Category: Issue 32

Dummies

Greg Ames

The word ventriloquism comes from the Latin terms venter and loqui, literally meaning “belly speak.” Dummies, therefore, are often referred to as “tummy talkers,” because they “speak from the stomach” and give voice to previously unexpressed thoughts and feelings. The doll speaks in a more frank and open manner than her human counterpart can, given the handler’s need to save face and follow established social conventions of propriety. The dummy, therefore, is the truthteller, the oracle, in this contentious relationship, and the “master” is soon revealed to be the subservient one. The audience sits in silent anticipation, eager to see the handler outwitted by a dummy who gives voice to the hidden and hitherto unacknowledged needs of heart, stomach, and genitals.

— Elaine Blabler, Hearing the Unspoken Voice: The Ancient Art of Ventriloquism

When she was eleven years old, my older sister Cassie carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with her wherever she went. The dummy’s name was Marilyn, and at first nobody had the heart to tell Cassie that Marilyn was not really a dummy, but a charred log from our fireplace. Every night Cassie slept in her narrow bed with this splintered wedge of burnt wood. She cuddled with it on the sofa while watching soap operas and sitcoms, and she left ashy smudges on everything she touched, from the refrigerator door to her once-white gerbils. Cassie’s homeroom teacher was concerned. The school psychologist, Nancy Palermo, asked my father if we had recently lost any family members to a house blaze or fiery car crash, anything like that. My father said, “Not exactly.” Ms. Palermo wanted to see Cassie three times a week after school for private consultations.

We lived in a squat, crumbling yellow brick house surrounded by tiger lilies. All the houses on Hood Lane were the same size. Our street appealed to young couples just starting out, elderly folks in pajamas, recovering addicts taking life one day at a time, and struggling small business owners. There were no block parties or street fairs, but every now and then some drunk kid would crash his father’s car into a tree, and we’d all gather around swimming in the headlights.

My mother’s absence from our lives—she said she was just getting her head straight in Tampa, Florida—forced my father to become the sole nurturer in our household, a terrible burden added to his already overwhelming duties as paragon and provider. He hadn’t touched a vodka tonic in over fourteen months. But when my mother took off for Florida, a move that took us all by surprise, Dad stopped going to his Don’t Drink meetings and stayed home with us.

“You listen to me,” he said from the helm of his armchair, unable to ignore my sister’s strange new hobby any longer. “That’s not a proper dummy.” He rose to his feet and stood above us. “Just look at it, for God’s sake. It doesn’t even have a mouth or or even a face.”

When my sister didn’t respond, Dad changed tactics. In a softer voice, he said, “The other kids will make fun of you. You don’t want that—do you, honey?”

He unwrapped a lollipop and paced in front of Cassie, who was seated on the family room sofa clutching Marilyn to her breast like some horribly burned infant. I sat crosslegged on the floor at Dad’s feet, paying close attention because I knew that someday I’d need to write all this down, just in case somebody asked me why I behave the way I do. “Ventriloquists are . . .” He thought for a moment. “Annoying,” he said. “And nobody really likes them.”

Cassie brooded, arms folded, on the sofa. “That’s not true,” she said. “A lot of people like them.”

“Sure, the dimwits in the audience eat it up with a spoon,” he said, “but only because they’re embarrassed for the ridiculous sap who totes a stupid dummy around. Really. It’s old hat. Fifties Vegas crap. That type of humor doesn’t appeal to us anymore. We’re much more sophisticated in our interests nowadays, Cassandra.” He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. “And I’m only talking about the traditional stuff. What you’re attempting here . . . Well, believe me, honey. Nobody will have any patience for some confused little kid with a burnt log for a freakin’ dummy. That’s for damn sure.”

“I like them!” Cassie said, her braces glittering. “I know you don’t care what I like, Dad, but ventriloquists make me happy.” She squeezed Marilyn tighter. “I’m gonna be a world famous ventriloquist someday, whether you like it or not.”

“Honey,” he said, “it’s burnt wood.” He chopped the blade of his hand through the air. “Am I the only one in this house who sees that? Just look at that thing. It doesn’t even have a mouth or—or even a face!” He turned to me. “Wayne, could you back me up here?”

“Dummies,” I said, smiling. “Dummies, dummies, dummies.”

My father stared at me for a few seconds without speaking.

“Mom would let me do it,” Cassie said. “Mom would encourage me.”

My father twirled the lollipop stick in his mouth. “I just don’t get the attraction of ventriloquism. Really. I’m at a loss here. I mean, it wasn’t even cool in my day. And now? Let’s face it, it’s not even in the conversation.”

He looked to me again. Whatever expression he saw on my nine-year-old face didn’t invite an easy alliance.

“You two need to learn about ‘cool.’ You know what the coolest kids in any school do?” Dad shoved both hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “They sing and dance. Look back in time, look forward: doesn’t matter. What will the cool kids be doing a hundred years from now?”

“Singing and maybe dancing?” I said, trying to catch Cassie’s eye, hoping she’d laugh with me.

“That’s right, son. That’s right,” he said, smiling back at me. “They will be singing and dancing in the streets. You can’t hold them back. Don’t even try.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Smart. Because it wouldn’t do you any good.”

My sister hugged Marilyn to her breast. “You guys are both such jerks,” she said in a small voice.

“What did I do?” I said.

