She wondered what the buyers used them for. Magic imprinted so easily. Down the street, Sue and her parents and Blake would coax Jake to get up for a few moments. They would drink apple cider, one of the big bottles, not one of the small ones, and eat goose they’d bought from Harker.
When Blake had gone to Sue’s dragging the leafy pole behind him, Harker came back and led her to the bedroom. The house was empty, her sons out, the way both he and the buyers liked it best.
“I want things,” Harker said, removing the butcher’s apron stained with goose blood.
“Which things?” Serena asked.
“Many things,” he said, and she began them, running her hands through his lichen.
In the morning Harker was gone, which almost never happened. Serena put on her printed wrapper and went outside, thinking he might be on the porch smoking.
Between the houses and the fields lit by sunrise there was a row of poles, each sharpened to a point, and each sharp point protruding through a head. She retched, recognizing the impaled heads of her next door neighbours, and Harker’s head and Blake’s. She saw Concepción’s, her black hair in a twist around her neck. Perhaps they had found her on the road outside town, the first of the girls to make her way home.
Serena watched a group of men receding on the downland road. One of them turned as if to look at her. His face flickered even though he was nowhere near firelight.
Her youngest came and stood beside her. She took little Jake’s hand.
The pole that healed you was sent by the strangers to protect Harker, she thought but didn’t say. He knew it was his, maybe he even made it, but I didn’t let him keep it. Now I have you and not him or your sister and brother. What about Agatha and Mildred? Maybe it’s not too late to find them?
Serena recognized the poles she’d sold. Letting go of Jake’s hand, she dashed forward and plucked a leaf from Harker’s eyebrow. Like the leaves on the surrounding trees, it was starting to turn a russet shade. But that didn’t matter. Serena would still take it home and set it in a glass of water. She would put the glass beside his pole, and she would wish.
The Meaning of Yellow
JESSICA LEFT HER JOURNALS on subways, in taxicabs, in laneways bright yellow with the first fallen leaves, soon to be brown and rumpled and smelling of Halloween. It wasn’t just drinking with Simeon; she was a forgetful sort. Each time she bought a replacement journal she told herself she’d leave it at home, but she could never bring herself to stick to this plan. She loved writing in cafés too much to ever give it up.
She always imagined the strangers who found her notebooks. Would they take up where she left off, filling the remaining blank pages with their own to do lists, love letters, and scraps of poetry? Would they complete her failed short stories? Would they share her journals with their friends and imagine her as plump and unattractive? Jessica was plump, but her father had told her that to fetishize the very thin was actually a desexualizing of the female form, representing a male fear of womanly fecundity. He could go on. He was a cultural studies professor. Simeon told Jessica how lucky she was. Jessica’s father was never going to sigh in a disappointed manner when she showed up for Thanksgiving dinner with dishevelled hair, sans make-up and polished nails. Simeon, Jessica’s best friend, was impeccably groomed at all occasions, but this failed to impress his own father, who hadn’t yet gotten over (and might not ever get over) the fact that his son was gay.
“Some people are straight,” Jessica pointed out, “and some aren’t. People should do what they want. Guys who want to wear eyeliner should, although I do think all those chemicals have got to be bad for your skin. And do you know what they do to the bunnies?”
“What bunnies?” Simeon asked.
They were in a student café called The Mermaid, drinking coffee and eating carrot muffins. Jessica had been there since one, Simeon since three. They’d had one refill each. Jessica would’ve gotten a third, but refills weren’t free, and she was out of money. She’d have asked Simeon to pay, but she was always doing that. He got money from home to flesh out his loan. Her own professor father balked at doing this; he thought she needed to learn how to budget. Jessica couldn’t budget to save her life. Just now the manager was giving them dirty looks. The place was filling up with the after class crowd, paying customers who’d ordered soy lattés and expensive pastries and were now looking for somewhere to sit.
“The bunnies they perform the experiments on,” Jessica told Simeon as they swung out the door. It was cold. She should’ve worn a coat and not just a sweater.
“Experiments?”
“They wire their eyes open and put mascara on them to see how they react,” Jessica said.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Simeon said. They’d reached the corner where they usually parted ways.
“Oh fuck,” Jessica said, patting her alarmingly empty canvas bag.
Simeon started to laugh. He knew what was wrong. Jessica ran back to the café, hair flying. Her clogs made a nice thunking sound on the wet October sidewalks. She burst into the door. Her notebook wasn’t on their old table, nor was it underneath. The people now seated were all wearing new brand-name jackets. Didn’t they have coffee chains for people like that? She asked if they’d seen her book. What she really wanted to do was go through their bags, one by one, as if she were a store owner and they were suspected shoplifters, but they were already looking down their noses at her obvious desperation. She asked at the counter. The pierced and tattooed manager rolled his eyes; it was his rush and he was understaffed. His eyes willed Jessica to disappear.
Back on the sidewalk, she looked around for Simeon. He was gone, home, she supposed. It was raining now, and she hadn’t really expected him to wait for her since they were going in different directions.
She set off for her little bachelor around the corner. Almost at her door, her clog kicked something on the sidewalk. She looked down. At her feet there was a hard-cover journal. It was yellow. She picked it up and stashed the book in her shoulder bag. She turned the key in her lock. She walked up the three flights of stairs. Her sweater and jeans were damp and wet. She unlocked the door to her tiny apartment, went inside and sat down on the old yellow couch. She opened the book she’d found and read.
Renee and her friend Neil climbed down the iron fire-escape that led from her kitchen to the roof of the first storey, where she’d planted purple fall asters and canna lilies in halved oak wine barrels. The cannas’ foliage lent the roof a tropical feel, and much to everyone’s surprise, managed to bloom, displaying huge spikes of glowing red flowers.
It was a perfect description of the back of Jessica’s flat.
Was this one of her journals? Maybe she’d forgotten she’d ever even had it, never mind written in it. Maybe she’d been experimenting with autobiographical fiction, and her first step had been to change her own and Simeon’s names.
Except the handwriting wasn’t hers, so that couldn’t be it.
She turned the page and read on.
She and Neil climbed down the second set of iron stairs and cut through the yard of the butcher shop, even in winter stinky from heaps of discarded beef bones, through the alleyway, and back out onto the main street where they’d seen it earlier in the afternoon. It was an enormous brocade couch with a real wood frame and not a pasteboard one, and was henceforth, extremely heavy.