The Time Tree


Arturo laughed. Arturo was fucking penniless.

You didn’t just wake up poor one day. It never came as a shock and surprise. Even people who suddenly lost all of their money in stock market crashes or in catastrophic wheat fires still had plenty of rich friends to call on who knew the tricks of the money-making game. They knew what branches to shake and which slots to stick a finger in and pull out a dime.

No, poverty was always pathologic – a slow, creeping disease with a distinct epidemiology and several critical stages. You either climbed out of it or it killed you. But it never caught you by surprise, unless you were crazy or sick. Like the sun going down on a big city, you could watch as it fell below the buildings, lighting up the clouds as it hit the horizon, turning the glass windows of seventy-story offices into burning prisms that seemed to warp and pulse along with the buzzing of the urban cicadas. You squinted as long as you could into the dusk, and then you were blind, running into fence posts, laughing joylessly as slick cats ran underneath your staggering feet. You had to laugh. If you didn’t laugh, you would crumple, and the roaches would rip off your rags and eat you alive.

Arturo sat on the curb in front of the Lux-O-Lube and laughed. The Lux-O-Lube was closed, as were all of the liquor stores, all of the shelters, and pretty much everything else in town except for the automats and police station.

Arturo laughed because today Arturo had spent his last fifty dollars on the rent for his storage unit. He would not be able to pay next month and he would have to find some other place to store his papers and canvas. Perhaps he would bury them like pirate treasure. Perhaps he would set them on fire and charge admission to see a life’s work in art burn. With the money, maybe he could make some changes. Maybe he could afford a doctor, a lawyer, his medicine, his dignity. A sandwich, a cup of coffee, paint, a future.

The night was long and hot, good for being outside if you had to be. Even though it was late, cars still passed him every once and awhile, but even when he stretched his long legs into the street they rarely swerved or noticed. It had been a month since he had been able to afford his anti-clotting medication, and it was only a matter of time before something froze inside him. He laughed and laughed, wondering if a car would stop, wondering if a tire across his chest would pop his tongue out of his throat and keep him from swallowing it if he had a stroke or seizure.

Down at the end of the long commercial street, a pair of headlights materialized in the mid-summer haze. They were bright and blue, almost too dazzling to be functional. As the car hit bumps in the road, the lights jostled and blinked. It was nauseating. Arturo put an arm over his eyes to shield them, waiting for the car to pass.

The car didn’t pass. Arturo quailed under the intensity of the beams as they settled on his face. Arturo stopped laughing. He looked up from his elbow. The car had halted right in front of him with the lights trained like dissecting pins holding open the guts of a frog. Arturo stood up, blinking, feeling raw. Was it the cops here to hassle him? Usually, they didn’t like giving away a free bed when they didn’t have to.

It was not the cops. It was a long green limousine with fins along the side like a barracuda. The driver side door opened up and a man squeezed out. He was gargantuan, with a tiny, puffy little red-face and a grimace that looked chiseled out of asphalt. He stood leering over Arturo like a child contemplating the murder of a bug that had become boring, squeezing a driving cap between his thickly-knuckled hands.

“You got fambly?” asked the man.

“Not the kind you ever see,” said Arturo.

“You a drunk, then? A dipso?”

“Not really,” said Arturo. “Not yet.”

The man put his hat back on his head and chuckled.

“You are a bum, though, for sure. Just a bum. You want some money?”

He fanned out a stack of hundreds. Arturo squinted at the bills, confused. The man put the fist of cash under Arturo’s nose, close enough that he could smell the ink and the fresh copper-plate funk. Arturo took the cash and frowned, ready to run at any moment.

“I’m an artist, not a bum, not a prostitute,” he said.

“Then how come you’ve got such a big hard-on?” asked the Driver though his straining teeth.

Arturo looked down at his pants. The Driver punched him in the ear and caught him as he fell to one side.

“Come on,” said the Driver, carrying Arturo with one arm like a sack of groceries. “You can count it in the car.”

His head lolling against his spine, Arturo heard a car door creak open. He felt cool fabric against his skin as he was thrown inside, and then heard a car door slam. Air puffed against his ragged tennis shoes. He sat up in the seat. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The smell of motor oil and wet garbage was gone, replaced with sandalwood, French vanilla, and stale cigarettes.

“I’m sorry you had to be hit,” said a figure sitting across from him. “The blow must have stung quite a bit. But our intentions are clean, not frosty or mean, so please listen, relax, and submit.” Arturo blinked the last bit of confusion away and found himself staring into the smiling face of a brilliantined rooster. If Arturo were painting him, he would have represented him with a series of bright yellow lines and hard angles, with black spirals for eyes and a jeweled crest of silver hair. He had a pale, slender face that looked not so much shaved as scraped clean of stubble, and a chin that you could use to pound in battleship rivets. He was about 20 years older than Arturo – late forties, early fifties. The most remarkable thing about him was his eyes. They were so blue that they might as well have been clear. Arturo had learned early on in life not to trust anyone whose eyes weren’t leather colored.

“I’m listening,” said Arturo. “I’ve certainly been hit harder before.”

“We will pay you in cash, we’ll pay you up front. You’ll make quite a stash if you agree to our stunt.”

“I certainly need money,” said Arturo.

“Money is nothing, like pepper or air. Take all you want. We really don’t care.”

“I would like a lot of it, then,” said Arturo, checking his ear for blood. It was clean. He stuffed the wad of bills the Driver had given him into his sock. “The more the better.”

“Spend it on drugs, spend on tail, spend it on schemes, and then spend it on bail. Spend it on dreams, or some dyspeptic frail – you’ll have so much damn green, you can go choke a whale.”

“Actually, I just need a place to put things. I still have things, you see. I’m not a drunk, or a bum, or a washout. I’m an artist. I used to be a pretty good one, actually. Arturo Montana, painter of souls.”

“We don’t care what compels you, or what gives you fever. All we need you to do is pull one hot little lever.”

With that last couplet, the car started to move.

“Is there any way I can get you to quit rhyming?” asked Arturo. “It’s very distracting.”

The man cocked his head to the side.

