Sleight Read Free Page B

shape of a shoebox. On one side of the sleight chamber, a string of windows allowed her to look down on the suburban development where she’d never played but watched others play. The opposing wall was mirrors. Every childhood evening, after school before home, Lark had attempted sleight between sunsets. One might think this would promote an auspicious sense of beauty. Lark spent all her youth, penny by shiny penny, measuring herself against beauty and its mimic. Herself, she found wanting.

    Lark looked at the girl again. Anna was now sleeping, and sleeping, younger—capable of pluck, of damage by fingertip. Out the window of the plane beyond her it was late afternoon.

    By age twelve, Lark had acquired all of the normal self-hatreds. She became a meticulously ordered catalogue of ugliness. Repulsive to herself. Lark was uncertain, now, how repulsive she’d been to others, but a torturer cannot concern herself with the guilt or innocence of her captive. She’d had acne. It was mild, as acne goes, but ever-present. It had haunted her cheekbones and hairline, cropped up beneath her jaw and around her nose. Nights, in front of the mirrors that seemed to be everywhere—sleight chamber, locker room, her purse, at home in the bathrooms, bedrooms, hallways, and on the dining room wall—Lark had picked at her face until it oozed or bled, then splashed rubbing alcohol on the wounds and cried. Really the pain was unworthy of tears. They’d simply attached themselves, recognizing the uncanny way they completed the evening ritual. If she didn’t shed a few each night, she’d been certain she’d wake the next day welted, leprous. She never tested the hypothesis—tears were too easily produced to forego.
    Anna coughed. Lark reached over to cover her torso with one of the blue blankets. The orange in the sky was now orange in Anna’s hair, and for a few seconds she looked like a softer, more manageable Clef. Clef had always had a wildly red mane Lark should have been too old to envy. Lark’s hair was boy-short now, but she’d worn it long and silky black in high school. To keep it from separating into clumps, Lark had brushed it constantly and washed it with hard soap twice daily, which made the roots brittle, which meant when she pulled it back for sleight the hair around her face broke and small quarter-inch shafts spiked outward in an unintentional nod to punk rock. Lark had wanted to be Catherine Deneuve. She was nothing like her, and it had made her furious. She’d trembled all the time.
    Lark stole another look at Anna sleeping, Anna folded in. And because she was aware of herself as mother, herself as failed sister, Lark decided the girl was still cold. Is this how it will be for Nene? Thingness? Dolldom? Too many of the worst possible years spent being leered at and worried over? Lark shivered. She rarely considered her daughter in the future tense. It seemed self-indulgent. Nene was so unlike her mother. Nene, despite everything else, had honest limbs.
    As a child, Lark had hidden her potential among tendons. Specifically, her knees and elbows, always poised slightly bent, were prepared to let wrath exit through a swift extension of forearm and fist, shin and foot. She remembered living in that position for years, never exercising her anger except during certain of the fastest sleight manipulations, or in bed. The wall beside Lark’s bed was battered by sleeping. To a social worker, she mused, the room—now Nene’s—would’ve looked very much like the scene of abuse.
    The pilot announced the landing. The ground was moving close, Lark’s ears were blocked. Anna woke up and, noticing Lark awkwardly opening and shutting her mouth, stretched and smiled her barely developed embarrassment. It was too sweet. How unreal the girl was, how actual.
    Lark had expected something different from life, something extraordinary. Public. That’s why she had gone to the academy, and she had been good, very. But sleightists