I slither across the road, not caring about thick rubber tires that run me over again and again, flattening me, sapping my desire to find Darren. What will I say to him? How will I find him? I concentrate on crossing the road. I give up on looking both ways.
On the other side, I lie panting for a bit, and look around. I glimpse the small brick building, its doors concealed by a corrugated sheet of metal. I try to remember the direction from which the kids usually come. I make up my mind and crawl toward the narrow slit of the horizon, as the setting sun bleeds all over it.
I hear chittering, and I turn to see a squirrel, its barbaric incisors bared, its eyes glistening. I try to shoo it away and rock, aaaaa, and twist and flail. Undeterred, the beast starts picking on my elastic, and I feel myself unraveling. I bang my head on the pavement, but the squirrel picks me up in its small hands (thank God it’s not putting them inside of me), then its mouth, and runs up the tree, as I flap along. The nature was stupid when she created socks—we have no defense mechanisms whatsoever. I hang limply and whisper “November” to calm myself down.
(The interior of a tree hole. Light penetrates in slants from somewhere high above the stage. The SOCK PUPPET, torn and wet, is on the bottom of it.)
The squirrel carries me to its nest in a deep treehole, and I worry that it will continue the horrid unraveling it has started below until all of me is gone. I wonder if a ball of yarn has a soul, but I doubt it. When I cease to exist, so will my spirit.
The squirrel nestles into the hole, and lays me on the bottom of it. I play dead until morning. When my captor is gone, I open one eye, carefully, and look around, to discover bits of moss and paper, but no other captives. With that, I make my escape. The squirrel runs out and back in, and out again, and I make very little progress, trying to worm my way up the vertical wooden wall. I watch my stitches and unraveled threads, making sure they do not get caught on splinters and jagged edges of the hole.
The squirrel passes me as I reach the opening in the trunk. I freeze, but the obtuse beast pays me no attention, its small mind apparently preoccupied with the wafer end of an ice-cream cone it clutches in its teeth. It passes me on its way inside.
(Playground in the park. There is a large tree, and the SOCK PUPPET is hanging out of the hole in the tree. The BOY is off-stage, but his shrill cries betray his presence.)
I peek out of the hole, and forget about my trailing threads and open gash. I stare at the town, washed by the first September rains into muted pearly purity, spreading below me. I whimper at the bigness of it, but I cannot deny its beauty. I peer with my button eyes, and everything stands out in startling clarity. I see dogs and kids running around, and realize that the squirrel dragged me to the park filled with children and their parents. I look for a watermelon-striped helmet. I cling to the rough bark of the tree, high above everything, and wait.
I decide to call for Darren, and I wail, aaaaaaaa, and my gash hurts, and my threads are sore and unraveled. I scream my inarticulate suffering, hoping that he would hear me, until I grow hoarse.
And then I hear him, aaaaaaa, screaming back at me. For me. Green and black stripes come into my view, and I see Darren running, I see Darren chased by the woman who usually brings him to Behavioral Therapy. “Darren, honey,” she calls. “Come back. Mommy will give you a cracker.”
The kid does not want a cracker and he runs straight for my tree, a fresh gash in his forehead glistening red, like mine. It takes persistence to hurt oneself while wearing a helmet. He tilts his pale face toward the sky, and his mouth opens expectantly.
I jump. I sail through the air and plummet, alternately, until his hands snatch me out of the air. His hands hold me, carefully, and do not try to enter me. I cling to him, grateful.
“Elija,” he says.
The woman is gaining on us, and I hurry to tell him. “Don’t let their hands touch you,” I whisper fiercely. “Don’t let them speak for you.”
He nods that he understands, and hugs me close. I drape over his shoulder and he runs. The woman recedes behind us, panting, her hands on her knees. We leave behind the park and its trees and horrible squirrels, we splash through every puddle we can find. I look at the sky, empty, happy. I hope that there is a place without intrusive hands, where one can scream and flail and speak his own words.
(Both the BOY and the SOCK PUPPET exit stage left.) CURTAIN
THE TASTE OF WHEAT
Dominique came from solid peasant stock, not frequently given to fancy; still, in the privacy of the thick bones of her skull, she dreamt of an Asian gentleman who insisted on being called Buddha, and small dogs with sharp white teeth.
The heavy sleep descended unannounced, smothering her with dreams in the middle of dinner with her family, or in the wheat fields while she was threshing. Any blink could turn into a jumble of images and voices, and then someone would shake her shoulder and say, “Dominique, wake up.”
Sometimes the dreams stopped before she was forcefully pulled away from them, and then she would hear what they said. “What is wrong with her?” and “You’d never think looking at that girl.” Then she blushed, and let the world in shyly, through the slightest opening of her lashes. The sun was fuzzy in their frame, and the faces—soft, undefined, kind. Then she would get up, smoothing down her skirt around her wide hips.
“You seem so healthy—milk and blood,” people said. They kept the second part of their comments silent, but Dominique knew what it was. She was defective, and no man would take a wife with falling sickness, no matter how well-fed and ruddycheeked. Her family thought that it ought to bother her, but it did not. She only shrugged and went about her business, ready to be assaulted by dreams with every step she took.
She worked in the fields with the rest of her compatriots, from the time when the sun rose to the sunset. But at midday she left the merry din of people laughing and talking, children squealing, oxen lowing, and went home to tend to her grandfather. He was too feeble to venture into the fields, and she took it upon herself to make sure that he was fed and attended to.
The old man looked at her with his colorless rheumy eyes that had seen so many harvests come and go, and she almost wept with pity. He was the only person she had ever known who understood what it was like to inhabit a body ready to betray him at any moment.
“Don’t worry, grandpa,” Dominique said, blinking hard to cool her suddenly hot eyes. “Maybe some day you’ll be born as a butterfly, alive for just a day, your life short and painless and beautiful.” She spoke in a hushed voice; even though she knew that her parents and siblings were in the fields, she worried about being overheard. Sometimes (more often as the time wore on) she intentionally garbled her words, so that only her grandfather could understand. She rather liked appearing as a large, mumbling thing, half-witted from her fits.
She fed her grandfather, pushing an awkward spoon between his gums, pink like those of an infant. His skin seemed simultaneously translucent and tough, like the wings of a dragonfly, with quartz veins intersecting under its pale, downy surface. His hooded eyelids stood like funeral mounds over his dead eyes, the coarse salt of his eyebrows casting a deep shadow over them.
“Grandpa,” Dominique said, “you are so good, you deserve to be a butterfly.” She thought for a bit, the wooden spoon in her red idle hand dripping its grey gruel. “They say being a dog is pretty good, but I’m not so sure—all you get is yelling and kicking. Unless, of course, you are Buddha’s dog. Perhaps a bird… the kind nobody hassles. Like a hawk; just promise you’ll stay away from the chicken coops, or people will throw stones at you. Promise me.”