“I can’t make any deals if I don’t understand what you want me to do,” explained Arturo.

“I can try if you like,” said the man. “But it makes me turn sour.”

The man grimaced and pulled at his collar. He shut his eyes and put his hand to his temple. Arturo looked around the limo. The interior ermine was as green as the exterior paintjob, and along the walls between the windows were framed pictures of towers and castles. A chandelier dangled down next to a chartreuse-tinted bubble sunroof. As the dapper kidnapper blanched, the Driver stuck his head up in the rear-view mirror and looked into the backseat with a concerned grimace.

“You alright, Cap’m?” asked the Driver.

“It makes me turn sour,” said the man again, snarling at the Driver. He looked like he was taking a particularly gnarly shit. He held his hand up in front of him. It was shaking.

“It makes me turn sour. It makes me TURN SOUR.”

He looked at Arturo with pleading eyes. Arturo shrugged.

“It makes me turn sour, like milk that’s been spoiled, or a wilting corn flower,” said the man very softly under his breath. He let out a deep sigh. The wrinkles on his forehead smoothed.

“How about I start asking questions, and then you start answering them?” said Arturo, now intrigued. “Maybe that will make things easier.”

“Fine and dandy, like pecan sandy,” said the man.

“Who are you, and where are we going? And why?”

“My name is Reloj, and I keep time for the City. I’m neither elected, nor picked by committee. My job is a burden, but the perks can be grand. Time can be bottled, can contract and expand. But tonight there’s a problem – the works are all dented. We’ll be caught in a loop unless the time can be vented. We’ll hire you freelance to cut through the strands. But the tree can only be touched by virginal hands.”

Arturo considered this.

“I have no idea what you are talking about. And I’m not a virgin.”

“It’s better if we show you,” said the Driver. “Reloj don’t get out much.”

Reloj winked and patted Arturo on the knee. They drove along in silence for awhile and Arturo looked out of the window at the sleeping metropolis. They were headed for downtown. The buildings grew taller along the sidewalks like mushrooms blooming in the darkness of a forest. Finally, the car came to a stop in front of the Click Tower, the biggest building in town, the city’s center, the gleaming finger of steel that pointed highest at the moon and therefore owned the orb’s sense of blood-spattered inevitability, a lunar lightning rod for all human epicycles, a buckle of business that cinched the city’s commerce belt into a cruel, mammoth institution, wrangling the bloat of vice, the fat of progress, the distended gut of the future, into respectable, lint-free, pin-striped, relaxed-fit slacks.

Arturo had once tried to paint a series of pictures of the Click Tower, but he had abandoned the project after several false starts. He couldn’t put his brush on the soul of the place. Was it the crest of gargoyles that circled the top in severe gothic contour? The angled black glass windows? The constant stream of suits that carried haunted acolytes in and out, imprisoned by buttons, money, and the expectations of the envious hordes? Was it the legions of men and women who threw themselves from the top every year after decades of silent, restrained agony?

The Driver got out and opened the door. Reloj and Arturo joined him in the arches above the Click Tower’s façade. The stone steps to the door were gloomy (too-bright, too many artificial shadows, too much man-made space) in the hot empty night.

“Now we go in and we go down, boss,” said the Driver. “You are going to see something you just won’t believe. But it don’t matter, because you’re just another fucking drunk.”

“Again,” said Arturo, “I’m not a drunk.”

“You will be,” said the Driver. “And you’ll wish that was enough.”

“If you scare him away, and he won’t do our bidding, then the one in the fire will be you,” said Reloj, poking the Driver in the chest. “I’m not kidding.”

The Driver frowned.

“Alright, alright,” he said, opening one of the wide Click Tower doors with a key from a ring. “Come on, then.”

The Driver led them inside and across the tiled floor to the gleaming gold elevators. He put a key into a lock next to the dark buttons and the lights lit up. An elevator opened and the three stepped inside. The Driver turned another lock inside the elevator and opened a cage full of buttons. He pressed an ebony knob labeled “TTT.”

The elevator didn’t go anywhere. Instead, the back of the elevator slid aside, exposing a winding steel staircase that only led down. The walls glowed green like an illuminated pool table inside this little well, and the stairs seemed to descend into inky infinity. The walls only glowed around the threshold.

As they began to climb down, the illumination followed them, lighting their journey. The Driver reached out a hand and touched the wall. It glowed fiercely under his touch and then began to fade as he took his hand away.

“It’s bioreactive light,” said the Driver. “Fungus and shit. It will last for a thousand years.”

Arturo wrote “tempus fugit” on the wall with an index finger and watched it fade.

“I’ve been working with these people my whole damn life,” said the Driver. “They get you when you’re a kid, see. It’s all kids. That way, they can make sure they knows what you know. I don’t knows any of that bunk you people get taught. I only knows the truth, so I don’t have no crazy in me. Mr. Reloj knows even more than that. He’s one of them that do the work of it. He’s barely even here, if you want to know the real truth. They get all spacy when they leave their little rooms.”

“What little rooms?” asked Arturo.

“You’ll see,” said the Driver. “You’ll see the whole thing.”

They continued to descend, spinning around in circles as the stairs ground down into the earth. The stairs actually bent at an angle, which made it difficult to keep your balance. You really had to use the handrails, or you risked keeling over and falling in between the iron slats. The stairs twisted around and burrowed down and out, following the sloping tunnel like a gun barrel canted on its side. Each step had a slight tilt; each bend went further than the one before.

“Why no elevator down here?” asked Arturo.

“This was here before elevators, man. Long before elevators.”

They traveled for what seemed like hours until they finally reached bottom. The stairs corkscrewed into a wooden platform and, as their feet hit the grain, a current of cool swept up along the floor and chilled Arturo’s face. It was good to be on solid ground after the dizzying spin down. At the end of the platform was a brown door with the name of the city burned into it, along with the enigmatic “TTT.” From the popping in his ears, Arturo realized that they were deep underground, deep under the Click Tower, deep under every layer of the human fundament. Deep under the basements, deep under the subways, deep under the sewers, deep under the parking garages. This was the roots.

