The Makings of a Fairy Tale

             There was a boy who lived with his mother in Boston. They lived in an old narrow

brick house that looked a lot like every other house that lined the block. He liked it

pretty well.

              The boy himself was a brown-haired bookish sort, legs skinny and straight as fence

posts, crooked teeth, and a tendency to repeat and repeat big words. Ecclesiastical

was a favorite when he was smaller. Lately, it’d been furtive and poltergeist.

              “Careful where you put your keys,” he warned his mother. “I think we’ve

got a poltergeist. And they’re furtive, you know. Poltergeists are very furtive.”

              “Please,” his mother would say, at last. “Give a mind a rest.”

              The boy liked to write his words almost as much as he liked to speak

them.  He exaggerated the vertical strokes and cursive curls of his letters so that

his inky notebooks resembled, or so he thought, the ancient script of legends and

gospels. To complete the effect, he stained his pages with tea—dipped them in a

simmering pot, dried them, and delighted in the paper’s browning and crinkling.

But, finally, his mother came into the kitchen to find puddles on the floor and soggy

pages spread out on the countertop. The mother grounded the boy from playing in

the kitchen. And no library for a week!

             The boy went to the library anyhow. He told his mother he was staying after

school for a group science project. His mother believed him—why wouldn’t she?

When the boy returned to their old brick house at a telling 5:15 pm—exactly

fifteen minutes after the library closed, which was located exactly fifteen minutes

away—the mother asked how the science project was going. The boy said it was

fine. He said they were studying the solar system, because it sounded like a science

project-y thing to study. His fifth grade class did the solar system last fall.

              The mother turned to her son and said, “Huh. My favorite planet was

always Neptune. It’s not the biggest, or the furthest away, it doesn’t have rings,

and it’s not the hottest or the coldest or the prettiest. It’s nobody’s favorite but

mine.”

              “Huh,” the boy said. His backpack, heavy with books, thudded to the floor.

              “I told that to your father once,” the mother said. “He said his favorite was

Earth, because it was his home.”

              She paused, and then added, “It seemed like he got the right answer

somehow.”

              The father comes from a wealthy family. On dreary days, the son called himself an

heir. But the money just meant that the father had to work only once in a great

while, which suited him just fine. At heart, the father was a wanderer. A nomad, he

liked to call himself. He took trips of hitchhiking and serendipity—those were his

words—because that was the way to connect most deeply with people all over the

world, all kinds.

              One night the boy had a lovely dream, but it skittered away when he opened his

eyes. His mother was sitting beside him on the bed.  It was very early in the

morning. The light that filled the room was malleable and liquid, an infantile light

not ready to be sharpened into day.

              It took a moment for the boy to realize the solidity of his mother’s body,

her breaths moving the mattress just so. When he did, it shocked him like a bee

sting. He sat up with a start. He gasped, “What’s wrong?”

              “Nothing’s wrong,” his mother whispered. She reached over and smoothed

a lock of the boy’s hair away from his face. Warm fingers. “Everything’s perfect.”

              “Good,” the boy said. He flopped back to his pillow and closed his eyes. He

felt the mother staring. His skin bristled.

              “I’d like you to join me. On an adventure.”

              The mother’s voice sounded almost childish. ‘Adventure’ was a word his

father would use. In his mother’s mouth, it was false, a verbal sort of dress up.

              The mother leaned over and whispered into her son’s ear. The drowsy boy

understood that the two of them were leaving the old brick house in Boston. But he

didn’t catch where they were going, and he was afraid to ask.

              The son asked, “And Dad? What’ll happen when he comes back?”

              His mother smiled strangely, lips curved up like tiny hooks.

              “When he comes back, we won’t be here. It’ll surprise him, sure, but it’s

nothing he can complain about, can he? Can he?”

              Once, years ago, the father took his son with him on an adventure. The boy was

small then, so it was only a three-week trip. But it was a grand tour.

