krebiehlr1
09-02-2013, 04:01 PM
This is a revised edition of a previous story.
The Fox on the Wall
Grey and white, I come into existence—graphite scratches on a blemished drywall in a naked room. Born with open eyes, I look into those of my creator as she stares back into mine, seeing more of me that is yet to be drawn. Jade stones nestle in waves of aged skin that hides behind soft, amber locks –—this is her face, and I wonder, what is mine? But almost as if intentionally answering me, she leans in close enough for me to smell the warm vanilla aroma of her hair, and in the wide pupils now so close to my face, I can see me reflecting through her.
I sit erect and at command, a steep arc curves down my back ending in a sharp flicking tail. Attentive are my ears, and gentle are my eyes that look back at me with understanding. Whiskers protrude through bristly, light fur like a wind is blowing through the infinite white around me. I am majestic, intimidating, and proud.
After adding a little more volume to my nose, she pulls back and scans me intently with the pencil to her lips. Although she is trying to take in her work as a whole, her green-irises keep skipping back to meet mine. Now, she is just staring into me as if she sees something there—nothing to fix or improve, but a certain liveliness. The vitality I feel that she gave to me is almost visible around me like an aura. I feel as if I could jump off this wall and into another dimension, but for reasons I can’t quite grasp, I stay.
As the woman steps back and smiles; not at me particularly, but now her artistry. A rambunctious rattling comes from the door to my right and dust unsettles from the floor as a tiny, tulip of a girl bursts into the room with a cardboard box hardly small enough for her petite arm span to grasp. She crashes into the woman’s legs, and like a million icicles shattering, a cup full of colored pencils spills across the ground.
The mother hoists the coughing girl into the air and plops her down on her mother's hip. Gently she combs the blond hair out of the girl's snowy face, tucking it behind her seashell ears, and begins bobbing up and down, shaking the gathering tears loose.
“Oh, shhh-shh, honey,” the woman says. “There, there, big girl. Yeah, you aren’t going to cry, are you? No, no, you’re not because you’re a Graham. You might have the blond hair,” she ruffles the girl’s scalp, “the cherry nose,” she pokes her nose with a boop!, “and blue eyes of your father. But you are strong like me!”
A soothing warmth overtakes me because that pitchy giggle that just erupted from the girl’s pebble-toothed mouth can make the daisies bloom in February. She is lifting up her scrawny arms and flexing them with a fierce grunt.*
“See, you are a Graham for sure—Oh my! Look at those muscles,” she says pinching the very squishy arms that are trying so hard to be firm. Another ice-melting laugh rolls out of the girl. “How do you like your new room, Alice-baby? It’s a lot bigger than your old one.”
“It’s so big!” Alice, the girl, says, bending her neck every which way to take it in from every angle. “Can all of my friends fit in—FOX!” Her large, deep blue eyes spot me and she wiggles out of her mother’s grip to race to my wall. With a soft, plum-sized hand she strokes my torso as if she can feel the silkiness of my fur in between her fingers. I want to purr. Her touch is so careful and I have a sudden motherly urge to cocoon her in my breast. “She’s so pretty, Mommy.”
“Do you like her?”
“She’s beautiful!”
“Just like you, baby.” The woman laughs.*
Alice’s gaze finds her way to my eyes. For a moment I feel a sort of surge run the course of my spine, making my fur stand erect—if it could. There is so much to see in that glassy stare: ivy crawling its way across the sea of vibrant blue, lightening in hue towards the pupil like an ocean meeting the shore. And much like an ocean, her eyes are filled with many things hidden beneath the surface—hidden to me—and as each new moon circumvents to a new day, that sea will only fill and make her into a woman one day.
“Come, honey, we have some more boxes to bring in.” With that, the two leave, and if I was given the ability to smile, it would still be present for long afterwards.
#
Days go by like minutes: Alice, the woman, and a man come and go with brown boxes; unpacking and assembling miscellaneous bedroom furniture and sorting through the mess of large-font books and inanimate animals—some very similar to myself. Alice spends most of the nights on the floor, playing with long-legged dolls and miniature sports cars, until the silky-haired mother comes in to tuck her little cub into bed. Books are typically read by her bedside until the girl’s eyelids fall like the drawbridge in her story—after the princess had been rescued, of course. And as the last bit of light extinguishes with the closing door, Alice’s purring snore is all that’s left to fill the dark room. I watch over her all night—every night.
#
As the seasons pass from summer to fall and drop into winter, the mother perfects my body in darker pencil. Trees are outlined on both of my sides with furry critters playing in the branches—Alice’s request. Grass lines the baseboards and tickles my paws, ivy sprawls up the tree trunks, and dragonflies, bees, and dandelion seeds polka-dot the remaining space. I wonder if the insects and other animals around me think as I do. Do they care for Alice? Can they see her right now? As she scribbles colors on a white page? Can they see how big she has gotten? Oh my, look at how she’s grown. Nearly up to my chin now, isn’t she? I want to tell her I love her, the way a mother should be able to. Can you hear me, Alice? Can you see in my eyes what I feel in my heart as you look at me now? She bows her head again to the creation on her page, but I see that twinkle in her eye, it’s as obvious as the smile on her snowy face.
#
As the sun winks over the horizon on a particularly cold winter day, the normally bleak clouds and white snow blankets are drenched in hues of crimson and gold. Two figures creep into the room with silent, socked feet. I am at attention and watching carefully. Slowly, the man and the woman lean over the bed where Alice sleeps, and right next to her ear bellow, “MERRY CHRISTMAS!”*
In what was only a few seconds, the girl pops like a groundhog from her pillow, throws her covers clear over the foot of the bed, and runs downstairs fast enough to leave her skin behind.
