Mostly Harmless

On the last day of creative writing before break, we played a “game” in class. Now, when I say “game,” I mean the kind of “game” nerdy writers play when they think they’re being cool.

We each wrote a word on a piece of paper and stuck it in my friend’s Santa Hat. . . then our teacher drew 5 words and we had to write a story with them.

The words were:

Bubbling

Hoist

Destruction (that wasn’t mine at all)

Undulating

Legitimately

Some of the most un-useful words ever. I mean, come on, legitimately????

It was a mistake on the housekeeper’s part. If she hadn’t forgotten that her day off was Wednesday, not Tuesday, she would have been there to open the door and the boy wouldn’t have had to meet his destruction.

But on this particular day, she had forgotten, just as an elephant doesn’t, and so, when the doorbell rang, there was no one there to answer it and turn the tall, dark stranger with a scythe strapped to his back away with the assurance that he’d come to the wrong address. Instead, the stranger was able to enter the house with the ease of an alien invasion to earth and was climbing the stairs to the boy’s room in no time. Minding the manners that had been drilled into him from a young age, he knocked politely on the boy’s bedroom door with the shaft of his scythe and waited, tapping his foot impatiently. It was a few moments before the boy opened the door.

He was a small boy. An innocent boy. The sort of boy they put on billboards for leukemia and no one can look at without being thrown back to that one time they were in bed with the flu on Christmas and weren’t allowed to open presents until they were better. It didn’t help that the boy never smiled and only ate cauliflower and brussel sprouts and all sorts of other hateful foods.

So when the door opened and he found himself facing a tall, dark stranger with a face like John Cleese, the boy didn’t laugh at the absurdity, he didn’t faint, and much like Mr. Nash’s Isabelle, he didn’t scream or scurry. He simply stared up at the spot where the man’s face should have been and politely asked why he was so early for their appointment. “You may remember, sir, that I am but seven at this current stage,” he said. The stranger laughed, but said nothing. The boy sighed, accepting his fate and motioned for him to get on with it.

The stranger raised his scythe significantly. The boy fell to the floor with the sort of sound a small child makes as he falls to the floor. And neither party was surprised to find that the little figure was dead. It was all rather anticlimactic, really.

The stranger carefully put up the scythe in the carrier his mother had given him for his 900th birthday (with the inscription “For Billy, the grimmest of all reapers, Love Mummy”) and hoisted it onto his back. He knelt by his little victim’s side so slowly and carefully that it would have looked tender had he not been tall, dark, faceless and carrying a scythe.

Slowly, he examined the boy. Though he was recognized as the best in his trade across worlds he still checked for a heartbeat beneath the thin cotton of the boy’s Transformer pajamas (which had been bought for him by a mother who tried to do everything right and failed miserably). Even professionals could get it wrong sometimes.

There was no air left in the little lungs—he was legitimately dead, though it seemed his soul was doing its best to escape his body in the form of spittle bubbling up from the boy’s mouth. He was used to this. It was without urgency that he reached into the undulating folds of his nazgûl-esque cloak and retrieved a vial with which he caught the unappealing fluid that held the essence of the boy’s being or something like that. He’d add it to his collection of weak attempts by humans to escape his hand. They were so foolish to believe in an afterlife. In a heaven and a hell. In any place other than a shelf on his living room wall.

He held the jar up to the light and peered at it. The contents ceased to look like exactly what they were and became a shimmering gas. He shook the vial gently and the gas shimmered. Death smiled. The young ones always did glow so.

Note: this is fiction, all fiction, and nothing but fiction. When I read this to my class there was a bit of confusion on that point.

Yeah. . . So I actually did ballet, that other post wasn’t a joke.

Yet another pre-write for that piece, but this one had a bit more structure. We had to describe a “transformed object,” beginning the piece with “I think of it with wonder now. . .”

Typically I did not use that for my first line.

I think of them without wonder now, their satin is no longer a shiny cream and the toes are ripped and soft. The ribbons are unraveling, their size is far too small and the wonder of it is, that once they were the object of my pride and now, they’re just that: objects.

I suppose they have some sentimental value and that is why I’ve kept them so long, but to anyone else it probably seems insane—not to mention slightly unhygienic—to keep a ratty old pair of shoes so long. Even the fact that they are pointe shoes makes a difference to only a few and when I say I’m not talking about the pair the famous lead of ABT’s Romeo and Juliet—what’shername—signed, even those few understanding nods disappear. The pointe shoes I speak of were my first ones. I was barely nine years old (so it’s a wonder I still have ankles) when I got my pointe certificate (signed by all four of my teachers and Marat) and was fitted for my first pair of Russian Pointes. It took two hours.

I was so proud of myself.

