Fragments
written by: Emjae Kelly
Leaping into the air, Anna begins to move her arms, which have become wings. She swoops them up and down as she’s seen buzzards do, rising from carrion in the road to avoid an approaching vehicle. Her bare feet lift from the ground.
Her wings glint beneath the sun in bronze, copper, and gold; and the wing tips and trailing edges gleam black, as if dipped in ink. As she glides over a lake, she sees in her reflection the creamy underside of her wings, the color of new butter.
Her braids have loosened. Now her hair flies out behind her in a cloak of mahogany, curls pulled straight by the wind.
Up, up, up she climbs. She sees her house below her, now the size of Monopoly houses, surrounded by yellow and green fields that remind Anna of the squares in her grandmother’s quilt.
The sun grows hot, and her arms, weighted by wings, feel heavy. She folds them against her side, diving headlong to the shade of the apple tree outside the kitchen, and rests in the cool grass.
***
Anna awakes in a panic. She’s forgotten the lines to the play she’s in. She can’t remember what she’s supposed to say except in bits and pieces. Worse, she can’t find the playbook to study. Anna tosses the clothes, layering the floor of her room. She pulls open drawers, spilling out her days-of-the-week underwear and multiple beaded bracelets in pastel, plastic gems. It is nowhere to be found.
***
The river rages beneath her; roily and muddy, its currents cresting with sour yellow foam. Debris rides the flood – entire trees pass by, pillaged by the river. She stands on the bank, awestruck by its power. The air feels cold and damp. Anna shivers beneath her thin, red sweater, pulling it closer to her. Still, goosebumps rise upon her arms. The river’s roar fills her ears. She begins to back away from the bank. Her foot slips. She slides toward the river. She opens her mouth to scream, but the river pours in.
So cold. So cold. So cold.
Anna warms herself on the hearth. The fire glows with burning wood from the apple tree, fallen during a winter storm. Sodden mittens and socks lay beside her, little puddles growing beneath them. Her mother brings a mug of hot chocolate, the real kind made with cocoa powder, sugar, and milk, and on top, a fat marshmallow. Anna wraps her hands around the steaming cup, warming them, but when she takes a sip, the liquid burns her lips, her tongue, her throat. Behind her, the fire suddenly blazes, throwing shards of heat against her back. She tries to move away from the fire, but it is as if she has become stone. She calls her mother, but the cocoa has burned her throat, so the sound she makes is distant, even to her ears. Anna feels her shirt begin to scorch. It smells like her father’s cotton handkerchiefs when she has let the iron linger too long. Pinpricks of sweat erupt along her hairline and upon her upper lip. And still she cannot move.
So hot. So hot. So hot.
Coal. The heavy, oily smell of diesel. Train tracks etch the train yard like stitches on Frankenstein’s face. Anna must cross them. To her left, she sees a monstrous engine in the distance, idling beneath the summer sun, but she does not know which track it is on. Before her, the shiny metal of the rails stretches into rows that cross each other so that they appear as a maze. Anna takes a step forward. Has the engine moved? She crosses the first track, looking again to her left. Yes, the engine is moving forward. Slowly. Anna is reminded of the lions she has seen on some nature show, moving slowly toward their prey. Hurrying now, Anna crosses the second and third tracks. The engine is gaining speed, its roar closer now, and Anna still does not know which track it travels on. She crosses a fourth rail. A fifth. The train is much closer now, and still she cannot determine its track in the cross-stitching of rails. The engine roars, close and closer. A whistle sounds.
***
Anna is being pursued. By a snake. A red rattlesnake that has curled into a hoop, reminding Anna of the red, plastic hula hoop her mother bought her for her eighth birthday. The snake holds its beaded tail between two fangs, rolling easily around any obstacle. Anna can see the diamond pattern of the snake’s skin and its black forked tongue flicking out over its tail. Anna runs faster. She hasn’t enough breath to scream. She can only run. The snake’s gold eyes gleam.
