November 1999
Our house was of glass and sat on top of a hill next to an apple tree that danced with the breeze on good days, but moaned with the rain on the days that needed moaning; and conversing too, when dialogue was buried. It was as if the tree and its apples – especially the apples – were the cries of the confessional spirits of me and Scarlett, beating from our insides, in our glass house.
The drumming of the rain on the glass was too loud.
I took out the cutting board and began cutting. To start with, we were having salad spiced up with sliced apples and dressing. After preparing the salad, I moved over to the steak and started cutting that too. She sat cross-legged, waiting at the table, not saying a word. I hesitated when I gave her her food and the knife. But she took them quietly.
We sat at our table, eating our foods in silence. Every now and then I looked over at her, but her head was always down. Scarlett, I resigned to believe, just preferred to carry herself like that these days. The loud and wonderfully proud lady I had met in the beginning disfigured into a silent, breathing and hurtfully beautiful piece of flesh, organs and bones. Where did her spirit go?
Squeezed out through her small spaces, and concentrated in one hidden spot. But where was that?
Our dinner was eaten and I blew out the candles that had seemed like nothing but unnoticeable bits of the background of a play that was so dramatic; it didn’t even need a background. And yet we hardly spoke over our salad, apples, steak, and red wine that looked like blood if you thought too much of it.
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In bed, I wore a white cotton tank top with shorts. She wore a silk gown, the one she had bought for me on our second Christmas together. Then she had worn it with a playful, devilish smile; now she wore it with obligation and ugly routine stitched on her curves. The chilled bed, I could tell, would need a lot of time to get warm. I leaned over her, her back to me, and was about to whisper something on the soft hairs of her ears. But at the last second, I decided not to. Still, my mere presence over her and my almost spoken words only chilled her. She curled herself, caught up and almost frozen in the coldness of the sheets like an exotic and mysterious creature, fossilized and found on a rock that could be mistaken for a glacier.
I left her alone. That’s what she seemed to be wanting. Abandoned, somewhat, on my side of the bed, I rolled on my left to face Scarlett. It was like looking at the back side of a rocky mountain you only thought you knew so well. But there were new crevasses, undiscovered by me, that were running a little too deep. I didn’t know how I was going to go to work the next day, with Scarlett and her odd behavior on my mind. But I was tired, and it was a bed that I was lying down on after all. I stretched out my left hand toward her, with all my four fingers.
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Scarlett woke up on an empty bed. The warmth that may or may not have built up during the night was now gone for good that morning. She sat straight up and erect and stared out of the glass window, remembering the day they had gone to the store to buy curtains, but then decided against them. They figured they were on top of a hill with no one else around, so what’s the use of getting curtains? They have nothing to hide . . . or so they thought and felt.
Scarlett stood up from the bed slowly. She turned and faced it, as if looking at it would help her remember how she received the night, how they both did. The sheets were all a mess on the side she wasn’t sleeping on, but not so much disturbed on her side. She left the room, determined to fix the bed after breakfast.
Walking through the house to the kitchen, Scarlett looked out the glass windows. The storm had not quite died down from last night. Gray clouds, like the under belly of a fevered and sweaty sheep, covered the sky, and drizzles of rain were merely the invitation for another huge storm later in the day. Scarlett’s joints ached as she bent over to pick up a knife from the knife holder under the sink.
She decided to have chopped apples on top of her oat meal for breakfast.
Apple after piece of apple journeyed into her mouth and went down to her stomach. After fifteen minutes, her bowl was empty; but her mind, gradually sharpened with each minute after her waking, became set, steadily, on the apple tree outside the glass window.
She lay down on the carpet and spread herself like a dying star emanating the last of its light. Her head turned toward the window.
The apples on the tree, she saw, kept swaying with the wind and were getting bruised with the whipping rain that was beating at them like something abusive and unnecessarily criticizing. The apples – what wrong had they done to deserve such a beating? Is it wrong to try to grow and provide pleasure to the mouth, body, and soul of another?
These thoughts seeped through the folds of Scarlett’s mind before she got up again and walked back over to the kitchen to where the knives were. Her hand reached for the same knife used to chop her apples. Cleansed with hot water and soap, the knife fit in her hand, unfittingly.
The phone rang. Scarlett walked over to it with the knife still in her hand. Was fate calling? Maybe fate was on her side, or maybe it was in the course of changing its mind, or perhaps fate had mercy after all.
“Hello?” Scarlett put the knife down on the table with her trembling hand. It was her older brother on the phone, already yelling accusingly. She combated his narrow-viewed words with a half-scream. “You didn’t have to do that!” Tears ran down her battle field of hot, wet, and red flesh. Capillaries on her cheeks rushed with angry emotion and surfaced in the form of a bloody war that filled her face, as her brother was screaming over the phone. There was more yelling from the both of them.
