“I am niche-less,” thinks Mr. Henderson. His creaky legs are getting tired. The wheel spins slower and slower. Ann Lee topples. Mr. Henderson has made a little pile of clay into a little pile of clay. He inspects it for some trace of endeavoring. The clay feels warmer than before; there is that. Mr. Henderson puts his cheek against the clay.
“It’s pleasant,” he thinks.
When Mr. Henderson wakes up his back feels very stiff. He has a feeling it’s the middle of the night. Mr. Henderson steps out of his garage. There is a full moon above the Security Spray Complex. In the bright moonlight, the bricks look very red and the broken glass in the windowpanes is sparkling.
Mr. Henderson has thought about using bricks from the crumbling wall of the Security Spray Complex to build a new kiln. Apparently, someone else has had the same idea.
“Hello,” waves Mr. Henderson.
“Hello,” waves Bryce. Her wagon is nearly filled with bricks and she keeps waving. Her palm stings fiercely with the residues of security spray. She waves frantically. Mr. Henderson drops his hand. He realizes that he is standing in the shadows. Should he drag his recycling to the sidewalk early this week? He thinks she has just room enough in the wagon for his soup cans.
[:]
There are so few things to think about in the center of town that Dorcas has fallen asleep. Luckily, she is still walking back and forth in front of the library. Dorcas jolts awake. Did anyone see her? Was she talking in her sleep? She half remembers a hoarse voice belting out the Dansmarks Radio interval signal. It’s a lovely song, but the notes are entirely out of her range.
“How embarrassing,” thinks Dorcas. No wonder Hildegard sleeps hidden beneath the stairs with the door locked fast.
The moon is high in the sky and the street is empty. Dorcas climbs the hill above the elementary school. There are no children on the playground.
“How do they keep the children inside on a full-moon night?” wonders Dorcas. “Do they drug them?”
In the moonlight, she notices that someone has painted a bright pink arrow on the side of the white church. The arrow is enormous. Dorcas would not be surprised if there were jættes roaming on a night like tonight.
Is that a jætte there? Gnawer of the moon? Giant of the gale blasts? No, it’s a woman on stilts rolling a stripe of pink paint across the white courthouse.
[:]
Mrs. Borage is playing her fiddle by the river. Her fingers are starting to burn. She is generating so much heat that she has lifted a little off the ground. You wouldn’t notice it. Mrs. Borage snaps the last string on her fiddle. She lets her bow arm drop. She feels vital and defiant. After all, she is hovering above the earth. Should she break her fiddle on her knee? Should she howl? Should she jump nude into the river?
Not until her birthday. Why wait your whole life to turn one hundred if you can jump nude into the river at ninety-nine?
Dorcas hears a distant splash. Something is displacing massive amounts of water in the town creek. A hippogriff? A manti-core? Dorcas hopes it has a very thick hide, nothing porous, no mucous membranes, a tight drum of a creature, generally insensitive to pain. The town creek is all security spray, except where it runs over the railroad tracks. There it is also creosote.
X
The day after a full moon, we are especially tired. Fiona eats raisin after raisin in the kitchen, but she still looks wilted. Even Hildegard is tired. There are no brain waves coming from the room beneath the stairs. Bryce draws a straight line across the door. She draws another straight line. Somewhere, far in the distance, the lines will reach a vanishing point.
Has Hildegard disappeared? Bryce slips a pixie stix beneath the door.
“Crunch time,” says Bryce, loud enough for everyone to hear. After crunches, sit-ups. Toe touches. Cool down neck rolls. Mrs. Borage’s oversplit is almost as deep as Ozark’s. Dorcas bends her knees and puts her hands on her shins.
“Not every body is meant to front-fold,” says Ozark. Mrs. Borage has assumed the lotus position.
“We should all have heavier hands and feet and heads, from a mechanical perspective,” says Mrs. Borage. She thinks of the human, how weight concentrates at the proximal parts of the limbs and trunk. She thinks of the pendulum.
“Elegantly done,” murmurs Mrs. Borage. “Best in show.”
[:]
Agnes steps in a puddle on the carpet.
“Be careful what you wish for,” says a voice.
“Could it be?” cries Agnes anxiously, looking at the puddle. “Snegurochka?”
Dorcas looks up. Agnes is standing in the corner of the parlor, talking to her feet. Dorcas looks at her own feet. The Seine is murky today and the dark-haired woman is huddled in a cloak.
“Could what be?” wonders Dorcas. She isn’t going to ask her feet. Has Agnes lost her mind?
Ozark comes into the parlor. Agnes is muttering into the corner.
“A whispering wall!” thinks Ozark. She’s never noticed the room’s acoustic curve. She looks swiftly at the other corner, the charred toast hanging from the hat stand. Is the hat stand whispering to Agnes? It can’t be the cockatoos. They’ve flown away at last. They are outside, roosting in the cairns.
“Maybe Ganzenland is the cockatoo Valhalla,” thinks Ozark. “Maybe it is in the Atlas of Death.”
[:]
In a book, a paleozoology book or a book of witchcraft, she can’t tell which, Agnes finds a recipe for musk otters.
A few cotton rags, two renal pores, a scoop of bloomy rind from the cheese jug, rainwater, chicken urea, ox blood, a pennyworth each, a dark corner, plenty of dust….
Cheese jug? We haven’t had a cheese jug in years.
“There were still milkmen when this thing was written,” says Agnes. “Mrs. Borage was in a dirndl.”
It would have been a lovely gift: otter gauntlets and overcoat.
“I can order them,” thinks Agnes. She looks around the kitchen. Everywhere, stacks of magazines. Has the house gotten smaller? Agnes peeks into the dining room. Weren’t there flying buttresses? Spandrels? Wasn’t there an oeil-de-boeuf? Wasn’t there a wing-shaped table? Someone has shorn the tassels from the curtains.
Bryce is sitting cross-legged by a pile of soup cans. She is pin nailing strips of aluminum to the drywall. She needs to make a decision.
“Sodom by the Sea?” asks Bryce. “The Ashtabula Horror?”
“The Ashtabula Horror,” says Agnes.
“I like Sodom by the Sea,” says Bryce. “It is more of a party theme.”
Agnes admires the mosaic, the aluminum trusses and pop-sicle slats, but why television dioramas? Why not shoeboxes?
“At least with shoeboxes, you get shoes,” thinks Agnes.
[:]
The action has moved to the kitchen. It must be time for lunch. For Agnes, it is a working lunch. She is researching vermilions, the tiny lions crushed by the thousand to color the crimson velvets of Versailles. Her heart isn’t in it. Vermilions had many hearts. Of course, they have been crushed to extinction.
“The Sun King,” notes Agnes. “His talons rouges.” She eyes the scuffed heels of Mrs. Borage’s high-heeled boots. Should she paint them crimson? Of course she should. Is Bryce thinking the same thing? Bryce winks at Agnes. She has a metal filing in her eye.
“Tomorrow,” announces Mrs. Borage. “I am going to be a centurion.” She shakes her head. “I find that nearly impossible to reconcile with my pacific lifestyle. Do you expect any upheaval, dear?”
Dorcas thinks. Mr. Zimmer did deliver that alarming letter. Where is it now?
“Bryce glued it inside the oven,” says Fiona. About time! The bare gray walls inside the oven made it seem like…