YOU ARE WALKING DOWN A FAMILIAR STREET AT DUSK. MEAT IS cooking. In the shadows down the block, you see a cardboard box, flaps open. The street is deserted; you will either be the first to look inside the box, or it has already been plundered; either way, there’s no reason to hurry, but you do. There is a limited variety of things left in boxes in your neighborhood: shoes gone the shape of feet, dusty videos, mugs with ceramic frogs amusingly glued inside them. You are hoping for books, and that’s what you find. Not many — others have preceded you — but you stoop anyway and poke through the pile, pushing aside The Big Book of Birds and What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
You are drawn to the shape, the color, the design of the book before you have made out the title. It is a durable old Dover paperback, its thick cover leathery with use and still bright red, except for a pink band along the top where a shorter neighboring book allowed sunlight to hit it. It is a small, fat, leather-bound book with marbled edges, its morocco binding glove-soft and chipped at the spine. It is a vintage pocket paperback with a keyhole on the spine, a map on the back, and a still life on the front: a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and a spindle.
When you flip through the book, more to feel the thick pages ruffle smoothly across your thumb, like an old deck of cards, than to check the contents, you find, pressed between two pages, a feather. It is white, it is black with an iridescent sheen, it is pigeon-gray, in any case you pin it to the left-hand page with your thumb as you begin reading, walking on. You like to start books in the middle. Maybe you like the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on. Maybe you just like doing things differently. In any case, you are soon engrossed, though the page waxes and wanes as you pass under the streetlights, and it is sometimes hard to make out the words.
It’s a good thing you read so much when you were a child, or you wouldn’t know what to think — you read — when you turn the corner on the greasy little street — a pigeon startles up, leaving a lone feather stuck to the asphalt — and see the dusty storefront into which the woman, her hands, wrists, and forearms so swollen that she appears to be wearing down opera gloves, is dragging a stuffed, heavy-duty lawn-and-leaf bag with numerous rents out of which what must be nettles are protruding. But since you have read every single one of Andrew Lang’s color-coded Fairy Books, even the ugly olive-green one, you recognize at once that she is a daughter and, more important, a sister, who is involved in the long, difficult, and not always rewarding work of saving her brothers from — you duck reflexively at a whirring vortex in the air: that pigeon again.
The woman, who has held the door open with her rump while she edged the bag inside, turns into the brightly lit interior and lets the door slam shut. It doesn’t matter, you can watch through the big shop window, despite the posters pasted all over it. Because you’ve read a lot of stories, you’re not surprised when she seats herself at a spinning wheel, behind which a row of brown, bristly little shirts hang from hooks screwed into the wall.
Because you’ve also lived — you’ve been living and reading for years, sometimes both at once — you are not surprised that people often repeat their most unpleasant experiences. It’s probably for the same reason we tell the same stories over and over, with minor variations—“The Seven Ravens,” “The Seven Doves,” “The Twelve Ducks,” “The Six Swans.” It is cozy to have one’s expectations met, though there is also, always, the possibility — is this is a happy thought or a sad one? — that things will turn out differently, this time.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST REMEMBERS
A young woman, who must be rather good at the domestic arts, to spin thread out of nettles, to weave cloth from that thread, to sew shirts from that cloth — or who will certainly, in six years, become good at them — is sitting in a room made of stone, her tongue a stone. She has been silent for two years, three months, four days. The sun is slanting through an unglazed hole in the thick wall, warming her knee, lighting up one leg of the spinning wheel and the rim of the basket of nettles. A bug buzzes up from them and whacks the rim of the basket, crawls along it, crawls all the way around it.
She has wicked thoughts. For instance:
Is self-sacrifice always a virtue?
If their positions were reversed, would her brothers do the same for her?
Would she want them to?
What is it like to fly?
Here’s how she imagines it: in a room just like this one, a basket of nettles at her knee, she is spinning. The stool knocks on the uneven floor as she foots the treadle. The thread is passing through her fingers, burning. Her skin prickles, comes out in bumps, more blisters no doubt, but on her chest, her ass, her back, her shoulders — that at least is new. Then she goes hot all over with tiny bursting pains, as if the blisters have broken all at once. Every pore is the head of a needle through which a thread is passing, or cloth through which a needle is passing; she is like a sun in an old painting, sending zips of light in every direction. Only it’s quills now crowding through her skin. They are pinkish gray, tightly curled and wet from her insides, but in the air they unfurl and dry to white until she is thatched all over with feathers, and at the same time her legs are tightening, hardening, shrinking. She walks out of the neck of her suddenly gigantic gown. A great force is pulling on her fingers, stretching them; feathers as strong as fingers shoot out of her wrists and the backs of her hands. She presses her lips together to keep herself from crying out and her whole face pouts and tightens. And then she cries out after all and, amazed by the sound she makes, spreads her wings and hurls herself through the window into the rushing sky.
She spins faster, to punish herself for her thoughts. The wheel thumps. The spindle twirls. Nettles race through her fingers. The pain is extraordinary. Her hands are no longer hands, but flames, or stars, or voices singing.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS
The performance artist has two kinds of dreams about flying. In one, she is swimming in air, doing a strenuous frog kick just to stay a few feet out of reach of the murderer who is calmly waiting for her to tire. In the other, after a running start, she simply lifts her feet and swoops up and away. She rises effortlessly, the sky is hers; suddenly, though, she is frightened, it seems that she is not flying but falling upward, she has gone too far, she may never return to earth, or to the murderer far below, who is now the only one who remembers her, but who has already stopped looking up at the shrinking speck in the sky, and is trudging home with the spade over her shoulder, thinking about dinner.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST WORKS
In a storefront gallery in a big city, a performance artist sits at a spinning wheel, spinning nettles into thread, sits at a loom, weaving thread into cloth for little shirts. She has made five and a half shirts. This has taken her five and a half years. In the beginning she had a lot of visitors. You wouldn’t believe how fabulous they looked or how loudly they commented on her spinning wheel, her loom, her nettles, her blisters, and her patience. But no matter what they said, she did not speak or smile. The visitors commented on that, too, saying, smiling, that it would be harder for them not to speak or smile for six years than to spin thread out of nettles, weave that thread into cloth, make that cloth into shirts. That was probably true, thought the performance artist, severing a thread with her teeth.
Attendance fell off. The gallery owners, who had interests in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, went on a long business trip. Her dealer stopped calling. The windows grew streaked and dusty. A row of posters advertising a burlesque show was pasted up — a woman dancing, naked as a prawn, within a storm of her own extraordinarily long, blond hair. Then flyers, their fringes of phone numbers fluttering: LOST RING, LOST DOG, LOST CHILD.
Occasionally a woman with silver hands comes, bringing pears.
The performance artist watches the sun move across the dusty glass while her hands twist and pluck. Once in a while, a winged shadow intersects the light.
HER YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER
He was sitting on the edge of my bed. I was on my knees in front of him, face in his lap, and suddenly there was this. wind.
Later I found feathers in my sheets, in my shoes. A small one floating, curved and lovely, in my water glass.
He has a huge, bulging forehead, like Edgar Allan Poe, and thin lips. Little round eyes, one raised shoulder. So no, he isn’t handsome. I had him down as a one-night stand, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The wing,
