Archive for December, 2009
Minka’s Gift
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Minka’s gift was to see how others would die. “Consumption,” she would say to herself while walking through Budapesht’s Jewish Quarter. “Accident. Consumption. War. War. Heart. Consumption.” Her only comfort was that her own reflection remained free of any sign of how she would meet her end.
Came the day she was waiting tables and a man sat down alone. Minka looked at him, and looked again. “Never will he die,” she thought. “He is immortal.” She hugged this knowledge to herself, and served him coffee, goulash and halaszle. After awhile he came every week, and after another while he came every day, and always sat by himself. By and by they talked, and by and by she sat with him so he was no longer alone, and by and by she walked with him by the banks of the Duna.
Their marriage was a small affair. He had no friends, and it saddened Minka to see how hers would die. They both observed the rituals: not seeing each other for a week, the fast for the day of the wedding, her veil. The rabbi thought it a curiously quiet ceremony.
Minka did not tell him of her gift. He might think she wanted only to learn how to live forever. She became pregnant and in time gave birth to a boy and a girl. When they were born she averted her eye at first, but could not avoid gazing on her little loved ones.
“Murder,” she sighed, and “Murder.” Immortality escaped them, then. She hadn’t even known it was what she was looking for until she saw it. She mourned her children even as they suckled.
The marriage lasted a year and a day. On the last day, Minka woke as usual before her husband, and turned to gaze at him before rising. She was shocked to see the age of the man with whom she had been sleeping. His hair had fallen out, his cheeks were sunken, one hand shook as if with palsy. And yet it was still he; he with the neverending life.
He sighed in his sleep, and said a word that chilled her. “Hungry,” he murmured. She knew, with a heartbreaking assurance, that it was not mere food that he must eat. She knew now how murder would visit her children.
Minka eased herself from the bed, backing away toward the kitchen and the very sharp knife. She kept her eyes on him.
“Murder.”
Biographies
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Note: Although this story stands alone, this is part of the Pandora series.
Pandora had not known then what we today take for granted: Our houses are watching us: from the center hole in the ceiling fan, to the constellations of faces and creatures inhabiting spackles in the painted ceiling, to the creatures frolicking among the knots in the wooden paneling. So it was that Pandora was taken completely off-guard by the house’s incisive observations.
Pandora returned from the gym after a half-hour on the stair-master, which somehow felt like her work at Widget Manufacturing, Inc. She stripped to her Underoos and struck muscle-man poses in front of her bedroom mirror. She pinched her gut and slapped her jiggly thighs. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fattest in the mall?”
“Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really want an answer?”
Being self-conscious of her body and her silly underwear, it wasn’t the best of times to hear a strange voice in her bedroom. “Who said that?”
“Rhetorical, then. My father always said I couldn’t keep my reflections to myself.”
“Mirror?”
“Yes?”
“What were you saying?”
“Simply that you have a body-image problem. Just accept yourself.”
Pandora stared into her reflection and nodded at it, slightly. She wrapped herself in a fluffy pink robe and stepped into the bathroom. She undressed in the shower, washed, and wrapped her body in a towel before standing in front of the bathroom mirror. “So,” she asked, “you think I have a body-image problem?”
The mirror snorted. “That’s one way to put it. All you do is primp and preen: Is my hair perfect? How’s this shade of lipstick? Vanity, vanity. I’ve never known anyone so damn self-absorbed.”
Shell-shocked, Pandora stared at her steamy reflection. Then she walked stiffly into the bedroom and laid herself across the bed, face planted in a pillow. After a good cry, she draped her towel across the bedroom mirror, dressed in her pajamas, and lay with the covers up to her chin. She tried to read, she tried to sleep, but her eyes kept leaking.
“Excuse me, Pandora. I couldn’t help noticing your distress.”
“Who said that?”
“Me. The ceiling fan. Look, I know I shouldn’t interfere, but those mirrors don’t see you for who you really are.”
“Thank you.” Pandora smiled up at her ceiling through bleary eyes. “It’s nice to know I have a fan.”
“Sure. Your problem is laziness: All you ever do is lie around.”