Eventually, life stopped whether you wanted it to or not. No photograph could prevent that. The best thing was to control the stopping, so in that moment before your heart gave that final beat you could think, at least I provided a smidgen of goodness that was not here before.
It was strange to walk boldly into the front door of Anna's building and take the elevator up sixteen flights, rather than sneaking to the back alley.
Anna's husband opened the door. His face was drawn. “Can I help you?”
“I'm Jameson Lemuel; I used to work with—”
“Anna said you'd be calling, but she's unwell today.” His body language, his bitten-off words, even his brassy hair seemed to be repelling Jameson. “Did you want to leave something for her?”
Jameson tried to suppress the swell of jealousy he felt towards this somber, bitter man. But of course, anyone who had the glory of being married to Anna and thought he was about to lose her would be fundamentally unhappy. “It's important. This will be the last time I ever see her.”
He was astonished at how calmly he stated that.
Anna's husband looked as though he'd prefer to push Jameson down the garbage chute, but he stepped back.
Anna was lying on an overstuffed sofa that seemed on the verge of swallowing her up. For an instant she was nothing more than an ill, pale woman. Jameson swallowed hard as he took her hand, squeezing it as gently as if it were a butterfly.
“How are you feeling?” The pill bottles and antiseptic smell told him enough. If he closed his eyes, he might have been hiding under the clothing rail again, praying beyond hope to make the ticking stop.
“Yesterday's treatment didn't go well. They keep frowning when they think I don't see.” Her hands looped feebly in conjunction with her words. She wasn't wearing any rings.
Jameson knew he should lead up to the announcement carefully, not plunge into it as if he were stepping off a hangman's trap door. After all, he'd been thinking about the decision for months, whereas Anna had no context or awareness. But the pressure had been building up in him, as if the second hand of his clock had been forced to remain still until — thanks to the unstoppable passage of time — sudden freedom pushed it forward into its rightful place.
“Anna, I want to...” He dropped to his knees beside the sofa, trembling with the intimacy of her lovely face so near his own. “I've decided ... to donate the rest of my life to you. At least two decades, possibly more.” Only the thought of her husband in the next room prevented him from stroking her face. “It's all I can give you, but it's yours. There can't be a world for me without you in it. Please take it, please; it's worth nothing to me if you aren't here. Just think about me, once in a while, on top of a mountain somewhere.”
Anna's eyes widened.
She looked past Jameson and shrieked a few unintelligible words.
Her husband elbowed Jameson out of the way, bending over the sofa, murmuring in the same language.
Jameson backed off, reeling from the emotional gush that accompanied his outburst, his mind straining to comprehend the foreign syllables.
Anna's head rested against her husband's hair, golden hair that failed to grow within a small bald patch on the back of his head, like a monk's tonsure.
“He's donating,” Jameson choked. “You're going to take his donation.”
He yearned to pull them apart and scream, I am offering you the rest of your lives together. Neither of you will have to make that sacrifice. Can't you be in the slightest bit grateful? Or even acknowledge that I'm here?
Her husband rocked back on his heels, bowing his head.
Anna stared up at Jameson, her face tearful. “Not you too. Not both of you. I can't do this again.”
Did she mean that she was accepting both donations? Or turning both of them down?
“Anna,” he said helplessly.
But if her husband had already offered to donate ... if Anna lived on, and her husband died, and Jameson himself did not have to die for her to live...
No, he couldn't think about that.
Anna said a few soft words to her husband, who stood and left the room without looking back at either of them.
“I wanted to save my mother,” Jameson said brokenly. “I wanted to stop time. Even if that meant freezing the rest of the universe in place. I would have donated to her if I could have — I mean that,” he said emphatically. “I was only twelve, but I knew what it meant to love someone enough to rip out the rest of your life and give it to her.”
“I was six when my mother died,” Anna said faintly. “And I knew what it meant, too. So much better than you.”
It took him several moments to piece together her meaning. “You couldn't have tried to donate your life to your mother. Not at six! No medical professional could possibly allow such an unethical— ”
“In my godforsaken home country? Only foreign suckers worried about ethics. There was a black market for everything — meat, clothing, children — why not life?” Her hands were struggling to shape her words, as if she were scrabbling at the base of an infinite mountain. “I brought my only doll to church so I could place it on the altar. I told my father I would give anything to God if it would convince him to let Mamuska stay with us. My father had already sold one of my brothers to a rich foreign couple. Why not sacrifice another child so that his wife could live? The very next night ... he told me we were going for ice cream.”
She was openly sobbing, and Jameson could barely see her through his own wall of tears.
“They tied us up side-by-side, as if we were animals. Even though she barely had any strength, she tilted her head away as if she couldn't bear to watch me. She never told them to stop. I failed her. I killed—”
“You were a child!” Jameson screamed.
Anna wiped her eyes, the tears streaming down her thin hands. “My father hanged himself. My aunt and uncle adopted me, spent two years lying and stealing to get our exit visas. I thought I'd left all that corruption behind, and then I got sick. What they did to me means I can't take your gift, or my husband's. I'm sorry. I never even dreamed you thought of me that way.”
