As If

When Pho wears red velvet heels as slippers she thinks of all the people — all the imagined people — and she watches their concerned faces through a keyhole on Sunday afternoon as they dance and dance in Lennon’s deserted ballroom. And all the people agree that Pho is most certainly mad.

            Because on Tuesday nights and Thursday nights and Sunday nights too, dark melodies waft out of the musty, mildew house on Mulberry Street (Dr. Seuss cannot keep all the street names to himself) where Pho perches in her window, with a bush of strawberry hair casually crouching on her head. She is full of distinct yearning to create a pair of wings. Not because of a lack of functional wings, or because the wing factory is broken, or because birds are dropping from the sky in spirals, but because darling Pho would very much like to create a beautiful thing of her own. Someday, this beautiful thing shall be fixed to the wall of a fancy museum with plenty of sculptures bathed in orange light, and all the fine people of society will plod over and admire this one beautiful thing above all the other beautiful things.

            Truth be told, a beautiful pair of wings is not a necessary object to begin with. But that’s all right. That’s ok. Pho has a habit of creating unnecessary things for no reason. Pho, who is old all of a sudden, if old is eighteen. If old is staring with dilated pupils into a neighbor’s run down shed and assuming new folks have dropped by for a visit. If old is chomping a chocolate yogurt popsicles instead of licking it, or lying in the grass despite all the spindly spiders skipping on your legs. Living in a seaside cottage by day and sometimes in tent by night on silver shores where goddesses Wave and Seafoam are each missing a toenail and threatening to break in. But that is all right. That is ok.

             Pho. Like Foe. Short for Phoebe. Jack’s giant got it right on the third try. Imagine. All the giants and all the Jacks and all the beanstalks with oh so golden brown eggs to bake benedict, or boil hard, or batter over a big, juicy pound of puffin flesh.

            There is another reason for the crazy calling. On most mornings little girl Pho went out on the seaside with a net limp like a carcass on her shoulder, plodding with her net in one hand and her dad in the other hand. With all four hands they cast her net high above the cliffs and held it up up up as if it were the world. At the end of the day, they did a better job than Atlas.  

            “To the right, Pho!” Her father wailed directions because what can a dad do in the wind but wail, because all the wind is wailing and all the words and worlds used to wail together with the wind. There — there was a puffin preparing to pounce. Pho saw his feathers ripple, his back legs quiver. She noticed a liquid look in his miserly left eye, as if the poor puffin was judging how far he could thrust his body into the air all at once. All at once, in one glorious swoop, Pho caught the ambitious fellow and daddy broke the nerd’s neck because a wee lass should never have to break necks.

            By the time the coals were hot in the backyard the whispering wind had settled down for the evening. Purple puffin flesh glistened in May’s looking glass, the Milky Way. The moon was a saltshaker. Such was another normal evening on Mulberry Street. A popular destination – land’s end resort for ritzy creatures and other calculating capers. Not recommended for puffin lovers, but often paired with a brief setting of eyelids in open windows, so as to feel a thousand and one breezes beneath the brow. So as to tease trees waving in the sun like wallabies, waving goodbye and hello all the time because trees never know who is coming and who is going. It is unreasonable to expect a tree to know that sort of thing.

            Then Pho might light a candle and lounge at her lace covered writing desk for ages and ages — far into the night as the night is far — with a witch’s finger tracing long lost diagrams of fairy godmother Matilda, or Earhart’s airplanes, or thin, razor bones of puffin wings. The trick to absorbing knowledge and achieving success is a bit of puffin grease on the lip. A bit of heel on the foot. A champagne glass brimming with buckets of coffee, and Grandpop’s favorite mug grinning with buckets of gin.

            Pho is young . . .  still young . . .  losing youth like ladies are supposed to, shall we say. The same, everyday. Slouching in the window with sheer drapes about her like a sail in a famous fort somewhere. Some things have changed, as things have a nasty habit of doing. Her freckles are softer than before, slight as the trees who lose shrubbery around their heels and slip away into sinking sand, for shame. Her red velvet heels have shrunk, no doubt. Shrunk like peddlers who used to come around to sell new products with their perfectly devilish deals. Now they’ve gotten quite so small she can’t see them at all anymore, and that sort of thing makes any girl sad.

            The vacuum salesman was fine. She liked how he spread out bread crumbs on the carpet and then whisked over the crumbs with a vacuum and woosh those crumbs were gone! Like the last nibble in a brownie pan, or the white on her wall just before she went at it with a paint mop. So be it, then. McCartney kept saying let it be, and she listened.

