Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 Read online

  You might find this bland, perhaps too predictable and organized, like the compositions of Schubert—but these matters are of the gravest importance.

  Your ticket is underneath your periwinkle blue pillow. Feel free to ignore the tooth with the cavity that has been under your pillow for two weeks. Teeth with cavities become uglier once they are removed from mouths.

  Be forewarned: Moss has rapid bones and tight fingers, so you will be coming, for your own good, whether you like it or not.

  She will remove your pajamas and hold you beneath the waves for several minutes. This is to indoctrinate you into the purity of what we, for lack of a better phrase, call “hootwater."

  Hootwater will allow you to endure the intermittent frost of your journey.

  I remember when we went to the Statuemaker's. It was a summer day—or at least a fairly warm day when the sun had discarded most of its clouds. I made a plaster cast of your forearms and painted them green. I still recall the gentleness of the imprints that your bulging veins made. If I remember correctly, that was the same day that you made a life-size replica of the head of the lead singer of the band Shark Week. I still remember the jagged blades of his hair. It's so remarkable how few lead singers go bald, sometimes I'm willing to hazard a guess that they use hair plugs or strange sprays that come in aerosol bottles. Each age creates its own alchemy, I guess.

  Miss Madison Wonderment, there will always be a siren singing you to shipwreck, but I miss you and I love you and I hope you are okay.

  If terrorists attempt to overtake the ferry, I hope you'll know what to do. Violence is never an answer. And, as we all know, it's seldom even a question.

  Eventually, once these pen strokes stop representing the formalities of what I'm supposed to say and start to show more of my heart and less of my mind, I'll tell you why I'm writing this letter.

  Please wake before Moss arrives to snatch you. I'm aware that you are still slumbering and will therefore ... (even if I find a very helpful black lark from the Urals or one of the last living Bran Arthur crows and they are willing to let me rubberband this missive to their leg, or even if I find a timeshifting polecat who will teleport and land on your bosom) ... most likely oversleep tomorrow morning, thereby being most astonished when you are awoken by a mythical or near-extinct creature who has an overly long and long overdue note that says to find a ticket beneath your periwinkle pillow because an ancient yet rapid ferrywoman is coming to, if you will forgive the pun and this tortuously long sentence ... ferry you off.

  Even if Moss tries to slice your clothes from your body with a rusty scythe, please take a moment to remove the dust and cobwebs from your bedroom. I doubt you will ever return or even see your belongings again, but I encourage you to do a light job of cleaning, else the muck in the crevices will infect the noodles of your mind and haunt you forevermore. Please remember that the tilt of a gothic sentiment is rarely becoming, even when you pass the pasture full of bleating sheep. Giving up, giving out or giving in will all seem tempting.

  Instead, I urge you to keep your wits about you and to practice arias so your vocal cords will be limber for when you need them.

  I will enclose the Field Guide to the Care and Handling of Mythical Creatures and I am unsure if you will find it useful. You may be so well acquainted with most of the bestiary that you could generate a similar compendium yourself. I doubt you would include such an offensive section as the chapter on ‘Unicorn Porn,’ so I have removed those pages and will be keeping them for myself. Plus, those additional sixteen pages might make the overall package too heavy for the aforementioned black lark, crow or polecat.

  It won't all make sense, but I need for you to suspend disbelief and just go for it.

  Many of the actions will seem counterintuitive. The actions are, no matter how far afield they seem, designed to intensify your skills at chess. You remember well what a fierce tactician I once was...

  Alas, my game began its exponential decline on the day of my great chess coach's demise.

  I still see Miss Frothy Nougat's face from her wheelchair vantage point: her beady eyes staring, her mouth chortling. As she fianchettoed my king and queen with a protected bishop—forcing a queen for bishop trade that was not in my best interests—and my vision became hazy with the color of beets, she finally developed alchemical powers of transmogrification and turned herself into a fifty-eight-piece set of flatware! Eight seven-piece stainless steel settings and two serving spoons! All there before me, complete with the wooden chest to store them!

