Penny Wonderfuls

“For eleven years I watched the seasons through the window, and saw more nurses and doctors than a person would see if they lived ten times as long as I did,” Elliot continued. He moved suddenly so that his body hid the bird from me. His hands took up the tools and a coil of wire, and I could hear snippings and crackings beneath the soft unfolding of his voice. His hands moved so quickly I could hardly believe it. 

“And I got sick of being sick, you know? I wasn’t really alive anyway, I was just pretending. I was just a shell of myself, and I wanted to get out, get out of my bead and my house,” the flatness in his voice, the utter void of feeling in it chilled me as he went on, hands twisting and pinching and pulling unseen.

“Most of all, I wanted to get out of my body.” He paused, all of him paused, as if remembering were some kind of rapture. He looked up at the window and quivered all over, leaving a paper cut-out shadow in the slanting beam of light that poured in at just that instant; an unseen crowd held its breath, and I along with them. 

His hands fluttered back to their work.

“And you don’t have to believe this, but I swear, one day I just… I just got up, and I left behind that wrong body and I had a new one. This one. I knew without anyone having to tell me that I had died,” he nodded to himself, or to me, I suppose. “But I didn’t die the way most people do. It was like dying meant being born all over again into the world, but this time everything was turned just so, just a bit different.

“Nobody could see the new me, or maybe they didn’t because they told themselves there couldn’t be two of me. They seemed relieved, though, and they moved away, and they left this me behind. And you know what? That was okay with me. That was okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t find any words that would comfort him, this beautiful, lost and broken boy. The specters of all those unknown years since he had died reared up before me in a billowing of blue and grey, empty and improbable and uncountable.

How long had he been all alone out here?

Boy

Inside the Last House, my fear froze, or at least that’s the best I can describe it. It didn’t vanish, no, but neither did it grow. I simply let it harden in my chest, rather than swell and overcome me. Elliot’s hand was so cold, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go; I held him like a balloon.

There was nothing in the house but dust and years and cracked beams of dirty sunlight; there was no furniture, no evidence of habitation at all. Up from the landing Elliot led me into the bungalow, past an empty kitchen and living room pregnant with half-shadows and twinkling with motes like caught stars. 

“This way,” Elliot said. 

He pulled me so that we skirted the door to a room that was utterly clogged by darkness; it seemed to breathe with huge hungry lungs as we walked quietly past. At the end of the hallway he pulled me to my left, into a room that was brighter than the rest. The only feature was a large desk with tools I did not recognize arranged on it and glimmering despite what looked to be a thick layer of dust.

Elliot released my hand and crossed the room, dropped the bag near the desk and stood with his back to me, looking out the window at the madly frolicking leaves in the woods outside. I waited at the door. 

“Was this your house?” I asked. He leaned down and opened the bag, and took out the body of the starling and laid it out on the desk with its beak pointing up and its wings spread and its frail little legs crazy and askew in the air. He stroked the feathers on its chest.

“The way my mother and father told me, they put me to bed one night when I was a baby, and I was healthy as could be,” he said. I could barely hear him. He pinched the bird’s beak between his fingers and twisted its head this way, then that.

“Then, in the morning, it was as if I was a completely different kid. I looked the same, but I was sickly and baleful and barely willing to eat. I cried and cried and nobody could understand why. A doctor was called, as I grew weaker and weaker: coughing, sneezing, weeping like an animal. He proclaimed me a lost cause; babies died a lot in those days, I guess. No one would have been too surprised.

“But I didn’t die, at least, not then. I went on living, barely, and clinging to sickness like a security blanket gone wrong. I couldn’t leave my bed, I couldn’t walk, but I kept on living, like some fake, some mockery of a real boy.

“My parents hardly came to see me, except when my mother would bring me my food or whatever medicine the latest doctor had decided would cure me.” He began to pose the bird, but his movements were sharp, almost angry.

“The way she looked at me… Like she wondered why I even bothered to live at all, if living meant being such a burden to everyone around me.”