Even though immense, the door swung open at the slightest push. They went through into the cavern beyond. The wooden platform abruptly ended, and then swept downward into a crater like the mouth of a volcano. An enormous tube of clear plastic exactly the size and shape of the Click Tower itself carved through the center of the chamber.

Inside the tube, at the roots of the Click Tower, at the roots of the city, grew a tree.

Arturo gasped and put his hands over his eyes with the shock of recognition. He started to claw at his face, but the Driver grabbed his arms and pinned them back.

Arturo had nightmares about this tree.

“We all have,” he whispered to himself.

The Driver made him hold his head straight, and squeezed his neck until his eyes popped open.

“You have to look,” said the Driver. “You are going in there.”

The tree was a thick black monster, as broad around as the Click Tower itself. It grew out of the center of the immense sunken cavern and through the ceiling, exposing its midsection like the pole of a circus tent. The plastic tube in which it developed formed a hermetic terrarium that seemed to have an alternate, shimmering atmosphere. A palate of mint green grass grew right up to the edge of the lucite, carpeting the rocky ground like hair growing from the scalp of a corpse. Butterflies and lianas twirled out their frenetic guts in the steaming cave – flipping, flopping, live as raindrops. Along the edge of the glass were squat little hutches at regular intervals that seemed carved from fallen seeds. The tree was so big that even its seeds were the size of trailer trucks. They were black and smooth and poisonous-looking. Velvet pillows were crammed inside each hollow like stuffing for a capon.

In each hutch sat a man or a woman who looked like a brother or sister of the enigmatic Reloj. It was Reloj at different ages and with different haircuts and outfits. Arturo counted 59 such hutches, along with one that was empty. Most likely, that was where Reloj fitted.

The people in the hutches were seated cross-legged, coiled like springs. Every second, one of them stood up and shouted either “tick” or “tock,” alternating accordingly. It was as if they were playing some sort of counting game. Reloj clicked his heels together and took off toward the empty hutch, shouting over his shoulder.

“My duty is done, and I return to my post. Life out of time is like the breadth of a ghost.”

He sat down on a pillow and waited patiently for his turn to come in the counting.

The Driver led Arturo closer to the tree. There was only one person inside the clear shield, a small child with her nose pressed against the glass. Her legs were manacled to the floor by a post near the base of the tree. She was a prisoner, unable to leave through the sealed portal carved into one side of the plastic.

“This is where the city gets its time,” said the Driver. “It comes from the tree, and then the people in the little sheds purify it and control it. They dole it out as necessary, slowing things down and speeding things up as the tree demands. These people never leave unless there is a problem, and the little girl in there is supposed to vent the time if things get fucked up. That’s her duty, you see. I’m a driver, and she’s a venter. That’s how it’s all supposed to work. The problem is that she is refusing to do her job, and we haven’t trained up anybody else yet to work the system. To deal with the paradoxes and the confusions and the contusions. In the meantime, for the time being, we need you to go in there and pull the lever that is going to vent off all of the excess time. You may not realize it, but we have been living in something of a bubble lately. This whole town could pop.”

“So there are trees like this one all over the world?” asked Arturo.

“Sure,” said the Driver. “Where do you think time comes from? Science? Psssh, science can’t even tell you which dinosaur was the funny one. Or how come jellyfish skin makes the best condoms.”

“I’m not going in there,” said Arturo.

The little girl physically looked like she was about eight or nine. But there was something hollow and ancient about her eyes. She looked like a night nurse at a state mental hospital. They were lucid eyes, alive and strong, yet they seemed to see far beyond Arturo’s own personal island of contingent verities. If Arturo were going to paint her, he would use a canvas made of glass and her pinafore would be mottled like the shell of a tortoise.

Near the base of the tree, near the terminus of the girl’s chains, was a bright orange lever that had been striped with black like a candy cane. The ground underneath the lever bubbled and breathed, as if it were covering a nauseated diaphragm.

“It’s real easy,” said the Driver. “You just pull that lever and the whole works should fix itself. I don’t know how it all happens, but I do know that you are going in there, with or without a couple of broken legs. If it’s got to be me or you, it’s going to be you. That’s all there is to it. Look on the bright side: after this, you’ll never have to work again.”

“I don’t need money that bad,” said Arturo. “I dream about this place. I wake up when I walk through that glass.”

“That could mean damn near anything,” said the Driver, putting his hand on the small of Arturo’s back and pushing. “Now, march. Hup two.”

Arturo opened the door and stepped inside.

The Driver went over and climbed inside Reloj’s hutch. Reloj was poised and ready, waiting with the finely-honed temporal instinct of a junkie or a lunatic -- a bent spoon, a squeezed trigger.

“What do you think is going to happen in there?” asked the Driver.

“The tree will be fixed, the bum will be nixed, and despite our success, some time will get mixed.”

“What are we going to do about the little girl? Are we gonna give her the chop?”

Reloj was silent. Suddenly he jumped up to his full height and shouted “tock.” Sparks shot out of the ends of his fingers.

“And the money? Are we really gonna pay this guy off?” asked the Driver.

“If he returns to appeal, we will honor our deal. But those odds just hit bottom since he walked through that seal.”

Inside the glass case, the air was thicker and wetter. Time itself was thicker and wetter and flowed like pancake syrup from the end of a fork. Arturo realized that there was no such thing as intelligence: some people just used their time faster than others. They ate the fruit of this tree too fast. The time tree pulled him close and yet repulsed at the same time, as if dancing with him. There was a junction box on the ground that appeared to have been destroyed by the feet of somebody small. Ropes of what looked like green snot poured out of a dent in the side and seeped into the ground.

As Arturo walked along the grass to the lever, the little girl followed him silently, tugging his pants, trying to get him to stop, to slow down, to pay attention. Arturo tried to get the chains off of her, but they were too tight, too well-crafted. He kicked at a link with his shoe and the chain just rattled across the ground like an electric snake.

“I’m sorry, little girl. I can’t get you out of here. Where would you go?” asked Arturo.

The girl didn’t say anything. Evidently, she had never been taught to speak. Instead, she pulled on the flap of Arturo’s frock coat, trying to dig the heels of her sensible sandals into the ground to stop his progress.

