Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of
them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that
fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black
dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as
though they'd put their heads through a black curtain.

But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I
noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked
for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hit
on the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as I
experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of
the old pictures.

The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked
like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir
pillow on Auntie's armchair in the living room, which had whorls of
paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried
to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.

And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared
behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water
levels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligently
sketched. I'd seen a *Polka Dot Door* episode where the hosts showed how
you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on a
sheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing the
image in manageable, bite-sized chunks.

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