“You were innocent,” Jameson pleaded. “You don't deserve to be punished for what they did to you. If anything, it's only fair to give you extra life to make up for it. Let me give you this gift—”
“I told you, I can't take it! They broke me, trying to force me to donate when I was six years old. Physically, a donation won't work. It's impossible now. They made me try to save my mother, and now I can't be saved.”
~~~~~
In the alley sixteen flights below Anna's apartment, impervious to the rain rushing down, Jameson crouched against the wall, stroking the bricks with his fingers. He willed them to freeze, to slow time into stasis so that they existed with no more motion than a photograph, to protect Anna for the rest of his life.
Tracey S. Rosenberg lives and writes in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her novel The Girl in the Bunker (Cargo Publishing, 2011) was a Scotland on Sunday Book of the Year. She's published poems and short stories in a variety of journals, including New Writing Scotland, Gutter, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She regularly performs her own work and will be appearing in Canada and Sweden later this year.
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The Piano Spinner
by Hayley Chewins; published April 29, 2014
Madd is ten when he hears the world stop turning, standing in his red gumboots in the center of Wednesday's busiest slum. No one else seems to notice the chickens walking in neat circles, the trees bent in still air, the rain pouring down from a bright, cloudless sky.
But he does.
His mother comes home most evenings. Makes dinner and strokes his head. Afterwards, he is allowed to sit for a while on the roof of the shack, watching stars circling.
Not tonight.
He has been hearing stories about the Spinner since before he could talk. When he was three he started asking questions.
; “Where’d she come from?”
“Doesn’t she ever get tired?”
Gumboots in puddles on the loose roads of the slums. Cages of frogs, rats, and snails. Smoke out of a thousand chimneys. A forest isn’t something he’s ever seen. Only heard about in stories. “A forest is a place of dreams,” his mother likes to say. A forest is the center of all of it.
Hock stops him at the place where the slum meets the road. He is slouched against an overturned dustbin, drooling into a Styrofoam cup. “Where’re you going, boy?”
Madd knows he can tell Hock the truth because he never remembers anything. “I’m going to find the Spinner.” He is kicking at the mud: a hard face with round eyes. Stretching his legs in the broad world of Wednesday.
He won’t survive without stealing. Luckily his hands are small and he is quick. He grabs a snail from a trader fending off a growling dog and breaks the shell open with his hands. An old man in a tattered suit tells him how to get to the forest. “Beyond the outskirts,” he says. “You’ll find it.”
He has given up on school. He can’t stand the chalk and the dust. The thought of only moving when a bell rings frightens him. He tells his mother in the evenings what he’s learned: the planets; why water evaporates; silent letters. Makes it all up. She doesn’t know the difference.
Really what he does with his days is listen. Listens to the movement of feet on the ground. The barking of stray dogs, the whine of tires, the squelch of mud. He was sitting in the wet when he heard it.
The music of the world, stopped.
The road empties as he walks. It’s getting dark. He tries not to imagine his mother returning home to find his empty bed. Her hands carrying dishes towards the sink. He wrote a note before he left, but after thinking about it he tore it up. He fed the pieces to a pig in the street.
This is the image he holds close to his chest when he sleeps: he’ll walk through the door with something green in his hand. Mother will know he’d gone for a true thing.
~~~~~
The following afternoon, he reaches the forest. The swaying green draws him in. The silk of leaves, trees thicker than men and towering, their trunks streaked black and white. Small furred creatures spread their limbs and leap from branch to branch. He sees them crunching on dark beetles. A buck lopes past, barely heard, with horns that look as though they’ve been sculpted out of bronze.
Madd feels his feet sink into mossy earth. The air is warm and filled with the ticking of beetles’ wings. He can hear a pair of birds singing to one another. One of them sings, “Who are you?” and the other answers, “I don’t know.”
Who Birds. His mother used to tell him stories about them when he was little. Interrupt a pair of Who Birds, and they will tell you who you are. He is frightened of knowing. Scared they’ll say the same thing Ma Fortune did after she spread out the mottled toad skins to read his fate.
“Nothing,” she said. “Can’t see a thing.”
Crouched in the doorway of the fat lady’s house, he saw his mother sitting across from her, a tea cup in her hand. “A future as dark as that.”
He leaves the birds to sing.
~~~~~
The sky is beginning to darken when he sees the Spinner’s house in the center of the forest. It is perched in the branches of an enormous tree, covered in vines. Glowing insects swarm around it, feeding on ripe berries and open blooms. The little wooden shed is so much a part of the tree that it appears to have grown into it like a scar. Madd wouldn’t have seen it if not for the light in the window. A rope dangles from a thick branch, and he drags the weight of his body up, his hands burning. He opens the door, moving fallen branches and vines out of his way — he doesn’t think to knock. A girl, no taller than he is, stands in the middle of the room.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Madd.”
“What’s a Madd?”
“It’s a name, stupid.”
He is annoyed by her. He wants to see the Spinner. The center.
