Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories

Praise for Sonya Taaffe’s stories:

Sonya Taaffe is possessed of a singular and brilliant voice, one I have admired (and envied) since I first read her work more than a decade ago. Few living authors have brought to the task of building fantasy and science fiction her keen eye for the intricacies of the sublime and the terrible, the erotic and the weird. Fewer still have approached this work with such an undeniable talent. It is not an exaggeration to say she takes my breath away, like a plunge into deep, cold waters. – Caitlín R. Kiernan

There’s a poetic quality and a flow to the language that only increases the dreamy, magical feel saturating the collection. – A.C. Wise

"Sonya Taaffe’s writing is prose concentrate that, when reconstituted in the vehicle of your mind, leaves you fully sated, fully nourished. Savor the stories of Forget the Sleepless Shores the way you’d contemplate a long-anticipated wine: slowly, languorously, your mind volleying between sensual delight and critical appreciation. And keep savoring: Taaffe’s unforgettable mix of poetic language, scientific precision, and microscopic analysis of human longing is simultaneously bountiful and never enough." – Carlos Hernandez

It’s rich writing, something to be savored. – Craig Laurence Gidney

Conscience stalks Oppenheimer as a golem of nuclear glass; passion is laid bare beneath a peat bog; fall and fire claim their own. A girl is moth-light to a throng of ghosts. The sea calls, endlessly imperative. The water chooses whom to drown. In Sonya Taaffe’s vivid cinema of metamorphoses, the elements themselves have eyes. Watch now and wonder. – Greer Gilman

FORGET THE

SLEEPLESS SHORES

Stories

Sonya Taaffe

LETHE PRESS

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories

Copyright © 2018 Sonya Taaffe. all rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in 2018 by Lethe Press, Inc. at Smashwords.com

www.lethepressbooks.com • lethepress@aol.com

ISBN: 978-1-59021-210-3 / 1-59021-210-x

The stories in this volume are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Credits for previous publication appear at the end of the book.

Cover layout: Alex Jeffers. Cover art: D.G.Smith, www.dgsmithillustration.com.

TEINDS

You hold me so tightly as you sleep, as though I might melt with midnight into cold air on the pillow, a crease in the sheets that smells like the hair of someone you used to love. Your arms around my waist, your hips cupped to mine, your mouth pressed to the slope of my shoulder, all night you whisper into my skin whatever dreams ride you like a breathless ghost, weld you so hungrily to me that at times I wonder, if you could bind our bones together, would you? I stir, tired or thoughtless, and you flinch awake; if I lie very still, sometimes you fall asleep before I do.

The moonlight strips through the blinds; the blue glass bottle from our first date, the night I drank sparkling water and you kept tugging at your sleeves, shines on the dresser like there are souls stoppered inside. You didn’t want to talk about the accident. You didn’t want to talk about the father. Only much later, upstairs in my apartment with my three ancient goldfish and the pen-and-ink portraits that never hurt me enough to take down, with the cheap wine I cook with and the ceiling fixture in the bedroom that blew out years ago, did you let me see your fire-scarred hands, the weals clawed across your stretchmarked belly, the ridges of a broken rib under the skin. The tiny punctures littered up and down your arms, whitened as old pox. You unfastened your skirt, peeled back your sweater as though each new scar revealed were a wound all over again, and I could not kiss them all better. A car crash, you whispered, like an apology. I went through the windshield. The steering wheel knocked him unconscious. He was still inside when it started to burn. I couldn’t save him. That first night, I could not sleep with your hands woven into my hair; but when I eased slowly away under the bedraggled blankets that we had hauled back up off the floor when even you were spent and almost peaceful, you scrambled upright as dumbly as if I had struck you, cornered between the wall and the autumn-cold window, and I could not coax you back to bed.

