Margaret Killjoy (15:19)
And we're back. When Jean Marc first showed up in Eletheria, he was all lean muscle and bruised colored eyes. A feral city thing. He had a kind of violent sadness coming off of him, toxicity of constant fear. His face looks softer now even though he's older. From certain angles you can almost see what he would have looked like as a child if a place like the city would even allow a childhood for someone like him. We walk all the way to the place where Eleutheria's compound used to be the wrecked carcass of the old prison with its big ragged hole opening into what used to be the north wing, all jagged with twisted pieces of rebar and steel eye beams sticking out everywhere like teeth in a mean, hungry mouth. I came to the prison alone last week, the day it rained all morning and the ruins smelled like wet concrete and wet ashes. I'm not sure what I was doing there. I found a dead sparrow right in the bomb blast's steel toothed mouth, lying with its wings spread on the ground. Its neck lolled limp in my cupped hands, and I thought to myself, there is softness in everything. There is softness in the sunless world inside the old prison, in the smell of old, old ashes that comes back up out of the ground after it rains. Some of those ashes are the burnt up bones of the men and women and little kids who are trapped inside after the bombs and back when the compound was still at the ruins. Sometimes I would find little pieces of bone in the buckets of ash I brought out for the gardens. Whenever that happened, I would keep them in my pocket and bring them up to the third hill after I was done, the highest one where you can see into the junkyard and what used to be the highway. I would dig little pits deep enough that the rain wouldn't wash them up and say a few words to the bone pieces as I scraped the dirt back over them and packed it down. Sometimes I would pull out some of my hair or make little cuts on my fingers and squeeze drops of blood out so they would know I hadn't forgotten why they died, why the prison and all the places around it were empty for us to build our home in the first place. For days I would feel the little pin pricks on my hands where I'd cut myself whenever I was washing the dishes or cutting potatoes or chopping wood. The pain would remind me of the bone pieces and the fire. I was too young to remember, and there was softness in that as well. Jean Marc and I stand beside each other in the prison's jagged mouth, our hands not quite touching, looking into the dark. My eyes scanned the ground for the sparrow's little body, but it's gone now, carried off by some animal. The flat field behind us is still surrounded by a high, high fence, although there have been torn up bits for as long as I remember. Some of the older people, like Sarah and James and Yehuda, tell me that it was a yard where they would let the prisoners exercise way, way back when, when the place was a normal prison. After everything changed. They never let anybody outside. There are people in the city who want to help us, jean Marc says, still looking into the dark. My face tenses up when he says it, and he notices they're not rats, not this time. I don't say anything. My hand leaves my side and traverses the space between us, meaning to touch him, although it stops short of contact and falls again, numb and heavy. At the compound there's an old mirror nailed to the door of the building that used to be a barn, and I catch my own eyes reflected in it as I'm closing the door behind us. I look worse. I look the same. Everyone can tell. No one can tell. I'm imagining it. I'm imagining everything. Jean Marc wrote a sign that says you're ugly and nailed it above the mirror because he was sick of people looking at themselves. I see it and smile as I latch the doors back shut again. The children assail us before we've taken our boots off, and my smile widens at the small hand searching my pockets, the laughing voices. I close my hand around my bottle of painkillers and Flora's tiny hot fingers try to pry it open again, wanting to know what I have. After the sun goes down, everyone goes outside where scrap wood from the dump site is already piled for the fire. It will be summer soon and there will be music and fire and laughing voices every night. I leave without speaking and go up to the top floor of the third building, where I sleep in a room which is really just one of the hall closets from back when the compound was a farm with a house made for three or four people, not 30. In the dark I think about Dr. Hansen, her soft crackly voice telling me I should be more careful, her scarred up fingertips brushing the hair out of my face, pinning it behind my ears. I dream she lets me lay my head on her stomach while she combs my hair. My mind drifts, pacified by the fantasy. When I open my eyes, she is not her anymore. She is dead, like the people on the propaganda leaflets that Jean Marc showed me, lurid photos showing the atrocities of the regime, Bloated faces. A woman's pregnant belly slid open like it's been unzipped. Her intestines are laid in a slick membrane knot on her chest and you can see the baby inside, no longer protected by the cradle of her pelvic bones, layers of dissected tissue pinned and ruched like paper roses, flesh petals, curved bone. I startle awake when Jean Marc kicks open the door. He shuts it again as quietly as his panic will allow, and darts into the corner beside where I'm lying. Shh, he says, and I can hear things banging downstairs, angry words being exchanged. There's an edge of laughter in his voice, and I know he's done something really stupid, but part of him is proud of it. The stairs creak with heavy footsteps, but I can tell from the sound of the hard soled shoes that it's Mason. He's infuriated this time. He's got a knife, says Jean Marc close to my ear. I can tell by the way he's walking. He's walking with confidence. The footsteps thud past us. Mason has been drinking. He yells Jean Marc's name twice, and then there's just silence, then a noise of frustration and he hurls something solid and heavy against the wall near where we're hiding. Jean Marc's hand wraps around mine in the darkness, but once Mason goes back downstairs again, he breaks out into laughter. He's been holding back the whole time. His wine smelling lips press against my cheek, and then he disappears again, probably leaving through one of the upstairs windows that leads onto the roof. In the morning, Yehuda looks exhausted, awake before everyone else, peeling a mound of potatoes into one of the big plastic washtubs. A pile of broken tinder that used to be one of the chairs lies gathered into a neat pile by the wood stove. He smiles when he sees me and I sit down beside him and take the knife off my belt and start peeling, thinking that's the best way I can tell him I'm sorry, not for anything I've done wrong, just for the way things are in general. He doesn't say anything, but I know he understands. Sometimes I think Yehuda is my father. Everyone takes care of the kids together at Ilithuria, feeds them and sews their clothes and teaches them how to mix bread dough and plant tomato seedlings and feed the chickens. But sometimes Yehuda looks at me in a special way, kind of sad and searching, and I think he's trying to find pieces of my mother in my face. Did you see the helicopter yesterday? He asks eventually, and fear jabs its sharp beak into my chest. No, I say, and I know what he's thinking, that we. That we have to leave soon, that we have to go north to where there's still places to hide. Jagged mountains where helicopters can't land. Brooms of dried nettles and motherworts sway from the ceiling rafters, newly risen sun spilling in through the crack in the door that's been open to let the spring air in home, the illusion of permanence. James comes down the stairs with two of the kids, sad, dark eyed Matthias asleep in his arms while Aretha straggles behind them, thin and rangy, her small face serious. He eases himself onto the bench besides Yehuda and they sit with their knees touching. Yehuda puts his arms around James and Matthias and they stay like that for a while with their eyes closed. Makes me sad for some reason, and I try not to look. Mina, what do you think we can do for Jean Marc? James asks me. I look at the potato I'm peeling and shrug my shoulders at him. For don't you mean about? They both laugh, although they try not to. He's not here and nobody knows where he's gone. Please, Mina, you seem to know him better than anyone else does. I do know Jean Marc better than anyone else. I want to tell him, and that's the reason I really don't care what happens to him. He'll be back, I tell them instead. He doesn't know how to take care of himself out here where there aren't any rich people to rob. Aretha pulls at my sleeve and frowns. She wants us to stop talking about it. I'm sorry, Reetha. We won't fight, I say, and I wrap my arm around her narrow shoulders and pull her onto the bench beside me. And do you know what else is always beside you on the bench? Just right there, ready to put a supportive arm around your shoulders like an old friend. That's right, it's the adze.
