Share in NaPoWriMo 2012

“It’s the saltwater ones you have
to watch out for. They feed on tears,
even if they’ve been dry for years,”
says Miss Crocodile. She drains her
glass, orders two more and pushes
one across to me. “They have good
memories.” I tell her I made
a serious mistake, thinking
I was supposed to steer clear of
hunters, the clumsy ones with bad
vision and good guns. No one warned
me about crocodiles, about
camouflage. I try to hug my
tail, then remember it’s gone. I’m
stupid, I say. She puts her long
snout against my cheek. “You’ll never
be safe once they come sniffing,” she
says. “They know where you live.” She claims
she once knew one: near-bright, ill-bred
and good at hiding everything
from booze to the tryst of the day.
I’ve listened to the story a
dozen times and never tire
of hearing her triumph, the way
she changes the ending each time
so her escape looks better and
smarter. She is no fool, not at
all. She came close to being turned
into a handbag, almost wound
up as a pair of boots. My bruised
ego is nothing compared to
that. Her eyes are shining. I am
her triumph, too. That’s why I’m here.
She has another lager in
front of me and urges me to
drink up. “The night is long, but so
is the road ahead of us.” She
slips something sharp-edged into my
pocket and hoists herself from the
barstool. “I gave him back the part
of his brain I’d excised and soon
after, we split. Enough’s enough.
Come, let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

“That’s her,” people whisper when I
walk past: “Our Lady of Love, Sex
and Pain. We thought she’d be dressed in
shining white robes or something.” “I’m
just like you,” I say, “except I
know everything. I have a gift.
I have a story. Hear, listen:
Basically there are two kinds
of people in the world: the ones
who are turned off by those who don’t
want them and the ones who aren’t. I
meet one of the other kind and
over coffee I ask the bad
questions: How long have you had this
heartache? And what would you do for
love? He holds his head in his hands
and says ‘It’s not me, it’s her. You’re
beautiful, you know that, but I’m
up against magnificence.’ So
I rethink this. There are three kinds
of people in the world: the ones
who are turned off by those who don’t
want them, the ones who aren’t and the
ones whose purpose is to hear how
and why the world sets up such a
collision course. I’ve seen stronger
men cast petals at the feet of
their muses and weep, I say. I’ve
seen it all. One day it will be
a bore to glue their pieces whole.
Sometimes miracles are a drag.”

She has nothing better to do.
She sips once, twice, does not stop. A
drift of bubbles clusters at the
rim, slides to the bottom of the
flute. She hears a burst of peach and
lemon: ‘It’s not that I’m ashamed
of you.’ She waits for the words to
trail. Another sip. Undertones
of spring flowers. Notes of pear and
melon. ‘It’s just that maybe my
standards are higher.’ This feels crisp
and clean with nice acidity
and a refreshing dry finish.
It’s the complicated ones that
always interest her. She should stop
now before she gets used to it.

The zucchini wished to be a
lover. The others (some mushrooms,
bell peppers and an eggplant) thought
it outrageous. ‘But she’s lovely,’
said the zucchini, dreaming of
sweating her in olive oil.
He loved the way she sighed as she
cooked. He loved her deft hands tying
her apron around the gentle
curve of her waist. He loved to watch
her roll her eyes when she tasted
sauce and knowingly added salt,
pepper, thyme. He thought his desire
simple and good. He wanted her
sighs to be about him, about
the way he might make her feel: joy
creasing her brow in the night, sweet
comfort opening her eyes to
him in the morning. What more could
he want in life other than to
love her? On the cutting board lay
pieces of the others, silent
and dreamless. ‘Her skin is smooth and
excitable,’ the zucchini
marvelled. He could not stop looking.

One morning she woke up to find
she was a dragon. It was kind
of a surprise. She held her breath,
exhaled slowly and gasped out sharp
little bursts of flame. She enjoyed
that. She also liked the steam that
curled from her nose when she thought of
hateful things. It was much better
than what she was used to. Her skin
was like armour and she liked that
best of all. At the office she
practiced being impervious,
reading mail sent by bad people
with bad intent. The scent of hell
rose up behind her eyes. This was
new and exciting. “You are my
one and only,” read a letter
that used to make her dizzy, but
this time the words and the rage and
the screen and everything else in
the room melted into a lake
of fire. She did not feel a thing.

