Tag: alpha centauri

On the third day the question of the bell arises. That morning Mina had brought over a baker’s dozen pamphlets detailing the touristic marvels of Mirana Seaside: seasonal dunes, salt marshes, sandspits. Dahlia’s lips curl and pucker with wonder at the glossy blue photographs and lovingly-written captions (“The birthplace of thousands of seagulls”, “Turn to page 7 for the story of the last frilled squid, dead at Red Point”). Mina is as enamored as Dahlia, hurriedly encircling places to visit with a felt tip pen. But the beaches and tide pools they encounter on subsequent day trips provide a reality different to the one in the bright booklets: littered with bottle caps, chalky rock strata burned through by acid rain, piles of phosphorescent fishing nets, and, in a secluded corner, the puzzling remains of a purple Volkswagen minibus, so far eroded it’s impossible to determine its age, but looking for all the world like a close cousin of the dethroned Greek shipwrecks sinking into the Black Sea.

“Didja know, princess,” says mermaid Mina with three fingers dipping into the hazy waters of a pool, “that there’s a difference between wreck and wreckage?”

“Nu-uh! They’re synonyms, silly.” Spitfire Dahlia retorts in her mother’s most hoity-toity tone.

Mina looks over at her disdainfully.

“Naw, I’m joking, joking. What’s the difference?”

“Wreck is used when the structure is still recognizable. Wreckage is used when it no longer is.”

“Huh. Is that right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Dahlia returns to her inspection of the rotting pier. The sky is a perfect white, and all around Dahlia lie colorless barnacles and deep green algae like shredded party streamers. The wood creaks and sighs as she steps on it in her cobalt Mary-Janes , exuding sweet-smelling water. It’s cool and very quiet. Only Mina’s clumsy humming breaks the spell of the tense waves and brittle landscape. Dahlia licks away the last taste of that morning’s orange juice from her lips, staring out at the featureless ocean. A few minutes pass before she notices the carcass immediately to her right.

“Oh great Gods!” she cries. Mina comes to her side, as close as possible without touching her. She follows Dahlia’s gaze and finds the bird. It is lying on its back, head turned to one side. Beginning at its throat is a clean gash, making its way through its miniature organs and tissues before tapering off midway. The insides have swollen and cracked in the heat, bursting out and bubbling up. Blood and yellow plasma has been soaked up by the boards and the wing bent back.

“Wreckage.” says Mina.

“The deathplace of thousands of seagulls.” says Dahlia bitterly. “Jeez, this is awful.”

“Princess, you ain’t kidding.”

“I’m going home. I just, oh jeez, this was supposed to be nice. I’m going home, dammit.”

“Wait. Hey, wait a second.” Mina has her hand on Dahlia’s bony shoulder. “Hey, listen.”

“What?”

Mina eyes her closely. “Okay. Well. Have you ever heard of the bell?”

FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE:

PART THE FIRST

PART THE SECOND

PART THE THIRD

On the fifth day, Dahlia follows Mina around the amusement park. The stalking hadn’t been a planned affair, but somehow seemed inevitable. There was that way Mina kept her hair tied up in elastic, fingers red and constantly in the company of each other, that manner of looking shaken-up and in need of a shaking-down. Mina the waif. Mina the lurching urchin. It keeps Dahlia nearby.

The amusement park Mirana, a seaside collection of spit-bright surefooted young’uns and their mechanical rolling counterparts, fossilized plum-colored planks twisting up in dramatic curlicues, emanating a suffocating blue heat. The Italian owner had had space divvied up and colored in the style of his home country: Dahlia’s quick eye spots Mina the fiend disappearing into the golden boughs of Toscana.

Tracing her steady voyage, it’s easy to see where she’s headed. At eleven in the morning, when Dahlia had started following her, she’d been in blue-white Sicilia, onwards to Calabria (all-you-can-eat pizza, Miss Oliver Twist has seconds and thirds), Basilicata, Campania (fun house in which Dahlia catches a thousand reflections of Mina in as many scalloped mirrors), Lazio, Umbria, leading up to Toscana. It’s a trip marked by indications, which Mina reads aloud as she passes them, taking care to step only on the orange tiles of the color-alternating path:

THIS WAY TO FLORENTINE FERRIS WHEEL ((Hello lovely blog readers (all six of you), Emma here, à la glorious footnote. National Novel Writing Month starts tomorrow! Please wish me luck and fruitcakes.))

