InkStains January (4 page)

The girl ran through the fields of flowers
with all the other girls, the children, and the animals. They made
garlands and necklaces and filled stone vases. But by the time the
blooms faded, nothing had changed.

The third god gave the youth fermented
grapes, from which he made the first wine. Like everything else, he
gave this to everyone, and though it was deliriously delicious,
still nothing changed.

Despite the three gifts of the gods, the
youth had failed to win his love. He wandered hopelessly through
the woods until he came upon a river, and there he sat on a boulder
and wept. They were brilliantly intense, those tears, and the skies
cried in sympathy.

After some time, he looked up and saw the
girl. She had come after him into the woods. She was smiling.

“
You brought me dinner, and
that was nice,” she said, in the language of their time so the
translation is approximate. “You gave the whole world flowers, and
I know that you gave them to me. You brought us wine, and I don’t
think we’ll ever celebrate anything quite the same as we did
before. Did you think I wanted these things?”

“
I don’t know that I was
thinking at all.”

“
You weren’t,” she agreed.
“And you aren’t now. I appreciate those things, but they are not
what I want.”

“
You want my heart,” he
said.

Her smile grew larger then. “I want your
heart.”

“
It’s yours,” he
said.

But the girl shook her head. “It’s not so
easy. Convince me. Tell me. Use every word you can imagine, and
make up new ones, but to show how much you love me.”

And that is how poetry was created.

9 January

She gathered all the things she thought might
be necessary: an assortment of spices, a candle and matches, dried
rose petals, wine, a bottle of ink and the right pen, a small
silver mirror, a tiny bell, two Russian thimbles, and a photograph
of her grandfather.

She didn’t actually need any of those things,
but she clung to ceremony. She lit the candle, she spread the
spices and the rose petals, she even served herself tea. She filled
the thimbles with wine and rang the bell and said a few ancient
words in the proper order. Then she waited. She was prepared to
wait a long time, and he made her wait a very long time indeed,
past midnight, until the clock chimed three the next morning.

The third chime hadn’t finished its echo when
he bent down, picked up one of the thimbles, and drank the
offering. “Hello, my little Mouse.”

He looked nothing like the young man in the
black and white photo, but he still looked strong and solid.

“
Grandpa,” she said,
drinking her thimbleful.

“
You’re getting to be quite
the talent,” he told her.

“
I’ve been sitting here
three hours,” she said.

“
I had a long way to go.”
He sat in his favorite rocking chair, which of course was still in
the living room. It creaked gently.

“
I’ve been studying,” she
said.

“
I know.”

“
I brought the
rain.”

“
I’m proud of you,
Mouse.”

“
And I’ve met a
man.”

“
Do you love
him?”

“
No.”

“
But he’s good to
you?”

“
He is.”

“
And you want my
help?”

She got suddenly shy. She looked away,
lowered her voice. “You promised you’d come and help when the time
came.”

“
I expected something
different, my little Mouse, but of course I will help
you.”

“
Thank you.”

So her grandfather told her the things she
needed, the precise measurements, the order of inclusion, the
method of consumption. “Best in a hot drink,” he said, “but not
tea. Chocolate.”

“
I can do that,
Grandpa.”

“
Of course you can. I
taught you well.”

They got up and hugged goodbye. Her
grandfather stepped sideways, out of sight, to begin his journey
back to the place from which he came.

She realized, then, her mistake. In Seattle,
she was three hours ahead of her grandfather’s Florida home. He had
made the journey at precisely midnight, his time.

The next night, she prepared a special dinner
for the man she’d met. He was gentle and courteous and
complimentary. He was smooth and cool and he did all the right
things. At the meal’s end, she broke out the homemade hot
chocolate, two steaming mugs of it. They shared it by the
fireplace, the crackling of the fire the only sound. She waited for
the chocolate to have its effect.