Even now, it’s hard to remember a time where I’ve been that proud of an achievement. I was nine years old and getting my point shoes when the average (and suggested) age was twelve and all my friends were still stuck in gloomy old flats. My pride was not even extinguished by the pain that came with wearing the satin-covered torture-devices for the first time. Or the time after that. Or the time after that. Or the time after that.

Dancers all complain about their shoes. About the blisters they give us. The pain of breaking them in. The pointe solution the more dedicated of us destroy our feet with. The sheer agony of learning to wear them. The dulled-pain that is a constant reminder you are essentially wearing blocks of wood on your feet. The amount of money they cost. The number we have to buy. It goes on and on. Trust me.

But no matter what we say, we all secretly love our pointe shoes. Not our flat shoes: those anyone can have. But our pointe shoes. The slow-torture we masochists worked so hard to attain.

For the first year of having my pointe shoes, I carried them everywhere and mentioned them to everyone. I took them on vacation and pretended to practice in my room just so I could show off to my cousins. I played with them on airplanes, folding and refolding their ribbons and then just staring at them, hoping someone walking down the aisle would notice that I had pointe shoes. No one ever did.

And if you’re wondering where that beautiful opening line comes from, it’s the first line of the mucus poem.

From a prewriting for my portrait of my ballet teacher:

Weekends, all day, every day was ballet (except when it was soccer). The only time I had was in the dressing rooms. And, surrounded by home-schooled girls who couldn’t string a subject and verb together to make a sentence for their lives, I was a total nerd. But I didn’t care about that, I just didn’t want to have to write backstage. It was noisy and cramped. Someone was always asking for help with their hair or makeup. People sang loudly and off key. Svetlana yelled at everyone within range in Russian while brandishing her scissors, scaring the younger girls, who ended up running through the warren-like system of dressing rooms shrieking and giggling. There was always someone in tears over one thing or another. The three boys of the company could never be found. You would spend ages waiting, hawk-like, for a chair and a little counter-room to work at, but the minute your wait was rewarded, you’d have to get up to go to the bathroom, or deliver something to Marat, or to race to the wings carrying the littlest angel’s candle which had been forgotten downstairs in all the chaos. When you returned, the chair you had painstakingly won and guarded had been taken over by an imposing level six girl with feet like tree-bark, gnarled and hardened by point solution, and who always seemed to be only half-laced into her clothing.

Go home, she said, and write for 50 minutes about memory.

Huh?

Go home, and write for 50 minutes about memory.

Any memory?

Whatever you like.

I took that literally and sort of made up fake memories.

9.2.10

If there were a clock in my room, it would be ticking. Loudly.

Marking off the moments I spend chair tilted back, eyes upward. The ceiling still looks the same. Boring. Off white. Not like the ceiling of my old room.

There, I used to stand on the headboard of my cream and pink bed and create constellations, sticking stars to their sky with sticky-tack the color of a blue raspberry, whatever that is. Around them were dirty finger print comets, dragged across the white sky as I balanced myself on that inch of headboard.

Whenever I’d added a couple more heavenly bodies to the starry array, I couldn’t wait for dark to come so I could see my self-created universe free from the blemishes of an five-year-old giant for the first time. The greeny-yellow-white of my stars’ glow was not that of the faraway pinpricks we wish on at night, but that which everyone under ten associates with aliens. And aliens, of course, invade earth only to be defeated by some hero or other, who inevitably dies at some point and the aliens return.

The cycle continues.

It’s like aliens, she said, explaining the food chain. One big circle.

Aliens? an older and therefore more disbelieving student asks scornfully.

Aliens, I affirm, enraptured by our teacher.

I don’t get it, is the inevitable apathetic rejoinder.

“You wouldn’t!” I should have shouted in my shrill kindergardener’s voice. Only someone who’d been an intergalactic hero could understand how the food chain relates to aliens. Big aliens eat the little aliens. And if you aren’t a big enough hero, you get eaten too. Big fish, little fish. Red fish, blue fish. Simple as that.

Such were the rules of alien warfare as I laid them out lying in bed staring at the hypnotic heavens six feet above my head. Battle after battle was fought in the air above me, until at last the F.O.G. (Federation of Good) called T.O. until the next night, so their commander could go back to being a little blonde girl with school the next morning and an inability to stay awake past 10 o’clock P.M.

When the ball dropped on Times Square in 2004, however, that was all over. Commander of the F.O.G. no longer, and a whole three years older, I was yawning at midnight when the champagne cork hit the ceiling and someone accidentally refilled my glass not with Martinelli’s, but with a little bit of the bubbly. Thirty seconds later, a choking and spitting Electra was led up to bed, with the comforting knowledge that someone would dye the champagne blue the next year.

And so I stared at the blue stick-tack at the edges of my stars, for a few seconds before I flicked out the lights, the taste of perfectly golden champagne still on my tongue.

