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.)

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.)