The mother and father laugh to themselves and make their way to the door. The woman places her hand on her partner’s shoulder. “Any news yet?” she asks, concernedly.
The man shook his head.
“Well, what are we going to do, James? We can’t just wait until our bank accounts run dry to start worrying. I’ll get a job. I’ll—”
“No,” James, the man, the father, says as clearly as he can. “Don’t worry about money. I can handle it, I promise. We just need to wait things out a little longer.”
“We picked up our lives and came here, and for what? It’s sucking us dry! What if we—if we lose the house—or—or—the car? What do we do then, James?” Her hand falls off his shoulder and she hugs herself as if chilled, obviously struggling not to cry.*
“We won’t. Listen to me, Emma. Things will work out. Just have a little faith in me, okay?” He wraps his arms around her.
“Mom!” cries Alice from several halls away.
“See, that’s why you need to stay home. She needs her mother.”
“She loves you too, you know.”
“Yeah, but like you, she has favorites.”
Emma laughs. “Well, you’re my favorite,” she says before kissing her mate.
“Mommy!” Alice cries again, except with more desperation in her voice—eager to officially begin unwrapping her presents.
“Are you okay?” James asks, his gentle palms on the woman's, Emma’s, cheeks and eyebrows raised. “No pills today, okay?” She nods without looking him in the eyes.
“I know,” she says, unconvincingly. “I’ll be down in a minute. You go. I need to find my camera.”
He hesitated, but nods and leaves.
I don’t like to see Emma this way. She gave me such life here on this wall, as much my mother as dear Alice's, and yet her desperation is so thick that I can smell it stronger than the perfume she seems to be soaking herself more heavily in lately. She paces around the room, now half-crying to herself and muttering things like, “We’re going to lose it. We’re going to lose it.” She looks around her, at the amazing and always improving illustrations by her little cub that hang randomly on the walls, at the bony oak tree through the curtain-parted window, and then at me on my grassy bed. I can feel her, and she is so afraid. Go be with your child, Emma, please. Finally, she leaves the room behind, still hugging herself as the door closes to a crack.
Within a matter of seconds, she returns, biting her nails and inhaling in deep, guttering sobs.* She paces and strides across the room, arms shaking almost violently. It takes a while, but she eventually calms to a mild shiver. But judging by the way a tear cradles on her eyelid, about to fall, when Alice cries for her mother once again, I can tell she is about to do something she will regret.*
Emma draws a palm’s worth of pills from her robe pocket. She stares at them blankly, unsure what to do. Her hand trembles more visibly and the light stomping of Alice’s feet coming up stairs forces her to make a decision. Two white capsules vanish into her mouth and the rest are pocketed.*
Three steps towards the door later and she is in the hall, and I am left with the remnants of her dignity on the floor in front of me. Oh, Emma. Silently I cry for her, because if the smile on a little girl’s face—her daughter’s face—on Christmas morning isn’t enough to resist an urge, then nothing will.
#
Winter stays for awhile but eventually melts away as the trees birth new leaves. Emma leaves the window open on warmer days. The scent of lilacs carries in the crisp wind that rustles the leaves of the trees and tickles the grass at my feet. Alice’s golden locks are now past her shoulders and swishes about at the mid of her back.
Alice spends most of her days outside, playing with the neighborhood kids in rambunctious games of hide n’ seek, hopscotch, and other childhood activities that send giggles fluttering in the wind outside my window. Emma works in the gardens while the weather permits and James comes and goes, sometimes gone for days at a time only to return more dismal and weary when he sputters into the driveway at midnight—home from failed investor meetings. I can hear their arguments through the air vent below me. They grow louder the longer they question their financial troubles.
“We are not moving again, James,” is Emma’s usual contribution. James is too stubborn to give up on his dream of inventing children’s toys to look for something more lucrative, and Emma isn’t educated enough to find anything worth the sacrifice of leaving her daughter’s full time care.*
“She’s eight now, Emma. She’s in school most of the day,” James says.
“You know damn well why I can’t get a job,” Emma says in a yelled whisper.*
“You can stop taking the damn things,” James says. “You yell and complain to me about us not having any money, but you’re the one bleeding us dry.”
“Oh, so I’m a leech? Is that what I am for this family?” Emma’s voice raises. “You really think this toy thing is going to catch on? Huh? Tell me, how many toys have you made for Alice? How many, James?” There is silence. “None.” Then a smack of a hand meeting soft cheek awakes Alice from her sleep—if she was sleeping at all—and she crawls with her pillow from her bed to my wall where she cuddles up into a ball at my feet.*
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Emma-baby,” are the last words of the night before the front door opens and slams shut again.
There, there, little cub. Snuggle closer. Everything is fine. I want to soothe my cub and sing her back to sleep. No child should be bothered with the burdens of maturity.
#
A couple of nights go by and arguing turns into yelling, which elevates to screeching, and Alice takes off out of the room and scurries down the hall. I see her long shadow stop at the end of the hall, peering around the corner. I hear her call down to her parents with a half-asleep, half-worried whimper.*
Sighs punctuate the argument for now and Emma comes up the stairs, stomping a little harder than usual. “Come, Alice. Bed.” The television flicked on somewhere beneath me, and the two girls trot back into the darkened bedroom.*
“Come on, back in bed. Now,” Emma says with displaced frustration. Alice scampers back underneath her covers and Emma retrieves the pillow resting against my paws from where Alice tried to drown out the yelling.*
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Alice says, burying her head back into her bedsheets. “When are you going to paint my fox? She needs to be orange like—”
“I don’t have time for you, Alice. This, I don’t have enough time for this,” she corrects herself. “You are old enough to stay in bed all night. You hear me?”
