A Cup of Normal

  DUCKS IN A ROW

  I didn’t have the gun in my hand yet. Another boy, about twelve years old like me, walked away from the carnival booth and a little kid, maybe six, put down his nickel. There was room for three people to play but the other two guns were gone, leaving empty chains swinging over the booth’s edge.

  I’d never been to the carnival before, never seen a real shooting gallery. But I was real good with a gun, or at least that’s what my dad would say if he were alive. So I waited my turn even though my ankles hurt, the blisters on my hands were sore, and a storm was brewing in the hot August sky.

  The stuffed toy prizes, hanging in a drift of blue and pink and green on a rod above the booth, whispered to the kid with the gun, but I don’t think he heard them the way I did.

  “Low,” they said, “slow.”

  The kid aimed high, missed twice, and winged one duck, which made a funny quacking sound, but didn’t tip over like it should. The boy looked pretty disappointed and dug in his

  pockets, but didn’t have any money left. He looked up once at the toys, then walked away.

  My turn. The guy behind the booth held out greasy hands.

  “Nickel for three shots, Sonny,” he said.

  “Say we make it an even four?”

  The man shook his head. “Rules say three, or go try another game. There are folks waiting their turn.”

  But there wasn’t anyone behind me. The wind picked up and the stuffed toys swayed a little more. There was anger and storm in that breeze, coming up big and soon.

  If I wanted my shots, I’d best take them now.

  So I put down my nickel and the man flipped the lever beneath the lip of the booth to set my gun up for three shots. The gun wasn’t much more than a toy rifle, slick and light with a sight on it that was shiny on the top edge and bent pretty bad. I held the rifle up and tucked the stock in tight against my bruised shoulder. I sighted down the barrel to get a feel for the thing even though holding it made the broken blisters on my palms sting.

  All the while the ducks clicked by, dragged by a chain wrapped round their feet that clattered over hidden spokes. I shifted how I stood, taking some of the weight off my worst foot.

  Painted yellow squares filled the spaces between the ducks. When I looked at them real close, I realized they were shaped like headstones.

  “Gonna shoot, or you gonna look at them all day?” the man said.

  I thought about flicking the barrel over at the man, pop a BB in his cheek, but this gun didn’t have no BB’s in it, only air. I put my finger against the trigger and sighted the ducks. Once I squeezed the trigger, air would pop out. If I missed my shot the ducks would play a tape recorded ping or ricochet sound.

  If I hit just the right point on the duck at just the right time, the duck would tip over and I’d win myself some respect. And a little justice for all.

  I waited, took a deep breath, squeezed, readied for the recoil. My dad would have thought I did a real good job. The one thing he told me I was good at was handling guns. Taught me all he knew himself.

  The ping rang out and a sharp ricochet echoed. I’d had the heart of the duck clear in my sights but I didn’t even graze the wooden bird.

  That wasn’t right. If there was one thing I did well, it was shoot.

  The wind blew harder until the toys above me rocked, creaked.

  “Aim low,” the toys whispered to me as inanimate objects often did. “Wait for the last moment. The man, the man slows the chain.”

  I thought it was right kind of the dead toys to give me advice and all, but I wasn’t sure I should take advice from something that had been hanging by its neck since the carnival opened six days ago. Still, I sighted again, waited for the ducks to rock up over the edge of the shooting gallery like a locomotive cranking up a switchback, and started counting.

  I had good rhythm. It meant the difference between getting a fist in the eye or the chin and knowing how to dodge the worst of my dad’s whip at my back. When I counted out the duck’s pace and put the sight where the duck’s heart — in just three beats — should be, I knew I was gonna hit it dead on.

  Out of the side of my eye, I watched the guy behind the booth. He looked bored, like he was watching the rest of the carnival: the snake girls, and balloon clowns and folks with half eaten corn dogs and ice cones.

