Weep For The Gravest Of Our Misfortunes: I Find The Pretty Girl (858 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.8 on 16 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Zampano (View user info) at 2007-04-11 09:51:45 EDT
Act I of IV
I Find The Pretty Girl
I find the pretty girl by herself. She is no classmate of mine. She is not my neighbor. I have never seen her before, but her mother has tied up her hair in white ribbon. Lace, it's called. The woman at the train station calls it lace, but that's later. It won't be so white then. I will have ruined it. I ruin a lot of things.
Like silence. I make clumsy noises, like in the morning, when I need to be woken up and shuttled to the schoolhouse. Twigs snap under me. Birds tell me of their surprise with squawky, flapping anger. The pretty girl is crouched on the bank of the stream. Perhaps she's looking for tadpoles. The weather is getting warmer, and when it's spring like this, I too look in the river for tadpoles fresh out of their eggs and with their baby arms flapping uselessly against their bellies. I keep them in jars filled with dirty water. I feed them leaves and dead flies and smears of jams from the icebox, if my sisters aren't watching. With my help, they become the biggest frogs in the village, and I let them go on the first day of summer. Maybe she does this too.
Or not. I walk out of the field with a great flurry of noise around me. She is quick to her feet, and I watch the petals she's been peeling off flowers fall from fingers and float freely away with the infant frogs. A dozen loves mes, a similar amount of love me nots. Her hair is colored like her eyes, and her eyes are colored like wet bark. It's not a dirty color. Really, it's clean, in the same way the ribbons—the lace—is clean. Curly. An older kid who sat beside me in arithmetic in the fall had hair much like that. His name was Mordachi, but I haven't seen him since winter. He was a foreigner, as were his parents. They've been gone for a long time now. Ever since the first rumblings in the ground, and the thunder that isn't thunder began between the hills.
The men in the streets are tall, and I watch them from the post office on la Rue Martel. Stiff and starchy. Dark clothing, ridiculous hats. They reward themselves with badges and patches on their collars. Guns I could never lift. When they walk, it's always together, always in boots that should make a hundred clomps but instead sound like one man taking his evening stroll. Every turn is on the same dime. They are graceful in their clockwork motions. My father and his gentleman friends could put on the very same uniforms and shoes, but they wouldn't be drawn right. Too much sleeve sticking out, or too loose a collar. You'd be able to hear them a block or two over when marching. The words the strangers use are rocky, and when we try to imitate them in the school yard we give ourselves stomachaches. The words are that deep inside of us.
And the guns. When a man steals a baguette of bread, he'd laugh at my father in the fake uniform and the barrel that didn't point the right way. My father, he is no soldier. The thief could feed his family that night. No hole would have to be dug in the gardens behind the library. The baker wouldn't have to scrub down the bricks in front of his shop. Red, red stains. The other boys and me, we each carry a copper bullet casing with us. They can be picked up freely from the gutters now. We have a lot of thieves.
Mordachi and his family are gone. This pretty girl, she has his hair. Wet bark. Why does she have to look so much like a doll? I am dusty and she has been scrubbed pink with soaps, toilet water. It's called porcelain, her skin. I would touch it, but it will crack. An egg shell, even. And she smells of musk, the damp corner of a closet, the coats and coats of grime in a forgotten attic. Moths live for that smell. She is the plaything of a child from years ago, when my parents were my age, or beyond that even. How dark was the trunk she was locked in? Who has she been stuck with? Might Mordachi share a little bit of that trunk with his family, and that smell of forced loneliness?
Isolation, it's called. I don't know.
It's just her dress. It's old.
I hope she will talk to me.
"Hello, are you looking for tadpoles? Look in the gaps between the rocks. I can show you."
Oh, my face burns. I never should have stuck out my hand. She won't shake it.
"Silly boy," she says.
"Silly girl."
Infants are stupid because they can't remember anything, and they don't say anything. Little kids forget stuff all the time, like simple manners. My sister Lily is only four and won't use her napkin at mealtime. Bigger kids, we can remember things, like all the regions and their capitals, or every multiplication table up to twelve. It's a foolish thing, then, to say I can't remember what happened for an hour or two that followed Silly girl.
That is not true. There are four distinct moment-memories, and these are what they are:
Firstly, I wade into the stream up to my shins and scoop up tadpoles that try to escape between my legs while she drops flower petals the same clean of her ribbons, her lace, onto the water. I ask her if she has been to the village square yet to see the Stur...the Sturmband...Sturmbannfuhrer. My stomach hurts after I try to sound it out. She says she has not been to the village square in such a long time, and that she has no idea what the gut-word is. It's one of the strangers with the guns, I explain. He has a uniform that is colored like soot, or the new blankness in his face. He dangles from this wooden beam that has been erected in the night, with his arms tied behind him, and his neck popped to the side. "You can see his tongue and everything." His men, the other strangers who listened to his every word, are gone from the streets, and my father and the gentlemen of the town, friend or neighbor, stand in front of the houses and stores with their baling forks and kitchen utensils. Some of them have been drinking wine from the bottle.
Secondly, I think to ask her why she is here, but I stop myself. This is my first adult thought. It's called reasoning, and it means that I understand that she herself isn't quite sure why, after months of fake lighting and whispered movements behind false walls, she has been granted the freedom of the grass between her toes, the taste of the sun on her brow. I could ask. She shouldn't answer.
Thirdly, there is a kiss. She isn't sweet like honey or a lemon drop; instead, she is flavored like my chapped lips. It is a kiss, though, and it is followed with her little fingers wrapping the lace ribbon into my hand.
Lastly, there are quiet rappa-taps coming from the village. Echoing booms. Shattering glass. More than one infant is crying.
User Reviews
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-09-23 17:50:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
http://www.ubersite.com/m/111745#2527241
Thanks. And ditto.
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-09-19 14:34:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-04-23 13:35:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2007-04-12 09:46:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Hmmm...
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-04-11 23:50:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Have a plus 2 just to encourage this sort of posting.
Maybe a +1 normally.
Yes, I'm feeling pompous today.
Submitted by i_can_get_you_a_toe (user info) at 2007-04-11 17:03:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by DudeThatsBOSH (user info) at 2007-04-11 13:35:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2007-04-11 12:56:29 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I didn't like this at all at first read, but I gave it another shot, and liked it
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-04-11 11:35:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Siren (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:34:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Very nice. Too bad I always miss sequels and this is probably the last I'll read of it.
Submitted by ChaosJester (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:29:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Pretty good...
This really feels like a little boy telling a story (albeit one who seems almost autistic).
I like how you almost nonchalantly slip in 'Ze Germans' and what seems to be a village rebellion against fascism.
The main theme could have been tightened up a bit; parts of it seem almost choppy but that may have been intentional.
All in all, I liked it and look forward to the sequels
Submitted by mynameisandy (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:28:13 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Very descriptive. More please.
Submitted by DrogoRoch (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:23:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I apologise for Sico below; his internet time is nearly up for the day I promise. "Come on Sico it's time for your meds; there's a dear."
I did read this and I agree with the girlies below. Bloody good.
Submitted by sicosemen (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:15:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
That's horsehit, inion doesn't know how to read so you just got lied to.
I, on the other hand, will be completely honest and tell you that I didn't read this because I was too busy slathering my burrito shell with guacamole and sour cream. later I'm going to put some hotsauce, no, scratch that, duck sauce on a spring roll, no scratch that, egg roll. I can't wait.
Submitted by inion_de_trua (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:10:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
seconded.
Submitted by LittleMonster (user info) at 2007-04-11 10:05:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I shall be waiting for more