Our neighbor, Marie, waves me down with those square hands of hers, flapping like fleshy wings. I consider pretending I haven’t seen her, turning blindly up the path to our own front door. But she would know I’m lying. Marie’s eyebrows are bushy, metallic—a sign, she assures me, that she is really much better now. She winds a long strand of silver hair around her fingers, gives it a tug, her eyes nailing me to the spot. Mesmerized, I watch it pull away from the scalp, leaving a bald patch flecked with blood. She opens her fingers, letting the autumn breeze snatch the hair away to get snagged on the clothesline. She grins wickedly, eyes disappearing behind tidal folds of flesh.
I could try and think of some excuse not to stay, but loneliness and worry have slowed my reflexes. The effort of trying to escape her unsettling jabber, to go inside and try to balance the books—the mystery of where or how I’ll make ends meet—is beyond me. Worst case scenario, I tell myself, is that it’s one hour I’ll never get back again. One hour. The curtains twitch from our kitchen windows—could be the wind, or Jules, doing a terrible job of spying on me. But Jules, I remember, isn’t home. Not anymore.
Marie’s husband Donald appears between the two houses, bearing the washing basket. Their clothesline is strung up at the front for all the street to see. This is due to an ancient, gnarled oak tree in their backyard (you can see the dark branches over the pitched roof) which keeps the place in perpetual twilight. Donald fusses with the pegs in hands customarily gloved, according to Marie, for his arthritis. The silvery filaments of his wife’s hair flail on the line, but can’t escape. “Cold’s coming,” he says in his womanly voice, and there is something ominous to the way he adds: “Heating bill’s through the roof.”
This day, when I return from dropping the kids off at school, Marie billows out as usual onto the sidewalk but there is a new set to her smile, a waxy gleam in her eyes. Behind her, Donald’s stoop over the laundry basket is even more precarious than usual, and there are lakes of sweat under his armpits despite the chill. I wonder if they’ve had a fight. Today he’s wearing kitchen gloves, and new angles in his hands poke beneath the yellow rubber, sharp hints of bone.
My mind races, trips over itself. The children clung to me this morning like monkeys—maybe I should try and rustle up some fun for them, but with what? A video and pizza won’t break the bank—maybe—but thinking about it saps my strength. I’ve nothing left, no reservoir to fight the exhaustion with either sleep or will. Besides there is that worry, buzzing like a fly in a dream, that I’ll offend Marie. Jules would say the woman was too thick skinned to offend, but I’m not convinced. I have seen something hurt move and retreat behind her deep-set eyes. A knowingness that makes my skin burn in shame. Her chins quiver a little and I hate to think that, to her, I’m just like everyone else in this cold and unfeeling place.
Jules was in my dreams last night, slyly erotic—and as secretive as ever—so I must have slept a little. She scared me a little.
There is a louche quality to Marie’s fleshiness that I find both repulsive and irresistible (the writer in me, Jules tenderly noted), allusions beneath the pouchy, unkempt hausfrau drag, to a glamorously disrespectable past. I can’t help but think about her having sex even though she’s out of shape and not all that clean. When she prattles on, I imagine those eyes sparkling before they faded and sank beneath the fleshy folds, her face framed by Golden Age curls before they silvered and thinned. Now she is That Woman—the one in every neighborhood who talks your ear off beside the mailboxes, no chance to get a word in edgeways, like she has you under some kind of spell, and before you know it there’s time out of your life gone forever. Disappeared along with everything else.
Jules never had time for Marie, not even an hour. “Would it kill the witch to throw that old housecoat in the wash once in a while? Or to put on a bra?”
But I saw a great Fall behind Marie’s stinky defiance, financial ruin, or some monumental disappointment in love, I’d suggested to Jules. That made her laugh—and I was glad to make her laugh. “You think?” she’d said, meaning Donald.
She had a point. Looking at Donald awkwardly pinning laundry to the line, I can’t see him having sex with anyone—my imagination won’t stretch that far. There is something missing about him, and it’s not just the way he habitually coughs into those gloved hands. His limbs don’t quite communicate with each other, making him rush at you one minute, back off slowly the next, looking into the distance as if searching for a lost opinion, or the grown children he seemed to have misplaced, or his own life, traded in now for someone else’s. You can’t help feeling sorry for Donald, Jules would say, more like a shadow than a man.
