Sunday, October 25, 2009

part the second, still beginning


Part One



On the fourth day of the week, Selina helped her mother fill baskets with spare parts, tether mechanical birds to metal perches where they creaked and chirped, and load everything into a rickety truck, which broke down halfway to the heart of the City as often as not. After a half-hour of swinging her legs on the torn, dusty passenger-side seat and watching her mother run greasy fingers through her hair and tool around the vehicle’s guts until the engine began its phlegmy purr once more, Selina would be all the more excited when they finally reached the City market. She loved to look up at the buildings, crammed together close, full of windows and almost as tall as the walls at the edge of the world (when the edge of the world had walls). The City smelled bad, like oil and smoke and outhouses, Selina thought, but it was full of paper lanterns, men and women wearing bright colors or fine dark suits like the man in Selina’s photograph, their fingernails short and clean, or painted purple. The market was cluttered with such people, from children younger than Selina to those bent nearly in half from age, their faces like rumpled laundry. They moved among the many stalls like a long, winding snake of limbs and eyes and grasping hands, whispering and shouting in a dozen languages. Selina looked from a boy with metal hoops and hooks stuck through his nose and lips and eyebrows to a huge, fierce-eyed woman with bare feet and a tiny, delicate deer-like creature on a leash. It had pearly cloven hooves, gold eyes, a tail with a tuft like a lion’s, sharp teeth. The unpleasant odors that permeated the rest of the City were overlaid with the singed, fatty scent of things being fried, the tang of citrus juice, the smell of sugar and salt and rising dough in portable ovens. From kiosks, stalls, trucks, carts, and blankets on the ground, merchants sold their wares with varying degrees of aggression. Selina observed a man selling real, living parrots and finches and nightingales with interest. His birds seemed rather drab and droopy in comparison to her mother’s, though one parrot had tail feathers the shade of a twilight sky and swore vociferously as they passed, slowly, in the sputtering truck. Selina laughed and shouted the words back to it. Her mother’s mouth turned up slightly at the corners, though the bird-seller glared disapprovingly beneath his imposing wig, which had a tiny model of a sailing ship stuck in it near the top.

After the truck had been maneuvered into the spot reserved for it, the birds and baskets unpacked and artfully placed on a tarp-covered metal folding table, and the big plywood sign stood up (JANE JOSLIN, SMALL APPLIANCE REPAIRS, SPARE PARTS, MECHANICAL CURIOSITIES & SUNDRY), Selina was allowed to wander off to explore the market while her mother plyed her trade. She was supposed to stay within her mother’s line of sight at all times, though, and suspected that she was allowed to wear as many brightly-colored ribbons in her hair as she did mainly to make her easier to spot. Usually, Selina walked slowly and aimlessly between the nearby stalls, watching, listening, and perhaps buying spun-sugar candy or a sweet, fizzy drink if last week’s take had been good enough for her mother to allow her a dollar coin as pocket money. Sometimes she saw other children talking together, chasing one another through the crowds, lining up for spun-sugar candy, throwing spinning discs, riding the shoulders of their fathers or older brothers, but she never tried to speak to them, or introduce herself, or make friends. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to run and shout and stomp up clouds of dirt with them; it simply never occurred to her that she could. She had never known anyone well apart from her mother and herself and the mechanical birds. She felt as though everyone in the City had known one another since the world began, that the City was its own entity, whole and running as smoothly as a tin turtledove with clocks in its belly. There was no room for outsiders from the edge of the world, not really, not to talk or stay or race or go inside one of the tall buildings. It would have been as ludicrous as trying to put the whole market in a sack to bring back to the piebald beetle-house.

Only today, someone was grabbing hold of the orange ribbon that wound its way through Selina’s left braid, tilting her head involuntarily backwards, and asking her questions all in a breathless rush. “Wow, what is that, is that real silk, where did you get silk, aren’t you just the junk lady’s kid, I mean, the mechanic’s kid? I thought you were poor and that’s why you live out at the end of everything. Do you like orange? Orange is my favorite color, I like to eat oranges too, only I don’t get to all that much because they’re so expensive on account of coming from way far in the south, you know, where there are tigers and things. Tigers are my favorite animal, probably. They’re kind of orange, too. Hi! What’s your name? I’m Cecy because Ceciline takes too long to say.”

After a few moments of stunned silence during which Selina struggled to make sense of what had just happened, she managed to answer, slowly and carefully, without moving her head or turning around. “Hello, um, Cecy. I’m Selina, but it isn’t short for anything. Sometimes my ma calls me Lina, but I don’t like that. I don’t know if the ribbon is silk. I think maybe it is. I don’t know where it came from. It just turned up. I don’t think we’re poor. I like orange, but my favorite color is…maybe green. Or blue. Or white.” She thought of the shifting sea that sometimes rolled outside her window and sometimes did not. She felt a lightness as her hair was released. “What’s a tiger?” she thought to ask, before Cecy bounced up directly in front of her and she got her first look at her new acquaintance.

Cecy was either a little younger than Selina, or very small for her age. Her hair, dress, eyes, and skin were almost exactly the same shade of light brown. It was odd looking, especially when contrasted with her pale orange boots, and her red-and-white striped tights, which sported conspicuous holes in both knees. She had an extremely pretty face, though, when she wasn’t contorting it into exaggerated expressions to accompany her rambling chatter. “Oh! You don’t know what a tiger is? How do you not know what a tiger is? Don’t you ever read books?”

“Yes,” said Selina, who had a book of illustrated fairy tales that she had pored over so often that the binding was beginning to fall apart, and who often snuck into her mother’s room to look at the books her mother kept in a cardboard box behind her tool shelf: musty-smelling paperbacks with yellowed pages and cover paintings of women with large breasts swooning in the arms of men with chiseled jaws. She didn’t understand everything that went on in these novels, but they were improving her vocabulary greatly.

“Okay, well, a tiger is a kind of big cat. Big as a bear. They have orange and black stripes and really long fangs and they live in the jungle, way far away in the south, and they can sneak up on their prey without a sound and then they pounce and eat it before it ever knows it’s dead. Sometimes they even eat people, but if you wear a mask that looks like your face on the back of your head, tigers won’t be able to tell which way you’re looking, so they won’t know which way is behind you to sneak up, and you’ll be safe. Tigers are good swimmers, though, and they have beautiful eyes, like gold. Would you like to come with me? I’m going in back of the puppet theatre to play with these other kids I know. You’ll like them. Kieran’s da is the puppetmaster, and he does fire-eating at night, and his ma is a seamstress and sometimes she gives us bits of cloth to make stuff out of, or ribbons like your ribbon, and sometimes we get to try and make the puppets dance on their strings.”

Selina hesitated. The puppet theatre was well away from where she’d helped her mother set up. When she looked back, though, her mother was engaged in intense haggling with a thin, bald woman and a beefy man with an enormous mustache. A copper and brass macaw sat on the table between them, alongside a small record player. Selina decided it couldn’t hurt to go with Cecy for a few minutes. Besides, she’d never played with kids her age before! Her heart was already beating faster, and she felt slightly giddy. “All right,” she said. Cecy shouted with joy, grabbed her hand, and pulled her deeper into the market with surprising strength for such a tiny girl, out of her mother’s sight.



(This installment of my story has absolutely nothing to do with Sunday Scribblings.)

(If you can help me think of a title for this thing, I'll be quite grateful.)

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