“I’ve got to pull that lever, little girl,” said Arturo. “No choice. Anyway, I wouldn’t be in this mess if you would do your job.”

Arturo put his hand on the black and orange switch and gave it a yank.

The tree shivered and then Arturo was gone. The branches high above that were connected to the steel girders of the Click Tower moaned and sighed. The little girl sat down in the grass sadly and put her chin in her hands.

But where was Arturo?

Arturo sat on the curb in front of the Lux-O-Lube and laughed. Arturo was fucking penniless.

As a green limousine approached him on the sidewalk he had a moment of deja-vu, but it passed. The limousine did not pass. A deal was made. Arturo got in, and the limo drove downtown.

After he pulled the lever the second time, and then the third time, Arturo didn’t laugh anymore. Something seemed familiar.

The next twenty times Arturo had to be dragged screaming into the limousine. He fought the stairs, he fought the lever, but in the end he always pulled it. What choice did he have?

Eventually he stopped caring. We’d like to think that eventually his soul went somewhere else, and that eventually it was just a machine made of man that the green limousine continued to pick up on the sidewalk in front of the Lux-O-Lube, delivered to the Click Tower, and placed in front of the time tree to be pulled into this infinite loop like iron shavings pulled into a magnet. We’d like to think that eventually Arturo Montana, painter of souls, got the death he deserved as ersatz savior of his city.

But bubbles float on forever, and their skin can be tough as dreams.

The Haberdasher’s Daughter


On his way to the tavern to take a room for the night, Franklin the Writer moped along the sidewalk with his eyes dragging the ground like fingers tracing dirty words in beach sand. The mail carriage which had carried him into town left him rattled and jittery, loosening the flesh on his bones with the constant shock of each stone as it passed underneath the cartwheels of the poorly-constructed hack. His fingers buzzed; his teeth melted together into a paste of pain.

As Franklin’s ringing feet carried him along the sidewalk toward the tavern recommended by the slightly intoxicated mail truck driver, his mind longed for stasis. He was cranky, pickled by travel, and he wanted nothing more than a big, foaming beer and a nice immobile bed to drink it in. Franklin had work, but it could wait until morning.

The hamlet of Shrew’s Gap was as good a place as any to hole up for a few weeks and put the finishing touches on the seven homemade tales Franklin was carrying to the city to sell. The stories were meant to be part of a collection called Seven Decades of Chalk and were meant to play off of each other like jewels in a Jack’s crown, but the cynical part of him knew that he would have to break them up in order to turn a profit on them. However, Shrew’s Gap looked sleepy enough to keep distractions at a minimum, and he felt confident that he could use the time here to punch his tales up and make them stand on their own.

Still, he was not looking forward to the prospect of revision. For Franklin, editing was like eating day-old congealed oatmeal – the kind you could cut into slippery slices with a knife and then eat on toast.

Franklin contemplated this dismal feast, oblivious, as a storm gathered in the distance and reached its boiling point. The mountain range on the horizon had given birth to stringy stratus clouds, which had dropped out of the upper atmosphere, tightened around the neck of the sky, and begun to choke the other nimbi into deep purple swirls, buckling them with increasing erotic pressure, teasing them and squeezing them to release their fat, sticky raindrops. Yet, all day the clouds protested and remained continent, and it had been so tense for so long that when the first drop hit his neck, it caught Franklin by surprise, even though it really shouldn’t have.

“Shit!” said Franklin, jarred from his reverie, breaking into a trot. “I knew it. My pack will get soaked to the grain. I’ll be reading these stories with a spoon and strainer.”

As the rain began to pick up, falling in heavier sheets, Franklin scanned the shops on either side of the street. He could duck in until the shower passed and then continue on his way. But even though it was not yet dusk, the business section of Shrew’s Gap appeared to be rolled down, dusted off, and stuffed in the closet to molder. Not a single lantern was lit, and many of the doors had thick chains wrapped around the door handles which were bolted with padlocks the size of beef brains.

Franklin tried pinching under the awning of the local butcher, but the rain fell in slanting slashes that whirled and shifted and caught him at chaotic intervals when his coat fell open. One minute the rain blew in from behind, the next minute you could open your mouth and drink it like a faucet. He really needed to be inside somewhere if he wanted to protect his merchandise.

He squinted into the torrent, trying to see between the slats of water that came tearing out of the sky to splash in the mud between cobblestones like blood filling up a fresh wound. Down the street at the end of a long line of clothing shops and darkling trinket boutiques, a light shone out of a window and reflected off of puddles in the gutter. Franklin hoisted his luggage and began running toward this sanctuary, splashing up water in muddy runnels behind him.

The store was built from alternating red and green bricks and carried an immense plate glass window in its eaves. It was punctured by an oaken door with a bright gold handle, twisty with sharp end-caps. The size of the window had caused the glass to pucker and bulge in places, giving it slight brown shadows of refraction. The shingle hanging above the store was engraved with a sombrero, and block letters with curly feet were stenciled across the brim: “L. Thierryault, Fine Hats, Helmets, and Cockades.”

In the window was a vision sent by the devil himself.

A girl wearing nothing but a vermillion panama posed rakishly behind the dimpled window-pane. Her ankles were crossed in a laughable concession to propriety, but the rest of her was as naked as a jaybird, as free as a child escaping out the back door of a hovel to avoid a bath or a spanking. Under an envelope of liquid flames, her skin was the color of a fresh snowdrift or a Venetian blind. Her heavy lips, vulva, and breasts hung with pendulous pink splendour, as pert as the hat that angled across the mass of her curly blonde tresses. Her green eyes sparkled like cut emeralds, and her mouth was parted in the barest suggestion of a smile.

Franklin stood in the street across from the now raging river that cut the gutter between street and sidewalk. He felt the satchel under his fingers slip from his second knuckles, to his first, to his fingertips. The window of L. Thierryault’s hattery was lit from within by a circle of flame jets that framed this vision and made Franklin’s gorge drop from his neck into his bloomers. Fat fingers mashed down the buttons of his sympathetic nervous system: he forgot to breathe; he forgot to beat his heart; he forgot to turn the cheese in this morning’s cream radish roll into fingernails and burping.

