Junk, or, the very rough beginning of a story

Selina lived at the edge of the world with her mother. They had a small house made of warped wood, corrugated metal, bits of polished glass in the bright colors of hard candy, cement blocks, Styrofoam, cardboard boxes, stretched and waxed canvas, and swirly brown stone that Selina’s mother cut from the edge of the world, when the edge of the world was being a cliff, herself. It was a strange, motley dwelling, but it kept them warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and it stood solid and strong through even the harshest weather. Selina thought it resembled a huge fish run aground, or a glittering insect clinging to the earth. She loved it because it was her home, and because she could not remember living anywhere else.

The edge of the world was a beautiful, dangerous, peculiar place. It changed its face from day to day. Sometimes it was a cliff of caramel-colored, sandy rock that dropped straight down into the sky, down, down to no further ground that the eye could see. Sometimes it was a soft place where weedy plants and sticky, pale soil faded into a kind of sea, which was not quite water though it hissed and rolled and splashed like it, and which stretched onward and upward into forever. Sometimes it appeared to be a massive wall of silvery fog, which could not be seen through, and which might give slightly beneath the palm of a curious hand, but could not be walked into, would take on the weight and texture of jelly, and then wet cement, forcing any intrepid explorer back out to the patchwork house and the dandelion-studded mud lest she be suffocated. Always, though, odd junk, detritus that was sometimes wonderful and sometimes disturbing, found a way to turn up at the edge of the world, brought in from whatever lay beyond it.

Each morning, Selina’s mother woke as the sky began to pale, put on the goggles and helmet and thick, lumpy coat that made her look as beetlelike as her house, and went out to sift through whatever the nighttime wind and waves and fog had brought them. Some of it she would throw straight back from whence it came with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders, or a shudder and a shake of her wrist once the offending object had left her hand, as though she feared she had been burned or stained by its touch. Some of it she would pick up and examine closely in the growing light of the day, her mouth twisting in thought beneath the large, opaque lenses of the goggles. Eventually, she would either set it aside, gently, or take it home to fix a hole in a wall, or to become a piece of one of her machines. Sometimes Selina followed her mother in her work, in her own, secondhand goggles (which were so outsized that the straps needed to be pinned to her hair for them to stay on) and coat and helmet, but she could never quite understand the process by which her mother determined whether any given object was worthless, dangerous, or potentially useful. Attracted to the oily, rainbow glint of what might have been a piece of broken crockery, were it not for the thin black wires that seemed to sprout like plants from its edges, she might reach out a rubber-gloved hand, only to have it slapped away. “Don’t touch that one, Lina! Dear God!”
“It’s pretty. And besides, it’s only a piece of some bowl, Ma.”
“You have no idea what that is or where it came from, and nothing is ever ‘only’ anything, child. Eeeugh. Just looking at it makes me shudder. Here, I’ll show you: pick it up under the wires, in the middle—careful, don’t jostle it any--- and throw it back into the sea as far and as fast as you can. Yes, that’s right. Like one of those spinning plate toys they sell in the market. Good girl.”

Selina’s mother would often try to explain her methods, and whatever little she knew of the providence of the things she brought home or refused to, but for all that she could make beautiful clockwork birds to sell in the market, birds that could be told from real, living parrots and pigeons only in their tirelessness and in the slight metallic clinks their feathers made when ruffled, for all that she could build a house of trash and castoff pieces at the edge of the world that stood firm and strong, and live in it, miles outside of the City, she was a poor teacher. She became impatient easily, spoke too quickly, used very long words that she seemed to forget that a girl Selina’s age, not even old enough for school yet, couldn’t possibly be expected to know, and hated having to repeat herself. Selina found that the best thing to do during these lectures was to keep pace with her mother as best she could, nod seriously on occasion, and sneak her left hand into the pocket of her coat to feel the cracked, glossy surface of the secret photograph she kept there.

She’d found the photograph lying amidst a tangle of prickly, thin vines on a day, months earlier, when the edge of the world was being something like a dense, dark forest that ran to an impassible, thousand-foot-high hedge of cramped-looking roses and large thorns. It was damaged, but when she picked it up, she could make out the image clearly, for all the white lines and creases running through it, the torn-away bit in its top right corner. She stared at it, surprised and puzzled. The photograph showed her mother, unmistakable with her large, pale eyes, profusion of freckles, grubby coveralls, and dandelion-clock hair. But her mother was laughing, laughing in a way Selina had never, ever seen her laugh, with her neck stretched out, her mouth wide open, and almost all her teeth visible and gleaming. And she was leaning on the arm of a man Selina had never seen before, a tall man with dark hair, dark eyes, a dark suit, and a crooked nose. Except for the nose, he looked quite sophisticated, and out of place next to the rather disheveled woman at his side. He gazed down at her though, and smiled widely, and the expression was so warm that Selina felt a vague twinge of sadness in her stomach. How she wished someone would look at her that way!
Selina didn’t know whether the photograph had come from past the edge of the world (with real people in it, could that happen), or if it was a possession of her mother’s that had been carelessly dropped, lost (but her mother never lost anything unless it was on purpose). She tucked it away in her pocket, though, because she liked it. She wanted to look at the man’s smile and her mother’s laugh until she had them memorized. She decided not to say anything about the picture in case her mother decided it was dangerous and took it away.


(for Sunday Scribblings.)