  But I knew he was looking at me out of the corner of his eyes, just like I was corner-looking him. I took a deep breath, squeezed the trigger, and saw the fella’s hand twitch beneath the lip of the booth.

  Ping! Ka-zing! The duck quacked, but damn-sure didn’t fall over.

  I made an exasperated sound. The wind was building up right along with my anger.

  “It’s a challenge,” the man said, “but you look like a fine strapping boy with a good eye and a steady hand. Last shot, you’ll have it sighted. For another nickel, I’ll load you up three more shots.”

  The air smelled like hot iron and the clouds rumbled like bellows feeding fire. There’d be a hard rain soon. Another whopper of a storm to clean away my sin. Something hot and loud. Something big as the one that came up yesterday while I was pulling the gun out of the attic. Thunder roaring so loud it covered the shots of the .30-06. Something that would bring rain to soften the dirt and make for good grave digging all night long even if all you had was one shovel and your bare hands.

  I hunched my bruised shoulder against the stock and tipped my head a bit to see if I could hear any of the toys talking again. They all just swung there uncommonly quiet as dead things should be, the way I wished my dad had been. I nodded at the man.

  “Keep your finger off the lever, and I’ll take my last shot.”

  “Oh no,” the toys gurgled.

  The man tipped back on his heels, then up again, looking like my dad used to — smiling like the dickens and still mad enough to hit my face into the back of my head.

  “This game ain’t fixed, boy. Nothing but the lever to load the gun back here. I’d show you so, but you’re not allowed to lean over this edge. Now take your shot and get on out of here.”

  “Low,” said the toys above me.

  “Quack, click,” said the ducks being dragged by the chain.

  “You saying you’re an honest man?” I asked. “That this is an honest game and I could bring me a sheriff, or lawman back here and they’d see there was no wrong doings?”

  “Sure thing, Sonny. Bring all the law you want.”

  I nodded again, real slow, like my daddy used to when he talked to the law and told them there wasn’t nothing strange about my bruises, wasn’t nothing wrong about my broken ankles.

  “Just so long as we have a reckoning of things.”

  “Fire your shot, Sonny, and get your britches home to your mamma.”

  “Low,” said the toys, “slow.”

  I licked my lips and sighted the ducks.

  Click, click, click, the ducks rounded the edge, dragged by the chain around their ankles, cutting their flesh and bone with every step as they stumbled behind their daddy’s pickup. The ducks staggered forward, ready to get shot, maybe even thinking it would be a relief. I counted, took a deep breath.

  The fella flicked his finger under the counter. The ducks slowed. I pivoted so the gun was aimed at the middle of the man’s forehead. His eyes opened so wide his eyebrows got hung up under his greasy hair. I squeezed the trigger. Thunder boomed.

  He jerked.

  Ping! Ka-zing! The ducks quacked. And all fell over.

  I held the rifle there at the man’s head, feeling the long straight line of power that poured from the end of the gun to the bone in my cheek and right on back to where the stock was tucked up against my heart. It felt warm. Powerful. Strong. Like a man should feel, my dad would say. Except I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel like that kind of man.

  The gun went heavy and cold in my hands.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the man asked.

  I tipped the rifle down a notch, so the
barrel was pointed at his mouth and crooked teeth. Truth was, I suddenly didn’t like the gun in my hands at all. Thunder rumbled again and I knew the storm was coming to me.

  “You owe me four prizes.”

  “Bull crap.”

  I motioned to the ducks with the gun.

  He looked over. Sure enough, all four of the wooden ducks were tipped over, flat as a widow’s heart.

  “You didn’t hit those with your shot, boy. You cheated.”

  “Not likely. This here’s a fair game. We agreed on that. I’ll take my prizes now.”

  He glared at me. “The wind blew them over.”

  “I aim to take what I’ve earned.”

  “Get out of here,” he said. “You’re not getting anything from me.”

  I raised the rifle again, swallowed hard so my voice came out even and strong.

