Black Wings by Mary Grimm

Eileen daubed the river mud on her arms, dredging up great handfuls and sliding them down her skin, and on the skin of her legs and chest above her swimsuit, like they used to do when they were kids. Mud soap. We’re taking a bath, they’d yell.

Above, the birds darted. Was she going to go or not? “Meet me,” her cousin Donny had said. “Please? In our old place.” She brushed her hair from her eyes, feeling the mud on her fingers.

The birds settled for a minute on the bush across the water and she watched the soft flutter of their wings.

She tilted the bottle of beer so that it poured a thin stream into the glass. “I don’t want to go to Vegas,” Eileen said, “or anywhere.”

“You’re a poop,” her cousin’s wife said. “I hate you forever.” Jane was pregnant and she wanted some fun. “I can’t go by myself, it will be too depressing, a fat woman alone in Vegas.”

“I have a job, for instance.”

“I notice you didn’t say I wasn’t fat. And fuck your job. Your boss would give you the time off in a minute because you are his sexiest employee. He’d probably give you the restaurant if you slept with his old married ass.”

Eileen considered this. She rubbed her fingers together, feeling the mud under her nails. “He’s a dog. I don’t want to owe him anything.” She didn’t say that she had already slept with him, and more or less regretted it.

“I’m so depressed,” Jane said. “Give me a drink of your beer or I’ll kill myself.”

Eileen passed her the glass. Jane took a sip and spat it out “You see what I’ve become? What I let Donny do to me?”

Eileen took Jane’s hand and stroked it, thinking of Donny. The last time she’d seen him he’d looked tired. His hair was long, curling feathery below his ears. He had told her he was so over it. She had watched the familiar curve of his mouth. His t-shirt had had a devil’s face on it, an advertisement for a neighborhood bar, Old Nick’s Den. The devil had a wispy beard and ears like Mr. Spock.

She hadn’t asked him what it was he was over. She had watched his mouth and his dark eyes. Her mother had said long ago that Donny had the most beautiful eyes in the family. Wasted on a man, she’d said.

“Meet me,” he’d said on the phone last night, and she’d said she might.

“You know, Jane, Donny would probably take you to Vegas if you asked him.”

“Don’t rub it in. I know your cousin’s a saint.” Jane took one of Eileen’s fingers and pretended to bite it. “I have a craving,” she said.

Eileen tilted her glass and watched the beer swirl and foam, her mind in the long ago.

Eileen and Jane and Donny, five years old, then seven, then ten, then hurtling into grown up. Jane in pink and white chiffon like torn clouds, Eileen in an identical costume: fairies dancing out of a cardboard wood on the splintery boards of the auditorium stage. Donny in the wings with his cardboard axe, ready to come out and cut down the cardboard tree which the fairies danced around. Donny’s hair the same color as hers, like black wings on his forehead and over his ears.

“You’ll always watch out for Donny, won’t you?” her mother had said. “Because you’re older. I hope you two will always be close, like your aunt and I are. I’d do anything for her,” she said. Her aunt, Donny’s mother. They slept over at their grandmother’s house some times, his bed a nest of blankets on the floor next to her bed, close enough to touch fingers or even hold hands if it was a bad night. If there was a storm they would share the bed.

Already then, he was in a different class at school, and what could she do if something happened. “Take him with you when you go to Jane’s house,” her mother said, and she had, again and again. Her mother was dead now and who knew what she would say, what could the dead say to the living that was any use? Her mother dead and her aunt still alive, if it was life to sit in front of the TV all day in a stupor.

*

Later, Eileen sat with her back against the tree at the old house, her grandmother’s house. Her aunt lived here now, but she was old and deaf. Eileen could see slats of light coming through the blinds on her aunt’s bedroom window, and the flicker from the tv. “You kids are angels,” her aunt used to say, “as cute as angels on a Christmas card.”

In the dark, Eileen breathed in the smell of the grass, the dirt. Her back was damp, her hair stuck to her neck.

Like a breath, his words against her cheek: “You came,” Donny said.

They both looked up at the window. “What am I supposed to tell Jane?” Eileen said, and he pulled away to look at her.

“You don’t have to tell her anything.” He played with the zipper on her blouse. “Tell her I love her. You know. Whatever.”

Eileen snorted and this sound, unexpectedly loud, started the next door dog barking. “That dog is wild,” she said. “He’d tear us up if he could.”

She felt in her pocket for the money and put it in his hand, watching the long shadow of the tree stretch away from the house to the brush at the back of the yard. Bats flitted black across the black sky in their jerky way. “Do you remember your mother used to say we were angels?” she said.

Donny shook his head. He was so close to her that his hair brushed her cheek. “She was drunk when she said it.”

Eileen nodded. It was one of the ways you could tell.

Donny laid his head against her shoulder. “Tell Jane she can name the baby anything she wants.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll do that.”

He stroked her cheek with one finger, and ran his hand down her arm, marking her one more time. 

………………..

Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection) - both by Random House, and a number of flash pieces in places like Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a YA thriller. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.

Twitter: @mcagrimm