A A Balaskovits - Magic for Unlucky Girls (retail) (pdf)

A.A. Balaskovits

c i g a M for r i U G n l u c ky

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Copyright ©2017 by A.A. Balaskovits All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express permission of the publisher or author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Balaskovits, A. A., author. Title: Magic for unlucky girls : stories / A.A. Balaskovits. Description: Santa Fe, NM : SFWP, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016033041 (print) | LCCN 2016039274 (ebook) | ISBN 9781939650665 (trade paper : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781939650672 (pdf) | ISBN 9781939650689 (epub) | ISBN 9781939650696 ( mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Girls—Fiction. | Fairy tales—Adaptations. Classification: LCC PS3602.A594 M34 2017 (print) | LCC PS3602.A594 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033041

Published by SFWP 369 Montezuma Ave. #350 Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 428-9045 www.sfwp.com Find the author at www.aabalaskovits.com Cover art: Arthur Rackham, “Goblin Market”

For my Mother and my Father

Contents Put Back Together Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Postpartum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Three Times Red. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Let Down Your Long Hair and Then Yourself. . . . . .

Suburban Alchemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Ibex Girl of Qumran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Beasts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 The Romantic Agony of Lemon Head . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Mermaid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Bloody Mary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Juniper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 All Who Tremble. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Put Back Together Again

t was July when I first saw him, a hot July, the kind of July that you

remember because you spent the whole month drenched, and you

were amazed that your body could stand to lose all its water. We all looked to the sky. The devout clasped their hands. That month I kept a

tally of gunshot wounds blaring into the ER. During the winter, when it’s too cold to set a pinky out the door, people keep their guns in shoe-

boxes and use kitchen knives. Then they roll bloody out of ambulances. The bodies come in on their backs or their sides, porcelain and metal

handles sticking out from their skin like deformed arms. The whole city was at the mercy of the weather, blandly dictating how we would mutilate one another that season.

Lizzy told me that, before med school, she used to spend her week-

ends chasing ambulances. There was something wrong with her blood, I suppose, because she said the noise made everything inside of her

bounce and sing. Lizzy, I told her, blood always moves. It doesn’t know how to stop until it stops. She was mesmerized by the red and white

blinding lights, the sirens that left a trail of yelping dogs in their wake. Someone, a teacher I think, told me that sirens were made a particular

pitch, one that made dogs, no matter how many times they heard it, into frightened little pups, barking mad for their mothers.

With the heat came the earthquakes—low, rumbling earth beneath

the concrete. The ambulances were going off all the time now, and even a minor shake would send people into the ER, holding their heads or

4 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

arms or legs from where they had hit themselves against their coffee tables, or each other. Even in the mad noise, it is easy to be bored, just something else to grow accustomed to when you hear it all the time.

That’s how I knew he was not a man, not like everyone wanted him

to be; the sirens still made him whimper and turn his head. ***

Men who dream cities dream stability, a kind of urban grace. When they planned their skyscrapers, they circled the part of the coast they

would build on. They did not know it was a fault zone, which I suppose

was no fault of their own. Their desire was pure in those early stages. Who could have blamed them for continuing on even as the ground began to groan and thrash? They built on sick ground; they could not see deformity for soil.

They planned where each building would go, down to excruciating

detail. In the city museum, behind glass, you can see their blueprints and all the smudges and erasure marks where they could not decide

what should go at its core. In black, thick letters they eventually decided on St. Ruth’s, our trauma center. She stood above the others, and on its

sides the other buildings decreased in size, like a glass and steel pyramid. *** There were too many people in the ER the first day I saw him. There

are always too many in the ER, a whole bunch of humpty-dumptys. That’s what Lizzy called them, the men and women and children who

were broken beyond repair but still crawled to the doors asking for help, expecting help, growing angry when they were beyond medical help. Lizzy used the same expression for the people she dated—some you hump once or twice, and some you kept around a little longer before they were sent off to the dump.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 5

Some of the hump-dumps in the waiting room would have been

better off on their own with glue and bandages, but they trusted the

glue and bandages of doctors more. I gave them clipboards and pens

and sent them, if they were bleeding enough, back to see the doctors. If they were only in pain, or could speak clearly, I had them sit and wait.

They came in together, a tall man with blond hair and a small

woman, barely five feet tall. She was leaning on him. There was blood, dark, the kind that hits the air and congeals. She’d been bleeding for a

while from her shoulder and her stomach. I knew she was a dumpty. I

was shocked she could move at all and hadn’t come in an ambulance,

but some people just don’t bother. I get that; ambulances are expensive, especially when you’re just going to die anyway. It’s a terrible gift to leave behind, those last bills.

The man had blood on him. He said, Sorry baby, sorry baby, sorry

baby, and he was crying or sweating thick mucous all over his face.

Sir, I told him, you have to wait here. She’ll be fine, I lied. I called

in the codes. I said, The nurses will take her to the back. They’ll care for her. You’re not allowed there. Sir.

The moment the body goes from structured to diseased is a slow

one, so slow you don’t notice a change until it’s already spread and

invaded the lungs, the heart, the pancreas. Violence is not so different from disease.

The man had a gun. It should not have shocked me, but it did. When

he pulled it out and aimed it at the girl, I felt disappointed and sick. The ground rumbled beneath us, and I rumbled with it.

I thought, how did he get past the metal detectors? And then I

thought that was funny.

I’m staying with her, he said.

I backed away. The humptys in the waiting area screamed and fell

on the ground and covered their heads, just like we had been taught for earthquakes.

Sir, I said. Sir, calm down.

6 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

The ER nurses were staring at him. The bleeding woman was losing

herself all over the floor. When this was all over they would have to disinfect everything under her. Bring in outsiders who did this sort of thing with hazmat suits. The carpet would have to be ripped out. It’ll be OK, I said. It’s going to be OK.

You bitch, he said and aimed the gun at me. You’re all bitches.

He shot. I heard it blast. Had it hit, the bullet would have gone through

me. My face—each tiny pore, that ugly mole behind my ear, the grease and

oil welled up under my eyes—would explode. There is a certain kind of

intrusion that is unbearable to think of, from people who do not bother to touch you, but can make everything in you shut down. It’s not like in the

movies or TV where they show a clear entrance and clear exit, like a bug that burrows in and escapes with a trickle of red. When it happens, your face, or your arm or your belly, burst outward, disintegrate in the heat.

I heard the crash of my computer tumbling off my desk. I saw my

papers flying around me, all those pens, the three clipboards, an empty stapler.

It did not hit me. I did not explode. A man, someone new, was

in front of me. I had not seen him, not heard him. I dropped to my knees and felt my head. The man with the gun was on the ground, the

ER nurses holding him down with their bodies. He was screaming and

wailing on about his girl, and she was on the ground, forgotten, dying or dead.

I rolled my hands over my face. I was there. ***

The humptys spoke in awe to the police: the strange man had been shot, but he hadn’t taken the bullet like he was supposed to. He wrestled the

gunman to the floor. They fought, there was screaming, the blood from that dead girl was everywhere. Whatever wasn’t stapled to the ground was

overturned. It wasn’t a major earthquake, just a small one, the kind that

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 7

shook vases off their stands onto people’s heads. The police took diligent notes and read them back to me. Later, they told me the blond girl had

died on the floor. Her name was Shannon. Shannon had been very small. The police asked me if I knew where the strange man had gone, but

I told them I did not.

Do you know him? they asked. No. I did not know him.

Ma’am, they said. When you’re feeling better, we have some ques-

tions. Just routine. Are you feeling all right? Ma’am? ***

I found him in the corner of the trauma bay, cradling his body with

his head pressed deeply into his jeans. I was shaking; he was breathing. When he looked up at me I was almost sick from the amount of blood

on his forehead. I thought he was going to die, and it should have been me. This poor son of a bitch took a bullet for me.

Jesus, I said. Steady now. I can perform first aid.

I approached him with gauze. He had blue eyes, really awful clear

blue eyes with a brown ring around them—I’d seen eyes like that

before—and I brought the white to his forehead and wiped the skin.

Just like wiping sh*t off the sidewalk. There was no wound, no entrance, no pain. He did not move, even when I dropped the gauze and backed away. This was worse than the man and the gun. I did not expect this. They said the bullet hit you, I said.

He was gone a moment later when the attending physician found

me huddled in the corner, as far away from the gauze as I could be. ***

I passed my boards with high scores, and after my pharmacy rotations I took a job in the ER. A layperson, or a nurse, would have normally been

8 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

hired to take insurance and health history from walk-ins. Lizzy helped HR get past my over-qualifications: I know the effects of the medica-

tions the patients are popping and how they react to one another, I can better decide what is serious and what can wait, I can perform mouthto-mouth.

During rotations, I sat behind glass and doled out meds to anyone

who had a handwritten permission slip from their doctors, or gave

generic Sudafed to kids who wanted to try to make meth in the trunk of their cars. After it exploded, and it always exploded, Lizzy would tell me about the way they looked with half their faces gone, and I tried to remember if they were the blue or brown shifty-eyes of the

little sh*ts who tried to sound stuffed up when they asked politely for little red pills.

Those evenings when I went to her apartment and sat at her

cramped dinette, Lizzy would say it’s inevitable that people hurt themselves. Don’t feel bad. Hey, did you hear the one about the women with the IUD?