I brought snapdragons to the coffeehouse where you had sold me black spiced tea; I showed my only party trick to your daughter, coins and candies palmed from behind her ear, clumsy-fingered, no magic to even a careless eye, but she smiled: and for a moment that ached inside my throat, so did you. In your basement studio, you drew blackout curtains against the afternoon and lit a branch of white candles in the sink, and under their rags of light I watched your face change from all the angles I could find. I could not make it change enough. The fire started at night. They said afterward it was the ventilation. As though I were an accusing ghost in your arms, I tried to keep hold of him, but the stairs gave way, and when my fingers grazed the pale chain-link above your collarbone, where splintered glass or metal had torn like teeth, you pushed me away. He never even saw his daughter. I picked her up from kindergarten, the day you couldn’t get out of bed, blank-eyed as an effigy in a mouse’s nest of quilts. Her yarrow-gold hair must be his, the sparrow slightness of all small children that she might outgrow: in the last of October’s sunlight, her shadow could have slung her up on its shoulders and carried her home in my stead. Her whole class had made construction paper masks. She left hers in my car.

She sleeps in the other room, in another slant of the moon; I will never learn how her father died. She made his heart into stone. His eyes into knotholes in a tree. He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t even see me. He was made out of fire and I held on to him, I held on to him, but I had to let him go. I couldn’t—I should have— So drunk you huddled on the floor like a dropped marionette, all snarled wires and smashed paint, the peatsmoke stink of whiskey like firedamp and you were crying, terribly, noiselessly, like you had never started and would never stop. Your shirt unbuttoned and discarded on a chair, your jeans bundled under the table, stripped in a fury and two candy-striped socks away from nakedness, and as I knelt in the shadows and bare-bulb kitchen glare I thought for a second that all your scars were looking at me. It hurt so much. It hurt…. In the bed that was not yet ours, I lay awake until dawn, for once holding you. The names you mumbled in your nightmares, ribboned and archaic as guisers’ masks, meant nothing to me.

I won’t let you go. Whether you say it aloud or only cling to me in the dark, when you cannot see what shapes I have taken, how I might scald out from underneath you, it’s what you are always promising: to hold me even if I burn to scars and take your heart with me. This time, to hang on in spite of blown tires, faulty wiring, the powers of hell; I don’t ask anymore. I love you. In the late winter night, we neither of us sleep, neither of us admit we are awake. You would shrug into my skin for safekeeping. I will take your daughter trick-or-treating this year. Lover, hold me less tightly. If I wanted to leave, I would not wait seven years.

CHEZ VOUS SOON

The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handfuls of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.

The chill made her breath shudder, and her hands might have been coated in stone for all their dexterity as she sorted through keys on the cracked concrete steps, fingers numbed and shining, her shoulders hunched under rain-blackened leather. Her oldest umbrella was still propped behind Demetre’s door, its maroon folds as comfortably dry as its owner was not. In his apartment, there had been hot cider and candlelight; she could have dried her sodden clothes over the radiator that hissed and spat like a fumarole, let the warmth and the half-jazz obsessions of Nobody’s Home pull her muscles to unwind and her thoughts to dreams, and she could have stayed all night for all Demetre cared. For all you noticed, she said aloud, and the damp air paid exactly as much attention.

In the buzz of a sudden streetlight, the rain had turned to dashes of magnesium, pen-lines that broke against the street. A freezing trail of water was working its way down the nape of her neck, vertebra by vertebra like risen hairs. By late afternoon, the apartment had been indistinguishable from midnight, all the shades drawn and Demetre on his knees in the jack-o’-lantern ring of candles like a possessed man; brushes and sponges and fingers as tender and avid on the canvas as a lover, and his vision in the streaks and hinting daubs could not have been what Vetiver Lawrey saw, before she closed the door on dry sanctuary. Now she pulled rain-stranded hair from her eyes, breathed out a ghost of condensation so harshly that her throat hurt. She could not have gone back.

The four flights to her apartment were drafty and smelled like stained cement and mildew, but the cracks on the walls showed no more than neglect as she climbed.

**

The white stones rolled

The breadcrumbs blew away

The candle burned the moon

The grass grew over

The creek rose

Chez vous soon

**

Before the storms and the cold moved in, Vetiver sat on Demetre’s spare bed and gazed through the last century’s panes at a sky banded like blue-and-white agate at the horizon, Chinese porcelain in the slow drift of clouds. The room was pale with sunlight, cream-colored plaster and scarred floorboards; the attic smell of old houses and the drying reek of Demetre’s work, linseed oil and turpentine, watercolor and acrylics, and cornmeal like prospector’s dust in the cracks of the floor. Decades of rain stains had made an Egyptian delta of the ceiling. Beyond the window, in mid-October clarity, the air tossed with the bright-burnt shimmy of leaves.

