“I wish,” she says.
Meanwhile, the girl in blue, embroidered and sashed, is weeping by the sea, for she loves the king’s son, and will never so much as glance at another.
Daybreak, the bird comes back to the foot of the bed of the girl in yellow, in the room where the table and chair are now broken. “Come,” the bird says.
“Not the sea, and not the well, and not the rain,” the girl says.
“Not the sea, and not the well, and not the rain,” the bird says. “Nevertheless, you have given your promise.”
Her hair hangs in clumps. From far down the hall, she can hear the flute playing.
“Follow me,” the bird says, and so the girl follows — all through the day and into the next and into the next, her feet now bare. When she can’t see, she follows by sound. When the wind blows, she follows by feel.
“Bird, I am dying,” the girl says, as day finds the world again. The kings’ men will hunt her.
Hungry and dizzy and thirsty and ragged, the girl in yellow spies a glass palace ahead in the distance, which, the bird says, is of another kingdom. Hour upon hour they walk and they fly. It disappears. “There is no palace,” the girl says. “It was only a terrible trick of the eye. All you have done is swindle me.”
“Then kill me,” the bird says.
“Maybe I will.”
“Go ahead,” the bird says.
The girl grabs the bird by the neck and wrings. It dies in dirt.
“What have I done?” the girl cries and cries. “Now all is lost.” And then the girl sees it: the feather in the broken body in tears. The feather is golden. She sits there awhile, in her dress that is yellow, aslump in the dirt.
She eats the bird. She sings in light.
The girl in yellow, bearing the feather, returns to the king. “Too late,” the king says. “The prince has already chosen another.” He turns the girl out.
The girl lays the feather under her pillow. She lives in a shack.
The girl in red is beheaded in the spring.
The prince becomes king. The streets are all paved.
Many years later, the prince who is king is disemboweled by his son. Asleep in a shack, a tiny old woman lies dreaming of flight.
All along the waterfront the girl in blue, who is ancient by now, who is shrouded by now, walks the skin from her feet until the blood leaves marks, until the bones leave tracks, until the wind and the water wash them away.
TAKEN
“Come with me down to the river,” she said.
“Now?” he said.
“Now,” she said.
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
It was the middle of the night. Their children were sleeping, and thus it was reckless. Nevertheless, they walked down to the water and killed the light they’d carried there.
The river was filled with what rivers are filled with.
“Listen,” she said.
He caught his step. “What is that?”
“The current,” she said.
“No, that,” he said. “The planet.”
“What planet? Oh,” she said. “Venus?”
“It’s early for Venus.”
She threw in a stone. “I suppose,” the woman said.
“Well, anyway,” the woman said.
“Well, may be, ” the man said. “Tell me what you think.”
“I guess we ought to go,” she said.
“It’s something, I think.”
The water was active.
Together they sat skipping stones in the dark.
THE AIR AND ITS RELATIVES
We cannot find the car in the lot, again. Our ears burn, or mine do. Wind off the lake holds a violence in winter. My father says nothing. The building from which we have just made an exit is already locked; its churning stars extinguished, planets suspended, moons switched off. It is a very old facility. It rests on a spit, a peninsula, a man-made extension, apart from the city, the center of the city with its steam and vibration. The lot is near empty, the sky too low. “Now I remember,” my father says. “ We’re not here.”
“Left,” he says. “Go left at the light.”
“I am trying,” I say. I have failed the test twice: rolled over the curb, did not see the object. Nevertheless, I do as instructed.
My father is wearing a jacket older than I am, gotten in war.
There is a star on the windshield.
The car had resurfaced outside of the aquarium a half-mile inland.
“Stop at the stop sign.”
“ Which?” I say.
Cracked glass. Droplets.
“Hit the de-fogger,” my father says.
“I know,” I say. I do, in fact.
My father is pushing a button on the dashboard. Bone and vein and knuckle; the nails are not clipped. There is a scar on the hand.
There is a sigh of activation and the world becomes visible.
“Better,” he says. “ You’re learning, I think.”
Now we are only maybe ninety miles more from home.
“Congenital,” my father said, the time that he said it, describing the defect. Degenerative, and worsened by the decibel. The permanent damage occurred in the Air Corps. Middle ear, my father said.
Pardon me. I did not receive the gene.
The soft bones of hearing went spongy, he said — the source of distortion. “Guam,” he said. The aid had whistled feedback. After a very long while or maybe a short while, a vein in the hand had been deployed to the ear, a highly adaptable channel for blood. Next came the nonstick synthetic material, surgically inserted, the same as we used to fry an egg.
“Listen,” he said.
He had a finger on the oscillator. Down in the cellar, under the rooms where we slept and we read and we ate and we sat and we looked at ourselves, he used Morse Code. Ham radio. The language of pressure.
“ The person to whom you are speaking,” he said, “can be anywhere at all.”
He asked me to practice.
“Why are you sorry now?” he said. “Couldn’t you pay attention to this?”
“You can pass,” my father says, “but you have to be quick. Caution causes accidents.”
My father and I had had a habit together of reading in the night. We would sit on my bed on top of the covers. The book was by a physicist, written the first time in between wars, world one and two, and later revised and later translated. We took turns aloud. We shared the illustrations, the drawings of phenomena, the waves and the charts, industrious particles, ink on white. “A child can understand, ” he said. I think I was eight. As best I recall, we did not make it much past the opening chapter, The Air and Its Relatives.
“See?” my father said, when we came to a stop. “Now you will not need to ask, why blue.”
The year it got too cold for school, my father says, he was sent on the train to an aunt in Chicago, two hours south, with nothing to do but fight with the boys with the stones along the tracks. Pipes froze. The Great Lake cracked. One day, my father says, he walked mile upon mile to that very same peninsula from which we had come, all the way out to that then-new attraction with two other boys, one of whom, my father says, would die in the war — shot out of the air, my father says — and one who could not, it turned out, afford admission. None of them entered. “ Fifteen degrees below zero, ” he says. “ You could feel the wind blowing deep in your bones. ”
“Shhh,” my mother said.
“Baloney,” he said.
She said, “People will hear you.”