Before he hung up, he said, as if he actually meant it, “She deserved what she got.” Scarlett slammed the phone on the receiver and picked up the knife at the same time. An angry and irate fate must not have fallen off the blade of the knife when she reached for it again.
The knife opened her skin very slightly as she directed a line across her wrist.
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I came home at around six-thirty in the afternoon. Scarlett greeted me at the door, but there was something about her smile that told me something had happened – perhaps something harsh – in the afternoon while I was out at work. Of course she didn’t tell me what, and I didn’t expect her to tell me. Expecting her to speak about her day has come to be foolish thinking. And the fool that I am sometimes, I was not a fool about this: Scarlett was hiding something.
Yes, ever since the incident a month ago.
I had out the cutting board to slice some fruits for our dessert after dinner.
“Darling, please go out by the apple tree and pick some apples. Some of them fell to the ground because of the storm this afternoon.” Scarlett was looking out the window.
“But we have enough fruit already for dessert.”
“Darling, please.”
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My raincoat flapped in the rain and wind, like a whip, slapping against my legs as I bent down to pick up the apples that had fallen on the ground. Scarlett watched from the kitchen window. I motioned to her that I needed a basket to carry the apples in, yelling through the rain. But she didn’t understand. The barrier of glass, although transparent, could not help her read my intentions, actions or words.
I came back inside with a dozen apples or so, tucked in my shirt folded outward to hold them in. Scarlett took the apples from me and meticulously washed each one for at least one minute. Then she prepared a glass bowl for them and chose one for me to cut up, along with the other fruits I had already cut for our dessert.
She sat, again cross-legged, at the table, waiting for the dessert until I brought it to the table from the counter. I sat down next to her and looked into her eyes. “Why the apples?” Scarlett took a bite of her fruits. Determined to understand her, I asked again. “Scarlett, honey, why did you make me go out in the rain to get the apples?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“There has to be a reason, Scar—”
“No reason.”
I slammed my left fist on the table.
Scarlett, her face immediately red like her precious apples, jumped a little in her seat, but remained silent. I felt her stare resting, sternly, on my missing left ring finger, which was bandaged up. She extended her hand to touch it, but I was too heated up in the head. Why has Scarlett been acting weird? Why has she suddenly shut herself up, like a beautiful bird that was willingly and stubbornly staying in the cage after given the opportunity to fly away and show the world her majestic wings? Over mountain tops and peaceful lakes, and traffic filled streets, her body reflecting on the windows of apartments where yells could be heard, but singing just the same.
I raised my left hand over my head and stormed over to our room.
It was from our bed that I heard Scarlett moving dishes around, utensils clanking to each other and on the plates. Now I was the one curled up in bed. I was on top of the sheets, determined not to speak to her.
In the dark of our room, there I was.
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My eyes closed and then opened. Now it was two in the morning. The moon outside, full and impregnated with . . . with . . . something. Whatever it was, the moon couldn't help but shine through the glass window. My eyes moved over to Scarlett’s side of the bed. She wasn’t there. But then the door creaked open slowly. A dark figure with the kind of elegance only Scarlett could force came into the room. Scarlett lay down next to me. I watched her, or a shadow of her. It was like although I was looking at Scarlett, without her knowledge of that, I felt my view into her heart and mind was blocked: she remained a dark figure inside and out. It was as if we were both blinded at that very moment.
Thirty minutes of Scarlett’s progressively slowing breathing passed, and I was still wide awake. I reached over to grab her hand. We held hands without her knowing for a few minutes. Does that mean that we didn’t hold hands?
Mine slid over to her wrist. A bulge of what felt like scar tissue protruded over it. It was a single line. Where was this from?
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I closed my eyes and saw a fall afternoon. It’s October 1999. I know it is because the leaves are in the cross between turning red and tryingly staying a summer green. In this one month old memory bottled in a dream, Scarlett and I are in her family’s house. It was just me and Scarlett and a movie in the living room. Her parents were both out and so was her brother.
As my tongue circled hers, the front door opened. Her older brother. Muscles and more muscles, hidden and restrained deceivingly under businessmen attire. I released myself from her, quickly.
“You. I have to show you something.” His thick pointer finger shot at me. I had met Cain twice before whenever I came to drop Scarlett off at her family’s house in the past. He had always been a reserved, yet agitated man, much like a quiescent volcano. The potential Cain had . . . .
“Cain, what are you doing?”
He ignored Scarlett. “Follow me.”
“Scarlett, it’ll probably just be for a second, right Cain?”
“Yeah, just for a second, Scar.”
“Maybe I should come.” Scarlett got up and grabbed hold of my left hand, as I was walking over to Cain. Naturally, she rubbed her thumb on my ring as she did so.
