Part 5

"And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it;

and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

~ Revelations 9:6

I am very small. I have always been small. I know people look at me and think I’m young, but I don’t feel young. I just feel small.

I am lying in Mother’s marigolds. The marigolds are tall, over my head when I lay down. I can lay on my stomach and look through them to the sidewalk and no one can see me, because I hide so well. When I lie on my back, the marigolds curve over me like trees. I can see the blue sky through the orange and yellow tops of the flowers. Sometimes I pretend that I’m a bug, sitting in the marigold forest. When I’m a bug, I’m too small for anyone to notice. Nobody can find me and nobody cares anyway. It’s safe and quiet in the marigold forest. A bug can hide for hours…. But I’m not a bug today. Today I watch. Today I listen.

I turn and look back at Jonathan, who sits on the porch. He’s still a baby. Sometimes I look in his eyes to see if he feels old and small too, but I don’t think he does. I think he just feels like a baby, which is good. He has six very white teeth and when he smiles there are dimples. He smiles a lot. He can see me in my hiding place and he waves his chubby fingers to say hi. He doesn’t talk very much, but he eats a lot. He’s eating right now. He holds a long slice of watermelon in sticky hands. He bites into it and his whole face is juicy and the watermelon juice runs down his chin and he doesn’t care. I can’t eat that way. I don’t like to have things on my face. He doesn’t care. The juice runs in a river down his chin and down his neck and down his chest because he only wears a diaper. But I know he doesn’t care.

I turn back to watch the sidewalk. There is a line of ants that work hard to carry things from Mother’s marigold garden across the sidewalk to the grass next to the street. I think there is an ant pile in the grass over there, but I haven’t gone to look. I don’t want to scare them. I watch them. They never seem to get tired, fetching and carrying and working all day, all in a line. I wonder what it would be like to be an ant. I wonder what it would be like to know exactly how to do what everyone wants. I wonder how it would be to have rules that don’t change. I wonder what it would be like to be just like everyone else. I watch the ants for a long time. I decide that I would like being an ant.

Jonathan gets up to go in the house. He toddles through the open door and shuts it behind him. He likes shutting doors. He likes to slam them hard. I think he likes the sound the most. But then he gets mad because he can’t open them again; he’s still too little. It makes me laugh.

I watch the ants some more. They’re small black ants. I wonder what the world looks like to them. Does everything feel huge? Do they feel like they will be swallowed up in a world that’s too big for them? Or do they just feel like the world is just the way it’s supposed to be?

I hear the footsteps a long time before I see the feet they belong to. I strain my ears without wanting to and I know what they’ll look like before they come into view. I listen to the scrape of the soles against the sidewalk. They’re Converse All-Stars and they belong to someone who carries his skateboard under his arm instead of riding on it when he gets close. They belong to someone that grown-ups talk about in happy voices. “He’s such a good boy,” says Mother, when she sees him mowing the lawn. “He’s so helpful,” says the neighbor when he takes out the trash with his lips rounded in a whistle.

The footsteps come closer, and even though I know I’m hidden well in the marigold forest, my back starts to hurt. I feel like the sun gets hotter. I want to get up and go in the house and crawl into the dark space under Jonathan’s crib, but I know it’s too late to move. My eyes are stuck on the sidewalk and finally those steps come into view. I watch them travel the length of sidewalk from one end of my front yard to the other. I hear them cross a different yard and clomp up the steps of a different porch. Miles away, I hear a door open and close and then I breathe.

They’re Converse All-Stars and they belong to someone who lives next-door. Someone who is bigger than me….

She opened her eyes. And had to shut them again as light stabbed. She groaned.

“Headache?” Harvest’s voice sounded somewhere above her.

She squinted up at him. On her bedroom floor with the sun slanting through the blinds, she was faintly nauseous. She closed her eyes again. Images flashed across her eyelids. “What happened?” she asked him. She felt, rather than saw him shrug.

“You fell asleep.”

“But something strange happened. Everything changed… for a few moments. It was like….”

“Like what?” his eyes flashed.

Like losing myself, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “What happened?” she said again.

“How should I know? You’re the crazy one.”

She furrowed her eyebrows, “I dreamed about….”

“Dreamed about what?” said Harvest.

Pitchtongue’s voice issued from somewhere behind her, under the bed. “Did you dream that you were the president of a colony of sentient goldfish in an Olympic-sized swimming pool on the International Space Station?”

“What’s sentient?” called Baz from the bathroom.

“Having the power to digest twenty-six pounds of paraffin in one hour.”

“What’s paraffin?” asked Baz.

“Single-malt whiskey thickened with broken glass.”

“Yum!” said Baz.

She ignored them. “I dreamed that I was an insect surrounded by giant trees. I wanted someone to smash me….”

“What else?” Harvest was curious.

She sat up. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I told you it was a bad idea to try to sleep,” said Harvest.

She looked him hard in the eye before glancing around as if trying to remember something. “Jam,” she said.

“What?” asked Harvest.

“Jam,” she said again, getting to her feet. Her head felt light. She realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten anything.

“Are we going to the store?” said Baz as he loped in from the bathroom and began to jump on the bed.

She went to the bathroom sink to splash water on her face. “No!” she called, then looked up, seeing Harvest behind her and lowered her voice. “No, I am going to the store, you all are going to stay here.”

“We have no reason to stay here,” said Harvest.

She looked up at him, dripping, “I don’t give a damn. I’m sick of your babble. You’re not following me.”

Harvest looked offended. “Babble? Me?”

Pitchtongue looked around the doorframe at her. “I never babble,” he proclaimed.

“Shut up,” she told him.

“My dear,” said Harvest, “You know there is only one way to truly silence us for a time. Do you really want to do that before you leave in the car? You know how dangerous cars can be.”

