Molly Peacock

Some quests begin before a person ever learns to walk. Q’s began at the foundling home, when he was still in diapers. They’d kept anything pointed from the Quonset hut where they housed the orphaned newbies, and later the house mothers forbade the children all but scissors with round edges, even table knives. “Mind, now stay in the queue,” they said, when his fingers reached for a safety pin or a paring knife or, once, one of the razors they kept (usually under lock and key) for the older boys. Q slipped back in line. Only the blunt was available to him, nothing to question, naught with an edge. Best pretend to be dull (though that was hard with a high IQ) and never query:Why hide the scissors? Why hide the razor? Why speak so sharply? Why no mums? No dads? At night in his bed, listening to the breathing of all the other boys in the long room, he also asked himself,Why me? When the house mothers changed shifts, there were always some unsupervised minutes, and that’s when the boys sprang into swashbuckling. Q loved leaping from bed to bed with an imaginary sword in hand.En garde! • At sixteen, with a razor cut on his chin from the new trial of shaving himself, Q stood at the doors of the Royal Flower Hall. He was quaking. This was the very first day of work in his life. He’d been supposed to be a shop assistant, a quotidian job like those of the other orphans who were all sent out to live as apprentices — to return only if found unsuitable. However, the Royal Flower Keeper had stepped in and demanded to know the name of the boy meant to be sent to the local florist, and now young Q was called to prep flowers for the Queen. “Can’t someone else do it?” he quailed as the Flower Keeper 
handed him a quilloned silver thorn knife. Q didn’t want to be found unsuitable. He quivered as thousands of roses arrived — he was supposed to separate their long, tangled stems, cut off the thorns, and queue them up straight on the tables for the arrangers. “But I’m new!” Q cried. He couldn’t quell his horror at the prospect of lifting a real blade to cut the thorns. “Look, dear, no quibbling. If you work here, you’re qualified,” the Flower Keeper said. Her knuckles bloomed out of the crooked stems of her hands. “Hold the knife with two fingers behind this little crossbar, that’s the quillon, and snip under the thorn.” She did it with elegant speed. One thorn gone. “It’s like swordsmanship,” the Flower Keeper joked, wielding her knife, fencing in miniature mime. In Q’s head rang the orders of the house mothers, “ don’t touch! ” But in his fingers lay his imaginary weapon come alive. “No time to be quiescent,” she said. “Equipoise is all.” Don’t quit now, Q said to himself. If he quit, he’d have to slink back to the orphanage, a failed apprentice, instead of going home to his newly found haven, a cold-water flat with a coin-operated heater, all his own. There he’d store the new paring knife his paycheck would buy, the pointed scissors    ...    So Q quashed his fear and set to work. • He began to duel through the roses. “En garde!” he whispered, lunging toward his petaled quarry. Soon there were thorns everywhere (some a bit bloody), but he did not make any big mistakes. He wasn’t perfect, like the Flower Keeper, but he was catching on. Like quicksilver she flashed her knife, each stem quickening with the sharpest cut. Instinctively Q used the quartata maneuver, a quarter turn to the inside, protecting himself as he flicked each thorn into the quagmire of floral detritus on the floor. With each toss of the thorn he added to what appeared to the Flower Keeper to be his nascent gift. As the lorries loaded with rose baskets and vases and bowls roared off to the palace, he quietly pocketed a thorn. Then the first question he’d ever spoken aloud curlicued to his lips. And because he’d had to save up this query for sixteen years, he posed the essential one, previously mouthed only to himself at night in bed: Pourquoi? “Why,” said the Flower Keeper, “for the Equerry, of course. And he for the Queen. You know who she is.” “Just a flower of a figurehead,” Q quipped. The boy’s quick-witted, the Flower Keeper thought, and said, “We’ll require you tomorrow.” And for quadruple tomorrows after that and after that, until Q began to accumulate expertise. Know-how defines a person, especially someone who’s grown up watching his P s and Q s. He no longer 