“I was scared. I thought that—”
“Don’t worry about it. You need sleep. Go to bed.” Emma turns away, eyes glassing over as she walks back through the door, closing it hard enough to rattle in its latch. The apology of the little girl teeters on the tip of her tongue, but melted into tears, which leaked onto her dandelion-yellow comforter.*
Oh, Emma.
Alice’s muffled sobs in her pillow fill the air and I thought of the owl who so often sat outside the window and questioned the night until dawn broke. Your child needs you. I can only keep thinking to myself, over and over, silently begging her to come back to ease her cub back into slumber. Never leave a crying child alone, because when life needs answers, a wandering and anxious mind is no place to find them.
#
Over the next few months, Emma and James’ quarrels happen less often. However, so do all forms of interaction. James sleeps less in his bed with Emma and more in front of the television while his wife tosses and turns in her much too-large bed; the squeaks of an experienced mattress travel easily down the hall. Alice hardly shows her wonderful smile anymore, the stress of the house sinking into her head more and more like second-hand smoke as the days go by. She sits in her room most nights and reads books to herself at my feet—moving from wide books with beautiful artistry to thin, colorless ones.*
During the days while Emma lies on the couch and James stays on the road for even longer whiles, Alice cements herself in her room and arranges assortments of crayons, colored pencils, and markers at the base of my wall. While the snores of her mother grumble through the thin floors, my little cub works on giving me an amazingly burnt-orange coat. In the eyes of a more talented artist, this is merely just a child’s coloring book page canvased more largely, but to me, to me it is perfection in the most vitalizing and invigorating sense. Now, as she swishes the last stroke of her crayon, I feel like a globe. A globe made up of the sea in Alice’s eyes, and the shore that is Emma, both infused in me as one.
#
But now, it’s all bleak. Rolling storm clouds suffocate the moon and drown the room in sharp shadows. I like it when it rains, it makes the house seem less quiet. My senses are keen and I can smell the acidity in the humid air and hear the gurgling of the drain spouts even though the blinds and windows are drawn shut. The sound of a plate and silverware clink into the sink before Alice prances up the stairs.
If I can close my eyes and just listen to the rhythmic pattering of rain on the window pane, I could most definitely fall asleep. But only for a little, because from the kitchen below, after a very quiet dinner that most likely didn’t dwell in subjects deeper than the weather, comes a shattering of what seemed to be a thousand dishes in the silence. “****,” says James, annoyed. I see Alice come in the room, but upon hearing the noise she sticks her head through the door to listen.
“Well, I guess we should move. How else are we going to afford new plates,” Emma jabs.
“Will you give it a rest for a goddamned minute, woman.”*
Voices begin to rise.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”
“Then quit acting like a ****ing child!”
“Child? Child!” Emma’s voice cracks and trembles like a twig about to snap. “‘Child’ says the man that—that makes toys for a living, kicking his feet and throwing a temper when someone tells him he needs to give up his stupid fantasy and find something to take care of his - his goddamn family!
“You think I act like a child? This is how a child acts!” Several more dishes crash to the floor.*
Then comes a noise loud enough to dwarf the thunder. A clap of flesh-on-flesh, palm-on-cheek, that vibrates through the house and screams in my ear. Everything is completely silent now, except for the echoing in my ear.
The clock ticks twice as slow, and my heart beats twice as fast. Foot steps come scurrying down the hall and find their way into the bedroom, pushing Alice aside. Emma throws her body into the door and it slams into its latch, proceeding to lock it from the inside. The cries of James down the corridor are muffled into nothingness. The wood between them and the sobbing of his wife, now hugging her knees to her chest, drowns out the storm.*
“Mom?”
“Alice, honey, come here. It’s okay.” Emma pulls her cub in close and buries her nose in her daughter’s silky hair. “It’s okay, honey. Sit down on my lap here. Oh, come here baby-girl. It's okay.”
Alice slides into her mother's lap and curls into her like a pea in its pod as Emma wraps her arms around her. Emma’s trembling cheeks are stained with tears now and Alice toys with the split ends of her mother’s hair, not making eye contact.
Why are you here, Emma? I want her to hear me so badly that I strain to force my thoughts and feelings through the space between us, though I am sure that I appear just as indifferent on my wall, hoping somehow that she will hear or feel my empathy for her. Don’t let your child see you like this, my sweet mother.
The imprint of a once loving hand glows pink from the corner of her lip to the whole of her ear. No longer does her hair fall in amber curtains around jade eyes—now puffy and steely-grey. Pale skin sags from worry and is wrinkled like a dried apple. James raps on the door louder and louder and Alice looks up into her mother's eyes.
"Can I let Dad in?"
Emma is silent for a moment. "Let's sit here just you and me for a while, okay? Do you want me to sing you a song?" She begins to hum an old favorite of Alice's, but it doesn't sound quite right with James begging entrance on the other side of the door they rested on.
"I want Dad to come in," Alice interrupts.
"What happened to just us girls? We used to have so much fun together, remember?"
"Uh-huh."
Emma, stop. Don't bring your cub into this mess.
"You want Daddy to come in, huh?"
Alice nods.
"You know what your father did to me?"
James heard through the thin door what she just said. "Emma, sweetheart, don't. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Don't turn my girl against me. Please."
"Do you see this red mark on my face, sweety?"
"Mm-hmm," Alice says, only glancing at the crimson mark for a brief second.
"Emma! Stop!" James pleads, his sobs sinking into his words.
"That's where your father hit me. He hit me." Emma looked into her daughter's eyes with a stare like ice.
"Did he mean to?" Alice says looking down at her socks, the ones with cat faces polka-dotted along the top.
