The Prairie Town

She says, everything happens somewhere. Directs those eyes like lighthouse beams someplace west. Doesn’t find what she needs. Looks at her feet. What she is out here: alone. It’s not so bad.

When he landed he was only sixteen and piloting a light craft. One wing bent earthward and the old man slumping. Alone among planes of sand. Goggles to keep out the glare, met no one for hours by his watch. In three o’clock radiance he rested under a shelf of rock.

Finally, the watch full of sand. Moon rising on the white edge of dunes. He waited and walked in nighttime. Sliced the fleshy plants. Sap like meat.

There was a cord around his waist pulling him north, polish to keep his goggles black and clear, no one asking him who or what, or where the old man left his bones for animals to pick.
Like this, he walked out of the desert.

For the longest time it was a speck on the horizon, a cliché she would have lied and said she dreamt if anyone asked. No one was there to ask. One day it was a larger speck and then all of a sudden it was a boy her size. She sat under the azalea to wait, watched his knees pass by, stop a ways down the road. He could smell her where she hadn’t washed, she thought. Both of them settled in to wait a while.

She hated to give away the secret: the boy had no eyes, only a pair of smokeblack glasses. His face was a dialect of stars reflecting. What if dust rose up? Out would come the cloth. The miniature bottle of polishing fluid. He walked like a ragtime piano. The little strings she wrapped around her fingers pulled toward him.

In between times she consoles herself with a battered Oxford English. The smell of leather, something like shaving cream she imagines. When she picks up the book she is touching something she’s waited for. The pages sigh, or she does. Inside the dictionary everything is always the same as it ever was: a television, phonograph, or radio cabinet that stands on the floor; a desk-like structure containing the keyboards, pedals, etc. of an organ; the control unit, oh, she thinks, the brain.

It’s true her leg was missing. Sometimes when the uncle was awash in spirits he’d lead her out into barbed wilderness and wonder with her which direction it had gone. The new leg creaking. It had been a doll’s leg, porcelain as a bathtub. Sometimes you just can’t trust your own body not to run off, she thinks.

The boy has never seen it. Or anything. But he imagines the flexing muscles of the rabbit move like the ocean and in any case its smell is also salt. Under his insistent hand the rabbitbody moves uncomfortable. But it is so small. Part wants to open the sternum, feel the muscled valves pump and spray. That decision is permanent so he just waits, feels the animal know his danger, feels the heart-motor run: fast, faster. Smells the wet air.

At dinnertime the uncle brings a jar of olives out of the sack to put in the cupboard to take out for dinner when the aunt would come from the store to eat and the uncle’s hand would stop scrabbling. Olives with pimento, small red pepper the ninety-nine-cent jar. The cheap uncle. Doll’s-leg cringes away from strap.

Chicken bone, kid glove, clock. Seven mason jars full of dust, another full of soot. Glass door of the drugstore. Crack down the street’s center line. Yesterday’s apple blossoms pressed flat as a kiss between pages of a leather-covered book. Yellow brick limestone slate roof thatch roof pavestone skipstone beggarman thief.

The uncle likes the smell of the ocean parts. Where he was in the army was full of ocean and the smell of ocean. He presses his nose to them. At night she puts them in their proper places. The uncle likes things out and messy. If they’re put away just right he might not find them next time.

But sometimes the boy is there in the dark pretending to be a branch that moves air syrupslow out her window. The new leg asleep in its cradle next to her bed dreaming peaceful dreams—the branch or the boy scratches the pane and she lies still as last night’s pan fish. If her sash is up he’ll whistle—low—and make her look, give away her wakefulness, and then: can I know your name? in his brokenbottle voice. She whispers: ——

The azalea blooms. Some of its branches break. Sometimes the light in the house above the dining table tosses color onto the road. Sometimes he can hear the aunt laughing to the uncle. Sometimes he looks up into the trees. Feels her eyelashes close featherquick on cheek. Counts her blinks by the hour.

The bicycle in the garage has one flat tire and no brakes but it’s cheerfully red. Basket waving tatters of a checkered bow. Left handlebar: rubber bulb of a horn shreds and peels. Over breakfast she tells the aunt she’ll take hot lunch that day. Tells schoolteacher she’s walking home, noonhour. Sits in the motey slant of windowshine, polishes that worn-out chrome as if there’s no—tomorrow not even a thought.

Schoolteacher commands politeness, lifts it up on a platter of gold stars. Manners count. Rows of stars count. She counts them out loud for the class. Her glasses chain jingles as she moves, its fifty-four links glinting lively into the dark puff of hair. She counts on their manners, arm fat jiggling as the 14-carat tinkles above. Never counted on the two of them in next-door desks, passing notes on the rachis of a roseleaf. Rows, not roses, schoolteacher expounds. She doesn’t know how many stars they have, anyway: so many they can’t be counted in numbers smaller than ∞.