For a moment, Franklin felt as if he had been hit by actual lightning and this was a vision of eternity. But no. He had merely been hit by the thunderbolt of love, and he could feel the electricity of the missile sizzle out of his toes and crackle across the top of the puddle he was standing in. It was a good thing his shoes were made from ram’s rubber, or he might have fallen over backwards -- stricken, dead.

It was the sort of thing you rarely saw in private, really.

It took Franklin nearly a full minute of soaking rain to realize that her eyes didn’t just sparkle like jewels. They actually WERE jewels. In fact, the entire woman was merely an illusion. A fabrication. A fake; a trick; a con. A doll; a model; a mannequin. A hustle; a man-trap; a cheap and squalid pander to the appetites of the torrid and base delinquents that ordinarily made Franklin sneer with aristocratic disdain. Yet here he was. Gawking. Drooling. Unmanned. Unhinged. Undone.

It was uncanny. She was so life-like.

Puffing his chest and gathering his wits, he tried the door. It was unlocked. Franklin pushed inside and stood, dripping, on a woven horsehair rug spread thinly across bare concrete. There were fabric tufts on the floor where it appeared as if carpet had once been violently removed. The store was small, and clean, and packed.

The store’s proprietor had risen from a stool in the back to stare at Franklin with frank surprise.

“How did you get in here?” asked the man, presumably Thierryault himself. He was bespectacled and hunched, and had long and hairy ears with points like a wolf. The mustache under his puffball nose was limp and black, and came down in two lines around his jaw, making him look as if his mouth had a hinge carved from wood.

“The door was open,” said Franklin, straining rainwater from his bangs.

“Don’t move,” said Thierryault. “You are all wet.”

“There’s nowhere to go, really,” said Franklin, smiling, gesturing to the cramped confines of the hat store. Thierryault did not return the smile.

“What do you want?” asked Thierryault. “You need a hat?”

Franklin shrugged, not sure if he should set down his pack.

“You need a big boater, right? Something fashionable and made from pig cloth, yes?” said Thierryault. He began rummaging through the various caps hanging on hooks and stacked on shelves, pausing intermittently to whip his head back around and affix Franklin with a penetrating stare. Franklin didn’t dare move from the square of horsehair carpet.

“Aha!” said Thierryault, rising from a pile of game coasters in a dusty corner and clutching a green beret in one hot fist. He swung his arm around like a morning-star and smacked Franklin in the forehead with the bottle green topper. He gave it a tweak, turned it, and then stepped back, satisfied.

“Yes, it is perfect,” said Thierryault. “That will be one piece of merchant silver, and then you must leave my store.”

“Actually, I guess I don’t want to buy a hat,” said Franklin, carefully removing the beret from his soggy scalp.

“You don’t? Then why are you here? Bothering me.”

“I was just passing by, you see, and I want to buy the girl in your window,” said Franklin reasonably. “I need a muse, but I have neither the time nor the inclination for the real deal. I live in the city, and she would be a perfect addition to my garret. I don’t have very much money, but maybe we could work out some kind of payment plan. I am just passing through, but I will be more than happy to mail you a check every month until…”

“Get out of my store!” shouted Thierryault, grabbing a heavy-fur lined grosgrained upturn with seventeen brass buttons and flinging it at him like a frisbee. The hat caught Franklin across the eyebrow and drew blood.

“Get out!” shrieked Thierryault, bombarding Franklin with homburgs, trilbies, ushankas, tricornes, and cork-lined simple simons. A bowler popped Franklin right in the nose and sent him reeling backward out the door, where he landed with a splash in a rain puddle.

There was the heavy sound of a lock being turned on the door, and then the shop went dark. Franklin could still see the outline of the girl in the window, and he stared for quite some time before picking himself up and continuing on his way. He was shocked, numb, wet, cold, and thwarted in the only half-assed sort of conquest he was capable of making. Time to give up.

The Bright Red Rump Inn was nearly empty. There was a slump of hair and adenoids snoring in one corner, and a jolly old woman in clogs was watching sports on a hanging set, wiping down empty tables and pushing chairs into their proper places with her ample bottom.

“Get him!” she shouted periodically. “Get that ball!”

As soon as she saw Franklin, her easy smile slowly faded, replaced in chilly degrees by mercenary hostility.

“Can I help you? Please don’t drip on my furniture.”

“I need a room, I guess,” said Franklin. “And something hot to drink. Preferably
something analgesic.”

“Don’t think I don’t know what that means,” said the woman. “I’m Mary-Ann McGwirt, and I’m smarter than you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Franklin. Mary-Ann McGwirt drew him a pint of beer and then put it into the microwave.

“You got gold?” she asked.

“I can pay for the whole week in advance, if you like,” said Franklin, taking off his wet topclothes and leaving them in a pile by the door. He walked over to the bar and collapsed into a stool, ready for some mental health.

“That’s good idea, starveling,” she said. “What brings you to this horrible rat-trap of a shit-sandwich hamstrung hamlet, anyway?”

Franklin frowned. All he could see were emeralds.

“Don’t listen to my wife one bit!” piped up the only other patron, the wrinkled male mass who until now had been heartily snoring away in the corner. “And don’t let her boss you around! She’s the original shrew.”

The old man had grey hair down to his ankles, long stringy runners of it that reminded Franklin of shoots of Bermuda grass.

“You be quiet, Marshall,” said Mary Ann. “What did I tell you about bothering the customers?”

“It’s my damn whorehouse,” muttered Marshall.

“It’s not a whorehouse anymore,” said Mary Ann. “And it hasn’t been for two decades. You are getting senile, irritating, and old.”

“Women don’t know their damn place anymore, eh lad?” said Marshall.

“Sure we do,” said Mary Ann, eyeing Marshall with fiery disdain. “At the top. With the angels and Miss God Almighty.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” said Marshall returning to his slumber, sprawled across one of the shining tables, his hair reaching down to the floor in front of him.