Two cats, a black tom with an orange ear, and a tabby, have found a patch of sun on their quaint, sagging porch and the tabby squawks at me, as if to say, Stay. Or maybe, Go? Warning or welcome, I can’t work out which. Marie squats down, surprisingly agile, to yank a weed at the foot of the mailbox—plainly a purpose to her loitering, and although I’m not sure what it is, I feel caught up in her unruly web, this presence bordering on obsession. She stands up to ask after the kids, which leads to some more dogged waffle about their own long-gone brood and then to the disappointing ending of the TV series she and Donald have been binging on, and then . . .
I guiltily lean against the fence, so overtaken by the need to sleep that the drift away from Marie’s operatic chatter is sensual, almost erotic in its surrender—and when I return minutes, or it could be hours later, she is saying something about a little-known shopping precinct way across town where you get the best—and cheapest—groceries. I shake myself awake, straighten up and push away from the fence, weirdly refreshed.
“It’s because of the immigrants over there.” She brings me back, chopping her arm threateningly in the direction of the intricate city skyline across the water, three bridges from our quiet, leafy neighborhood with its restored old homes and inclusive schools. “Refugees and what not. They look at the prices over here, and go, No way.”
“No way,” echoes Donald.
“Beans,” I say, “were nine dollars a kilo at the supermarket yesterday.”
“Nine dollars a kilo,” she shrieks. “Over there, you could get a whole box of beans for that, I imagine. Snake beans, too, which are much tastier, although they go bad quicker. And other magical temptations—all the exotic stuff they keep for themselves.”
We too were immigrants once. Country girls, young and in love. Jules had applied for a head chef position in the capital, asked me to come with her. With the freelance work I could do from anywhere, I had nothing to lose. It was an adventure, after all. Two kids later and with a restaurant of our own in a neighborhood we couldn’t afford or still hadn’t adjusted to (or that maybe after all had not adjusted to us), we began to feel less and less like adventurers, and more like unwelcome strangers in someone else’s idea of Eden.
It made Jules uncomfortable when I talked like that. She said to save it for the novel when I could get to it, which wasn’t often. Paid copywriting work came first, and there were always those evenings when Jules needed help at the restaurant, or with the accounts. My skin cools with the memory of delivery drivers unloading trays of meat and vegetables from belching trucks that looked like monochrome cutouts taped onto the vivid colors of the upscale avenue. You’d never know the trucks had been there after they’d gone—they’d left no sign that I could see, or maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough. I tried once or twice to offer the drivers a drink—fresh-squeezed juice or ice tea—but they always refused, said they’d get something once they were home. “Home,” they’d say, looking in the direction of that jagged skyline. Like they knew they didn’t belong where we were, and feared to eat or drink anything of this place.
Marie says, “Who can afford beans at nine dollars a kilo?”
Donald shakes his head sadly and there’s that sad validation behind her eyes again, as if to say, Not a single mother like you. I flush because it’s true. I don’t want to return to the country. The children have friends at school. I feel close to Jules here, her slim figure at the edge of my eye, that sense of someone at my elbow, the voice in my head.
But for how much longer?
Marie plants both hands on her hips, the housecoat buttons gaping to expose an ice-blue belly. I look away, my brimming eyes making a blur of Donald, a blur of the oak tree with its dark arms enclosed around their gingerbread house. “It’s so hard, being alone.” Her eyes shift to Donald and back again. “I know you’re hurting, Rebel.” There’s a croon to her voice now. “But an adventure . . . a day for yourself . . . ”
An adventure . . . and yet. The children at school, the long drive to the city and back, not to mention what it will cost in gas. I should forget it—just have a nap, write that review for some electronics magazine, and carry on as always. Maybe try and scrimp even more than I already do. No more of those packaged snacks for their lunchboxes, maybe. Less wine. Less meat . . .
Less everything.