I hadn’t heard the one about the woman with the IUD.

An ambulance whirred by, screaming, and we both listened.

She gets an IUD, Lizzy said. Doctor fiddles it up between her legs,

pats her on the ass, and tells her to have a good day. Some months later she comes into the emergency room real dignified and dazed. She has a

brown paper bag and she dumps it on the desk. It’s a bloody fetus with the IUD stuck in its head. Dumpty-dumpty. Oh yeah? I said.

She asks for a refund, of course. Isn’t that horrible? I said.

*** Lizzy and I went to med school together. She studied surgery; I stuck my nose in pharmaceutical textbooks. We took classes on medical ethics

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 9

together. It was an easy friendship, someone to complain to about the

job and who wasn’t grossed out when one of us had to say she dug around in someone’s grandmother that day. There was no danger of competing for residencies. We made a game where we would tell one

another the worst stories we heard or saw while practicing, some of

them so bad we said if it happened to us, or if it happened again, we

would drop out and take up guitar like the other med kids who tried to pay their bills sitting on the corners strumming rhythm. Yet when it happened too many times that the ugliness became rote expectation, we

told the stories and pretended to be surprised. Sometimes we told them with our mouths on one another’s, and sometimes with our hands, but

those tellings, those movements, were not permanent. Just an ache that needed to be expressed with bodies, and a familiar body was best.

What did the man look like, Lizzy asked me, after I told her about

the shooting. The bulletproof guy. Blue eyes, I said. Really blue.

sh*t. I was stuck on a kidney transplant. Waste of a good organ.

Woman’s got an ongoing marriage of her lips on a bottle. I thought she was at the bottom of the list.

She’s got the money for a brand spanking new one, never touched

a drop in its life. Your guy is in the papers, Lizzy said. They’re calling him the Miracle-Man. You’re not the only one. You heard about that

fire on Fourth? The Catholic school? He saved three kids and their plaid

jumpers, all of it. The kids were half burned, but he was perfectly fine. Not a scratch on him. Jesus.

Sounds like he’s going to get around to all of us, she said. *** Within a week, the man was like an earthquake, touching everywhere

you could see. They printed photos of what people thought he looked

10 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

like—a mess of cheekbones and floppy hair—and discussed him on the evening news. They ran side-by-side headlines in the paper: Unknown

Miracle-Man Saves The Day right next to Unstable Grounds: Will Our

City Crash? Some of the smaller rags called him the antichrist, a fake messiah, and they claimed he was a sign the city was going to hell. The rapture, they said. Repent. They made up glossy brochures with warning

signs of the devil and handed them out on corners. They left their palms out, spread, if you accidentally took one.

People were carrying signs for him, marching in rows down the

streets, hanging their signs in their apartment windows, having them printed on T-shirts. There were all sorts of messages for him in English

and Chinese and Russian. Go away, they said. Save us, they said. Please help. We need you. And others, Miracle-Baby, marry me?

He’s like a pill, I thought. After swallowing, it’s scientific magic,

and suddenly or slowly everything fixes itself and you don’t even need to know how it works. The only ritual is in doctor’s scripts and cash exchange.

When I was a young girl, I thought illness was when the strands

of the body that vibrated together became frayed, like strings in old sweaters. Pills broke apart, dissolved, and they would attach to those

strings and unfray them, retwist them, heal them, make them new.

But that’s not entirely true. Pills retighten our muscles and our veins, making them unnaturally strong, keeping us together long enough to

grow old and cultivate cancer. And you can’t fight cancer unless you are willing to kill off some part of yourself. There is no miracle; there is only holding on.

And once we crack open, we are all infestation. Cranial fluids,

spinal fluids, blood, and pus. One of the first things they showed us in school was the slow decomposition of a body. Within minutes of

dying the cells break down and pollute with carbon dioxide. It starts in the stomach and spreads. In a week those gases reach the face. The skin discolors and begins to slide off the bones. The gases in us rise and

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 11

release; we expand. We look like we’re floating, a kind of rotting magic. That’s why we have to get the dead in the ground or in the freezers or the fire as fast as possible before we witness this decomposition. When

I first saw a body bloat twice its size, I vomited. I had to watch the eyeballs and intestines liquefy, then the muscular organs melt. The skin splits and falls off from our bones like finely cooked pork. The muscles

turn into waxy soap. The blood pools on whatever side the body lies on, stomach or back. Like a rash. In that way, we are not so different from the rust on the buildings that house us.

Our bodies are only temporary; they are supposed to be temporary.

But this man was not temporary.

*** I paid too much for my apartment, a sh*tty one-room fourteen stories

high with a bed, a chair, a desk, and a fridge that was shorter than my chest. Everything in it was green, from the bedspread to the pale walls

to the one picture I halfheartedly put up of a clock, frozen at five-eighteen.

It had a balcony allowing for a lonely freedom, somewhere to smoke

so I didn’t have to walk down the stairs and inhale with the rest of the

people in my building. I liked inhaling and watching the filter spot with brown and black, the reminder of what I was taking in. At least I was taking something in.

I didn’t smoke during the day. One too many people made just

loud enough comments about how horrible it was to be a health-care

professional and know how badly I’m f*cking myself up. Or the short, fat ladies who walked by and coughed, that strained cough when their

throats were clear, because they were too polite to say anything. Or

the old men with polos and Bluetooth, saying what a shame it was, such a young thing like me doing this, and their mothers died from lung cancer.

12 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

At night I went out on my balcony every twenty minutes.

He was out there. That man. I didn’t know for how long. The sun

had not yet set, and I could see it fading on the mush-yellow threads of his hair. He hunched against the stone. His feet were bare.

I had a long knife for butchering beef off the bone, sharp enough

to cut through fish scales and skin. I’ve never used it; I hate cutting into flesh. I held it in front of me and knelt in my kitchen. I watched him

all night. He had a strong back, and I could see the outline of bones indenting his shirt.

He shuddered only once, a great heave that lifted his whole body

into tension. I trembled the knife and closed my eyes. He was gone when I opened them.

*** Every night he was out there, whimpering when the sirens blazed past. Sometimes I only saw him for a few minutes before I blinked and he was gone, other times he was there all night, rocking, his hands around his head.

It was loud at night. I could hear the dim buzz of the lights, the

automated bell of the convenience mart across the street banging when the doors open. The people laughing, sighing, talking down below. And

the steady, impertinent jerk of the building, when everyone shut up for a second to wait and worry if something bigger was coming. *** I had trouble sleeping at my apartment with him out there, so I asked

Lizzy if I could spend the night with her. I didn’t tell her about the man. I didn’t think she would believe me, or worse, she’d want to come over and look. She didn’t mind, said she liked the company. It’s miserable to

live with someone else sometimes, but even more miserable to live alone.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 13

At night, I watched her undress down to her panties—striped

blue boy boxers with ripped lace along the edges—and took pictures

of her with her camera. She posed with her ass stretched out and her

hair or her hands covering her breasts. Her hair was done in pigtails, long enough to almost touch the elastic blue band around her hips. She

looked straight at the camera and smiled or pouted in turn. Sometimes, she asked me to only photograph her from the neck down.

After each click she bounced over and examined the photo and

either pushed delete or handed it back to me. I took twenty pictures of her, and when we were done I helped her curl plastic wrap around her lower torso all the way down to her thighs. I waited outside the bathroom while she showered.

Once, when we were sharing horrible stories we had heard over

drafts of thick beer—the girl with the twenty-pound colon, the guy who stuck the needle up his ass to see if he would get high quicker—Lizzy

told me about the night she had been at a bar with a man she didn’t like. She entertained him on boring nights because he was generous with

food and drink, because he had been a lieutenant or a sergeant in the military, and because he always had fresh-cut hair and a firm chin. He

continued to buy her drinks but stopped himself after two, and when

he drove her home he drove to his home first and asked her to come upstairs. It was next to the train tracks. She remembered the trains very clearly. Perhaps he was threatening, maybe sexy, but Lizzy went up and

slurred and had her body banged into the fridge. She banged against it so hard it fell over and, laughing, they stood it upright before collapsing on the bed like rag dolls. He was rough, and she had bruises

and a urinary tract infection that felt like hot steel when the last train cut through her head and woke her up. She dressed and asked him if

he came, and he said no. She felt around inside her, around the burn, and felt satisfied with his answer. She refused a ride and sagged home.

After, instead of sex, she posted pictures of her body onto hard-

to-find websites. Men, maybe women, she said it was hard to tell from

14 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

their usernames, would send her electronic money, and she would mail the panties, carefully folded into Ziplocks. The people who bought

them, I imagine, spread the bag’s lips apart real slow, like they were

spreading her legs, and lifted her panties to their faces and inhaled, or maybe they put them on their tongues and rolled them about, like caviar, or wine.

She had started with shoes, but the money was in panties.

She was currently working on a special order for a man who believed

she was nineteen and working her way through cosmetology school. For

a thousand dollars she was wearing a single pair for two weeks and was

not to take them off for anything; showering, her period, even to piss. She drew the line at sh*tting herself and said she cheated on the pissing

part. She was going to pee on it the day she sent it. To cover the smell she doused her outer clothes with perfume.