  “Mister,” I said, “you know you cheated. You know I shot those first two ducks clean just like the kid in front of me did, and the kid in front of him did. And you know I knocked down those four ducks while this rifle was aimed at your head. I’m a good shot, that’s what I’m saying. And if I’m good with a toy gun, you better believe I’m good with anything I put my hands on.”

  I don’t think he understood what I was saying, but he got enough of my drift to snarl at me and pull two toys down by their haunches. “Take your damn toys, but don’t ever play this booth again, hear?”

  I put the rifle down with full gratefulness and rubbed the feel of it off my palms before taking the two dogs from him. “These are fine, and I’ll take them to the kids you cheated in front of me. But I want the ducks too.”

  “Get the hell out of here, boy.”

  The wind kicked up and got the booth rocking so hard, all the toys fell off the bar and went rolling like cotton candy tumbleweeds down the dirt and sawdust lane, bouncing into tents and booths along the midway. The man made a grab for the toys, but none of them blew his way, happier, I suppose, to take their chances on the wind. The plywood bolster board of the booth above him fell and darn near crushed his fingers, except he jumped back fast and howled, so I think he mostly got scraped.

  Off his footing, he flailed back into the ducks. The chain broke. Ducks and wooden headstones fell to the ground.

  Which was all right with me. Every living thing deserves to be free. My daddy never said that, but I know it’s true — now that he’s dead.

  Me, I just turned away, leaned into the wind, and started walking. I planned on finding those boys and giving them the prizes they’d earned. I planned on handing out a little justice for all, and then leaving this town to try being good at something else. Maybe try being someone else. Someone free.

  The four ducks waddled up behind me, like inanimate objects sometimes do, wooden feet making clack, clack, clack sounds against the dirt, wooden wings flapping as the thunderstorm finally rang out and pulled a good strong rain out of the hot August sky.

  I love origin myths and wanted to write a myth about the origin of music. After finishing the story, I knew it was missing something. Finally, it dawned on me that I needed another character. I added Sath, the snake to the story, and then the myth felt complete.

  SINGING DOWN THE SUN

  It wasn’t the music that changed, bell-sweet and delicate as a moth’s wing. Jai always heard the music no matter where she had hidden it. But the silence within the melody was different, the pauses between each note too long, then too short. Jai tightened her grip on the handle of her hoe and glanced up at Black Ridge where a forest of yellow pine stood dark in shadow. She knew what the changes in the song meant. It meant Wind and Shadow had found a new child to do their bidding.

  “What will you do about the music?” a soft voice asked.

  Jai startled at the sound of the ancient corn snake, Sath, who sunned on the flat stone at the corner of her garden. He was her forever-companion, the one creature who had promised to never leave her. But he had been gone for nearly a year and had returned this morning as if he had never left. As if she had not spent long days and nights worrying that Wind or Shadow had found him, killed him.

  His sinuous body looked like a rope of sunlight, his scales jewels of orange and yellow with deep black outlining the patterns down the length of him. She had forgotten how beautiful he was, but had not forgotten how afraid and betrayed she had felt when he left.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” Jai answered.

  Sath lifted his head, black tongue flicking out to taste the air, the wind, the song. “The song has changed.”

  Jai didn’t answer.

  “Wind and Shadow will take the child,” he whispered.

  Jai blinked sweat from her eyes. “You have been gone for a year. Did you come back to tell me what I already know? I won’t teach another child. The gods can fight without me this time.” Jai went back to hoeing the dirt between the summer-green shoots at her feet.

  “But I am home now,” Sath said.

  “That is not enough.”

  Sath rocked his head from side to side, his black eyes never moving from her. “I am sorry you were alone. But the child is —”

  “— the child is not my problem.”

  “Even if he dies?”

  The wind carried the song to her, melody and pauses chilling the sweat on her back and neck, tugging her faded cotton dress and the handkerchief covering her thick black hair.