A gust of wind tugs the hair free of the sagging clothesline, and it disappears into the sky. I think of Jules’s spicy soups made from bone broth. Thick with noodles and tender beans, vegetables she ordered in from that distant market across the three bridges. Those trucks filled with fragrant bunches of herbs and all the special cuts of meat that Jules knew about, sourced from hidden suppliers deep in the civic heart, just three bridges away. Why had she never taken me there? Why had I never taken myself?
“It’s a wonderland, truly. Nothing like the supermarket.” Marie leans in, her breath clovey. “Most of the vegetables are stale there, been sitting around in warehouses for days. And the chicken is grey—you ever noticed that?”
I have.
“Go and see for yourself. The kids can come here after school. It’ll only be for the afternoon. Donald will make his world-famous crepes.”
Donald grins from the clothesline, scratches his ear with a rubber-gloved finger. The children did go over there once or twice when I had to help out at the restaurant, and Toby told me about the delicate crepes Donald made with lemon and sugar—so bad for them, Jules said. But what choice did we have, with no family of our own here to help out? When I think about it, Marie and Donald are the closest thing to that. To family. I look one more time over Marie’s shoulder toward that magical place that Jules kept to herself. I repress the anger—it’s to be expected, I’m told. One of the stages. It’s not real, I’m told. Jules would be proud of me for following in her footsteps, for trying to get the finances under control. For not giving up.
I think about that nap, about sleeping forever.
But then a cold whiff of Marie’s unwashed housecoat brings something unexpected with it—the scent of possibility. Not only in the world, but in myself. Where is that possibility now? That chance? Not here, in this prim soulless suburb, but over there.
Beyond the bridges. A faraway spire needles a patch of blue. Donald has finished hanging up Marie’s stained dishcloths and his undershirts and announces he’s going inside to make the batter for the crepes, clapping his gloves together, as excited as a child himself.
“You never know what’s around the corner,” Marie says, her lips quivering. She smiles at the distant skyline as if at a long-lost friend. “Or who. Over there.”
I nod yes, yes, pushing my uncertainty aside. I tell her that I’ll text the children and call their teachers. All business now, Marie draws out detailed directions on an envelope she fishes out of the mailbox. You’ll need one of those folding trolley-bags, she tells me, offering hers. But I have one in the car, and without even going inside the house (afraid that I’ll see Jules there, maybe, worried that she’ll somehow be able to talk me out of it) I drive across three bridges to check out the prices in the forgotten streets of the city.
Marie is right. In the shadows of the graceful towers and glittering hotels, there’s a whole other world. I wander up and down the dirty, noisy alleys and byways lined with fruit stands, or huge wooden crates on wheels from which vegetables spill; behind shuttered doors at half-mast, hooded vendors preside over nostril-tickling mounds of spices and teas. Racks of cheap pastel sweatshirts clack on plastic hangers, and women with their hair tucked into white caps slice bloody hunks off plucked or flayed carcasses to be weighed on creaking scales. I treat myself to a sweet buttery coffee brewed from behind a hole in the wall. From a discount store that smells of residual monomers and incense, I buy the children magic markers and a fairy tale coloring book—I think of how Jules would love the way Little Red Riding Hood looks like a Kardashian and Prince Charming more like a Korean alcoholic.
Thinking about Jules here feels different than missing her back in our neighborhood, when there is both too much that reminds me of her and not enough. Here I feel her near. There I only felt her gone.
I buy a huge tray of strawberries for dessert, enough to share with Marie as a way of saying thank you. I owe you, Marie, I think, half delirious. I owe you big time!
I decide to wait until I’m closer to home to buy the cream, my mouth watering, the children’s smiles getting ever wider in my mind. I pick over fruit that looks like human hands, or covered in horns; peer into cages crawling with scaled insects that smell like a cross between urine and chocolate. I make reckless attempts to bargain as Jules might if she were here. I chastise her with fond irritation for not taking me here herself.
“Better late than never,” I say out loud. And no one looks askance as they would in our neighborhood where talking to oneself is as frowned upon as littering, or wearing pajamas to the store—remember, Jules, that’s where we met, we’d both gone to the 7-Eleven in our pjs, you to buy milk for your flat and me to get cigs for my mom.
