A Scene A Day

Ninety-two degrees in the shade – but there was no shade.  Traffic was at a standstill and the A/C was busted.  Every time the temperature gauge hit the midpoint, Dale had to turn on the car’s heater.  Every time he turned on the heater, Dale thought of his wife, Allie, reading those eight dollar magazines she thought he didn’t know she bought every damn week and watching television every damn day instead of looking for a job.  It wasn’t even good television: sitcoms from her childhood and exploitative ‘talk’ shows, when just a few months ago she used to watch the news or documentaries that he’d at least be interested in discussing with her.

Cars began to ease forward.  Dale waited until the vehicle ahead of him was almost four car lengths ahead before hitting the gas; nothing irritated him more than rolling forward five feet and having to stop again.

Allie’s face appeared in his mind, skin broken out from the chips and frozen pizzas she’d taken to eating all of the time, chins adding up almost weekly since she rarely hauled her ass off the couch any more except to get more chips and frozen pizza, or chips and soda, or once, appallingly, chips and apple butter.

Okay…so one thing pissed him off more.

Eagle Point was awash in moonlight.  The second full moon of the month, and every fallen log, every boulder and makeshift seat around the bonfire pit held children.  They waited in the cold, clear night, having been called from their beds by a promise, a whispered covenant.

The second full moon of the month: the only time she would come.

A flock of nightbirds flew over the clearing.  For a moment all was shadow and the noise of flight.  When the shifting, shuddering shadows were gone, she was there: a ten-year-old girl, blonde hair turned silvery in the moonlight, standing in the bonfire pit.

Although she was at least five feet from the nearest child, they all drew back a tiny bit anyway.

“I’m glad you came,” Peri said, “because this is important. Now listen, and I’ll tell you how I died.”

You’ve finally figured out what bothers you about that girl, the middle-schooler with the flat gray eyes.  She’s either a grade above or below your son, you’re not sure; but she’s at all the soccer games and school functions; always with her younger brother and sometimes with their gray-eyed mother but usually not.

What bothers you isn’t her expression, so oddly detached and distant that for a long time you’d just assumed she was autistic (you’ve decided this can’t be the case…who would send an autistic child to bike to the school’s Open House alone?) or the simple gray or ash-brown shifts she wears – so far out of fashion they might have come from another century, if not for the exceedingly fine weave (is that silk?).

No, what bothers you is the way she carries herself, moving and walking with an odd gait which is awkward and lumbering one moment, incongruously buoyant the next.  It’s as if she were accommodating some shifting weight, something excessively heavy, which continually slid about her frame as she walked.

She’s sitting in the row ahead of you in the bleachers, head cocked in the direction of the soccer field.  Since she sat down, she hasn’t moved – doesn’t seem to be following the game at all.  You look at the odd cut of her shift in the back.  She’s turned at an angle, and you can see the shape of her strangely prominent collarbone; it juts out too far and seems to go too far down, a small shelf of bone where there should be only a slim rod, and you think: wings.  She walks like that, sits at odd angles and a careful distance from everyone, because she has wings.

A whistle blows; the game is over.  Your son comes running in from the field, alongside a lank-haired, pale boy – the gray-eyed girl’s brother.  The girl stands and waits for the bleachers ahead of her to clear before starting down.

She glances at you for the tiniest moment: just a shy middle-school girl, never be a beauty but prettier than she probably thinks, a little too young to be carry so much responsibility for her little brother, and in her own world. You laugh at yourself and begin to gather your things.

You rummage in your purse.  From the corner of your eye you see her turn to leave; as your fingers wrap around your keys, you feel soft feathers graze your cheek.

There is an old man in the granite which makes up that hillside.

He can only be seen at certain times of the year; be careful of spotting him when the full moon is out.  Night or day, the full moon gives him sight.  This is his burden: if he sees you, he must tell you one true thing before calling on the rock to flow through and over you, drowning you in limestone and shale.

During the height of the Origami Wars, Takumi could barely face waking up in the morning.  Although he could not have foreseen the military applications, his Papercut Theorem was directly responsible for years of devastation and destruction.  Takumi frequently considered killing himself – but he knew that if he died, the Plurality would discontinue work on the desperately-needed Papier-Mâché delivery system that was their one hope to stop the seemingly countless armies of paper whales, cranes, and jumping frogs that had caused so many horrifying deaths.

You were wrong about them, the silhouetted families, couples and children on the water tower.

It doesn’t matter that you aren’t here, may no longer even be alive; I can hear you as well as if you were at my shoulder. They didn’t change, they were destroyed by the blast. But any change is annihilation of a sort; whether it anneals or erases can only be seen/understood much later.  Even now the (City Council) is making arrangements for the remaining pieces: this dancing child will be placed along I-75 at our border and that bisected man will front the new library doors.  They will be altered, made into monuments and playground features, and the new water tower will doubtless boast some empowering slogan.

Maybe-ghost whispers at my back: This isn’t the change I meant.  You reveal your youth, my heart – just a bit older, and you’d realize that it never is.