“Now are you going to answer my question or not?” asked Mary Ann, plopping down the hot glass of beer in front of him.

“I’m a writer,” said Franklin. “Although, it looks like I might be out of stories.”

“All dried up?” chuckled Mary Ann.

“To the contrary,” said Franklin glumly. He opened his bag across the bar, angling it out into the sink. Out poured a gallon of water and little bits of ink and parchment.

“My, my,” said Mary Ann.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Franklin. “These were all copies.”

“Yes, but what is a writer without his stories?” asked Mary Ann.

“This does set me back and ruin all of my plans,” said Franklin.

“You’re shitting yourself anyway,” said Mary Ann. “The future is in pictures.”

“It’s possible that this town might have a few stories lying around that I could misappropriate,” said Franklin, politely ignoring her. “Since I’ll be here awhile, maybe I might as well learn some of them,” he insinuated.

“You’d want to talk to that sleeping sack of crap in the corner there, then,” said Mary Ann loudly. “He won’t shut up with his lies and bullshit. He’ll make you wish you were a plumber, or a moneylender, or something else respectable – not another story addict.”

“I’m not deaf, you know,” said Marshall.

“No, just lazy. And damned foolish. We should be closed during the winter. We haven’t had a customer in weeks.”

“The writer fellow would disagree,” said Marshall, pulling his face out of his hair and pushing in closer to the table. “Say, writer fellow, bring your beer over here and keep an old man company. Let the wench stew in her own foul juices.”

Mary Ann snorted and turned back to the television. Franklin shrugged and sat down next to Mr. McGwirt. The old man smiled conspiratorially and gave him a poke in the ribs.

“The truth is, she gives the best head in maybe four counties,” he whispered. “And she’s probably as smart as she thinks he is. And look at me! Wrangled her away from every farmer in the district! Heh! I guess she likes her men tough and mean. She’s as sweet as a turnip in the sack, let me tell you.”

Franklin looked over his shoulder at the Mary Ann who was leaning over the counter with her face screwed up in a rictus of passionate rage. Were turnips sweet?

“Get him! Tear his elbows off and shove them up his cock!” shouted Mary Ann.

“She’s definitely a keeper,” said Franklin.

“Now what is it you want to know?” said Marshall. “I’ve been in this town my whole life. I know all its secrets and I know all its tales: tall, short, and grisly. I know who’s stained what pillow, and I know ghost stories that would make your short hairs curdle up like milk. Ask an honest question, and ye shall receive an honest answer.

“And never mind the shrew!” he shouted at Mary Ann.

“Up your skinny old raisin anus with a mint toothpick,” she shouted back.

Marshall gave her the finger.

“Well, I guess I want to know about the hat maker,” said Franklin. “More specifically, I guess I want to know about the mannequin in his window. I guess I want to know how I can buy her.”

Mrs. McGwirt turned the television up. Marshall slapped his knee and cackled maniacally. He tossed his hair back and tied it into a knotted ponytail behind his head.

“Now that IS a good story,” said Marshall. “I guess you ran into Thierryault out there on the street, eh?”

“He threw me out of his store,” said Franklin.

“He would do that,” said Marshall. “Probably thought you were another collector or fetishist. Or gawker from the big city. Tried to buy it off him, huh?”

“Just in love,” said Franklin.

“Who isn’t?” said Marshall. “That girl, she was something else.”

“Theirryault’s a creep,” said Mary Ann. “Always was. And not just a creep. A cheap-skate. And his hats are all out of style.”

“Now Mary Ann,” said Marshall, “Let’s be honest. If we was to go upstairs and look in your closet, we’d find a Thierryault bonnet or two sitting up there right now.”

“Puh,” said Mary Ann, “He’s still a creep.”

“Just a different breed of fish, maybe,” said Marshall. “Maybe worse. The truth is: no one knows for sure what sort of man he is. He has no friends, and no enemies. That girl in the window of Mr. Theirryault’s haberdashery is his one and only daughter. She was a bit different in person, mind you.”

“I’d like to see that,” said Franklin.

“Well, tough shit,” said Mary Ann. “You never will. Because she’s dead.”

“I was getting to that,” said Marshall. “I’m telling the story here, by the way. You have no flair for drama. No soul for mystery or pathos.”

“Go on then,” said Mary Ann. “Tell it. Let’s see how much you remember and how much you mangle.”

“Storytellers believe in a higher truth,” said Marshall. “Isn’t that right, writer-fella?”

“The actual truth is often boring and uninspired,” admitted Franklin.

“Well, you are in luck,” said Marshall. “This story is neither, and happens to be ACTUALLY true just the same.”

He rocked back in his chair and tented his fingers. He took a long sip out of Franklin’s beer, and rubbed his eyebrows. He gave Franklin a threatening look and then coughed up a wad of something vile into his fist, picked something deep and spongy out of his nose, and wiped both body-prizes onto his jeans.

“The only person who could really tell you about Mr. Thierryault was his lovely wife Athena. But she’s dead, too. She died during childbirth, believe it or not. It still happens once in awhile. Especially when your baby has a facial tumor twice the size of its head.

“That little girl ripped her apart, and no kidding. Goodbye, Athena. Hello, little girl. He named her Adelaide, and I can’t say whose idea that was, but I like to think he was bending to his dead wife’s last demands. Her lips, puffed and swollen with the horrors of a doomed pregnancy, uttered the words ‘Adelaide’ right before she expired for good, her head lolling to the side like a rabid milk cow.

“Of course, that’s all pure speculation. Maybe he just liked the name. A dead wife is a good reason to start making some changes, acting out your own little whims.”

Marshall gave a look askance at his own gloomy bride. She wasn’t paying attention.

“Either way, there’s old Thierryault, a single father with a daughter who would die if she fell asleep on her back. The damn tumor would crush her, you see. Choke her to death like a malignant little twin. It was heartbreaking, when they first showed that little girl in the newspapers. They’ll have to carry her around in a wheelbarrow, I said. No turtlenecks for her. She’ll have to tie rocks in her hair to keep her balance once she’s old enough to walk. This girl was a monster, my friend. But that’s not what Thierryault saw. He saw his pretty little wife, and his pretty little daughter, and he loved her dearly.

