chronicles of irene

It was not Saturday, and Irene was not dead.  She was dreaming of who she was and who she had been.  In fact (we have decided) she was also dreaming of who she might still become, and, if this child she carried inside was a girl, who that girl might become.  A stream of children, one blooming out of the next and the next, pale and floaty, weightless and fine and extraordinary – poured through Irene’s dreaming.  (We have decided) they will all be showstoppers.  And that we will love them, profoundly.  

The floor under Irene’s cheek is as cool as a white cotton sheet and seems not at all like wood.  Her arm pillows her head where she lays on her side, her knees draw up at a slight angle, and the child inside, the tiny fish of a child she will teach to swim some day, in the Loyalsock River where she once swam, is slipping through currents of dreaming.  And now this unborn child is watching Irene.   She has legs, the child does, and webbed toes and is nearly as tall as the dwarf, Massimo, who is holding her hand like a paper-doll cutout’s hands attach to the next and the next.  Other children come out of the folds in the dreamed paper: a child, Massimo, another child, Massimo.  All one dimensional and white. 

The dreamed children burst and reburst.  They are like fireworks, the after sparks floating to ground.  Irene squeezes her eyes, willing them whole again, and Massimo.  And the one tiny fish of a girl swimming inside. 

Irene frowns.  Massimo has been dead a long time.  Her memories of him have been dead for almost as long.  In what city did he fall, tangling the bulbous ends of his clown shoes to wild applause? 

Fear shivers from shoulder to shoulder.  Would they, the crowd, applaud her fall?  Were they applauding now?  She hears muffled applause through the floor.  It comes from a long way off.  It sounds like ocean heard through a conch.  Get up, Massimo.  Get up.  The applause shrinks to nervous chuckles, the chuckles turn into jeers, and Irene can’t lift her head from the floor of her Hell’s Kitchen apartment anymore than the dying Massimo could lift his from the sawdust.  From the edge of the ring, she had watched him die.  How could that be?  How could that be?

Her frown deepens.  It’s not right that a forgotten little man who had so little to do with her life has entered to handle her dreams, so curious, so in the way of her progress.  He is replaced by Fred Astaire.  She hears Fred and decides they are sharing a dream.  Heaven, I’m in heaven, he croons, and she wonders when she learned to move with such grace across a dance floor and how she can follow his every move with her cheek pressed against such a cold surface.  She wants to look at him.  She wants to see why his cheek would be cold and hard, but the dance is so lovely, cheek to cheek, and they move in spirals around the room, up broad staircases and back down, until a voice selling Ivory Snow interrupts.

On the far side of the room the radio sits like a brown cathedral.  She manages a glimpse, but mostly sees floor — all the plank lines running toward her, disappearing into her body, how her body weighs across them.  Or, how they run, run, run away from her.  If the planks were painted in broad stripes of varying colors, they could be the striped coat her cannon wore.  The painted coat on her Steel Pier cannon. 

But the planks are not painted.  The cannon was never hers.  When her eyes close again, she bends the broad bands of color into black and white, she bends the planks under her body around and around, just like the Steel Pier cannon.  She needs a space to hide; the cannon is safe, in the off-season.  Irene exhales a long breath, takes in poisoned air from the third floor apartment.  All the paperdoll cutouts have been snipped into confetti, there are sparks falling, there are sparks falling everywhere, even into her hair, but they don’t burn, they don’t catch fire.