They both became sleepy. She suggested they
sleep there, in front of the fire, warm and close together. By
midnight, they both slept soundly, and the fire died down.

She woke at dawn, still in his arms. The
potion had worked. She was in love.

10 January

When the night is darkest and coldest, long
after midnight but far from dawn, when even the cat’s asleep, they
arrive. There are nine this night – perhaps more or less on
another. They enter through a hole in the wall, like mice, or a
break in reality, each from another direction, each reaching the
bed in their own way. They pull themselves up the sheets hanging
over the edge. They scale the legs of the bed. They drop down from
the dresser or the ceiling fan. They surround the sleeping girl,
then crawl closer, across her ankles, over her stomach, up her
forearm. One climbs onto her face and feels the gentle rhythm of
her breathing. And one by one, they slip under her skin and into
her consciousness. They are Mares, the wranglers of nightmares, and
why should tonight be any different from any other night?

Abruptly, her breathing changes. Her eyes
snap open, catching, in the murk, one quarter-foot tall Mare
standing on the bit of skin between her upper lip and her nose.

It’s barely 3am. The nightmares had already
started. She’s not really awake, not really asleep. And the Mare,
so unused to being caught in the act, freezes.

She opens her mouth, perhaps to yawn; but
like a cat, she snatches the Mare in her maw and swallows him
whole.

She coughs and gags, but it’s too late. She
sits up, suddenly quite awake, trying to dislodge the wriggling
thing in her throat.

The other Mares, eight of them, find
themselves quite forcibly ejected.

The Mares try to scatter, but she’s too fast
for them, still embodied with a bit of dreamland strength and
agility. She catches them all and puts them in a shoebox. They yell
at her, they curse her, they shake their tiny little fists.

She shakes her head. “No more,” she says. She
closes the shoebox and puts a heavy book on top so they can’t get
out.

She gets a glass of water in the bathroom to
better wash down the Mare she’s swallowed. Then she goes back to
sleep.

It’s blissful, uninterrupted, without night
terrors or dark landscapes or wicked dreams. When she wakes, her
tummy is a little upset, but it’s not too bad. She checks on her
captives in the shoebox. Since the sun has risen, they’ve gone
dormant, and they can barely protest.

She says, “Sleep, little ones.”

Over the next few days, she feeds them bacon
strips and lettuce leaf and a saucer of milk, which the cat finds
disconcerting. When she walks down the streets, she sees the shapes
of strangers’ fears. Spiders here, public speaking, falling,
rejection, clowns. In a bar, she touches a man’s arm as he flirts
with her, and she sees the walls closing around him, the swell of
darkness, the crush of a constricting ceiling. He runs outside,
seeking space and air. She laughs, but not too loudly. At night,
she sleeps deeply, though the sun seems to tire her and the moon
mourns the hours without her.

The fifth night, before midnight, she opens
the shoebox and looks down at her captives. She says, “I’m hungry.”
She catches one by his leg and pops him, without salt, down her
throat. A little bit of whiskey helps him go down more
smoothly.

She goes out, and now doesn’t even need to
touch her victim. A random young girl breaks into a fit of
screaming that ends with hyperventilating and tranquilizers.

The next night, she opens the shoebox on
seven Mares and licks her lips. She takes two, one after the other.
The family down the hall all wake up simultaneously and flee a
burning building that never burned.

The next night, she eats three. They’re
harder to swallow in such a quantity, but she’s gotten used to the
taste. They’re quite potent, flavorful and thoroughly frightening.
In the city, she doesn’t just create vivid, overwhelming nightmares
for the sleeping and the wakeful, she gives them form and
substance. Knife-wielding clowns run rampant in the streets, some
riding on the backs of reptilian raptors.

The next night, only three Mares remain. She
dips them in chocolate. After, she thinks she should have thought
of that sooner.

The night is young. No one sleeps. The world
suffers universal night tremors that incapacitate nations and
industry. Lovers quarrel. Trains stop running. There’s a
suicide.