She narrowed her eyes and pulled open a small drawer, withdrawing the blade of a razor. Looking him straight in the face, she pulled the razor across the palm of her hand, three times, until the oozing blood dripped into the sink.

Harvest sighed.

“You really are no fun, you know,” he said in disappointment and dragged himself to another part of the house. The twins who had been rambunctiously wrestling in the next room became silent, and Pitchtonge, Baz and Fox vanished. She sighed in relief and dabbed her hand with a towel. She knew she had a good hour before she could expect them back again. Plenty of time to run to the store for seedless raspberry jam.

She pulled a brush through her hair and tugged on her favorite shoes. Backing out of the driveway, she made sure not to get too close to any of her neighbors’ cats, who seemed to avoid her at all costs anyway. She passed slowly down the street, well-manicured lawns preceding brick houses with tidy eaves.

This is the type of neighborhood that people talk about , the type of neighborhood that people envision when they think of the American Dream. White picket fences and symmetrical hedges and this is the type of neighborhood where kids play Cowboy-and-Indians in their front yards. Just as this thought ran through her mind, she saw two young boys as they chased each other around a large oak tree in their front yard. One wore a good imitation of an Indian chief’s headdress and pulled the string back on a toy bow, the other sported a cowboy hat and a pair of belt holsters. Cap guns ready, he cornered his opponent against an barberry bush and demanded surrender.

She smiled to herself, thinking that in a few years, Jack and Elijah might just have been doing that very thing. She jabbed at the ON button for the CD player. Music suddenly thumping through the speakers banished the somber thought.

Eleanor walked up and down the aisles at the store, unable to remember if the jam was next to the syrup or the condiments. Finally she located it and carried it to the checkout.

Next to the conveyor belt, she dug in her bag for her wallet. The girl rang up the purchase and as she handed the cashier the money, the girl stopped and said in a shocked voice, “What happened to your hand?”

She looked into the girl’s face without expression, waiting to see what sort the girl was. She seemed to be the sort who was genuinely curious, but unimaginative.

“Puma,” Eleanor answered.

She girl’s eyes widened and then she nodded, as if she’d experienced something similar. “Better put some ointment on it,” the girl advised.

“First thing,” she took her bag and turned to walk out through the automatic doors.

The van turned down the main street that would lead to her neighborhood. She saw a park on the right side of the road and a playground in the distance. On a whim, she pulled into the driveway and parked in a space not far from a small lake adjacent to the play area. Trees sprouted all around - two or three particularly large oaks that looked good for climbing.

Eleanor closed her eyes against the cool breeze as she pushed the car door shut. What a perfect day for climbing. At the first large tree, she kicked her shoes off and reached for a low branch to pull herself into the crook where the trunk split; a few more choice branches and deliberate movements upward and she was twenty feet off the ground. On a likely branch, not too leafy, she stretched out, feet crossed behind her, elbows to either side. She lay like a leopard, comfortably languid across the thick branch, her head down on her hands to watch the people in the park below.

They crossed underneath her without knowing she was there and she liked that: a woman in a brown coat, two fat cocker spaniels tugging at their leashes; three black teenagers in long jerseys, lanky and big-footed, one with a basketball under his arm, heading to the courts over the hill. A woman pushed a double-seated stroller with empty seats, calling after her toddlers as they ran ahead to the playground. Eleanor watched the playground for a while. There was a sort of rhythm in the way the groups of children played. The swings were a constant back and forth, the slide a never-ending jostle of arms and legs and shouts. Her hair drifted across her face in the breeze and knew that she would be content to stay on the branch for hours. When she tucked her hair behind one ear, she saw the cockatrice.

It sat further down the branch, hidden in the leaves. It was watching her. It fluffed its wings and bobbed its head twice. She looked at it, and the beast unraveled its scaly tail from around its feet. The cockatrice hopped forward on the branch several inches. About the size of a small rooster, it was feathered and scaled and the color of spring leaves. Turning its head to focus one titian eye on her, it spoke.

“You like the trees,” it said. It wasn’t a question. When she didn’t answer, it took another step forward,

emboldened by her silence. “There are not many females of humankind your age that do this.”

“Do what?” she asked.

It tilted its head inquisitively, “Climb to such a height and watch and listen. One would think that if night fell, you would sleep here on this branch, among the leaves.”

I might, she thought. She watched the tail of the cockatrice as it talked. Green scales of varied shade winked at her, some of them gleamed like gold when struck by light, others dark like moss on the underside of a stone. The tail curled and then unrolled again in an undulation she found fascinating.

“But,” it continued, “such a thing is not heard of among those not of the fae. Unless….” It blinked its eye and clicked its beak. “You are not of the fae?”

“No,” she replied. “I’m not.”

“Curious,” said the beast. It regarded her momentarily. “And you are not afraid of us?”

“No,” she said. “Should I be?”

“No,” it told her. “We are not dangerous unless we choose to be, much like your selves.”

She was still watching its tail.

“Where are your revenants?” it asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Your revenants,” it repeated. “The ones who follow.”

She shook her head.

It flapped its wings twice and then shrugged its feathers flat, its tail wrapping around its feet. “You have the mark.”

“What mark?”

It rolled its eye and hopped to turn back to its shady cluster of leaves. “The mark of the revenant.”

She watched it settle back into its nest. It preened its feathers for a while, the tail whipping back and forth. Finally it turned its salmon-colored eye on her again.

“Fly away home, ladybug,” it told her.

She looked at her watch. The children would soon be home and she would need to be there to smile at them. She swung quickly down through the branches. The cockatrice still watched. She could feel it. When she looked up to find the creature, it was invisible among the leaves. She pulled her car keys out of her pocket.

“Goodbye,” she called. There was no answer.