Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
Beetle Mercy
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
My mother was Suzanne Miller, the woman who used to win prizes for her vegetables at our county fair every single year, even the years she didn’t enter.
“How do you do that?” Asked Maureen next door. “It must be witchcraft.”
Of course this was true. But if every magic has a signature, my mother’s was in loopy, if exact, handwriting, the kind of handwriting that tells the reader that here is a person who used to put hearts instead of dots over her “i’s.”
She used to turn beetles into birds for the day, then turn them back in the evening. When we saw her doing it she would say to us, “I think they need a change of scene.”
“Suzanne,” our father would say, and somehow fit whole ranges of reproach and love and weariness and desire into her name, notes which I can only hear now, when I’m grown up, and remember the exact sound of his voice.
When they took her up to the hospital and we followed in the car, our father saying softly, “Suzanne,” to himself and the wheel every now and then, we knew something would happen, even if we only felt the knowledge under a blanket of tears.
When we saw her sitting up in the the hospital bed we knew but we didn’t want to know. Our father looked at her and took her hand, and she said, “not long now,” terribly sad for his sake, and he said, “I know.” She took us each in her arms and tried hard to squeeze the breath out of us the way she used to when we came home from long trips, but she was already too weak. And she kissed our father the same way he said her name.
“Suzanne,” he said once more.
“A change of scene,” she said seriously, and then she wasn’t there. I guess we must’ve all blinked at once, not to see her go. The sheets settled back where she’d been.
When we got home the house finches over the door had finished building their nest, and my brother crawled out on the roof and counted three eggs.
“One of them will be her,” he said, very sure.
The Hardest Step
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
I should have known when we took the ship too easily. “She’s cursed,” one of the prisoners told me smugly. I looked at her where she hung still in the water. “You board,” said my Captain.
I hauled myself aboard, sweating in the tropic night, wondering why I couldn’t smell gunpowder—but then, few shots had been fired. We had won by the trick of having more guns than they, and they could not have known that we were nearly out of balls and powder both.
I took a step towards the aft deck and jumped in the air when a voice spoke beneath my feet.
“Where do you come from?”
“Fr-from the sea,” said I.
“And claim this ship?”
“I d-do,” I answered, choosing that that would be the last time my voice shook.
The voice laughed with a creak and boom below decks.
“Then take the wheel.”
“I will,” I said.
The first step was not the hardest. The night pressed in on me suddenly, squeezing the breath out of me, tight as a corset, thick as August in Tortuga.
But I bore it. I had before. The air parted again.
The second step was not the hardest. A riptide of blood covered the deck, washing me to the knees, while out of it rose every man I had killed in battle, clutching their wounds, looking at me with eyes that stared into my future and saw my end. I smelled the stench of iron in their bloodsoaked clothes.
I faced them all a second time. The tide receded, taking them with it.
The third step was the hardest. The lights from the other ship went out, the water stood empty, then surging waves shook the whole sea and I saw the ship I stood upon, and I myself, sailing down into a terrible maw with teeth of foam that would surely take me—alone, all alone.
But I kept my sea legs. I had earned them. The lights blinked back over the still water.
“Take your ship, girl,” said the voice.
“Not so loud,” I said.
I took the wheel, and called across the water that the ship was mine, could I have a crew?
“You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that,” laughed the Captain. “Very well, I will send you a crew if you will sail under me.”
“For a while,” I called back. “Long enough.”