the rim of the tub.
“Good. Okay,” Elga said soothingly. “Now if you close your eyes and count to three, you will get a big surprise.”
Noelle, uncertain but excited that perhaps this meant more treats, shut her eyes tightly and began, “One, two—”
Suddenly, she felt the firm hands of the old woman pushing down on her skull, shoving her head forcefully under the water. Noelle squirmed hard to break free, thrashing to get out from underneath Elga’s grasp, but the woman moved quickly, pressing one palm against the side of Noelle’s face while her fist pushed the girl’s bare torso down to the base of the tub. Noelle kicked and opened her mouth to scream. Gagging, she sucked in a lungful of the green water. It burned against the inside of her throat. She twisted and pushed with all her strength, thrashing like a caught fish, but she was no match for Elga. Terrified, the girl tried screaming again. Looking up out through the murky water, she saw the stern shadow of the old woman’s face staring down at her. Noelle reached out to pull at Elga’s arms. She was so confused, the water entered her lungs again; the dark green was growing black. It felt as though acid was being dragged through her veins. Then she saw nothing.
In her dream there was a russet red chicken. The two of them stood in a large circular clearing in a birch forest. Noelle was wearing her nightgown. The pine needles tickled her bare feet. The chicken stepped around her toes, pecking randomly at the soft ground. Then it looked up at her and spoke: “You are a dancer?”
“No. I was a dancer,” corrected Noelle.
“Yes, I heard about that. The ballet, the audition, tut-tut,” said the chicken before returning to its pecking.
Noelle looked around the forest; it seemed to be quite early in the morning, though perhaps it was twilight, she was unsure.
“Excuse me,” said Noelle.
“Yes?” said the chicken.
A strong breeze came blowing through the trees, making their branches creak. Noelle started shivering. She looked down at the bird, who was waiting patiently for her to speak. “Do you perhaps have something to tell me?” Noelle asked. “Is that why we are here? I would like to know, for I am getting quite cold.”
“Yes. I have something very important to say,” said the chicken, pausing between pecks to look up at the girl.
“What?”
The chicken cocked its head as if trying to recall. “Well, I believe I am supposed to tell you to—” At that moment there was a blurring flash of red as a fox suddenly darted out from the trees. The chicken squawked and jumped, thrusting its feathers out wide in a panicked attempt to escape but the fox pounced upon the bird and, with a quick hard bite, snapped its neck. Then the fox dashed off into the woods again, carrying the bird’s limp body in its mouth. The wind stopped. Noelle looked around at the vast solitude surrounding her and called out a tentative “Hello?” The lonely sound of her small, worried voice echoed in the woods.
Frightened, she woke up. She was in the hotel bed again; Elga was sitting at her bedside. Noelle immediately jolted up, desperate for escape, but the old woman grasped her tightly in a warm embrace. “There, there, do not worry, it is over, you are fine. You are good now. Look at you, you are fine.” Elga stroked her hair as a terrified Noelle beat the old woman’s sides with her tiny fists. Finally, Noelle stopped struggling and burst into tears, wrapping her arms around Elga and letting her whole body shake with grief and relief. “Why did you do that?” pleaded the girl through her tears. “Why?”
“It had to be done. Relax. You are safe now, you are safe forever,” said the old woman.
The girl cried hard until it seemed as though she had drained her body of all its tears. Then, finally, she relaxed and lay back down again. Elga leaned over with a dingy handkerchief and roughly wiped Noelle’s cheeks dry. Sitting beside her for the next hour, she massaged Noelle’s back as the girl rested. Looking out the window, Noelle noticed the sun had set. There would be no shopping, she had slept through the whole day. “We missed going to the stores.”
“Do not worry, there will be plenty of time for stores. You rest,” said Elga, playfully tugging at the girl’s earlobe. “But first tell me, what did you dream about?”
“A chicken.”
Elga stopped rubbing her back. “Mmn. You are sure it was a chicken? Not a duck or a rooster or—”
“I know it was a chicken.”
“Fine. So what did this chicken say?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No. But it wanted to. It tried to tell me a very important thing, but then it was eaten by a fox.”
“A fox? Hmmm.” Elga gave Noelle a final pat on the back and stood up. “Okay. Well, a fox is not so good.” The old woman shuffled out of the bedroom and shut the door, turning out the light behind her and leaving the girl in the dark.
XVIII
It was a simple trick that saved Vidot. For two consecutive days he watched as Dottie took the slender vials of fleas down, one by one, and handed them to Billy, who then disappeared with each into his hooded workbench. Billy wore his unusual pair of thick magnifying spectacles as he labored, making him resemble some sort of massive and diabolical insect god each time he emerged to take hold of a new subject. Billy would then vanish again beneath the white cloth, working for less than a minute, before reappearing with a carefully harnessed flea. A good number would be attached to carriages while the rest were hooked up to small silver balls. After observing to check that the flea was relatively undamaged by the operation, Billy would carefully hand the flea to Dottie, who would box the creature and place it in a traveling case.
The process was simple in theory but its actual exercise was, like any effort involving the collision of creatures with conflicting desires, fraught with violence. A good portion of the fleas taken beneath the hood were often simply brushed out, landing on the floor, mortally injured or dead, many torn to pieces. Occasionally, Vidot watched the silhouette of Billy’s hooded fist come down with a force that shook the whole table, after which the debris of what must have been an unruly and uncooperative flea would be swept out onto the floor. Vidot surmised that Billy had an uncanny ability to predict a flea’s motions, gathered over a lifetime of wrangling these simple creatures. Of course there was no remorse or even pause amid the constant carnage; these were merely bugs, common vermin, nothing more. The couple and their dog blithely ignored each death, stepping all over the fragments of flea debris as they worked, until they eventually crushed the corpses into dark smudges resembling no more than ink stains on the floorboards.
The entire exercise took about an hour. After they were done, Billy applied wax to his mustache and fastidiously put on his threadbare suit and tied his red-and-black-striped bow tie while Dottie rolled up her net stockings and zipped up the black petticoat with the pink trim. Watching her, Vidot could still remember the budding sexual thrill that had struck him as an adolescent watching the much younger version of Dottie assist a then much handsomer Billy in front of that small carnival crowd. To the enthralled and childish Vidot, she had been as captivating as a blossoming flower, teasing the bees crowded round with the succulent honey lurking there beneath the edges of her pink skirt. She must have been barely twenty then, if that, at the time of her life when every expression she adopted could not help but be coquettish and tempting. Now, though, she was of an age where it was almost too bittersweet to watch her dab on her eyeliner, brush on her rouge, and paint on the black vanity mole above her lip. The two gathered their carnival cases up in their arms and left, turning out the one bare lightbulb as they went, leaving all their captured bugs in the pale shadows nervously tapping against the walls of their slender glass prisons. Vidot did not hop about. Instead, he laid his head against the vial’s cold surface and waited, feeling the hard pressure of time closing in.
A little after the church clock chimed ten, the two would come home. Each night it was clear that they had been worked to the edges of their endurance. Dottie would immediately lie down on the bed, tired and silent, and proceed to undress while remaining horizontal. Across the room, a slouched Billy emptied his pockets of small bills
