Breakable Things, page 3
And as Lord Petty drew a rattling breath, his diatribe chaptered by deep inhalations, Mrs. Fox said in a voice so calm, so certain, that the world stilled at its conviction. “And then you stole the dead man’s hand so you could barter it for my own. Though you watched me be wedded to my husband, though you drank to our happiness, though you claim yourself an honorable man. You stole a dead man’s ring and then bade the wolves to come devour us.”
Mrs. Fox rose and something ancient stood in her place. “No, Lord Petty. That is not how the story ends.”
“How did the story end, Papa?”
“Bloody, of course.” Mr. Fox said primly. “Now go to bed, my loves. Tomorrow, a hunt waits.”
radio werewolf
“You really think there are Nazis in these woods?”
“I think there’s something in the woods.” He shrugs at me, tall and lean, still slightly gangly, like he’d never learned the art of his limbs. He raps the side of his nose, grey eyes stalking the pines.
There’s something in the woods.
I shiver and stuff my hands into my pockets, following his gaze to the treeline. Boom. A few seconds later: the crack and crash of timber, a snarl of fluttering wings. Bird screams.
The Nazis’ broadcasts said they had guerrilla forces waiting, watching from the mouth of the pines. Werewolves. Ready to devour us whole.
I hiss out a breath.
“Yeah. Us.”
He breaks out a laugh for me, sharp, this yipping thing like he’d chewed it off something bigger than him, something wilder than him. If dogs could laugh, this would be the sound they make.
“Someone is going to get court martialed then. Between the Panzerfausts debacle and the radio transmissions.” I rake my nails along my chin and down my throat, where the stubble’s grown wild.
He looks back at me, not quite smiling, the corner of a lip jagging upwards.
Boom.
“I really think someone is just fucking with us.” I grumble.
“I don’t.”
“Look, these woods are filled with god knows what. Someone probably just found old recordings and decided it’d be fun to, I don’t know, stir up some paranoia in the ranks. Keep things lively. I mean, we’re shooting down trees, for heaven’s sake. Everyone’s bored.”
“There’s been witnesses.”
“There are always witnesses. Pick a myth. Someone knows someone who has seen it, swear on their grandmother’s grave and all that. Personal testimonials are worth shit.” The words roar louder than I intended. By the end of it, I’m panting, sucking gobbets of cold air, breath curling between my teeth.
He’s grinning.
He’s fucking with me, I realize with a twitch, and I choke the urge to growl. “There isn’t a Nazi resistance waiting in the woods.”
He licks his tongue over his incisors. “But there’s something in the woods.”
“Sure. Squirrels, bears, foxes—”
“Wolves.”
And the world quiets when he says the word, the air wrapping itself about the sound, stretching the syllable into the echo of a howl. The hairs on my neck rise and I force a grin, shoulders scissoring back.
In the encroaching dusk, he’s all angles and white smile, a little ungainly, like something that wasn’t meant to be standing on two legs. If you narrow your eyes just so, you can almost see it, a sharpness to his face, a certain bestial light.
I show my teeth, a warning in the expression. I can’t help myself this time. “Wolves. Fine. And whatever else the landscape might hold. But no German resistance. If there were any, they’re dead. We’re just chasing ghosts here. Unternehmen Werwolf was propaganda. It was meant to scare us.”
“You say it like you know it for a fact. You say it like someone who heard it from the source. All those people with their thousands of theories and you say it with the confidence of the werewolf telling the village, ‘Don’t be afraid. There aren’t any wolves in the forest.’”
Something screams in the woods, something wild, something broken-boned, terrified.
“And?”
His teeth are as long as mine. “Oh, nothing at all, sir. “
“Get back to camp.” The words slide out like claws. “This place is clearly getting to you.”
He laughs again as he lopes away, singing under his breath the words we hear every morning, blared from Berlin. “My werewolf teeth bite the enemy. And then he’s done and then he’s gone. Hoo, hoo hoo.”
