I felt the same chill now. My skin loose and the air chilling me internally as I sat the rock on the ground and rocked it back into place with my big toe. I rubbed my hand across my throat and let it rest on my chest. He had come the closest to penetrating my armor, getting past my skin, my tough hide, and all of the challenges that I placed for him to prove himself. He passed. But after all that he had not reached me. He had only reached someone that he thought was me. And, maybe it had been.
I sat with my knees hugged to my chest and rocked slightly, pushing the rock with me. I tilted it out onto its broken side and let it fall heavily back to its resting place. I could run my entire foot across its top and lift the base by lifting my heel, pointing my toes down when I arched my foot. The black streak was barely visible, showing and then disappearing as I rocked it and stopped as I leaned forward with the rock raised. The floor was hard beneath me and I leaned into the wall beneath the windowsill. With a quick thrust of force from my foot, I pushed the rock against the wall, stuck and exposed, the beautiful black marble visible, smooth and worn. It was covered by the granite, rough and crumbling. Years of sediment piled onto it, covering the delicate beauty hidden beneath the coarse exterior.
My toe rubbed a piece of the black edge and I wondered if I wasn't better without him. The colors of the granite swirl in some areas and the drab colors hide the vivid pure black underneath. The black rock feels powerful, and the rock surrounding it poor and dry. The light granite color was a mask of ugly plain mountain, deceptive and tamed. I stood and left the rock propped upward against the wall, revealing the jagged black design underneath. I walked to the door and opened it. I stepped out into the hallway, the dirty runner cold beneath my feet. Barefoot, I walked outside my building and stepped onto the cement. Stepping gingerly around loose stones and pebbles, I looked across the lot and felt the cool air brushing my skin. Taking a deep breath, I felt the air chill and burn my lungs. I felt the breath in my fingertips and my toes. I stood on my tiptoes, pressing my feet into the cold pavement. I scanned the area and walked over to a large curb. I sat beneath a tree and crossed my ankles, staring at the ground. Amid pine needles and gravelly rocks, there were small pebbles and stones that had blown to their resting place. I leaned over and brushed my fingers through them. I picked up a small red stone. It was smooth and had shades of burnt red and orange swirling across its smooth surface. I rolled the cold stone in my hand and closed my hand over the stone, embracing the color.
Gay Milner
Marzipan
Gunshot. What? I must have fallen asleep; the red patch burns on my thigh against the Naugahyde. It's hot, and the air damp with stickiness that belongs to this landlocked land. The gunshot? — yes—The Virginian, that blond boy Travis, snub nose and cupid mouth on the other side of the smoking barrel. But the grainy black-and-white, the grainy sound (a soup of music) is just the faded image of some more violent dream. I can't hold it. I pull myself hand over hand back into it because I must save myself, or her, or it. What did I need to do? A lump of failure in my chest.
Over the cowboys a cheap cardboard frame sits on the fake wood of the TV set, little gold pressed curlicues around a snapshot of Dogzilla, his rich red hair curly on his ears that hang like a pageboy to his thin black smile. Irish setter as coed circa 1958. And is that my only personal memento, the only photograph worth bringing after thirty-five years? What was that dream? I'm a cowgirl, my dog has been abducted by a rustler; crap. What creature is it that I must save?
I balance myself, pain slicing up from my spine across my right hip socket, unsteady on my feet, and hobble to the front door, swing the squeaky screen. On the porch — knobbled knuckles of my stockinged feet on the red cement — I reach for the post and am overcome with dread. This porch support is a double cylinder of painted metal, held ten inches or so apart by (also painted, rusting white) metal shapes: a series of interlocking tendrils, leaves, two birds in flight. Where it disappears into the clapboard ceiling it has been patched with grainy putty. Its two feet are buried in the red cement. The grain of the paint grates on my fingertips.
I look "into the eyes" of this flat white metal bird, and there tumbles out of the hot void where the dream has fled a moment from Liege. I was — what? — no more than eight or nine because the market was still there, and yet there was some fear attached to food, the possibility of want. Nine, then. 1939. My mother's hip warm against my shoulder in a coat of loden green. A bird was pecking at the edge of a puddle, at a piece of cake or petit four. Yes. My mother was buying bread and I was waiting to see if there would be a marzipan, a biscuit, a mille-feuille for me. I was — why? — terrified that I would be ignored, denied, expected to go home without a treat. I wanted to bend and snatch the cake away from the bird, who seemed impossibly bold at my feet. Like the German boys who would not hesitate to say anything— scum! kike! gypsy! This bird had my sweet, unless (her voice murmured above me, the inconsequential murmur of the housewife and the merchant, his deeper, dulcet, reasoning plaints mixed in with hers) — unless she would remember me. Why did I both suppose that they could feed me and fear that they would not? The bird cocked a beady eye at me. Taunting. An ordinary small brown bird, fat with feathers, who might yet pluck out my eyes.
My mother said, "Simone. M. Partenier is speaking to you."
Partenier. The name comes back unbidden, the patissier of the open market. His banner ran along his stall at the level of my knees in red scrolling script that I could read: Partenier Patisserie. In front of that the malevolent bird sat pecking at the petit four, shaking it like a dog with a sock (like Dogzilla my only darling, my only offspring, whom I have abandoned).
"Say thank you to M. Partenier." Who handed down a plain crust of day-old roll. Betrayed, I couldn't speak.
I grasp the metal pole and feel its contour on my palm, turn my palm on its painted surface, feel the white sides of the hospital bed before they wheeled me in. It was a tube of just such stuff. They raised the sides and suddenly my pallet had become a cage. I looked up through the bars and reached up on both sides to hoist myself but my muscles were straw. The beak-nosed nurse told me not to be "irritable now," and someone — someone else — there were how many in charge of me? — stuck a needle in my arm. My weakness became lightness, I could have floated from my cage, but all the while I knew that this was because they had stolen away my will. They were taking her, I had been tricked. They told me that a broken child was worse than no child at all, but they were tricking me. I rose against the needle, against the bars, against the hand of the nurse who now — thieving bird, big keeper of sweets, hot hip of my mother, abandoned dog — I rose and struck her full in the face.
I think what I said was not intelligible. To myself I said, "I've changed my mind. I'll have the broken one."
"No!" I said to M. Partenier. "I don't want your old crust!" And my mother marched me home and washed my mouth. Soap bittered on my tongue where I had wanted marzipan.
And later, when there was no food, how I would have welcomed a crust of bread. As, now, I would have a deaf child, welcome a heart with a hole in it, see for blind eyes, instead of this none, this nothing, this no one. I have a metal bird and a snapshot of an Irish setter I abandoned. I have a metal pole in my hand, a cement porch, a TV set. The music swells inside, full of unlikely sugar.