Stunt Read Free Page B

mistresses in nightgowns, purse-sized rifle clutched in hand, boss-lover’s blood seeping into the carpet below; a spy on his elbows inchworming under a French window. You would cry for a thing downed, for a thing won. You could not distinguish their world from ours. I could. But I would pretend the delusion. ‘Huzzah,’ you would say, ‘huzzah.’ Cigarette stem ghosting the air. ‘Huzzah,’ I would answer, like a good catch, ‘huzzah.’
    The last time I visit Marta, one week ago, she pats my head as she always does. She wears an oval locket around her neck. It is new. She will not let me see who is in it. Her hair is ChicagoNight Life Black and matted and she has not dressed even though it is evening. Her cheeks are flushed like she has been tilling a field of stone or weaving wool to make garments for hundreds of children. She is full of children. They are quiet hills growing inside of her. She smells like she is fermenting. When I ask her if she has a fever, she says, ‘No, I am sanguine.’ When I ask her if she is pregnant, she says nothing and pulls a book down for me, the shelf teetering as if it is a beginner stilt walker.
    The book is about a girl three oceans away who invents a language for a rope. The girl transmits a series of desires and commands to her rope and, to her astonishment, it rises an inch off the ground, and then a foot, until it coils up and lassoes itself through the air, coming back to her feet, and it dances for her and then it dances with her and then she thinks she hears it chuckle.
    The girl feels a closeness with the rope that far surpasses anything she has ever felt with human beings, even her grandmother, whose kindness is never cumbersome. This closeness, like an undertow, makes her go toward the rope and away from everything else. She repeats these conversations with the rope a thousand times a day. Always away from her home and her school so that she will not be mocked or called mad. Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods, between the jackfruit and the betel nut, bamboo creepers, the jamun and the mango. Until she does not have to have any other conversations. One day, she looks around as everyone eats their meals and laughs and wears certain shoes and ties their hair the same way and she wonders, missing her rope:
When did I become so different from everybody else?
    â€˜I know,’ I tell the girl in the book. ‘I know,’ I tell Marta.
    The girl leaves for the forest.
    On the day that they are about to lock her up, the mad girl in the woods, her village is wiped out by a flood. But she is not, because she talks to her rope and it rises while she stands on it, lifting her to safety. She hovers above her village and watches its superstitions be washed and wrung clean. Before they are drowned, the villagers have a final glimpse of her. They think she is an apparition floating above them. But they are wrong. Things like this, a girl on a rope in the air, are not sudden or fake or heavenly. They are a slow coming. They are an accumulation of events. Much like the flood. It seems quick. Barrelling across the earth. But it is not. It has been plodding. It has been brooding. Yes, the water was loosened – but it had been groaning all the while.
    {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}
    my darlin’,
    there is no blue here.
memorize blue.
    your grand disappointment,

your only scar,

s.
    Am I missing my code? Are the stars blinking a message? Are those car lights for me? Did they not dim and brighten? Was that a tapping on the roof ? Footsteps on the path? A whistle? I know that if I see the sun strain itself against the sky, I will die. Please do not let this happen. Please do not let day come.
    We did swear. Our thumbs cut and pressed together, blood as our witness, we swore.
Forever.
We both have scars to show for it. I look at mine now. Ephemeral as a smudge.
    What if you promised yourself to others? What if you have a hundred