“No, you stay. You—” again he pointed at me, “Come. It’s in the backyard.”
A twig scratched my shin as I followed Cain into the forest area behind their backyard. Cain was searching for something. He kept muttering to himself, and laughing, like a mad scientist or a literary critic, or any critic for this matter, gone insane.
Finally, in a clearing, there it was. A huge red and purple flower, growing proudly and naturally.
“You see this?” Cain pointed at the flower against the overcast sky, a fragile lighthouse that can be overtaken by the foam of the waves. My eyes followed. “I found this here when I was a kid. Scar wasn’t even born yet. Look at it.” He gently touched one of its petals with his muscular and veined, thick hand. I could imagine the lighthouse crumbling.
“I see it.”
“When I was a kid, I watched it grow. Each day, it got bigger and bigger.” Cain had eyes only for the flower. “One day, my friend died. We were best friends. We were real close. But then we started to separate. I’d have baseball practice but Vinny . . . you know what he liked to do? Knit. He fuckin’ liked to knit.”
“What’s wrong with liking to knit?”
“Shut up. It didn’t help that I saw him . . . with one of my team mates. So one day, I was in a fight with him. You could guess what we fought over. The next day, I saw that he had knitted himself a noose. He hung himself with it.”
I saw a small tear drop escaped Cain’s eyes as if it were escaping a jail house.
“And I came back here and saw the flower. And it was still growing. Vinny was dead and the flower kept growing. It’s not natural.” At that, Cain took an ax that was hidden behind a nearby tree. With one big sweep, he killed the flower, cutting it off from the root.
“What was that for?” I yelled at him and ran over to the flower, now lying on the floor. I kneeled down beside it as if it were a person. Cain looked at me and winced. His face was wet and so was his shirt. That’s when I realized it had been raining the whole time.
Cain dropped the axe and reached into his pocket. A box cutter. He walked toward me. Worried, I gripped the flower more sternly and stood up. “Cain, what are you doing?”
“He shouldn’t have killed himself.”
I was now moving backwards, trying to get away from him, the murdered flower in my hand.
“He shouldn’t have killed himself.”
Suddenly, Cain increased his steps and walked faster toward me. I didn’t want to take any chances. Out of the clearing and back into the wooded area, I desperately ran.
As I was zig-zagging in and out of trees, the red and purple flower still in my hands, I always feared Cain behind me. His breathing, his movements, everything about him I began to fear. I became paranoid until I ran out of breath and decided to hide behind the trunk of a fallen tree. I stayed there for at least five minutes. I looked down at the flower and noticed blood on my hands. There were thorns from the flower that I hadn’t seen until now. It was hard to pull the flower off of my hand since the thorns dug into my skin so deeply. It was like snake fangs burrowing in flesh for the kill. I had to use my other hand to get it off. The skin stubbornly stuck to the thorns as if they were glued together; I was connected to the flower. When I finally did get it off of my palm, I saw holes in my palm with blood dripping from them, like the tears I saw falling from Cain’s eyes.
When I was sure he couldn’t possibly be near me, I stood up and quickly looked around.
No Cain in sight.
I started walking, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A huge thick stick came in my field of vision. I got knocked out cold after falling to the floor hard. The last image I saw before the blackness consumed me was Cain’s face, his tears dripping on me and his hand with the box cutter moving toward my left hand, spreading out my fingers.
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The bandaged left hand and missing ring finger twitched as the sun swept through the window. Alone. Scarlett wasn’t there anymore. Sweaty faced. A faint delirium passed through the mind brought on by the memory dream.
Out the window, Scarlett was by the apple tree.
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“What are you doing?”
Scarlet relaxed her shoulder and let down the bow. “I’m practicing.”
Twelve apples were perched on twelve wooden sticks stuck in the ground. They were all aligned, one after another vertically across Scarlett’s view so that she need only aim at the one apple in the front in order to pierce the bow through all twelve of them.
“You’re practicing?” This seemed random. First the disorientation of the dream memory, and now Scarlett was practicing the bow and arrow. An utter mystery filled with surprises that sometimes frightened you was what she was. “Where’d you get it from, the arrow and the bow?”
“What darling?”
“Where did you get the bow and arrow from?”
“When I was younger, my parents took me and Cain to the Grand Canyon. The golden days, when we were younger. Judgments seemed so far away then.” Her eyes drifted far off into the trees, not thinking about the apple she had been aiming at while talking. Scarlett’s voice had become more strained than it was in the past, like a smooth piece of paper that had gotten wet by water, and was now plagued with crinkles. It no longer was recklessly melodic with each corner of intonation; rather, it was purposeful with a daunting flame underneath. When she did speak now-a-days, it was to say things she would allow herself to say, to let go. “His name was Joe, Indian Joe. Cain and I met him when we were trying to get ahead of our parents around the rocks.”
