It was only a moment that Sophie was out, but the dream she had in the dark space of her mind felt eternal. She was clutched in the talons of a giant bird, its claws like a cage around her body, its dark feathers batting and disorienting her. Sophie tried to steady herself on the claws but her hand slid off them; she tried to grip the creature’s scaly legs but they were so terrible to touch she drew back her hand and gagged. She couldn’t breathe with the evil smell of the beast, and began to thrash and kick at the claws, bringing a shriek from the bird as it looped its long neck down and locked its terrible eyes on Sophie. A great razored beak stuck with blood and fur and skin; bulging eyes with ruptured red blood vessels streaking like lightning across the yellowy whites; a knotted chiffon scarf around its neck. It opened the knife of its beak to scream.
“Oh my dear, dear granddaughter! My little bumblebee! My tiny birdie-girl!”
* * *
SOPHIE WAS AWAKE, gasping air back into her body, the air her fall had knocked from her lungs. She was tangled in the bony limbs of her grandmother. Kishka’s feathers fluttered into her face, ticking her eyes—no, it was her scarf, the scarf her grandmother always kept knotted around her neck. Scratchy-soft, spritzed with perfume. Kishka’s smell was a deep, green smell, the smell of a lime petrified to stone. It was a hard, heavy smell, something dug from a cave. Kishka smelled of emeralds, if emeralds had a smell. The initial lightness of the perfume was pleasant, but as you inhaled more deeply it grew darker, leaden, til you feared the fumes of it in your lungs. Sophie pushed herself away from her grandmother, and breathed deeply.
“What?” Kishka cried, insulted. “A grandmother can’t give her hurt granddaughter some care? I’m just seeing if my little tweety bird is okay,” Kishka watched the girl stand up, unsteady, like a colt just dropped from her mom. Sophie felt dizzy. She was afraid to look at Kishka and see a set of wild, yellowed eyes beneath her regular grandmother eyes—squinty eyes, always peering through a veil of cigarette smoke or against the fierce summer sun. She jumped as her grandmother’s bony hands came clutching at her chin—claws, Sophie thought, she and her mom always laughed at Kishka’s claw-hands, but it wasn’t funny now, how did Sophie ever think it was funny, nothing was funny about a grandmother that was also a shrieking bird-monster clutching at your face with her talons. Sophie jerked away but Kishka’s grip grew tighter, her fingers sinking into the girl’s skin and then releasing. All the while Sophie kept her eyes closed, afraid to look, even though the scene of the vicious bird clawing at her face was no better.
“Oh, dear.” Kishka pulled her hand away from Sophie’s chin, and Sophie opened her eyes. Kishka’s fingernails were pointy and ragged, with blotches of chipped-away nail polish here and there but the splash of red on the jagged tip of her thumb wasn’t polish at all. Sophie stared at her grandmother, dizzy and horrified, as she licked the girl’s blood from her claws. “You hurt yourself,” she said, nodding at the scrape, beading with blood. She slid her jagged nails into the knot of her scarf and freed it, quickly daubed at the cut on Sophie’s face. Sophie jumped back at the touch, but Kishka’s hands were like an iron vise upon her.
“What is wrong with you?” her grandmother spat. “I’m trying to fix you up from your tumble and you’re acting like I’m trying to kill you! You bang your head or something?” Kishka opened her mouth and her tongue slid out to moisten the scarf. Sophie shut her eyes again but too late, too late, the sight of her grandmother’s tongue, thin and pale as a worm, forked like a snake and rising from a coil at the back of her throat, made her feel sick.
“There, there.” Kishka patted the wound gently with the moistened scarf, cleaning the red smears off Sophie’s chin. The old woman glanced at Angel. “Well, children hate getting a spit bath from an adult, but it’s my right as a grandmother, isn’t it?” She knotted the scarf back around her neck and pulled Sophie in for a hug.
“My little Humpty Dumpty took a real tumble, didn’t you? Did you bang your noggin?” She released Sophie, held her at arms length, her hands on her shoulders. Kishka smiled, a smile Sophie had seen all her life. Had she bonked her noggin?
She placed her hands gingerly on the top of her head, on her shoulders and knees, on her face. No part of her body felt hurt, but some strange place inside her felt deeply bruised.
The thought of the bird, of her grandmother’s tongue, sent a pukey feeling straight through her. It had been like a vision from the pass-out game, only terrible. Sophie worried that she had brought that dream space too close, and now her body was falling into it on its own.
“You only tumbled from a little bucket, for goodness sake,” Kishka said. “I think you just gave yourself a scare. You gave us a scare, too! When did your lazy mother drop you off? Oh, here—Angel, this is my granddaughter, Sophie. She got her mother mad at her and now she’s going to be staying here at the dump all summer. Sophie, this is Angel. He runs the glass recycling until I tear it down and fire him. Which is any minute.”