It’s not meant to be representative, Demetre repeated. As though the words were the act itself, to ensure that the autumn-colored riot accumulating on the canvas—mixed media, everything but bones and fallen leaves—meant more than haphazard inspiration, that his sight aligned with Vetiver’s and the implicit, always-critical audience, It’s suggestive. You look in, and fall will look back. There was a smudge of crimson under his thumb, all his fingertips bruised rainbow with oils and chalk. His shirtsleeves were fingerprinted like miniature canvases themselves. When Vetiver replied dryly, That’s very Nietzsche, he raised his face into the washed-honey sunlight and laughed without sound.

All of Demetre Moran’s gestures belonged to a taller, thinner man, a year-king blond as cereal and as easily cut down. His hair bleached to straw-colored burrs, still rye-brown at the roots: like dirt under the nails of his name, and more than once he had painted himself in grainfields or the lightless lap of the earth, hands filled with the slippery roe-glisten of pomegranate seeds, sheaves and broken blossoms like a child in his arms. He had the pale, resilient face of a moonstruck pierrot, but his bones in moments of stillness were as determined and fine as his own sketches. Briefly surfaced into commonplace conversation and submerged again into creation, he murmured more to his own distracted hands than to Vetiver, Oh, so, you think autumn is an abyss?

Things fall, don’t they? So when do they hit bottom? But he did not answer, and she listened instead to the wind flexing against eighty-year-old glass, supercooled seep toward the paint-layered sill, decades measured in little more than molecules and continents drifted faster apart. A faint chill was working its way into the room; she flattened her hand against one pane, palm to the season as in benediction or parting, and rose to turn up the music while Demetre painted.

The same way she drank coffee, Demetre listened to music: he could run on instrumental fumes for days. He had changed Frank’s Wild Years for Chez Vous Soon an hour and a half ago, and Iconoclast was coming around for the second time. And the angels seethe as you cease to breathe so unselfconsciously…. Demetre’s lips moved to the words, unconscious karaoke of Liora Elliott’s precise, rapid-fire bitterness, but Vetiver was already leafing through the CD booklet for lyrics. In the liner photographs, the members of the band were blurred black-and-white faces, caught mid-turn in quarter-profile or absorbed in their instruments: the girl on guitar, the man who played piano, some androgynous fair-haired figure stooped behind a drum kit to pick up a fallen stick. The cover art showed porch steps in a flashlight fan of brightness, warped and paint-cracked, casualties of wind and autumn rain, and someone’s foot propped on the top stair where a pumpkin’s Halloween grin had long since filled with water. Nobody’s Home. On the last page, she found three lines of Latin printed in the same cut-and-paste typewriter font as the lyrics, that she read out to Demetre for their reliquary cadences: dea, magna dea, cybebe, dea domina dindymi, / procul a mea tuos sit furor omnis, era, domo; / alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.

Demetre was softening a slice of earth-tones with the edge of his thumb, caramel into the fall-gold pallor of aspen leaves; wholly engrossed, ears stopped with paints. I don’t speak Latin, he said over the last chord, a snarl of minor notes that unraveled into silence. Isn’t there a translation?

Not that I can find.

Damn. Not for Vetiver’s incomprehension, but for the streak where his knuckle had caught in a line of goldenrod oils, he nipped at his lower lip and cautiously scraped at the canvas with a thumbnail. On the stereo, another relationship was already going down in flames and delicately worded shrapnel. I’ll look online.

