“What the fuck, man! Don’t do that,” Daddy said. “She’s my kid.”
“Lighten up, Muddy! It’s just a little Christmas fun. She’s such a sour little thing. Always scowling at us like she’s our mother. You gotta nip that in the bud when they’re young. A lady should always be smiling.” The Deadman looked my Daddy in the eye. “You ever hear the one about the cat who broke his promise?” And he stuck the needle in my arm.
After that I didn’t have hands anymore.
I felt like I was all filled up with yellow, the yellow that looks like all the lights turned on at once. I could hardly see with all that yellow swimming around in me. The TV changed to another show, the one where the beautiful lady in a glittery dress turns giant glowing letters around and everyone tries to guess the sentence. She was wearing my smart dress with the butterflies on it. She reached up and turned over a B but I don’t like B because B is for Badgirl so I reached up to turn it back around and that’s when I knew I didn’t have hands anymore.
My arms just ended all smooth and neat, no thumbs, no pinkie, no ring finger, like the plastic bottoms on the ballgown bodies. The stumps dripped yellow and blue butterflies onto the carpet. They flapped their wings there, grazing the rug with their antennae to see if it was flowers. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t anything. I looked around but I couldn’t see them lying anywhere, not even under the sofa. I couldn’t feel anything when I touched the letter B on TV with my stump, or the beautiful lady’s hair, or the wall of the living room. When I gave up and dropped my arm back down I must have knocked over a bottle or something because there was glass everywhere but I didn’t feel that either. The Deadman grabbed me to keep me from falling in the mess but I couldn’t make my fingers close around anything, not his sleeve or the corner of the table or anything. My fingers wouldn’t listen. They weren’t fingers anymore.
I had so much yellow in me it was coming out, coming out all over, washing over everything and making it clean like the dancing lemons on the shaker of powdered soap. I twisted out of the Deadman’s grip and crawled away from him back into Daddy’s lap.
“Daddy, my hands are gone. Fix it, please? I don’t know how to be a girl without hands. All girls have hands. No one will play with me at school.”
But Daddy was asleep in his mudpuddle world again and when I tried to pat his face to wake him up I just clobbered him because stumps are so heavy, so much heavier than fingers. But he didn’t wake up. Someone on TV in Giant Letter World spun a big wheel and it came up gold, too. The beautiful lady in my smart dress clapped her hands. See? All girls have hands. Except me. Another blue butterfly flew out of my stump and landed on the window. It was night outside. The butterfly glowed so blue it turned into the moon.
The Deadman pulled a deck of cards out of his back pocket and started dealing himself a hand of solitaire at our kitchen table. He was real good at shuffling. I took my eyes back from the butterfly moon and put them on the Deadman. He put his cigarette in his mouth and dragged on it good and ragged.
He was shuffling cards with my hands.
I knew my own hands and those were it. My pinkie still had green fingernail polish on it from my friend’s mom’s house and a scratch where I fell playing hopscotch last week. My wrist had my lucky yarn bracelet on it. He’d popped them off me like a princess’s head and stuck them on his body. My hands should have been way too small for the Deadman to wear but somehow they weren’t, either he got little to match them or they got big to match him. I decided he got little, because my hands should be loyal to me and not him. My hand put down an ace of hearts and waved at me. Then words started coming out of me like blue butterflies and I couldn’t stop them and they came out without permission, without me even thinking them before they turned into words.
“Are you a person?”
The Deadman chewed on one of my fingernails which he had no right to do.
“Used to be.”
“In Paris, France? With the river?”
The Deadman snorted. “Yeah.”
“How do you stop being a person?”
“Lots of ways. It’s far harder to keep on being a person than to stop. I do think about starting up again sometimes, though. I do think about that. But once you been to that river, it fills you up forever. You need something real good to turn your heart back to red.”
“Why do you keep coming back here? Do you even like my Daddy? Are you really his friend?”
“I think he’s a worthless piece of shit, Badgirl. But he has cable. And he has you.”
The blue butterfly moon got bigger and bigger in the window. It was gonna take up our whole apartment. “Did he know I was in the… the… arrr-mwah?”
The Deadman sighed. He put down a quick 2-3-4 on his ace. “It wouldn’t have gone different if he did or didn’t, kid. The thing about having the whole world in your back pocket is that every day is nothing but wall to wall bargains. I don’t have to dicker. They keep upping the price. Everyone wants the world. I just want everyone.”
“I want my hands back.”
The beautiful lady turned around six or seven letters quick, one after the other. She was still wearing my smart dress, which I guess is why she always knows the answer to the puzzle. But now my dress had gotten long like a wedding dress. It glittered all over. The green bow and green buttons were all emeralds falling down her back and all over the stage. Her chest looked like the sun and she had stars all up and down her arms and the blue butterfly moon was rising in the studio, too, right behind her head like a crown. Everyone had stolen my things. I wanted her to come out of the TV and save me and turn me around like the letter B. But she wasn’t going to. She had my dress. She had what she wanted.
I’m a little black cat, I thought. Little black cats run away. Little black cats don’t need hands. The blue butterfly moon had gotten so big it bulged up against my treehouse and the front door at the same time. Little black cats can climb up on the moon and ride it far, far away. To Paris, France and the Bronx and the continent of Atlantis.
The Deadman glanced at the game show. For once, he didn’t solve it before the contestants did. He just touched his lips with my fingers and said quietly:
“I need them.”
Little black cats don’t need anyone. Little black cats have magic no one can steal. Little black cats run faster than dead men.
“Why?”
All the letters lit up at once and the lady in my dress touched them all, smiling, buttons and bows and butterflies sparkling everywhere, until they spelled out: HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE.
“With clean hands, Badgirl, you can start all over.”
Little black cats run right out, just as soon as you open the door.
A Fall Counts
Anywhere
THE LATE SUMMER sun melts over a ring of toadstools twenty feet tall. On one side, a mass of glitter and veiny neon wings. On the other, a buzzing mountain of metal and electricity. The stands soar up to the heat-sink of heaven. Three thousand seats and every one sold to a screamer, a chanter, a stomper, a drunk, a betting man.
Two crimson leaves drift slowly through the crisp, clear air. They catch the red-gold twilight as they chase each other, turning, end over end, stem over tip, and land in the center of the grassy ring like lonely drops of blood. But in the next moment, the sheer force of decibel-mocking, eardrum-executing, sternum-cracking volume blows them up toward the clouds again, up and away, high and wide over the shrieking crowd, the popcorn-sellers and the beer-barkers, the kerosene-hawkers and the aelfwine-merchants, until those red, red leaves come to rest against a pair of microphones. The silvery fingers of a tall, lithe woman stroke the golden veins of the leaf with a deep melancholy you can see from the cheap seats, from the nosebleeds. She has the wings of a monarch butterfly, hair out of a belladonna-induced nightmare, and eyes the color of the end of all things. The other mic is gripped in the bolt-action fist of a barrel-chested metal man, a friendly middle-class working stiff cast in platinum and ceramic and copper. His mouth lights up with a dance of blue and green electricity that looks almost, but not entirely comfortably, like teeth.