Boy

We stayed until Elliot’s bag was mostly full, and he asked if I wanted to come with him to take the birds where they needed to go. I remember thinking that I should have been afraid of him, then, that all I had ever heard of death was that it was bad, that it was scary, that it was final. Elliot flew in the face of all of that; he was beautiful and sweet and his death… It did not seem to be an end.

More than that I knew that I loved him, terribly. His slow sweet voice and the way he handled the bodies of the birds like delicate treasures sent my stomach fluttering. I told him I would go with him. 

“What do you do with them?” I asked, as we slid through the grass like ships through yellow water, he ahead of me with the bag slung over his back, me skimming my hands through the waves and snatching up flowers. He shook his head.

“You’ll see. Better that you see,” he said. I followed him back the way I had come, across the field toward the Last House, and as we went that old place grew larger and closer, and I felt that fear stirring in my stomach. Of course it was his house. 

Did he haunt it? Did being dead mean you needed to haunt something?

I had stopped again. Elliot noticed, and turned around, his eyebrows arching beautifully into a question his mouth wouldn’t frame.

“I’m scared,” I said, eyeing the house. Elliot seemed to think about that, and then held out his free hand to me, and his palm shone white in the sun.

“You don’t need to be,” he said. I stared at him, until, trembling, I took his hand—which was cold, so awfully cold—and let him lead me. 

Boy

soul-in-division asked: I've caught up now. I absolutely love this story! I am embarrassed to write prose after reading this because I am realizing that, when I do, I really have no idea what I'm doing. Lol Being embarrassed won't stop me, but I just wanted to express how excellent I think you are. xo Bettie

Oh gosh, thanks, that means an awful lot. And never let anything stop you from writing what you want to write. Even if you feel like prose is a weak point for you, the only way to get better is to keep doing it. Your poetry is awesome, and I can only imagine you’d put that much love and effort into whatever you choose to write.

I didn’t want to help Elliot gather dead birds, but I did want to stay, so I followed him as he went about, collecting those broken creatures with his bare hands and stuffing them into the sack. I wrinkled my nose as I watched.

“Won’t you get sick? They’re dirty,” I said. He looked at me with a perplexed expression and just shrugged. 

“I don’t get sick,” he said. It was not a boast, just a flat pronouncement. His face as he said it seemed sad, though, and I could tell that he wanted that to be that. He picked up a crooked starling and plucked at the wings and tutted his tongue and put it gently into the bag with the others. 

The birds we found were numerous, and from the spectrum of decay it seemed to me that it had been weeks since anyone had come to clean them away; Elliot and I had met here by chance, then. I would not have found him if I had come the day before.

I fidgeted as Elliot continued his grim work. His bag must have been getting heavier but he showed no signs of strain while carrying it. He dropped and lifted it as if there were no birds inside at all. I found myself wondering what he meant to do with them all.

“Where do you live?” I asked, when the silence had gone on long enough for my liking. He shrugged again.

“I don’t.” I frowned, not entirely sure what he meant, and so I asked him. He looked up at me with a curious mix of sadness and befuddlement, as if he wished I hadn’t asked but was also surprised that I had bothered to.

“I’m dead,” he said.

“Oh.”

Boy

It wasn’t only that I was surprised to find someone else out there where no kids had any business going, but I don’t think I understood that then, not really. So, thinking that I was merely afraid, I stood frozen, watching unblinking. Then Elliot looked up and saw me and our eyes across that distance met and I felt myself unravel.

He didn’t wave, just tilted his head as if I aroused very mild curiosity in him but nothing more. Then he put his bag down. He crossed his arms and seemed to be waiting, so I swallowed and went toward him, wringing my hands.

“Hullo,” I said, when I was a few steps away. We were now at the very base of the drive-in, and it loomed above us like a slab of atmosphere forgotten. Elliot looked to be my age, or maybe a year older; he was taller than me. 

He looked… Colourless. Or nearly so. His skin was a chalky white, but spattered with freckles that twinkled grey. His eyes, likewise, were smoky and huge and round, and his rumpled hair was an impossible platinum. He had rolled up the sleeves of his perhaps-blue plaid shirt, and his pants, too, were up at his knees. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. 

“Hey,” he said. I looked down at the bag, which bulged strangely. I pointed at it.