Laughter and disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Scarlett, put down the bow and arrow; you might get hurt.”
“No, we really did meet this Indian Joe.”
“How come you never told me about this?”
Her arm began to tense up again, as she was getting ready to shoot.
“You don’t know many things about me, about my past. We’re always so focused on the present, but sometimes the past just shows up, so unexpectedly.” Like the bow and arrow. Like Cain. “I’m trying to say, he painted us a flat stone of huntsmen, and gave me this bow and arrow. ‘To shoot down what’s been shot down already in the minds.’ That’s what he told me.”
She bent her head down. With one eye closed, and the other in total concentration on the apples, Scarlett inhaled and was about to shoot.
“Are you any good?”
She smiled for the first time since she had shown signs of some strange oddity in possession of her, that which had made her peculiarly reserved and deeply darker than before. Deranged in her eyes, Scarlett laughed.
And to demonstrate her prowess with the bow, she shot the arrow through all twelve unlucky apples.
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Scarlett took a knife from under the sink and stole herself into the basement, carrying her bow and arrow. Inanimate objects were stored away for memory’s sake in their basement. The ticket stub of their first movie together, the now broken sled they used after the huge snow storm hit back in ’97 (they had accidentally crashed into a steel fence, and left it fortunately unscathed and laughing), a cell phone that was rendered broken by the both of them when business calls for Scarlett were beginning to become too annoying and too much in between them. The basement was the perfect place for her bow and arrow thought Scarlett.
It was also the perfect place for her to draw another line over the bulge on her wrist. The knife cried blood.
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The stove was a blur and suddenly flew to the other side of the room. The refrigerator floated up to the ceiling. The television soared from left to right. Sprinkles of flashing lights, like those used in a play to indicate lightening, rendered my squinting eyes. And the pulsating throb on my head was too much. It wasn’t long until I realized I was having a huge migraine. I felt my way to our room from the back door, using the wall, and when I finally got there, I let myself fall to the floor.
In a vision, Cain was in our house. He had broken through one of the glass windows. He was after something, in dire need of destroying it in the hopes of destroying its meaning, us. He wanted it, the purple circle I used to wear before I couldn’t wear it any longer, thanks to him himself. He couldn’t find it because I had it in my pocket. If I couldn’t wear it, I carried it around. Either way, it stays with me.
In this vision, I hid in my and Scarlett’s blinded closet, watching Cain ransack our bedroom looking for the ring. I began to laugh. It was so involuntary. Yes, and so very necessary. It was my victory. But when he heard me, he rushed to the closet door.
My breath quickened as I braced myself for his wrath. Suddenly, Scarlett barged in the room with her bow and arrow. Scarlett, my savior, my rescuer, my own mystery novel that gets me every time, yet assures me that there is a resolution that can be reached.
She shot Cain’s head with her arrow. And Cain collapsed on me, hard.
"Scarlett, your own brother."
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She gave a little jolt and the bed shook, but she was still obviously asleep as Scarlett dipped a wash cloth into a bowl of ice cold water. Brook had earned herself a fever. After hearing a thud on the ceiling, Scarlett had rushed upstairs to their bedroom and found her on the floor, Brook’s purple ring on the floor next to her pocket.
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Late that night I awoke in the peaceful dark. Scarlett was lying next to me, sleeping soundly like she does. A tray on a small table next to me held a bowl of water with a small towel.
On my left, Scarlett was lying down, her back to me, again.
My eyes made their way to our glass window. The moon, gaily bright, and the silhouette of the apple tree with its apples, seemed to have a mind of their own -- the stealthy and secret way they romanced in the night, the moonlight with the shadows of apples.
My hand moved over to hers. The bulge. It was still there. I caressed it as a tear fell down.
As if for comfort, or for an answer, a tune gently floated through my mind as I leaned over to Scarlett. I sang it to her in the soft of my voice:
While this woman is sleeping here,
I tell her what I can't if I were to wake her.
Powerful but hardly will she ever hear,
the secrets that I've saved her.
Well you are famous, indeed,
for all your shyness.
Ain't that sweet?
But ain't this a fine mess?
We're in so deep;
I must've gotten lost in the process.
Let’s just let things be . . .
easy.
And an honest one you've made me,
because the solace that you gave me
was proven. Problems ain't the main thing to fall apart:
the archer's sloping shoulders.
And its story is tale as tall
thus reminding love is allegorical.
I mean the goal here after all
is not to hurt at all
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Scarlett felt a soft brush of air or wind, like a kind spirit, gently kissing the fine hairs of her ear.
