Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ a scarf around it? No. A crucifix? A locket would be better, on a thin gold chain, not real gold, gold-plated, the gold worn to gray. And in the locket? Let’s say a tuft of fine brown hair, straighter than your own, and possibly not even human, the hair of a dog, perhaps, or a donkey, or a goat, or a [word indistinct]—

      A child is missing, a child is lost—

      But there is nothing to be gained by panic. We are making what haste we can. Already I have put the ravine behind me. In front of me I have put the road, of course, and a muddy field where thistles mutter and twitch. Meanwhile it steadies my mind to think about you, phlegmatically typing “phlegmatically,” and without even needing to check the spelling. You wear a ring on the thumb of one small but wide, rather rough, dry hand, and it sometimes rings like a bell against the frame of the typewriter, as now—ding! Your ring, unlike your locket, is true gold, though worn thin in some spots. It was probably your dead mother’s ring, unless your mother still lives, let her live, why not, though much altered, for the worse, by the syphilis.

      You half rise. Then you regulate yourself and sit back down. I suppose you think I am wasting my time baiting you when I could be describing wonders heretofore unknown to science. The silhouettes wheeling high above me now, for instance, of the greatest of the many birds seen here, if they are birds, which they are not, and yet they are not anything else either. They gyre around a single point. Naturally it is myself, or rather a point directly above me. They are almost stationary in flight, despite their huge, ungainly bodies, and though you would think such large birds would have to beat their mauve, fleshy wings in a frenzy just to stay airborne, it is not true, they oar the air almost haphazardly and at intervals between which they hover as if sustained by a constant updraft. Only occasionally do they—adjusting the angle of their wings almost imperceptibly—dip and slide into a descending curve.

      Here comes one now, its eyes like the glass heads of hatpins, a crescent of dust on each globe. Remarkable detail, but I would disabuse you of the notion that there is anything intrinsically more marvelous in that bird than in the way your shoulders draw together as you shift in your seat, feeling the coarse linsey-woolsey of your school pinafore fret your shoulder blades, or your hard ankles crossed beneath your seat, flexing rhythmically, so that the soles of your shoes knock against the wooden crossbars. I have not even forgotten to account for your oversized and rather scratchy underpants, loose about the waist, slightly damp in the crotch, or for the pocket in your dress, the inky handkerchief in the pocket, and the dime in the lining.

      Hark to the bird! A sound like tearing paper as it stoops. I fling myself at a sheltering brake. [Rustling.] A mistake: My fichu is caught fast—my skirt; the snickering thistles pull me down. Thorns rip through my petticoats. Talons rip through my hair.

      Then the bird beats back up and is gone. After smaller prey, perhaps—save her—I surge up—but no, if I am right, Finster is the falconer here, not the prey, Finster herself in the intemperance of a child’s will conceived and sent these birds. Attagirl!

      Unless I am. The falconer, I mean, though if I am that, then I am prey and falcon too, throwing my own self off the glove, scaring me up, striking me down.

      “A puppet show!” the thistles jeer. “A humbug!” Flecks of page-white writhe across the landscape. It is disintegrating again. And I went to so much trouble over it!

      [Static, hissing; two or three sentences indistinct.]

      —rely on, at least. Which is fortunate, because I depends [sic] on you. And yet I am almost sure I made you up. Why? You are too real. Too detailed. The crease at your wrist, for instance, usually to be seen in one of what I suppose to be your age—no more than sixteen—only in conjunction with considerable baby fat, though not in your case, it is just that your skin is unusually dry. You have matching creases at your ankles and your knuckles are calloused and fine lines are already forming at the corners of your mouth. You yawn, and a shining thread of saliva joins your uvula to your tongue. A dot or two of white suggest the incursion of streptococcus into your left tonsil, which, slightly swollen, resembles in shape and surface texture an overripe fig. With the tip of your tongue you test your lower lip, in which a crack has opened, salmon red.

      I suppose I love you a little. It is easy to love what one has invented.

      The girl Finster is not lovable.

      Save her!

      The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

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