Remember?
The dueling sensations of freedom and reassembly hit me like a drug, new connections proliferating, old ties cut. I try to imagine which store she ordered the restaurant meat from, or the vegetables that were her specialty, the hot sweet soup whose name I could never pronounce. I can all but see her there ahead of me, those slight, determined shoulders (she was so thin in the end) lost in the crowd but always right around the next bend . . .
She doesn’t look back.
In my rush to follow that phantom figure, one wheel on my trolley-bag snaps under the weight of groceries—boxes of tiny eggs and bunches of herbs and sacks bulging with beef, pork and ground lamb. I laugh at the hobbled bag under its weight of exotic, and even better, affordable loot. I have gone, as Toby would say, from zero to hero, escaped finally from paradise, the big empty house where I write empty words while the kids are at school learning nothing if not to forget. Learning to smile again, moving away from me.
I look for her up ahead, but she’s gone.
Reality washes in. But it’s a version that makes my skin itch. My eyes sting. I grab onto a stand of beans for support, feeling as though I might fall. Snake beans and runner beans and yellow beans. Beans the size of kidneys and as long as arms, or beans as small as grains of rice that look like tiny eyes, beans as black as tar and blue as veins. Dried beans and tinned beans and marinated beans, stewed beans in sticky crocks floating with fatty flesh, and jars of rainbow-colored jelly beans. I am suddenly ravenous. Shaking with a needful, nagging hunger.
Deep in the valleys cast by the shadow of the towering buildings, I drag the broken trolley bag to the car, the straps of grocery bags digging welts into my arms. An oasis of one tribe gives way to an island of another, an impromptu football game in a mud-churned field. Disorientated by the cacophony of calls to prayer, bell towers pealing the hour, funeral processions of chattering transvestites, I notice, with a twist of renewed panic, that the sun is getting low. I load the trunk and get in behind the wheel with a groan of relief. I’ll be home soon, and although I’ll catch the commuter traffic crossing the bridges, I hang onto that thought. Home. I steer past the thronging shops and hawkers, which takes longer than I want to in the traffic, until eventually I get to a zigzagging boulevard called Raining Street. The car feels heavy beneath me, sluggish as if reluctant to move in that direction. The road twists on and on. I reach for Marie’s envelope, but Raining Street is not on her hastily drawn map. I peer down the lanes, searching for a familiar sign. Smoking food stalls obscure my view, make my stomach growl. I brake to avoid a stray cat, black with one orange ear, straining to hear my own thoughts over the loud music coming from busy corners around which crowds swell. The rat-tail braids and knit caps of the musicians register at the edge of my eye. It’s getting late. The children will be getting hungry too.
I pull over, consider buying something from one of those smoking stalls, but I’ve already spent too much. Instead I get out, go to the trunk and loosen a few snake beans from a bunch tightly bound in a rubber band. I bite off the tip. It’s delicious, surprisingly nutty with a peppery aftertaste. I look around me one last time for a road sign and finding none, get back in the car.
I drive slowly through Raining Street which seems to go on forever but which empties out eventually into intermittent strip bars and boarded- up banks. I have chewed to the bottom of the half-yard long bean, and spit the slender stem into my sweating hand. I slowly take a steep descent, trying to work out where I am, take a turn I think will put me onto the first bridge toward home . . .
and then another one, and soon I am inarguably lost. I pull over next to a dusty costume store to check the GPS, beginning to wonder about the state of the meat in the trunk. Why had I bought so much? Will it even fit into the freezer? My stomach sours. I step outside again to check the bags of lukewarm meat and already wilting vegetables jammed amidst the beach towels and library books. An empty bus rattles past up the hill, the driver in wraparound shades. Traffic is sparse. The street lamp above me fails to turn on. A whiff of blood and strawberries stings my nostrils. Beyond a closed door in one of the unlit apartment buildings, a couple begins to argue in a language I don’t know, urgent and hopeless. Starving, I grab a bundle of snake beans and hurriedly get back in. I lock the car, check the rearview. My eyes stare back at something just over my shoulder.
