Sleight Read Free Page A

performance rather than spoken concurrently with it is an established one. Lately, that tradition has come to be challenged by a radical troupe known as Kepler.
    3 Some ancient American hieroglyphs contain depictions of “stone jugglers”; some of Revoix’s original sleight structures seem to reference these forms. The figures are invariably shown with downturned faces and with one hand raised into the air, cupping a single rock. Initially, archaeologists thought this rock was a sacred object, perhaps even an original thing. But after enough ruins were stripped bare of their jungles, comprehension—even for archaeologists—was inescapable: the figures holding the stones were the center. Although their presence is integral to the calculations of time and shame in which they are found, the jugglers are separated from other carved forms (healers and mathematicians). Indeed, in pictographs with very little space wasted, left around the stone jugglers is a silent periphery.





PAIN.
    F or Lark and Clef, the everyday injuries of sleight—pulled muscles, floor burns, fishwire and fiberglass cuts—came to both of them synchronously, as if they shared a single body or phantom abuser. Coincidence might have been plausible, until Lark left the sleight world and the unexplained bruises continued raising their greens and purple-blacks eventlessly upon her.
    It had been six years since she’d left. Six years of minor aches and injuries not her own to tend.
    And now—pregnant. Lark’s breasts hurt, but she wasn’t. Couldn’t be, stitched, zipped up as she was. Nipples raw against T-shirts, sheets. With Nene this, yes, but else? A kind of calmly. Although she moved through it more like numbly, as during mending. Bones knitting. Her, pregnant, had been a broken state, and the child was a fix. A knot inside the wound. Nothing won, and when she gave birth, it was just another rent, another bit she wasn’t getting back. The right mother would have made good, simple words at the in-fluttering thing: fly, go, be. You. The right mother could give and feel all sorts of right things she was incapable of. Whole joy. Resale-value joy. That store didn’t like her. It was Clef who was pregnant. Had to be. But to live this again, adjacently, for her sister’s body—how could that be fair? And how could she be thinking fair? Whose word was that?
    Lark’s dream woke her. Her, swimming in borscht.
    “Drew?” she asked.
    “Yes?” Drew was now awake too.
    “I think I have to get out of here.”
    Drew’s body nodded toward her, his eyes closed. “Was the ocean bouillon?”
    “No. Borscht.”
    “Yes,” Drew said, “that’s no good.”

NAMING.
    O n the flight to New York—to Clef—Lark had the aisle. The young girl beside her was maybe in high school, maybe not yet. She smelled like powder. Something about her assured Lark she’d never taken. She was lovely in a really human way. She wasn’t, for example, aware of Lark staring at her. She didn’t, because of the staring, extend her limbs against the short seat so her thighs wouldn’t thicken. She slouched, but didn’t slouch with length.
    “What’s your name?” Lark asked.
    “Anna.”
    Lark smiled. It was a lovely, human name.

    Lark’s parents named their first daughter after a type of bird or adventure—an adventure lite. One that flew or flew by. Lark was supposed to grow into her name, to gather it round herself like an Easter shawl to keep her safe from every weighty thing. Forget that shawls don’t protect against the elements, that only widows pin tight the neck, or whores—with gaudier jewelry. Forget that children kite them overhead in wind, that little girls taunt imaginary bulls with dirt-swept shawls, torn. To her mother and father, Lark’s name was like an aria. They forgot that it rhymed with dark.
    Lark had tried at light, lovely. To disappear. By herself with ten or eleven other girls daily for over a decade. The room she grew up in was the exact