"THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE IN HOUSES FROM CASTLES"
by Lauren Bride
There were 13 other people on the bus that day with Marion, but luckily she was no fool and traveled with a strategy. Marion sighed when she thought of her very clever method. It was so obvious. All she had to do was breathe. Each time she exhaled, her old air formed a brick and the bricks made a wall, like the wall of a castle, you see. So after only a few moments on the bus Marion was being hauled across the town safely within the walls of a tower. She took up two seats with her body and a little more with her fortress.
She noticed that others were so sloppy with their breathing ! And in these modern times. With the window open this was not so bad, things could get around and back outside. When winter came, though, the bus would be rotten with the detritus from tongues and noses, all hanging in the air and sinking to the floor in a gas riot.
Marion looked outside on that day and saw two boys running a somewhat artful lemonade stand. One boy was tiny and wore a very smart suit and glasses and squinted as the bus approached. When it slowed to make a whining stop, she read their painted sign:
LEMONADE, PAY WHAT YOU CAN
MICE AND RATS – FREE
She saw a patchy, wriggling mound of fur in a laundry basket on the ground next to the stand.
Marion felt a warm and soft push against her side and slowly turned her head. The woman with the bad heart sat next to her, making sucking noises as she readjusted her false teeth in her mouth. She did this often. Every time she swallowed they shifted, but working them back into place caused much saliva to pool in her mouth; there was frequent swallowing and sucking resulting directly from this.
Attacked! Equipped for such imprecise ambushes, Marion allowed the thinnest and strongest wall to line up in the crack of shadow between their two bodies. She deftly turned this wall into searing ice and compounded her hatred for this woman from her safe spot. She sat with her eyes closed and her jaw set, concentrating on the strongest, most impenetrable wall that she could. She burned the woman with the coldness of it.
There were sucking and wheezing sounds. The woman with the bad heart went “tsk, tsk, tsk” a few times, which really sent her teeth askew, but that sentiment was important enough to her to continue expressing it.
“Say, I know you!” the woman said excitedly. Marion opened her eyes, staring straight ahead. “Go on, I do! You’re that one whose dad died not long ago. I heard your mom had already run off too, yeah!” The woman with the bad heart was pleased with herself for remembering. “How’re making out? That’s a pity, it really is, life is just plain cruel sometimes.”
The woman surveyed Marion from her close position. Marion felt the dirt on her legs from yesterday’s activities. She took the bus and then walked to a pond every day and then walked home. Sometimes she sat right in the water. She sat and built towers and fortresses with the fantastic machines of her breathing, and left them there to stand.
“Why don’t you come home with me today, okay?” the woman said, patting Marion on her shoulder. Marion felt her wall bend against her shirt and then bounce back into place.
She got up and off of the bus with the woman and walked behind her as she waddled and sucked and wheezed. Marion’s teeth were clamped together so hard.
“We’ll have dinner and then play cards, that’ll make a night. I’m an early-to-bed, early-to-rise sort of woman. And it has been so long since I have had the company of another girl. We’ll have fun together.” The woman slurped her teeth and put her hand to her chest with her excitement.
The two of them, the woman with the bad heart and the imposing Marion, chugged along in a two-car train. They turned a corner and a woman walked along towards them. She stared at Marion with a soft face. Marion looked back and saw that the woman had terrible limp and wore no shoes – a mad woman, she recognized this instantly! The limping woman held her hands cupped and as they approached her, she saw that she held a dirty-grey rat in her palms. Its hairless pink tail wrapped around her wrist two times. Marion saw the woman’s gentle eyes and one tear dropped from her own eye, and slipped downward, seeping into the earth.
The limping woman crouched down and this crouching looked painful. The rat unwound its tail from her wrist and went to Marion, perching on her enormous shoe. Marion continued walking just like this, the rat’s tail daintily knotted in her rotting shoelaces.
At the house of the woman with the bad heart, the smell was a forceful blend of liver, ammonia, and the iodine smell of elderly bodies. The drooling woman chattered and began chopping onions for their supper, and soon the house smelled like this as well.
Marion sat on the carpet and stared from a window. The rat slept on her foot. She closed her eyes and dreamed of the boy from the lemonade stand. She took a slip of paper from her pocket and a pencil from a table nearby and wrote “ I love you ”. Pulling out her other crumbling shoelace, Marion carefully tied the note to the rat’s back, and more tears came. When they hit the carpet in the home of the heartsick woman they sprung one flower per droplet. Each flower uncurled one petal at a time.
Marion unwound the tail of the rat from her shoe and gave it a shove and a look so it would understand its business. But her eyes were rusting from all the moisture. She saw the wind bend the trees right over outside so they were bowing down, their hair all brushed over. Smelling the onions and wanting to touch the rat again now that it had scurried away, Marion wondered where her mother was.
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Lauren Bride attends the University of Toronto. Her work has also appeared in THIS Magazine. She likes to paint and draw as well.
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