“Okay, okay, fine, if you insist on pursuing this,” he said, making a grand concession, the lollipop bobbing up and down in his mouth, “just ditch the log, and I’ll buy you a real dummy at the clown shop or whatever, and you can—”

“Stop it!” Cassie pushed past him. Swinging her pointed elbows, she ran out of the family room and stomped up the stairs, trailing a whiff of scorch behind her. We heard her bedroom door slam shut.

“Well, she’s got a flair for the dramatic, I’ll give her that,” he said. “But I’m worried about that girl. What is she trying to prove here?”

Stroking his goatee, that gingery eruption of hair on his face, Dad looked out the family room window at the snowplowed street. Cassie’s strange behavior had called into question so much that he had taken for granted, including his own coolness. He was forty-four years old, a marketing director for Studio Arena Theatre, a job that allowed him to dress and act like an artist—ponytail, earrings, jeans—yet still collect a businessman’s steady paycheck. He liked avant-garde theater, but he was not hip enough to deal with the grotesque in his own home. He bit into the lollipop. Flakes of green candy clung to the inverted triangle of hair beneath his lower lip. He would have welcomed my mother’s input in a situation like this. Her absence galled him. He looked down at me and frowned. “And what do you find so amusing, mister?”

I had become a watchdog for adult hypocrisy. I spent up to twelve hours a day studying the erratic behavior of grownups with a smirk on my face.

My father hitched up his sagging jeans and squatted before me like an aging baseball catcher. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Let’s have us a little chat,” he said, “man to man. Now, I know you two are a team, but we’re all on the same team, right?” I smelled the sour apple of his lollipop. “Is your sister still popular at that school? What do the other kids say about her?”

“She has lots of friends,” I said, and then corrected myself. “She used to.”

He nodded. “Minor setback. She’ll win them back. So, who are the most popular kids nowadays? The singers, the dancers? Or the jocks?”

I shrugged.

“The nerds?” He smiled. “Have the nerds finally risen to the top?”

“Every cool kid is different, Dad.”

“Right, right. It’s the age of specialization. She’s taking a big risk with this log thing, but who knows? It might pay off. You think it could?”

I was the wrong person to ask. My inability to keep up with the latest trends always unnerved my father. The public schools, in his opinion, were a hotbed of ingenuity, a testing ground where a tribe of potential superstars sparred over the future of our culture’s rites and rituals. But I was too busy to worry about any of that. My mother had moved to Florida, without warning, and I’d become the unofficial archivist of her debris. I inventoried the baubles on her bedside table. I straightened the photo I’d pinned on the fridge beneath a pineapple magnet. Nights, in my bedroom, I read her left-behind books, especially the photocopied working scripts from the roles she’d played at the theater. I fixated on her tiny pencil-scrawled notes in the margins: “Build.” “Energy, energy, energy.” “Brokenhearted.”

“So what’s your gambit to achieve popularity in school?” my father asked.

“My what?”

“Your sister has Marilyn. What sets you apart from the pack?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“That’s loser talk. Think about where there’s a demand, a need, and then give the people what they want. Are there any singers and dancers in your grade?”

“I don’t know.” A tired sigh escaped me. “I guess.”

Roosevelt Middle School, a four-story moron factory on the west side of town, warehoused close to four thousand kids, and featured a substantial population of head bangers, gasoline sniffers, bullies and other future felons. Mr. Brummer, the head security guard, roamed the corridors eyeballing every backpack and lunchbox with the institutional distrust of an El Paso border guard. A cleft-chinned chain smoker with a diamond stud in his left earlobe, Brummer the Bummer would sometimes stop me in the hall, invade my personal space and ask an inane question just so he could see if my pupils were dilated. I didn’t know if he recognized the future stoner in me and was trying to prevent this terrible fate, or if all his chatter about illicit substances and “what they could do to a boy” actually drove me to the bong in high school.

“You kids have so much to offer,” Dad said, “but in my opinion you’re selling yourselves short.”

He tucked the sticky lollipop stick behind his ear, one of the oddest moves I’d ever seen him make. Though twenty years have passed since that day, I still sometimes think about that hapless white stick balanced over my father’s ear like an unsmoked cigarette, giving him the look of a street tough in an old Hollywood movie, a ne’er-do-well loitering outside the pool hall.

Dad patted my shoulder, stood up, and walked out of the room. In the kitchen, a cupboard door banged shut. “God, grant me the serenity . . .” he said. A moment later he returned, his cheek bulging with a fresh lollipop.

“I’m gonna check on Cassie,” I said, rising from the floor.

“Okay! Now you’re talking.” He nodded in approval. “Good man,” he called after me. “That’s the spirit! Report back to me afterwards and we’ll compare notes.”

I climbed the stairs and knocked on my sister’s closed bedroom door. “Get lost, Wayne,” she said, sniffling. “I just wanna be alone.”

I opened the door and stepped in. The bonfire aroma blended with all the other exotic smells of her bedroom: damp towels and washcloths; nail polish remover; sticky bottles of cheap perfume spot welded to the dresser; cherry and grape lip gloss. She’d moved these items from Mom’s dressing table to her own, along with some costume jewelry and a handheld mirror. Chest down on her bed, her ankles crossed in the air behind her, Cassie flicked through the pages of a Seventeen magazine. Marilyn was on the once-white pillowcase, just under Cassie’s swaying feet. In the virginal setting of her bedroom, this black log was as conspicuous and disconcerting as a man standing naked in traffic.

