Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31 Read online

  It occurred to her that she might be able to make rent if she hired herself and her iScreen abilities to Hollywood. She could do a whole set of alternate endings to soppy romances, and sell them to the sadness addicts, the fastest-growing segment of the population, according to the latest study. They were paying for drugs that allowed them to cry. This would be a drug-free way to do it—the synthetics were never as good as the real thing.

  And then she realized she wasn’t thinking big enough. She could do more than enhance movies to increase emotion. She could skip the middle step altogether. If she advertised discreetly, found the right listservs and networks, she could charge astronomical prices for real emotion transfer. Divorced couples, revengeful teenagers . . . she could double-deal, perform endless back-and-forths, manage the emotions of entire families. She could offer people the opportunity to literally feel each other’s pain.

  She would not only be able to keep her apartment—she could travel, and get an expensive bike, and collect books, and hobnob with bigwigs. She could set up a foundation for downtrodden girlfriends whose boyfriends weren’t that great in the first place. She began work on a demonstration vid. She was going to be so rich that she’d be able to buy any emotion she wanted, any time she wanted it.

  Four Poems

  Lesley Wheeler

  Archipelago of Crusoes

  Aisha chose the most Confederate-shadowed spot

  on the whole Colonnade: the room where General

  Lee pledged to serve as President. The sun

  is gone. We wait, islanded in the dark,

  for our pupils to open. The air full of May.

  We ask, “Is anyone there?” Six outcasts rest

  their fingers on the planchette. Aisha is firm,

  pressing for a pulse. The rebel spirit

  who replies cannot spell; the pointer staggers.

  He was an untried soldier, he says. He died

  at forty in North Carolina. Now he loiters

  around the popular ghosts, lonely in love.

  We all crowd together to listen in the faint

  light from the naked windows. We try so hard

  not to touch one another that our limbs go numb.

  A plastic foot trips off the Ouija board

  and a swifter hand follows. A veteran

  at séances from the military school

  next door. Stonewall Jackson? Although we’ve heard

  he loathed his students, he’s glad enough to lecture

  now. We are his enemies, and yet he’s us:

  the castaways who linger after class.

  Is there an unhappy spirit in the room?

  YES NYAU. We puzzle. “Gold,”

  Eric says. “New York,” tries Catherine.

  “Author?” I ask. “James Merrill was from New York,”

  Aisha cries. The pointer flies to YES.

  We babble questions. Alison wants Merrill

  reincarnated as her first-born child; he’s game.

  The waves divide us, stop us calling out,

  but only distance lets us sit so close.

  No demons. Just one more voice. An undergrad?

  YES. He lurks in a corner, in exile even

  from us, the ones who invite the ghosts of dead

  gay formalists to possess our future babies.

  There was a crash ten years before, the fall

  my son was born, killing a sophomore and

  his passenger. Drunk. I’m hot with shame

  but no one can see. The current’s flowing fast.

  “What did we read—did you like any of it?” NO.

  I sigh; Briana snickers. “What was the course?”

  The letters flash by too quickly, but later I dig

  out my grade book: a Dickinson seminar.

  Seventeen hundred secret messages.

  The row of checks unbroken—he never skipped.

  I never sent a letter to his parents.

  I look at Eric, who glances back as if

  in a rearview mirror. His signal from a distance.

  I can’t always read them. “Did you catch what he

  spelled?”

  Andrea raises her college-ruled face and they all

  turn to me, shining, as open as postcards.

  She fiddles, deadpans. The answer a wreck,

  a funeral for a kind of solitude.

  “He said, FAG ENGLISH.” Outed, hysterical,

  we drum our hands and feet upon the floor,

  our separate heavens ringing like one bell.

  The Wallace Stevens Strategy

  There, crouching darkly on the traffic light,

  a surly man, hunched as if over a pipe,

  his hat as long as his beard. Look straight on

  and he dissolves. There is no leprechaun.

  Had been wondering about paranoia,

  trying for nothing that is not there. A lawyer

  is reading my email. Above me an empty heaven;

  through my feet, the traffic’s infrasonic tone.

  Bitter air. Pointed smell of autumn mold.

  Before this trudge back home, a superior told

  me his touching was nothing. All would be well.

  The leprechaun doubts it, since he, my optical

  disturbance, is a watcher, male, unkind.

  No place for “I” here. Just the nothing that’s mine.

  Werewolf Arm

  Call it Becker’s nevus if it makes you feel

  safer: that patch of darker pigment on your righteous

  wrist where the hair grows thicker. Just aesthetic,

  scientists assure, occurring mostly

  in males. Reasonably rare. Nothing to fear

  though maybe why you are obsessed with masked

  monsters, Dr. Jekyll’s violence,

  lunacy gripping mild men. The idea marked

  you, slow contagion. An earthy suggestion

  beneath scuffed snow on some Carpathian trail.