              On the road, his father turned poetic: He said he wanted his son to be in beautiful

places so a bit of the beauty would bleed out of them and into him. It was his

birthright to be made of beautiful things, his father told him as he fitted a

miniature backpack on the boy’s shoulders. Real things. In the Grand Tetons,

water ran clear as a song. Heaps of red clay covered graves in a Wyoming

reservation cemetery. They tiptoed up to the graves, sniffed the shockingly bright

flowers, and toyed with the trinkets set before the crosses—icons, prayer cards,

rag dolls, plastic toys. They imagined stories about the buried people.

              Headed back towards home, they watched a meteor shower from the top of a sand

dune in southwest Michigan. The father told his son that he now had a thousand

wishes in the bank for having seen so many falling stars at once, and the boy

believed him.

              “A thousand wishes?” the son asked. He realized he might test a new word:

“We can make a myriad wishes?”

              “Or one really big wish,” his father said.

              They were lying on their backs, their heads resting on crumpled-up

jackets, chins tilted towards the sky, not looking at each other. Their arms touched.

The boy made like he didn’t notice.

              “A myriad of wishes on the stars come together and make one super-

wish?”

              “That’s right.”

              “Guaranteed to come true.”

              “It’s a sure thing.”

              The boy peeked at his father’s form, now a solid black shadow.

              “What are you going to wish for?”

              “If I told you, it wouldn’t come true.”

             Back in Boston, it was never dark enough to see stars. But the boy knew they were

there. It was a powerful secret, like knowing there’s a genie in a tarnished oil lamp;

like knowing there’s a truth-telling spirit in a mirror. On field trips to the

planetarium, the boy would eye his classmates with their hinged-back heads and

slack jaws, and he felt an electric certainty of having seen something more

beautiful than any of them had ever known. While the others measured their

constellations with a screen of plaster pockmarked by tiny lights, the boy had faced

the galaxy straight on. He’d felt the heat of a thousand meteors.  He’d seen

Mars—his father had pointed it out to him, the planet as red as a drop of blood.

            The mother and the boy knew he’d keep coming back, because he kept coming

back. Complete with huge sloppy kisses and traveling stink that forced his son to

inhale through his mouth. When he kissed the mother hello, he’d often cry himself,

and she too, of course, and for days they couldn’t stop touching each other—always

at least a finger interlaced with a finger at the dinner table. He cooked all the meals

when he was home—strange sizzling dishes, expensively spiced vegetables. He

used recipes from all over the world, and while they ate, he talked about the people

he ate with when he’d first tasted each dish. So many people! The boy imagined

that his father just kept running into the same old man, who put on elaborate

disguises and accents, a false mustache or a bulky shawl, all to fool his father into

thinking he’d met everybody in the world; an elaborate joke.

            The father always—in a few weeks, in a few months—he always left again. He left

again, always, and after he left again, he sent letters, as usual, but the mother and

the boy never knew where to send their own letters, so they didn’t write any.

            The mother worked at a bank. She had responsibilities; people reported to her.

She couldn’t just pick up and leave to go ‘traipsing,’ as she put it, and besides she

didn’t want to. That’s what she said, but the boy suspected that the father didn’t

ask her to join him. When the boy returned from his three-week

adventure—dropped off, really, giving him the distinct sense that he’d been

humored—his mother scrubbed dishes and loudly ran the tap while the boy tried

to find the right words to describe the places he’d been.

              “I saw a myriad of beautiful things,” he said. “Everywhere! I saw a myriad

of lucid things.”

              His mother cried, but already the young boy was tired of seeing his mother

cry.

             The old brick house in Boston sold quickly to a family with three toothy children

and parents who didn’t want to commute to their eminently normal publishing

jobs. The family was happy with the house, and happy with the furniture included

in the sale.

