She does not read, watch TV, or make love. She listens to music. She goes places with her friends. She rides roller coasters but never screams when they plummet or twist and plunge upside down.
If you told her the jacket was yours she’d just shrug and give it back to you. It’s not like she cares, not one way or the other.
Heart of Gold
—sentences.
Sisters, maybe twins, possibly cousins. We won’t know unless we see their birth certificates, the real ones, not the ones they use to get ID.
This is what they do for a living. They walk in, take what they need, walk out again.
It’s not glamorous. It’s just business. It may not always be strictly legal. It’s just business.
They are too smart for this, and too tired.
They share clothes, wigs, makeup, cigarettes. Restless and hunting, they move on. Two minds. One heart.
Sometimes they even finish each other’s—
Monday’s Child
Standing in the shower, letting the water run over her, washing it away, washing everything away, she realizes that what made it hardest was that it had smelled just like her own high school.
She had walked through the corridors, heart beating raggedly in her chest, smelling that school smell, and it all came back to her.
It was only, what, six years, maybe less, since it had been her running from locker to classroom, since she had watched her friends crying and raging and brooding over the taunts and the names and the thousand hurts that plague the powerless. None of them had ever gone this far.
She found the first body in a stairwell.
That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, “I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That this job is making me hard. That it’s making me someone else. Someone I don’t know anymore.”
He pulled her close and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn.
Happiness
She feels at home on the range; ear protectors in position, man-shaped paper target up and waiting for her.
She imagines, a little, she remembers, a little and she sights and squeezes and as her time on the range begins she feels rather than sees the head and the heart obliterate. The smell of cordite always makes her think of the Fourth of July.
You use the gifts God gave you. That was what her mother had said, which makes their falling-out even harder, somehow.
Nobody will ever hurt her. She’ll just smile her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.
It’s not about the money. It’s never about the money.
Raining Blood
Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny Frenchwoman with white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months’ pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.
Real Men
Some of the girls were boys.
The view changes from where you are standing.
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.
All of these things are true.
HARLEQUIN VALENTINE
It is February the fourteenth, at that hour of the morning when all the children have been taken to school and all the husbands have driven themselves to work or been dropped, steambreathing and greatcoated at the rail station at the edge of the town for the Great Commute, when I pin my heart to Missy’s front door. The heart is a deep dark red that is almost a brown, the color of liver. Then I knock on the door, sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!, and I grasp my wand, my stick, my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air…
Missy opens the door. She looks tired.
“My Columbine,” I breathe, but she hears not a word. She turns her head, so she takes in the view from one side of the street to the other, but nothing moves. A truck rumbles in the distance. She walks back into the kitchen, and I dance, silent as a breeze, as a mouse, as a dream, into the kitchen beside her.