fiction by LAURA KASISCHKE
from THE FLORIDA REVIEW \
One Wednesday a barge got stuck beneath the bridge. We were children, and we loved this fateful accident, this trouble occurring to others, this summer entertainment conducted under a bridge, just foi us. We stood on the bridge all day looking down, waving our little stripes
and stars at their hammers and sickles.
The men on the barge were patient with us. They had children of their own. They’d been stuck many times on barges under bridges in their own countiy in the past—which was a gray woolen blanket behind them, sodden with memories, like the sea.
They smoked cigarettes, ran their hands over the tops of their heads, waited for something to happen.
Rag-Anne was with me on Wednesday on the bridge.
Rag-Anne had been with me since the beginning.
I’d woken up in this world behind bars in a crib with Rag-Anne beside me—back when she was new and all her stitches were pulled tight and her yam hair was blonde and I wore a ribbon and called my father Daddy. She was as real to me as the friends around me on the bridge that day—with their dirty faces, eating candy they wouldn’t let me taste on sticks—but she was a doll. Gray and limp and made of thinning cloth. I’d long since swallowed her button eyes. There were greasespots on her apron.
But, of course, I was also growing older. I had dirt on my knees that
no amount of scrubbing could wash off. One day when I crawled into my father s lap and called him Daddy, be pushed me off.
“Ugh, does that thing have to sit at the table with us?” my father would ask, looking at Rag-Anne looking at him from her seat at the end of the table.
Oh, just a little longer, my mother said in the small voice she only used when he was in the room. “Someone’s birthdays coming up!”
Oh, the birthday, the birthdaycomingup. There was a doll I’d seen at the department store and wanted and been assured I would have. That dolls human hair reflected the department store light, and her eyes were made of human glass and her skin of human plastic, like all the dolls at the department store I’d always wanted and had yet to have.
But the doll on the bridge above the barge with me that day was named for my grandmother Anne, who’d died alone in a back room of our house two winters before, unraveling like a sweater or a shadow in her bed as I played with the doll by the fire and turned up the volume on the television so I couldn’t hear the other Anne struggle for breath on the other side of the wall.
Anne, and Anne.
On and on.
But everything came to an end in the end.
“Your doll’s never been on a barge,” my friend Rachel’s older brother said in a false-baby voice. “She wants to give it a try.”
Once, this boy had snatched a piece of watermelon out of my hand and eaten it in front of me while I screamed. Once, he’d grabbed the tail feathers of a dead bird in a ditch, and flung it at me. Once, he’d stuck a handful of snow down the front of my pants—keeping the hand there as the snow melted, staring into my eyes as if he were seeing into my brain.
That bird he’d flung managed to fly, flapping its wings mechanically over my head for a few seconds before it fell in front of me in a soggy heap to die a second time, and the soggy heap of that bird was what he saw inside my brain.
And the snow—I told my mother about the snow, and she put her dishtowel to the side of her head and said, “Oh dear, oh dear, don’t say another word about it. You don’t want Daddy to find out.”
I expected Rachel’s older brother to grab the doll from my hands and
toss her over the bridge. I realized in that moment that I had been prepared since the day I was bom for this boy to grab my doll and throw her over a bridge. I wouldn’t even gasp, I knew, when he did it. I would let him. I would watch.
But he didn’t.
He just looked at Rag-Anne, at me, and then down at the men on the barge. They were patient down there, but they were also tired. This was no longer a game to them. The air was maritime gray. Rag-Anne looked at me with no eyes. Please, she said, speaking to me with no eyes.
Please ?
She meant the bridge, the barge, the men below us. Please.
What?
Please, you know what.
Please.
She was trying to explain to me what I already knew but had not entirely believed. That she was getting older, as was I. That everything was about to change—whether we accepted the change, whether we set it in motion ourselves, or tried to prevent it, or not. That there was birthdaycomingup. That there would be a new doll with blonde hair and human eyes, and what would become of Rag-Anne then?
We knew. We knew. We knew.
Why not?
