Sheila Black

Someone buried red slippers under the floorboards and the mice nested in them. The floors splintered no matter how many cans of deck paint we used. And one night at the Embajada I broke a tooth, and the very next night three teenagers were shot dead as they sat at a booth by the window eating mofongo. The neighbor woman used to sing a funny song from the forties about a “road” and “clear day,” a fast car and a woman with a pistol. You could see her back had been broken, and she dragged her left foot behind her down the stairs to the mail room. And Junior began smoking crack after his church on Columbus failed and started going by his birth name which was Jesus, until he fell in love with Irma of the hideous rabbit-fur-and- white-leather jacket, who stopped the cars by waving her watery hands, smoothing her moth-bitten hair from her moon-pale face, the violet lipstick she always wore, until she wound up drowned in the East River, and no one would say if it was suicide or murder. But Junior said there were eels inside her and began preaching again, doped on the corner. Mr. Rodriguez fired him, though he didn’t want to, and after Mr. Rodriguez often looked sweaty and pale as he labored to move stuff to the basement, which he had once done with Junior to help him. We painted our rooms cinnamon, Aegean blue, repainted them eggshell, gris-perle. We fought, and you tore all my letters and diaries and sprinkled them out the window where they landed on the roof of your car, plastered there by a violent summer storm. It took hours to scrape them off; I wept and Mr. Rodriguez gave me a small plastic-wrapped packet of Kleenex and a month later you wound up in St. Luke’s on lockdown and Junior caught pneumonia, died that November. He was thirty-eight, though we had believed him older. They buried him in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Once I rode a cab out that way — we got lost, so many ticking minutes among the slender white spikes of the graves. The red slippers — they must have been for dancing, thin soled as if with mouse skin, a powder inside that might have been talc, rosin, or years of plaster dust, a piece of   broken ribbon, black at the edges as if   burned off or torn and smeared with shoe polish. Or the mice had gnawed it. And you said “The name of the film,” and I said I thought it was a story older by far, a girl who puts on the shoes and cannot get them off, who skips down a road, then another and across the world, until her feet fall off, and her hands and they make her wooden ones.

In the frozen square, the student asks me if I will sell him the books from my backpack. He hides them under his winter coat. Steam rises from the whole wheat rolls we break open at the breakfast table. We drink hot apple tea and pronounce the skyline “charming.” In a jail a man counts the visible bones, and recounts them in the blaze of morning. To turn a self to light proves painful — each piece must be dissected in turn; you pass through every feeling imaginable, so many you might make a dictionary — dread to disgust, delight to degradation. The prisoner remembers wanting only to read as if in a fever — running fingers over pyramids of words as if he might translate himself from this life to a more vivid existence in which he cuts open the pages with a knife in plain sight of everyone like a man eating meat and potatoes at the dinner table. Not that world; this one where blue light and sharpened files, where identikit and stamps on passports, where the book in his back- pack is a crime, and I have sold him down the river for ideas I barely value — the volumes flung carelessly across my hotel room, while he picks mushrooms on the edge of dread, pallid ghosts of what won’t speak or be spoken. Or where I remember what it is to be present in the world, and I turn away, unable to bear it — so much light and dread, so much in the darkness growing or simply how hard to ever remain in place.