The Crow Knows What Is Breaking
I always wondered if Mary’s troubles had anything to do with the things she broke. There were so many plates, saucers, brooms, and vases breaking before one could only wonder. Sharp and bony and breakable was she. Her fingers were twice as long as any man’s. When she was a girl I remember how well she hid them. A defect. From the ends of her fingers the breaking began. Saucers slipped from her hands. Cups too.
She was not meek but she was reserved and I wondered if what she really wanted to break were the necks of the children who teased her.
We are the same and whole, the children said, because you are different and apart.
Surround yourself with beautiful objects and kiss your bird. Kiss your stone. Yes, these were the ways of her beauty. She had found glinting off the side of the old mountain road a little talisman, a black stone carved into a simple bird. So it seemed like prophecy when some days later an old crow, an ancient grandfather crow, came and befriended her. It embarrassed her, this crow who followed her and talked to her, said her name: Mary, Mary. She ran from it, hid from it, covered her face with her long fingers and asked it to go away. Go away, she said. You only make me stranger. Her hair was the color of his feathers, blue-black, and it seemed he mistook her for one of his own. He would sit on the window ledge of the kitchen in her casita and cry out into the night and piñon trees as another saucer slipped from her fingers.
No one knew this, not even I, but there were times when the breaking occurred before the accident. Rage caused those things to fly from her fingers. A too-tight lid and she would bang it against the brightly tiled floor until it broke and jam spread a deep red stain. A silver spoon in her hand she would snap because the coffee was too bitter. Mary, Mary, said the bird. Mary, Mary.
The broom she broke swatting too hard at cobwebs on the high ceiling. The vase she broke because maybe, maybe not, there was a bat in the house and she was always a good aim. It got to be that no one visited, no one visited at all without thick-soled shoes on, the floor treacherous with broken glass and no broom to sweep. Just her long, long fingers too long to be useful, and the bird. Mary, Mary.
The bird lived until it seemed hardly possible it could live any longer. How could it? It would settle on her shoulders and she would sag under its weight and shoo him off. Shoo, shoo. When had her troubles started? She was not so alone was she? Was there not town close by? The crow scared the children off, caused them to cry witch and search for her in their windows before they slept.
Mary, Mary, crowed the bird. Mary, Mary. The children listening: Surround yourself with beautiful objects and kiss the sky.
She never told me this, and I never knew, but in the night a man would come scratch scratch at the window of her little house. Who was this man, no one knew. It was said he was a workman who’d hopped over on a train looking for work and shelter and kindness. He had the same hair she had, the same as the crow, the same as the stone bird she’d found on the ground years ago. His flesh, they said was the stone and he’d grown from it like a tree from a seed. Perhaps he was the crow himself. Feathers would float down from the ceiling for hours after he left. Objects left behind: a tiny jar with a silvery angel trapped inside, a charcoal drawing on paper, an old oil lamp, a shotgun shell.
She never told me this, and I never knew, but it was the stranger who swept the glass from the floor with the new broom he brought her. It was this man who bandaged her bleeding bare feet and pulled the glass from her heels. He made her good cornbread and heavy mutton stew. He brushed her long black hair and plaited it into two, wove in thread to keep it steady, and shooed the crow from her shoulder.
Why did I never think to do these things?
This man would come to steady her hands and find new uses for them. Her long arms she would wrap around him. She was calm when he was near. She was calm when there was no crow to say, Mary, Mary, and she could invent a new name.
In town she was taller, slower; her eyes searched for no one’s, shied from no one’s. She did not stumble. She did not sag under the weight of the old crow. She did not sag under the weight of the children running from her. She transcended them.
At night in the summertime, in the streets of the town, the children played a game. The girls ran from the boys, the boys ran from the girls. Tree was homebase and safe, and they chanted softly so she could not hear: Mary, Mary. Surround yourself with beautiful objects and kiss your bird.
The Watermark
i.
The angel is my watermark. She climbs out of a small glass bottle found on the street and lights on my shoulder where she points to all wondrous things. Her finger jabs around, a tic all angels share. There are so many things to show us. I don’t dare tell her because she is jealous and spiteful, but I too might be an angel.
