Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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      Those peculiar entities they called letters frightened me a little. Nothing in the groans and hoots of speech suggested to me that it was made up of such articles. I might have imagined myself the victim of a fanciful hoax, had my father possessed any sense of whimsy or shown the least interest in my belief one way or the other. Spurred and tufted like flies’ feet, the printed words seemed glossy but dry, chitinous also as a fly; the round counters were globular, oversized eyes that were watching me knowingly; like flies the words kept deceptively still, but appeared primed for flight, and when I closed the book I heard coming from it the sound a fly makes against a window in another room, a quiet, sad, monotonous frenzy. From other, larger books in the glazed bookcase came the dull underwater rattle of crustacean claws. If speech was made of such spiky characters it did not surprise me that they got caught in my throat and tangled up in one another. The marvel was to see them in such quiet and orderly ranks upon the plot of the page. One thought of cemeteries. Perhaps it was their spirits that rose, silent and vaporous, to the reader’s mind. The reader was then God, bent avidly over the charnel ground, inhaling souls.

      You will perceive that I was confused, and not only theologically. My mind teemed with likenings. I could not even decide whether the printed word was quick or dead. Now, accepting that it is both quick and dead, like ghosts, I can barely understand my perplexity, but I remember it. With equal vibrancy do I remember the nap of the curtains against the side of my face, and the brandy sheen of the fine hairs on my lawlessly exposed shins, and the dark room whose heavy chairs and desks and secretaries, inkstands, ledgers, and paperweights, galvanometers and centrifuges, coils of copper wire, retorts and beakers all kindly turned their backs to me, and the page staining with brightness the space around it, and how I would shuffle sideways on my haunches without lifting my eyes from the page when a chill along one thigh told me that the sun had moved. Time, syrup-slow. My father’s absence, that had made it so. The absence of everyone, except the distant authors whose intentions somehow infused the cryptic signs before me. Infused also the green and violet specters that the incandescent page burned into my retinas.

      I do not remember how I learned to read, only that the sound of human voices gradually rose above the stridor of those flies. I say that it rose, but it felt more as though I descended, leaning through the words (which no longer seemed like wrought iron—or flies—or crustaceans—or any solid thing, but like so many bolt-holes) and hanging precariously over another world, whose doings I took in with avid eyes.

      Every day it came nearer. The jealous buzzing of the books that I had not chosen rose to a din, the handles of the barrister bookshelves rattled, but I paid no attention, forcing myself—against trivial but unyielding impediments, such as my body—toward a place that felt more like home than home did. Sometimes I came away from my father’s study with the sand of its shores under my nails, or a furry blue leaf entangled in my hair. When I stole a look at myself in the shadowed, subaquatic depths of the mirror in the hall, I could see strange reflections in my eyes: languid wicker airships crewed by clockwork octopuses, a church thatched with feathers, a quarry from whose unfathomable depths a winding line of ragged, gaunt laborers dragged barrows heaped with muddy phonographs.

      My idyll was cut short through my own weakness and cupidity. I was very often hungry as a child. I do not mean to imply that I was deliberately starved—that was not one of my father’s particular unkindnesses—only that in our strictly regulated household there was no hope of securing so much as a heel of bread until the clock in my father’s study had informed him that it was mealtime. But my stomach did not heed the clock, so I ravened. Sometimes I dared to set ahead the clock, but not by much. Sometimes I secreted a biscuit or a piece of cheese in my pinafore during a meal, and put it aside to nibble while I read, but my willpower was not strong and I invariably fell upon it a short time later and then was as hungry as if it had never been. Sometimes to chew on a bonnet string gave me a little relief, but it was accompanied with dread, since I knew that I would be punished if the ends were seen to be damp or frayed.

      So as the clock ticked, and the golden parallelogram slid across the floor, and the weight on my left thigh grew heavier, and the weight on my right grew lighter, and my soul leaned into another world, held back only by the ignoble cravings of my stomach, I took to eating books.

      I exaggerate. I did not eat whole volumes. I tore off the corners of pages and bit and sucked and chewed and when they eventually dissolved, I swallowed them. But it felt like eating, and placated my belly, and so I resorted to it more and more often, and even stole away one tasty book to hide in the shed against my next incarceration. I grazed ever farther afield, depredating whole swathes of my father’s library (even today, I must be part book), and learned discrimination. I found that I disliked the coarse yellow stuff of the cheaper books and magazines, which disintegrated quickly into a sort of paper gruel that was gluey and gritty at once. The thick white glossy clay-coated stock on which some illustrated books were printed squeaked nastily under my teeth and sometimes dealt paper-cuts to the corners of my mouth. The best paper rendered down into a sturdy cud that lasted, and had a simple, bready flavor.

      You will excuse, I hope, a brief excursion into pedantry. The compulsion to eat paper bears the same name as a measurement of font size. It is known as pica (from the Latin pica, or magpie), and is said to reflect, like the compulsion to eat dirt, chalk, or ice, a nutritional as well as a psychological abnormality. I believe that the homology with a type size is instructive, and that pica reflects, also, an abnormality in relations with the printed word. I loved books not spiritually, but carnally. And although I did not know it, I was practicing to channel the dead, who have always found in the printed page their most reliable medium.

      Though possibly I was just trying to bite my father, in proxy.

      In any case the time came that I had always known would come. When the uproar arose from the study, I set down my embroidery (a mere prop; my work never advanced by more than an X or two), rose, went out the back door, and crept through the loose and rotting latticework (more X’s) into the muddy space under the back porch. The feet of giants creaked overhead. It grew colder, darker. I heard the sound of the dinner bell. My stomach boiled obediently. I became aware of the pointlessness of my position. My father was not even looking for me, confident that I would eventually return.

      I did, and was beaten, scalded, shut up in the shed. Thereafter my father’s study was kept locked. The key now hung around his neck. I would not until years later even consider resorting to the Cheesehill library, for that would entail mingling with my social inferiors. Only one book remained to me, hidden in the shed: a gnawed copy of Moby-Dick. I might have done worse.

      I believe my father attributed my assault on his book collection to spite and never considered that I might have taught myself to read. Well, I believe that it is uncommon enough.

      Now, however, I turned from reading to writing. It was not quite for the first time: As soon as I had learned my letters I had employed them in fell curses scratched on our boundary rocks and fences, calculated to alarm the superstitious children of the neighborhood. More recently I had exercised my talents in a stolen ledger on a few pitiful stories in which young girls defied their captors in magnificent invective, the account of which made up the majority of the narrative. It will be apparent from these examples that the written word played then a merely prosthetic role, supplying an eloquence that in speech I lacked, and giving weight to infantine fantasies of puissance.

      But now it became something more for me. My ledger, barely a quarter filled, became my daily consort. Concealed in the shed, where I kept it, I poured into it all the thoughts I could not frame in speech, trivial and great; I wrote about my housework, my rabbits; I wrote fragments of stories; I wrote to read myself writing. As I did not speak like a little girl—did not speak—I did not write like a little girl. My syntax was baroque, my style orchidaceous. The phrases tumbled out, with inflections first heard decades and centuries before my birth. I had read them all before, in arrangements only a little different. Though they addressed the concerns СКАЧАТЬ