Sophie looked at Angel, and Angel winked at her. It was a quick wink, so quick wondered if she’d really seen it. As she reached to shake Sophie’s hand, Angel winked again, slower, if a wink can be slowed. “Great to meet you.” Angel’s voice was gruff, but female. Sophie peered at her. What was this strange day when everyone was something else? Angel pushed a bit of hair behind her cap with—well, could hands be male or female? Sophie was starting to feel dumb. She knew Angel was a girl, but her nana seemed to think Angel was a guy, and Angel somehow knew that Sophie knew she was a girl, and appeared to enjoy putting one over on her boss. Sophie relaxed, relieved to be included in the joke, if that’s what it was.
“No egg on your head?” Kishka reached out and ruffled Sophie’s curls, her fingers getting stuck in a snarl. “Well, what the—doesn’t that mother of yours comb your hair? It’s a rat’s nest!”
“I’m fine, Nana,” Sophie finally spoke. She helped pull her grandmother’s fingers from her hair. Just regular-old fingers, bony and old. Sophie’s hair tangled easily; if she didn’t brush it each morning the snarls formed in sleep would continue to weave together throughout the day. She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and pulled the mess of it quickly into a bun. “Mom’s really busy,” Sophie explained. “She had to get to work.”
“There’s no excuse for walking around looking like a homeless person,” Kishka insisted. “I can be mad at you about it, or I can be mad at your mother. Which would you rather?”
Sophie realized as her grandmother stared at her quietly that she expected an answer.
“My… mother?” she said.
“I thought so. Smart girl.” She went again to ruffle Sophie’s hair, thought better of it, then reached into her housedress for a pack of cigarettes. “Anyway, I was just telling Angel here that his tumbler is too loud; it makes it impossible for me to take my naps, and I’m an old woman—old women need naps.”
“I can get a smaller tumbler, but everything will take a lot longer. And it’ll cost a few hundred dollars.”
“You’re not getting a penny out of me, mister. Figure it out! And, I’m going to leave my granddaughter here with you. You like this part of the dump, don’t you, dear? It’s pretty?”
“Yeah,” Sophie said, gazing back at the sparkling drums of glass. “It’s really pretty.”
“Well, Angel will let you help him. And if anything”—Kishka took a drag from her cigarette, let the smoke leach from her body, thoughtfully—“weird happens, Sophia, you come and tell me right away.” Kishka glared at the tumbler. “And someone will be on his way back to Puerto Rico so fast his head will spin.” Kishka scuffed away from the glass recycling area, her plasticky sandals kicking dust up her legs, a haze of smoke drifting around her. “I’ll be in my trailer, trying to nap, if anyone needs me!”
“I wouldn’t want to wake her up,” Sophie said when her grandmother was out of sight.
“I don’t want to,” Angel said. “The machine’s just noisy, and we have a lot of orders, and I think all that lady does is sleep.”
“No, I didn’t mean you did,” Sophie said quickly. It felt sort of awful to have been left there with Angel. Sophie didn’t like being around strangers. It made her self-conscious even when she wasn’t reeling from a bunch of weird experiences—or hallucinations. “It’s more like, my grandmother’s kind of scary! I don’t ever want her mad at me.”
Angel smiled and shrugged. Her easy calm was foreign to Sophie, who was only ever around high-strung, sort of stressed-out people. It made her even more compelled to jabber nervously. “She seems to like you well enough.” Angel cocked an eyebrow and waited for a comment from Sophie, but Sophie was scattered and nervous.
“So, you’re from Puerto Rico?” she asked. “My best friend Ella is from Puerto Rico, too. Her parents are, she’s from here.”
“I’m actually not Puerto Rican,” Angel said. “I’m Mexican. But I’m not from Mexico, I’m from here. And my parents are from here, too. My family has been here a while.” She scratched her head beneath her knit hat. “And, I’m not a guy. But you knew that.”
“Why don’t you tell my grandmother?” Sophie asked.
Angel wrinkled her face. “She’d just act weird about it. And, the less your grandmother knows about me, the better.”
Sophie felt a pull to know something, something more about Angel. What it felt to be a girl like she was, tough like a boy, so casual about it. She felt that part of herself pull outward; then, remembering the smack of impact, she drew it back in. Sophie busied herself playing with a bin of beads. Angel looked at her curiously.
“You okay?” she asked. “From your—fall, or whatever that was?”
“Yeah.” Sophie nodded.
“You want to talk about it?” she asked.