Well, it turns out that Thierryault was a better father than most people would have expected. He made sure she got the care she needed, and he sold a metric ton of hats to pay for the best doctors to make sure she would live. People started buying his tophats and feathers out of pity for him, really, but then a funny thing happened. People around here started to develop a taste for his brand of cranial expression. It started to be somehow criminal to walk around these streets without some sort of headwear, and folks all around started to take notice.

“His business flourished and his daughter did, too. She got nearly healthy, even though the tumor grew up alongside her. She wore her head up high, and more often than not, one of Mr. Thierryault’s bonnets was right up there on top of the whole mess. The man was an artist with a real knack for misdirection, you see, which is the primary purpose of a hat. A hat is supposed to…whoosh…take your face away. Old women who wanted to call attention to themselves as objects of beauty without the beauty to back it up with were snatching his hats off the shelf left and right. Both claws. Left and right! He could turn even the most humble straw into something that carved your face into a mystery, into a forgettable adjunct, into the shadowy period underneath the slash of his exclamatory skull-topping masterpiece. He had a gift, and the irony was, if it weren’t for his daughter, his dead wife, and this town’s initial pity, his talent might have gone unnoticed forever.

“But it didn’t. Boy, didn’t it. You may not believe me, kid, but forty years ago, Mr. Michelle Thierryault was a pretty damn big celebrity around here. Maybe the biggest celebrity Shrew’s Gap has ever seen. And that’s even counting Mary Ann over there, who used to draw in whole football teams when the moon was right.”

“Football leagues,” corrected Mary Ann. Evidently she was listening after all.

“Every day, you could see Thierryault and his daughter selling hats at their haberdashery to crowds of out-of-towners. As Adelaide grew older, she learned how to work the line of people who stretched out into the street from Thierryault’s shop – modeling his newest fashions, joking with them, letting them get a good eyeful of the rotten mass that grew out of her forehead and down her face like a snail oozing out of its shell. Her spine grew strong as hell. It had to be, to carry the weight of her freakishness, and the literal weight of the tonsil on her face. She grew witty. She grew wise. She grew the best pair of tits I’ve ever seen, and the cutest little bottom to match. Why, many a day you would see her from behind and you’d fantasize, fantasize all to hell. But then she would turn around, and you would question your morals. But then, if you were me, you would question your morals again. Why shouldn’t she be a conquest? Why couldn’t she be a good night’s work of it? And yet, the tongues of propriety! They would carve you into meatballs, my friend! She was our collective burden, our little town symbol, and she was therefore sacrosanct. Hideous, perversely nubile, untouchable, regal, and charismatic in a way that had to be brand new to a world newly awakening from the prejudices of deterministic folly.”

“You are a sick old man, Marshall McGwirt,” said Mary Ann.

“Perhaps,” said Marshall. “And yet I speak true. Would we be having this conversation at all if I did not?”

Mary Ann was silent.

“At any rate,” continued Marshall, “Theirryault’s haberdashery continued to flourish, and Adelaide continued to bloom like a snapdragon or pokeweed. His hats were seen on the heads of royalty, and he began to enter a phase of pure artistic expression that got him noticed in bohemian circles. His hats became objects of sheer abstraction – unbounded by reason, physics, maudlin concessions to practicality, or the antiquated theories of the stodgy conservative hat Brahmins. He made enemies. He made exegetes. He forced beauty upwards above the neckline, above the face even, to settle, piled like a halo, on the heads of his increasingly high-profile clientele. The lines disappeared and Thierryault began to do his business by appointment only, going so far as to spend months working for a single client on a single hat to be unveiled at public occasions that some speculated were merely contrived to showcase his genius. Adelaide often served as the gateway to these engagements, and it became customary for requests to be channeled through her. She would sift though the various correspondences from around the globe and then submit ideas to her beloved Papa at her own discretion.

“To give you an example, there is the case of Madame D’xouah and the Six-Tiered Fedora. Madame D’xouah was the young bride of the Big City’s foremost renal specialist; a veritable kidney magician. Twenty years younger than her husband, she was expected to be a fashionable piece of elbow vinaigrette for the medical wizard and serve as the visual manifestation of his inner intellectual beauty. She fought and twisted under this demeaning position, but was ultimately powerless, less she court divorce and all of its attendant miseries. However, young Madam D’xouah was not above simple subversion. You must know all about that, as a moody little artist. Power can’t plug up every crack.

“You need a whole team of slave boys for that,” agreed Mary Ann.

“At any rate,” said Marshall, “it came to pass that a hospital was being dedicated to Dr. D’xouah for his remarkable achievements in the treatment of chronic septic myalgia. His wife was expected to appear at her husband’s side as radiant and deferential as she could possibly be. She requested a Thierryault hat from her husband, who readily accepted her demand. She sought out the haberdasher through her aristocratic connections and made her case. It was just the sort of fashion challenge that Thierryault and his little girl loved. It did not take much prompting on behalf of Adelaide to get her father to accept the commission, and father and daughter set to work, combining their remarkable and unique sensitivities. The hat must be loud enough to catch the ears of the attentive, yet quietly demure – floating underneath the radar of her honored mate.

“On the day of the gala, Thierryault presented his Six-Tiered Fedora for Madam D’xouah’s inspection. He called it the Ajuvia. The hat was constructed of six slanted layers of polished yellow photo sensitive latex and piled up high like a stack of ribbon-fried crepes. Water tumbled down each brim and cycled back up with the aid of a small motor to drizzle back out of the top like a fountain. The hat glowed with an inner light halfway between yellow and orange, and each of the hatbands was made from white porcelain. The thing looked heavy, but it was so well crafted that it was light and easy to wear. To the shrewd observer, it made its point with a canny visual pun: this was a woman whose husband’s passions placed her below his beloved urinal tract.

“The hat was such a success that Madam D’xouah was snatched up by a wealthy young Colonel and became Madam Colonel Marjoram within the year. Dr. Dxouah nearly challenged Thierryault to a duel, but his friends convinced him that he was better served in letting the embarrassing matter drop altogether, and Dr. Dxouah reluctantly capitulated to these cooler heads.