Emma coughed a sob. "Yes. Yes he did, honey."
"Did he say he was sorry?"
From across the room I can see the shiver of Emma’s body amplify so violently that she quivers the hairs on Alice's head. "'Sorry' is only a word."
"Oh," Alice says, but I'm not sure if she quite understands. Either way, she shouldn't be here. Not in this room, not in this house, not in this situation.
She is only a child, Emma! Alice is looking at me now and I see that ocean in her eyes turn shallow and distant, unfocused and confused. Come here, child. But she can't hear me, because I'm not real, though I know by that look in her eyes, that lack of a sparkle and depth of that black hole of unanswered questions she needs filled, that she wants me to be real as badly as I do.
"Can I go watch TV?" Alice asks.
"You don't want to sit here with me? Are you not having fun?" Emma brushes the hair behind her daughter's ear. James hasn't pounded on the door in a minute or two and the silence now is incredibly loud.
"I am, Mommy." Alice picks at her socks. "I just want to watch TV right now."
Emma's nose twitches and she raises a hand from Alice's hair to scratch her head. "Fine. Go," she says, barking. "Why don't you go hang out with your father, he's in a playful mood tonight."
"Are you mad at me?"
"Alice, if you want to go then go." Emma stood up, forcing Alice to roll out of her lap. She starts pacing the room, hand over her mouth and rubbing her arms and chest as if cold. She stops when her hand dips into her pocket and a small noise rattles in the air.
"You can watch TV with me, Mommy."
"Leave, Alice."
"No, I want to stay with you.”
"Leave!” Emma twists the doorknob and jerks it open, and then proceeds to pick up Alice from under her arms to nearly toss her out of the room; her own room. The door slamming punctuates the short whine Alice is able to mutter before being divided from her mother. Emma turns around and runs a trembling hand through her wiry, grey-tinged hair while letting out a shaky sigh into the tension-dense air.
I can smell the acidity from the rain mixing with the stagnant, sweat that lingers in the room. Thunder rolls in the sky, originating from somewhere closer than when the storm started because I can feel the house shudder from its grumble, and then a small rattle signals that Emma has found her pill container again in her cardigan pocket. With a pop and a gulp, she drains two of the tiny capsules. All I can do is be thankful Alice isn't here to see it.
As Emma looks across the room at me, I can see her eyes become less focused and more glassy. But the way her stare catches mine, I can feel the click, like a radio finding the right frequency to clear the static, and I can tell, I can feel, that she sees that woman she used to be reflected inside of me—like the way I first saw myself reflected through her. Her eyebrows lift, her mouth parts, and I can feel the chill creep up my spine like I’m sure it is crawling up hers. A tear falls from her reddened eye and hits the floor with a pit. She walks closer and I straighten my back, our locking stares don’t falter. But then her eyelids sag into something that reflects resentment, hatred, disgust. Her face scrunches into something like a withered fruit and as she jerks her head and walks away, my last hope for her redemption, her salvation, falls into a deep, black hole.
Emma pulls the drawers and dumps the cups of coloring utensils on her daughter’s desk, looking for the wedge of something pink and rubbery that she holds in her hands now. She grips it tight and strides over to me where I can see her intentions as she raises the eraser and places it on the wall to the right of my head. I look at her and project one last thought to her, I still love you, Emma.
Nothing.
Then, time slows to an infinitesimal drag as my last few moments of vision were spent looking into the eyes of the woman that created me, made me the personification of the true mother buried deep inside her, the reflection of what she will never be again, and then that rubbery block slides across my eyes, making the world agonizingly black and dimensionless. I want to cry, but I can’t.
I want to roar, howl, cry, and beg for her to stop, but each time she drags that eraser over my flat face, it feels as if fire is singing each hair and nerve into oblivion.
Again and again, ferocity fueling her arm, she tears my whole life into darkness. I hear Alice call through the door and I know that I’ll never be able to look at her snowy skin, cherry nose, or daffodil hair again. Her father is there too and they both pound on the door, pleading their mother and wife to let them in.
I hear a chuckle, a grim and sinister laugh roll out of the frail, broken woman, and I know what she is about to do. She may have taken away my ability to watch her destroy herself, but I am still a part of her, and I can feel the despair coursing through her veins. But most horrifyingly of all, I feel the pleasure she can’t contain now of escaping this world through the only way she knows how, and the tool is unsheathed with a pop.
She must have tilted the entire container into her mouth because a sound like rain starts pattering on the floor—her pills.
For a moment, seeming more like a lifetime, Emma's percussive gulps fill the blackness before a sound like a body crumpling follows, and I can slowly feel myself becoming. . . less. She gutters something that vaguely sounds like words, but I cannot make sense of it. Then every sound in the world fades into a maddening silence that envelopes us—or maybe just me. I howl into the nothingness, but no one can hear me.
In my black prison, I feel a tapping on my shoulder. Emma appears at my side, bright and familiar with a tear pooled under those green eyes—eyes I knew a long time ago.
It’s only been a couple of seconds since we had last seen each other, but it feels like an eternity. She smiles down at me; it’s time to go.
We turn and walk towards something white in the distance, but I stop, Emma's hand falling off the nape of my bristly neck. Turning around, I see Alice crumpled on the ground, hugging something next to her—the limp body Emma used to belong to—sobbing and wailing into it. She is a dandelion with blown-off seeds.
She looks up at me through broken eyes, and I can tell she knows I've left—I can feel the loneliness she feels clenching inside me, and I have the same urge to stay as I did on my first day on that wall.
I turn back to Emma, but she has already gone.
So I go to my cub, curl her into my breast, and purr into frayed-straw hair as she squeezes me back like a child would to her mother.
