Threadbare
The professor stands speaking, preaching. A living, breathing ghost sprung from the cage of Irving's Tarrytown and set loose upon the classroom. Dragons roam the margins in chicken-scratched ink, laying waste to a town of blue and black and spiraled metal. Fire leaps and curls unbridled, in blatant disregard for the laws of physics. And still Ichabod is talking, talking, bow-tied and balding. Spikes and horns and gnashing teeth. Ichabod speaks and heads roll. My skull slumps to the chair back; a hooded black jacket hangs battered, beaten, broke. Holes in the sleeve cuffs and a zipper long gone.
There is chalk on the board, dust and words and no one is paying attention. Austin has fallen forward, passed out on his desk. Tired all the time, he says, sore, all the time. Austin woke up in his car this morning, woke up in his car yesterday morning, woke up in his car the morning before that. A sunrise comprised of knuckles on glass, the parking attendant feigning just enough concern to make sure the boy isn't dead. He never is. Napping, he mouths to the man; adjusts his seat, his shirt, braces for the day. Runs his hand through his hair and his eyes across the mirror. Bloodshot and haggard, each and every morning. He needs to shave, to bathe in something other than the bathroom sink. Austin stretches his lower back, his arms, fists into the roof of his car and he shakes his head.
Ichabod is babbling, babbling. Talking about Maggie the flower and her will to live. She loses her will, she loses her life. Society, he says, society is to blame. It killed this flower, killed her dead on an oil-slicked shoreline. Inevitable, is his word. Unstoppable. She is consumed, he says, trodden and trampled and too weak for her world. This is what Ichabod speaks of; this is what Crane tells us.
Pens and pencils waltz across pages, blue and black and yellow, leaving footprints in doodles and drawings. Words of love and lust and boredom dance across a spiral-bound ballroom. Sabby sips at the coffee she steals when she doesn't have a dollar to spare. She is the most graceful of the petty thieves. Watch her weave her way through the crowd, slalom through students and sandwiches, through salads and soups and lunch trays. She slides to a stop at the percolators, massive industrial strength cylinders churning and gurgling and steaming at the far end of the cafeteria. Takes out her insulated mug and makes a withdrawal from the first dispenser on the left. She pockets the sugar packets and cream containers, tightens the lid and walks back out. Walking through the herd of the hungry and vaulting the entry turnstile.
A futile effort, Ichabod says. Maggie is adorned in the finest of Bic ballpoint dresses; she rides a winged dragon with flowers in her hair. She cannot win, he says, her choices are wrong; her choices will destroy her. Maggie tells the dragon to breathe the lawless fire, to ravage the town of blue and black sticks. Smiling as she watches society burn. This is what Maggie tells us. This is what we hear.
* * * *
I work double shifts, pull inventory the night before an eight a.m. class. I work myself stupid for low wages, a handful of paper cuts in green. Committed, says the boss, industrious. He does not see the sleight of hand, the vanishing act played with his profits, does not see the paper cuts mounting my forearms, because I wear long sleeves.
Staggering down the hallway, blinking and blearing my way through the morning, caffeinating myself to consciousness, I babble like Ichabod, rattle off the dusty words clinging to my brain. My teachers believe me to be a genius, lavish me with awards and praise and raised expectations. Listen to him, they say, listen to him speak and read what he writes. I make their profession worthwhile, they say, I am more than they could hope for. I think, know, they are wrong. I am a magician, a roadside hustler selling rain to the thirsty. Hopes are pinned on my illusions and I will not disappoint. Conjure up a storm and lay into them with a tornado of dust.
* * * *
Monsters in the margins, bleeding ink across the semester. Maggie leads an army now. The gutter flower has grown thorns, indelible and entwined around more than just the vertical red.
* * * *
The driver's seat, says Austin, is the most unforgiving of beds. Austin leans in the doorway, smiles his way into a job, a free dinner, the waitress's pants. Unshaven, disheveled. Please, he says, pity me, he says, I need a job, a place to live and eat. Austin looks like a god of rock and roll, with his geometric jaw and a jungle of untamed hair. Please, he says, puts his hands on her hips. For me, he says, confident and ruthless. Eyes like a supernova, he watches her melt, feels her dripping through his fingers. Austin gets his job, his place to live and eat. He wakes to a feminine sigh, her soft, warm skin against his. Maybe not attentive but at least awake, he writes bad poetry and tells me his plans for the weekend. Smiling now, always smiling. Austin waits his tables and sleeps with his waitress and acts like the rock star he is.