It’s not that I don’t like sex with men, she said as I helped to remove

the wet plastic paper. I do, I really do. It’s just that I haven’t been able

to get it up, you know? This is safer. It’s cleaner. Just me dirtying myself. I helped her replace the wet plastic paper with dry, wrapping it

around her torso. We clambered onto her bed because she only had a couch piled with papers and books and the clothes she hadn’t bothered to carry to the Laundromat for weeks. She kept buying more clothes instead of taking them in.

She wore two pairs of baggy pants and a sports bra. I wore a long-

sleeved shirt. It was hot in her apartment. I could hear the air conditioner thrumming, but it was half-hearted, weak against the heat. You can take off your shirt, you know, she said.

I shook my head. I had not taken my shirt off in front of anyone

for a long time, not even Lizzy. I could barely stand to look at myself without one on. She took off her bra.

Did I tell you the one about the girl with the birth control? she asked. Maybe. Probably. Did it end poorly? Always does.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 15

Lizzy rolled onto her back and put her hand under her head. I could

see the outline of her lips and the curve of her nipples in the low light. The

blinds gently bounced against her open window. I rolled onto my stomach. I guess her doctor didn’t tell her how to use the pills, so she goes

into the pharmacy, after about a week, trying to get her prescription refilled. Are you sure you haven’t heard this one? Sounds familiar. Tell it anyway.

The pharmacist looks through her file and tells her she shouldn’t be

in so soon for a refill, but the girl says she’s out.

I reached my hand over to Lizzy’s stomach, that smooth expanse,

the small curl of her belly from hamburgers and beer on weekend nights. I watched her face.

She’d been taking them all right, used them all up. She put one up

her vagin* every time she had sex with her boyfriend. Christ, I said. I spread my fingers over her belly.

That tickles. No, don’t move; it’s all right. I don’t mind. So, the

girl, yeah, she’s got a terrible yeast infection. And on top of it, surprise, she’s pregnant.

The small print is too small. No kidding.

Lizzy put her hand on my back. I could give you a massage if you

want, she asked. But this is nice, too. Your turn. Tell me one.

I haven’t got one. Haven’t been to work since the shooting. Remember one.

I thought about that girl with her blue eyes. In our stories, we never

really gave details, not about what the hump-dumps looked like, unless it was necessary.

There was this girl who came in during my rotations, I said. Near

the end.

When you were working down on Lawrence?

Yeah, the small shop. She was getting her co*cktail. Covered by

insurance, thankfully. She was only sixteen.

16 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

How did she contract?

No idea. She had a baby, too.

I felt Lizzy’s hand stroke the side of my breast. I stilled. Was she breastfeeding? Lizzy asked. I think so. Yeah. Two co*cktails.

I rolled onto my hip and shoulder.

You haven’t told me this one, Lizzy said. No.

I touched her sweatpants with one hand and put my other near her

mouth. She was smiling.

Go on, she said. Go on.

I felt the line of a scar on her belly, a line of reformed skin that

never looks as pretty or feels like the original. Scars are too smooth to be

like normal skin. They feel used, and so much better, like a small rebirth, a reformation, a testament to having experienced pain and triumphed.

Lizzy curved her hand on my hips. I closed my eyes and felt under-

neath the stretchy waistband on her lounge pants. The Saran Wrap was

like her scar, so damn smooth. It wrinkled, quiet, but I heard it over the sound of the air conditioner, that weird unnatural smooth sound. I saw her hand moving under my shirt and went still. I removed my hand and rolled away.

Hey, she said. Hey.

I got up and put on my pants.

I can take it off, she said. He’ll never know. Is it a guy? Probably.

I reached around for my bag. Are you leaving?

I’m out of cigarettes, I said. Are you coming back?

Outside, I lit up one of the emergency cigs I kept in a plastic box in

one of the thousands of zippers in my bag. I smoked all of them on the

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 17

way back to my apartment, a good twenty blocks. I checked the balcony when I got back in. The man wasn’t there. *** The earthquakes were getting worse. People with money or families out

of state started a great migration to anywhere that would have them, but there were still many left behind. The hospital called and asked me to come in—we know you’re not over what happened, they said, but we

need you. The ER is full. A lot of them just need to be patched up. You can do first aid.

I let it go to voicemail. I considered showering to leave my apart-

ment but eventually just left and picked up a carton of cigarettes and

a case of diet soda. Lizzy called twice and didn’t leave a message. I

watched a lot of TV. Sitcoms. I couldn’t stomach the news. I couldn’t leave.

He was there when I came out of the bathroom after the sun went

down. That bastard, I really wanted a cigarette. I considered sneaking downstairs, but being trapped on the elevator during an earthquake scared me. I hated stairs.

I picked up my boning knife and slowly opened the balcony door.

He didn’t move. I slipped the knife out in front of me and felt my way to the other side.

You just stay there, I said. You’re trespassing. This is my balcony, so

you don’t get to make any movement. You can stay, but don’t move.

I lit a cigarette and sat down. The muddy clouds were out, but even

if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to see the stars, not with all our light.

The man looked at me. Even in the dark his eyes were obnoxiously

blue. I pointed the knife at him. Hey, I said, don’t move. He stared.

I butted my cigarette and lit another one.

18 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

I said, I guess it’s polite to thank you for saving my life. You didn’t

have to, but thank you all the same. He kept looking at me.

Do you want one? I asked. No, you don’t. People like you don’t

smoke. One of the first people I saw cracked open was a smoker. Lungs

were soot, all black. But that didn’t make me want to stop. It makes sense. You know the health symbol, the snake and the rod? I always thought the snake was poisonous, and a rod, well, how the f*ck are you supposed to heal people with that? Healing means hurting first.

He watched me. I watched him. Around us, I could hear the noise

of the city, like the ignorant buzz of cicadas flying, and falling, when they hit a halogen light.

*** I grew used to his presence but thought of him as nothing more than a curious spider, the kind I used to have in my bedroom as a child. They

would form their detailed webs in the corners, and I was too scared to kill them or touch them and put them outside and save them, so I let

them stay until they died on their own because nothing fell into their nets. Eventually my father would come in and squish them in bunched up toilet paper, because it was kinder, he said, to kill them quickly then to let them starve.

I still took my knife with me. In case. ***

Lizzy kept calling and hanging up. The hospital stopped calling. On the

news, they had experts and politicians recommending that people move or stay, depending on the station. They went out to get the voice of the people on the streets: What do you think of this man? Do you think he’s really there to save us?

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 19

Man, said a teenager, the mic held up to his face. I don’t know. He

kind of, he kind of seems like he has to, you know? Else why else would he be here? What’s he got to prove?

I changed the channel. This time, it was a woman with a pressed

suit and pulled back hair. She was sitting next to an anchorwoman who looked the same, hair and suit, except the other was blond.

Hysteria, really. A red herring created by the media to keep us from

talking about the real issues. Unemployment is the highest it’s been in years, and with the earthquakes creating serious questions about our

infrastructure, the politicos must have prayed for such a man to come

along and confuse voters, to save them from the excuse to have to talk about what we elected them to discuss.

Have you seen this man? the blond asked. Only pictures.

And what do you think of him? He’s handsome, certainly.

*** Lizzy left me a voicemail:

Why aren’t you answering? Are you OK? I’m really worried about

you. I have to talk to you, please; it’s about that miracle guy. Do you believe in him? I didn’t, I didn’t, and I was wrong, I was so wrong. She coughed for a second.

I jumped. I mean, jumped, she said. From the roof of my apartment

building. I don’t know what I was thinking. I lost this little girl on the

table. She was seven, Jesus, just f*cking seven years old. And I kept thinking how unfair it was, how useless I was. Why haven’t you been returning my calls? I thought I was OK, you know? It wasn’t serious.

And I, I just jumped. I didn’t even think about it. I just wanted

to get some air and then I thought about it and I didn’t stop thinking about it. I jumped. I thought I was going to be some broken dumpty on

20 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

the sidewalk, and they’d declare me dead and forget me in the morgue. But he caught me. He came out of nowhere. He can fly, Jesus, did you know he could fly? I really think he can save us. I really do.

She repeated my name over and over until it sounded strange and

unfamiliar to me.

I dialed her number but ended the call before it connected. ***

He was out on my balcony. I lit up and offered him one, but he didn’t respond. He huddled with his arms over his knees and his face smashed against his arms and watched.

Thank you, I said. You saved a friend of mine.

He moved his shoulders up, the barest of shrugs, but it was some-

thing, and for some reason it made me happy.

Take off your shirt, I told him on a whim. He didn’t move.

My hands were shaking, but I managed to get my shirt over my

head. I didn’t look at him but I knew he was staring at my breasts, and

not in the way a man stares at a woman’s breasts, because no one who

had seen mine looks at them in that way. Your eyes remind me of this girl I once saw, I told him. She had horrible eyes. Yours are nice.

His arms dropped to his sides, and he moved closer to me. To get

a better look.

Once, I told him, much the way Lizzy and I would tell one another

stories. Once, there was a young girl who needed medicine because she was very ill. I imagine men like you don’t get ill.

She asked me for her prescription. I didn’t remember her, though

I bet I’d filled it for her before. HIV-positive, stage three, so there were a lot of pills, a lot of checking in the computer to make sure that she

was on time, that we weren’t overdosing her, that we got everything right. You can’t trust people to keep track of all of it on their own. She

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 21

was supposed to pick up two prescriptions, and the computer said she always picked up two. One for her, and one for her baby. I took a long drag.