A little later, when there is no one to watch, when the sounds of singing become muddled, a wolf stretches and follows him into the gloom.
recite her the names of pain
The siren holds her fuck-yous, her how-could-yous, her-why-did-yous, her how-fucking-dare-yous, against the roof of her mouth, on her tongue, in her lungs, until the ceiling breaks and the world comes down.
“Fuck,” she shades her eyes with a hand, debris like confetti still raining from the firmament, reality paper-shredded into pulsating glitter. No one else notices except the woman on the opposite end, mouth opened in shock.
“Fuck,” she says again, softer this time, because sometimes—most times, if she is going to be honest about it—at the end of a world, nothing else is half-enough.
I check my reflection in the oval, man-sized mirror at the foot of the long hallway that marries our rooms to the apartment. The noon-light spills onto the carpet at a slant and it is colder than it has any right to be, blued by the dusty church glass. A single bristle feather, the same shade of black as my hair, points from my throat like a signpost, the little barbs gold-glossed. I pluck it out.
“Are you going out?” Ligeia slumps against her doorway, eyes still heavy with sleep, sockets smudged with liner. She yawns. “It’s too early.”
“Already evening in the archipelago.” I point out, putting on hoop earrings. Starlings in miniature, bronze and beautifully detailed, clench each loop with tiny, gleaming claws. Some decades ago, they used to sing whenever I sat by the sea but lately, they’ve gone quiet. Like a lot of things, I think they’re tired, husked of love for what was once home. This isn’t a country for magic any longer, no place for old ghosts or brass-boned birds.
“So?”
“There are supposed to be punters.” The velvet jacket might have been too much. I slough the garment and stretch, stare at where the wing stubs protrude from the cheap fabric. It is a man’s tank top, loose along the breasts and the hips. A bad fit. But I like the damask, indigo over faded eggshell-white, and how it distracts from the cigarette-burns constellating my collarbones, and how it walks the eye to the tattoos bangling my forearms: manta rays, sphinxes, feathers by the thousands.
“Like I said: so fucking what?” Ligeia is tall and thin as a coyote’s warning, the pile-up of her curly black hair barely tethered by a tortoiseshell comb. Tendrils spill over an eye as she cocks her head. “There are enough birds on the island that they’d lie to each other about having seen sirens. If they really wanted prophecy, they’d go to Delphi. Are you really trading pancakes for tourists?”
“There’s one—” I begin to say, an image between my lips, the taste of it like roasted marrow, the shape of it like a jag of chewed-down bone. I don’t love them the way Parthenope does. I don’t loathe them either. But sometimes, they hum like a hope I’d forgotten and their longing becomes a hurt, a fishhook dug deep, a noose around my neck pulling me onward, forward to whatever comes next. “She’s hurting.”
“They’re always hurting.”
“She wants answers so bad.”
“They don’t.” Ligeia lets her hair go. When it falls, it becomes plumage, black-blue like a bruise. The air is breakfast smells: pancakes and rye-cut goat butter sizzling on the pan, alcohol cooking to caramel, bacon burnt the way I like them, Chemex coffee like only our sister can make them, sweet and oilless and golden. If I wait too long, I’ll never go. “None of them ever want answers. They just want you to tell them they’re right.”
“Nonetheless—”
A crooking of a rueful smile. Ligeia’s teeth gleam barbed and bright. “—she persisted. Fucking go. Maybe, you’ll make it back in time for brunch.”
“Is this where you eat me?” the woman demands. She’s so small, the siren thinks. Like some downy, broken-backed thing that’d staggered out of its nest and fallen out of the boughs, still shrilling like it had the deed to the sea and the sky. But at least there’s wonder there in the shine of her sclera, held like a key, like this is the moment when the world unlocks and her happy ending spills free.
The siren regards her petitioner, heavy-lidded, still coked-up on miracle. “You wish.”
It must have cost them everything. Russo doesn’t rent out Gallo Lunge for cheap.