Our house was of glass and sat on top of a hill next to an apple tree that danced with the breeze on good days, but moaned with the rain on the days that needed moaning; and conversing too, when dialogue was buried. It was as if the tree and its apples – especially the apples – were the cries of the confessional spirits of me and Scarlett, beating from our insides, in our glass house.
The drumming of the rain on the glass was too loud.
I took out the cutting board and began cutting. To start with, we were having salad spiced up with sliced apples and dressing. After preparing the salad, I moved over to the steak and started cutting that too. She sat cross-legged, waiting at the table, not saying a word. I hesitated when I gave her her food and the knife. But she took them quietly.
We sat at our table, eating our foods in silence. Every now and then I looked over at her, but her head was always down. Scarlett, I resigned to believe, just preferred to carry herself like that these days. The loud and wonderfully proud lady I had met in the beginning disfigured into a silent, breathing and hurtfully beautiful piece of flesh, organs and bones. Where did her spirit go?
Squeezed out through her small spaces, and concentrated in one hidden spot. But where was that?
Our dinner was eaten and I blew out the candles that had seemed like nothing but unnoticeable bits of the background of a play that was so dramatic; it didn’t even need a background. And yet we hardly spoke over our salad, apples, steak, and red wine that looked like blood if you thought too much of it.
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In bed, I wore a white cotton tank top with shorts. She wore a silk gown, the one she had bought for me on our second Christmas together. Then she had worn it with a playful, devilish smile; now she wore it with obligation and ugly routine stitched on her curves. The chilled bed, I could tell, would need a lot of time to get warm. I leaned over her, her back to me, and was about to whisper something on the soft hairs of her ears. But at the last second, I decided not to. Still, my mere presence over her and my almost spoken words only chilled her. She curled herself, caught up and almost frozen in the coldness of the sheets like an exotic and mysterious creature, fossilized and found on a rock that could be mistaken for a glacier.
I left her alone. That’s what she seemed to be wanting. Abandoned, somewhat, on my side of the bed, I rolled on my left to face Scarlett. It was like looking at the back side of a rocky mountain you only thought you knew so well. But there were new crevasses, undiscovered by me, that were running a little too deep. I didn’t know how I was going to go to work the next day, with Scarlett and her odd behavior on my mind. But I was tired, and it was a bed that I was lying down on after all. I stretched out my left hand toward her, with all my four fingers.
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Scarlett woke up on an empty bed. The warmth that may or may not have built up during the night was now gone for good that morning. She sat straight up and erect and stared out of the glass window, remembering the day they had gone to the store to buy curtains, but then decided against them. They figured they were on top of a hill with no one else around, so what’s the use of getting curtains? They have nothing to hide . . . or so they thought and felt.
Scarlett stood up from the bed slowly. She turned and faced it, as if looking at it would help her remember how she received the night, how they both did. The sheets were all a mess on the side she wasn’t sleeping on, but not so much disturbed on her side. She left the room, determined to fix the bed after breakfast.
Walking through the house to the kitchen, Scarlett looked out the glass windows. The storm had not quite died down from last night. Gray clouds, like the under belly of a fevered and sweaty sheep, covered the sky, and drizzles of rain were merely the invitation for another huge storm later in the day. Scarlett’s joints ached as she bent over to pick up a knife from the knife holder under the sink.
She decided to have chopped apples on top of her oat meal for breakfast.
Apple after piece of apple journeyed into her mouth and went down to her stomach. After fifteen minutes, her bowl was empty; but her mind, gradually sharpened with each minute after her waking, became set, steadily, on the apple tree outside the glass window.
She lay down on the carpet and spread herself like a dying star emanating the last of its light. Her head turned toward the window.
The apples on the tree, she saw, kept swaying with the wind and were getting bruised with the whipping rain that was beating at them like something abusive and unnecessarily criticizing. The apples – what wrong had they done to deserve such a beating? Is it wrong to try to grow and provide pleasure to the mouth, body, and soul of another?
These thoughts seeped through the folds of Scarlett’s mind before she got up again and walked back over to the kitchen to where the knives were. Her hand reached for the same knife used to chop her apples. Cleansed with hot water and soap, the knife fit in her hand, unfittingly.
The phone rang. Scarlett walked over to it with the knife still in her hand. Was fate calling? Maybe fate was on her side, or maybe it was in the course of changing its mind, or perhaps fate had mercy after all.
“Hello?” Scarlett put the knife down on the table with her trembling hand. It was her older brother on the phone, already yelling accusingly. She combated his narrow-viewed words with a half-scream. “You didn’t have to do that!” Tears ran down her battle field of hot, wet, and red flesh. Capillaries on her cheeks rushed with angry emotion and surfaced in the form of a bloody war that filled her face, as her brother was screaming over the phone. There was more yelling from the both of them.