quavered, quadrillions of roses now quasi-ordinary, royal waste a quiddity. I’m not a quitter, he’d said to himself, and each night went back to his cold-water flat where he had enshrined that little thorn in a matchbox. • Well, he didn’t live in a cold-water flat now. Now he lived in a sunlit house with a stash of razors in the marble bathroom and, in the drawers of his magnificent kitchen, a motherlode of paring knives, bread knives, steak knives, bird’s beak parers, boning knives, cheese knives, chef’s, clam, and carving knives, filleters, and mincers. Now Q was Senior Keeper of the Royal Flower Hall, walking across a stage toward the Queen herself. He had kept the talisman thorn from his very first day with the roses. Just that afternoon he had taken it out and dropped it in the pocket of his tuxedo, anticipating touching it for luck before he received his award from Her Majesty. But when the Queen posed her standard question, “Have you come a long way?” Q was quite bewildered as to how to answer. Sometimes a simple question cuts into an aromatic world of mysteries. But we must learn to answer, to cut. Q, his distinguished silver hair perfectly trimmed, his neck properly shaved, looked down at the curls on the Queen’s forehead and remembered his first unspoken word,Why. A quixotic word, an essential thorn. It had pricked him awake, into manhood. Arrangements of roses passed through his mind — how those magnificats of magentas quenched his imagination. How the choral crooning of pale pinks calmed his qualms. Among roses he had reached his quintessence. Yet, is it a large enough life, to arrange roses for a Queen? When the whole world out there hurtled toward famine and war? He hadn’t intended to stay, to make a future in flowers, taking people’s breath away with something so spectacularly unnecessary as his rose floats. He had been a thorn in someone’s side, spectacularly unnecessary himself. He’d been sent out into the world alone, blunted by the unknown facts of his identity — his search for his parents rewarded only by locked doors, locked cabinets, and, later, graveyards. Patiently Her Majesty waited for his answer. In physical distance he had come a short way, but he’d swashbuckled miles to reach the end of his quest. “Only from Kew Gardens, Your Highness,” Q answered simply at last. Then she put into his palm the royal thank-you, in a quilted sleeve: a silver rose wreath made from an ancient mold that gave it stylized petals, prickly leaves, and, cut in at the bottom of the circle, a thorn. “Q from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka

As P strolled the path around the pond, he sniffed the humid air. His kimono brushed the parched ground. The metals of the earth rose up in traces of dust and hints of lightning: a waft of petrichor, the smell before the rain. Beyond the pale hills of his peaceful land, scores of horse soldiers prepared their armor. Soon the soldiers would sweep across the plains, and the dry politics of princely maneuverings would be as rice paper soaked with blood. Instead of petty policies — immensity. Peaceful farmers would be impaled, paltry officials imprisoned — twisted, screaming, then praying. There on the dusty path the young poet P was just perceiving the beforeness of it all, the pre-. From his masters he had learned that immensity makes the small crucial. A little poem before a big war becomes a necessity. And like a small poem on a long scroll, a lily pad appeared on the pond. P stopped to peer. He puzzled through its pattern of green inside green on water. A poem began to perfuse. It was inside P, but it was also on the lily pad. At...On...    At first only prepositions came to him. He stared into the water, seeing the silvery clouds reflected. Then he leaned at an extreme angle and noticed the pattern of his gown wavering in the reeds. A pinpoint of a poem stabbed him, like the sharp scent of earth before the rain. Petrichor:before, before. • Then drops pelted the pond, pipped at the pond, plunged toward it, plummeted into it, driving P to take refuge beneath the deep tiled eaves of his house. Inside the sliding paper doors were a desk and a futon. On the desk lay a brush. On the futon lay a lover in uneasy sleep on petal-printed silk. He chose the desk. He lifted the brush while looking down at the restive slumberer. In a mere matter of stopped time he had his poem, written from the very tissues of an arm and hand that could plunge a sword. Silver soldiers mass on far horizons, but here, silk pools on the bed. The rain rained; moisture curled the edges of the paper. Seventeen syllables, an epic of energy, made him drowsy and hungry. His lover still asleep, he rose, ate leftover peaches poached in soy sauce and ginger, and, with the rain a drizzle, thought