No one ever dyed the champagne blue. I forgot by February and I would be surprised to learn that anyone else even remembered the promise the next day. But I didn’t mind; I got to see green beer a few years later at a neighbor’s St. Patty’s Day party. And just about green everything else. Green chocolate even! My friends assure me it was very good and normal chocolate, but I’ll never know as I couldn’t bring myself to bring something shaped like a Hersheys bar to my mouth if it was any other color than brown. Green is arugula. Green is celery. Green is mould. A green chocolate bar wasn’t about to make it past my defenses.

I did however reduce myself to cannibalism in the event of a chocolate Santa Clause given by some forgotten angel to my family at christmastime one year. It was the size of my littlest brother. Quite little at the time, but huge for a chocolate Santa Clause. He stood on his own two feet under the Christmas tree, smiling out at the room with his jolly brown face and happy button-nose, which I later devoured as the first piece to come off him.

We read Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me” essay on learning to love to read in class. My teacher encouraged us to note Alexie’s use of the child’s voice as we read it in such sentences as “Superman is breaking down the door.” We were then assigned to write our own piece in a child’s voice.

I hated writing this. But that was back in September. And when I dragged it out again in January for the class’s final public reading I actually quite liked it.

I’m still as a stone,

I’m still as a mouse,

I’m still as a statue,

Except for my mouth.

Mummy helped me write that out today. I said it to her before but now I put it on paper myself. Then I put it in Daddy’s computer, but Mummy typed. I’m too slow because I have to find the letters in their little spaces and they don’t come in order. They go like this: Q W E R T Y U I O P A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M, which isn’t right. I don’t know why. Mummy calls it the QWERTY keyboard because of the first six letters. QWERTY. She says it helps you type faster but I don’t think so. You have to spend all that time rearranging the alphabet so that it starts with Q and ends with M. If it were better why didn’t Anne teach us the alphabet beginning with Q? If it is faster why put A in front? Probably because the song works better. They need to teach people the song to help them remember and the whole thing is messed up without ELEMENO in the middle. You can’t say ESDEFGEE. It’s too hard to remember. And longer to say. And everything’s about time, I think. The freeway saves time and I like it. But Mummy won’t let us have the windows down anymore on the freeway. P’s drawing flew out the window when he was still in Bamboo Yard you have to keep the windows closed so you won’t lose anything else. I wish Mummy hadn’t made that rule. It was fun to throw goldfish out and hurt your neck spinning to see them fall behind the car like flying fish. I guess. I don’t know exactly what a flying fish is. Sarah says they are fish with wings like a butterfly. I don’t believe that because if you get a butterfly’s wings wet it can’t fly and it hobbles around on the ground just like Tiny Tim and then it dies. It wouldn’t be smart to give a fish wings that couldn’t get wet. So they have to be waterproof ones, like a duck. I know duck’s wings are okay in the water because there are a lot of ducks that come swim in our pool sometimes. The boy ones are prettier than the girl ones, but Daddy explained to me I should call the boys drakes, even though they look nothing like dragons and the girls hens, though they aren’t the same as chickens. He told me that while pushing me on the swing and sing Sailing, Sailing Over the Bounding Main. But he never says Jack, he says me, because that is my song. Even though I don’t know what the Bounding Main is. P’s song is Yankee Doodle, but Mummy just uses the tune. The words are very different and are about Perrin drinking milk which he does a lot. I’m glad my song isn’t about milk. Milk is okay, but sailing is better. And whatever the Bounding Main is, at least it sounds better than a heifer, which is a cow. Cows and milk. Bounding Mains and ships. We are very different people, even though everyone asks if we’re twins. No! I am older! Mummy calls us Irish Twins though. She says it’s because we’re only fifteen months apart. I’m convinced it’s sixteen. But it still doesn’t make a difference because we were born in whole different years and that means that we can’t be twins, even Irish ones. And I’m American-English anyway. Not Irish. We did a project in LL Yard on where we were from and I didn’t color in Ireland, so I know. Only America and England and Germany and Holland and Canada and the one above England that’s connected but has a different name. I made them all blue and was careful not to color outside the lines because JT’s looked like something spilled red all over the paper and I didn’t want my paper to bleed like his even though it would have been blue blood. That is why I am the leader. I am more careful and know about things like the Bounding Main. I had to sing the song for JT because he didn’t know it. But I had to sing Jack not me because he doesn’t know the real thing. We ran with our arms out for sails while we sang it, but I had to explain about tacking when we turned into the wind because otherwise he would have been a motor boat which isn’t right. JT said he preferred motor boats anyway because they have engines like jet planes so he ran straight across the yard and waited for me to tack. He always waits for me, which is why we are friends. I am the captain, he is the first mate and no one gets left behind.