That catches her attention, as it was never
part of her plan. To tell the truth, she never had a plan, never
meant to swallow the first Mare, but they were like candy. Like
drugs. Like ice cream. She couldn’t stop.

Days pass. No one sleeps. Circles under
sunken eyes become prevalent, then unavoidable. She, and she alone
– perhaps her cat – can sleep through the day. Things stalk the
shadows, things she never imagined, the distorted nightmares of
seven billion sleepless zombies.

For her, it’s a living nightmare, and she
knows it’s nothing next to what others suffer, but she has no
control. It broadcasts from her and through her, nightmares made
real, ultra-real, and supra-real. She takes to screaming and
pulling out her hair in clumps.

Everyone else knows it’s her. They watch her,
stare at her, follow her, and stalk her. They gape from the windows
and doorways and alleys, moaning, pleading, crying, begging. She
runs, but they’re everywhere. They point at her with blood-stained
fingers. They scream. They cackle. They gather outside her
apartment door, on the fire escapes, on the rooftops across the
street. She can’t get away from them. They don’t let her sleep.

She breaks and screams and bolts upright in
bed, spitting out the first Mare.

The others escape, racing across her sheets,
off the bed, evading the cat and vanishing uncaught. But one, wet
with her spit, straightens himself and looks at her and grins.

“
That,” she says, panting
and sweating, her heart racing, “was uncalled for.”

He bows and says, “And now that I’ve seen
your heart, oh would-be Queen of Nightmares, I can only promise
worse.”

She swats at him, meaning to crush him like a
bug, but by the time her hand crashes on the bed he’s stepped
sideways and disappeared.

For the rest of that night, until dawn
breaks, the cat tries to comfort her. It does no good. She drinks a
glass of water and wonders how long she can keep awake before going
insane.

11 January

The city was old and gray. It’s never quiet,
it’s never dull, it’s full of color in all the secret corners and
hide-aways and personal spaces.

Outside, there were bridges stretching to
other shores, and cars that would take you far away, but the
streets almost all ended within the confines of the city and the
subways wouldn’t take you out of it. They went around and around
underground, stopping at the same platforms every time – every
time, that was, except this once.

This one time, the subway stopped at a
desolate, abandoned platform, which it often passed, and one boy,
Bobby, stuck his head out the doors, looked up and down, and
stepped off the train.

The concrete here was old. It crumbled in
places. Faded paint peeled off the walls. There were
advertisements, jeans and perfume and opera, but they were older
than Bobby.

The train doors closed and left him
alone.

The lights at the station shone dim, but
glowed nonetheless, which had to mean something. Someone paid to
keep the lights on.

Bobby admitted his
worldview was skewed. Trains did exist that took you north of the
city or west, or even south, should you feel a need for
self-inflicted punishment. But no trains stopped here. The tiles on
the wall called it
Rue de
L’illusion
, which was the wrong language
but easy to translate.

“
Hello!” he called out. His
voice ran down long halls, turning here and there, eventually
returning with no real answer. Bobby left the platform in the most
logical direction, passing deep shadows and closed-up newsstands,
until he reached a set of stairs rising to daylight.

He climbed.

Bobby thought he knew his home city. He had
been to all the edges. He had visited museums and bookshops and
candy stores. He had seen the very rich with their fancy cars and
well-dressed doormen, and he had seen the very poor with their
tattered dreams and scraps of hope. He had seen crime and passion
and business and beggars. He had seen bankers and bakers and
lawyers – and even the mayor. He had, in his fourteen years,
explored every road, street, avenue, lane, and alley. He had seen
rooftop gardens and dirt lots no more than ten feet wide. But these
particular streets were new to him, never before seen, occupied by
buildings that weren’t near as gray as the rest of his city. And
the streets were quiet, empty and abandoned. He walked in the
middle of the street, arms outstretched, a thing that would get him
killed in any other part of the city.