again of his poem. How could he have loved it in the instant after he wrote it, but now be so unsure? He sat at his desk again. Another one? This time he drafted: Poppy? Penis up. Prow into periwinkle. Peony behind. After he calligraphed the puzzle of passion across the page, he woke the one in the pond of pink silk, and they proved it on the futon. He heard the pluvial patter on the eaves, while they angled and slipped, perspiring on silk. The stamping and snorting of the horses sweating in their armor was far too far away to be sensed by P, but he heard. He felt the pond muddied and the roof cracked and the poems scattered. How far was he now from this picture in his mind? He worked to make his pleasure stay, pitiable and small against the portents rising, for P was afraid this afternoon would never be remembered after the bloody conquering. But later the barbarians would bivouac in this house, the pond saved for drinking water, the path roughened by horses, and the 
reverse of P’s scroll used for another man’s military diary, his afternoon’s foreboding and pleasure a preparation for the future, and in the future, a stay against another’s view of the past. “P from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka

Why waste away in a box when you could be a nurse tree? That’s what they call dead logs: mushroomeries of the woods. Your living room’s a wood of couches, books, and chairs. You’re dead not at all, but could you be preparing for things to grow inside the chest of the log you plan to become: cherished compost heap where heat turns the brown mess of feelings, sorry, that’s peelings, into comp-o- sition? For we who love our hands in dirt, a leaf skirt de composing seems an ideal station between this life and next: I visit your room as on a forest walk. Passing a fallen log — is that you? — I see a scarlet fungus cap pop up from friable bark.

NO was a violin, NOT a viola, and NEVER a cello. They were noble instruments, but highly nonconformist. Prickly in personality, if sexy. Wayward. Always went in their own direction. Made odd choices. Loved the difficult. Naysayed the popular. Collectively unified in a single reaction to the mainstream: negative. When they first chanced to come together, they doubted they would ever meld. But the minute they began to make music, they discovered a numinous core to their triangle. They couldn’t see this core, smell it, or touch it—and neither could their slender audience (thirty people on folding chairs in a church). But all felt it was a natural union of sound, nimble and sublime. That night they became the Negativo Trio. Retiring to nestle in the velvet warmth of their cases, they whispered to each other, debriefing and musing in the first of many nightly pajama parties. This very first evening they discovered that what they wanted above all were two things. One was to play their music with the very nacre of its nature, and the other was fame. Night after night they played. Increased their bookings. Recorded. And were downloaded. They raised money to pay off the debt of their obscure choices. On stage they each shone with the patina of centuries: maple, spruce, and willow with an elegant varnish of gum arabic, honey, and the whites of eggs. But they weren’t famous, even though they played a nocturne as if every note were a black pearl. Yet NO, NOT and NEVER did everything everyone advised them to be famous: they networked, they nodded nicely to publicists, they flashed their Negativo news on social media. But the fact was, the trio wasn’t for everybody. “Do you think it’s our name?” NOT the Viola asked. “Would we be more famous as the Nightingale Trio?” “Nope,” said NEVER the Cello. “Negativo has our brio.” And NEVER was right. The three of them played with nerve. The knottier the piece, the better. They made their audiences reach. “We should be sexier,” NO the Violin said. “Naughtier. It’s our propensity for the minor key; we should lighten it up.” But when they played in the minor key, their audiences felt they had arrived at the navel of the universe. The instruments could never give up the minor. Would the Negativos ever learn what the people in the seats knew? The trio wasn’t famous because, well, they kind of unnerved people. You had to have nettle to take them on. Though they certainly wouldn’t have said no to notoriety, eventually they had to admit that they could not surrender their quirks. “We will never be famous,” NEVER said one night after they had nestled in their cases for their midnight debriefing. “I’m nauseous,” said NO extravagantly. “And neglected,” said