Balboa

"Sure, there are few more melancholy sights in this world," said Tiz, "-- which is melancholy enough without addition! -- than that of an idealist who fancies himself a hard-headed man of the world: he has the hardships of both, and the comforts of neither." Balboa, who did not quite understand him, nodded gravely.

Fishlight

They had moved the tables to the walls, and the floor was all ribbons and confetti. Aged men grinned and bobbed their heads. They were wearing sashes; buttons; bill caps with the insignia of their units. Crooked banners behind them, on the paneled walls, repeated the devices. But the celebration was muted now, folding in on itself. I noticed that some of the litter on the floor was money: dollar bills, five dollar bills, ten dollar bills. I frowned. I didn't like the idea of these ancients letting their cash drift about. The young people in the kitchen and on the floor, well – I'm fond of them, but they're not very dependable. And nothing seemed entirely under supervision, here.

I stepped behind the counter. There was a fat wallet resting on the rubber matting over the floor. I picked it up and looked inside. There were big bills in there. Hundred dollar bills, even thousand dollar bills.

The swing doors to the kitchen flew open, and a teenaged waiter staggered out, his face flushed, his eyes too bright. Two quick steps, and he'd seized the wallet.

I hung on. I knew the wallet wasn't his. We wrestled over it. I was a lot stronger than he was, and he lost his grip and fell back, but other young guys came through the swing doors, in the same state of excitation. It was time to retreat.

I took a deep gulp of air, and buoyed by that, floated up to the high, grimy ceilings. Exclamations below. Enough of this. I shoved off from the wall and glided out through a high open window, where I opened myself like flower, and let the wind take me.

---

I'm not a thief. I didn't take the money for me. But I didn't know who to take it back to. Who knew me well enough to know I wouldn't steal? I landed in a bright warm stream that meandering behind some condos, and made myself a fishlight. I wouldn't steal, would I? Thousands of dollars. You could buy things, with thousands of dollars. I began to be afraid, and swam quickly, and more quickly, down the shallow brook, with my shadow coming behind me. Had I stolen the money? Was I a fish? Did anyone know me that well? Did anyone know me at all? I darted under a bridge and hovered there, my heart pounding, my gills opening and closing, and my heart full of confusion.

Some time later, the thought appeared: what if I never took the money at all? I looked at my hands, and they were empty. The liquid sky was luminous. I could have, I said to myself. I could have dreamed it. I mean, who would hold a bash like that at Tom's? Why would they have been throwing money about? And what would a fishlight be doing there, in any case?

I'm not a thief, I said to myself. But there's a lot of things you can do with thousands of dollars. And that's a good trick, you know? Taking a deep breath so as to float to the ceiling. That's the kind of thing you only think of if you're a fish.

I don't think I'm a fish.

I stand up and wade up out of the water, beside the little ornamental bridge. I don't think I can fly, either. I pant a little.

I don't think I'm awake.

I don't think I ever took that wallet.

But there are a lot of things you can buy, with thousands of dollars.

Box (I)

She only knew the box was hers to keep. “What's in your stupid old box, anyway?” She wouldn't answer; she didn't know; it was locked, it came that way. She wasn't even sure who gave it to her: maybe one of the dead aunts and uncles they still talked about as if she should remember them. Uncle Bill Who had a Way with The Ladies, or Aunt Sarah Who was not Always Wise. She liked the sound of Aunt Sarah.

When her grandpa offered to prise the box open, she reacted with a violence that surprised even him, though she was given to violence, and he of all people should have known why. He let it be: for a miracle, he let it be.

It made a faint jingly rattle when you shook it. Jewelry? Money? No one knew. It was small, smaller than a brick, and she had a dozen hiding places for it. Hide it in the same place over and over, and people would guess the place by watching her go to it. Someone would find the box and try to open it. She knew enough of the world to know that. And either way they would ruin it. Either the contents would be something they really thought valuable and they'd take it away, or they would put names on it that would steal its potency. “Just trinkets,” someone would say, or “Irish pennies and not even old.” No. She wasn't going to risk that.

She grew up awkward, too tall, inclined to be plump, and dangerous, with a cold eye and a hair-trigger temper. “Sullen,” they called her. She carried a purse unfashionably big, so she could stow the box in the bottom of it. People thought she was trying to look feminine and failing. She didn't much care what people thought.

In dreams she went away to the state college, where they read poems that didn't rhyme and had penises in them. They would sit in big classrooms and talk about the poems as if the penises weren't there. She wasn't sure she wanted to go to college, but she knew she wanted to get out. And there was a slender young East Indian man, a man Grandpa would have called a nigger, in her dreams. He stood sideways to her, respectful and silent, and one day she gave him her box to hold while she got her things together. All in the dream, of course. He handed it back with the bare shadow of a smile, nothing pushy or loud, and said, “we know about boxes in India.”

Sometimes he was in the bathroom with her, which never seemed wrong, in the dreams, but which made her blush when she woke. He said the same thing there. He held the box and when he handed it back he said, “we know about boxes in India.”

In one dream she tried to explain that she was not violent because she had red hair, she had red hair because she was violent, and he said no, she had red hair because of the box, because of what was in the box. This made her cross, because how did he know? And he said, “Listen, this is important.” He put something in her hands and folded them over it. His skin was dry and supple like a snake's. And then he vanished, moving gently sideways till he wasn't there anymore.

She woke with her hands folded together, and when she opened them, there was a silver key.

Now: when you open a real box with a dream key, is what you find real or dream? The problem seemed like one of arithmetic principles. Are dreams associative or commutative? Or was it like negative and positive numbers, a dream times a real always made a dream? Or maybe it was the other way around. Did you learn things like that in college? She doubted it. But now she had two things to hide, the box and the key.

Ermine

Big Tent Poetry: Persona

"The glory of it stings," she says, and I picture her, fifty years younger, on a motorcycle, helmetless, that wonderful hair lashing her face, her arms wrapped around some Frenchman.

"God comes like that" -- her arthritic fingers won't snap, but she can make the gesture of snapping them -- "and then he goes away again. Easy for you to say he's coming back. But what if he doesn't?"

She taps my chest with her fingertips, all ten of them. "You don't say what you think, do you?" She nods. "You want to be taken for a nice man, that's right, that's the right thing to do. You go home and tell your wife I'm crazy with God, tell some jokes about me, about old maids and spaces under the bed. But to me you nod just like I'm making sense. Is it time for my medicine yet?

She drifts across the kitchen, a tiny pink wisp, and fills a glass with water. Her hair floats around her, white laced with black: a mink turning to ermine. "But you're not the medical one, are you. I was forgetting. You're the masseur. What Linda calls the 'masseuse.'" She chuckles, her voice low and raspy. "You look manlike enough to me. Of all the times, they get a man to touch me when I'm too sick to appreciate it. Isn't that just like the world, isn't it though? That's why the crazy with God stuff.

"Oh, God," she adds, "he knows that. No secrets between us. He says he doesn't mind, he's got worse things to worry about."

She climbs onto the table and shrugs out of her robe, snuggles under the blankets, and blinks at me. "So touch me already."