I crunch through the last of another bean, extract the inedible stunted stem from between my lips. My mind circles again to whether the children have eaten. I steer through the dusk, shift gears and turn down the winding hill. According to the GPS, I need to take a right hand turn at the bottom of the switchback, which I navigate too quickly in the deceptive light, the descent steeper than I thought.
I am sure that this will get me to the old highway that leads to the first of the five (or is it three) bridges back to the affluent neighborhood that I can no longer afford and to the children who have lately been dressed for school and spreading peanut butter on their sandwiches before I’ve managed to wake up in the mornings. I thank God, again, for Marie, and for Donald’s crepes, remember too late that the last time Madeline ate them, she complained afterwards of a stomach ache. She said that they were slimy, and reminded her of skin. Sweat pools at my spine.
Don’t eat the skin. Whatever you do.
On Marie’s map she had marked out the cheapest butcher, the freshest greengrocer, the best place to sit for kopi. But now with the car filling up with the smell of dead flesh, I can’t bring any landmarks to mind in the teeming neighborhoods, and all I can recall from Raining Street are instruments lowered at the end of the song.
I keep driving. The raw beans sit heavy in my gut. I toss the tough yet fragile-looking stems, with dirt still clinging to some of them, out the open window. When we’d just come in from the country, I’d been conscious of how people stared at Jules for tossing even an apple core into the bushes—and much later, we’d both tried not to smile when Toby insisted that his banana peel was biodegradable. But the car reeks of blood and overripe fruit, making it hard enough to concentrate without a pile of half-digested green waste on my lap. Better out than in, Jules would say, or maybe that was me.
I spit one straight out the window.
The setting sun fills the car with rusty light. Even with the window open, the smell of the meat is overwhelming. I drive past vacant lots and abandoned self-storage buildings. The pedals feel sticky underfoot. Liquid runs into my shoes, between my toes. Eventually, I pull over and dial Marie’s number, fumble it once, but reach her machine on the second go.
“Rebel?” the machine says in Marie’s quavery voice. “What kind of a name is that? The child of hippies, right . . . or drunks. Wait, didn’t you say your parents had a band? A country band. Was that it? Well, I imagine that you never saw yourself as the type to run off, like your mama did, but maybe you just need to get your head on straight, girl? That’s the kind of thing she’d say, isn’t it? How grief’s a bitch and parenting’s a motherfucker and all that? Well you should’ve thought long and hard, Ms. Rebel, because if living was easy, everyone would do it. Now what you need to do, child, is keep driving as long as you can. The redness filling up your car? It’s not the setting sun, but I expect you already know that by now. Madeline and Toby will be fine. They tell me they love you. I’m sure that’s true, for now. But memory’s a tricky thing, child, a devilish thing . . . I expect you know that too . . . ”
The phone drops from my hands, Marie’s tinny voice rasping from the passenger seat. My throat closes around the scream. I manage to stumble, gasping for breath, onto the curb. Blood sloshes onto the pavement from a rising red pool on the floor of the car. I back away, leaving red footprints. The road stretches empty in both directions. All is still, dead still, and utterly silent. Above me is no longer the sky but a watermark, slowly spinning, of the whole city I’d left behind . . . the tall glass towers rooted in place by the random scrawl of dirty streets and forgotten people . . . the lacy bridges connecting the bland affluent neighborhoods one to another. The air shifts behind me.
“I always hated that freaken harpy.” A sigh. “You wouldn’t listen, though—big old softie.”
I close my burning eyes. I don’t have to turn to know who it is.
“I miss you too,” I say.
I’m afraid of what she’ll look like after all this time. I’m afraid she won’t be there when I turn around. So I don’t.
“Marie’s full of shit,” she says. “The kids will always love us. They need you.”
“Where are you?” I ask. “Why have you never brought me here before?”
“You’re not ready for it yet, Rebel.”
“Marie said—”
“I told you not to listen to that lying crone.”
I half-sob, half-giggle. “Don’t be a misogynist, Jules.”
“And how exactly—” her laughter is warm, full of love “—can a woman be a misogynist?”