“Can I come in?”
Inside, everything is covered in dust and spiders’ webs. The piano stands against the wall, beneath the only window. The keys look like yellowed teeth. The girl wants to know how old he is.
“I’m ten.”
“Oh,” she says. “Me too.”
She is wearing a moth-eaten coat. Her eyes shine like two frozen disks of river water; her skin looks as though it’s been spun from spiders' silk.
“Can I sit down?”
She motions to the piano stool, the only chair in the place. It creaks when he sits on it.
“Where’s the Spinner?”
“The what?”
“You know — the woman at the center. Who plays the piano? Keeps the world together?”
He doesn’t like girls. He wants her to leave so he can get on with his adventure. She moves closer to him. He inhales the dust of her and chokes. He forces himself to be still, to stare into her eyes.
“You want to see the center?”
“Duh.”
He watches as the girl begins to unravel the silver thread of her skin. She wraps it, glistening, around the stool and his legs. It looks delicate, but it’s as strong as wire.
“What are you doing?”
He tries to stand up but he can’t. He feels his knees wasting. His stomach churns like the day Hock let him drink from his Styrofoam cup. He is nauseous and his skin feels hot.
“Play,” she says.
He wants to tell her that he can’t play the piano. He’s not one of those rich kids who has lessons. He’s never even touched a piano before today. She takes his hands and places them on the keys and he feels his fingers move over them.
Music appears in the room like a flower in a barren place.
“It will feel awkward at first,” she says. “Before the muscles are trained.”
The window is open. The forest stretches into darkness before him. Green, alive, growing. He sees now that at the center of it — at the center of all this life — is a death. A sacrifice. After hours, days, the muscles will bruise. Blood will pool under the skin. The spinner-girl stands behind him.
“It was a bird,” she says. “It flew right through the window and brushed against my neck. It flapped about on the floor. Broken wing, I think. The sound, the feather against my neck. For a moment the piano lost its hold.”
A muscle spasm shoots through his left thumb.
“I was ten,” she says. “When it happened. I heard the gap. I was sitting in the playground, watching clouds.”
She shouts over the music.
“A boy opened the door when I knocked; he looked younger than I was. He gave me tea and I drank it — I was so thirsty. I remember listing the strange things that had happened: the television wouldn’t work, rainbows were black. I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was playing the piano. I still remember my name, but I don’t say it anymore. Not out loud.”
He needs to ask her how long she played for. She hears the question ring out even though he hasn’t spoken.
“A few hundred years — I lost count.”
The words burrow into Madd’s heart.
“How did you...”
“It’s the music,” she says. “Whatever you’re playing, it’s from the inside. You can’t hide in here.”
She opens the door and walks out into the dark: into the sounds of the growing green.
~~~~~
After a few days, Madd’s hands are purple. He catches himself drooling, slumped over like a cowering dog. He stretches his neck to look out into the forest. Then he hears something: the Spinner-girl, singing. He is comforted by it. She hasn’t left him — not entirely; not yet. Hours later, he can hear whimpering. By midday, she is back.
“I need your help,” she says.
Her mouth is straight and stiff. After she has spoken, the music quickens. The girl looks at him as if to say, “Hope is a dead wish.”
“I’ll only help you if you untie me.”
“It won’t matter, even
if I do. The piano won’t let you go.”
“All it took was a bird, for you.”
“I think it has to be something from the outside. From the forest.”
“Could you catch something?”
She shakes her head.
“Your skin. It’s made of spiders’ webs, right?”
“I...”
“Tie it around my waist. Then pull. It’s worth a try.”
She winds the silver thread a few times around his waist. She holds onto the loose end and walks to the other side of the room, pulling. He turns his head to look at her. She is straining and he hasn’t budged.
“You can’t make it happen this way,” she says. “It has to come from the forest.”
“Shhh.”
Who are you? I don’t know.
“Have you ever seen a Who Bird?” he asks the girl.
“I think Mamma told me about them.”
“If you interrupt them, they have to tell you who you are.”
“How does that help?”
“If I interrupt them, they’ll seek me out. They’ll have to tell me.”
The girl crosses her arms.
“But how will you interrupt them from here?”
“I’ll have to shout. You can lure them here. Outside the window.”
“What should I use?”
“Something shiny. They like to steal.”
“I don’t have anything shiny.”
The Spinner-girl is quiet for a little while. Then she pushes her thin fingers into the socket and pulls out one of her eyes. She holds it in her hand. It shines like the scales of a silver fish. Madd tries not to grimace.
“That should work.”
She takes the eye outside and places it in the branches of a tree. They wait for the Who Birds to fly over. The girl stretches out in the sun. When she sees them winging overhead, she whistles. They swoop down, one after the other. The girl whistles again: the signal for Madd to shout. As he speaks the words, he can feel every part of him in them: his heart, his gut. Every painful thing.
“Who am I?”
He lets his head fall onto the lid of the piano. The Spinner-girl has climbed up to the door, framed in light. They hear the chatter of birds.
“They’re gone. They’ve gone in the wrong direction.”