“So you see, Thierryault was a master of his craft, a specialist of the highest caliber, a real individuated big-shit. We all expected him to leave the Gap and move his operation to the Big City, but he kept his shop right where it is today and made his clientele come to him. Real smart. But then the unexpected happened. His daughter fell in love, you see. And she fell hard. All the way to the bottom, I guess.

“The man in question left town thinking he was cursed, but the truth of the matter is that he didn’t deserve such a fine woman as Adelaide Thierryault. And I know all about fine women. This jerk was a rug merchant who had been hired to install deep plush at the haberdashery, and he thought himself a fine rake and half. His name was Henry Relampago, and he had side burns all the way down his face that met under his chin like a helmet strap. He was soft spoken, tall, swarthy, and cruel. He had eyes like blue mugs of hot coffee – dark swirls resting in steamy crocked repose. He was polite to Adelaide when he did business, but she took this as something more. She had visions of Henry as a sensitive artisan like her father – someone who would see past her gruesome deformity into the intelligence beyond.

“If he had any sense, he could at least look down past her face at her beautiful, strong, blossoming body. But Henry wasn’t that sort of person at all.

“He was a brute. A monster for perfection. The carpet business demands a certain thrill for exact measurements and obsessive calculation, and there was nothing deep plush about Henry Relampago. Nothing brave, nothing romantic. He was holding out for a woman who complimented the high opinion of himself that years of unreflective mirror-gazing had given him. He couldn’t even look at Adelaide because her face embarrassed him. Adelaide took this as a sign of infatuated bashfulness and mounted a campaign of constant flirtation. Of course, this only made things worse.

“Henry tried to avoid her as much as possible, but she sought him out whenever she could. Her father was not an issue. He thought his daughter was basically sexless, and had ignored her burgeoning humanity with typical patriarchal cluelessness. As other Dad’s lamented the affairs and foolishness of their hormone-fueled fillies, Thierryaulot was convinced he had a readymade companion for life, and made no attempts to lock her up or control her appearance and behaviors. He considered himself lucky that he had such an ugly daughter. In fact, he cheered Adelaide on as she modeled the most seductive and revealing outfits she could find for the horrified Relampago. She would sidle up to the grunting, tacking carpet-layer wearing basically nothing, a popsicle jutting out from underneath the mountain of distended purple flesh that was her face, and her father would cheer her on, proud to have such a sleek, useful platonic concubine. We would see Henry in here often, pale, sweating, sick to his stomach, nursing a vodka. The man was an idiot.

“What happened next is a subject of much local debate and speculation. We all saw it happen, but nobody still knows for sure. Afterwards, Thierryault wanted to hang old Henry Relampago from the nearest chestnut, but there were too many witnesses – too many eyes that sadly had to tell the truth to one another.

“It was a hot summer day. The sun was fierce. Henry was here at the bar, drinking up a storm, when young Adelaide came in wearing a checkered tablecloth for a bra, cut off shorts, and nothing else. She sidled up to him and put her arms around him sideways, but he just shot back his drink and pushed her away coldly. She was hurt. Here they were all alone out of the house and he was not willing to take her up on her limitless sexual promise. She began yelling and he began yelling back. I kicked them both out and they carried on in the street. People came out of their shops and homes to see what was going on with the haberdasher’s daughter and the new guy in town. She called him a dickless cold fish, and he spat right in her eye. She started crying, and he began walking to the room he had rented above the tannery. That’s when she pulled a knife hidden in her shorts and ran at him. Somebody yelled for him to look out, and Henry whirled. He punched her in the face, punched her hard, punched her right in the tumor. He buried his fist in her oozing face with a sickening splash, and she fell down in the dirt of the street, thick brown pus bleeding from every orifice.

“Henry just stood there, shocked. She reached out her hand to him and the knife fell out of it. He looked at all of us gathered there and wildly demanded that we defend him as she lay dying.

“She had a knife!” he shouted. “You all saw it.”

She did have a knife. There was no question. But by the time we got her to the hospital, she was already dead. And Henry Relampago was long gone. Laying carpet in hell, hopefully. If there is justice, he will be reincarnated as the vomit-prone Berber of a nursery school or a nursing home.”

Marshall leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, his fingers laced together behind his head.

“Thierryault was stunned. Shocked. Destroyed. Ruined. He confiscated the body from the constable and took it home, weeping, carrying her empty form slung over his sunken shoulders. This was against all rules and regulations, but what could we do? The whole town felt responsible for her death. Somebody should have intervened. Somebody should have broken the cruel facts of life to Adelaide gently, before she discovered them the hard way. I think maybe we wanted her to explode. Maybe we all wanted to see Rempalago get stabbed. It should have been him dead in the dirt. Adelaide could have pleaded insanity, and no jury in the world would have convicted her. It was a horror. A terror. A disgrace this town will never recover from.

“Several months later, Theirryault buried his daughter, and then he put that mannequin up in his window. He had paid a surgeon most of his savings to remove the tumor from her face post-mortem so he could see what she would have looked like, and then he paid a plastics expert the rest of his savings to make the life-size sculpture. He stopped making custom hats, and he stopped doing most everything else, too. You can see him sometimes late at night, sitting in his own window, gazing at the reproduction of his daughter, the flames of his candles illuminating the tears on his cheeks. He’ll die soon, you know. He looks sicker everyday.”

Marshall grinned.

“And you want to buy her, you silly ass,” he said. “Thierryault will be buried with that doll, mark my words. It’s a wonder you made it out of that store with your skin.”

“I guess SO,” said Franklin, staring at his shoes.

“Rain’s letting up,” said Mary Ann. “It’s gonna get cold. You’ll want a room with a furnace.”

“All I want is a room facing the street,” said Franklin. “A room with a window.”

Marshall and Mary Ann looked at each other.

“And it’s not her face,” said Franklin. “It’s something else. I couldn’t tell you what. Something sharp.”

“It’s certainly not her hat,” said Marshall McGwirt quietly.