I asked her, with a row of people waiting behind her, why she wasn’t

getting the medicine for her baby. I expected her to tell me that the baby had died, or was being cared for by someone else. I was prepared to be embarrassed for asking. She said, she looked at me in the eye and said

that she stopped dosing her baby. She wanted to see what would happen to her if she stopped taking them. I inhaled and exhaled.

I almost dropped my cigarette when he touched me, gently, like he

was scared of me or scared I would move or yell. His fingers brushed the scar between my breasts, that long white and thick puckered line.

Accident, I said. I was on a bike and a car hit me. They had to crack

open my chest.

Take off your shirt, I told him. Just take it off.

He lifted his hands up and kept them there, so I pulled the shirt

over his head.

Don’t move, I told him. I want to see something.

My father’s boning knife was sharp enough to cut my finger when I

ran my fingers along the edges, so I knew I wouldn’t have to press deep. I put it to his chest, below his nipple, and ran it across. When there was no mark, I did it again, harder.

I bet you’re jealous that you can’t have a scar like mine.

I was angry at him, not because he touched me, not because he

saved Lizzy and me and so many others and allowed all this madness

to keep going on, but because he was distant, unable to tear or break, and all those miracles and acts of bravery he performed weren’t really anything special.

I told him to put his shirt back on and he did.

He took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his own and

breathed in. He coughed. It was such an unremarkable human sound,

22 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

that weakness, that recognizable part of me that was ugly and yet, because he was nothing like me, I clung to it. I started crying in that

way I didn’t know you could cry, when all the water runs out of your eyes and you don’t make a sound, but you can’t stop either. Thank you, I told him. Thank you.

I was grateful to him and sick for it. *** When you cough your body goes through three phases; the inhalation,

where you voluntarily take a breath against the scratches in your throat, knowing full well that what comes next will hurt, but there will be a sick

pleasurable release as well. Then you force the air against your vocal cords, your glottis, and it spreads apart like thighs. When it opens, the air releases out your mouth, something violent, a quick noise, a harsh scratch. It is

instant relief, for a few seconds, before the back of your throat tickles again. You have to apologize afterwards, make amends for letting that

small part of you out, or if you sneeze, invoke the divine. Lizzy was

a great cougher, really loud booming, startling noises, and she never apologized.

In this way, we continue on—brutal hacking things. ***

I watched Lizzy on the news, saying what the man had done for her, how he had plucked her in the air. She was so happy, so ecstatic, but she

lied and said she tripped over the edge. My stomach clenched. I’d never seen her so happy before.

Of course he’ll save us, Lizzy said. She was in the midst of a mad

kind of belief, and I never thought her as lovely as I did then.

We don’t have to be afraid. We don’t have to leave, not while he

is here.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 23

*** When the earthquake bounded across my room, I hid under my oak

desk, like those kids did in the atomic age with their arms over their head. I was thrust side to side, up and down, and even though I had removed most of my objects to the floor and off the tables and the

walls, everything fell over. Outside, I could hear short, quick screams, and the grumble and quake of pieces of the building breaking off. I

tried to light a cigarette but I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking, even after.

When it stopped I stayed where I was, even after the sirens awoke

outside. I waited for the aftershock, a sign that the larger one had already happened, and it would soon be over.

The aftershock did not come. How long would we have to wait? ***

That night, I watched the figure of the man in the window of the

high-rise across from and below mine. We were old stranger-chums; I had spent many mornings watching him over coffee as he struggled with his tie in his mirror or went to his own balcony and frenzied

his hands at the pigeons. Though I’ve never seen him watching me, he must have seen me out on my balcony smoking and known me

in that friendly, voiceless way, where you are so tuned to someone’s habits you know them as well as your lover, except you do not know their name.

He stepped out onto his balcony and looked down. He was crying,

great sobbing shoulder-hunching bursts, and put a gun to his head and

pulled the trigger. The pop left his face a wound. His useless torso and limbs fell forward over the edge.

I did not look down at first. I knew what I would see: his body

crushed under its own weight, and his pants soiled with the remnants

24 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

of his colon, the last thing he would do. And then I did look, that long

horrible glance, the fine sizzle of his blood in the heat, the body. People gathered around him until, slowly, methodically, they got on their knees

and put their hands over the places where his skin had cracked and the wet oozed out. It was a fantasy kind of first aid, if you put enough pressure on the body it will right itself.

He had not inflicted a wound but exposed one. ***

Soon after they taped off the sidewalk and cleaned him off, the whispers

started. That miracle man can’t save us all, if any of us. He should have known that man was suicidal, sick. We’re as alone as we always were.

The believers remained because they trusted in a man who sat on

my balcony every evening and plopped nicotine in his mouth without inhaling. Others remained because they could not afford to leave.

The earthquakes were getting worse, stronger. They lasted almost a

minute, now.

*** Lizzy, I think you need to get out of here. Where the f*ck have you been?

Listen to me. I can’t explain it, but I think it’s going to get worse.

Have you been watching the news?

I have been calling you and calling you. Why didn’t you answer?

They’re not saying it, not outright, but this guy, whoever he is, he

can’t make the ground stop shaking. We’re all going to get caught in this if we stay.

I almost called the police; I thought you were dead. For f*ck’s sake,

why didn’t you call?

Are you listening to me? You have to get out.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 25

Get out? And go where? Look, this guy, you don’t get it. He’s

already saved both of us once. He touched us, bestowed some magical sh*t on us or something. Why wouldn’t it work again? Why bother to do it once if not again? What would be the point of that? All the king’s men, Lizzy. All the king’s horses.

Well, she laughed, who the f*ck tries to put eggs back together

with hoofs?

I thought, only a fool would try with their hands.

Why did you leave me like that? she asked. Was it something I did?

I kept going over it. I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything. Don’t say that, I thought. It all means something. ***

He was staring at my breasts again, so I took off my shirt and let him see. I handed him a lit cigarette.

I explained how when I inhaled it wasn’t really supposed to go to

my lungs, that was just an unfortunate byproduct. It had to get into my

blood to feel good. In the lungs, there are millions of alveoli, little pink, hollow tissue, and they absorbed the smoke and drugs and spread it into my bloodstream. They were good little suckers. Every time he tried to inhale he coughed. A man died here, I said. My neighbor. The man inhaled and did not cough.

You’re getting good, I said. Now you’ll start craving them.

He stood up and looked out onto the sky. There wasn’t much to see

up above, but across, we could see the lights, all the lights that people had strung up high and lit.

You should let us be, I told him. Go back to where you came from.

We can handle ourselves.

***

26 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

I had a dream where Lizzy and I had purchased a special kind of house. It was made of endless rooms, the kind the psychotic architect cannot help but continue, for if it ends then so does he. There was a room with

all sorts of twinkling lamps and soprano songs in the walls. In one room, there was a piano carved out of a tree, still stuck in the ground, but alive all the same. Blossoms fell onto it, and it was so beautiful, and I knew

we could live there forever; we would never become bored, and never get lost, because we would always find something new.

We did not even have bodies, not really, we just floated along,

floated into one another, a happiness in not being corporeal.

Then I looked at the vents where it was musky, and there, piled onto

one another, were corpses, and I knew without seeing that the entire house was built with the dead in its walls. I called Lizzy over.

She screamed and screamed and screamed, but it felt right that we

should build and live amongst our dead. I floated into the vents with the bodies. It was warm there, and honest.

I woke up and turned on the television.

Sunday mass. A man in black with bowed head and clasped hands: We must have faith that he can save us, not because he can. We

know he can. But we must have faith that we are worth saving. There is something in our history, in our foundation, in our lives, that is worth

remaining for. If we leave now, we forfeit, we retreat, and all that we have made is dust.

*** I was on my balcony when the big one hit.

The dogs started barking first. Sometimes, with the quakes, they

were so small that I heard some people could feel them in one room of

a house but not in the others. This one was everywhere, and it was quick. I could see people in the building next to me slam against the walls, and their computers and TVs slide off their desks.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 27

The building beside mine cracked, like a zipper opening up, and

each side began to move away from one the other. Loose pieces fell off. People screamed along with the crashing stonework.

People were running out of the way, but not all of them would

be fast enough, and the miracle man could not be there for all of

them. Some could barely stand and were crawling on the ground, falling onto their sides. There was glass on the ground. If they lived, they would get infections and slow-die. My cigarette fell over the

balcony, still lit, and it left a trail of weak fire in the air. There were many stomped cigarette butts on the ground. A little memoriam of my own.

The building was shaking hard, but I lifted myself up to the stone

surface of the ridge. I could see St. Ruth’s wobbling like Jell-O, and the dogs were barking mad.

And in the distance, the man, flying. Flying straight towards me. I turned my back on him and jumped.

Falling felt like nothing, like being unconscious, like holding your

breath really long until you’re about to explode for release.

Still I saw him, rushing towards me—this man who could really do

magic, just like Lizzy said he could. Lizzy, Lizzy, where are you now? Still here? Crouched under your desk, near your bed, your cellophane wrappings shaking so hard you piss right through them?

