the current trend of reenactment, or has she just run out of ideas?”. “Though the memory of pain lingers in the form of the scars that silver the artist’s hands, the element of physical suffering has been removed from this new, softer work, and there is a corresponding loss of intensity”. “The trick has grown old. One wonders whether, after yet another six years of silence, anyone will be left who cares.”
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
The room is hot, the air is thick. It stings her throat like nettles. It tickles her throat like feathers. Either way she can’t breathe. No, it’s not the air, it’s a length of yarn twining round her neck; the children have appeared, the children have been found, wandering in the forest, shut up in yet another castle, it’s joyous news, and they’re running around their mother, the performance artist, with a ball of yarn they’ve found somewhere, and they don’t realize, nobody realizes, how tight the loops have become. Unless it’s her brothers, who have come after all, who are grateful after all, all six of them, pulled away from their barbecues, their robbers’ dens, their high-stakes online poker games, their castles, their princesses, led of course by the youngest, the one with the disability, and as her knees give way they are severing the yarn with their beaks, fanning her with huge wings, lifting her up with their red, red feet — they’re weaving a net, they too know how to weave, a net of nettles, they’ve taken the sides in their beaks and they’re lifting her on it, beating their great wings, already she is high above the city, she sees the glass mountain rising before her—
Or it is the man with chicken feet helping her up, he’s kicked off his boots to free his feet, he’s more agile like that, and the woman with silver hands is fanning her, with one of her own shirts. What has happened? She must have slipped on the glass mountain and fallen. But luckily she still has the chicken bones folded into her napkin, and now she plants one in a crack in the glass, tests to see if it will support her weight, and plants another a little higher. Up she goes! Higher and higher into the rushing sky, her gaze steady, her knees only trembling a little. She is nearing the top. One more step and she will be able to reach — but the napkin is empty. She cuts off — with what? Bites off — her little finger. Stepping on her finger, she reaches the top.
There is the great arched door. It is locked, of course, but she has been given a chicken bone to use as a key. She carefully unfolds the stained napkin. There is nothing inside!
Now six robbers enter the art gallery. You can tell they are robbers because they wear black masks and black capes. They are small robbers — children, or dwarves. Each is exactly the same as all the others, except the sixth. There’s something bulky and white sticking out from under his cape where his left arm should be, almost sweeping the ground. Something soft and white.
They do not bother with the wallets, rings, watches, and cell phones that the guests have already thrown down in anticipation of their demands, but move straight to the wall and take down the little shirts, as calmly as people getting dressed in the morning. There is one shirt each. Naturally, the robber with the white thing under his cape — okay, it’s a wing — chooses the shirt with no left sleeve. He goes to it straightaway, as if he knew it would be there. Probably he did, probably he had cased the joint. He frees the defective shirt from its fiddly hook and falls in behind the others, who are already filing out through the door. The performance artist jerks after them, is stayed by a hand on her arm, her dealer’s. Something confusing is happening outside, a sweeping and whirling — capes and shirts and feathers. A honking call sounds. The performance artist rises to her toes. Her feather boa stirs in the breeze from the closing door.
VARIATIONS
The performance artist picks up a shirt and puts it on. She spreads her wings and falls into the sky.
The performance artist picks up a knife and cuts off her baby finger. She inserts it into the glass lock, which clicks smoothly open. Inside are her three children and her six brothers, waiting with open arms, with spread wings, with eleven arms and one wing.
The performance artist picks up a pen. (It bites her.)
The performance artist picks up a ball of yarn.
The performance artist picks up a phone and buys a ticket to Florida.
SLEEPING AND FLYING
A man sleeps, one arm flung over his lover’s chest. In the dark air over the bed, his wing beats; he is dreaming, of course, of flying. But his other arm holds on tight.
Elsewhere, a woman’s hands silvered with scar tissue flutter, too. She is also dreaming of flying. No, she is dreaming and flying, reclining in a window seat, her crooked, scarred, shining hands folded in her lap.
YET ANOTHER SHIRT
“I was never very craft-y,” says the woman with silver hands. “For two obvious reasons. But does it have to be feathers or nettles, nettles or feathers? Couldn’t you do something with the yarn?”
READING AND FLYING
A girl is sitting in a room. The sun is slanting in the window, warming her knee, lighting up the book she holds open.
You are reading while walking, she reads. You can’t see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf-shadow, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings. You are a bird. Reading, you can fly. You are flying now.
I read hundreds of fairy tales when I was a kid, studied them as if they contained information I would eventually need to use, so I ran into many different versions of the story the Grimms called “The Six Swans.” My experience of the story thus included the confused sense — which my own version attempts to capture — of a compulsive repetition with variation. All the versions agreed, though, that the girl didn’t quite finish the last sleeve of the last shirt, so that her youngest brother kept his wing on that side. That wing marred the happy ending in a way that felt truthful to me — a lasting reminder of her ordeal, and his. It was also surely a suggestion that the desire to fly was only ever dressed up in human clothes. That was the part left out of her story, I always thought: how she must have envied her brothers’ animal freedom even as she worked to save them from it.
JOYELLE MCSWEENEY. The Warm Mouth
WARM MOUTH: CHINSCRAPER, WHY ARE YOU LYING THERE IN THE road with your jaw shoved back through your brain and your guts blown out as if you’d tried to swallow the highway?
CHINSCRAPER: Warm Mouth, I used to make my way along the median strips and trashy shoulders, my head in the vinyl noose of a six-pack, pop tabs gilding my teeth. I could steal the grease off a Taco John bag. Styrofoam was my bread. Oh, how far that good life seems from me now, laid out in this attitude of supplication, my head smashed in by a speeding Jeep!
WARM MOUTH: Truly I feel for you, Chinscraper, for I am also alone this night. Climb into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.
WARM MOUTH: Kneescraper, why do you sit so still on that swollen chair which seems to breathe and groan all around you as if to swallow your small self?
KNEESCRAPER: It’s not a chair, it’s my grandmother’s body. Don’t worry, she’s not dead, just sleeping, and below her is the wheelchair, but you can’t see it for her girth. Maybe you’ve seen us neck deep in traffic or working our way across intersections like a fucked-up beetle, an evolutionary no-go, me in her lap and the motor straining to scoot us through the exhaust fumes with our groceries swinging from the arms: two-liters, Sno Balls, turkey jerky. She told me not to leave her but the night is so interesting with train tracks crisscrossing it like a game board and gilt-bellied delivery trucks slithering up to the gas stations. It’s so hard to keep my promise!
WARM MOUTH: Kneescraper, I too am curious about this night and so is my friend Chinscraper. Climb up in