I’ll learn Latin. Vetiver slid the booklet back into the CD case, turned it over to look at the artwork on the back: a china cup half full of dark liquid that might have been coffee in a rakish slice of film noir light, nine drops beaded around the saucer’s chipped rim. ‘Die, magnet, die….’ She looked neither like autumn nor a summer’s corn-queen, her hair like walnut shells, clipped back from her face with turquoise and silver, her eyes wood-green with contacts in and dark hazel without. Demetre had painted her features onto sirens and fractured glass, her loose-limbed body onto nudes and abstractions; in five years, he had never let her photograph him. ‘Adios, insightful age. Adios, old mad dogs,’ and the guitar skittered up a riff like a torn seam.

Reaching for the palette of acrylics, Demetre had knocked the turpentine rag to the floor; down on hands and knees to retrieve it, half out of sight under the scraped, paint-dripped table that had been a writing desk knockabout years ago, he spoke so absently that she almost missed him beneath Cass Birch’s thin, urgent singing. I don’t think Nietzsche ever did have the abyss look back. Sunlight striped the worn seat of his jeans, his shirt-tail come untucked as he straightened. He’d still be running today.

Vetiver flicked a look at the canvas, smears and bare patches and cornhusks pinned to the upper right-hand corner, no bottomless attraction yet. I’m looking right now, she almost said. I haven’t fallen yet. Still on his knees, Demetre scrubbed at a streak like fresh olives and made an irritated, half-dramatic noise, and she put the case back onto the windowsill, the click of plastic and white-paint strata like percussion in a rare second of silence. His intensity made her smile, thoughtless and easy. He was more lost in the autumn inside his head than in the bright and sinking season outside.

The times I’ve tried, the ways I’ve died and wished you’d cried…. Down in the street, the wind shook the trees like noisemakers; and she watched Demetre, enraptured, watch the leaves falling brilliant in his mind.

**

The footprints filled

The branches blocked the sky

The evening star can wound

The tide is turning

The mirror’s cold

Chez vous soon

**

The last days before November; the dead’s own season, inconvenient as bones. The headache like steel wool inside her skull, as charcoal and clenched as the storm-coming skies, as unlikely to break, though she nearly knocked Demetre’s old toothbrush into the sink as she slid the cabinet’s mirrored front aside, looking for the closest painkiller to hand. Down the hall to the spare room, Frank Black’s measured mystic’s statements tore up into a scream, six for the Devil and seven for God, and Vetiver closed her eyes against even the soft-white light. Between the heat and the sullen clouds, too far into fall for Indian summer, global warming’s parting kick in the teeth, and Pauline’s phone-call cancellation a little after eleven o’clock, later than the last minute, she could as cheerfully have broken the glass as reached behind it—all the day like dirty water down the drain, and why the hell did Demetre keep chewable grape-flavored antihistamines in an Advil bottle? She dry-swallowed two aspirin instead, bitter catches in her throat. When she took down the prescription bottle from behind the tooth floss, dry-gourd rattle, maracas for a skeletal dance, her head hurt only a little more.

The doorknob was tarnished brass, cool in her hand; black and white lightnings underfoot that Demetre had brought back from some southwestern trip, handwoven geometries of the fifth and final world. Even before she opened the door, she recognized the next CD that clicked into the player. Demetre, for God’s sake…. From his stillness where he stood, fixed between the music and the canvas, exclusive and intent, she did not think he had heard her. A week ago, a day, half a hour, she would not have cared; seated herself on the spring-shot bed whose rumpled covers smelled more of dust than guests and framed imaginary shots in her mind: the overcast, Demetre’s pagliacco profile, lamplight in sloping pools. Now there was a seasick roll of anger in her stomach; even odds on the headache, and nothing in the song helped.

She had never heard before how much silence there was in the music: the piano like a child’s spidery singsong, the whisk and leaf-graze of jazz brushes, and only a chord here and there from the guitar at a verse’s turn, a broken underscore. Only when the singer’s voice lifted from its whisper, that sibilance and the concealment of a smile had planed down to genderless smoke, could she even guess at its owner. The breadcrumbs blew away, the candle burned the moon…. A little rich for Cass’ voice as pale and peeled as his name, but Liora’s had a truer grain, and she would not have crooned like a lover where she could have knife-twisted the words even a little. Half-murmured, the ghost of a narrator, and as the piano mocked to itself, Chez vous soon.