Before he hung up, he said, as if he actually meant it, “She deserved what she got.” Scarlett slammed the phone on the receiver and picked up the knife at the same time. An angry and irate fate must not have fallen off the blade of the knife when she reached for it again.
The knife opened her skin very slightly as she directed a line across her wrist.
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I came home at around six-thirty in the afternoon. Scarlett greeted me at the door, but there was something about her smile that told me something had happened – perhaps something harsh – in the afternoon while I was out at work. Of course she didn’t tell me what, and I didn’t expect her to tell me. Expecting her to speak about her day has come to be foolish thinking. And the fool that I am sometimes, I was not a fool about this: Scarlett was hiding something.
Yes, ever since the incident a month ago.
I had out the cutting board to slice some fruits for our dessert after dinner.
“Darling, please go out by the apple tree and pick some apples. Some of them fell to the ground because of the storm this afternoon.” Scarlett was looking out the window.
“But we have enough fruit already for dessert.”
“Darling, please.”
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My raincoat flapped in the rain and wind, like a whip, slapping against my legs as I bent down to pick up the apples that had fallen on the ground. Scarlett watched from the kitchen window. I motioned to her that I needed a basket to carry the apples in, yelling through the rain. But she didn’t understand. The barrier of glass, although transparent, could not help her read my intentions, actions or words.
I came back inside with a dozen apples or so, tucked in my shirt folded outward to hold them in. Scarlett took the apples from me and meticulously washed each one for at least one minute. Then she prepared a glass bowl for them and chose one for me to cut up, along with the other fruits I had already cut for our dessert.
She sat, again cross-legged, at the table, waiting for the dessert until I brought it to the table from the counter. I sat down next to her and looked into her eyes. “Why the apples?” Scarlett took a bite of her fruits. Determined to understand her, I asked again. “Scarlett, honey, why did you make me go out in the rain to get the apples?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“There has to be a reason, Scar—”
“No reason.”
I slammed my left fist on the table.
Scarlett, her face immediately red like her precious apples, jumped a little in her seat, but remained silent. I felt her stare resting, sternly, on my missing left ring finger, which was bandaged up. She extended her hand to touch it, but I was too heated up in the head. Why has Scarlett been acting weird? Why has she suddenly shut herself up, like a beautiful bird that was willingly and stubbornly staying in the cage after given the opportunity to fly away and show the world her majestic wings? Over mountain tops and peaceful lakes, and traffic filled streets, her body reflecting on the windows of apartments where yells could be heard, but singing just the same.
I raised my left hand over my head and stormed over to our room.
It was from our bed that I heard Scarlett moving dishes around, utensils clanking to each other and on the plates. Now I was the one curled up in bed. I was on top of the sheets, determined not to speak to her.
In the dark of our room, there I was.
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My eyes closed and then opened. Now it was two in the morning. The moon outside, full and impregnated with . . . with . . . something. Whatever it was, the moon couldn't help but shine through the glass window. My eyes moved over to Scarlett’s side of the bed. She wasn’t there. But then the door creaked open slowly. A dark figure with the kind of elegance only Scarlett could force came into the room. Scarlett lay down next to me. I watched her, or a shadow of her. It was like although I was looking at Scarlett, without her knowledge of that, I felt my view into her heart and mind was blocked: she remained a dark figure inside and out. It was as if we were both blinded at that very moment.
Thirty minutes of Scarlett’s progressively slowing breathing passed, and I was still wide awake. I reached over to grab her hand. We held hands without her knowing for a few minutes. Does that mean that we didn’t hold hands?
Mine slid over to her wrist. A bulge of what felt like scar tissue protruded over it. It was a single line. Where was this from?
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I closed my eyes and saw a fall afternoon. It’s October 1999. I know it is because the leaves are in the cross between turning red and tryingly staying a summer green. In this one month old memory bottled in a dream, Scarlett and I are in her family’s house. It was just me and Scarlett and a movie in the living room. Her parents were both out and so was her brother.
As my tongue circled hers, the front door opened. Her older brother. Muscles and more muscles, hidden and restrained deceivingly under businessmen attire. I released myself from her, quickly.
“You. I have to show you something.” His thick pointer finger shot at me. I had met Cain twice before whenever I came to drop Scarlett off at her family’s house in the past. He had always been a reserved, yet agitated man, much like a quiescent volcano. The potential Cain had . . . .
“Cain, what are you doing?”
He ignored Scarlett. “Follow me.”
“Scarlett, it’ll probably just be for a second, right Cain?”
“Yeah, just for a second, Scar.”
“Maybe I should come.” Scarlett got up and grabbed hold of my left hand, as I was walking over to Cain. Naturally, she rubbed her thumb on my ring as she did so.
