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Calcium
Calcium. She knew she needed it. She
sometimes craved it. At night, when the whole town slept, she’d sneak out of
the house and down to the pier. She knew some pregnant women ate dirt. Some ate
iron. She craved oyster shells. She would have eaten the oyster too but someone
had scared her off, made her think red tide had hit the shores. But she didn’t
crave the flowery oyster. She craved its carbonated shell. She would put a
whole half in her mouth. She’d rub her tongue along the smooth side, trying to
rub it smoother. The hard ridges cut her upper mouth. She’d broken a tooth on
one of her shell-eating ventures.
After she’d broken her tooth, she’d vowed
to give it a rest. She ate Tums and spinach and drank a gallon of milk a day.
Convinced her craving had something to do with the lack of sun, since it had
been getting darker and darker, earlier and earlier, she had tried to up her
vitamin D intake—so she ate more cheese and drank more milk. She even ate,
against her better judgement, the oyster without its shell.
The night was thick with gray. As she
moved through fog toward the river, rather than the streetlights lighting her
way, she illumed the fog. Her winter-white skin projected, unlike Simon’s,
whose stayed dark and leathery all year long. That skin beam bounced off the
clouds, toward the closest matter, down to her path, lighting her way. She
smelled the green skin of the river before her light hit the water. The path
from her house was a straight shot to the place where they dropped off the
oysters from the boat. The oysters would wait there for ground transport to the
city, a few dozen making it back up the hill, into Bastion.
The dock, and the river banks should be
empty at night. Orange lights from the ships, tunneling mid-dredge, dot the
fog, its wake lapping the sandy bank. But otherwise it is dark and quiet. Once
Quinn made it down to the water, the clouds broke—the fog forced up the banks,
leaving the water’s edge clear. The lights from the boathouse made shadows and
Quinn’s eyes had to adjust. Self-emanating light replaced by the standard,
harsher bulb light. She looked around for oyster casings. Usually, oyster
netting lay strewn around, threatening to trip Quinn, or to harness other small
animals. Tonight, there was no netting. She walked further west, down the bank,
searching for the glimmer of shell, an opal spectral. For the first time, since
she’d been escaping down to the river, she couldn’t find a hint of oysters. She
ground her teeth, hoping the hard enamel would give way to the flake of
keratin.
By the time she reached the far dock, she
had almost given into the lure of dirt eating. Then she saw what she had come
for. A pile of oyster shells, stacked bony against the soft flesh of the river
bank. She almost ran toward them. And then she stopped. Before the oyster mound
stood a man. Before the man stood a table. Upon the table stood three oyster
shells, their humps heaving against the now faraway fog.
"Can I have one?" She gathered
her full height. She stood up to him.
"First. Have a game."
"Can’t I just have a shell?"
"But darling. Don’t you want to know
what’s underneath? Play a game." He shuffled the shells. She pressed her
protruding stomach against the edge of his table.
He had a radio. Perhaps he was listening
to a New York documentary about the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway, the entire
transportation infrastructure traipsed out, down and around the ocean, further
mixing up the Atlantic and the Pacific with its prow and its wake. Entire
girders big enough to frame ten room ranch houses. Four to five barges needed
to carry each one. An entire forest in Oregon had to be cut down to make those
girders. She wondered, what constitutes an entire forest?
Perhaps, under that shell, sat one of
those incorrigible idols from Malaysia whose posture designs your future. His
hands on his back, you’ll grow rich and fat. His hands on his head, you’ll win
a war. Under his armpits, sure to lose all your loves because you refuse to
admit how wrong you were. Hands touching his feet, your life will be just like
it is, the moment you let him out of his box. But if his hands are on his ears,
might as well do yourself in now, poxes and boils would be a dream to the way
you will suffer—because you will have a child whose skin and whose heart, will
have no way to callous. He’ll bleed himself to death before he’s even born.
Or a woman, selling animal livers from
the lining of her coat. She sleeps outside at night for fear her brackish hair
will congeal in a pile of wet ashes while she frenzy-scratches her skin the
furnace air has dried into flakes.
Maybe he’ll let her make a wish.