The words might have been a promise, or a threat, and either as inescapable as the other. Over them, as sharply as a retort, Vetiver said, Do you have to listen to that album while you work?

Demetre answered mildly, I like it.

You’re playing it every time I come over.

That happens. In one corner of the canvas, he had printed with dead leaves like lithographs, ink all the shades from maple-scarlet to old bronze. If he had opened one hand to her, she could have read his palm like a Rorschach; he only looked a little puzzled, less defensive, mostly impatient. "Remember how many times you played The Waking Side of Sleep? I’d have left that CD in my car if I’d had any sense."

That was different, Vetiver said flatly. There were small pieces of bone on the table, beside the watercolors; green-flecked, sponged through with moss. As hastily as though the white keys were telltale bones themselves, the guitar strung with a dead woman’s hair, Vetiver stooped and twisted the volume down on blond, lanky Elie Shusteff , who in one photograph had leaned against a cinderblock wall like a phantom at the feast, disconnected, unremoved. As though she had done murder herself, and the headache were her guilt. The oldest penance of pain.

I hadn’t stopped taking my meds, and she held up the bottle like orange amber, childproof-capped, so that he could see more easily the date and all the pills unswallowed and safe inside.

Vetiver. His gaze slid back to the canvas, half landscape and half collage, all the colors of sun and cold earth. Only a slight crease between his brows, that were faded brown as his hair had never been in all the years Vetiver had known him. Don’t yell.

When did you stop? She hated how her voice slammed into him, condemnation and condescension: she did not care. Last week? Six months? Don’t you remember—

Vetiver, I didn’t—

How long?

For fuck’s sake! She argued so rarely with Demetre, she had forgotten that he could actually lose his temper: no extravagance or broad theatrics; nearly still, drawn tight and expressionless, and only the paintbrush in his left hand shivered slightly. What do you care? I don’t hallucinate. Do you think I’m going to get violent? None of the old rituals have come back and I’m not hurting anyone. I need to finish this piece and the meds— He stopped, visibly, half a sentence away from cliché: the painter under the maddening spell of la Fée Verte, the poet coughing up his life’s best work in consumptive clots, all the dead and romantic artists who made addiction their inspiration and sickness their muse. Shit, Demetre said, no rise or fall in his tone, and he laid the paintbrush carefully on the table, between deer bones and a half-empty bottle of black cherry soda, and wiped off his palms against his hips. Vetiver, I play Nobody’s Home because I like them, I’d have called Dr. Blair if there were any problems, and this work is not going to get finished if you shout at me. Can you—

Can I what? Leave your brain to chase itself into smaller and smaller circles until you won’t even pick up a brush for fear you’ll fuck it up?

No. When he stepped forward to take the prescription bottle from her hand, she saw how tense his shoulders had become, no matter how gently he spoke. No central air in a house this old; there was sweat even on Demetre’s wrists, but cold sank down her back like winter mercury. Can you not treat me like an idiot.

Like a broken record: a useless spell. If you go back on your medication.

As soon as I finish this piece. I’m not messing with my health in the middle of a project. As calmly as though he had offered a compromise: scanning the printed label, his name and the doctor’s name and the dosage, before he set the bottle down among all his painter’s paraphernalia; a rainstick’s worth in calculated milligrams. When Vetiver shook her head, she would have sworn she could feel the headache’s weight behind her eyes, cancerous, cast-iron. Chez Vous Soon was still a murmur underneath their taut silence, as mindful as a scar. Demetre might have been sarcastic, as he tested the paintbrush’s stiff-dried tip against his thumb, or the words might have been awkwardly sincere: You can put on some other music if you like.

**

You pried the planks up

Strewed salt on the floor

Rosemary at the windows

Rowan over the door

**

The dry and dark morning, branches smooth with last night’s ice and the streets still treacherously glossed, and the kitchenette counter was cold under her palms: salt-and-pepper granite polished across its grain, that had first attracted her to this apartment and its brownstone chill, and her coffee was cooling almost as fast as the raisin bran she had poured milk over was softening into sludge. Still in her bathrobe, her hair sleep-flattened all different ways, Vetiver stirred indifferently at the cereal and wondered if she could still cancel the shoot. Only yellowed light from the bedroom slanted through onto the linoleum, most of the shades down; maybe she could crawl back into bed and sleep this time. But the clunky phone on the countertop was ringing like a carillon wasp, and she must have made some noise that sounded like hello, because the woman on the other end of the line said cautiously, Julia Lawrey?