I step out into the dusk and onto an outcropping, bend down, fingers wefted over a knee, my chin on my knuckles, and watch as the little group exits their boat. They don’t look like they belong here, don’t look like they’ve ever belonged anywhere, their voices jouncing along the cliffside, screeching and stupid.
They run their fingers over whatever they can reach. All of them except for her, the one who’d collared me, cornered me, corralled me here with her prayer, her impassioned plea for him to be better, for her to matter, for this to not be true, please, just please. She holds herself like a dime-store empress, regal and brittle and sick with need.
She looks up.
I always wonder what they see. Whether it is a girl of about twenty, indeterminate height, indeterminate ethnicity, hair so wild it traps sediments of starlight, or something primordial, plumed and only precariously human. Maybe, they just see the help, someone to hold their hand as they itemize Li Galli’s trousseau of wonders, theirs for a night and the price of the world.
I never ask.
Like them, it doesn’t matter.
“Then tell me what I need to know.”
“You won’t like it.” If the woman had asked, she’d have told her that the dust isn’t dust, but destiny shaken up like a snow globe, particulates of possibility free-floating in a soup of maybe. “You humans never like it.”
“I don’t care.” She grabs the siren, fistfuls of feathers crushed in each hand. “Tell me what I need to know!”
“What you need to know or what you want to know? Because there’s a difference in the two and you don’t need me for one of them.” It hurts. It surprises the siren that it does, the silhouette of the woman dwarfed by even one of her wings, because she knows it’d take no effort at all to snap her neck: one contraction of a verdigrised claw, a squeeze, a pop. But here they are, with the woman grating her palms down to the bloodied bone, feathers like sea foam pooling below them.
“What I need to know.” The woman cries.
In answer, the siren sighs.
I serve them dinner in a room frescoed with blue-white zellige. Fresh mackerel fried with salt and pepper and lemon juice and olive oil so pure it’d make a nunnery look like a bacchanal. Moussaka pilfered from Parthonepe’s oven. Dolmathakia and feta in neon-bright bowls. Stacks of pita, mason jars full of olives. Even taramosalata, beige-colored, beautifully savoury, and a wasted delicacy at that table of timid palates.
Through it all, she watches me.
Moonlight paints the villa opal, a nacreous glazing that seeps into their skin. For fun, I pour them wine from amphoras millennia-old, but they make no mention of the vintage except to ask why their drink is so watery and even then, they don’t press too hard. The first night is always sacred, haloed and hallowed by the understanding such expeditions are once in a middle-class lifetime.
“Tell us a story,” says a hook-nosed man in a coat too big for him, an arm around a woman with hair like the death of autumn, freckles crowding her high-cheeked face.
I oblige and recite them two stories of my beloved Parthenope, the first one a piece of libel, a lionization of that half-wit Odysseus, and the second a truth no Greek historian would put to ink. In that version, the real one, my sister doesn’t die, doesn’t drown because of a liar. Odysseus’s ship docks itself and lovelorn, the crew emerges, six abreast with a dowry of their deeds. They ask her to marry them. Yes, every last one. Even Odysseus, the memory of Penelope devolved into a half a heartbeat’s worth of hesitation.
And of course, Parthenope marries their cook, no sin in the birdcage of his soul, a bit of magic instead, spice-touched and tawny. One day, I’ll tell the story of what happens next and how a siren fell in love with a land.
“Tell us a truth,” says a girl who is all angles and attenuation, the spokes of her bones pressing through blemished skin. She ashes her cigarette into a blue-glassed cup, a shallow layer of sticky-sweet wine already congealing.
I tell them to go on Twitter and follow a thread through translations of the sirens, annotated at last by a woman. “Mouths,” I intone, paraphrasing my favorite part. “keep eating the wrong things, and mouths speak and sing to enable and thwart the onward journey. Mouths are powerful and dangerous.”
“Tell me my future,” she says and while I think how to answer, she reaches out, circles my wrist with her fingers.