A falling object descends at an increased rate, meaning the farther

you fall, the more impact your body has on the surface, the more it has potential to leave a mark. An object that is caught, however, must be caught delicately, without panic, else it will break.

I wanted so badly for the ground to catch me.

My arm twisted under me when we made contact. My bone, I know

this feeling, was broken. His bones, under his skin that cannot have been skin, felt like steel. I screamed, but I was not louder than all the voices

under me, rising up louder and louder around the sounds of our concrete toppling over, breaking upon itself.

28 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

He flew me up higher and higher until we were above the dust

clouds and I could see St. Ruth’s fall apart and all the descending buildings breaking away from her.

We went higher still. I felt sick.

Postpartum

ou must never begin a story with waking up, so let us start

right before. She slumbers unaware of two small, dumb mouths

pulling at her body, her children, those twins with fine hair and greedy eyes. One of each, a girl-child and a boy-child, naked and filthy, their

genitals soaked with the grease of unattended months. They empty

themselves as they crawl from her thighs to her breast, where they suck the ever-flowing milk. They smear brown and yellow. They chirp for more.

Asleep, she dreams: an old woman, a caretaker, removing cinnamon

buns from an oven. It heats up the room, a smell of rich comfort. She reaches to taste the risen dough, but the woman gently forces her hand away; too hot little girl, not yet. The girl is unused to waiting, so the woman tells her to recite her daily lessons.

Keep my fingernails clean. Tie my hair away from my face. Press

my thighs tightly together.

On your wedding night, what do you say? Here I am, husband.

Yes child, and one day your prince will come. Sing with me now

child, one day he’ll find me, one day he’ll save me, one day he’ll take

me away. Chapped skin on her fingers, the years compounded into

the bony knuckles, a sheen of gray over her eyes, the old woman ices a bun with melting sugar. Eat it slowly, savor it, let it melt. There’s a good girl.

32 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

She has been pricked twice; once, not her fault, her father was short

on golden plates, and a fairy with thunderous eyes went hungry at the baptism. This fairy knew her own value and would eat on nothing less than malleable metals from some faraway war-torn place. She never forgot the slight, and later placed a thorn whittled with a sleep spell in a

spindle, certain the girl would touch it when she was of age. The second time, not her fault, she was in her hundred-year bed, and a man with a crown on his head found her. Dazed and delighted, he bent over her still

form and placed his lips on hers, found her warm enough. He undressed and climbed in.

*** The boy-child, with nothing to gnaw and his milk teeth aching in his mouth, begins to scour her body for something firm to connect with. By

chance, he happens on the thorn in her finger and sucks with the same insistence of his father. It dislodges easily.

The dream begins to fade, and she fights to see it to its end. Give

me your palm, the old woman says. I can tell you what your beloved will

look like. Ah, see here? He will be handsome. He will be kind. He rides a great white steed, and he has got all his teeth. Close your eyes now; if you think hard enough, maybe you will see him, too.

Roused against the lethargy, she looks down at her body, the mold

all around her from a wet bed, the dried blood between her thighs from a lonely birth, her breasts askew atop their dressing gown, the girl-child

weeping against her arm and the smell of spice far away and fading. Desperate, she tries to hold onto that wrinkled old face, the taste of

dough rolling under her tongue, but it dissolves as she opens her mouth. Unlocked, she attempts the eruption of a hundred-years-buried song in

her breast, one she never learned, the long wail, but her throat is dry, parched, and all she manages is a whelping croak. Beside her, the girlchild, ecstatic to hear the sound of her mother, begins to wail.

Eden

veryone called him a horse f*cker, though not in his hearing. No one dared. Rolo had a mean face, like someone had pressed

thumbtacks into his cheeks when he was a kid and the impressions

remained like tired wounds. He never talked to anyone, and if you tried, they said his small eyes got even smaller.

Jim-Bob, Earwig, and I used to hang around the stables where Rolo

worked on Mr. Scarsdale’s farm. There was less to do there than anywhere else in town, but nobody bothered us, so if we wanted to smoke

or drink the beer we hid under our jackets or look at my father’s crusty nudie mags, we could do so in peace. Rolo kept to himself, minding

the horses and shoveling sh*t out of the stables. For a long time I didn’t think he knew we were there.

Of the three of us, Jim-Bob was always first to grab a beer, light a

cigarette, or pull on his dick. He was named on account of his mother

compromising between either of the two men who may have been his

daddy. She never called him Jim-Bob. It was always one or the other, depending on which man she decided she liked better that day. Or

maybe to make the other jealous. Jim-Bob had several theories. His mom smoked clove cigarettes every day and throughout every preg-

nancy, though Jim-Bob was the only one who’d made it out alive. She used to pull up her shirt and show her cesarean scar to anyone who

cared to see. “Bikini cut,” she’d say. “Right across. Like they were cutting down a tree.”

36 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

We called Earwig after the little critters because he was kind of like

an earwig, ugly and small but pretty harmless. When we showed him a picture of one he flailed his arms and shrieked, and so we kept showing it to him until it bored us to see him react.

The three of us were always looking for new things to get off to,

especially around the Apple Fest when the weather was warm and dry and all the girls wore their clothes tight on their bodies and put extra

wag in their hips until we were halfway mad. We couldn’t get out of

the town—the whole of our families broke bread and brow there—but we could get off on the town. It was Jim-Bob who’d found a picture of

last year’s Apple Queen in a two-piece, so we were spending the day masturbating over it.

“Where did you get it?” I asked. “Dad’s Bible. In Leviticus.” “Which dad?”

Jim-Bob shrugged.

Last year, the Apple Queen was a tall girl with long hair. Every girl

in town wanted to be the Apple Queen, crowned at the Fest. It meant she was the prettiest seventeen-year-old around. This one had been especially attractive. She had blond hair. I liked blond hair. Hers was the palest I’d

ever seen. Almost like fresh-fallen snow. I was in the middle of whacking away, thinking about her looking at me or maybe talking to me or something, so I didn’t hear Jim-Bob or Earwig stop or back away. I didn’t hear Rolo approach, or Jim-Bob do up his pants real quick.

“What’re you doing?” Rolo said. “Hell you boys doing?” It was the

first time I’d heard his voice. It sounded unused and that made it cruel. He was wearing a faded red cap, long unwashed strands of his hair falling around his face, the rest of it tucked behind his ears.

Jim-Bob and Earwig got up and started running without any care

for me. Earwig was screeching, trailing his pants behind him like a flag. I didn’t move. Up close Rolo looked like the boogeyman, except worse because he was real.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 37

“What’s this?” he said and picked up the picture of the Apple

Queen from where Earwig had dropped it. It was crumpled, and there

was a bit of Jim-Bob splashed on her belly. I didn’t know what to say, or if I should say anything, so I sat there dumb quiet and watched him stare at the photo with a long and sad face. “How old are you, boy?” he said. “Thirteen. Almost fourteen.” “She ain’t for you,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant. I was going to ask him, but he

turned around and said, “Aw, sh*t.” One of the horses was hitting its ass against the fence, bucking its head and whinnying. It was a stallion. I could tell from here.

I noticed Rolo slipped the Apple Queen’s picture into his dirty

overall pocket before he ran off. For a while I watched him coax the horse. Even though he was probably a crazy f*ck, I had to give Rolo credit. He stayed calm, even when the thing jumped and kicked its

strong legs. A horse that size could take your head off. When he calmed it down they just stood still, both of them, staring at one another like they were both batsh*t or something. It was weird. That

night I dreamed about horses running away from me until I couldn’t see them anymore.

*** I didn’t see Earwig or Jim-Bob again for a week after that, but I knew I’d see them at the Apple Fest. Everyone went to the Apple Fest except

Rolo, and his lack of attendance was always spoken about in the beer tent, loudly or softly, because who else but a horse f*cker wouldn’t want to come and see an Apple Queen get crowned? Whenever he was the

punchline, they all slapped one another on the back and laughed. Rolo

was the easy joke. It united them. Even the women thought it was funny to laugh about Rolo. Often they wouldn’t have anything funny to share

38 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

with the men, but they could all laugh about that poor old horse f*cker guy. I felt sick when they said those kinds of things.

I walked around with my dad until he abandoned me at the beer

tent to be with his friends and tell his favorite Rolo story, though I don’t think they’d ever met. Dad was always quick to point out how

Rolo stole his job and everyone knew it because my father was the best farm worker there was and Scarsdale had the best farm and that meant

the best money and weren’t there enough people in the town to hire? Looking for outside help, my dad always said, was the luxury of the

asshole rich. All the men would agree with him because they’d wanted that job, too, but they wouldn’t have f*cked a horse to get it like Rolo must have.

I found Jim-Bob and Earwig standing around the beer tent waiting

to see if one of the fathers would get drunk enough and feel sorry

for sober boys and pass them a cold one or two. I thought they were avoiding me because they were embarrassed for abandoning me with Rolo, but that wasn’t the case.

“Did you bring it?” Jim-Bob asked me, flicking his lighter. He had

a shiner around his eye. I didn’t ask about it, because I could recognize that kind of damage when I saw it. Earwig only had his mother and three sisters, so he kept staring at it, but even he knew better than to say

anything. Those kinds of things you maintained quietly, else you were a puss*.

“Bring what?” I asked.

He lowered his voice. “You know, idiot. The picture. From the

Bible.”