I sat down on the smudged pink comforter and placed my hand on her back, the way Dad sometimes did with me when I had a nightmare.

“I have gum in my room,” I said, trying not to brag. “Hubba Bubba and Bubble Yum. I’ll give you a piece. What’s your favorite flavor?”

She ignored me.

“I might have Juicy Fruit, but I’d have to check first.”

“I don’t want any gum. God.”

We sat in silence for half a minute, my sister smothering her tears while I searched for the right words.

“Want me to try to paint your toenails again?” I asked at last. “I can do it better this time.”

“Just leave me alone, Wayne. God, can’t I have any privacy in this house?”

“I wish! Tell me about it,” I said, employing two of her favorite expressions back-to-back to ingratiate myself with her. And for about three seconds, I gawked at the oily burnt stains on her pillowcases, knowing, even then, that they would never be clean again. “Hey, Cassie,” I said. “You’re right. Ventriloquists are cool.”

She swung her face toward me. “Really? You think so?”

“Definitely.” I nodded. “Yep.”

“I’ve been practicing every night. I’m getting better, too. I think I’m actually pretty good.”

“Well, that’s what it takes. To get good, I mean.”

“Do you want to see me do a routine?”

I told her I did, and honestly, I did. Even though my sister’s armpit sweat smelled foreign to me now and zits had colonized her chin, I still considered her my best friend. We hadn’t spent much time together since Mom had left for Florida. Cassie’s bedroom had become off limits. No boys allowed. So I felt honored by her invitation to watch a private performance.

She propped the burnt log on her lap. Her oily forehead featured a few ashy fingerprint swirls. Her smudged yellow T-shirt called to mind a demented crossbreed of Charlie Brown and Pigpen. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.” She took a deep breath and shouted, “It’s a nice day today, isn’t it, Marilyn?” She bounced her left knee once, hard, and ashes fell to the rug.

“Mmm-hmm!” Marilyn said.

Cassie looked down at Marilyn as though she were a newborn baby.

“Do you like going to school, Marilyn?”

“Mmm-hmm!” Marilyn said.

“That’s good.” Cassie laughed. “School is important. But it’s also really tough for a lot of people. Will you be ready for seventh grade, you think?”

Marilyn thought about it for a moment, considered the possibilities before answering definitively: “Mmm-hmm!”

My sister stared at me with raised eyebrows. “So? What do you think?” A loose strand of blond hair fell over her eyes. She pushed her lower lip out and blew the curl back.

“Wow,” I said.

“Right? I’m getting good at it. Mrs. Palermo says I have a ‘unique talent.’

Remember when I told you about Mister Charleston and Woody coming for assembly? They were really great and everybody loved it when Mr. Charleston drank that orange juice and Woody sang ‘Feelings.’ Whoa oh oh feelings.” She searched my eyes for an answer and motioned to her oppressor downstairs. “And if I love it,” she said, “shouldn’t that be what matters? I want to get really good before Mom comes back, so she can see what I can do.”

On an intuitive level I understood my sister’s sorrow. On the other hand, I found ventriloquism weird and scary. And though I agreed, in principle, with my father’s assessment of the craft, I tried to remain neutral to protect everyone’s feelings. Even at nine, I recognized the necessity of self-preservation.

“Why won’t he ever support me?” she asked. “Why does he do that?”

I shrugged. “Because all grownups are dicks and I hate them?”

Cassie smiled at me. I smiled back. Then we both broke out snorting and cracking up. At that moment, we were as close as we had been since Mom left for Florida.

It didn’t last.

“Well, if Mom’s not back soon,” Cassie said, “I’m going to Florida to live with her. She’ll let me do what I want.”

My sister had once been popular and funny, a straight-A student who had always been a favorite of her teachers. Her high standing had given me, her little brother, an extra boost. Left to my own devices, I was a brooding, bookish daydreamer trying to read Waiting For Godot and The Bald Soprano in my room while other boys shot pellet guns by the railroad tracks. Sometimes I tried to read my mom’s existential philosophy books, too, and as a consequence of this unsupervised research, I began to suspect that God, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, was just another big fat lie, a threat perpetuated by adults who wanted to keep children docile. I waited for the day when Dad would sit me down and explain that heaven and the devil and happiness and sex also didn’t exist. It occurred to me that grownups had no idea what they were doing, especially when it came to raising children, and I studied their alien behavior with cold objectivity, hoping that by understanding the nature of hypocrisy, I might not go through life terrified of absolutely everything.

As far as I could tell my sister was a lost cause. A training bra dangled over the back of her desk chair. She couldn’t pass a mirror without poking her hair, checking her teeth, inspecting her profile. Her once-smooth face was now shiny with grime and pustules. Something secret and horrible was going on in her bedroom at night, something that didn’t include me.

I wanted Cassandra to go back to normal, to give up ventriloquism and become my best friend again, but she was as stubborn as everybody else in the family. Nobody could tell her what to do. She needed to believe she’d made the choice on her own. My job, as I saw it, was simply to plant the seed and skedaddle.

“You know,” I said, rising to my feet, “it’s okay that you’re embarrassing our family with all this crazy stuff. Because Mom isn’t ever coming back. She couldn’t wait to ditch us.” I motioned with my chin to the burnt log in my sister’s arms. “Probably for reasons like this. We’re freaks.”

