The Deal

The Actress

Alex races through the kitchen, the autumn sun in her hair. The large slice of the hawthorn hedge visible in the window is bathed in the kind apricot light of early fall. She is laughing, Mark is chasing her, laughing and gaining, and just before they reach the sauna, he catches her, turns her around, and kisses her passionately.

Eggs are scrambling on the burner, and coffee is brewing, spreading the beautiful terracotta smell of fresh coffee in the kitchen. It is early, he has to leave for work, but she kisses him, as if in a frenzy, and perhaps she is in one, and presses herself tightly against his body, indicating that she wants to go make love. They laugh all the way to the bedroom, Mark pausing at the stove long enough to turn off the burner and remove the pan from the hot surface.

As they enter the bedroom, in embrace, Alex opens her eyes and looks at Mark, his beautiful eyes closed, his light brown lashes resting on his cheeks. As they pass the three-way mirror, she sees a glimpse of the two of them, kissing. But right as she is about to close her eyes again, she sees someone else, too, just behind them.

She gasps, recoils. Mark, mistaking it as further show of her desire, tosses her on the bed. The he sees the look on her face. “Alex?”

Quick as lightning, the smile is back on her face. “Come on”, she says, pulling him on top of her.

The Professional Widow

After totaling the juniper bush, Alexandra must have fallen asleep in the flowerbed, since the next morning, early, she awoke to Mark trying to nudge her awake, rather urgently, bordering on manhandling.

“Alex?! Alex?! Just what the hell are you doing out here? Do you know how worried I was when you weren’t there when I woke up? What did you do, just decide to do a little gardening in the dead of night?”

For some insane reason Alexandra felt such exuberant happiness in seeing him, she hugged him hard, tears forming in her eyes, dirty and groggy from sleeping on the moist soil the whole night. It was ridiculous, really, but somehow she felt as if she hadn’t seen him in ages. A distant bell echoed in her mind, and she freed one hand to see her right hand, her fingers. It was dirty and bleeding, and she saw the remains of the small tree all around the flowerbed. Why she had thought she would have Mark’s wedding ring on her right ring finger she had no idea. It was right there on Mark’s left ring finger where it belonged. But she could have sworn – and why did she not have any recollection of coming out in the yard to do some radical gardening? How was is possible that she had fallen asleep? She was so cold, too, and it seemed as if the sun was looking a little funny, as if she had slept all through summer, and it was autumn, the autumn sun. But it could not be. She knew she had some head troubles, but she wasn’t that far gone.

Mark was holding her, and trying to get her to stand up. Her limbs felt heavy and stiff, almost as if she had been lying on the ground for days.

“Darling, can you get up? Nip-Nip, can you move your legs? Oh god, look at your hands, honey! Can you move at all? Alex?”

The Child/The Magpie

The arrow goes straight through my heart/Without you everything just falls apart. Bead earrings, a belt, a jumper, a blazer, a pair of stockings, a felt hat. Ten journals, twenty, twenty-five. Words and pens and books and two boxes of necklaces and brooches. When Alex was little, she always liked the idea of my blood wants to say hello to you/My fears want to get inside of you/My soul so afraid to realize (How very little there is left of me) collecting beautiful things inside tiny boxes and organizing them in rows on the rickety wicker shelf on her bedroom wall. When she hid her heart and most of her emotions in those boxes too, her doctor later told her, it was, to great extent, because of her overprotected and shielded childhood. Her intense and all-encompassing need to have everything just so around her, not leaving her house a lot, her world consisting of order and pause and detail, all of it, derived, in all kinds of mysterious ways she would never quite understand, from those childhood years of cocoon and overwhelming amount of pure love from her mother, paired with a pre-existing disposition of worry and neatness, and then one thing leading to another later on.

Her childhood was so happy. This she remembers; the content feeling of being immersed, saturated, in love. And her collections of things; her crayons, categorized according to hue, and her book spines in perfect order, mother’s button box she was sometimes allowed to take out from the wardrobe to play with, her bed always made by herself (she was so proud of this), and her treasures, her own buttons and earrings and necklaces inside the boxes, like she has now.

It’s the keeping the emotions in the boxes that has become the greatest problem in her life. I got my head but my head is unraveling/Can’t keep control, can’t keep track of where it’s travelling/I got my heart but my heart is no good/And you’re the only one that’s understood. Once a box is open, everything just flies out until there is nothing left.

The Monsters

“You unbelievable bitch! I may lose my job, and you don’t even seem to care! You never do, so why am I not surprised? If it has nothing directly to do with you, you just – don’t.”

“What? How can you - I’m just your fucking whore, aren’t I? I’m just here to fuck you silly, or pick up after you! You piece of shit asshole!”

“Alex, no! That’s not what I - What are you talking?”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? That’s what I am, nothing but your prostitute. I perform sex in exchange of being allowed to live here, to eat from the fridge, to sleep in the b-“

“What is this? Stop that right now, are you crazy? Is that really what you think? Alex – that makes me the saddest man on earth. I mean, that is horrible, if you feel that way.”