“Oh.” I said. “No. He took it. Rolo.” “sh*t.”

I was giving Jim-Bob a “sorry-bout-that” cigarette when we saw

her. Last year’s Apple Queen. She looked better than in the picture, even with more clothes on. I couldn’t remember her name, but I never could

remember any of the names of the Apple Queens. You could always

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 39

tell an ex-Apple Queen, even long after they became our mothers and

grandmothers. There was something about the way they walked, like they were better than us, which I guess was true because they were

better than us. Sometimes you’d see them walking around on a non-Fest day with their rhinestone crowns on their head, the sun hitting it and

shining so bright it pierced your eyes to look at them straight on. Still, we all wanted them, better than us or not—still wanted to see what they felt and tasted like.

She was swinging a bright red leather bag on her arm. It looked

heavy. She stopped in front of us. I couldn’t see her eyes. She wore big dark sunglasses. Earwig and I held up our chests and stared at her full

on. Jim-Bob was a year older than us and had more experience with girls, so he looked like he gave two sh*ts. She said, “Can I bum one?”

Jim-Bob gave her his cigarette. He held the lighter up to her lips. I

was impressed; his hand didn’t tremble or anything.

“You boys come to watch the crowning?” she asked. We nodded.

“I was so pretty last year.” We nodded.

“Having a good time?” she asked. We nodded.

“You gonna cheer for the new Apple Queen?”

We shrugged. It was the right response. For the time it takes to

smoke a cigarette real slow, last year’s Apple Queen stood next to us

against the tent and puffed. Some of the men would occasionally pat

her on the head or her ass and say, Hey, Apple Queen, hey, and sometimes she’d say hey back and other times she stood still like it hadn’t

happened. We thought it was real cool, like we were being real slick and all that because she stayed with us. After, we were going to leave

without saying anything, because that’s what you do with a girl, even an older one; you leave them wanting more. But Earwig opened his damn

40 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

mouth and told her we hung out by Rolo’s barn and she should come

by with us whenever she wanted. More smokes, he told her. And booze. “I know the place,” she said. She said she might stop by in that airy

way older girls had, and once she was gone Jim-Bob and I really let

Earwig have it. We punched him on either side, hard, but he didn’t cry because none of us cried from something like that.

We all went to watch them crown the new Apple Queen. It was

a good day for it. Sometimes it rained, but today it was stark and

sunny. While all the women sat around and smoked and whispered in

one another’s ear, the men took all the fruit they’d pulled off the tree branches until they’d left them bare and laid them all down at the new Apple Queen’s feet. Then they took the crown and blue sash from last year’s queen and gave it to the bright-faced new one. She was plump in

the face and brunette this time and she sat high on bushels of red and pink and green and rotting brown apples and raised her hands above us

all, all very pretty like. We all loved her with our eyes, except last year’s

Apple Queen. She looked like murder. Red revenge. Sure, she smiled, and her teeth were all straight and white, but she had the same expression my dad did when he takes off his belt in the middle of the day.

After the festival died down and the men had to be carried away by

their wives and daughters, Jim-Bob and Earwig said they were going to go to the diner and get free sodas from Earwig’s mom, who worked as

a line cook and would sometimes slip us burnt toast and undercooked eggs if we waited around long enough. She was a tired, happy woman and we all liked her. On the weekends she worked as a vet tech, which

I think she liked better, said it was more fun, but there wasn’t enough business to do it full time and there was no husband for her to only

work when she wanted. She was always extra special nice to us boys, and if we were good she’d let us watch her cut the dead animals open or throw them into the fire.

I said I might join them at the diner later, said I was going to try to

get the picture back, but really I just kept thinking about Rolo and that

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 41

horse. He’d looked at that stallion like I saw Jim-Bob look at last year’s Apple Queen. Maybe the rumors were true.

When I got there Rolo was shoveling out heaps of sh*t. He fum-

bled with the shovel when he saw me. I should have asked for the pic-

ture, but he just kept looking at me like he didn’t know what I was, even though I suppose we looked mostly the same, except he was older and dirty. I asked if I could watch him take care of the horses. He stared at

me for a long while, and I thought he would refuse, but he just turned around and kept shoveling. I took it as invitation enough.

He took care of the stables for Mr. Scarsdale, who was rich enough

not to live around us. Scarsdale grew up in the house a few over from where I was born and lived, but he had a good sense for numbers and cheating, so he’d made it out of here. The girls all wanted to be the Apple Queen, and we boys all wanted to be like Mr. Scarsdale, who could afford to keep this land for breeding and competition but didn’t have to live on the sh*t himself.

Rolo worked hard and was real kind to the horses, kinder than my

dad was with me, anyway. He really took his time with them, especially when he bathed them. He’d take a hose and wet the ground

near their hoofs, then splash their legs. He spent a lot of time on their legs, smoothing the muscles there with his bare hands. He said you had to check the vein on the inside of the leg and make sure it was

cool before you hosed their body, else they’d colic. Then he’d move up

the firm thighs and massage them, then onto their shoulders before

moving to their necks, their long torsos, and the tail. He shampooed their manes and tails and scrubbed hard, whispering cooing things I couldn’t make out all the while. Then he’d put on their anti-sweat

sheets and call them good boy or good girl, like my mom used to

do when I was young and coming out of the bath. After, he’d cut up carrots and feed them. When the sun wasn’t too hot he worked them

around the yard, which didn’t seem much like work. They liked to run, their long, knobby legs prancing like they were on show, and their tails

42 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

shining. Rolo must have brushed them all the time to keep their fur that straight and that nice.

I think he must have been lonely, because he told me all their names

without me asking. There was Pinky, Haze, the tiny white mare was Butler, there was Charles Schulz, and the big brown stallion who’d been

angry yesterday was Strut. Strut was Rolo’s favorite. I could tell. He took his time with Strut, whispered all sorts of soothing things, called him “a sweet dumb beast” and fed him red apples. “Hey,” I said. “Yeah?”

“That picture.” “Yeah?”

I shrugged. “You still got it?”

He kind of turned away from me and hid his hand in his pocket.

“Yeah.”

“Can I have it? It isn’t mine. I gotta give it back.”

He took his hand out of his pocket and handed me the picture,

except it seemed cleaner now than when he’d taken it. Washed, if you can wash a photograph.

“Shouldn’t do that,” he said, looking at Strut. “What would she

think if she knew?”

I didn’t know. She was an Apple Queen. How would I know what

kind of things went on in her head?

“She looks like a sweet thing,” he said in the same tone he used

when talking to Strut.

*** Even after I gave Jim-Bob the picture back and he decided we shouldn’t

spend so much time near the barns (“f*cking horse f*cker,” he said. “Shouldn’t be allowed to be in town. Pervert. Probably watches us and gets off on it.”), I still kept going back. Sometimes I didn’t talk to Rolo

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 43

and he didn’t talk to me, but he’d always let me watch, and sometimes he let me shovel out the sh*t which I didn’t care for really but it felt good to

clean something for the horses. My favorite was when he let me touch

Strut. Not much, and never for long. Just a quick stroke of his nose or a fast pound on the flank. The horse was wild and angry, but when he was

younger, he’d won a couple of races, so they let him do what he wanted, so long as he would mount a mare when he was supposed to.

I had to keep making excuses why I couldn’t hang out with Jim-Bob

and Earwig. Jim-Bob said, f*ck, whatever, when I said I was sick or I had

to stay home and help my mom with something, but Earwig would get all

quiet and say he missed me and he hoped I got better soon. I called him a dope, and then he said bye and hung up, but I felt bad for him.

I never saw Rolo anywhere outside of the barn. He must have

gone out for food and supplies and things that you need, but he wasn’t ever in town. Didn’t he want a cup of coffee with the other old guys?

I always offered him a cigarette because that was something you did with friends—and it would force him to go into town and buy more if

he took to them—but he always refused. Said it was bad for the horses. Said it was bad for me, too, but whatever.

He wasn’t a talker, but I could usually get him to talk about the

horses. If I asked about what people said about him he always told me to shut up, but if I asked nice things he would talk back. Once he started talking without me having to ask anything.

“See that?” Strut was running and whinnying. I thought it was

because he was pissed or something, but Rolo said it was because he was happy.

“He’s fenced in,” I said.

Rolo grunted and grabbed the cigarette from my mouth. He broke

it in half and threw it behind him. “Strut’s easy,” he said. “He don’t need

things like we do. Just simple stuff. All sorts of ugly things don’t exist in his world. The only thing ugly to him is the fence, but see there? He runs around it like it ain’t there, so it ain’t.”

44 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

And Strut did gallop around it like it wasn’t there, like he wanted

to take the turns he did and not because there was wire and wood in the way.

“Think like a horse does,” Rolo said. “It might disconnect you for

a bit.”

I could tell he thought that was a good thing. I tried offering him a

cigarette again, but he said no.

It was Earwig who called me and begged me to hang out with him,

so I cut an afternoon with Rolo short and met him at the diner. His

mom said she hadn’t seen me around much and made me a strawberry

milkshake. Earwig lowered his head, waited until his mom had her back

turned, and whispered that Jim-Bob was f*cking last year’s Apple Queen. I think he told me so that he’d have someone to spend time with during

their act. He seemed more lonely than usual. But he was a good kid. A little off but good all around. For him I spent the next afternoon with

Rolo, went home for dinner because otherwise my mother would have

sent my father out, pissed off from working nine hours, to drag me to the table, and planned to spend the evening with Earwig and Jim-Bob.