I left her bedroom with hardly a backward glance. I trotted down the carpeted stairs, kicked open the back door, and hopped down the slushy cement steps. Snow crunched underneath my sneakers in the driveway.

My father followed me outside. “What did you find out, champ?” he called out. “Let’s compare notes.”

I sprinted down the driveway and dove behind a snow bank, knowing that I had broken away from her, too, my last link to the idea of a family.

“Wayne!” My father stood on the steps and hugged himself for warmth. “Come here, son. I want to ask you some questions.”

Ignoring his call, I lay flat on the sidewalk behind the snowbank, holding my breath, swallowing my words, until my father cursed at the sky and returned inside.

From that night until just now, I have been on my own.

Isn’t that Nice

Halley Parry

Marielle had a tooth yanked from her gum on a Tuesday while most people she knew were gliding around carpeted office buildings moving papers from one window to the other and eating salads from round plastic bowls, their feet secretly bare beneath their desks. After the procedure as she approached her apartment, she remembered that her husband, Simon, would not be at home waiting to tend to her. This was not because Simon would be on call sitting next to his ambulance or tending to other injured people, but because he wasn’t her husband anymore.

The rotten, extracted tooth rattled around a plastic orange container shaped like a treasure chest. It was not her tooth to bite with, gnaw with anymore despite its long, troubled history in her mouth. A stray cat switched its tail on a small patch of dirt next to the steps leading to the door of her building. Her apartment sat three stories directly above a dress shop, the kind of store that only contains seven or eight items, as if each dress would become violent if left too near a competitor. The beta fish of dresses. She preferred crowded shops where you can’t distinguish one item from another until you pull it out, and leave empty handed because nothing looks quite as beautiful when held up by itself but merely compliments its rack mates. She examined the gaping hole in the front of her mouth in the reflection of the window, actively disregarding the eyebrow raise from the woman behind the counter.

For several weeks after preschool let out for the summer, a neighbor’s daughter was dispatched to Marielle’s house for containment and snacks while the girl’s mother, a robust woman named Ophelie, conducted research about the details of her own infanthood. Specifically, who her birth mother might be. Little Hattie was parked in a wooden chair with the excess of a long tablecloth pulled across her head when Marielle came in. Her stuffed bear Frizzy was on the floor smiling his yarn smile. “She was just here,” Marielle mused falsely with a smile, fewer teeth, “I guess all of this pie is for me then.”

“I’m right HERE!” Hattie squealed, dramatically revealing herself and clearing the table with a comic clatter, a clatter that lasts much longer than the inciting incident and continues smashing gleefully long after it should have ceased. Marielle was still sweeping up broken glass and collecting grains of sugar when Hattie’s mother leaned on the buzzer downstairs. Marielle had always hated how a sound could infiltrate the space without her approval. The buzzer rang again, longer. Hattie had salt on her face from tears and was picking blueberries out of the pie, holding her legs very still while Marielle reached under the table for a particularly jagged fragment of vase. The vase had been a gift from Marielle’s husband, Simon. His sudden departure from her life made her suspect he was apt to return just as suddenly, so she left the wounded door to her apartment gaping, exposing the warm innards of her apartment to the hallway. She already couldn’t remember much about his physical presence. When his name was uttered or floated behind her eyes she thought of a small bump on the back of his head that flaked like a delicate pastry and the night he had crawled into bed making every effort not to touch her by crossing his arms over his chest, sheathed in his favorite sweater and clammy-handed. This was the night after the doctor told her that she was broken, that she could not carry a child in her belly. She pictured rust swirling through her bloodstream, her womb an old safe floating to the bottom of the sea. But she didn’t blame the man; the switch of his biology had simply been flipped to off.

Hattie was examining the pictures of a children’s book with an element of horror in it, a mysterious beast with a hard metal spike for a tail and big round eyes. The beast was unpredictable, and according to her mother, nothing to worry about. “FAERIES” she screamed as if it was an obvious answer to the question no one was able to ask aloud, forgetting momentarily about the mess she had just made: “The beast hates FAERIES because they are beautiful and can fly and live forever until we all EXPLODE.” A piece of blueberry launched from her mouth with the force of her XPL. She must know something about science.

Hattie was explaining the beast in more detail than was reflected on the pages of the book when her mother came in through the open door and immediately asked her to please stop, she was not supposed to mention the beast after dark. Because that’s when he is here, I suspect, said Hattie’s eyes. Ophelie whisked herself over to her daughter and ruffled her short blonde hair. She wore a pink faux fur coat that was stained and matted and resembled asbestos torn from the walls of a remodeled home. She wrapped her cold fingers around Marielle’s wrists and over her flannel shirt to drag her into the kitchen where she opened a bottle of wine without asking, “I found her,” she said, quietly pausing to make a snide comment about Marielle’s missing tooth, “I fucking found her.” Ophelie had been adopted by a couple in Manhattan when she was two years old. Now, she was spending afternoons at the adoption agency sifting through records after being diagnosed with a rare genetic, if nonfatal, disease. The agency informed her that they could not give her any information about where she came from because she had been turned in by a woman who found her, ” found me,” she repeated with bug eyes, “outside the supermarket.” Marielle did not have time to formulate an appropriate question before Ophelie began to speak again.