  Tonight the sky is a skin, the clouds are ghostly

  stains. Guilty, you startle, hearing the moon

  through your writing hand. Fingers flex; a tic

  works down one leg. She knows how sick you are

  Surviving Fragment of

  “Hippo Sonnet”

  . . . their cries through the shattering wood.

  They never thought they could be so good.

  Verses flickered red on my eyelids

  as the dream touched down, its engine

  stuttered, and I arrived. My muse

  a suitcase stuffed with parchment scraps.

  Every night heaved onto the wind’s

  back with a mechanical grunt; every

  morning lowered to ground, with, if

  I’m lucky, lines scratched on the stub

  of my boarding pass. Like a flowering

  gerbil. Or: Alien / like a piece of a wheel /

  struck. The words are lint, fibers

  to flick off my jacket before I queue

  for the next connection.

  If, instead,

  I dash out doors that snap behind me,

  startled to have yawned; if,

  after miles of asphalt dendrites,

  I exit the taxi and stroll to the trees;

  if I finger the braille of the leaves, I find

  the scene ionized. Warty

  fruit rolls along an almost-vanished

  path. Idiomatic cackles rise

  and blue bark tinkles down, scraped

  loose by some uncanny passage.

  If I persi
st, late for my plane

  again, I spy language hovering

  in the synapse, signaling wildly,

  ready to charge. Monstrous and poignant.

  Words that inspire a ticket and change.

  I never thought I could be so strange.

  Never Eat Crow

  Goldie Goldbloom

  She was three, maybe four, when they sold her. Someone bent down and put their lips on her forehead and that was goodbye. A fence all made from sticks, a willow tree, a geranium growing in a bucket. Grass mown by a horse pulling a cutter bar.

  The second step from the top was always damp. Dew fell on the bleached wood from the lip of the tin roof and on summer mornings, when Soile sat there, her bare feet cringed from the cold. Cold is a killer. She was the cleaning lady; on this island, this year, every one of the visiting people used her. They said she never stole, but she did. Not small things. Large. Mattresses. Lamps. A rocking chair, a family portrait, a painted Norwegian chest that she’d carried away on her back as the owners sat picnicking under the birches, her hand hooked through one of the heavy iron handles, her head almost touching her knees.

  She wore the front of her black hair parted and tied into braids, and the back covered with a bit of cloth shattered from use. Ears looked like dried apricots to her, tart and delicious. This island, so small and green and singing with life in the Finnish summer, was barely a hunch of snow sticking out of the frozen sea in winter. Now, she came each week with that year’s dog, Hamlet, and a sled. A long-haired dog can keep you from freezing. Hamlet, besides, had blue eyes.

  The whiteness is blinding. Nothing else exists. The snow over the ice melts in the momentary midday sun and refreezes into a crust. Walking, she broke through with each step, a push, a crack, a fall into solidity. Again and again. All the way from Rymattyla. The summer people paid her poorly in the winter, but better than they knew.

  No one came except hunters. Once, twice a day, a shot. Perhaps the hunters. Perhaps the ice. During storms, the hiss of ice razoring the walls of the cabins. Where did all that summer go? Sometimes seeds or dragonflies or autumn leaves were trapped in the ice. The ice breathes. Melt, on the surface, slicks back and forth with each breath. Watch the early larvae swimming and you will see.

  She, Soile, comes this morning, her paw on another girl’s arm.

  “Are you sure it’s alright?” says the chattering nervousness.

  “Which house to stay in?”

  One cabin has antlers piled up to the roofline, invisible against the snow except for where they have mouldered.

  “Don’t they mind?”

  Soile holds up the ring of keys. Four keys. “Which?”

  They met in summer on a different island in the archipelago, where Soile had gone to sell a three hundred year old mirror and to eat crayfish. Wasps built houses like lotus pods under the wide eaves of the café. She thought she’d seen the girl, Lena, before, but try as she might, no memory came forth.

  “What are you?” she said, and Lena, giggling, said nineteen years old, sixty-five centimetres tall, plump, carbon-based naughty girl.

  “Naughty?” Soile said, her teeth showing, and the girl, under the table, pushed her foot forward and touched Soile’s bare toes.

  The meadows were filled with tiny yellow butterflies that summer, absolutely filled. Upon closer examination, they have pink legs and hairy. Chickens and roosters crawk under all verandas, too many, too many. By the end of the summer there will be fewer. The dog and she will be rounder. Feathers can be stuffed into plastic grocery bags and pushed between a sweater and a shirt, for warmth, come winter. Chicken fat, rubbed on the face and ears, protects against frostbite. Almost nothing better than the cold slip of fresh laid egg raw in the throat, the sweet smooth shell kissed between the lips. Pleasure feels like raw egg. Walk too fast through the marshy places and mud will splatter up your calves and thighs. Smells of mushrooms, rotten wood, shit.