The Fox on the Wall
Grey and white, I come into existence—graphite scratches on a blemished drywall in a naked room. Born with open eyes, I look into those of my creator as she stares back into mine, seeing more of me that is yet to be drawn. Jade stones nestle in waves of aged skin that hides behind soft, amber locks –—this is her face, and I wonder, what is mine? But almost as if intentionally answering me, she leans in close enough for me to smell the warm vanilla aroma of her hair, and in the wide pupils now so close to my face, I can see me reflecting through her.
I sit erect and at command, a steep arc curves down my back ending in a sharp flicking tail. Attentive are my ears, and gentle are my eyes that look back at me with understanding. Whiskers protrude through bristly, light fur like a wind is blowing through the infinite white around me. I am majestic, intimidating, and proud.
After adding a little more volume to my nose, she pulls back and scans me intently with the pencil to her lips. Although she is trying to take in her work as a whole, her green-irises keep skipping back to meet mine. Now, she is just staring into me as if she sees something there—nothing to fix or improve, but a certain liveliness. The vitality I feel that she gave to me is almost visible around me like an aura. I feel as if I could jump off this wall and into another dimension, but for reasons I can’t quite grasp, I stay.
As the woman steps back and smiles; not at me particularly, but now her artistry. A rambunctious rattling comes from the door to my right and dust unsettles from the floor as a tiny, tulip of a girl bursts into the room with a cardboard box hardly small enough for her petite arm span to grasp. She crashes into the woman’s legs, and like a million icicles shattering, a cup full of colored pencils spills across the ground.
The mother hoists the coughing girl into the air and plops her down on her mother's hip. Gently she combs the blond hair out of the girl's snowy face, tucking it behind her seashell ears, and begins bobbing up and down, shaking the gathering tears loose.
“Oh, shhh-shh, honey,” the woman says. “There, there, big girl. Yeah, you aren’t going to cry, are you? No, no, you’re not because you’re a Graham. You might have the blond hair,” she ruffles the girl’s scalp, “the cherry nose,” she pokes her nose with a boop!, “and blue eyes of your father. But you are strong like me!”
A soothing warmth overtakes me because that pitchy giggle that just erupted from the girl’s pebble-toothed mouth can make the daisies bloom in February. She is lifting up her scrawny arms and flexing them with a fierce grunt.*
“See, you are a Graham for sure—Oh my! Look at those muscles,” she says pinching the very squishy arms that are trying so hard to be firm. Another ice-melting laugh rolls out of the girl. “How do you like your new room, Alice-baby? It’s a lot bigger than your old one.”
“It’s so big!” Alice, the girl, says, bending her neck every which way to take it in from every angle. “Can all of my friends fit in—FOX!” Her large, deep blue eyes spot me and she wiggles out of her mother’s grip to race to my wall. With a soft, plum-sized hand she strokes my torso as if she can feel the silkiness of my fur in between her fingers. I want to purr. Her touch is so careful and I have a sudden motherly urge to cocoon her in my breast. “She’s so pretty, Mommy.”
“Do you like her?”
“She’s beautiful!”
“Just like you, baby.” The woman laughs.*
Alice’s gaze finds her way to my eyes. For a moment I feel a sort of surge run the course of my spine, making my fur stand erect—if it could. There is so much to see in that glassy stare: ivy crawling its way across the sea of vibrant blue, lightening in hue towards the pupil like an ocean meeting the shore. And much like an ocean, her eyes are filled with many things hidden beneath the surface—hidden to me—and as each new moon circumvents to a new day, that sea will only fill and make her into a woman one day.
“Come, honey, we have some more boxes to bring in.” With that, the two leave, and if I was given the ability to smile, it would still be present for long afterwards.
#
Days go by like minutes: Alice, the woman, and a man come and go with brown boxes; unpacking and assembling miscellaneous bedroom furniture and sorting through the mess of large-font books and inanimate animals—some very similar to myself. Alice spends most of the nights on the floor, playing with long-legged dolls and miniature sports cars, until the silky-haired mother comes in to tuck her little cub into bed. Books are typically read by her bedside until the girl’s eyelids fall like the drawbridge in her story—after the princess had been rescued, of course. And as the last bit of light extinguishes with the closing door, Alice’s purring snore is all that’s left to fill the dark room. I watch over her all night—every night.
#
As the seasons pass from summer to fall and drop into winter, the mother perfects my body in darker pencil. Trees are outlined on both of my sides with furry critters playing in the branches—Alice’s request. Grass lines the baseboards and tickles my paws, ivy sprawls up the tree trunks, and dragonflies, bees, and dandelion seeds polka-dot the remaining space. I wonder if the insects and other animals around me think as I do. Do they care for Alice? Can they see her right now? As she scribbles colors on a white page? Can they see how big she has gotten? Oh my, look at how she’s grown. Nearly up to my chin now, isn’t she? I want to tell her I love her, the way a mother should be able to. Can you hear me, Alice? Can you see in my eyes what I feel in my heart as you look at me now? She bows her head again to the creation on her page, but I see that twinkle in her eye, it’s as obvious as the smile on her snowy face.
#
As the sun winks over the horizon on a particularly cold winter day, the normally bleak clouds and white snow blankets are drenched in hues of crimson and gold. Two figures creep into the room with silent, socked feet. I am at attention and watching carefully. Slowly, the man and the woman lean over the bed where Alice sleeps, and right next to her ear bellow, “MERRY CHRISTMAS!”*
In what was only a few seconds, the girl pops like a groundhog from her pillow, throws her covers clear over the foot of the bed, and runs downstairs fast enough to leave her skin behind.