“But then we, me and the hag from the agency, found the cops who were there that night when I was dumped. It was on the exact border and the same exact day that they found that tribe of feral people on the mountain.”

Marielle remembered the history lesson about the feral tribe, their hairy faces, the headlines and the lawsuits, the updated science textbooks. The skepticism surrounding their DNA tests, when scientists realized these people had more genetic material in common with fossils of early humans than humans today. No one knew how they had remained unseen for so long. And she also remembered that they were suspected to have produced offspring in jail. She remembered how they spat accusatory fingers of drool at camera crews and were all later arrested for one thing or another. One woman, she remembered slowly, had been arrested for eating a live tabby cat. It was missing, its face printed on cheap paper and stapled to every telephone pole on the block. The woman was using a staple to clean her teeth when they found her—she’d stabbed the officer with the staple, leaving a tiny puncture wound on his thumb that bled for days.

Ophelie sat down, “So what they think is, I am the direct descendent of a yeti. Half yeti, maybe. At least this explains my Pangaea forehead and inability to keep my arms properly shaved.” She was taking this news surprisingly well. Marielle wasn’t even sure how to classify this news. Ophelie had a set of adoring parents and a latent desire for fame, but surprises had never settled well with her. Hattie’s genesis had unwound her and stitched her back together in a particular chaotic shape and this revelation had the potential to nibble at the stitches with a set of pointy teeth.

“The beast is here,” said Hattie from the doorway to the kitchen, flatfooted and flat voiced. She was having an intense conversation in glances with the space just behind Marielle, who couldn’t help it and turned around slowly to see what was behind her. There was, of course, nothing there. “He’s hungry,” said Hattie and placed some pie on the ground.

Hattie’s beast lives on a tall island in the middle of the sea on a planet pasted with clouds. These are her words. Paste is how a child makes things stay where they could not otherwise. It is impossible to tell how large or small the beast is; it could be as small as a tealeaf or as large as a lumbering mammoth. No one knows how large the planet is, either. The sea that the island juts from is the color of strong black tea and glints from the scales of thousands of tiny silver sea creatures that dance in roils and fall like bubbles in a boiling pot. She complicates the picture book with her own drawings, self-portraits, rudely inserting herself into the narrative as she had inserted herself into the narrative of her mother’s body.

“You aren’t afraid of the beast anymore?” said Ophelie in disbelief.

“He can’t come unstuck yet from the book.” At this, Hattie was ushered out of the room and into her own apartment down the street.

A square of light from an adjacent window fell onto the bed over the lump of Marielle’s body in the otherwise dark room. As she lay perfectly still under a mound of blankets in an attempt to warm one area of the bed as efficiently as possible, a muffled alarm began to scream beneath her. It began as a low tone and escalated quickly. She tried to ignore its shrill whine but it coaxed her into wakefulness and she climbed, shivering, from bed and fastened a robe around her waist. The alarm was muffled by the floorboards she placed her feet on and lifted them from, one after the other until she reached her front door, which she left ajar even in sleep. She looked out her kitchen window onto the street, empty save for several parked cars. There was no chaos. The only chaos existed in her head where sound stopped being waves and turned to noise. A light was flashing intermittently below her, illuminating the sidewalk that was damp from an earlier rain. The whole scene appeared to be made of glass.

She retrieved her phone from the bedside table and dialed 9-1-1. The dispatcher answered, “What’s the address? Did you see an intruder? If you didn’t see an intruder or any evidence of a crime, I can’t send someone down there. We have pressing emergencies that…can you hold?” She held. She peeled a banana and began to eat it. The aroma filled the kitchen. Then the banana started to taste metallic, like she was cutting it with razor blades instead of her teeth. The banana came away from her mouth red. The alarm escalated again, grew louder and more insistent. It made her veins pulse, the taste in her mouth became stronger and she spit on the floor, red, like she’d just flossed her teeth with rusty wire. She took another pill and stuffed her mouth with the cotton swabs they had sent her home with in a small plastic bag. The cotton tasted like fresh laundry and when the emergency dispatcher came back on the line, she tried to speak but the sound wouldn’t escape through the cloth, it muffled her words. She wrapped the blanket strewn on the back of the couch around her ears and was lulled to sleep on the couch by steady, unanswered cries for help.

The next morning, in silence, she took two more pills and called in sick from work. She awoke in a daze hours later to Hattie humming softly on the floor beside her. Hattie’s voice was low, a cheerful little growl, “You napped,” she said, “I came in myself. I’m hungry.” Marielle’s stomach bowed towards her spine, hungry too, and when she stood up the world flashed bright. She boiled water for spaghetti and sliced an avocado in half, throwing the knife into the pit to lift it from its flesh, while Hattie floated on imaginary wings around the kitchen table. She drained the noodles and filled each half of avocado with mini shrimp from the freezer, they would thaw before it was time to eat. The pit of the avocado landed with a dull thud on top of trash in the bin. The curve of the shrimp bodies would heat to room temperature, be consumed, and then heat for life in their human bellies before being expelled.