NOT excessively. “Never,” said NEVER decisively. They would never fill the biggest halls. Or be the first name on the tips of tongues. And with the inverted logic of misplaced dreams, even though they had toured, had notched up review, and had triumphs and fans, and websites and bloggers, and a body of criticism devoted to them, they felt they had reached their nadir. The next morning they couldn’t seem to get up. They lay immobile, as if their velvet-lined cases were coffins. A netherworldly silence descended. The dust of despair drifted through the crack between the case tops and bottoms onto these living dead. Time dragged like a dirty hem. Naught into Nil. Desolation into Dormancy. Dormancy into . . . . . . Rest. Rest into Snoozing. Snoozing into Sleep. Sleep into Healing. The nostrum of sleep lasted until the pinkish light that heralds spring. A noisy nuthatch drilled for insects in a nearby tree. It was a forest sound, yodel-y and ebullient. It awoke the maple and spruce and willow of the Negativo’s constitutions. Their bodies couldn’t help responding to the vernal signal given when spring utters its only word:Nevertheless. If not fame, nevertheless music. “Numbskull nuthatch!” NEVER growled. “Ninny nuthatch,” NO yawned. “Bumptious bird,” NOT shifted, inadvertently jostling the snap to the dusty case. It sprang open. NO unclicked and climbed out, too. And NEVER heaved the lid. They played immediately of course, trying a violin piece by the underrated Nardini. Most thought him a lightweight, but the Negativos gave it their signature interpretation of naked necessity. “Oh it was NOTHING,” they began to say to one another as they did musical favors for themselves, producing scores of synchronicities and the occasional juicy nihilistic dissonance. They buoyed on their notes, as if a midnight Pacific of calm, rich, dark negatives were effused with luminescence. How relieved their listeners were to have them back. Again their audiences were made aware of the noses between their ears. That slight, brief piquancy in the nostrils was the smell of earthly harmony. It came from within the airy column that united the instruments, the nucleus of their refusal to suit. Such accord, though it is as rare as ease, seems like nothing. And so the Negativo Trio was known as a trio’s trio. Not famous, but known. Contrary to the vicissitudes of fame, ease is the path of the known, smooth as the satin of the instruments’ finish. To be recognized, yet not to suffer the disadvantages of fame, is a state so ideal it is the pinnacle of a career. NO, NOT and NEVER had at last woken up to that.

M loved the little house she shared with her mum, its magnolias and mansard roof. Inside, the smell of molasses and ginger had sunk into the timbers. Water mumbled from a hand pump, not a faucet tap. Music murmured, not from a radio, but from a soft piano. All was washed to softness—the sheets, the table linens. Even the gold rims on the old dishes were brushed down to a blur. M had been a surprise late baby, and her mother was almost the age of a grandmother. There were only the two of them—plus Maugie, their cat. M grew up thinking she understood her mum. But in fact she only understood her in daylight. The night world was where mum paced with her mountains of money worries. Down the hall M blissfully slept, and down in the basement Maugie moused, bringing her prizes up to the landing so M and Mum could find them first thing in the morning. And in the morning light Mum’s money misery vanished. She never spoke of it. But when Mum got sick, her worries magnified. Her illness brought the night world to daylight, though she still managed to hide it from her daughter. Mum could no longer hope for a miracle. Unbeknownst to M, just before Mum died, the ancient lady up and took misfortune into her own misguided hands. She sold their home to the neighbors who had always coveted it. Why didn’t she tell me? M plagued herself with questions all through the small funeral—she and her mum were the last of their line—and said to her distant cousins and her friends:She never ever mentioned money! Lawyers, real estate agents, and the neighbors of course were summoned. But the deal was done. Though M harbored murder in her heart for those greedy neighbors, she couldn’t get the house back. It’s all MY fault—I should have known, M moaned. It took a long time for her to settle these affairs. She’d taken a leave from her job at the museum, but eventually she had to go back to work. She and Maugie went to the only place M could afford to buy, a small but gleaming