging the pieces by bright skeins in the branches of the big tree.

Social Worker warned about the group home.

The dolls belonged to the twins, their mother had dragged them from the attic back in the time of Tabitha’s swollen belly. Discovering them in a sad pile on her parents’ bed, she remembered the chaplain at the hospital saying her baby had gone into the sky. It was comforting. She mimicked it the only way she knew.

Sometimes when the wind blew, the plastic arms knocked together and she thought of babies clapping, and the dragonfly wind chime gave up a few rusty notes. For a moment her heart was light and so was the world, for a moment there was color, faint hues of blue and gold in the sky, blue in the dolls’ eyes.

What could it matter to the warm body whose job was only to see that she was eating and keeping herself clean? Turning her head, Social Worker eventually went away again. Falling, change, upside down, all these words were forgotten.

One day a taxicab appeared, an improbability so far from town, and crunched to a stop in a cloud of gravel dust. She rose—the porch swing gave a perfect view, but she did not believe. From the cloud emerged Tilly, suitcase in hand. On her hip balanced a birdlike child of perhaps two, black hair and round eyes.

Tilly shuffled down the walk, head down, steps deliberate. The child’s eyes flickered back and forth between the twins and her mouth made a perfect O, asking, “Who?”

“Tabitha,” Tilly said in both answer and greeting, dropping the suitcase. Her eyes flitted over the tree.

“What’s her name?” Tabitha’s voice was a croak.

“Don’t know. Won’t tell me, won’t answer to anything.” A single braid snaked over Tilly’s shoulder, scars zigzagged the arm enfolding the child. “Where are the others?” 

“Dead.”

Tilly nodded. “I’ll come in and never leave again.”

“No.”

“I’ll come in anyway.” With sad eyes she plodded up the porch steps.

The little girl put out both arms and Tabitha wrapped her up, the weight comfortable against her, warmth unfamiliar. Tiny fingers linked behind her neck. The screen door slammed behind all of them and Tabitha’s limbs tingled. The nameless child dropped to her bare feet and scrambled under the kitchen table.

“Can I stay in our room?” Tilly asked.

“It’s not ours.”

Tabitha watched her sister—Tilly’s eyes swallowed every change, her hand fluttered over the stair rail.

The rattle of pans, crack of eggs, sizzle of bacon failed to draw the girl out. Tabitha fought the feeling of waking up, stirred and turned and blinked. She felt the child watching.

“What’s your name?” Tabitha asked.

“Tabitha.” A heart-shaped face appeared between the chair legs. Blue eyes. Voice like a bell, a wind chime.

 “Yes. What’s your name?”

“Tabitha.” 

Tilly reappeared at the foot of the stairs, pale.

Bending, Tabitha asked, “Will you be Tabby? We can’t both be Tabitha.”

“I Tabitha.” Unblinking. She looked at the twins.

 “Will you be Tabby?” Tilly asked.

Tabitha shrugged.

The afternoon passed untying the pieces from the tree. The yard became a giant chessboard of slowly reassembling dolls.

Tabitha looked up, her twin was gone.

The little girl wandered the rows of fragments, a plastic arm in hand.

Searching room to room, Tabitha finally stopped at the doorway she had not crossed in years.

The broken glass had disappeared, the wood floor glowed bright honey. The cradle in the corner was empty, and the curtains reached inwards, offering their wispy shadows.

 Shaking, she climbed through the open window onto the roof.

Tilly stood near the chimney, hair loose and blown into the exact shape of a gingko leaf. Urn in one hand, lid in the other.

Approaching carefully, quietly, Tabitha extended a spidery arm to meet her sister’s.

The metal container was the size and heft of a baby bottle when she wrapped her clammy fingers around it. Before thinking twice, Tabitha flipped her wrist and swung her arm in a wide arc, tearing a gash in time and space.

A rainbow of ashes caught in the wind, tossed into the branches of the tree. Rustling leaves spread them further. Some drifted into the old sandbox, but that was okay.

Below, the child Tabitha saw the twins on the roof, jumped up and down, and clapped her hands.

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Mantodea

by
Matt Bell

From across the bar, I couldn’t stop staring at her, at that breathtaking mouth of hers. Obviously as orally obsessed as I was, she filled that laughing cavity with whatever was close at hand: lime wedges, olives, tiny black straws she chewed between cigarettes. Gallons of vodka or gin, I couldn’t see which. She cracked ice cubes between strong white teeth, the sound audible even above the jukebox and the clatter and clack of pool balls coming together, spiraling apart. I wanted to stick my fist in there, to get her bright red lipstick all over my watchband. 

Getting up from my table in the corner, I steadied myself on chair backs and unoffered shoulders. The floor was the sticky history of a thousand spilled nights, and other couples danced between the pool tables and the bathrooms, their shoes making flypaper two-steps to the country-western songs spilling from the jukebox. I weaved between them until I reached the bar, where I took the stool beside the woman. 

I lit a cigarette, signaled the bartender for another whiskey with a raised pair of fingers. From up close, the woman was all mouth, the rest of her thin, too thin, hungry and lean like cancer. I wondered about the nutritional value of her life, of everything that passed through the furious red smear of her lips. I imagined both our mouths working furiously on each other, kissing with jaws unhinged as snakes.

I turned toward her, lifted my glass. Tried to remember how to smile without opening my mouth. Felt I probably wasn’t doing it exactly right.