  She falls in love with fat. One bite and she knows if it will be worth her while to digest. Sweet sweet fat, shining and soft and slippery, bubbles of winter joy. Chew or spit when once you knew. Owls look big, but there’s only a bare handful of greasy meat under all that fluff. Never eat crow if you value your life.

  On the old maps, she’d been told it said “No Man’s Land” . . . she liked the sound of that, wanted it tattooed across her chest, but was afraid of the pain and her own blood and the no-going-backness. She’d never met a man who seemed anything more than the most tepid of lap dogs but she hated to rule out possibilities. About the unknown, the other thing it said on old maps was “Here be dragons.”

  Fir wood, under your feet, feels gritty. Pine feels hot. Walnut is cool and smoky. Maple needs sex and demands it now. She liked linoleum for the way it sold itself cheaply and didn’t try to worm its way into your life. Linoleum wore latex hotpants. Linoleum had pink hair and “No Man’s Land” tattooed across its chest. Carpet wore fake pearls but said they were real. Soile always wore men’s shirts from the thrift store and a huge floral skirt, so her body was divided above from below, at the line where the shirt ended and the skirt began. She wore an apron too, with pockets cut from old jeans and a loop for her hammer at the hip.

  You have no idea what damage you can do to someone’s face with a hammer.

  When it’s forty below, you can sit in a hospital emergency room, and pretend to be waiting for someone. Police on night duty are brought in, with large chunks of their buttocks and noses lost to frostbite. If they wear those gloves that stop at the knuckles so they can smoke, they come in missing fingers. The public library is also a good spot, but you’ll be asked to leave if you smell bad. Bathe in the sea even in winter. That’s how steel is made strong. By plunging it into cold water. Scrub with sand. Disturbing the patrons, the library says. You can get on the train and just not get off again for days, until you need to eat. A big dog is like owning a fur coat.

  Behind the bakery and the fish shop and the grocery are dumpsters full of perfectly good food if you don’t mind the food that isn’t perfectly good anymore that’s in there too. And rats. And used diapers. And needles from the junkies that no matter which way you climb in will always poke you in the bum. Rats are good eating when they are small, especially the tails.

  The homeless shelter in downtown Turku serves a hot lunch on Mondays because the bakeries and the fish shops and the groceries are all closed on Sundays and the dumpsters are emptied on Saturdays and there’s a lot of kids will eat there and say they are lost just to get food, the liars. She’d like to put the claw of the hammer right into the sockets of their eyes for taking her food. They call her Spit, which is all wrong. She doesn’t call them anything. The whiteness is blinding. Nothing else exists. Sometimes she hears the zhring of summer crickets in her head all winter.

  Her hands are thick and brown and dirty. Work hands. Her thumbs stop at the first joint and don’t have nails. Someone forgot to teach her how to talk right. She makes mistakes like saying, “What are you?” instead of “What is your name?” She can drink four litres of milk at one time and only throws up if she bends over. The girl, Lena, is from the mainland. She is going to university. She is pretty and wears a parka that you couldn’t freeze in and drives a car and has a plastic card that gives her money whenever she wants it and she smells like Lily-of-the-Valley. She told Soile that when Soile sniffed her neck. “Lily-of-the-Valley,” she said.

  They go into one house after another. Mrs. Pekkonen hired Soile right off the street, dog and all, to clean her cabin. She believed that, given decent work and good wages, Soile was reclaimable. On Mrs. Pekkonen’s Steinway piano, Soile pecked out four bars of Pachelbel’s Canon. “Taught myself,” she says. Mrs. Pekkonen patted her on the head.

  “Do you have children?” the Pekko asks. Soile looks like an old thirty. She thinks she might be fourteen. Or nine. Those are nice numbers
.

  Then came Chopsticks, Fur Elise, Twinkle Twinkle, Killing Me Softly.

  The weather turned cold and Mrs. Pekkonen went back to Helsinki in her Vulva.

  “Check up on the cabin, will you?” she asked. Fifty markka for checking up. And a family portrait. And a Turkish carpet that wore real pearls.

  Swings half-buried, the chains driving down into snow. Clear the snow and you can sit with Lena on your lap and swing and swing and swing and not let her go even though she is screaming because it is too high and too long and your fingers are too tight and the frame is shaking and coming up out of the snow. Rust from the chains reddens her hands.

  If you wrap your feet in newspapers and then rags and then plastic bags and then duct tape them closed and then put on the extra large gum boots you found at the cabin nearest the dock, your feet will not get cold or wet and you won’t lose any more toes. If she loved me, she wouldn’t scream. Duct tape hurts like hell when you put it on lips. A chain about the neck is just as swift.

  Soile lights the stove with the kindling stacked on the shelves nearby. Never use the leather ones because they stink. The ones with photographs burn green and slow. This is the last house with any kindling left. These are the last pieces of kindling. Crimpling the papers lets the fire eat air.