              Every day after school, the boy and the mother tied bandanas around their hair,

pulled on old shirts, and went through drawers and cupboards. They made piles of

things to keep, things to give away, and things that were the father’s, which the

mother intended to give to his sister until he returned. His sister had just been

widowed and had space that, it seemed, she desperately wanted to fill. She thought

she was storing her brother’s things because the family was redecorating the old

brick house. She didn’t ask questions. She seemed to have problems of her own.

            Among the things delivered to her house were the father’s books—ragged, the

pages thin from the oils of his fingers. Also, there was an orange and red blanket

from Central America; several knit scarves and a set of mittens an old woman in

Oklahoma made for him; a pair of boots so worn through they were useless for

anything but hiking to the corner store; and his notebooks, which, the son noticed

with joy, were as painstakingly inked-over as the boy’s own.  He stole one of his

father’s notebooks, and also one of his bright socks that had no match.

              The boy read his father’s notebook: “I’m more alive during night than day,

when, unfortunately, fewer people are around to testify to it,” it said. “I do things

slow: walking, speaking, dancing, kissing, mourning.”

              What did it mean? There were no dates anywhere.

              Quite a bit of household stuff was given away or sold. We don’t need much, after

all, the mother repeated. Too much stuff crowds out the good things in life.

Sometimes the mother cried, and the boy didn’t know what to say. Sometimes the

mother imagined out loud what would happen: she imagined the father clomping

up the steps of his house to find the new family there instead of his wife and son.

She imagined that throat-closing moment of shock. Boy, is he in for a taste of his

own, she said.

             She wanted to linger as a ghost, the son could tell, for that one moment. She

wanted to see his muscles going slack with Horror. His face breaking with Sorrow.

His guilty True Love for her, them both. That’s what she wanted.

              “Help me stay awake. Help me stay. Stay, help awake me.” 

               Then the father came back.

               It was March, and still snowing. The boy met him at the door; he just happened to

be in the bathroom when he heard the front lock turn. They hugged. The son felt

his sleepy heat leave his own body for his father’s.

              We’re leaving you, too, the boy almost said. The words skipped at his lips. We’re

leaving for something else. He opened his mouth, he would tell him the truth, but

then the father put his finger to his lips in honor of their quiet. The boy swallowed;

the words shook in his belly.

             Where’s your mother? the father mouthed.

             Sleeping.

             And he pointed. The mother had fallen asleep on the couch that night. She was

limp and blanketed, her head angled strangely among the cushions. They could

hear her inhales.

            The young boy watched his father heave out of a backpack. He watched him pull

wool mittens off his hands and drop them to puddle on the floor. He pulled out of

his coat, he plucked his hat off his head. He loosened his shoelaces and toed the

boots off his feet. He saw his thick and mismatched socks, hand knit by someone

somewhere. The father padded across the room and knelt before the mother’s

sleeping body, as if he were before an altar or a coffin. His palm moved slowly over

the mother’s face, never touching it, but following its curve and angle, the ghost of

a caress. And then he took his hand back and he watched her dreams. The son

knew that he saw not only his dreaming mother, but her actual dreams. He sensed

his father’s stare looking straight through his mother’s thin eyelids. The young boy

wondered what he saw. He wondered if his father saw nightmares, or beautiful

things, or himself. He wondered if his mother’s dreams surprised him. He

wondered if his mother was waiting for him, there.

            They did love each other.

            In the morning he kissed his wife hello, and she cried, of course. He took a hot

shower; she trimmed his brown beard by the kitchen sink. She swept up her long

hair with a glittery clip and the boy caught his mother pinching a blush into her

pale cheeks when his father left the room to make a phone call.

          The father mostly spent his time experimenting in the kitchen, sending his son to

the grocery store for ingredients, and he told so many stories. The father didn’t

notice the boxes and bags lining the rooms. We’re leaving, the boy thought, you,

and you won’t know how to find us.

            The father called the closets messy, when really they were half-sorted.

            “Somebody’s let this slide,” he said when he went to retrieve a memento box he

kept in the back closet. He stepped between trashbags full of clothes that were set

to disappear soon. “Is this your job?” he asked his son. “To keep it tidy in here?”