***
She sits in a room which looks much like the living room in the house where she babysits Sunday nights for the Carlson kids. She is listening to the television, or maybe it’s a radio, and looking out the big picture window that faces the road. It is dark. The children must be in bed because she is by herself. Whatever program is playing in the background, it stops, and a voice heavy in its seriousness says, “We interrupt this program for an important announcement. Russia has launched a nuclear attack on the United States. I repeat, Russia has launched a nuclear attack on the United States of America.” The announcer pauses. “You will not have time to move from the spot you are now in.”
There is no sound, just a blinding flash. The world dissembles.
***
Anna recognizes the house. Old and falling down, its exterior once white, now grey, it stands at the edge of a hayfield, guarded by a sole and ancient elm. She and her brother have explored it before, careful to keep out of sight from the man who owns the property. This time, she is alone.
When she steps through the unlocked kitchen door, the air becomes cooler, although the day is hot outside. Through a window, the sun casts oblong light upon the wooden floor, illuminating dust motes which dance in its rays. Cupboard doors hang open, shelves empty. She walks across the peeling, fading red linoleum floor.
Two stairways connect the second and third floors. Anna chooses the back staircase, narrower and steeper than the main stairs, and begins to climb to the third floor. She hears the sound of small, scurrying feet. At the top of the stairs, a hall opens into several bedrooms, and when Anna opens the door to each, she discovers a bed, neatly made with a quilt whose color varies with each room; shades of blue, shades of pink, shades of yellow, or green. Anna wonders who has lived here and why they left; and where they might be now. The house seems to expect their return at any moment.
In one room stands a dark dresser, a milky mirror above it. Dust covers the surface of the dresser. In the middle of the dust is a sliver-backed brush tilted on a side, as if it has wearied of life. Its yellowed bristles hold a few auburn strands of hair. Buttons of different colors and sizes scatter across the dresser’s surface, as well as an old, quart milk bottle which bears the name of some long ago dairy in red letters. She pulls open the top drawer. It is filled with old clothing; whites no longer white and edged in dainty embroidery, an infant’s woolen cap and sweater knit in navy, a green silk shawl with knotted fringe.
Anna wanders from room to room. The day has grown late. Shadows grow longer. Outside, the sun slides to the lower branches of the elm. The way home is long, a lonely dirt road sided on one side by a steep bank thick with multiflora rose bushes and on the other, moss-covered boulders with secret chasms.
Anna runs down the flights of stairs and out into the overgrown yard, looking around to see if she’s been observed. She begins to walk briskly to the dirt road that leads home. She hopes she will meet no one. Her mother has warned her of helpful men who might invite her inside their car.
***
Snow falls from a pewter sky, collecting on snow already fallen. Anna stands in a field surrounded by tall pines. It is so quiet that she hears the flakes falling upon the nylon of her navy parka. When she looks down, she sees a spot of bright blood marring the snow. She steps forward and sees another drop and then another, each growing in size. Anna begins to walk faster and then to run, following the trail of blood. Her breath forms clouds above her head.
It seems she’s been running a very long time. The blood now appears in big, ragged splotches. So red against the snow. Anna thinks of when her mother spilled Spanish wine upon her grandmother’s white linen tablecloth, how it bloomed.
She runs. Ahead of her, footprints. She slows. Ahead of the footprints is a single drop of blood. Anna steps beside the print in the snow. The footprints are hers.
***
In the bathroom mirror, Anna sees her mother, who is late into a pregnancy. Anna views her mother’s face; pale and oval, framed by blonde curls. She looks out of her mother’s eyes, blue, the color of cornflowers in August. Her mother’s hand, or is it Anna’s hand, reaches up to wash their face with a warm washcloth that smells of Pear’s soap. The soap reminds Anna of a fish, slick and gold. The woman moves the cloth in gentle circles across forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin, and then bends to the basin with cupped hands to rinse the soap from her face. Anna sees the flash of a wedding ring, a sliver of gold. Hands pull off a nightgown, white cotton printed with pink rosebuds and trimmed at the neck and sleeves in lace. In the mirror, her mother’s breasts appear heavy, ripened fruit, her nipples brown stems. Hands move to hold the burgeoning belly, as if in embrace, sliding them over skin stretched so taunt that it appears translucent. How can it be that Anna, in her mother’s womb, feels the warmth and strength of those hands while being the hands that warm? She is both mother and child. In this, she is eternity.