At night I lay on my belly so as not to bend or break my wings. My lovers complain about the feathers that fall into their mouths as they sleep. She shows me so much that I dream she holds onto my index finger in both her hands and flies me through the sky. We break silent the night air. Back in my room she strokes my wings that are starved for affection and use. She kisses me between my eyes. I was wise in a cage, she says. But now I am free. I am precious but with a tongue longer than Lilith.
The angel climbs into the bath with me and floats on her wings like a feathered kayak. Then she climbs out and leaves tiny footprints that catch the light like crystal tiles.
With her tongue she weaves stories. She translates the birds that argue caustically over the contents of the dumpster outside my window. She befriends the tiny insects that live in all my plants. To amuse herself, she grabs hold of my finger with her hands and bites me between tiny rows of glittering teeth.
I tell her I might also be an angel and she bites and stomps and puts her wet hands in my ear while I sleep, causing me to wake up slapping at the side of my head. I ask her, where have you come from?
Daily I am transported. My eyes are so wide to see what once only an angel could show me. I gesture with wide wild arms to show those around the thread that runs through everything. Those strings and webs are meant to catch us humans unaware. I watch the large lumbering human-folk trip over those threads and shout, as they dust themselves off and nurse bruised knees: There is nothing other than what we see!
Prove it, I yell back, and I raise my wings and I fly away.
ii.
There was an infant found in the forest eating the soil. The blackest, most fertile soil, dug up from beneath the brush and leaves and stones. The man that found this child brought her back to his little earthen cottage, cleaned her, and fed her fresh milk from his goat. He took her to the priest in town and bathed her in cool water made holy. She was christened Angelina. She was named so, the priest reasoned, to free her from the earth she ate. To lift her closer to the heavens. But each morning, under her fingernails there would be white clay-dirt from the walls and the shit in her cloth was white as well.
As Angelina grew older she learned to hide the earth she ate. She patched up the holes she made in the walls and cleaned beneath her fingernails. Her father would throw up his arms to heaven when he caught her. He would sit her down at the table and fill her with ripe tomatoes, onions, and potatoes from the garden. He would fill her cup with the good goat’s milk and force her to eat three quarters a loaf of hard, dense bread.
Here, he said to her. Eat! Eat! Leave the earth to nourish you through her fruits. Dirt is too close to shit to eat! he would yell. She would nod at him, careful not to show her teeth that revealed black earth stuck between. Angelina was miserable. She could not stop craving the earth that had nourished her since infancy. She imagined that she, with no known mother, had been attached to the earth at birth. That her umbilical cord had been torn directly from the soil, like a root. Laying on her bed, she decided never again to eat dirt. Her father kissed her forehead. The priest smiled especially at her on that Sunday. The benches beneath her softened.
Her father left to travel. He kissed her on her cheek and hugged her. Will you be all right?
Yes, Papa, she answered.
Angelina, if you leave the walls intact the rats won’t get in.
Yes, Papa.
For two days, Angelina was fine. It had been two weeks since earth had passed between her lips, but sweeping the dirt floor broke her will. She sank to her knees. She cried huge tears that dropped to the floor and turned the dirt to mud. This broke her for it was mud she loved dearly.
With this taste of the forbidden she lost control. She rushed to the garden where the soil was blackest. She sat in the middle of the garden, a pile of uprooted tomato plants beside her and brought fistfuls of dirt to her mouth, the seeds, freshly sown, were crunchy. She knew she would never reach her father’s sky and the heavens of the priest and she didn’t care.
The sun went down, the sun rose again. Angelina ate and ate. She grew fatter and fatter with each sunrise. She fertilized the earth around her with her shit, and flowers, plants, and vegetables grew from the rich soil.
She dug herself deeper and deeper until she was buried. Content, she sat in the darkness, eating the dirt that fell around her face. Finally her skin stretched open and she burst like a pod gone to seed. She broke open from her belly to her throat. From her body grew a great many plants that she was never to see, but of which she was the source.
BETHANY BALL was born in Detroit and lives in New York. She has been published in The Common, BOMB, The American Literary Review, The Sewanee Review, and more. Her novels What To Do About the Solomons and The Pessimists are out now. She is currently at work at a new novel.