  A coup de grace. A coup d'etat. All relentlessly polished.

  Miss Madison Bloomflower Wonderment, my dear friend from the bedazzled and misbegotten days of our youth—when everything was different and we didn't have to sell our organs and burial plots in the name of refinancing our plans for world peace. It makes my mouth thirst for cranberry soda just to think of it...

  I, metaphorically, can taste your apprehension. I've used an extremely shiny scrying mirror and looked in on you from time to time. I know that you've—until this moment—lived a mundane life, and I'm unsure of how to put you at ease. I haven't written a letter like this to anyone in some time. Eventually, the iciness of your journey may force you to come to the conclusion that you're no longer breathing...

  Don't worry. As long as the boat is moving and you can smell the aftertaste of the hootwater and the unpleasant, microwaved kelp odors of the deep, you're alive.

  My digressions are not digressions. I offer these instructions, these examples, to help you see how it will feel to shed your skin and live in the new world. And I need you to do this for me.

  You've always spoken rapturously, eyes glowing like irradiated yo-yos, of how you are willing to scour, scourge and scorch the earth in the name of Goodliness.

  Your transformation will be more than taking responsibility for your actions. It will be about taking responsibility for the concerns of our planet. Desperation looms at our borders. Mother Nature has been forced to hide in the deepest of creek bottoms. She whispers Nan'an-accented Chinese in the Chang-hua Hsi-hu Dialect in Taiwan and even Literary Urdu while traversing the streets of Nice, but the world has weakened. Her guises possess less of her resplendence than ever before and are becoming more and more unsettling every day.

  Beware of the sheep. If you're not careful, their song will sing you to shallows and miseries. Earplugs and Dramamine won't render you immune. Burning a reproduction of Lucien Freud's painting of Jerry Hall from when she was naked and pregnant, and then stuffing the ashes into your inner ear won't do any good at all. You, before you wake from your dream and enter into mine, must rehearse a song.

  Since there was the ill-fated possibility that you would board Moss's ferry unprepared, thereby binding you to drown at the bottom of Lake Erie as you pass the sheep, I planned ahead and, four years ago, gave you a special collection of songs.

  Yes, the entrails—actually, their vegetable-based equivalent consisting mostly of burdocks and nettles—and auguries, even four years ago, revealed that you, despite my doubts and self-indulgent consternation, would be the only one who could unhook her ankles from the trammels of time and destiny.

  I made preparations and precautions, hoping against hope that you could rise up and make a stand in the names of Decency and Goodliness.

  I knew my realms could begin to crumble—that my labors of love and pain and loss could lean toward the abyss, but, even in making backup plans and preparing for such plumb and perverse eventualities, I didn't know I'd become this world-weary. I feel hypocritical, like a windup toy that's broken when it first comes from the packaging. But ... I was wise enough to teach you the mystical chant.

  And we must press on. So, betwixt “The Last Train To Clarkesville” and Chris De Burgh's most sprightly pop-rock hit, I burned—uncompressed yet digitized, stereophonic yet innocent—a copy of the song you must sing to get past the sheep. This will be the dark teatime, the nadir of your private underworld, the foment of rebellion that
gets stoked by your self-will.

  At least I buried the song you will need to sing on a CD-R that you have listened to so many times that you'll know it by heart, even under stress and duress.

  Yes, a cruel fairness on my part, but I am too fond of you to leave you fully unenchanted. But it will be quite difficult for you to sing, for, as you've now realized, Edgar Winters’ “Frankenstein” is an instrumental and driven by a textured triumvirate of synth, sinister guitar and a drum solo.

  If I'd truly known the direness, the totality of these circumstances, I would've hired the soprano Anna Selina “Nancy” Storace as your vocal coach. Or her reanimated corpse, since she died two hundred years ago.

  Had I truly known, I would've held your hand as you screeched and yowled for every high and low note.

  Here is the time where you may have to rush to the prow of the boat and fight Moss, if need be. I know I have told you that she has rapid bones and you cannot resist, but I am unsure of her loyalties and—if she is a minion of a darker force than I—I wanted to give you a heads up, so that she wouldn't get the drop on you and bash an oar into your skull right when things were getting really important.