The mother and father laugh to themselves and make their way to the door. The woman places her hand on her partner’s shoulder. “Any news yet?” she asks, concernedly.
The man shook his head.
“Well, what are we going to do, James? We can’t just wait until our bank accounts run dry to start worrying. I’ll get a job. I’ll—”
“No,” James, the man, the father, says as clearly as he can. “Don’t worry about money. I can handle it, I promise. We just need to wait things out a little longer.”
“We picked up our lives and came here, and for what? It’s sucking us dry! What if we—if we lose the house—or—or—the car? What do we do then, James?” Her hand falls off his shoulder and she hugs herself as if chilled, obviously struggling not to cry.*
“We won’t. Listen to me, Emma. Things will work out. Just have a little faith in me, okay?” He wraps his arms around her.
“Mom!” cries Alice from several halls away.
“See, that’s why you need to stay home. She needs her mother.”
“She loves you too, you know.”
“Yeah, but like you, she has favorites.”
Emma laughs. “Well, you’re my favorite,” she says before kissing her mate.
“Mommy!” Alice cries again, except with more desperation in her voice—eager to officially begin unwrapping her presents.
“Are you okay?” James asks, his gentle palms on the woman's, Emma’s, cheeks and eyebrows raised. “No pills today, okay?” She nods without looking him in the eyes.
“I know,” she says, unconvincingly. “I’ll be down in a minute. You go. I need to find my camera.”
He hesitated, but nods and leaves.
I don’t like to see Emma this way. She gave me such life here on this wall, as much my mother as dear Alice's, and yet her desperation is so thick that I can smell it stronger than the perfume she seems to be soaking herself more heavily in lately. She paces around the room, now half-crying to herself and muttering things like, “We’re going to lose it. We’re going to lose it.” She looks around her, at the amazing and always improving illustrations by her little cub that hang randomly on the walls, at the bony oak tree through the curtain-parted window, and then at me on my grassy bed. I can feel her, and she is so afraid. Go be with your child, Emma, please. Finally, she leaves the room behind, still hugging herself as the door closes to a crack.
Within a matter of seconds, she returns, biting her nails and inhaling in deep, guttering sobs.* She paces and strides across the room, arms shaking almost violently. It takes a while, but she eventually calms to a mild shiver. But judging by the way a tear cradles on her eyelid, about to fall, when Alice cries for her mother once again, I can tell she is about to do something she will regret.*
Emma draws a palm’s worth of pills from her robe pocket. She stares at them blankly, unsure what to do. Her hand trembles more visibly and the light stomping of Alice’s feet coming up stairs forces her to make a decision. Two white capsules vanish into her mouth and the rest are pocketed.*
Three steps towards the door later and she is in the hall, and I am left with the remnants of her dignity on the floor in front of me. Oh, Emma. Silently I cry for her, because if the smile on a little girl’s face—her daughter’s face—on Christmas morning isn’t enough to resist an urge, then nothing will.
#
Winter stays for awhile but eventually melts away as the trees birth new leaves. Emma leaves the window open on warmer days. The scent of lilacs carries in the crisp wind that rustles the leaves of the trees and tickles the grass at my feet. Alice’s golden locks are now past her shoulders and swishes about at the mid of her back.
Alice spends most of her days outside, playing with the neighborhood kids in rambunctious games of hide n’ seek, hopscotch, and other childhood activities that send giggles fluttering in the wind outside my window. Emma works in the gardens while the weather permits and James comes and goes, sometimes gone for days at a time only to return more dismal and weary when he sputters into the driveway at midnight—home from failed investor meetings. I can hear their arguments through the air vent below me. They grow louder the longer they question their financial troubles.
“We are not moving again, James,” is Emma’s usual contribution. James is too stubborn to give up on his dream of inventing children’s toys to look for something more lucrative, and Emma isn’t educated enough to find anything worth the sacrifice of leaving her daughter’s full time care.*
“She’s eight now, Emma. She’s in school most of the day,” James says.
“You know damn well why I can’t get a job,” Emma says in a yelled whisper.*
“You can stop taking the damn things,” James says. “You yell and complain to me about us not having any money, but you’re the one bleeding us dry.”
“Oh, so I’m a leech? Is that what I am for this family?” Emma’s voice raises. “You really think this toy thing is going to catch on? Huh? Tell me, how many toys have you made for Alice? How many, James?” There is silence. “None.” Then a smack of a hand meeting soft cheek awakes Alice from her sleep—if she was sleeping at all—and she crawls with her pillow from her bed to my wall where she cuddles up into a ball at my feet.*
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Emma-baby,” are the last words of the night before the front door opens and slams shut again.
There, there, little cub. Snuggle closer. Everything is fine. I want to soothe my cub and sing her back to sleep. No child should be bothered with the burdens of maturity.
#
A couple of nights go by and arguing turns into yelling, which elevates to screeching, and Alice takes off out of the room and scurries down the hall. I see her long shadow stop at the end of the hall, peering around the corner. I hear her call down to her parents with a half-asleep, half-worried whimper.*
Sighs punctuate the argument for now and Emma comes up the stairs, stomping a little harder than usual. “Come, Alice. Bed.” The television flicked on somewhere beneath me, and the two girls trot back into the darkened bedroom.*
“Come on, back in bed. Now,” Emma says with displaced frustration. Alice scampers back underneath her covers and Emma retrieves the pillow resting against my paws from where Alice tried to drown out the yelling.*
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Alice says, burying her head back into her bedsheets. “When are you going to paint my fox? She needs to be orange like—”
“I don’t have time for you, Alice. This, I don’t have enough time for this,” she corrects herself. “You are old enough to stay in bed all night. You hear me?”