And then comes Sabby, singing sweetly.
Like Little Bo Peep, she's lost her sheep, but she knows where to find them. Leave them alone and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them. Her flock arrives with lust in their eyes, their only intention to please her. She holds her crook high and they follow blind, running headlong into disaster. Then Little Bo Peep falls fast asleep and dreams she hears them breathing. When she awakens, she finds she's mistaken for they are only bleeding.
Blue-jeaned and beautiful, she watches and waits atop the steps of the student center. A cigarette between her fingers, counting time with each falling ember. Sabby the shepherdess, with a smile like razor wire, shoulder length hair dancing across her eyes. She is glory, or a closed door and a hall of concrete.
She is Sabby, sweetly singing.
* * * *
A lack of money, sleep, meaning, always a lack of something. An abyss wide and gaping, a sharp-ledged rookery for all manner of monsters. Hydrae of nobility and desperation, dragons and demons and winged beasts that fly from a breach grown thick with the vines of a gutter flower.
* * * *
"Time," says Ichabod, "has run out. Your lives, as you knew them, are ending, and you will have to begin anew. You're smart kids, you know this. This finishing and commencing, this life of starts and stops. It is a song you've heard a thousand times before, I'm sure. Our job was to groom you, prepare you to take that next step, to mold you into fine, upstanding, capable young men and women. And I think I can safely say that we have done that. We are proud of what you have become."
And the crowd goes wild. Those who said they supported us, those who claimed to care as we struggled and stole and slept in cars, cheering the old man on. Ichabod is a smokestack, ancient and cracked, seeping, polluting the air. The gathered mob of family and friends high on the fumes. Blanketed by a snowfall of ash.
"I must warn you," he says, "there are wolves out there. Jackals and hyenas. Those with less," he pauses, "noble upbringings. You must be ready for them, ready to stand your ground and raise yourself above them. You must be the ones looked to in times of uncertainty. You must be the grizzly among the pack-minded, the jungle cat among the scavengers. Do not forsake others, no, no, but do not succumb. You must be eagles, with talons to help when possible and wings to leave when necessary. Carry yourselves with majesty. With grace. With fearlessness."
Ichabod cannot see the dragons circling overhead, with scales and fangs and eyes burning crimson. Breathing a fire that could scorch the sun. Ichabod does not see the eagles die.
"This great nation is looking to you for stability, looking to you for hope. You are the ones to return us to our former glory, free from doubt and internal conflict. The ones who will run for public office, take history-making strides in the private sector, the ones who will inherit our country."
Ichabod pollutes the air with optimism and nostalgia and a complete misunderstanding of this life.
"You are the ones to make whole the shattered pieces of our American society. You are the ones to pick up where we left off, to take the steps we cannot."
We are choking on the dried up, burnt out memories of something else, something better.
"You are our pride. Our future."
The liar, the rock star, and the siren. We are Maggie's garden, with heads bowed low.
"I can think of no class, no students, holding more promise than you."
There is a thunderclap of applause, the ground shivering from the sound. We are knee-deep in twitching dust, an endless sky of black clouds trembles before us.
I look at Austin and Sabby through the growing shadows. We stand straight and breathe deep and choke on the wind. We shuffle our sneakered feet, shift our shoulders beneath plastic gowns. The dust is everywhere; the storm is unprecedented. A whirlwind of ash, unexpected and unfathomable, tears through what is left of our concern.
And we laugh.
With fear and doubt and kamikaze tendencies. We smile through the maelstrom and mount our beasts, our poorly sketched dragons of ink and paper, no longer caring if they will be enough.
– Eirik Gumeny is the editor of Jersey Devil Press and author of the novel Exponential Apocalypse. His short fiction has appeared in Thieves Jargon, Mud Luscious, and Red Fez, among others. He is very tall and has a hard time finding pants that fit correctly.