Hattie began eating the shrimp frozen because she liked strawberry popsicles. It was cold but sunny so they went out to eat on the stoop. Hattie placed her small white plate one step above where she sat and Marielle placed hers one step below, next to her feet. She leaned around the banister and peered into the shop window. The woman behind the counter was looking at her fingernail as though on the brink of a great, but puzzling, discovery. She was sweating, Marielle could tell because she wiped her forehead with a small white square of cloth, too small to be a handkerchief. It reminded Marielle of the gauze and the pasta in her mouth began to taste like a sweater Simon used to wear under his uniform when it was cold. She had once tried to take the sweater off with her teeth but it took much too long, and she found he was wearing another sweater underneath. It was impossible to undress him.

The entire storefront was a window that had been perfectly polished until it appeared invisible. One short white dress hung on a metal mannequin in the center of the store. Its shoulders were structured like two paper airplanes and the shopgirls’ part was as straight as a runway down the center of her head. She moved from behind the small counter and adjusted a sleeve of the dress on display, making no discernable difference, but the adjustment appeared to satisfy her. She resumed her post in the sterile greenhouse, a light wind moving among the leaves. Marielle pushed on the gum where her tooth used to be and it throbbed. Several minutes later, Ophelie turned the corner and approached the stoop, a manila folder under her arm bursting with crisp white paper. Marielle knew it had something to do with the woman, her mother, but didn’t ask. Ophelie swept Hattie from the porch and down the street, she placed a warm hand on Marielle’s knee and Hattie mimicked the gesture on her foot in a gesture of goodbye.

Marielle descended the stairs behind them, leaving the dishes where they sat, and entered the shop to see if perhaps the alarm from the night before had come from inside. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror to the left of the entrance, her jeans fit poorly and her t-shirt was wrinkled and yellowing in the armpits. The girl behind the counter raised her eyes but did not utter a word of greeting as Marielle approached the counter. She placed both hands on the cold surface and the girl still did not raise her head. She was thin, her collarbones stuck out through her white silk top which seemed to not be touching any part of her body but hovering around her. Marielle suddenly remembered her tooth, and that speaking would reveal its absence. This was not an environment for missing teeth. She would be frowned upon. Instead, she smiled with closed lips and in order to explain her charge of the counter, she selected a lacy black thong from a bowl and purchased it in silence, how sophisticated of her. When she emerged back out onto the street she pushed onto her gum harder with a dirty finger and looked down to realize that the thong was an XS, PETITE and had cost her forty-six dollars she didn’t have. The stray cat ate the leftover shrimp on the stoop.

Hattie let herself in promptly after school the next day and sat quietly until the sun set. Marielle woke up on the couch and found her in the kitchen on tiptoe, slicing a banana with the handle of a serving spoon. When Ophelie swept through the door, Hattie was elaborating on her day with a mouthful of banana, “…and his teacups are made of dust. No, his teacups are made of sticks and his tea is dust which is why he always has a cough,” she coughed to elaborate before continuing, “and all over the mountain are yellow flowers that grow pomegranate seeds and that’s what he eats.”

Ophelie’s teeth were stained with red. She announced that she was done with research, she had no more interest in learning about her mother and Hattie would no longer need to spend afternoons with Marielle. Her eyes wouldn’t focus and Hattie looked at Marielle as though she knew this mood, her mother should not be questioned or prodded, and Hattie followed her somberly. Marielle was surprised to feel a great sense of loss that Hattie wouldn’t be arriving every day. At first, it had seemed like a great burden but she had come to enjoy Hattie’s small presence.

Marielle fell asleep before taking any medication, her gum suffered a dull warm pain she had become accustomed to and almost welcomed. The lack of pain in the rest of her body made her feel perfect. She was naked, she hadn’t changed the sheets since he left and they were soaked with oils from her skin. As if on cue, the wail of the alarm woke her from a deep sleep and this time she shot from bed immediately. She had dreamt of her wedding, slipping in and out of her dress under observation in rewind and then forward slowly. The petite thong rested, rolled up in a tiny coil, on the kitchen counter.

This time, she zipped up the jeans on the floor next to her bed and went downstairs onto the street. She called 9-1-1 from her cell phone, a different voice from the previous night answered, “What is your emergency.”

“Something set off the alarm in the shop below my apartment and it isn’t shutting off,” she said unsure if the wail had drowned her out entirely. The alarm began to hold its notes longer like a melancholy performer.

“Is there evidence of a break-in or other criminal activity?” the dispatcher took a sip of something next to the mouthpiece.

“No it just keeps going off, the same thing happened last night and no one comes to turn it off.”

“Ma’am, unless there is suspicious activity I can’t send a car down there.”

“What if I told you it was me, I’m breaking into the store.”

“Are you, ma’am?”

“No.”

“Good night then miss.” The liquid he had sipped made him cough before he hung up.

She pressed her nose to the window, leaving a smudge. The interior of the store was completely still, a diorama, the white dress stood in darkness. At intervals in time to the beat of the alarm it was bathed in red light. The color weaponized its purity, blood spilled on a snow-covered garden. She didn’t sleep or even close her eyes until the sun rose and the alarm was silenced presumably by its own code, by the finger of the unreadable woman who would remove her coat and place it delicately over a chair behind the counter.

The day passed, and at noon she went to get a new tooth sewn into her gums. It was made specifically for her, and was not noticeably different when she bared her teeth in the small circular mirror. Only she could tell it was an imposter. She missed little Hattie. On her block, a woman was crouching down next to a small boy and pointing at something. Marielle followed her finger which led to the stray cat, curled up behind a dresser that someone had discarded on the curb next to a bag of trash. The woman was enunciating kitty, K-I-T-T-Y and sounded ridiculous, “Isn’t that cute? Isn’t that nice? He’s sleeping!” As Marielle passed she saw, after some scrutiny, that the cat was not sleeping but had starved to death.