Vetiver. I go by Vetiver. It’s my middle name. When she looked out the nearest window, the sunlight was as low and leached as the dead of winter. Too tired for humor, her parents’ theories about dull and exotic names, she said only, What can I do for you?

Down the wires, the woman dragged in a breath so heavily that static flurried into Vetiver’s ear. I don’t have the wrong number, do I? This is Carol Meade. I’m calling about Lewis.

Demetre? There was ice closing in her throat, as cold and dense as last night’s storm. The name that she had always known was as slantly true and untrue as her own, and she repeated it like a charm against this stranger’s silence, cross fingers and spit and she would not have to hear what came next. You’re talking about Demetre? What’s happened?

So carefully colorless she could have been no one, the woman named Carol Meade asked, When was the last time you talked to him?

Two or three weeks ago. We didn’t exactly have a fight, however much she would have preferred one. Calling his name, two or three times, before she came back in from the kitchen; cloves and cardamom to strain from the mugful of cider she carried, a steam of spices. The prescription bottle had still been sitting on the crowded table, like a pointer to his singlemindedness, the season that had drawn him in, and he had said over his shoulder, You should understand. I’m painting the fall no one else can see. For the first time, she might have been afraid, but she asked, How do you expect me to see it, then? and Demetre, candlelit like his own effigy, penny for the guy, only laughed. She’ll see you. That’ll be enough. Vetiver’s gaze had frozen onto the canvas: the mounting chaos of paints and chalk and pen-lines, shellacked bone and leaves, stalled-out intimations of figures and anatomies more autumnal than human; but nothing looked back. She? Vetiver said, very softly. Only Liora Elliott had answered, all invitation and uptempo arcana. Show me how the razors shine, how the gods of childhood lied, and how the bones and bitters twine…. By the time Vetiver walked out into the rain, Demetre might have forgotten that she was ever there at all. She said now, and very quietly, We haven’t really spoken since.

Carol Meade made a small, throat-caught sound that Vetiver realized after a moment was a swallowed sob: not colorless, after all; someone. I’m sorry, Ms. Lawrey. I’m so sorry. We thought you knew, and what she should have known, Vetiver did not even have to ask.

She heard the details anyway, while her coffee chilled and her cereal dissolved and the slow pressure that was not a migraine gathered inside her head: how Lewis Duncan Moran had run his junkyard Ford Escort off the highway and into the guardrail at three o’clock in the morning and ninety miles an hour and the paramedics found windshield glass shot through him like ice, precious ore in the earth. The last time Vetiver had ridden in his car, clear September light and the leaves were only starting to turn, she had teased, We’re in a museum piece. I swear it runs on cuneiform and curse tablets—powder-blue and rust, full of transmission growls and brake squeaks, and the back seat had rattled with old tapes whose cases had vanished into the paper-strewn no-man’s-land under the front seats long ago. Demetre had laughed, cranked up A & W another notch. It does stall in certain phases of the moon, and they sang along to medievalist punk all the way home.

Long summer’s day I dig away and lay the bodies in their graves. A short and sun-dying day in waning autumn, and Demetre was ashes already. Vetiver ground her wrist against her eyes, childlike, futilely, to push the tears back. Yes, she said. I’ll come to the memorial. Thank you for telling me, and after she had hung up the phone, still holding onto the receiver as though she had forgotten to let go, what hands were for, she picked it up again, and canceled the shoot with Maria.

**

The leaves have fallen

The shadows spilled to seed

The wind plays through the ruins

The flint and the flower

The toll

Chez vous soon

**

She went to the memorial service in black jeans and a sweater dark enough blue to pass in the right shadows, because she had no suitable dresses. Fifteen minutes on the bus, pockets full of Kleenex and the bright cold grained