  Sweetheart, your work is cut out for you. In fact, it's microprocessed like cheese that was grated and then put in something that was both a chopper and a hopper until all that was left was some sort of stringy and gooey cheese-butter. And I do apologize.

  Due to the vagaries of metaphysical adventuring, your ordeal will only take one hour, the most intense sixty minutes of your life.

  Forgive me if I treat you like a snapshot frozen in time. I know we've drifted over the last half decade. If I trusted someone else, maybe I would've dreamed about their coming to rescue me from myself and ... well, we really mustn't question the power of dreams. We've just got to go with this. Fate: how the gnarled yarns are woven, measured, and snipped, these aren't the part of living that we get to question. We can wonder why we eat strawberry jam even after we're full or why we wear certain clothing even after it fits too tightly and stops looking snazzy, but comfort foods and comfort clothes seem like tripe when compared to infinite fights between demons and angels, fire raining from the sky and all that.

  Destiny is destiny, and it's getting the best of me.

  There's nothing left inside me. I only seem alive. If you don't gather the prettiest flowers (I recommend gladiolas intertwined with verbena) and place garlands around your neck and sully forth on this treacherous mission, people we once held dear as fairly decent friends will become mere foggy memories, or worse, I, and everyone else we used to love, will perish ... we'll drop from the earth like puppets with their heads bitten off by the giant from “Jack & The Beanstalk."

  Honestly. That's why this is so urgent and so dire.

  I wear the same clothes I once did, but the description of my face has changed radically. My skin is baggy and I walk like a woman who has forgotten her feet.

  The flowers of the garland that I pretend to wear in my mind are long wilted and tumbling to the ground, one chartreuse blossom at a time. My powers have diminished to the point of being non-returnable items that I couldn't even hock at a flea market in Oceania. My clothes smell of rancor and strife. The world has won. The battle for my wits and sanity is lost.

  I wish today were a different day and that we were reminiscing of happier times, munching crullers at a cafe in Prague or betting on ponies in Saratoga Springs.

  Do you remember when we went to Glenn Miller's birthplace for a camp field trip? The gold records in the shadowy basement of the library? And there was that other exhibit, the one with “Protective Devices from throughout the Ages?” Condoms, firefighter suits, slingshots, religious relics and pajamas with feet in both children and adult sizes. Those were my favorites. What were yours?

  I wish we could go back to that museum. I shouldn't let this part slip, but these terrible things are brewing inside me like a bitter tea...

  Let me clear my pen like someone clearing their throat.

  There, on a separate piece of paper you may never see, I've made a strange doodle that looks like a skull with batwings mounted on its temples.

  If I'm letting the horrors flow, please forgive me. If you die on your quest to save me, please forgive me. If I am deceased when you arrive, that's an acceptable ending...

  No, I'm serious and I mean it. Too many people, in our cankered and plague-blighted age, want nothing but happiness, nothing but Jane Austen.

  You, my pretend love, will have to be wise enough to accept tragedy if it's time for tragedy.

  Maybe the truths I need are, for lack of a better construct, truths from beyond the grave.

  Your trip will go something like this:

  Moss will capture you, threaten to skin you alive and then, instead, remove your clothing and submerge you under water for a few minutes.

  Then you might have no choice but to choke some of the elixir known as hootwater down your throat.

  You will pass a field of flowers more succulent and charming than anything you've ever seen. Please pay them no mind whatsoever. Promise me you won't even look hard.

  You will go underwater and underland and smell things that are slightly worse than any smells you've ever imagined. I remember when someone snuck a vial containing the musk of a striped skunk blended with the rancid remains of four-hundred-year-old ghee clarified butter into the handicapped-accessible bathroom in the back of our classroom at Sleepaway Witch Camp. The vial, left on the radiator, smelled atrocious, but what I'm talking about is far worse.

  You will encounter the singing sheep. This is paramount. You need to open your mouth wide and let the “Frankenstein” music cackle from your throat, even if it starts snowing pink snowflakes that make your eyes go kooky.