Why not, while there was still this chance? While there was still this barge below us on this bridge? Who knew how long until this chance, this barge, was gone forever from our lives? Could she not just, peihaps, please, give this other life a try?
No, I thought, clinging to her more tightly.
Rachel’s older brother smirked. The others watched.
No.
No eyes.
When he touched her with a finger, she didn’t even flinch. His smirk, his dirty finger. It seemed she didn’t even mind.
“Just let her try,” he said, almost kindly.
Please, she said. Oh, please. How long anyway is any doll’s life? How long, anyway could any life go on? My grandmother had finally been taken from our house on a stretcher borne aloft by a muscular woman and a small man. They’d burned her up. I knew that much. I saw the um, and overheard.
“Toss her over,” my friend’s brother said. “Go on.”
He didn’t need to speak to me like a baby now. Now, I understood
the language we were speaking. Toss me over, Please. It was what she would have said with eyes if she still had eyes, if her eyes were not lodged deep inside me. I looked at her, at him, and then—
Then she slipped, feathered death, over the railing of the bridge, sighing into the oncoming twilight below us, and my friends older brother poked me gently between my legs with his finger—a burning bianch unfurling itself all through my body and sprouting out of the back of my skull when he did—while the other children laughed, and he said, “Good job, idiot.”
For whom did I cry all the way home and into the bathtub that night?
Rag-Anne?
No.
I d cast her off on purpose. I’d hated her, and her decay, her frayed gray petticoat, her grease-stained apron, even her name.
Rag-Anne, and also Anne.
I’d hated them both—but especially my grandmother, who’d burned a hole in me by dying, by allowing herself to be burned alive. I could stick three fingers into that hole, wiggle them around—bloodless, painless, but also terrible. I’d wanted those two out of my sight.
And, yet, I felt afraid. The men on the barge seemed not to have noticed that a doll had fallen into their midst. Who knew what they might do when they did? They might cast her into the water. They might set her on fire.
That night, an enormous hairless zoo animal made of silence slipped into my dream, lay down on top of me, and stayed there, like a warm snow-pile, until morning. Then, we all went back to the bridge and saw her:
Anne!
I knew it was her by the expression on her face. I had been looking at that face for years, and it had never changed, even without eyes.
The boys whistled, but not loud enough for the men smoking on the barge to hear. The men on the barge were watching her, paying no attention to the children overhead.
She was blonde now, again, in a thin fresh flowered dress. No underwear, it seemed. I could see a black triangle between her legs, the button-eyes of her nipples. There was a smear of fiery lipstick on her mouth. Where had she gotten it? Even my grandmother had never worn lipstick.
She was laughing as she sat on their laps. One man's lap, and then another's. She was barefoot, black-eyed, very young. When one of the men on the barge pointed a cigarette in our direction, she looked up,
holding a hand to a forehead.
Was she saluting, or blocking the sun?
She waved at us with her other hand, and we waved our little Ameiican flags back at her, and the boys stuck out their tongues. The men on the barge grabbed at her small breasts, and she just laughed and let them—and then she was gone, and then she was gone, down m t e
bowels of the barge. ,
Anne, my grandmother, my rag doll animated by their new world
down there below the bridge, on the barge, their wild new life, which was entirely my fault, my hideous idea entirely, my brave idea that had saved them from the fire.
You know the rest.
The bridge. The barge. A church bell clabbering in the distance along with the echoing sneeze of a metal tool banging on a metal roof— as if it were a competition between heaven and earth, as if heaven had the slightest hope of winning.
It was hot down there, and they took turns, and they came back out into the sun, pulling on their shirts, zipping up their pants, one by one, one by one, until each of them was done, and then the barge began to pull away, and all of it was gone.
And all of it was gone.
And I started to cry again, and he touched me with his finger between my legs again, almost tenderly, my friend s older brother, and he said, “Shut up, you idiot.”
It was Thursday. Nothing like that ever happened again.
Nominated by David Baker, Pinckney Benedict, James Harms, Jane Hirshjield, Mark Irwin, Jim Moore