condominium. How could she transfer doilies and dusty velvet couches with broken legs into this glare? What was home any more? She had an iron bedstead, not a sleek futon. Of course Maugie kept finding her way back to the old homestead, and M had to keep quashing the mayhem in her heart as she retrieved the crafty little animal from that basement now full of the neighbor’s traps instead of mice. Up in the condo, M’s dreams began. Each night she dreamed of a ruined house. Mornings she woke to a smell like something left in an oven too long, a whiff of burnt molasses. Sometimes in a dream a window without a wall fell to the ground in mockery. Night after night in her sleep M shouldered mountains of blame. But then came morning. All she could do was embrace the day. With her long shapely arms, she put on her makeup, donned her mackintosh, and struck out for the museum, determined to muddle through. “It’s not my fault, I know,” she said to McM, the man who occupied the next desk. “I just miss my home.” He offered her a meatloaf sandwich. She said, “I never knew my mum, after all.” M’s dreams went on mortgaging her nights. When she startled awake, there was only Maugie at the foot of the iron bedstead squeaking an unsatisfactory plastic rodent, and a monstrous stink of burnt molasses and cat pee. M decided to bake. Using her mother’s measuring cups, she chased the aftermaths of the dreams away by spicing the smells. With cinnamon, with allspice, with vanilla and cardamom, she made muffins, mousse, and meringues in the open-concept kitchen. She used all her mother’s bowls, and all her mother’s spoons, to expunge the smells—and she almost did. Meanwhile, Maugie knew whenever workmen propped open a staircase door. The cat would slip into the hall, then escape down the stairwell through the service door. And M would get a call at the museum from the mingy mean-spirited neighbors. “And what am I going to do with Maugie?” M moaned to McM. “Your cat is lonely,” he said. “Does she have service potential?” Maugie would be tested. McM agreed to help. The minute McM walked into the combo of gleam and old wood and velvet and iron, the marvelous smells wrapped around him. “You’ve been baking,” he murmured approvingly, “in your farmhouse in the sky.” But M was busy wrangling Maugie into the carrier. Shortly the cat was deposited on the welcoming laps of ancient ladies in wheelchairs. That champion purr eased the ladies’ hearts. Maugie aced the test. Seeing the ladies, something in M eased, too. “My mother is a mystery I may never solve,” she said to McM on one of their lunchtime trips to the old ladies. Maugie now went willingly into her carrier. And so the bright weekday activities wore down the mountains of dreams. Blame became a molehill. M’s nightmares became so predictable they were almost friendly. Metamorphosis set in. McM lingered when he held M’s coat, and she lingered as he slipped it on. Their hands met when they put the cat carrier into the car. But these were the gestures of daylight. Thinking she was ready to brave the evening light, M had made the mistake of inviting McM for Saturday dinner. When the day came, she lay in bed with a fever, vacuuming was abandoned, her mahogany hair unwashed. Though the mushroom soup gurgled on the stove and the mousse slept in the fridge, the main course had never been started. She left a message canceling. McM arrived anyway with merlot and magnolias. He merged into M’s mess. It smelled of cough drops and kitty litter and dust and the fragrance of a woman in a slept-in nightgown. She slid beneath layers of consciousness like the layers of the blankets he straightened for her. And then balancing two hot toddies, fully clothed, he climbed into the bed. Maugie obliged him with a space. M was too weak to protest. She woke and drank and woke and slept. At midnight M sat up and slurped the mushroom soup held by McM. Magnificent . . . And then she sank. That night of course she dreamed of a house, but this house was merely old, not ruined. It was the homestead, magnolias laden, sheet music still in the piano bench. When she woke, she smelled McM, still fully clothed at her side, his glasses on the floor, batted about by Maugie. Nothing smelled burnt. Unlike her mother, M didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in muddling through. Slowly something had risen in her, like those moons you sometimes see in an afternoon sky, night inside the persistence of day. M sat up in bed, hugging her knees, looking at McM sprawled beside her.The house at last is inside me, she thought.I’ve finally moved.