Aren’t the notes a promise. Don’t they say I’ll build you a house, with the vines on it you like. A hexagonal window. Little wires throwing sparks, a switch and a bare bulb, a built-in table, Murphy bed, two goosedown pillows, redchecked cloth, a pitcher and bowl for serving, three silver spoons and matching forks, an old knife and slab. Matching plates with apples painted on. A little garden down below. Promises growing up through the foundation. Linen sheets and a rope to hang you with.

Cusp of winter, she stands on a frozen lake and watches the world dilute. She was going crazy in the little room, the slabbody of the uncle in every corner like saltpork. White and unappetizing. The cold months hang over her head, a string of dried fish, and her body begins the process of living without her. Hair and shakes. What she’s hungry for they haven’t stored up in that house for quite some time.

When he is breathing in the alley sometimes he can feel the tips of his fingers glow blueblack and then he knows someone is there. In the perfect building of his mind he stands guard over the town. Eyes masked, all-seeing. Keep The Girl out of villain-reach, swing her up on a magic rope, the sound of his cape. Then she passes him quiet as a ——. He hears the girl moving in his darkness, the smell of lilies-of-the-valley, her fear like a struck cat. Wants to go with her wherever she is hurrying.

He is a hard nut to crack. Next to her under schoolteacher’s rigid gaze he slips loganberries, a rusted flange into her palm. She hopes. Hides his gifts under the mattress. In the house of the uncle she tries to be invisible but the little presents make her body take shape. He can’t see her, makes her want to be seen.

Someone wonders where the uncle’s voice is. Whether it is laying cutthroat in a gutter. She would answer in the paper tongue that house taught, the voice of the uncle is handmade lace along the pillow’s edge. But this is not the uncle’s story.

What it is: open bluegrass chords on mandolin, the slow fiddle’s keening. Under the bleachers music wraps her like a shawl. Fringes touching her gooseskin. The taste of sweet tea. Shape of the window on her nightwalls, her right leg talking pretty to her left, hands clapping a double-time singsong with the red-sweater girls at school. Bird in the hand.

Walking along the curb, she notices violets beginning to poke through cracks. The shade of a police car. She remembers a matching tin one, its rubber wheels, carpet fuzz tangled in treads. When the boy comes out of the drugstore, she follows him. Alley to alley. Whether he can smell her or not he doesn’t say, anything. She gathers her memories: railroad, dogwood, a mismatched deck of playing cards; tracks him into deep shade on meadow’s edge, touches his back, watches his face change. Leaves lilacs and little dreams tossing in the wake of her sprintaway.

How many people can one girl, slight-built, weak in sports, easily distracted, plain grown pretty, love in one lifetime? What is it makes that sharpsweet first taste of soda bread, trace of wool on the tongue, and how to name what never belonged to her, never could? And who can love her? The touch of hand on skin like fine thread cotton. Once things are fed and taken care of, every saucer proper in its proper place, who is going to name the way her arm muscles ache—what for?

A lot of things come in shapes with two edges. Hatchets. For example. The aunt is fond of saying her coming to live with them is a double-edged sword. She thinks, no, more like a cross to bear. What the sense would be of a blade with just one edge she doesn’t know. You want to cut the person on the way out, just like on the way in.

After everyone is sleeping there is time to curl beneath the wood shaving bench, listen for footsteps to the basement door, the trembling jars of relish and the girl brave among scraps of flaky pine. Or to run. She holds a thin spoon between her fingers, wonders what time the last light will pop into darkness, plans route after route through the midnight house.

At six in the morning something singing is in the bracken of his mind: it is no everyday. Fingers to the delicate tray of ear, glossy spectacles. Creaking out of the house, the boy with no eyes feels his way through the blossoming-unfamiliar garden. Radish bodies, potatoes budding tiny underground, the silk of dill new to flower. Tingles his palms. Leaves a blind dust on his shirt. Touches tomato leaves, feel aphids march battleward on fingernail. All new.

And if all this exists? Girl who speaks to the wolf-boy. Boy with pads of callus thick like two years on his feet. Tonight they can steal away in a red boat blue on the inside. And the sea and the boat and the bodies rocking. If she’s never been on the water before, all right; if he doesn’t know which way is north. They’ll point toward shore.

Éireann Lorsung was born and raised in Minneapolis. Her poetry collection, Music for Landing Planes By, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. Lorsung received an MFA in writing and BA degrees in English and Japanese from the University of Minnesota; she has also studied at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She currently lives in Nottingham, England, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural studies.