When he is good, all she wants to
do is write and write. The words flow
girlish and pink, sweet as candy,
mixed up with lipstick and sighing
and the scent of him. When he is
bad, she still writes, but the words have
holes in them, smirks on their faces.
She thinks she is a sucker no
matter what. When she wakened the
morning after he set fire
to everything she held close and
dear, with the light and the tv
and her shoes still on, it took a
minute or two to remember
she was angry. She is the kind
of person who is afraid to
find the edges of love. It would
be like driving off a cliff, she
thinks, exhilarating until.

When daylight dims she grips my arm:
‘Let me tell you a ghost story.’
She is always saying this. I
do not know what it is with her
and ghosts. I do not attract them
but they follow her wherever
she goes, night and day. She tells me
they invite her to kiss and f**k
and jump off a cliff together
and I keep warning her, Only
one of you is going to make it.
But every couple of days it
is the same. One of them sees her
at the market, puts a friendly
grey arm on her shoulder and slips
an empty cup into her hand,
telling her to pretend it is
coffee. She resists at first but
soon she half-believes and by then
it is too late. No one can save
her. ‘It is only a ghost,’ she
says, ‘And I am invisible
to everyone else.’ Tonight she
wants to light a candle and talk
about the one that got away.
This is the ghost to die for: bright,
good sense of humour, handsome in
all the right ways, generous. To
me this ghost sounds as dodgy as
all the others and the only
difference is the way she feels.
She will not hear of it. She says
she has never known anything
like this. ‘Run away with me,’ the
ghost had begged, pulling her. It is
hardly fair to have passion dragged
into it, I say. As we sit
talking we hear a tap at the
window and we freeze. I want to
shout Go away but remember
ghosts can walk through walls and she is
already reaching for her coat.

Nothing will remain when you leave.
The space where you used to be will
be rearranged and swept clean as
though you had never been. The walls
will not remember what you said,
if you spoke at all. Even your
fingerprints will get fresh paint.
There will be nothing to miss. In
my house the only thing I missed
was the upstairs closet with a
secret passage that led to the
basement. In there I thought if I
held my breath, squeezed my eyes shut and
listened, I could dissolve into
particles and float into a
new dimension. I do not know
how many times I tried. I heard
the drip of a laundry faucet,
inhaled sighs of cigarettes and
once, ‘Go to hell!’ followed by quick
footsteps. That is not enough to
miss, either. I wanted to find
something, a looking-glass I could
walk through, perhaps, with a lover
waiting on the other side or
an alternate history if
it had a purpose other than
accumulating time. Nothing
is worse than the something that could
have been. Nothing is worse than what
you could leave behind but do not.

The artist who painted in three
colours woke up in one colour
that morning, a grey the exact
shade of mist. It was confusing.
She figured there must have been a
rainbow while she slept and she had
missed it. It was not the first time
that happened. Last year, when a storm
brewed fierce and glowing, she sat on
the porch and watched the colours of
the day fade to the same grey. There
was no rainbow either, only
space in the sky where it could have
been. The next door neighbour waved
her over. ‘If you’re looking for
the rainbow, it went west of here,
behind the old bungalow on
the corner. It was a good one.’
In future she would have to be
smarter, faster. This morning she
smelled rain and quickly ran outside.
She scraped away the grey and found
the colours still there, but falling
into each other and she could
not tell one from another. ‘You
probably never saw a real
one,’ said the neighbour, who was in
the front yard trimming roses. ‘They
must be foreign currency to
you.’ He opened his wallet and
shook out an accordion of
pictures. ‘Look at these,’ he said. ‘I’ll
show you every rainbow I’ve known.’
She saw colours in every size
and shape, every detail, every
graceless shade, every cheap shadow.
‘You’d have been lucky to have known
these,’ he said. ‘What a sheltered life.’
As she turned away, one colour
pulled out of the rain and followed
her inside, then another and
another. She caught them on a
sheet of cold press and held them close.
‘Lucky,’ said she, the artist who
painted in three colours. ‘Lucky.’

The March day was so warm that rose
bushes burst into bloom as she
dug holes for them along the fence.
She heard a rumble and the sky
darkened and fell and caught her heart
in a single drop. She felt a
dragonfly glance her brow and as
her knees grazed the earth, she reached up
and cupped her ear, but the only
sound was a distant hammer from
inside. After some time, she picked
up the spade and leaned it on the
fence. She put on the sweater she
had left hanging on a branch, went
in the house and washed her hands of
soil. “We almost got rain,” he said.