We three met up where we used to go whack off together, but

Jim-Bob had brought the ex-Apple Queen. We couldn’t tug on our-

selves with an Apple Queen around, especially if she was Jim-Bob’s. Seemed rude. She wore a red dress that ended before her knees and didn’t wear shoes. It was dark, but she wore sunglasses anyway. Her toenails were painted pink. Her fingers were dirty.

She brought beer, much more than we could ever get raiding our

parents’ cabinets or hiding bottles in our coats at the drugstore, and we

got really trashed. Earwig didn’t know when to stop, so he vomited, drank more, vomited again, and passed out, but not before he cried out for his daddy, wherever that guy was. Last year’s Apple Queen was older and wiser and knew what to do, so she rolled Earwig on his side

and said this way he wouldn’t choke on his vomit or smash his nose and suffocate in his sleep. Apple Queens are sweet like that.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 45

I kept staring at Jim-Bob to see what changed when someone

f*cked an Apple Queen. We’d all imagined what it would be like, but besides his clenched jaw and looking off into the distance, it didn’t

seem like much was different. He didn’t even pay attention to the Apple Queen, and I felt bad because maybe they had a fight or something— people who f*ck often do—so I made sure she always had a full beer

and a cigarette in either hand. That made Jim-Bob even more quiet. He tried putting his hand on her bare ankle but she hit him, hard.

She said, “Show me the horses,” and she said it to me. “Jim-Bobby

told me you hang around here a lot on your own.” That made Jim-Bob wobble to his feet.

“What are you pissed about?” she asked him. She was laughing. “Nothin,” he said. “I’m going home. Tired.”

“Oh, f*ck you,” she said. “You’re just a sh*t.”

Jim-Bob took two of the better beers and walked off, muttering to

himself the whole time.

I wasn’t feeling right, so when she asked me again I shook my head.

“Can’t. Not mine to show.”

“You can,” she said. “I want to feel that smooth thing under me.

What’s a queen without a steed, huh?” And I knew then that she hadn’t

drank nearly as much as the rest of us had. Or she could handle it better. She grabbed my hand and led me, like I was some magic bunny foot

that would get her through whatever barrier she believed was there but she didn’t really need me. I was disposable. I didn’t mind. Her hand was soft and dirty and that was OK. It was simple and I liked it.

She opened the barn door and I guess Apple Queens have a strange

sort of strength in them. They don’t look it, but they got it. She pulled me in and she was laughing.

We saw Rolo there and we stopped moving. He was only wearing

an old pair of jeans and stood in front of Strut’s stable, holding the horse’s muzzle in his hands right close to his face. He had his eyes closed and he was touching his lips against the horse’s nose and he must have

46 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

been whispering something because I could hear the vowels drawn but I couldn’t make them out. It sounded something really painful kind of

beautiful like. It hurt to watch. I wanted to leave, but the Apple Queen pulled me forward. Rolo turned and saw us and he looked scared.

“What’re you doin’ here?” Rolo said. He jerked back from Strut.

The horse whinnied and threw his head back, almost hitting the side of the pen. “Get outta here.”

I wanted to but the Apple Queen kept dragging me. “Oh, wow, all

that sh*t they say about you is true,” she said. “You really do f*ck them.” She made it sound like that was so cool.

“I said go!” He looked at me, his face all red, his eyes almost all

white and wet. I pulled myself away from the Apple Queen and stumbled to the barn door, but I was so curious that I didn’t leave. I stood

in front of the doors and watched the Apple Queen take careful steps toward him on her toes, like a ballerina.

She picked up one of the apples Rolo kept around for the horses. A

green one with spots, the real sour kind. She brought it to her nose and

took a big whiff and smiled. She stared at Rolo and bit into the apple, the liquid dripping out the side of her lips. She took the piece from between her lips and offered it, opened palm, to Strut. “Don’t,” said Rolo.

But she winked and the horse sniffed her palm, opened his muzzle

and, with his huge, blunt teeth and sloppy lips, gulped the apple piece

up. The Apple Queen took another bite of the apple and swallowed it. “Sweet,” she said.

Rolo grunted and rubbed his chest like he wanted to cover up.

“Aw, don’t be like that, Mister Roly-Poly,” she said, sitting on the

side of one of the troughs. “You’ll scare the kid.” She spread her long, pretty arms and said, “I always wondered that about you, whenever they

talked about you. Old Rolo likes to f*ck horses. They say I’m too old to be the Apple Queen anymore, but that’s just age. So what’s wrong with you? Why doesn’t anyone like you? Is it because you can’t get a woman to

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 47

spread herself for you? Come here,” she curled her fingers towards him. “I can like you, if you want. Don’t you want to know what you’re missing?”

She fisted the hem of her red dress in one hand and lifted it, wil-

ly-nilly, like she wanted to get it over with. Then she laid back and parted her thighs really fast, balancing herself on the two ends of the trough. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. Around her thighs, near her

puss*, she had tattoos of thorns. I felt worse than I did before. I wanted to touch those thorns and see if I’d prick myself.

“Well?” she said when Rolo didn’t move. “Ain’t you gonna?”

But Rolo just looked scared. Like she was scaring a big old man like

him, even though she was shorter and must have underweighed him

by about sixty pounds. Strut was grunting and hitting his body against

the side of his pen. Rolo kept looking at the horse and then back at the ex-Apple Queen.

She looked up at him, her eyes kind of wet, and she said, “We don’t

really belong here anymore, you know. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? Don’t you want to? Come on, I don’t bite.”

He shook his head. He didn’t say no. He said, “Gotta take care of

Strut. Yer scaring him. Get out. Get out.”

Strut didn’t look freaked or anything, but I didn’t like the way the

air felt, so I ran out of the barn and went back to Earwig. I wanted

to leave but I couldn’t just abandon the stupid kid. I pushed him and pulled him, but he groaned and wouldn’t budge.

She came towards me like something beautiful and terrible, and I

wanted to run but I couldn’t. She pointed to the cigarettes, and I pulled

one out and lit it and gave it to her. She said, “You saw, didn’t you? In

the barn. All of it.” She looked at me, cold, her face squashed. “You like what you saw?” she said, sounding like she was accusing me of doing something wrong.

What could I do? I nodded. Of course I’d liked it. Thorns and all. “How much did you like it?” she said, her voice soft and scary. “A lot,” I said but I didn’t mean it.

48 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

She put her hand on my shoulder and pulled me close. “What about Jim-Bob?” I said, grabbing her wrist.

“You’re here right now,” she said, like that was the best thing about

me, and maybe it was.

She was my first kiss. She was taller than me so she bent down kind

of low and licked my cheek. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I stood there and let her take my shirt and belt off. Her hands were cold. I didn’t know your hands could be cold when you did this. She

kept touching her lips to my chest and forehead, like my mom would do

when I was sick with fever as a kid. I tried kissing her on the lips, and she let me, but it was awkward and stiff so I stopped.

We lay down together and she guided me in. I should have known

what to do, because Jim-Bob had told me what it was like—he heard

his mom and either of his dads all the time—but what could I do? I thought the thorns would scratch me if I moved too much, so she did

all the moving. It was over pretty fast, and when she was done she got up and left without saying good-bye or straightening her dress or wiping what was left of me off her leg. Her cigarette butt was next to my head.

I stayed with Earwig until he woke. He said he hurt all over and

cried the whole way home. That’s the kind of sad kid he was. He didn’t ask me about what had happened or why I was the only one there and

that was good because I didn’t want to tell him. I tried to think about

the Apple Queen and how it felt to be in her, but all I could imagine was Rolo and how he’d talked to Strut and how that just seemed nicer. *** I tried to go back to the barn after that and, I don’t know, apologize or something, but Rolo wouldn’t talk to me anymore. He wouldn’t even

look at me, so I stopped going around there, even with Jim-Bob and Earwig to drink and smoke and look at pictures. We didn’t see last year’s

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 49

Apple Queen anymore after that, either. I asked Jim-Bob what had

happened to her and he rolled his eyes and shrugged and said f*ck her. Everything just got quiet and boring after that, but then Mr. Scars-

dale returned to town because he’d heard one of his mares, Charles

Schulz, had taken ill. Everyone was talking about it, not because anyone cared about the horse, really, but because Scarsdale rode into town

in a white Lincoln Town Car, and it was as big as a boat. Our dads spent their time at the fancy bar—The Apple Turnover—wearing their

Sunday suits when Scarsdale was in town. I think because if he showed up there he might give one or all of them a job, but he stayed on his

farm with Rolo. They tried all they could, but Scarsdale lost interest because he had enough money to do so. He sent Charles Schulz to the

vet and packed up his big car and left before they had the results. Ear-

wig’s mom was the one who looked after her, and she let Earwig and me watch her do the examinations. Jim-Bob didn’t have the stomach for the smell of animals.

“It’s good for you boys to see how things work,” she said, watching

the horse roll around in obvious pain. She put her head down and lis-

tened to its guts and said there was a lot of gas. She used something

called a nasogastric tube, which she put in its nose and it went down all the way to its stomach. It was hard to watch her do that to Charles

Schulz. She was a big thing, really sleek, and I could tell the tube made her miserable.