“No, you stay. You—” again he pointed at me, “Come. It’s in the backyard.”
A twig scratched my shin as I followed Cain into the forest area behind their backyard. Cain was searching for something. He kept muttering to himself, and laughing, like a mad scientist or a literary critic, or any critic for this matter, gone insane.
Finally, in a clearing, there it was. A huge red and purple flower, growing proudly and naturally.
“You see this?” Cain pointed at the flower against the overcast sky, a fragile lighthouse that can be overtaken by the foam of the waves. My eyes followed. “I found this here when I was a kid. Scar wasn’t even born yet. Look at it.” He gently touched one of its petals with his muscular and veined, thick hand. I could imagine the lighthouse crumbling.
“I see it.”
“When I was a kid, I watched it grow. Each day, it got bigger and bigger.” Cain had eyes only for the flower. “One day, my friend died. We were best friends. We were real close. But then we started to separate. I’d have baseball practice but Vinny . . . you know what he liked to do? Knit. He fuckin’ liked to knit.”
“What’s wrong with liking to knit?”
“Shut up. It didn’t help that I saw him . . . with one of my team mates. So one day, I was in a fight with him. You could guess what we fought over. The next day, I saw that he had knitted himself a noose. He hung himself with it.”
I saw a small tear drop escaped Cain’s eyes as if it were escaping a jail house.
“And I came back here and saw the flower. And it was still growing. Vinny was dead and the flower kept growing. It’s not natural.” At that, Cain took an ax that was hidden behind a nearby tree. With one big sweep, he killed the flower, cutting it off from the root.
“What was that for?” I yelled at him and ran over to the flower, now lying on the floor. I kneeled down beside it as if it were a person. Cain looked at me and winced. His face was wet and so was his shirt. That’s when I realized it had been raining the whole time.
Cain dropped the axe and reached into his pocket. A box cutter. He walked toward me. Worried, I gripped the flower more sternly and stood up. “Cain, what are you doing?”
“He shouldn’t have killed himself.”
I was now moving backwards, trying to get away from him, the murdered flower in my hand.
“He shouldn’t have killed himself.”
Suddenly, Cain increased his steps and walked faster toward me. I didn’t want to take any chances. Out of the clearing and back into the wooded area, I desperately ran.
As I was zig-zagging in and out of trees, the red and purple flower still in my hands, I always feared Cain behind me. His breathing, his movements, everything about him I began to fear. I became paranoid until I ran out of breath and decided to hide behind the trunk of a fallen tree. I stayed there for at least five minutes. I looked down at the flower and noticed blood on my hands. There were thorns from the flower that I hadn’t seen until now. It was hard to pull the flower off of my hand since the thorns dug into my skin so deeply. It was like snake fangs burrowing in flesh for the kill. I had to use my other hand to get it off. The skin stubbornly stuck to the thorns as if they were glued together; I was connected to the flower. When I finally did get it off of my palm, I saw holes in my palm with blood dripping from them, like the tears I saw falling from Cain’s eyes.
When I was sure he couldn’t possibly be near me, I stood up and quickly looked around.
No Cain in sight.
I started walking, but then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A huge thick stick came in my field of vision. I got knocked out cold after falling to the floor hard. The last image I saw before the blackness consumed me was Cain’s face, his tears dripping on me and his hand with the box cutter moving toward my left hand, spreading out my fingers.
______________________________________________
The bandaged left hand and missing ring finger twitched as the sun swept through the window. Alone. Scarlett wasn’t there anymore. Sweaty faced. A faint delirium passed through the mind brought on by the memory dream.
Out the window, Scarlett was by the apple tree.
_____________________________________________
“What are you doing?”
Scarlet relaxed her shoulder and let down the bow. “I’m practicing.”
Twelve apples were perched on twelve wooden sticks stuck in the ground. They were all aligned, one after another vertically across Scarlett’s view so that she need only aim at the one apple in the front in order to pierce the bow through all twelve of them.
“You’re practicing?” This seemed random. First the disorientation of the dream memory, and now Scarlett was practicing the bow and arrow. An utter mystery filled with surprises that sometimes frightened you was what she was. “Where’d you get it from, the arrow and the bow?”
“What darling?”
“Where did you get the bow and arrow from?”
“When I was younger, my parents took me and Cain to the Grand Canyon. The golden days, when we were younger. Judgments seemed so far away then.” Her eyes drifted far off into the trees, not thinking about the apple she had been aiming at while talking. Scarlett’s voice had become more strained than it was in the past, like a smooth piece of paper that had gotten wet by water, and was now plagued with crinkles. It no longer was recklessly melodic with each corner of intonation; rather, it was purposeful with a daunting flame underneath. When she did speak now-a-days, it was to say things she would allow herself to say, to let go. “His name was Joe, Indian Joe. Cain and I met him when we were trying to get ahead of our parents around the rocks.”