D always felt, somehow or other, double. He was an upright line, but then again, he was a curve. When he looked in the mirror straight on, he saw the dapper features of the diplomat he was. But sideways, if he took off his horn-rimmed glasses, he imagined he could be taken for a rather distinguished Dame. He always saw both sides to everything. Would he ever find his dæmon—the divine spirit within? Did he really have one spirit? D seemed to be singing a duet with himself. Seeing both sides made him a champion procrastinator. D dilly-dallied. Waited till the last minute to decide anything. At every posting, he drove the staff crazy. But that was diplomacy. Now dusk dropped on the gated embassy grounds. D flipped on his desk lamp, and the pool of light shut out the trees, looming and dissolving. D drew the drapes, deaf to the delicate drone of insect wings. He returned to his desk, trying to distract himself from a strange little pain that had come to him all his life, like a recurrent dream. (Except, he had to confess, he never dreamed.) The pain was a distinct tiny stab in a spot, well, what would you call that? D called it down there. For years, since he was a little d, he considered all the options about this strange pain. It was nothing, really. He went long times between feeling it. Maybe it was too slight to worry about, but then again . . . At last D decided to see a doctor. As a matter of fact, he saw a number. “Tell me your dreams,” the first doctor said. “Don't bother to ask me, I never dream,” D said. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” the doctor quoted. D demanded a referral. “I've got a very specific pain,” he said to the next doctor. He pointed to, well, down there. “Your testicle,” the physician said. Which required a test. Several. And more. Finally the second doctor read all the results and announced, “Aha, a dermoid cyst.” What? Inside the cyst were hair follicles and an eye-type thing with eyelashes and a tooth. “Do you think I was a twin?” D wondered with a weird kind of delight as he examined the x-ray. Well, the doctor wouldn’t go that far. These dermoid cysts were usually removed in childhood. No reason, however, to remove it now. D wouldn’t dream of having it removed! It explained everything! That slightly creepy darling little creature in there must have been a twin, someone D had grown around as she dissolved. D was convinced it was a twin sister. And D had absorbed her. Of course he wanted to keep her with him. That very day, he had his first dream. Exhausted after his discovery, he had returned to the embassy in the late afternoon. Unable to face his office, he diverted his steps from the front walk toward the deserted path on the grounds where no one ever seemed to stroll. He walked deeper into the woods. The path sloped into a shaded dimple in the earth. It was dusk in the dell. D heard the drone of insect wings. In the mottled light a dragonfly dove straight down. Up curved a damselfly. Impulsively D lay down in the leaves in his three-piece suit and curled up like a praying divine, two hands under his chin. He felt himself melting a little. All the old bedevilments dispersed into a delicate dampness. The world softened from darkling to darling . . . . . .A stately antlered stag appeared in the distance and slowly, with a calm command, walked closer until D could see that he wore a diamond necklace around his neck. The stag slowly bowed his head, doffed his entire rack of antlers, and raised his head up again, looking directly at D.Now the deer was a doe! The doe blinked her eyes at D, as if waking. Then she donned the antlers, and turned and walkedaway . . . D woke up ravenously hungry—and overjoyed. He dusted himself off and drove straight to dinner. As he stared out the restaurant window, eating his dumplings, he wondered if responsibilities really do begin in dreams. Maybe dreams are responsible to us, he thought. He felt his sister inside him. She was the reason he was a debonair man, a man who understood that everything has two sides: inner/outer, yes/no. D thought both in lines as sharp as the creases in trousers, and in curves like the swirls of a skirt. What do I really know? he asked himself. Only that he had woken strangely endeared to himself—and satisfied. Now he understood the necessity of delay. To wait, and then to discover. Never to have only one answer. The napkin at the restaurant had come rolled inside a little sparkly ring. “Add this to my bill,” he said to the waiter. And pocketed the little diadem as a reminder of the dyad he was.

What if we got outside ourselves and there really was an outside out there, not just our insides turned inside out? What if there really were a you beyond me, not just the waves off my own fire, like those waves off the backyard grill you can see the next yard through, though not well -- just enough to know that off to the right belongs to someone else, not you. What if, when we said I love you, there were a you to love as there is a yard beyond to walk past the grill and get to? To endure the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know) is altruism: not giving, but coming to know someone is there through the wavy vision of the self's heat, love become a decision.