I reach for her hand. “Cold.”
“You can look at me, you know. I’m not covered in worms or anything. What’s that smell?”
“Strawberries.” I angle my head toward the voice, keeping the high flat planes of those cheekbones– her pride—just out of focus. “I bought them for the kids.”
She groans theatrically—always. “They were the only thing I could eat in hospital, remember? In the end. And that sinful heavy cream you brought in to help wash them down.”
I bring the icy fingers to my lips—the wedding ring reflecting the russet glare of the blood-filled car. Jules takes me into her arms. She feels the same. Her mouth and tongue are as warm as my tears, and when we separate, I tell her she looks the same. Almost. Filmier. Less substantial. Still Jules though. She smooths the hair off my damp face. Then she spits something into her hand. It’s a shred of bean flesh from my mouth.
“Vigna unguiculata,” she says. “Snake beans?”
“I bought a whole box. I’ve been munching on them, tossing the stems out the window. Sorry.”
“We used these all the time at the restaurant, remember? For the soup.”
She’d fallen in love with the East as a backpacker, and we’d planned to go there together as a family. I reach for her but she’s walking away from me toward the rear of the car—it seems like miles, as if we’ve been on a travelator while we’ve been talking, like at the airport. The nausea is overwhelming, the snake-ball in my stomach, time wound around itself like that thick tangled vine of silver hair wound around the clothesline—not past, not present but both and neither—the restaurant, my job, the children we raised together in the neighborhood that spat us out in the end.
But were never free.
I can just see Jules crouching down behind the car. She comes up with something in the palm of her hand—one of the bean stems I’d tossed out the window.
“When did you start eating these?” she calls.
“Raining Street,” I say. “I know I shouldn’t have littered but I just wasn’t thinking. What the hell, Jules, the birds’ll eat them and if not—”
We look at each other across the empty length of road, half smiling. “They’re biodegradable,” we say simultaneously. What she doesn’t ask out loud, since I hear her thoughts like my own, is what made me toss the (non-biodegradable) snake beans outside the window in the first place. What made me leave a trail? What makes any of us?
“Well, let’s hope the birds haven’t gotten them all,” she says almost to herself. “Listen, I reckon these will get you home if you hurry, at least to Raining Street. It’s at the edge of kind of gorge, a trench. Did you notice how it got steep after that?”
The descent.
“It’s the boundary,” she says. “The border . . . ”
She slumps. I don’t have to ask between what and what.
“If you’d waited until you were here—” she clicks her chin at the empty road beneath the spinning sky “—it would have been different. You might not have a chance. Once you eat something from this place, it’s harder to leave.”
I look around. What is there to eat here, I wonder, and who is there to eat it?
“Those kids need you, Rebel. Don’t ever give up. Promise? That old witch’ll do them no good. Look at what she’s done to Donald.”
“But what about her disease?”
“There isn’t a name for what she’s got.” Jules’s eyes go straight inside her. Her lip pulls up in a grimace, chunks of gelid green bean flesh between her teeth. “The only one sick was me.”
I feel a prickle of dread, the same unease I’d known after the restaurant was a success, and then when she’d finally come to bed at the end of a long night, fuming about a difficult customer or a bungling apprentice. I never blamed her for the booze I could sometimes smell on her breath, or the lateness of the hour—I never wanted Jules to know how fearful I was that the restaurant was asking too much of her, or that we were.
“And her real children?” I say, thinking about Marie and Donald rattling around in their gingerbread house, all those empty rooms. “The ones all grown up?” I’m shaking. My feet squelch in the blood-filled shoes.
“Or not.” Her voice is barely a whisper, too soft for me to hear, but I do. Like a voice at the bottom of a well that is my heart.
“She knew that as soon as I saw you I wouldn’t want to leave,” I say. I’m tired from the long drive. I think about that nap again. “Marie knows everything.” The twilight flows like a river over the car. I feel like I’m asleep even though I’m awake. I think about kicking off my shoes and finding a soft spot in the ditch and spooning with Jules, until we both drift off.