Talk about it? What was there to talk about, if it was just a tumble? Angel’s eyes were wide and steady. Did she know that Sophie had seen something? The girl shook her head quickly. Her head felt fine. She wished it didn’t. If it was throbbing, if it was cut or bumpy she could maybe explain to herself the terrible things she’d seen. But she was fine. Maybe she was going cuckoo.
“You want to see the tumbler?”
Sophie nodded.
Angel led her into the crooked building. Up close, Sophie could see that it was nailed together in the same ramshackle style as the shelving outside. The wood was the same, planks that looked like driftwood, uneven and rough, with gaps for sun and rain to fall through. A giant blue tarp lay bunched by the machine.
“To keep it safe from the elements.” Angel kicked it with her boot.
The tumbler wasn’t as big as she thought it would be—a roll of steel with a confusion of entries and exits.
“It’s so loud it feels like an earthquake,” Sophie said. “I thought it would be bigger.”
“It’s the glass. It’s very loud. It sounds nice to me, though. If you listen closely you can hear each piece singing as it tumbles, I swear.”
“Really?” Sophie was skeptical. “Maybe the machine is making your ears ring or something.”
Angel laughed. “No, no, it’s the glass. You’ll hear it too, after you’ve been here a while.”
That just made Sophie more certain the tumbler was ruining Angel’s eardrums. She leaned against the machine, scanning the dirt floor for shards of glass, which there were a lot of. The whole place was a mixture of sparkle and grit, sort of magical in an ordinary way, and for the first time Sophie considered that maybe her punishment wouldn’t be so punishing after all.
Angel taught her how to clean the mucky glass that the garbage trucks rumbled in, each of them wearing thick gloves like they were doing important, dangerous work. She showed Sophie the bins for brown glass and green, for white glass and clear glass. She told her to keep an eye out for things that looked special, might be antique. Once the glass was sorted, Angel showed her how to smash it, which was really great fun. They wore goggles to keep the sharp dust from their eyes. They poured the rubble into the tumbler, and turned it on gingerly, half-expecting to hear Kishka scream at the sound of the churn. But the churn was too loud to hear anything; Angel had to motion Sophie to follow her outside the shack, waving at her with her fat, goofy gloves.
By the outdoor shelves where Sophie had fallen, Angel pulled off her gloves and tugged the goggles from her face, knocking her wool hat to the dirt in the process. Her dark hair sprang free, long bangs flopping into her face. Sophie thought it made her look more like a girl, all the hair, and then swiftly changed her mind, deciding she looked more like a boy, like one of the shaggy-headed jerks riding through Chelsea on their dirt bikes, looking for girls to torment with whistles and kissy sounds and awful comments. Angel looked like them, only nice, which meant Angel didn’t really look like them, either. Sophie figured that Angel just looked like Angel, and decided not to think about it anymore.
“Good job, kid.” Angel clapped Sophie on the back, collecting her too-big goggles and gloves. The goggles stuck in the snarl of her hair and for a terrible moment she imagined she’d need Angel’s help to get free. She hated the thought of Angel touching her snarls. Why didn’t she brush her hair more? Sophie resolved to groom herself better. She had a job now; she wasn’t just rolling on creek beds with Ella. She couldn’t wait to tell her friend about her excellent day, about Angel and the glass and the tumbler.
“I have something for you,” Angel said, reaching deep into the pocket of her work pants. What she retrieved sat round in her hand, spanning her palm. It was a piece of glass, a blue so faint it was like the thought of blue, the very beginning of the color. Caught inside its frosted center was a scalloped seashell, white with a stripe of rose at the bottom base, like the last glow of an excellent sunset before it sank into the sky.
“Wow,” Sophie breathed. “How did you make this?”
“I didn’t,” Angle said. “I didn’t tumble it, either. It’s sea glass. It came like that right out of the ocean.”
Sophie inspected it, turning it over in her palm. She pressed her fingers against its smooth edges, feeling for a ghost of the sharpness that had long been worn away by the sea. “But how did it happen?” she asked. “Like, was it glass someone made with seashells and then it got dumped in the ocean and rolled around?”
Angel shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess that could have happened, but it’s really old. It’s very mysterious. I did do this”—she pointed to a hole at the tip—“so you could, like, wear it as a necklace.”
Sophie thrilled at the thought. “Yes!” she said. “That’s so cool.”
“But you can’t let your grandmother see it, okay? She thinks half the things that come into this place are worth something, and they’re not, but she’ll take it and put it in her trailer and that’s the last you’ll see of it. Keep it low.”
“Okay.” Sophie nodded solemnly. She pulled her house key out from her t-shirt and strung the sea glass onto the rope. “I think it needs a really nice chain,” she said wistfully. “But I’ll wear it on this for now so I don’t lose it.”
“Right on.” Angel gave her a salute. “See you tomorrow. Get some sleep. Your bones are going to be sore after all the work we did today.”