cloud.
Jack, he sees up ahead the hole the smoke done drilled there.
Jack, he sees the sunlight pour in through the hole the smoke done drilled.
The sunlight, it pours through the hole.
The sunlight, it pours through the hole and goes right for them iodide flakes under the glass lid on the glass dish.
Up inside there, up inside there the iodide flakes begin to melt. But them flakes don’t melt as much as they don’t turn into no water. Them iodide flakes, they turn right into more smoke turning and twisting under the glass lid.
Jack, he climbs himself right through that Jack-sized hole the smoke stairs done drilled in the top of the metal cloud. Jack, he climbs right out of that there hole in the cloud.
Jack, he is standing on top of that there cloud.
Jack, he is standing on top of that there cloud holding in his hand the glass-covered glass dish holding the cloud of purple smoke that once’t was the silver flakes of iodide.
Jack, he lifts up the glass lid right then and there. And the smoke, it commences to expand. The smoke it begins to break into a million grains of smoke carried by the wind up there in the blue-blue sky.
Jack, he blows with the breath from his dirt-filled lungs the last of the smoke from the dish.
Jack, he sees the million grains of smoke go looking for the million cloud-clouds all white and lovely-like.
Jack, he’s done climbing.
Jack, he is on top of the big ol’ metal cloud and he is done climbing.
Jack, from way up there, he watches in the blue-blue sky the grains of smoke go looking for the cloud-clouds all white and lovely-like.
Jack, he’s done climbing, he’s done climbed all he was going to climb.
Jack, up there in the air, works up a bit of spit in his dry-dry mouth. It ain’t much but enough.
Jack, he works up some spit.
Jack, he leans over the edge of that big ol’ metal cloud he done climbed. He looks down into the dirt-cloud hanging there down below.
Jack, he spits.
Growing up on a vast flat plane, I lived my life two-dimensionally on the x and z axes. Width and depth. Anything that drew my eyes to the height of y, then, was magical. Television towers, radio beacons, windbreaks and copses of trees, grain elevators, silos capped with lightning rods, lightning itself, windmills, and water towers. The I drawn upward. There is a reason, I think, that Chicago — the city of the flat prairie, the flat lake — is the birthplace of the skyscraper. Growing up, I visited, first, one tallest building after another as the first was replaced by the next. I went to the observation deck of the Prudential Building and watched them build the Standard Oil Building even higher. The Standard Oil Building didn’t have an observation deck but the Hancock Building did, and from there I watched them build the Sears Tower, and from the Sears Tower I could see, well almost, forever or, at least, Gary and Indiana off in the vast distance. Growing up, I grew up. And growing up, I grew up on a vast flat plain that once was made up of devil’s food cake topsoil that seemed endlessly endless. Growing up, plain on the plain so vast all of us and everything, even skyscrapers, seemed reduced to minute points in an infinitely plain plane geometry. Growing up, I sang without really knowing that the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye. Growing up was the drama of stark dimensions — x to y to z — rearranging themselves in this medium, this medium of time. Time running short. Time running long. Time running out.
KELLY LINK. Catskin
CATS WENT IN AND OUT OF THE WITCH’S HOUSE ALL DAY LONG. THE windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.
Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.
The cats trotted and slunk and leaped and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.
The witch had three living children at this time, although at one time she had had dozens, maybe more. No one, certainly not the witch, had ever bothered to tally them up. But at one time the house had bulged with cats and babies.
Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way — their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers — the witch had acquired her children by other means: she had stolen or bought them.
She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic), although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set, and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.
One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.
Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.
Are you still reading? The witch, up in her bedroom, was dying. She had been poisoned by an enemy, a witch, a man named Lack. The child Finn, who had been her food taster, was dead already and so were three cats who’d licked her dish clean. The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge. Once the question of this revenge had been settled to her satisfaction, the shape of it like a black ball of twine in her head, she began to divide up her estate between her three remaining children.
Flecks of vomit stuck to the corners of her mouth, and there was a basin beside the foot of the bed, which was full of black liquid. The room smelled like cats’ piss and wet matches. The witch panted as if she were giving birth to her own death.
“Flora shall have my automobile,” she said, “and also my purse, which will never be empty, so long as you always leave a coin at the bottom, my darling, my spendthrift, my profligate, my drop of poison, my pretty, pretty Flora. And when I am dead, take the road outside the house and go west. There’s one last piece of advice.”
Flora, who was the oldest of the witch’s living children, was redheaded and stylish. She had been waiting for the witch’s death for a long time now, although she had been patient. She kissed the witch’s cheek and said, “Thank you, Mother.”
The witch looked up at her, panting. She could see Flora’s life, already laid out, flat as a map. Perhaps all mothers can see as far.
“Jack, my love, my birdsnest, my bite, my scrap of porridge,” the witch said, “you shall have my books. I won’t have any need of books where I am going. And when you leave my house, strike out in an easterly direction and you won’t be any sorrier than you are now.”
Jack, who had once been a little bundle of feathers and twigs and eggshell all tied up with a tatty piece of