As Marielle walked from the kitchen to the living room with a glass of wine later that evening the room erupted into noise with such ferocity that she dropped the glass. It was not the alarm as she initially suspected but her telephone. The glass didn’t break, but warm red wine eased onto the carpet like a tide. She answered the phone on the second ring, it was nearly 10 o’clock. It was Hattie and she sounded scared, there was a dish clattering in the background.

“Mama made dinner and it tastes bad,” she whispered.

“What do you mean it tastes bad.”

“It’s not dinner,” Hattie’s voice rose with panic.

“I’ll come over, hang tight.”

She walked to the building where Ophelie and Hattie lived alone in the garden apartment. There was a small arrangement of doll furniture on the curb, a bed made from cardboard and matches, a chair that would seat someone just larger than the person who was sized to sleep in the bed, a tattered blanket, a tiny jar of jam that reminded Marielle of continental breakfasts at cheap motels and a small flower pot full of Styrofoam peanuts. She recognized these objects, they were Hattie’s toys, placed on the street like old junk.

She pushed tentatively at the buzzer, twice, three times until Ophelie came to the door. She was speaking as if she had started a conversation long before Marielle arrived, “And did you know, “she said, frantically slicing a chicken and placing it onto empty plates and picking what appeared to be a feather from between her teeth but couldn’t be, “that the women got raped by the hunters that found them, that those were the babies they gave birth to?” Marielle looked closer. The chicken was completely raw, bleeding onto the plates and the table was set for five people.

Before Marielle had a chance to answer, Hattie lowered her head and vomited into a soup bowl on the table in front of her, perfectly refilling it, and cried with her head in her hands. Ophelie laughed a wicked peal that ended in one long note.

Emerging from stun into ferocity, Marielle pointed to Hattie’s fork, “Put that down,” she said, “Ophelie, go to bed. I’m taking your daughter to my apartment for a sleepover.” Ophelie’s face softened, as her hand clenched around utensils, “My daughter?” She lunged before falling to the ground with the force of her own sobs. She lay among them. Marielle whispered, “Get yourself together.”

“Hattie, why is Frizzy’s furniture on the sidewalk?” she stepped to Hattie and took her hand, crouched on her knees.

“He’s moving out, he hates it here, and he particliary hates mama ,” she screamed weakly as though she were trying to scream in a nightmare, dry and soft. Frizzy sat propped in the chair next to her, disturbed. Marielle was wrong. This was bad news and Ophelie was taking it murderously.

Marielle led Hattie outside where she promptly vomited on the sidewalk, drenching Frizzy and her own front with bile. She wept and cradled her stomach. Marielle pulled her hair from her forehead which was burning hot and lifted her off the ground, smearing vomit on her sweater but not minding. With her other hand she reached into her pocket for her phone and began dialing 9-1-1, again. The memory of her recent failures with those particular digits stopped her and instead she did something she swore never to do again, she called Simon. He had a fondness for Hattie and would know what to do from a medical perspective at least. Hattie tugged on her hair, wanting to be let down. Marielle placed her on the ground where she bent down and scooped up Frizzy’s match bed from the curb, one-eighth his size, and returned to slump against the back of Marielle’s legs. Frizzy would need somewhere to sleep. Simon answered on the third ring of the second call, “What.”

She lifted Hattie back up and said with the strain of the little body ascending in her voice said, “Hattie’s been poisoned by raw chicken and possibly something else I need help. She’s really sick.”

“Jesus Christ Elle. Please tell me you aren’t making this up,” he said.

“No, I need you to come help me, it’s a sick child.” She was silent while he agreed, she apologized for the call and continued the journey down the block where she carried Hattie up the stairs clumsily, Hattie repeatedly head-butting her in the mouth like a tiny goat, and placed her gently on a towel on the bed. She dreaded his arrival but carried within her a deep desire to see him, to remember his face. She went into the front of the apartment and closed the front door. She wished she hadn’t apologized. As she turned the lock, the alarm began to scream and a sound mimicked it from the bedroom.

Marielle clamped her jaw with surprise and her new tooth chose this moment to fall from her mouth in a cliff dive to the floor where it crashed with such ferocity that it overpowered the competing wails for just a moment. The pain was acute. She took one pill, two, three, placing her mouth directly under the faucet. The water splashed joyfully on her face and neck. She immediately began to feel the numbing effects of the pills on her body and mind. Hattie was silenced but the alarm carried on with unrelenting vigor, tearing through the fiber of her ears into the intricate network where her thoughts nested. She did not know where Simon was coming from or how long it would take him to arrive, how long had it been since she called? Frizzy stank and she placed him in the sink with the water still running before checking to make sure Hattie was alive, her pulse thrummed under the skin of her neck. She checked her own pulse too, because life is a fragile thing. She embroidered this on a pillow in her mind. She would wash Frizzy until the water ran clean.

A steady wind grazed her face and she felt her eyes opening and closing instinctually to protect themselves. The alarm seemed louder tonight, the shop darker. The dress shone like a moon instead, carrying within it an inherent vital brightness. She picked up a metal chair chained to the café next to the shop and used the leg, which reached just far enough, to shatter the front window of the store. Then she reluctantly dialed 9-1-1.