Her own mouth said, Whatever it is you’re thinking of saying, it’s probably the wrong thing.

I waited before I responded. Waited until the urge passed to tell her about my old life, about all that I swallowed in the months before the hospital. I wanted to tell her though. Wanted to tell her about the coins and thumbtacks and staples. The handfuls of dirt and crushed light bulbs.

I wanted to tell her that like a lot of poisons you might eat, you have to swallow a lot more drain cleaner than you’d expect, if you’re trying to kill yourself. At least, the stuff hadn’t worked on me, not as I’d once hoped it would.

What it had done was clear me out, get rid of all kinds of things that had once been stuck inside of me. That had backed me up.

What it had done was take away my lower intestine, give me a short throw of a colon that couldn’t handle spicy food or even most solids. No citrus or tomatoes. No milk or milk products.

This new body, it wasn’t supposed to be exposed to alcohol, but giving up the booze was never really an option.

What I said to her instead was, I like watching you eat, drink. 

I want to buy you a meal. 

A meal with courses. Appetizer. Soup. Salad. Fish. Meat. Miniature loaves of bread with mounded pats of butter. 

I said, I want to watch you eat desserts that you have to chew and chew. Taffy. Caramels. I want to give you hard candies to suck thin and crush between your molars.

I said, I’d lick all the sticky sugar off your teeth for hours, if you wanted me to.

Her mouth laughed, said, The only meals I eat I find at the bottom of cocktail glasses. 

She fished her olive from under her ice cubes and popped it into her mouth, then licked clear liquor off her dripping fingers. I watched a single drop spill down the back of her hand, trace the blue ridge of a vein from knuckle to wrist. I laughed too, but with a hand over my mouth, hiding the teeth destroyed by chewing steel, the gums peeled black by the Drano. She reached over and pulled my hand down, saying, When I was a little girl, I thought mastication and masturbation were exactly the same word.

She had a disorienting smile, and for a moment I didn’t know who was aggressing who. She laughed again, slipped off the barstool with a swish of skirt. Drained her glass. 

Her mouth said, It’s not love at first sight, but it is something, isn’t it?

She walked away, past the pool tables and the dancing couples, their temporary lusts. I watched as she pushed through the swing of the bathroom door. I stubbed out my cigarette, finished my drink, then walked toward the bathroom myself, my guts burning and my throat scratched with smoke, my brain brave and dumb as a lizard’s. I put my hand on the cool metal panel of the bathroom door. I pushed.

The bathroom was two stalls and a single sink beneath an empty frame that once held a mirror presumably busted by some drunken stumble. She was inside the near stall, the smaller one. There was less room to move than there would have been in the handicapped stall, but there was enough. 

The door wouldn’t lock, but I didn’t care. Her back was to me, that glorious mouth seen only briefly when she looked over her shoulder, the wet slash of her lips framed by the toss of her chopped blond hair. I wanted her to turn around, but I thought she was teasing me, even though she wanted what I wanted or something close enough to count. She didn’t look back again, just put her hands against the slick tile wall, planted her feet on each side of the toilet. Waited for me. When I got close, the nape of her neck smelled like bad habits, tasted worse. I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to feel nice. Neither of us were. She flinched slightly at the sound of my belt buckle striking the porcelain toilet seat, then asked me my name. I whispered a fake one, then told her the truth when she asked me to repeat myself, knowing she’d assume it was a lie. 

Right before I finished, I felt her back arch toward me, felt her hands reaching for my face, pulling it close to hers. Her mouth opened, taking in my cheeks then my nose then my right eye, the whole side of my mouth. I felt her teeth tugging at the scratchy pouch between my ear and my jaw line, wanted her to keep going, to keep devouring me until I was gone.

I’d once thought I wanted to eat something that could end me, but now I knew I really wanted something else, something approximately the opposite. Something this woman could give me.

Later, after it was over, I realized she’d wanted the same thing, that I’d failed her by not tearing her to pieces, by not taking her inside me one bite at a time.

Too focused on myself, what I thought instead—right before I pulled out of her, before she pushed me against the stall divider with her tiny wrists full of their fragile bird bones, and definitely before she slipped past me without giving me the last kiss I so desperately wanted—what I thought then was, This one time will never be enough.

Still misunderstanding everything, what I said was, I’m going to need to see you again.

Her mouth laughed as she exited the bathroom, the sound so loud my ears were already ringing by the time I got my pants up. I raced after her, out of the bar and into the cold parking lot, where I lost her to the night’s thick blanket of confusion, its sharp starlight and fuzzed out streetlamps. 

I waited for the sound to stop, and eventually it did. Nothing she’d done would turn out to be permanent. Her smell would be gone by morning, and the teeth marks on my face would take less than a week to scab over and then, to my terror, heal completely.

For the first time in months, I went home to my apartment and emptied the kitchen junk drawer onto the dining table. I picked up the tiny nails and paper clips and stubs of pencils and erasers and whatever else I could find and then I jammed them into my system. I considered pouring myself a drink, then stopped and took a long hot swallow from the bottle. I smashed the unnecessary tumbler on the corner of the counter, watched as the cheap glass shattered everywhere. Stepping carefully so as not to cut my bare feet, I picked up the most wicked shard I could find. I held it in my hand, then set it in my mouth, rested it on my tongue. I swallowed hard, and when I didn’t die I went back for more.

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