            “No.”

            “Even though nobody sees the closet except us doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have

some self-respect, you know. The hidden places matter too.”

            “We’re leaving,” the boy said. “Mom and I are absconding, and we’re never going

to see this motherfucking closet again.”

             The father didn’t often raise his voice to his son, but hearing the young boy use a

curse word so casually repelled him. He pushed close to the boy’s face and with a

pointed index finger, he admonished him harshly with the usual paternalisms:

Don’t let me hear that ugly word again. Only stupid people resort to words like

that—stupid people. 

              Shortly later, they met around the dinner table. The son listened to tales about the

prettiest weathered churches in Peru. And swimming in a place in Lake Michigan

where his father saw the Independence Day firecracker celebrations of a dozen

small towns all at once, sparks exploding up and down the curving shoreline of the

state. Oh!—And of eating cactus (sticky and bright green, he said) on the Mexico

border with a family that helped him with his Spanish. He loved the old man in that

family best and called him his Mexican Grandfather. He had so many stories.

              He stayed twelve days. Towards the end of his time at the old brick house in

Boston, while the father was packing up his things again, the boy’s mother asked

her husband why he hated Boston. This is where we grew up, she said. All our

friends are here. The father shook his head and said nothing.

              “Aren’t you going to answer me? Or even when you are here, am I going to

have to deal with this sick silence?”

              “You already know what I’d say.”

              “Tell me anyway.”

              “I’d say that I’m not going to say no to the beauty all over the world for

Boston.”

              “You talk like there’s nothing beautiful here.”

              “You want me to say that you’re what’s beautiful here, don’t you?”

              “Your son,” the mother said, sweeping his arm towards the young boy,

who was sitting cross-legged on the couch and pretending to read. “Your son’s

here.”

              “And I love him too.”

           On a hot day, early in the summer, the mother and the son left the old narrow

brick house in Boston forever. The boy didn’t tell anyone from school that he

wouldn’t be back in September. He didn’t know who to tell. He hummed on the

train ride across the city. His mother’s face had no color.

            Much later, miles away, in a new and undoubtedly beautiful place, the young boy

wrote a fairy tale. It was about an heir who lived near the salt ocean. The ocean

held a thousand souls, the bodies of drowned men and women with their one

wish—to breathe—stuck forever inside their sealed throats. The wishes colored the

ocean like dye, turning it a beautiful shade of blue no one had ever before seen.

            The heir lived in a brick castle near the ocean, and all day he’d stare out the turret

window, watching the waves, until his own eyes turned as blue as the water full of

wishes. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough. One day, the heir abandoned his rich

kingdom to live a more beautiful life. Trees, rivers, bare feet, soil. Real things, not

wishes. It was a matter of destiny. What isn’t a mater of destiny, come to think of

it? The heir abandoned his fortune and was now a wandering warrior. A peripatetic

prince. A desolate peripatetic.

              The boy wrote his fairy tale in beautiful black ink, long lines and full,

swooping capital letters, and some pictures too, of the beautiful places that now

surrounded him, and himself sitting in them. He took his mother’s matches and

burned the edges a bit, like a true gospel, but this time his mother did not come

into the kitchen and stop him. The boy accidentally burned his entire story. He

cried over the smoky black flakes that had been his tale, but not without a sense of

the pretty melancholia of it all.

Anna Clark’s fiction and journalism have been honored by 13 national and regional awards, including three Hopwood awards at the University of Michigan and Best News Feature from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. She maintains the literary and social justice website, ISAK and guest blog at WIMN's Voices. Her past and forthcoming publication credits include: Utne Reader, Women's eNews, Bitch Magazine; The Women's International Perspective, Clamor; Kitchen Sink; ColorLines; The Ann Arbor News; The Current; The Herald-Palladium; and What's Up Magazine, where she served as arts editor.  In January 2007, she received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She currently works with The Center for New Words, a literary nonprofit in Cambridge, MA.