Stories About Things (2 page)

There must have been some mention of his
name in the "Dearly Departed" clause. Too bad I was trying so hard
to remember it to pay attention then.

Then,

Oh.

JACK, it said on the temporary grave
marker.

Oh. Jack. Right.

Got back to the apartment.

"How was whasisnames funeral?" said the
roommate. "What
was
his name anyway?"

"I don't know, but the ceremony was
great."

FOUR

Syrup dripped slowly, not like blood. Syrup
was sweet, too, but Chi didn't know what blood tasted like. Rusty,
maybe, from the iron, iron like in magnets. He used to think that
was why people stuck to the earth: they had metal in them, and so
did the planet. He didn't think that anymore. If it were true, then
why did dead people stick just as hard as living people, even when
all the blood was drained out? Why didn't they go floating up away?
He used to think that was why they nailed coffins shut.

Sip. Click
.

The flask snapped back in its seat on his hip
where a magnet stuck it in place. Mother thought it was rum, and he
let her think that. Rum didn't work, though. Rum erased what maple
syrup remembered. Other people drank, remembered things that didn't
happen and forgot things that did. Chi wanted to remember what
happened and forget what didn't.

Sip. Click.

The store itself was not the temptation. Not
that Chi could ignore the rows upon rows of maple sugar cookies,
gallons of syrup, lollipops in the shape of maple leafs, and tawny
fudge squares. He couldn't. He was a good boy, though, and he
wasn't tempted by the things that he shouldn't have.

The temptation wasn't the cookies and syrup
and lollipops and fudge; it was the key. The key hung on the wall
by the door after dark when his parents had gone to bed. He looked
at it every evening at six, when his mother and father locked up
the store and brought in the key. Sometimes, he would get up in the
night, come downstairs quietly, and stare at the little piece of
silver hanging on the peg by the door.

Sip. Click.

It was funny that the taste hadn't gone away
all these years. Chi had thought that eventually he would get used
to the sticky sweetness of the syrup and wouldn't be able to taste
it. But he still did. Maybe it was a symbiotic relationship--the
syrup and the memories--one kept the other alive. The memories
hadn't faded, and the taste was part of the memories. The taste
kept alive the memories, which kept alive the taste... Whatever the
reason, the maple sweetness was just as clear as the day he'd first
drunk it, and it recalled that time perfectly.

Sip. Click.

"No, we're not supposed to!" Geo had said the
first time they snuck into the shop after dark.

Chi agreed. They
were
good boys, both
of them. But rows of sweets, stacked neatly in a dark storeroom
will sing to any young child, and Chi was listening. Now that he
stood, key in hand, with his parents sleeping in the house, he
heard their song loud and clear. Geo was not really trying to
resist anyway; he was just making a token protest to fall back on
later when they were caught. All Chi needed to do was make the
token argument to cement the deal. It was the standard contract of
light mischief. So he said,

"Who'll know?"

He took one of the little jugs of syrup and
poured it into their two bottles (white ones that you couldn't see
inside of.) The shelves only took a little rearranging to conceal
the empty space. And the empty jar of evidence they buried by a
tree. They sipped the syrup slowly so it would last. It wasn't
difficult, though, like eating a chocolate bar slowly is difficult.
No one can drink maple syrup except drop by drop, one sip at a
time.

Sip. Click.

It went in a metal flask now instead of a
white water bottle. He was almost grown now, and grown men who
didn't play sports and worry about nutrition and hydration and
those sorts of things didn't carry around water bottles everywhere.
No one carried around hip flasks either, but Chi did it anyway. He
needed something to carry the memories in, and the flask had come
with a nice holder with a magnet.

"Don't dwell," they told him, all of them,
parroting each other. "Look ahead of you, not behind you."

But he wanted to look behind. There were
rocks back there, and if you weren't careful you could trip. You
had to look. His mother put it a different way.

"Don't run backwards," she said. "Don't run
backwards."

And don't push, either
, he would add,
but silently in his head so she wouldn't hear it.

Sip. Click
.

He sipped the syrup carefully, one drop at a
time. And he remembered carefully, one moment at a time. There was
only one thing he couldn't remember.

Sip. Click.

Sip. Click.

Sip, sip, sip.

Click
.

No matter how hard he tried, no matter how
carefully he went over the memories, there was one he could not
recover. For ten years, maple syrup held all the memories except
that one.

Why was he angry? He couldn't remember.

Sip. Click.

Push. Thud. What were they fighting about? It
must have been something important. It
must
have been. But
if it was so important, then why couldn't he remember?

Sip. Click.

Slip.

Crack.

"Geo? Geo?"

That was the moment when he forgot. He had
been angry, he knew he had, but at the sharp crack of bone on rock
and the thud of Geo's body hitting the ground, he forgot.

The blood ran fast, and so did Chi. He ran
and he ran, back to the house, though his stomach and chest and his
legs all cramped up, and he couldn't breathe fast enough to get
oxygen to the muscles.

He ran for his father and mother, then his
mother ran for the doctor down the street, and someone ran for the
policeman.

"Geo's hurt," he'd said, and everyone
listened because they were good boys and never got into
trouble.

They all ran very fast back to the field
behind the house. But the blood ran faster. It was all out of Geo
by the time Chi got back with help.

Sip. Click.

Drinking water would give him more energy. If
he had more energy then he could run faster. But Chi didn't run
anymore. There was no reason to. Blood was like water, and it ran
fast. If you had a race with blood, it would always win, no matter
how fast you ran. Maple syrup ran slow, and you didn't have to race
against it. He was done racing.

His mother thought he was too slow.

"You have to get out of the room," she'd say.
"Get a job, meet some friends."