She wants to grab the shell.
For the first time, she wants to grab
whatever is underneath that shell, hunker it down under her tongue, and take
off up the bank, see if the old man with the brim of his leather cap pulled too
far down over his eyes, would chase her. Maybe he couldn’t even see her as fast
as she thought she could be.
Stopping the shuffle, he urges her to
settle. "Darling, there are no riddles. Pick one."
As she always would have, even under
normal circumstances, she picks the middle one.
Nothing there.
She picks the other.
Nothing.
She picks the last.
Nothing.
She pleads with her eyes. Smiling, he
pulls his hands from out behind his back. Opening them, she finishes the
sequence. "Nothing."
"But not quite nothing. Perhaps
something that even you don’t know you want."
Raising her eyebrows, she nodded at the
nothing.
He said, "Don’t put down your gun
till your sure the motherfucker’s dead."
"What?"
"I said, don’t presume you know the
hard structure of trees."
She shook her head to clear her ears.
"What did you say?"
"For the last time darling, if you
see smoke, dig for fire. Pray for rain." He handed her all three oyster
shells, tipped over his table, folded up its legs. Hoisting the table by its
lip, he put hand to cap, nodded at her, and walked west down the bank.
She wanted to shove all three shells in
her mouth at the same time, but she paced herself. A piece of driftwood made a
fine enough seat. She sat down, balanced her tricky weight against the tiltings
of wood and bank and popped one shell into her mouth.
The first crunch hurt her teeth, brought
a little blood. Then she saw a moon. Tuesday’s fullness—an archy, harvest moon.
She could see, looking left, west toward the ocean, the moon crouching into the
black water. The moon dislodged an owl. The owl flew over her head, its
wingspan crossing the moon. She breathed in the air, relieved at its move.
The second shell cracked open fields of
wheat. Stalks of yellow waved against her, parted for her. Fish swam between
her legs, nipping at her calves, feeding on her skin. She saw herself smiling
at the fish. The fish smiled back, the bite marks filled in, the wheat gushed
around her.
On the third, she felt the steel of her
body in the water. She felt the tremor of poles and a surge of electricity.
Stiff and blank, she held against the waves. The water turned warm turning her
soft. She wove the water. The water wove her. They ran on together, wet steel,
warm water, passing through each other, making good time toward the ocean.
Quinn looked up toward a man with a fish
in his mouth. Only it wasn’t a fish. It was a dry piece of bagel. And it wasn’t
any old man. It was Simon. The bagel fell out of his mouth because his mouth
was open and wet from laughing. Waving her hand in front of his face, she hoped
to wash him away. But he stayed and kept smiling at her until she finally just
asked him what the hell he was laughing at.
"You’re covered in snowflakes."
Quinn wiped her face, brushed the oyster flakes into her hand to show him their
crusty hardness. They melted before she could produce them. "Have you been
here all night? Weren’t you cold?"
His saying so made her shiver. He wrapped
his coat around her, bent over to zip her up. "Pretty soon, you won’t be
able to fit in my clothes. Can’t believe it snowed down here. Maybe never has.
Hungry?"
"Usually."
"Pancakes?"
Because he bought her pancakes
She decided to give him the knife.
Because he didn’t ask her where she had been all night, she decided to give him
the knife. Even though she rarely thought about Duncan, she thought almost
daily about his apple knife. Quinn didn’t imagine that the knife’s proper
title, or its primary properties, were for cutting apples. But she remembered
how its metal swayed. She remembered the shiny black handle and how it seemed
to reflect back into the apple, making the apple’s skin harder and a darker
red. The knife’s edge seemed almost invisible, sharper than even her mother’s
kitchen knives, which were sharpened every two weeks by Tom, the cutler who
traveled up and down the coast, and a bit inland, with his whet and his stone.
He’d bring knives back from France which would make her father cry because he
missed the challenge and her mother cry because, until recently, she hadn’t
been able to afford any of his special knives.
Now both Alice and Patrick, whenever they
traveled into the city to test new restaurants, they took their own steak
knives to the table, ordered a filet or pork loin, dug into their back pockets,
or, in classier restaurants, removed them from Alice’s purse, and showed them
off to their waiters. Sometimes, their food came more quickly than other’s did.
