“Ah,” says Ms. Kidney, who lives alone at the tip of the narrowing North and has lost everyone, her three sisters beneath the green ice, marked by their upright sleds, for as long as we’ve known her.
[:]
Agnes does not study Przewalskis.
“Did Ms. Kidney mean trilobites?” wonders Agnes. In any case, it is impolite to correct a guest.
Like most paleozoologists, Agnes supports the Crick Theory of Panspermia. Life arrived on Earth as spores blown from a distant star system. It is a very dull business, paleozoology — tracing this flat worm to Alpha Centuri, this sea sponge to Cygnus.
Agnes devotes herself primarily to witchcraft.
[:]
Ms. Kidney is so vigorous! Already she has collapsed Dorcas’s card barbican and two legs of the card table. Bryce’s barkentine has also sustained damages. The bottle is intact, but the spanker mast has snapped.
“How did she do that?” wonders Dorcas. She looks at Ms. Kidney moving vigorously about the parlor. She wonders if Ms. Kidney has a Theta-brain.
Dorcas tries to picture Ms. Kidney engrossed in the harvest: Ms. Kidney moving slowly and rhythmically through the trees, dropping a thousand round oranges, one by one, into the Indian River.
Dorcas pictures the oranges bobbing all the way to the harbor where the International Association of Lepidopterists has merged at last with the International Association of Longshoremen, netting and crating oranges, loading them onto ships. One crate. Two crates. Tall cranes. Blue sky. High spanker masts. Warm air, oddly still.
“Dorcas, how beautiful!” cries Bryce. Dorcas looks down at her hands. Her hands have been scouring the rinds of oranges.
Dorcas watches from the other end of a Theta wave — hands peeling bright wings of orange rinds, mounting them on the bare branches of the hat stand. The cockatoos have fallen silent, watching.
[:]
Bryce claps her hand over her mouth. Why can’t she keep her peace, like a cockatoo?
“Because beauty crowds me,” thinks Bryce, woefully. What if her impulsive cry has trapped Dorcas’s soul forever among the starry branches of the hat stand?
Bryce remembers the story of the old couple in the forest, how they shaped the snow into a maiden with a glittering crown and a brocade cape and the snow maiden was so beautiful, the old couple cried, “Come home with us, Snegurochka!” and she went with them between the pines to the warm little hut with the wood fire crackling and she turned into a puddle right then and there. The old couple tried and tried, but they couldn’t love a tepid little puddle, and the puddle-maiden was so saddened she wept bitter tears, and every day the puddle grew larger until at last the old couple was swept away, the end.
“Oh!” thinks Bryce. Will she be swept away? No. Bryce will love Dorcas’s soul up in the branches of the hat stand. She will care for it tenderly. She will hang Dorcas’s favorite things from the hat stand — hard squares of cinnamon toast and her collection of clear plastic cassettes. She will put Dorcas’s body in the opposite corner, with her arms stretched upwards, just like a hat stand. She will put an orange in each hand.
X
Ms. Kidney’s purple overalls have given off all their steam. They’ve started to shrink, the cuffs rising up to the tops of her swamp boots until they are the perfect length for wading in the Indian River. It’s almost time to go, then. A moment more.
Ms. Kidney and Agnes and Mrs. Borage sit together on the sofa, talking politics. Mrs. Borage is remembering a red-lacquered voting booth, how she swept the velvet drape to the left and all the golden rings whistled on the pole. She sat. A burst of light. Her picture fell through a metal slot.
We have the picture on the mantel. Mrs. Borage looked serious, voting. Those were serious days.
[:]
The three women on the sofa have fallen asleep. Now there are many kinds of brain waves in the parlor. Bryce paints the different waves across the walls. She doesn’t know very much about neuroscience. The waves are all tangled up.
“Medusa again,” sighs Bryce. She adds a pegasus. She gives the pegasus a mane of green vipers and a green viper tail.
Will Bertrand see the self-eating serpent? It is unlikely. Every year there are fewer snakes in Europe. The Irish Example has proven too powerful.
[:]
Agnes jumps to her feet.
“Fo ic under fot, funde ic hit hwæt eorðe, mæg wið ealar wih-ta gehwilce and wið andan and wið æminde and wið ba micelan mannes tungan,” says Agnes. She looks around the parlor. The charm has had no effect. Bryce’s painting, however, has turned Dorcas to stone.
“Beginner’s luck,” thinks Agnes. “Luck of the Irish. Lucky stars.”
Ms. Kidney is pulling on her parka.
“You,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Buzzard with the crockpot!” She rattles the amber-poke against the window frame.
“You,” she bellows. “Vile Borgia! Away!” We rush to the window.
“It’s just poor Mr. Henderson,” says Mrs. Borage. Mr. Henderson waves towards the open window.
“Do the creatures take soup?” shouts Mr. Henderson. He is stamping his boots on the sidewalk, clutching the crockpot. The streetlight above his head winks on.
“The last bus!” yells Ms. Kidney. “It leaves from the lumberyard at sundown.”
A kiss for Mrs. Borage.
“Happy birthday my Scrumpleshine, my darling,” says Ms. Kidney. “I’ll bring you honeybells.” She bangs through the front door.
“Skip, Ziegenpeter!” bellows Ms. Kidney, and Mr. Henderson goes skipping out of Ms. Kidney’s path. His knees creak. Mr. Henderson is a Przewalski, quite a Przewalski, but his legs are the legs of a cricket, skinny, black, and chirping. Mr. Henderson skips like a buzzard-horse-cricket. It is the saddest skip we’ve ever seen. Agnes documents it for her research. A hyper-color Polaroid.
“Can I have it!” says Bryce.
“No,” says Agnes.
[:]
Suddenly, the crockpot slips out of Mr. Henderson’s arms and breaks on the sidewalk. The broken pieces fall away from the soup, which is a red cylinder, unmoving. Mr. Henderson stares at the cylinder of soup. He stares at the unnecessary crockpot.
“Does everything suffer my attention?” asks Mr. Henderson. He can’t bear to look at the brightly lit house, with the warped walls and the sinking roof making curves like the physical universe, and Mrs. Borage waving kindly from the window, so he looks down the street, not toward the cul-de-sac and the abandoned Security Spray Complex, but in the other direction, toward the lights of the lumberyard. He watches the woman run toward the lights, her broad back and high-crowned Russian hat with the earflaps moving up and down like wings. She is shouting something. It sounds like “Heißa hopsasa!”
“Who is Heißa Hopsasa?” says Mr. Henderson.
Mr. Henderson is afraid that he will see the woman lift into the air. He is afraid that the wings of the Russian hat will carry her up, up, and away, high above the treated planks piled in the lumberyard, and she will go flying through the unmonitored airspace of the town. Did the Russians send her?
Mr. Henderson remembers the days of espionage, the little plane circling the pink and gold striped domes of St. Basil’s Ca thedral. Basil the Blessed. Basil Fool-for-Christ.
Mr. Henderson forgets how Ivan the Terrible blinded the architects, how they never erected another dome in Moscow. Poor Postnik! Poor Barma! That happened before the days of espionage, in the days of feudal pattern warfare.
Mr. Henderson has been losing his vision slowly, a little bit lost to each pot, not one of them fearsome in their beauty.
X
Bryce turns the keys in the cockatoos and the music starts again. Does everyone know the words?