She wanted him to go forward instead of
backwards. Chi didn't think he was
going
backwards, though.
He was
looking
backwards, and that was an entirely different
thing.
Looking
backwards was important, even when you were
standing still. He had to see what was there. There was something
back there, and even if everybody else didn't see it, he had
to.

Sip. Click.

"What happened?" they had asked.

All of them, the doctor, the police, his
mother, asked the same question. His hand still held a baseball.
He'd forgotten about that too. When he looked down at it, it
answered for him.

"Accidental?" they'd said, already nodding
sadly, because these were good boys and when trouble happened, it
was an accident.

"Yes," Chi said. "He was running backwards
and tripped on the rock, smacked his head on the pile. He was
running backwards to catch a ball."

"Yes," his mother said. "He comes out with
his friend to play baseball all the time," she explained, and they
nodded. You could see the worn grass between the bases - three
trees and a shrub for home.

They were good boys and it was an accident.
The grass was wet, and he wasn't looking behind as he ran back.
Slipped and hit the rock too hard. Too bad, they said, shaking
their heads.

"That's why you don't do that," his mother
said, crying. "That's why you look where you are going."

"It was baseball. He was running to catch a
ball. He was looking at the ball. You do that in baseball."

Sip. Click.

Ten years of drinking maple syrup had rotted
his teeth prematurely. Chi didn't care. Teeth could be fixed, the
past couldn't be. He wondered if memories could be. He wanted to
fix his memories.

They weren't broken that bad,
he
thought.

Everyone else's were worse because they only
looked ahead. The taste of the syrup had recalled the day for him,
recalled it crystal clear, for ten years, except for the one thing.
Sip after sip of maple syrup, flask after flask, jug after jug, and
he could not remember why he was angry. He could not remember why
he pushed Geo onto the rocks. That had been wiped from his mind the
moment the other boy fell, and no amount of looking had brought it
back. He kept trying anyway.

Sip. Click.

FIVE

When the swing fell again, the tree died.

That wasn't how it was the first time. Then,
it had been just a matter of getting a new rope and stringing it
back up. They couldn't do that anymore because there was nothing to
string it up on.

The first time, Bridget has seen the rope
make a graceful arc from bough to ground. It had sounded like a
candy bar snapping in half (not one of the gooey ones, though–a
crisp bar. Like Crunch or Hersheys, not Twix.) A soft, crisp pop,
then the arc. Broken from hours of carrying her up into the sky, it
was a beautiful, not a sad injury.

She had shared the wound then, too. The seat
disappeared from beneath her, somehow falling much faster than her
own body and the rope's. Of course, she should have been holding on
like her father always said to, but she liked to drape her arms
lightly around the ropes. That way, it was more like flying.

That time, she really had been flying. Her
body was weightless, not like a bird struggling to keep itself
aloft, but really weightless like the air itself.

For a second.

She saw the broken rope falling beside her,
and wondered how it felt to finally be free of the tree. They
landed beside each other in the leaves which crunched beneath them.
It sounded like applause.

The second time the swing fell, there was no
applause, and no flying.

The saws screamed so loudly that Bridget
couldn't even hear the snap of the branches. She imagined it must
have sounded like a much bigger bar of candy - maybe a solid block
of chocolate filled with nuts.

The branch with the swing went first because
it was lowest. The swing fell silently, or at least whatever sound
it made was drowned by the hysterical saw. It's branch made a soft
whump
against the ground, which was again brown with
leaves.

Bridget couldn't help cringing, just a
little, remembering the bruising fall. The swing and the branch
laying beside each other reminded her of her and the rope laying
beside each other, looking at each other. But she had been happy
then, despite the bruises, and she couldn't imagine the rope
feeling sad either. Both the swing and the branch looked sad now.
They hadn't flown, just fallen. The grace was gone.

Maybe that was why the leaves didn't
applaud.

She looked for one second, then another limb
fell on top of the first, then another and another. Then the trunk
joined the pile and the screaming finally stopped. For a while she
just stared at the pile, unsure of whether she were looking at it
from the outside or whether she were still trapped down there on
the ground with the swing.

SIX

The filet mignon was tempting, but the stewed
tomatoes were heavenly. Of course, Cora's attention was not caught
by dish itself, but on the one who could transform the hated food
into such a delicious piece of art. The medley of spices
masterfully blended made the single tomato into an entire meal in
itself. After that first bite, she paid little attention to the
other dishes. The other chefs were good, but they were only
human.

Caleb was a magician.

She read his nametag when she snuck back to
the makeshift kitchens to investigate the origins of the miraculous
tomato dish. He was there cooking, surrounded by a cloud of spices.
Those spices would always linger in his hair and his clothing. Her
mother argued, scornfully, that Cora had only fallen in love with
the scent and the spices but not the man.

"He isn't
handsome
," the older woman
would protest. "And he can't afford to make himself so."

Cora disagreed.

Her mother's party had brought the two
together. Her insistence on gourmet and fresh-cooked refreshments
for her aristocratic guests was responsible for Caleb's presence in
that neighborhood, one in which he would never have been seen out
of uniform. Her mother was responsible for their meeting. But she
had skipped the tomatoes that evening, and hadn't cared who made
them. It was only when the cooking dared to woo her daughter that
she even noticed him.

Cora's pleading never bought her mother's
approval; but Caleb's talents in the kitchen could tempt it. When
she eventually deigned to try her son-in-law's cooking, she at
least had to admit that her daughter's heart–or perhaps her
stomach–had never stood a chance against that charm. Even the
stubborn heiress could
attempt to
forgive the pale, rotund
man his looks and poverty for one of his homemade meals.