***
Dr. Bennett follows Anna’s mother up the stairs and into Anna’s bedroom. He is a tall, lean man whose face looks as if it had been carved out of granite in sharp planes. His iron grey hair lies in tight waves over his ears. He carries a large, black bag. Setting it down by the chair beside Anna’s bed, he brushes Anna’s hair from her face and studies the red, raised rash across her forehead and cheeks. Anna’s mother hovers beside him.
“I’ll have to take her temperature rectally,” he said. “I can’t chance her biting the thermometer and breaking it.”
Her temperature is 104.2 degrees. The doctor checks Anna’s pulse, which proves weak and thread-like. He examines Anna’s neck and chest, which also reveal a raised rash in angry red. He opens her mouth. Anna’s tongue is the bright red of ripe strawberries.
He looks at Anna’s mother with eyes the same grey as his hair. “Scarlatina,” he pronounces. He lifts the black valise from the floor, opens it, and removes a vial and hypodermic needle. “I’m giving her penicillin,” he says. He turns the girl’s body to its side, and once again, lifting her flannel nightgown, swabs the area with alcohol before jabbing the needle into Anna’s buttocks to release the penicillin.
***
She is at her grandmother’s in the bedroom once belonging to her mother. Dark green shades cover the room’s three windows. Anna does not move in the Victorian bed, which is hand-painted with flowers, but lies still beneath a quilt made of velvet scraps. She sees cracks of sunlight beneath the shades. A fly buzzes at one of the windows. She thinks about getting up and going downstairs to the kitchen, where she hears her grandfather clattering pans and dishes in the kitchen. The smell of coffee wends its way into the room. Anna remembers catching fireflies the night before, brushing them off grapevine leaves into a Mason jar, its lid punched with holes so the bugs could breathe. Had she let them go, or did the jar still sit on the porch with the lightning bugs belly up, their lamps a dead white? Her grandmother’s sheets and pillowcases smell of sun and of having been ironed. The fly draws away from the window, trying to light on Anna’s face. She pulls the covers over her head and thwarts its efforts.
***
Anna opens her eyes, which feel swollen and gritty. Her throat is raw. She is thirsty. She turns her head. Her mother sits in a rocking chair reading a book, but when she senses Anna’s stirring, she closes the book, and sets it down. She stands.
“How are you feeling, Anna?” Her mother places a cool hand on Anna’s forehead. Anna turns toward her and notices a twinge of pain on her hip and winces. She asks for water.
Her mother hands her a glass of water, which Anna drinks. It is tepid but feels wonderful to her throat. The shade in the room has been drawn, and a single lamp provides illumination. Anna falls back on her pillows.
Anna’s mother explains that Anna has scarlatina, a dangerous virus, but that Dr. Bennett has given her penicillin and that Anna should be feeling much better soon.
“Are you hungry?” Anna’s mother stands and adjusts the bed covers. “I can make you tomato soup and bread cubes. Or maybe you’d like ginger ale?”
Anna feels as if she is two people; one in her bed, and one standing a little ways removed. She smells the Vicks her mother has slathered on her neck and chest, and beneath it, a sour smell she realizes comes from her.
.
As if reading her mind, her mother says, “After you eat something, I’ll give you a sponge bath. Change your sheets.” She turns to go, but stops, turns back to Anna. “You were really sick, Anna. Your fever was so high you must have been hallucinating. Between shivering and throwing off the covers with your thrashing, you muttered about all sorts of nonsense. Do you remember?”
Anna thinks for a moment. Trails of fever dreams disappear like mist when the sun appears, leaving no clue as to their once presence. She shakes her head. “No,” she says to her mother. “Not really.”
Anna turns to her other hip, the one that doesn’t hurt. She hears her mother in the kitchen, pulling out a pot for the tomato soup. Burrowing into her bed, she closes her eyes.
Her arms have become wings.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
This piece is a composite of recurring dreams I’ve had throughout my life. I stitched the fragments of these together in a child’s fevered imaginings.