“Rebel! Wait. She doesn’t know everything. She just thinks she does. She sent you here sure that I’d make you stay. That I’d cook you something, maybe with the beans. But she forgot about Raining Street.” She lowers her voice to a stage whisper.
“Or maybe she doesn’t know.”
She smiles and jiggles the bean stem at me. “She doesn’t know us. She thought I’d want you to stay. But I don’t. I want you to go home, to try and live without me. You’ll do that, won’t you? For me?”
Crimson lights flicker on and off in the sprawling ceaseless city.
“You want me to go back?” I say. “Even if it kills me?”
“Don’t let it.” She stumbles toward me, feeling her way around the car. “Don’t give that old witch the satisfaction.”
She’s wearing the embroidered silk slippers I buried her in. We bought ourselves matching pairs for our first Christmas together. Her face ripples.
“What about you coming with me?” I say through the tears. “If I can leave, so can you.”
“I’ve been here too long.” Her skin looks too small for her skull. “You better get a move on. It’s uphill all the way to Raining Street, and the trail will be hard to follow.”
“Raining Street,” I say.
“Once you get there, you’ll be fine.”
I tell her I love her, and I always will.
“You better,” she says. And then she is gone. I return the way I came, inching along and stopping wherever I think I see a fragile, curling stem by the side of the road. When I do, I put it in my pocket. Sometimes I get it right. Other times, it’s not a bean stem, but something else. A creature in the shape of a human hand with blind, seeking fingers tapered at the end. They claw at me, because they can.
Eventually I run out of gas, leave the car at the curb, open the trunk with all the stinking meat in it for whatever still eats down here. I find a piece of rebar for the hand-shaped creatures, some of them as big as dogs, pointed teeth sunk into a cavity just beneath the tapered middle finger. I get lucky sometimes. I must have thrown out the occasional seed too when I was leaving my trail, and some have taken root in the barren soil of empty lots and front lawns strewn with bicycle frames and rubber gloves floppy with time. When that happens, I carefully pull the long, snaking fruit from the young plant—a foreigner in this place like me—and I keep walking. I chew the sweet young bean carefully, see it taking root in my stomach, sending out tendrils, carving a path back to that secret place. The street whose name Marie could never know.
I wonder what other people call it. Other lovers. Sons, daughters and other lost mothers. That borderline between lost and found, under and over. Forgetting and not. I wonder why Jules called it Raining Street. Or maybe that was me.
It is dark here at the bottom of the hill, and mostly empty, windblown with dumpsters and burned-out cars behind which another waits. He’s been with me for a while, his uneven cowering footsteps now ahead of me, now behind.
“Donald,” I call. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” When he finally emerges—his rushing gait even more twitchy than before, his sclera meaty and red—his flayed hands are on me in seconds. He gets at my face, rending the flesh from my jaw with his broken finger-bones, the jagged shards of his wrist—going for my tongue, I suppose. I beat him off eventually with the bar, but it slows me down. I spend the winter between the walls of a derelict store, mashing snake beans with some Advil I find in my pocket. When the frost thaws, I come out, catch my face in a smashed car mirror. I keep away from reflective surfaces after that.
I learn to spot his syncopated trail in the dust, and one day, I find the skull of some poor creature as displaced as me. It’s human-like but smaller, with jagged fangs and a distended snout. I spear the rebar through the nose-hole, use a shard of glass to cut strips off an old tire to lash the skull onto the end like a mace. I manage to get the Donald-thing in the groin finally, matter spurting and his screams echoing along the windblown ways; no sign of Marie coming to his aid. Poor Donald. I’m sure she has other familiars to send my way and I’ll be ready. But Jules was right. It’s a big damn hill. Freezing in winter, burning in summer—and always tinged with that crimson dark. Come spring, the smell of May lifts my heart a little and I kneel down to touch a brave dandelion daring to grow in the cracks. But then autumn hits with a shriek and that dread gust blows straight from her cold heart. Half blinded by driving rains and swirling leaves, I feel my way along the steep path, the mace in one hand, the other seeking out bean stems, knowing I’ll get to the top one day, back to my children—this world being a tricky thing, Marie, a devilish thing.