It is a big fucking mistake.
“He doesn’t love you. That’s why he isn’t here. It isn’t a question of dignity. If anything, it’s vanity, because he hates the idea of looking weak. But you on a good day, you with your heart on a plate, you make him believe there’s at least one person he’s better than, one person smaller and needier, one person who’d die without him. Except not really because he doesn’t want to deal with the pressure either. He just likes knowing the possibility exists.” The siren tilts a sympathetic look at the woman and there’s something ophidian now about her unblinking expression, a little bit of lizard in the lilt of her smile. “Covert narcissists, man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Sirens don’t lie. I just told you that. We tell truths that no one wants to hear and that’s why sailors flung themselves into the sea. We sang to them of their wives, their husbands, their children and how they’d be forgotten, how their loved ones moved on. Because wars are for kings and not the people left behind.”
“He loves me. He said so. We’ve an understanding—”
“Just like you did with the last one.” The siren does not know how to be kind. Some days, she wishes she did. “You can still walk away. You’re still young. There’s a whole lifetime to make up for the scars they’ve both carved.”
“Lying.” Staccato now, the objections, stilted and spit in rhythm as the woman teeters through to the kitchen, her friends flash-frozen by the prismed glare of the moon. “You’re lying. You’re lying, lying. Why the hell did I ever think this was a good idea?”
This time, the siren doesn’t hold back.
I begin to speak.
Verbiage profound as the siege of Carthage, alliterations like artillery, it rills from my lips, a trickle at first before it begins to pour. Now, there’s metaphor, verses and curses, a hip-hop throughline, swagger straight from the Bronx, and it is in Aeolic and Ionic and Gaulish, a little bit of Koine Greek, some Chinese, but no English. I’m sick of that bland mash, pasty and imperfect. Besides, it is a kind of ecstasy to knit the dead new bodies of prose.
I swallow air, exhale prophecies of the present.
Wisdom isn’t omniscience, but you didn’t hear that from me. She stares at me, slack-mouthed, and I pity her for a minute. She thought it was honey I’d spewed, not warnings, not game plans for what might be, not a way out but a route deeper into the stories she’d wanted.
I recite her the names of pain: the one like rivers under your bones. The one like crushed glass. The one like lying to yourself. The one like wires looped around the muscle. The ones like giving up, like breaking down, like every day in a world you don’t want. The one like his name and his name too, nothing in the sound of them enough no matter how you rearrange the letters.
I read them to her slow. Then, I read them to her quick. Until the tributaries of my proselytizing come together into a road map, pointing the way home. She shudders through every sibylline syllable. I repeat encores until finally, she begs me to stop.
“You’re lying.”
Humanity is such a piece of shit.
It is still morning in New York when I come back home, and Ligeia and Parthenope are at the kitchen island, sipping from ceramic cups that smell of honeysuckle and green lime. They look over, half-smile slotting into place.
“Did she want answers?” Ligeia asks.
I shake my head.
Parthenope, hair a fortune of braids bronze and black, lets out a slow, smoky noise, like she’d breathing the city’s fumes for days. “Nothing wrong with trying.”
Ligeia pushes a plate towards me. They’d saved me a sandwich: fresh-baked sourdough topped with tomatoes, fat slices of fresh mozzarella, some basil. She looks at me like she knows precisely what happened. “Nothing wrong with letting them do what they want. There’s no point to them. They’re just here taking up space.”
“What did you do to her, anyway?” Parthenope asks as I pour myself lukewarm coffee, shrewd as always.
“What else do you in these situations? She pulled a knife on me. First one in a hundred years. I told her the truth and I let her go home to grow old with her fear. The worst thing you can do to a coward is make sure they live forever.”
kiss, don’t tell
You never told me she’d be so human, so sweet. Marzipan bones and caramel hair, latte skin stretched taut over a face still new to wanting. Just a mouthful, really, a morsel, her eyes brittle as she watches us flit by, heartbeats sliding between the ribs of time.