“I was scared. I thought that—”
“Don’t worry about it. You need sleep. Go to bed.” Emma turns away, eyes glassing over as she walks back through the door, closing it hard enough to rattle in its latch. The apology of the little girl teeters on the tip of her tongue, but melted into tears, which leaked onto her dandelion-yellow comforter.*
Oh, Emma.
Alice’s muffled sobs in her pillow fill the air and I thought of the owl who so often sat outside the window and questioned the night until dawn broke. Your child needs you. I can only keep thinking to myself, over and over, silently begging her to come back to ease her cub back into slumber. Never leave a crying child alone, because when life needs answers, a wandering and anxious mind is no place to find them.
#
Over the next few months, Emma and James’ quarrels happen less often. However, so do all forms of interaction. James sleeps less in his bed with Emma and more in front of the television while his wife tosses and turns in her much too-large bed; the squeaks of an experienced mattress travel easily down the hall. Alice hardly shows her wonderful smile anymore, the stress of the house sinking into her head more and more like second-hand smoke as the days go by. She sits in her room most nights and reads books to herself at my feet—moving from wide books with beautiful artistry to thin, colorless ones.*
During the days while Emma lies on the couch and James stays on the road for even longer whiles, Alice cements herself in her room and arranges assortments of crayons, colored pencils, and markers at the base of my wall. While the snores of her mother grumble through the thin floors, my little cub works on giving me an amazingly burnt-orange coat. In the eyes of a more talented artist, this is merely just a child’s coloring book page canvased more largely, but to me, to me it is perfection in the most vitalizing and invigorating sense. Now, as she swishes the last stroke of her crayon, I feel like a globe. A globe made up of the sea in Alice’s eyes, and the shore that is Emma, both infused in me as one.
#
But now, it’s all bleak. Rolling storm clouds suffocate the moon and drown the room in sharp shadows. I like it when it rains, it makes the house seem less quiet. My senses are keen and I can smell the acidity in the humid air and hear the gurgling of the drain spouts even though the blinds and windows are drawn shut. The sound of a plate and silverware clink into the sink before Alice prances up the stairs.
If I can close my eyes and just listen to the rhythmic pattering of rain on the window pane, I could most definitely fall asleep. But only for a little, because from the kitchen below, after a very quiet dinner that most likely didn’t dwell in subjects deeper than the weather, comes a shattering of what seemed to be a thousand dishes in the silence. “****,” says James, annoyed. I see Alice come in the room, but upon hearing the noise she sticks her head through the door to listen.
“Well, I guess we should move. How else are we going to afford new plates,” Emma jabs.
“Will you give it a rest for a goddamned minute, woman.”*
Voices begin to rise.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”
“Then quit acting like a ****ing child!”
“Child? Child!” Emma’s voice cracks and trembles like a twig about to snap. “‘Child’ says the man that—that makes toys for a living, kicking his feet and throwing a temper when someone tells him he needs to give up his stupid fantasy and find something to take care of his - his goddamn family!
“You think I act like a child? This is how a child acts!” Several more dishes crash to the floor.*
Then comes a noise loud enough to dwarf the thunder. A clap of flesh-on-flesh, palm-on-cheek, that vibrates through the house and screams in my ear. Everything is completely silent now, except for the echoing in my ear.
The clock ticks twice as slow, and my heart beats twice as fast. Foot steps come scurrying down the hall and find their way into the bedroom, pushing Alice aside. Emma throws her body into the door and it slams into its latch, proceeding to lock it from the inside. The cries of James down the corridor are muffled into nothingness. The wood between them and the sobbing of his wife, now hugging her knees to her chest, drowns out the storm.*
“Mom?”
“Alice, honey, come here. It’s okay.” Emma pulls her cub in close and buries her nose in her daughter’s silky hair. “It’s okay, honey. Sit down on my lap here. Oh, come here baby-girl. It's okay.”
Alice slides into her mother's lap and curls into her like a pea in its pod as Emma wraps her arms around her. Emma’s trembling cheeks are stained with tears now and Alice toys with the split ends of her mother’s hair, not making eye contact.
Why are you here, Emma? I want her to hear me so badly that I strain to force my thoughts and feelings through the space between us, though I am sure that I appear just as indifferent on my wall, hoping somehow that she will hear or feel my empathy for her. Don’t let your child see you like this, my sweet mother.
The imprint of a once loving hand glows pink from the corner of her lip to the whole of her ear. No longer does her hair fall in amber curtains around jade eyes—now puffy and steely-grey. Pale skin sags from worry and is wrinkled like a dried apple. James raps on the door louder and louder and Alice looks up into her mother's eyes.
"Can I let Dad in?"
Emma is silent for a moment. "Let's sit here just you and me for a while, okay? Do you want me to sing you a song?" She begins to hum an old favorite of Alice's, but it doesn't sound quite right with James begging entrance on the other side of the door they rested on.
"I want Dad to come in," Alice interrupts.
"What happened to just us girls? We used to have so much fun together, remember?"
"Uh-huh."
Emma, stop. Don't bring your cub into this mess.
"You want Daddy to come in, huh?"
Alice nods.
"You know what your father did to me?"
James heard through the thin door what she just said. "Emma, sweetheart, don't. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Don't turn my girl against me. Please."
"Do you see this red mark on my face, sweety?"
"Mm-hmm," Alice says, only glancing at the crimson mark for a brief second.
"Emma! Stop!" James pleads, his sobs sinking into his words.
"That's where your father hit me. He hit me." Emma looked into her daughter's eyes with a stare like ice.
"Did he mean to?" Alice says looking down at her socks, the ones with cat faces polka-dotted along the top.