Laughter and disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Scarlett, put down the bow and arrow; you might get hurt.”
“No, we really did meet this Indian Joe.”
“How come you never told me about this?”
Her arm began to tense up again, as she was getting ready to shoot.
“You don’t know many things about me, about my past. We’re always so focused on the present, but sometimes the past just shows up, so unexpectedly.” Like the bow and arrow. Like Cain. “I’m trying to say, he painted us a flat stone of huntsmen, and gave me this bow and arrow. ‘To shoot down what’s been shot down already in the minds.’ That’s what he told me.”
She bent her head down. With one eye closed, and the other in total concentration on the apples, Scarlett inhaled and was about to shoot.
“Are you any good?”
She smiled for the first time since she had shown signs of some strange oddity in possession of her, that which had made her peculiarly reserved and deeply darker than before. Deranged in her eyes, Scarlett laughed.
And to demonstrate her prowess with the bow, she shot the arrow through all twelve unlucky apples.
_________________________________________
Scarlett took a knife from under the sink and stole herself into the basement, carrying her bow and arrow. Inanimate objects were stored away for memory’s sake in their basement. The ticket stub of their first movie together, the now broken sled they used after the huge snow storm hit back in ’97 (they had accidentally crashed into a steel fence, and left it fortunately unscathed and laughing), a cell phone that was rendered broken by the both of them when business calls for Scarlett were beginning to become too annoying and too much in between them. The basement was the perfect place for her bow and arrow thought Scarlett.
It was also the perfect place for her to draw another line over the bulge on her wrist. The knife cried blood.
___________________________________
The stove was a blur and suddenly flew to the other side of the room. The refrigerator floated up to the ceiling. The television soared from left to right. Sprinkles of flashing lights, like those used in a play to indicate lightening, rendered my squinting eyes. And the pulsating throb on my head was too much. It wasn’t long until I realized I was having a huge migraine. I felt my way to our room from the back door, using the wall, and when I finally got there, I let myself fall to the floor.
In a vision, Cain was in our house. He had broken through one of the glass windows. He was after something, in dire need of destroying it in the hopes of destroying its meaning, us. He wanted it, the purple circle I used to wear before I couldn’t wear it any longer, thanks to him himself. He couldn’t find it because I had it in my pocket. If I couldn’t wear it, I carried it around. Either way, it stays with me.
In this vision, I hid in my and Scarlett’s blinded closet, watching Cain ransack our bedroom looking for the ring. I began to laugh. It was so involuntary. Yes, and so very necessary. It was my victory. But when he heard me, he rushed to the closet door.
My breath quickened as I braced myself for his wrath. Suddenly, Scarlett barged in the room with her bow and arrow. Scarlett, my savior, my rescuer, my own mystery novel that gets me every time, yet assures me that there is a resolution that can be reached.
She shot Cain’s head with her arrow. And Cain collapsed on me, hard.
"Scarlett, your own brother."
_________________________________________
She gave a little jolt and the bed shook, but she was still obviously asleep as Scarlett dipped a wash cloth into a bowl of ice cold water. Brook had earned herself a fever. After hearing a thud on the ceiling, Scarlett had rushed upstairs to their bedroom and found her on the floor, Brook’s purple ring on the floor next to her pocket.
_________________________________________
Late that night I awoke in the peaceful dark. Scarlett was lying next to me, sleeping soundly like she does. A tray on a small table next to me held a bowl of water with a small towel.
On my left, Scarlett was lying down, her back to me, again.
My eyes made their way to our glass window. The moon, gaily bright, and the silhouette of the apple tree with its apples, seemed to have a mind of their own -- the stealthy and secret way they romanced in the night, the moonlight with the shadows of apples.
My hand moved over to hers. The bulge. It was still there. I caressed it as a tear fell down.
As if for comfort, or for an answer, a tune gently floated through my mind as I leaned over to Scarlett. I sang it to her in the soft of my voice:
While this woman is sleeping here,
I tell her what I can't if I were to wake her.
Powerful but hardly will she ever hear,
the secrets that I've saved her.
Well you are famous, indeed,
for all your shyness.
Ain't that sweet?
But ain't this a fine mess?
We're in so deep;
I must've gotten lost in the process.
Let’s just let things be . . .
easy.
And an honest one you've made me,
because the solace that you gave me
was proven. Problems ain't the main thing to fall apart:
the archer's sloping shoulders.
And its story is tale as tall
thus reminding love is allegorical.
I mean the goal here after all
is not to hurt at all
_______________________________________
Scarlett felt a soft brush of air or wind, like a kind spirit, gently kissing the fine hairs of her ear.
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