  Jai did not answer the snake. She pulled the hoe through weeds knowing that Sath was right. When Moon discovered Wind and Shadow had caught a child, there would be a battle for the music, and the child would die.

  It’d happened before. She had found the first child who played the music many years ago. He was a fine strong boy named Julian. Julian had been a quick student. He’d learned how music had come into the world. He’d learned that Wind and Shadow wanted it, and that Moon wanted it more. He had fought to keep the music hidden in the world, like she had, like it was meant to be. Maybe he’d been too strong. Like an oak cracking down under a storm.

  He had been only six years old.

  And that slip of a girl, pretty and bright as the sunrise, Margaret Ann. Jai had taught her too. Tried to teach her to ignore Wind and Shadow. But Margaret Ann had gone walking in the night and was swallowed up by moonlight. Poor little bird, Jai thought, poor sweet child.

  “I’ve buried enough children,” Jai said. “Teaching them didn’t help.” She struck the dirt, broke clumps, uprooted weeds, but the memory of the children would not go away.

  Sath drew into a tighter coil, resting his fiery head upon circles of scales. “Not teaching helps less,” he said. He gave a slow, gentle hiss. “Please, forever-companion?”

  “Forever-companions don’t leave each other.” Jai finished weeding the row and the next, following the curve of the land. All the day Sath watched her with dark unblinking eyes. And all the day the music drifted down to her, sweeter than she’d ever heard it before.

  There was power in that song and there was power in the player. But she had made up her mind.

  At the last of the last row, Jai straightened her back. The shawl of night would soon come down. Time to fix a meal, boil water for tea, soak her feet.

  “Are you coming?” she asked Sath.

  The snake uncoiled and slipped off the edge of the stone like a ribbon of orange and umber and gold. He crossed the rich tilled soil and stopped at her foot.

  “Will you teach the child?” he whispered.

  “No.”

  “Ahh,” Sath said sadly.

  The sound of his disappointment made Jai wish she could take the words back, but she did not want to teach another child, could not bear to see the gods tear a soul apart again. Jai ignored the snake and made her way to her house: a sturdy square cabin with two windows and a pitched shake roof shaded by a gnarled hickory that combed the wind in leafy exhale. Perhaps the child’s ignorance would also be his saving.

  Just as she reached the edge of her yard, just as she looked up at her doorstep and
saw the small silent figure standing there — that very moment — she realized the music had stopped, leaving nothing but the warble of the night bird and the whisper of the old hickory tree.

  The child was small, dusky-skinned and red-haired. A boy. Long in the leg, and serious of eye. He looked to be ten, still dream-slight, as if not yet anchored to this living world.

  Oh, please no, Jai thought. “What are you doing out this late, child? Don’t you have no mama calling you in for supper?”

  The child blinked, shook his head. He pressed his back against her front door. He held a wooden bowl-shaped instrument tightly against his chest — string and wood and magic itself. There. On her doorstep. In his arms.

  No one had ever pulled it down from the mountains. No one, not one adult who had no chance of it really, nor one child who could still hold magic bare and true in their hands, had ever gone up to the mountains and brought the music down to her.

  “Please help him,” Sath said from the grass at her feet.Jai put one hand on her hip and tried hard not to show her fear. She did not want to fight the gods again.

  “There’s no place for you here, child,” she said. “No place for that music. You should go on to your mama now.”

  “I don’t have a mama,” the boy said, and his voice was honey and starlight, the sound of a barefoot angel begging on her doorstep. “I don’t have a daddy, neither.”

  Jai shook her head. None of the children who were taken by Wind and Shadow had kin.

  “There’s no room for you,” she said again.

  “Jai,” Sath whispered, “please don’t turn him away.”

  The boy looked down at the snake.

  “He told me,” the boy said. “Told me I should find you. Said you would help me. Please. I don’t have another place to stay.”

  Jai was surprised the boy could understand the snake — Sath had never spoken to anyone but her. She was even more surprised that Sath would tell the child to come to her, that he would expect her to help again.