Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
Book online «Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗». Author Cory Doctorow
That’s what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing my grid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture, using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in the surface of the photo.
And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was, where it wasn’t. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in the photos. As I drew, day after day, I realized that I was drawing the shape of something black that was blocking the curtain behind.
Then I got excited. I drew in my steadiest hand, tracing each curve, using my magnifier, until I had the shape drawn and defined, and long before I finished, I knew what I was drawing and I drew it anyway. I drew it and then I looked at my paper sack and I saw that what I had drawn was a pair of wings, black and powerful, spread out and stretching out of the shot.
She curled the prehensile tips of her wings up the soles of his feet, making him go, Yeek! and jump in the bed.
“Are you awake?” she said, twisting her head around to brush her lips over his.
“Rapt,” he said.
She giggled and her tits bounced.
“Good,” she said. “’Cause this is the important part.”
Auntie came home early that day and found me sitting at her vanity, with the photos and the water glass and the drawings on the paper sacks spread out before me.
Our eyes met for a moment. Her pupils shrank down to tiny dots, I remember it, remember seeing them vanish, leaving behind rings of yellowed hazel. One of her hands lashed out in a claw and sank into my hair. She lifted me out of the chair by my hair before I’d even had a chance to cry out, almost before I’d registered the fact that she was hurting me—she’d never so much as spanked me until then.
She was strong, in that slow old Russian lady way, strong enough to grunt ten sacks of groceries in a bundle-buggy up the stairs to the apartment. When she picked me up and tossed me, it was like being fired out of a cannon. I rebounded off the framed motel-room art over the bed, shattering the glass, and bounced twice on the mattress before coming to rest on the floor. My arm was hanging at a funny angle, and when I tried to move it, it hurt so much that I heard a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.
I lay still as the old lady yanked the drawers out of her vanity and upended them on the floor until she found an old book of matches. She swept the photos and my sketches into the tin wastebasket and then lit a match with trembling hands and dropped it in. It went out. She repeated it, and on the fourth try she got the idea of using the match to light all the remaining matches in the folder and drop that into the bin. A moment later, it was burning cheerfully, spitting curling red embers into the air on clouds of dark smoke. I buried my face in the matted carpet and tried not to hear that high note, tried to will away the sick grating feeling in my upper arm.
She was wreathed in smoke, choking, when she finally turned to me. For a moment, I refused to meet her eye, sure that she would kill me if I did, would see the guilt and the knowledge in my face and keep her secret with murder. I’d watched enough daytime television to know about dark secrets.
But when she bent down to me, with the creak of stretching elastic, and she lifted me to my feet and bent to look me in the eye, she had tears in her eyes.
She went to the pile of oddments and junk jewelry that she had dumped out on the floor and sorted through it until she found a pair of sewing shears, then she cut away my T-shirt, supporting my broken arm with her hand. My wings were flapping nervously beneath the fabric, and it got tangled, and she took firm hold of the wingtips and folded them down to my back and freed the shirt and tossed it in the pile of junk on her normally spotless floor.
She had spoken to me less and less since I had fixed the television and begun to pick up English, and now she was wordless as she gently rotated my fingerbones and my wristbones, my elbow and my shoulder, minute movements, listening for my teakettle hiss when she hit the sore spots.
“Is broken,” she said. “Cholera,” she said. “I am so sorry, lovenu,” she said.
“I’ve never been to the doctor’s,” she said. “Never had a pap smear or been felt for lumps. Never, ever had an X-ray. Feel this,” she said, and put her upper arm before his face. He took it and ran his fingertips over it, finding a hard bump halfway along, opposite her fleshy bicep.
“What’s this?” he said.
“It’s how a bone sets if you have a bad break and don’t get a cast. Crooked.”
“Jesus,” he said, giving it another squeeze. Now that he knew what it was, he thought—or perhaps fancied—that he could feel how the unevenly splintered pieces of bone mated together, met at a slight angle and fused together by the knitting process.
“She made me a sling, and she fed me every meal and brushed my teeth. I had to stop her from following me into the toilet to wipe me up. And I didn’t care: She could have broken both of my arms if she’d only explained the photos to me, or left them with me so that I could go on investigating them, but she did neither. She hardly spoke a word to me.”
She resettled herself against the pillows, then pulled him back against her again and plumped his head against her breasts.
“Are you falling in love with me?” she said.
He startled. The way she said it, she didn’t sound like a young adult, she sounded like a small child.
“Mimi—” he began, then stopped himself. “I don’t think so. I mean, I like you—”
“Good,” she said. “No falling in love, all right?”
Auntie died six months later. She keeled over on the staircase on her way up to the apartment, and I heard her moaning and thrashing out there. I hauled her up the stairs with my good arm, and she crawled along on her knees, making gargling noises.
I got her laid out on the rug in the living room. I tried to get her up on the sofa, but I couldn’t budge her. So I gave her pillows from the sofa and water and then I tried tea, but she couldn’t take it. She threw up once, and I soaked it up with a tea towel that had fussy roses on it.
She took my hand and her grip was weak, her strong hands suddenly thin and shaky.
It took an hour for her to die.
When she died, she made a rasping, rattling sound and then she shat herself. I could smell it.
It was all I could smell, as I sat there in the little apartment, six years old, hot as hell outside and stuffy inside. I opened the windows and watched the Hasids walk past. I felt like I should do something for the old lady, but I didn’t know what.
I formulated a plan. I would go outside and bring in some grown-up to take care of the old lady. I would do the grocery shopping and eat sandwiches until I was twelve, at which point I would be grown up and I would get a job fixing televisions.
I marched into my room and changed into my best clothes, the little Alice-blue dress I wore to dinner on Sundays, and I brushed my hair and put on my socks with the blue pom-poms at the ankles, and found my shoes in the hall closet. But it had been three years since I’d last worn the shoes, and I could barely fit three toes in them. The old lady’s shoes were so big I could fit both feet in either one.
I took off my socks—sometimes I’d seen kids going by barefoot outside, but never in just socks—and reached for the doorknob. I touched it.
I stopped.
I turned around again.
There was a stain forming under Auntie, piss and shit and death-juice, and as I looked at her, I had a firm sense that it wouldn’t be right to bring people up to her apartment with her like this. I’d seen dead people on TV. They were propped up on pillows, in clean hospital nighties, with rouged cheeks. I didn’t know how far I could get, but I thought I owed it to her to try.
I figured that it was better than going outside.
She was lighter in death, as though something had fled her. I could drag her into the bathroom and prop her on the edge of the tub. I needed to wash her before anyone else came up.
I cut away her dress with the sewing shears. She was wearing an elastic girdle beneath, and an enormous brassiere, and they were too tough—too tight—to cut through, so I struggled with their hooks, each one going spung as I unhooked it, revealing red skin beneath it, pinched and sore-looking.
When I got to her bra, I had a moment’s pause. She was a modest person—I’d never even seen her legs without tan compression hose, but the smell was overwhelming, and I just held to that vision of her in a nightie and clean sheets and, you know, went for it.
Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off her back. Found myself staring at.
Two little wings.
The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey neck I’d once found in the trash after she’d made soup with it.
“How did you get out?”
“With my wings?”
“Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead over the tub?”
She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.
“I don’t know,” she breathed, hot in his ear.
He arched his back. “You don’t know?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I remember, for five years.”
He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs, making her shudder and jerk her wings back.
That’s when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.
He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes after it rose.
They held hands as they walked down the hill, and then Elliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside, skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down the hillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waited for him and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristic demonstrativeness.
He marched right into Mr.
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