“Whatcha doing with that?” He peered at me as if deciding simultaneously whether I was stupid and also if I was trustworthy. He settled on at least one, for he bent down and opened the mouth of the bag. I peeked, and stifled a cry.

It was piled inside with dead birds. Some were skeletons, some were still feathered; they were cast in varying states of decay. I covered my mouth  and my nose and backed away, but only a few steps. Guessing at my confusion, Elliot motioned to the wall.

“They can’t tell it’s not sky, you see? They just fly right into it–bam–and they’re dead. Somebody has to clean them up.” Abruptly his mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. “You know what they called this place? The Skylark. Isn’t that a riot?”

He bent down and tied up the mouth of the bag again, then straightened and re-crossed his arms.

“I’m Elliot,” he said, the name rolling from his tongue like the galloping of horses’ hooves. I told him my name, and he smiled, and I felt something inside me shatter.

“I like that,” he said. Then he grabbed the bag and hefted it over his shoulder, turning a little and saying, “Come on. You can help if you want to.”

Boy 

i hope there is more of this! edge of my seat here :0

There certainly is! Glad you’re liking it. :3

As I wandered into that great big openness, I slowed to a walk and let my fingers pass through the prickly tips of the grass and across the swaying clusters of goldenrod. Indian paintbrushes winked at my feet. Around me it seemed there flickered a friendly fire of red and pale gold, sweeping in sighing stripes away from me on every side.

I ambled aimlessly for a while through the field, until something curious caught my eye. A distant square of the sky to my right seemed to be peeling away. Tiny pocks of a strange slate grey that could not have been cloud speckled it, like an egg all flattened out. As I came closer it seemed even more incongruous, an impossible section of weird and dilapidated air. Only when I stood in front of it–and this came about very much without warning–did I understand what it was.

It was a wall. More than that, it was a screen. A drive-in, from the looks of it, the back of which the owners had painted approximately the same colour as the sky beyond. From the overgrown state of the lot, it was plainly long disused. And yet I was not the only one visiting.

When I first saw Elliot, it was as he wandered about the foot of that tall, strange wall, a great big burlap bag over one shoulder and a mid-morning sun making his hair shine like beaten silver. Years later I can still remember how my whole world seemed to shift in that moment: how my stomach dropped away from me, and the lump that gagged me in my throat, and the frantic sprinting of my heart and the near-painful tensing of my palms.

How strange that love should feel so much like sickness. 

Boy 

I can’t thank the wonderful and mysterious prose editors enough for the features over the last few days. I’m all flustered. Thank youu!

I walked past rows of houses hemmed in by tigery shade and barely-tamed hedges. My feet made a drum-skin of the pavement, or so it seemed, for the neighbourhoods were so quiet each step was like a heartbeat from the earth itself. The road unwound before me, and I followed it east, to where the world as I knew it ended.

I stopped there, where the road abruptly turned to gravel and dirt and encroaching grass. As I hesitated, a rabbit sloped onto the way and stood and stared at me with its nose quivering, and I stared back, and when I took one step toward it it zipped like tawny lightning into the long, long brush. I had come to the wild country.

Only for a moment I looked over my shoulder at the comparatively ordered land from which I came. Then I crossed the border.

For a time I followed the road as it dipped and slunk its rutted way between the narrowing gap in the shimmering trees. When the dirt and stones gave suddenly away to tall blonde grass, though, I found myself stopping again. I could see the Last House, crooked and weathered with dark gaps between the boards over its broken or missing windows. Here I halted, as I knew I would. 

It wasn’t that the house scared me, exactly. Or rather, it scared me no more than it did all of us kids who had come this far and decided that going past it simply wasn’t worth the risk. It was that you didn’t know what to make of it; why didn’t anyone live there? Why did it go on standing if there was no one to keep it? These unanswered questions gave it a gravity and an infamy that were enough to keep us far away. 

I skirted the very edge of the property, my steps quickening as I drew level with the slanting house and then snapping into a frantic run that took me whipping through the grass into a great wide meadow and leaving the hungry emptiness of the Last House behind me. I felt its hollowness calling to me like an anchor, reminding me where I had strayed from.

Boy