To rush them out the door or to cater to their finer tastes, Quinn could never
be sure. Quinn thought it was a wonder they had any customers in their
restaurant who had been privy to their eccentricities. In Bastion, her parents
seemed cool, characteristic, unaffected. In the city, strange birdedness
dripped of them like water that had run just a bit too closely to the power
plant.
But then, Quinn wouldn’t deny her own
knife obsession. She even had a special box for the knife that Duncan left
behind when his family finally dragged themselves back to a bigger town where
Duncan’s proclivities could be made more discreet. Or maybe he had no
proclivities. She’d never heard anything about him since. He’d left the knife
on the porch. He had always brought the knife, and an apple, and had always
eaten the apple. And on the day that she told him that she had told her
parents, he left the apple, and the knife, on the porch next to where he’d been
sitting. She thought he would come back—at least for the knife.
She had made the special box. Finding
wood had been no problem. By the mill, she found a leftover cut from the trunk
of a soft fir. But she had a hard time finding a saw. The closest thing her
father had was a meat saw. She had predicted how happily Patrick would have
reacted to wood dust ending up in his veal stock. So instead of sawing, she
chiseled, although she didn’t have a proper chisel. She used leftover shells
and knives her parents had discarded for their newer, more special knives.
Sometimes, when it had rained for three days straight, her nails would get long
enough and the fir soft enough to scrape it out without a metal tool. The
slivers hurt less than the time she gouged out her thumb. Then, she had seen
bone. When she hand-scraped, she only tore fingernails back. The gouge had bled
for days but after the whole Duncan thing and Portland exile, she didn’t want
to show Alice. She didn’t need another lecture on proper precautions. After
that, if her fingernails weren’t strong enough, sometimes she used a spoon.
Or course, she just ended up with a
hollow piece of a log. It wasn’t a box by any stretch of the imagination. Quinn
hollowed out another log, this time just deep and wide and long enough to fit
the knife. She nestled that smaller log, with the knife in it, into the larger,
fully hollow one so that the top of the knife touched the bottom of the larger
log and the bottom of the knife touched the middle of the smaller. The package
ended up being larger than she had hoped. It barely fit under her bed. She had
to shove it under the boxsprings by pushing at the box with her feet. When she
had moved to the city for good, she’d forgotten it. Or she couldn’t fit to
retrieve it from under the bed. Either way, it wasn’t until she moved out of
her parent’s house, into the house down the road, that she had even conceived
to open the box, let out the knife.
She found Simon at his desk, turning the
arm of his printer. He’d found the ancient machine at a flea market in Nevada.
Of course, it came with no ink and an uneven roller. Still, to Quinn’s
surprise, he tended to make it work. He had rolled thousands of pamphlets and
flyers out on that thing. Sometimes he would roll for so long that he’d have to
switch arms. Even still, his right arm bulged more thickly than his left.
Carrying the box on her hip, she came up
behind him, the stretch of her stomach nestled in the small of his back. The
words mole and vole kept emerging around on the ink roll. The spinning made her
dizzy.
"What’s that poking me?" He
turned into her.
"Here. A present." She shoved
it toward him.
"A log?" He stopped spinning.
"It opens." She slipped the
inner half out of the outer half and pulled out the knife. Simon held the knife
up into the light. Then he set it down on the desk next to the printer. Picking
up the box, he ran his hand along the inside of the narrow scrape. He rubbed
his fingers into it, letting the oil from his hand permeate the dry of the
wood.
"Can I have this too?" Quinn
nodded as she watched him reach for a bottle of ink. He poured the ink into the
shape in the wood. From a large spool of paper, he tore off a piece, pressed it
into the cut.
"Look. It looks like a fish. Let’s
make a million." Simon tore another piece of paper from the spool. He
pressed the paper into the ink. He made another fish.
Nicole Walker is the editor of Quarterly West.
She has been published in Seneca Review, Fence, Iowa Review, Puerto del Sol, among other places.
Email: Nicole Walker
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