            But Pho never bought a vacuum or anything from the traveling salesmen, so she figures if she was a salesman she wouldn’t come back either. But she does wish they would wear some sort of bright color, you know? Some sort of pop, so she could see them despite their size. Perhaps all the peddlers are hiding from the coyotes. When Pho stays up far into the night as the night is far, she hears coyotes. Coyotes are eerie. Eerie as if backs of chairs suddenly ceased being backs of chairs . . . then chairs would no longer be chairs either, they would all be stools.

            Now that is a distinct, traumatizing vision, shall we say. Stools are not fit for cozy seaside cottages. Stools are not fit for roasting puffin poultry over a spit, nor for laboring night after night over one winged diagram after another. All the drawings, diagonal lines, elevator shafts, engineers, glass blowers, and master painters need chairs. Stools are for lovers, not fighters.  

            A coyote scream is one reason Pho means to make a pair of beautiful wings. All the terrifying things need foes. Pho certainly needs a foe but she’s too busy to find one. Busy at nights researching wings. Busy in days sleeping and making wings and re-arranging light fixtures in her cottage. When some say she’ll never be able to make wings she poo-poos them and snaps her wrist in their face. “Eat some toast,” she says. “Toast without butter or jelly or jam. By itself. Dry toast.”

            But truly, Pho likes toast. She never admitted that to herself until now. Until this morning when she, for the first time, began to doubt her ability to create a pair of beautiful wings. She burnt herself up a piece of toast and slathered it with margarine to be healthy, because margarine really does taste like butter and surely the difference between the two is a scam. Everything is a scam, ay! Surrounded by scammers and door to door vacuum salesmen and wily coyotes howling in the far night. Imagine what might be in the sea, the sand, or the vacant house on the other side of the lagoon! What horrid creatures exist as Pho’s foes and what can she do about it if she can’t make a pair of wings . . .

            This is her job. Making wings. There is plenty of work to be done. She taps her chin and stares into the abyss of all her toil. Of all the vanity these walls were forced to shelter and all the candles that burned to a wick and drowned in their own wax. “I don’t like it,” she whispers. She would have wailed if there had been wind.

            Wind. “Hold onto its tail and see where it takes you,” mother once sang. 

            Wind Pho wants, indeed. To catch an invisible tail of wind in the neck of her pinky finger and be swept up on some dragon’s silken back. To fly far above seaside cliffs and Mulberry Street and peer down between shadows to see where she now wades in the stuff her folks called cliffweed.  

            Do you know why sand sparkles? Because small flying creatures have to soar over the sea before they officially become fairies, and some drop out of the sky when they are tired and shatter against the rocks. One of the many tragedies of the coast. But Pho never lets things get her down. Pho is like a puffin who mocks each of the trappers by hopping from net to net, launching further and further into the sky where the air is fine.

            Pho rests. She sets her mind at rest and she and her mind are lying in a large bunch of cliffweed where no one can see a nymph like monster. Eyes shut tight to keep headaches away. Eyes hardly standing to be shut and wandering sometimes. Looking up and around, dazed. Oh, but what is that! Her eye catches on a bright little thing in the shrubbery. A pop of color. Oh oh oh! What a pop of color is that dear creature! This sort of creature is far better than any fairie. This is a creature no puffin should eat, this beast should be esteemed as a wise being and hoisted high on a pillar so as to sit at the city gate. So as to wave goodbye and hello to all those who come and go.

            Crawling closer to the creature on her elbows, Pho gasps. Look at those wings. Watery, wrinkled wings in wailing wind. Same color as that broken crayon she found on the plane last Sunday, but so much brighter as if struck by lightning. Unreal. Her thoughts wander all around in spiral shapes. Descending and ascending and climbing spiral ladders. Her black eyes are thick with lore, with longing for beauty too simple to comprehend. Like craters her eyes fill with treasure and melt. Oh, wings, oh, sheer, seasoned drapery on a gaudy summer’s night, as if the moon replaced the sun for a day and folks did not notice. Pho breathes cautiously and stands. Ah, a Luna Moth, she realizes, recalling the distinctive color. This is the sort of beauty which fills her with warmth, and perhaps even carts with it a petite parcel of fear. The wings have been here all this time. Here, where they are needed most — fixed to this humble creature's back. Where they always have been and always shall be.

             

*Taylor and Kirsten, I owe you eternal thanks for all of the never ending puffin ideas. Also, many thanks to John for the Luna Moth inspiration!