She said it had to be colic and depending on which kind it was

she might have to operate. While we were waiting for the results, she

started shining up her scalpels and the saws. But it wasn’t so bad, just too

much solid food and not enough water. She gave it a stomach tubing, which put water in its gut and helped loosen up the food. Then when it all came out the other end, she spread it on a piece of cellophane and let us look.

“Apples,” she said. “Horse musta been mad for ’em. Too much of a

good thing, you know?”

50 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

*** Last year’s Apple Queen waited to announce her pregnancy right

before the new harvest. She did it by wailing and crying and saying how ashamed she was and only was coming clean of the crime because she couldn’t hide it anymore—her belly was too round for an Apple Queen now, even an ex one—and she was too goodly-godly to get rid of it. And

when people asked where she got it she wailed louder and said it wasn’t

wanted; she’d said, No, no thank you, no, in her shrillest voice, but it

was Rolo who’d done it. He didn’t just f*ck horses, she said, but pretty ex-Apple Queens too.

My mother had been the one to tell me, shaking her head and

saying what an awful, awful thing it was and clucking her tongue and

staring at the ground. That night I woke up sick and ran to the toilet and

threw up my dinner. I crept down to the kitchen and called up Jim-Bob and got one of his dads—I couldn’t tell them apart either—and said

it was an emergency and please could I talk to him. Jim-Bob yawned into the phone and said, after I asked, that no he didn’t f*cking f*ck

last year’s Apple Queen. She was a frigid bitch who didn’t f*cking put

out and who’d said that? Earwig? That kid thinks f*cking is when two people touch thighs.

I heaved into the kitchen sink but there wasn’t nothing left to

empty.

In the morning before my father woke up to go to work I watched

my mother slip on her fancy Sunday coat and take up father’s hunting shotgun. She looked at me and smiled soft and told me to grab my

coat and come with. As we walked, more and more mothers and their yawning sons poured out of their houses. I saw Earwig gripping his mom’s arm and sucking on his fingers. He waved at me but looked

tired and lost. Jim-Bob was with his mom, helping to light her cigarette as she walked. All the women had shotguns and were experts at

handling them. They were the ones, not their husbands, who marched

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 51

out into the middle of the night and scared off the yowling coyotes that kept their kids up. Last year’s Apple Queen marched in front of us on the arm of this year’s Apple Queen, brunette comforting blond. I kept staring at her round belly.

I held my mom’s hand and tried to pull her back but she kept

pulling me forward. We stopped at Scarsdale’s barn and it all seemed so unreal, like watching a movie on TV. Rolo was in the barn brushing

Strut. He watched last year’s Apple Queen point to him and hold her

round belly, and he seemed to accept the injustice of it for what it was, but he took hold of Strut’s reins and tried to lead the stallion out of the barn. Strut got spooked by all the people and he jumped up and kicked

his front legs. The women then began to shout about how the horse was

tainted and oh what a poor thing and how kind it would be to destroy it. I watched them run Rolo like he’d run a horse around the yard,

except they ran him straight out. I saw Earwig’s mom running out with

her hacksaw in one hand and a spatula in the other. She was arm in arm

with Jim-Bob’s mother (both of them, I remembered, had been Apple Queens), whose shirt rode up, and I could see the scar that was left on

her to bring Jim-Bob into this town, and I realized that’s what women did: they cut or were cut open. Last year’s Apple Queen just stood back

and watched. I tried to meet her eyes—I wanted her to look at me—but she wouldn’t.

Earwig gripped my arm and Jim-Bob’s mouth hung open as we

stood dumb and watched the women tackle Rolo and hold him down. My mother fisted her hand in Rolo’s hair and held him still. They

stripped Rolo down to nothing but his socks. He wasn’t fat or anything, but he had the kind of flabby flesh you get from a hard life packed onto

his stomach and his thighs, his ass. They held him between them and

made him watch as they spoke kindly to Strut and pulled him out of the barn, all the time Rolo was crying softly, and he didn’t say anything even when they used hunting knives and their hands to tear into Strut’s

trembling neck. They tore him apart. They kept saying, this is what you

52 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

did to that poor girl, see what you did to her? I’d heard rabbits scream

before and that was something awful and foreign, but when a horse

screams it sounds closer to the screams we make: simple and terrified, and I wanted to be able to make that noise and save that pretty horse, but my mom, who I felt love for even then, raised a red brick and shoved it down hard on Strut’s face and called it kindness.

Then they turned on Rolo and threw rocks at him and fired their

guns at him and missed and said they wouldn’t miss again. He ran and they chased. For a nude, scared man he ran quick, and they split us up

to see if we could find him, making jokes that the one who brought back his dick would win a prize.

*** Us boys ran away from our mothers and the women, and we were the ones who found Rolo huddled beneath a pine tree, holding his pale

body tightly in his tan arms and legs. I could see his shriveled genitals shining with wet and I knew he had pissed himself. Rolo looked up at me and said my name, quietly, sadly, asking for peace, a kind gesture or word.

“You know him?” Jim-Bob said, and I didn’t know if he was talking

to me or Rolo because he had a hard time looking at either of us.

I picked up a rock, a real jagged one. Earwig started whimpering

and saying, “Hey. Hey. What are you doing?” He was looking from me to Rolo with a sad long face. He was too dumb to understand, but I

knew Rolo was lucky because he had a chance to break free from all those things he loved and escape this place.

I screamed at Rolo and called him a horse f*cker and threw the

rock at his shoulder.

“Jesus f*ck,” said Jim-Bob. “You hit him?” He looked at me with a

strange sick kind of awe, like even though we had just seen our mothers

ravage all around us it had never occurred to him that we could do it, too.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 53

Earwig was crying like the stone had struck him, but it was Rolo

who was bleeding. Rolo didn’t make a noise and he didn’t move, and I

wondered if he had even realized what had happened. So I picked up another rock and raised it high in my fist. I aimed it at his balls but I missed and hit the soft, white part of his thighs. Rolo yelped like an animal then and got up on his shaky feet and stumbled, his pale ass and balls bouncing, his thin legs running him away to somewhere far better than here.

Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me

y father is a great man of meat. Inside the hot, wooden house where the geese are kept, he stretches their long necks into

straight lines and gavages grass and corn into their bellies, and when their wings can barely lift their plump bodies into the air he guts them

and sears their livers with pepper and salt. In the pasture he keeps four fat, black cattle that he names after my forefathers: Luc, Pierre, Mau-

rice, and Yves. When their bellies skim the ground he makes tartars of their loins with shallots and piquillo peppers. Then he buys four more

fat black cows and names them Luc, Pierre, Maurice, and Yves. When

he loves me best over my sisters he makes my favorite, pot-au-feu, and he cooks the meat so tender that no matter how much I suck on the flesh I still taste the bone.

I am often my father’s favorite. When all my sisters put their white

and smooth hands to their chests and faint at the gore on his killing smock, I gently untie its knots and wash it with my bare hands until they stain red. Because of this, my father gives me the first and largest

servings of leg and rib, and when he boils lamb’s head I am always allowed to chew on their glossy, black eyes.

When men come for my hand my father keeps them at bay by

giving them the hands of my sisters, and they go gaily into common houses that smell of lilacs and goldenrod. But when the man with the

short beard comes at night for a bride my father is all out of other

daughters, and so he weeps and curses that he had not been given sons

58 – A.A. BALASKOVITS

instead, for he would care less to lose a son. But my father must give me away, because a daughter is only a dowry to be won, even if he loves her as much as my father does me, even if there is no one left to care for him now that we are all gone, and my mother long dead.

The man claims to be no different than my father, for he too had

once been a butcher, a great one, prolific in his craft. When he threw sumptuous feasts he would slaughter, by hand, fields of goats, sheep, and cattle. His hands confirm what he says, for no man that has slaughtered can hide the stains, and my new husband’s are streaked dark red.

On our way to his castle the peasants we pass on the road avert

their eyes to their feet. The old women, their head and eyes covered with black scarves, tap their foreheads, chest and shoulders. They wrap

their gnarled fingers around giant crucifixes that weigh down their thin necks. I ask my husband why he is no longer a butcher.

He says butchering is in his past. Then he points to the dark sky and

says, Each time the sun swings around the world we are all allowed to

begin again, and he says this with such sincerity that I begin to love him. We are married in a small ceremony attended only by his sleepy

servants. He goes over the lines and movements as if by rote. On my hand he places a simple, thick gold band. He takes me to a great ban-

quet hall for the celebratory feast, and though there is no one but us,

twenty tables are laden with exotic cheeses and all manner of fruits. There are fifty different types of breads and all kinds of whipped butter,

honey, mustards, oils. He slices apples and pears with an expert wrist,

and these he hand-feeds me. Though I eat for hours from his hand, nothing fills me up as father’s sliced cattle could, or a spoonful of his stews, or even a morsel of liver from a fattened goose.

After we perform our duty to our bloodlines, I lie on top of him

and run my hand across the coarse hairs on his chest, and they are blue in such little light. I ask if I might be allowed to go to the market and purchase some meats, only a little smackering, for I crave it so. He denies my request and kisses me on my forehead.

MAGIC FOR UNLUCKY GIRLS – 59

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