  If you don't die, and out-sing the sheep, the bleaters will then morph into giant Koala bears and pteranodons. Things will be both mad and deep. The Koala bears will test your abilities at high-speed ballroom dancing and the Cretaceous period pterodactyloid winged reptiles will play you in simultaneous games of chess.

  Be careful. Pteranodons don't have teeth, so they'll be moving the pieces with their claws.

  I erred before—though it is important, chess is not the proper metaphor for your journey. A more correct parallel would be to compare your quest to spelunking. I am the flashlight on your head, but you are the only one who can remember to wear the hat and lean so the beam points in the right direction. That makes you the heroine for this one. I've said it previously and in a prism of ways, but I really and truly need your help on this sucker.

  There are three final dumplings of wisdom that I must offer, even if you feel your brain is full and a goodly amount of interstitial seepage is clogging your ears:

  1) Eventually, you will have urges to strike your forehead against hard, flat objects. Please refrain.

  2) All vegetarians have sacred cows. It's how the totemic animal connection occurs. Even if they occasionally wear leather that they received as a gift. Meat eaters do not have “sacred carrots” or anything of the sort. If someone eats meat and claims to possess sacred cows, they are nothing but a deceiver and you shouldn't meet with them, except at public places like the reference section of the New York Public Library or the aforementioned pastry shop in Prague. Even then, you may merely dip into the pages of a library book you've already read or have one cruller or two, but not three.

  3) If you are given an unsharpened pencil, by anyone, you must sharpen it with your teeth. Immediately, even if your mouth is already full.

  Finally, in what, potentially, should've been comment number four: interstitial brain seepage will not protect you from the songs of the sheep. Sing as if your ability to draw breath depends upon it, for it does. Like many countries and sovereigns who have grown fat with greed, I have made enemies faster than I can kill them.

  Please do not blame me for being the messenger. Please do not let your eyes jaundice on this matter, Miss Wonderment. It pains me to admit this, but you
are my only hope.

  Finally, I'm sorry about the thirty bucks that you think I still owe you. Several weeks after I last saw you—approximately 1,222 days ago—I loaned thirty dollars to a whitetail deer who was jumping through the woods. Therefore, the deer now owes you thirty bucks and I've been in the clear since then, even if you weren't aware of it.

  Thank you for your attention to these dire and utterly important matters.

  Disregard them at your—and everyone else from Katmandu to the tip of Timbuktu's—peril.

  Cruella Boney “Maroni” Stiltskin

  also known as

  Little Medea Medusa Mendicant

  (who had blonde pigtails and sat next to you at the first level of Sleepaway Witch Camp)

  * * * *

  P.S. At some point, you may be asked if you would like to enter the “Land of Beauty.” Don't. No matter what. Even if they tell you that Jimmy cracked corn and you shouldn't care. I mean it. Do not enter the Land of Beauty. It isn't worth the creosote-drenched bandages...

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  The Film Column

  William Smith

  The Tenant

  1976, dir: Roman Polanski

  Few films can match The Tenant's portrayal of the nervous isolation under every city-dweller's skin. Trelkovsky, played by Polanski, has a lead on an apartment from which the previous occupant defenestrated herself. He pounces, claiming to have heard of the opening through “a friend ... no, a relation,” and resourcefully bargains his way in. He never displays either doubt or guilt at having stolen a nearly-dead woman's home, and when the super reassures him that “she won't get better” he seems relieved by the lack of complication.

  Trelkovsky isn't cruel, but apartments are “very hard to come by these days” and, after all, every vacancy is predicated on someone else's triumph or tragedy—they've either moved up in the world or out of it. Once the apartment is secure, the tenant has the luxury for pity and visits his predecessor in the hospital. She is wrapped in bandages from head to toe and what can be seen of her face registers nothing but horror and pain. A grief-stricken (and attractive) friend stands by the bed. Trelkovsky—who is “a relation ... no, a friend” of the afflicted—offers her comfort and a drink.