“There has been a break-in at a shop on 3^rd street,” she paused, eyeing the dress, “two doors down from my apartment and they’ve broken a window,” she went on, “it’s two men, one tall and one short and they are wearing all black and they were both coughing aggressively.” She remembered that little details make everything more believable, “actually just one of them was coughing, but so aggressively it sounded like two.”

When she hung up, she walked idly through the hole she had created and circled the dress like a predator, the red light of the alarm had begun flashing rapidly, now bathing both her and the dress in its violent hue. She ran her finger over the fabric and licked it, as though she had just touched a delicious cake and tried to hide the evidence. She turned and caught a glimpse of herself in the long mirror made for examining bodies in beautiful things. She was drooling slightly, the pills, she wiped it away and smiled a toothless grin at herself. She remembered something then about the wild women, one in particular. Before she was cleaned up, before she was placed somewhere in the city, they had led this particular wild woman into a room with a mirror and observed her. The first thing she did was throw herself at the mirror. It took her a moment to realize that she was seeing herself for the first time. She placed her hands on the mirror and leaned in, moving them up and down in precise measurements. She found she could not let go of her own reflected hands and wept at her own image. When the image wept back, she laughed. When her reflection laughed, she looked around for an explanation. Her reflection looked around for an explanation, too, but she couldn’t see it when she turned her head.

Marielle carefully unzipped the back of the dress and lifted it from the mannequin. It was weightless. She shoved the dress under her sweater and thought of the look the saleswoman would give her. The delicate structure! You’ll wrinkle the fabric! Monster, crazy bitch, the most unsophisticated woman in the world!

She crunched back over the mound of broken glass as though they were fallen leaves, nearly slicing her cheek on the jagged wall of the window, sprinted into her apartment and threw the dress down on the couch where it reclined delicately to rest. She heard sirens in the distance approaching, the sounds swirling like a physical thing from all directions. She put on a jacket and went back onto the street. She was standing on the sidewalk when the first police car pulled up, blue lights flashing and giving the whole scene an aquarium glow. Before she had a chance to speak, the man in the passenger seat had her hands behind her back and was snapping handcuffs over them. She thought about struggling but was swimming. She knew that this could be cleared up easily with a few simple words but the shock had muted her. The officer got her blood on his hands and checked the wound on her cheek gruffly, certainly filed it as evidence of her guilt. So, she had cut her cheek after all.

Then she recognized a plain car pulling up to the curb. Simon stepped out of the driver’s seat and left the headlights on, a diver’s spotlight in the swirling blue sea of light. He exchanged some words with the cop, patted him on the shoulder. It appeared to pain him to admit that he was acquainted with the bleeding woman in handcuffs on the sidewalk. He must have known the police officer as well, because he apologized profusely as he uncuffed her and pawed her face strangely. She explained that she had been the one to call the police and reiterated her description of the burglars to a “how unusual, they took one dress,” from the officer.

She realized she was speaking with a lisp. Her husband led her upstairs, she didn’t limp, “Hattie’s in the bedroom.” She wouldn’t thank him again or apologize. She slurred, he didn’t ask her many questions. Simon opened the door with his own key, but found that it was unlocked and shook his head. He helped her gently lay down on the couch, on top of the dress. She could feel the fabric of it on the back of her arms and she smiled. He either did not notice the dress or chose not to, and took his bulky backpack with him into the bedroom.

She heard him ask Hattie what her favorite color was, which was the wrong question. Hattie didn’t believe in favorite colors. She knew, already, that one color was meaningless without the others. She had the tenacity of an elderly politician who would never be elected but continues to run every year. Hattie choked on the words she was saying, and they were followed by the sound of vomit in a bowl, and Marielle’s husband came into the living room looking for pen and paper, “How does she know the word ‘contract’? I don’t think she remembers me,” he sighed, disrupting the top layer of sugar in the bowl on the kitchen table. Marielle, wide-awake, lay on the couch and listened to the sounds of this man taking care of a child in what was once their bed together. She felt a shallow, tortured emotion, like trying to pick an invisible hair from your tongue and giving up.

A commotion in the kitchen captured her attention. Frizzy was drenched and trying to hide, she saw his leg slip down into the drain and the sound of the water running changed. It was no longer water falling on steel but water falling into more water. His head lowered into the sink but his expression did not change.

Her husband’s voice surprised her before she could prevent Frizzy from drowning, “Hattie will be fine, it was just a powerful reaction to the raw meat and stress. I’ve given her something for infection.” He picked up the thong on the counter, “What’s this? You’ve never worn anything like this before.” Before he could say, It doesn’t suit you, he stepped on the tooth that had fallen from her mouth earlier and barked. She wanted him to stay.

“You’ll be okay with a full house tonight, then?” he said, moving towards the front door, which was now open.

Not quite a full house, she thought to herself, there is still one empty bed. When she was alone she took teeth, both rot and enamel and placed them side by side in Frizzy’s bed, covering them gently with a piece of gauze. They were the only occupants of the house small enough to fit. Then she put on the dress and climbed in bed next to Hattie who was sleeping peacefully. The water from the sink rose to the brim of the basin and slowly began to flood the apartment while the beast climbed up the fire escape and into her womb.