At her mother and Samson’s wedding reception, Dahlia steals candy buttons from gift bags and tells Auntie how upset she is at not being able to walk around the house topless any more.

“Can’t do it with him around,” she says, licking her lips colored Yellow Number Five. “and even if I did, just look, just look at ‘im! He’d snitch to Momma for sure.”

Auntie chomps down on her teeth, Pan-Cake foundation wet on her hook nose and sloping collarbone, offering Dahlia nothing. She knows better now, than to give the child reason to believe she agrees with her. Momma! Auntie thinks your new hub’s a tattler too, she went and told me so! Ohoho, not going to happen again, Auntie’s determined, the babe can be kamikaze all by her lonesome.

Auntie’s eyes paw Dahlia’s courtesan’s bouffant and fingernails, painted with orange permanent marker and glitter glue.

“I know, Auntie,” Dahlia whines, “but how was I supposed to get dressed up for this, huh? It’d be like letting Momma win.”

Auntie’s sympathizes, but not enough to brave the primeval waters of mother-daughter conflict. The cellophane mammalian eyes, which through the magic of natural selection are also Dahlia’s own, circle once, twice, careening from the daylily flower arrangements (Dahlia thinks monocotyledon, sophomore Biology, Miss Rittenhouse’s China red cardigans) to the collapsing Neapolitan ice cream cake dead center (Dahlia thinks sacarose, fructose, lactose, I want to go home, I want to go home).

Color-alternating strobe lights, Mr. and Mrs. Samson Faktorowicz waltz by, merry-go-round, tight turns and whorls quick enough to make the brand-spanking-new Dahlia Faktorowicz’s head spin. It’s a storybook affair, but Samson ruins the effect by letting his hands stray below Dahlia’s mother’s waist, and she, the DayGlo princess rotting, lets him, drunk and reveling, revolving, revealing.

“Oh Good Gad,” Dahlia says, “great Gods. Save your humble servant.”

“Better get used to it,” Auntie says, unable to resist getting a hit in with her perilous problem niece, “you’re going on their honeymoon, aren’t you?”

Churning loud, huffing and puffing, a wounded Dahlia skulks out to the parking lot.

Even from several hundred meters away, her feet are clearly visible. Pink socks, it seems, carnation pink like a decomposing hog’s tongue. She’s in what appears to be a large woman’s blouse, gauzy fabric that billows out behind her as she pads along the sand. The shirt her sails, the long neck her mast, and that dark whip of hair? Flag. A flag to match the red one set up by the Red Cross on the shore, meant to mean: these are not safe waters.

On the first day, Dahlia goes out to meet her. Dahlia’s been taken on her parent’s second honeymoon, a word she’ll associate for the rest of her life with Maraschino cherries and ungainly coitus. She doesn’t try to avoid her mother and Samson’s frequent displays of affection, though she doesn’t avoid stating how distasteful she finds it either. It pleases her, to see her skittish skylark skank of a mother go out of her way to find privacy, to avoid her daughter’s critical grin. Dahlia opening the closet to see her mother with her coils fingering Samson’s hair, lipstick marks like tiger stripes.

March the fourth, and Dahlia’s tired of hide-and-go-seek with her skinny Ma and her pseudo Pa. She spots the girl and runs to her, heaving, feet sinking and staining the beach: Dahlia’s size nine cobalt blue Mary-Janes. She wraps her hand on the girl’s shoulder, bony joint coated in thin blouse like white sea-glass.

“Hello,” Dahlia says, bringing the unknown to a standstill. She’s small, smaller even than Dahlia had anticipated, a veritable scrap, shipwreck. The skin in the folds of her knees is pale and clear, but the rest of her is burnt black. The color has spread even to her eyelids, like watercolors, or wildfire.

“Hi.” She answers, quite coolly, turning to face Dahlia. She has a pert nose and squinty eyes, maybe thirteen years old to Dahlia’s seventeen.

“I’m Dahlia,” Dahlia says. This is how she operates, stun, shock, wait for a reaction. This is why Dahlia doesn’t have a boyfriend, and why she couldn’t stay back home while her mother and Samson rode out this vacation. No one wanted to keep her, and no one was willing to leave her alone.

“I’m Mina,” she says, and from that moment (and various moments in the twelve day span that followed) onwards, for the rest of her life, Dahlia will associate pink socks, blouses, boats, bells and dying with that name.