Emma coughed a sob. "Yes. Yes he did, honey."
"Did he say he was sorry?"
From across the room I can see the shiver of Emma’s body amplify so violently that she quivers the hairs on Alice's head. "'Sorry' is only a word."
"Oh," Alice says, but I'm not sure if she quite understands. Either way, she shouldn't be here. Not in this room, not in this house, not in this situation.
She is only a child, Emma! Alice is looking at me now and I see that ocean in her eyes turn shallow and distant, unfocused and confused. Come here, child. But she can't hear me, because I'm not real, though I know by that look in her eyes, that lack of a sparkle and depth of that black hole of unanswered questions she needs filled, that she wants me to be real as badly as I do.
"Can I go watch TV?" Alice asks.
"You don't want to sit here with me? Are you not having fun?" Emma brushes the hair behind her daughter's ear. James hasn't pounded on the door in a minute or two and the silence now is incredibly loud.
"I am, Mommy." Alice picks at her socks. "I just want to watch TV right now."
Emma's nose twitches and she raises a hand from Alice's hair to scratch her head. "Fine. Go," she says, barking. "Why don't you go hang out with your father, he's in a playful mood tonight."
"Are you mad at me?"
"Alice, if you want to go then go." Emma stood up, forcing Alice to roll out of her lap. She starts pacing the room, hand over her mouth and rubbing her arms and chest as if cold. She stops when her hand dips into her pocket and a small noise rattles in the air.
"You can watch TV with me, Mommy."
"Leave, Alice."
"No, I want to stay with you.”
"Leave!” Emma twists the doorknob and jerks it open, and then proceeds to pick up Alice from under her arms to nearly toss her out of the room; her own room. The door slamming punctuates the short whine Alice is able to mutter before being divided from her mother. Emma turns around and runs a trembling hand through her wiry, grey-tinged hair while letting out a shaky sigh into the tension-dense air.
I can smell the acidity from the rain mixing with the stagnant, sweat that lingers in the room. Thunder rolls in the sky, originating from somewhere closer than when the storm started because I can feel the house shudder from its grumble, and then a small rattle signals that Emma has found her pill container again in her cardigan pocket. With a pop and a gulp, she drains two of the tiny capsules. All I can do is be thankful Alice isn't here to see it.
As Emma looks across the room at me, I can see her eyes become less focused and more glassy. But the way her stare catches mine, I can feel the click, like a radio finding the right frequency to clear the static, and I can tell, I can feel, that she sees that woman she used to be reflected inside of me—like the way I first saw myself reflected through her. Her eyebrows lift, her mouth parts, and I can feel the chill creep up my spine like I’m sure it is crawling up hers. A tear falls from her reddened eye and hits the floor with a pit. She walks closer and I straighten my back, our locking stares don’t falter. But then her eyelids sag into something that reflects resentment, hatred, disgust. Her face scrunches into something like a withered fruit and as she jerks her head and walks away, my last hope for her redemption, her salvation, falls into a deep, black hole.
Emma pulls the drawers and dumps the cups of coloring utensils on her daughter’s desk, looking for the wedge of something pink and rubbery that she holds in her hands now. She grips it tight and strides over to me where I can see her intentions as she raises the eraser and places it on the wall to the right of my head. I look at her and project one last thought to her, I still love you, Emma.
Nothing.
Then, time slows to an infinitesimal drag as my last few moments of vision were spent looking into the eyes of the woman that created me, made me the personification of the true mother buried deep inside her, the reflection of what she will never be again, and then that rubbery block slides across my eyes, making the world agonizingly black and dimensionless. I want to cry, but I can’t.
I want to roar, howl, cry, and beg for her to stop, but each time she drags that eraser over my flat face, it feels as if fire is singing each hair and nerve into oblivion.
Again and again, ferocity fueling her arm, she tears my whole life into darkness. I hear Alice call through the door and I know that I’ll never be able to look at her snowy skin, cherry nose, or daffodil hair again. Her father is there too and they both pound on the door, pleading their mother and wife to let them in.
I hear a chuckle, a grim and sinister laugh roll out of the frail, broken woman, and I know what she is about to do. She may have taken away my ability to watch her destroy herself, but I am still a part of her, and I can feel the despair coursing through her veins. But most horrifyingly of all, I feel the pleasure she can’t contain now of escaping this world through the only way she knows how, and the tool is unsheathed with a pop.
She must have tilted the entire container into her mouth because a sound like rain starts pattering on the floor—her pills.
For a moment, seeming more like a lifetime, Emma's percussive gulps fill the blackness before a sound like a body crumpling follows, and I can slowly feel myself becoming. . . less. She gutters something that vaguely sounds like words, but I cannot make sense of it. Then every sound in the world fades into a maddening silence that envelopes us—or maybe just me. I howl into the nothingness, but no one can hear me.
In my black prison, I feel a tapping on my shoulder. Emma appears at my side, bright and familiar with a tear pooled under those green eyes—eyes I knew a long time ago.
It’s only been a couple of seconds since we had last seen each other, but it feels like an eternity. She smiles down at me; it’s time to go.
We turn and walk towards something white in the distance, but I stop, Emma's hand falling off the nape of my bristly neck. Turning around, I see Alice crumpled on the ground, hugging something next to her—the limp body Emma used to belong to—sobbing and wailing into it. She is a dandelion with blown-off seeds.
She looks up at me through broken eyes, and I can tell she knows I've left—I can feel the loneliness she feels clenching inside me, and I have the same urge to stay as I did on my first day on that wall.
I turn back to Emma, but she has already gone.
So I go to my cub, curl her into my breast, and purr into frayed-straw hair as she squeezes me back like a child would to her mother.