“I am nothing! My entire value to you or anyone is purely incidental and indirect. It’s not who I am, it’s what I can give you. And let’s face it, with my income, it certainly isn’t money.”

“Alexandra, you need to shut your mouth now. Why are you saying this? Why? Why are you deliberately trying to make me feel like a worthless piece of garbage? You always do this, every time. You just have to make everything about you, you goddamn --“

“Go to hell, motherfucker!”

“Okay time out. Let’s take a breather right now. Stop it! Stop squirming, I’ll let you go as soon as you calm down! You are deluded. Honey, I think you need to consider going back on the meds. This is insane. If I have ever done anything to make you feel that way, I apologize. I have no idea where this is coming from. Is it – are you hurting, again, from down there? Is that it? Alex? Why would you, why would you want to be so mean to me? I – I can’t do this. I need to get out of here.”

“Mark? Mark? Please don’t go, I don’t know why I said it, please! I just, I feel – but I can’t go back on – Mark?”

The Professional Sufferer/The Magpies

The known side effects for using Valeriana officinalis do not include rapid heartbeat, arms going numb or to sleep, or face becoming thicker and thicker, until one feels one’s eyes are disappearing under mountains and walls of flesh, swelling all through the night, and in the morning, there is the face of a sow in place of her own face. They do include upset stomach, though, and strange dreams, thinking problems, nervousness, tiredness and the so-called Belladonna Hangover, nausea, trouble breathing, restlessness, and headaches, along with the welcome effects; calming the nerves and inducing sleep, reducing menstrual pains, reducing symptoms of OCD and PMS, anxiety relief, and of course it acts as a mild sedative. But if one ignores the recommended brevity of the periods of treatment, the side effects may skyrocket. Instead of taking a benzodiazepine once every two or three weeks, one uses valerian every night, suffering henceforth with all the accumulating side effects. Used for hypochondria, hysterical states, depression, muscle and joint pain, but most of all because she is afraid to go to sleep at night.

And of course, the known side effects do include the swelling of the face, but she is fast to skip ahead, and does her homework poorly. The diamonds in her eyes are as bright as the blue capsules, and the herbal tea, her own Belladonna Mix, has a weird taste lately, and her urine is kind of greyish purple, but she will not go back on the meds. The meds is what made her not see the magpies on the wire, trying to warn her, because the birds are her friends, and they know when it is coming.

The Acrobat

She is a house cleaner, a gate keeper, a flower waterer, a home maker. She is a pale shadow of those who came before her, she does her knitting silently and proudly, and clears the table right after eating. She is a ring bearer, a shoe polisher, a window washer, a secret mourner. She is a leaf raker, a lawn mower, a snow shoveler, a car waxer. She walks all the way to the end of the dirt road to get the paper, and when she is done reading, she will wrap the biodegradables in it to take outside in the compost. She is a strawberry grower, a mute picture on the wall, she hangs there like the best of them, and if she does a mildly worse job than those who came before her, can you really blame her?

She is a vacuum cleaner, a full thrash bin, an unmade bed. She gets the winter coats from the storage and keeps them outside on the terrace for at least two nights before taking them back in. She is a mouse trap, a clothes line, a bar of soap, an empty page in the journal that has the canvas cover she just loves to run her fingers on. She in a book reader, a TV watcher, a mirror starer, a curtain changer, a laundry washer, a wood chopper. She does her chores alone and alone, and when the loneliness is such that she cannot bear it, she calls her husband. And if he doesn’t answer because he is busy, she talks to her shadow self, the woman in the mirror, because she is a water colorer, a secret keeper, a demon walker, a twilight dreamer. She is a borderline balancing act, she keeps books, she runs the water to mask her crying in the bathroom at night.

The Deal

You shall have him back, then. He will not know what happened. I will not interfere with his life, or show myself to him. But you will give me all your children, and you will give me yourself, and this deal will bind you to me until you die.

But, I don’t have any children.

No. You don’t.

And he will be safe? Absolutely? With me?

Yes. Well, what is safe. I cannot control everything, Alexandra. Just my own domain.

And he’ll never have to see you?

Never. But he will see you, Alexandra. He will see you, and you can’t stop it.

What children? I don’t understand. And why wouldn’t he want to see me? I love him. What do you mean – no! No! No more! Stop it! Stop it, it hurts! Yes, yes, I will, I will, I just want him back, I need him! Please, stop! No, my hands, you’re burning me, please, please stop it, I will do whatever you want, just bring him back to me!

Be quiet. You will go to sleep now.

Some inspirations for this piece: Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele; David Lynch’s Lost Highway and the accompanying Original Soundtrack; Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; Stephen King’s It, the first reason for this entire story.

Words in italics, in the chapter titled The Child/The Magpie, are Trent Reznor's, from the song The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails.