Nowhereville, p.11
Nowhereville, page 11
“Okay,” Maureen said aloud. At least this wiki was convinced that the idea that the azure dishes somehow stained their owners as ridiculous. Because of course that was ridiculous. Mildred/Hortense with the mushroom cap hairstyle was crazy. But there was still the fact of the luminous azure scarf. And the faceless woman in her foam art.
Maureen asked her phone, “Search for Ingrid LeFevre.”
The first and second hits directed to LeFevre & Co. The third link was productive, being a history of the LeFevre family. She scrolled past the bios of company founder Arvid LeFevre and his brother Osvald until she found what she was looking for.
Ingrid LeFevre was pictured, an old-timey photographic portrait that had a slight plum-colored hue to it. She was a white woman with wide eyes, a heart-shaped face with her ringleted hair fashioned into a bun on top of her head.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Maureen muttered.
The dress Ingrid wore was an exact replica of the ornate gown that the many-faced lady wore on those plates.
2
“Where did you get that lipstick, girl?” asked Diane, one of the secretaries, when she walked into the office.
“I love those shoes,” said Justin, one of her fellow instructors.
She passed an obstacle course of admiration before she made it into the ladies’ room. She stood in front of the mirror, shocked and unsurprised at the same time.
Maureen was covered in azure. Everything was beautifully and terrifyingly blue. Bright, electric blue. The simple black tunic dress she’d thrown on was blue. As blue as the scarf around her neck. And her shoes. And her makeup, both lipstick and eyeshadow.
“I look like a damn smurf,” she said to her reflection. Or that little girl in the Willie Wonka movie who turned into a blueberry.
Even so, Maureen had to admit, she looked good. Azure was her color. It played nicely against her dark skin.
She reached up to flake off some of the eyeshadow. It was a little too thickly applied; she’d been running late. A piece of it chipped off. It had an oddly solid texture. The chip hit the bathroom counter. And shattered, like a piece of pottery. Maureen felt a tickle at the spot where the flake of eyeshadow had been. It was a pinprick, small but insistent. She ignored it, and focused on the piece of eyeshadow on the counter. It was jagged and crystalline in structure. She touched it.
“Ouch!”
It stabbed her finger before turning into powder. She put her finger into her mouth and slowly backed away from the mirror.
Maureen didn’t have to teach any classes that day. She just had office hours, during which no student visited save during finals. She closed the door to the room and continued searching on the internet for Ingrid LeFevre.
She found a death notice from a month ago.
INGRID LEFEVRE (March 30, 1926–April 9, 2017). Heiress to the LeFevre company. Socialite, trailblazer, patron of the arts, collector of oddities. Survived by her daughter Harriet Ohm. In lieu of flowers, please donate to the LeFevre Foundation.
“Collector of oddities.” The phrase caused her spine to tingle with disgust. She saw the silent stares of black lamp boys and the glittering eyes of the skulls. She no longer liked the plates. They were no longer whimsical.
2
“Harriet Ohm?”
“Speaking.” Maureen immediately recognized the fluty voice.
“Hello. This is Maureen Sexton. We met yesterday. At the estate sale on Sunday?”
“Are you scheduling a delivery? Let me get the number of the moving company—”
“No. I’m not having anything delivered. You gave me the dinnerware? The Azure Porcelain?”
“Oh, yes! I remember you. Quite the lucky girl, you are! You know, they are collector’s items . . .”
Maureen bristled at being called girl. She let it slide though. There were more important things to contend with at the moment. More of her eyeshadow had crumbled off. Chips of azure pottery littered her work desk. “Was your mother the model for the lady in the dress?”
“Why, yes. She was quite the belle de jour! Her father thought it would be a scream to have her immortalized in ceramic.”
“I . . . thank you. Thank you very much,” said Maureen. She hung up the phone; she knew what she had to do.
Immortalized in ceramic.
Even now, her bones made a hollow scraping sound like the tines of a fork against fine china.
2
By the time she got home, the lines in Maureen’s hand were blue, like veins of lapis lazuli. The glazed fingernails on her left hand were fissured like the surface of an antique vase.
Maureen stumbled into the kitchen where the plates were. The color was no longer intense. The design was washed out, the color of faded blue jeans. All the plates were ghosts of what they had been. All save one.
The faceless woman was no longer sitting in her circle. She stood, facing Maureen. The void where her face should have been was an undulating, turbulent oval of lovely blue. It was both an eye and a mouth. The nonsense script encircling the rim of the plate burned azure.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Maureen picked up the plate and smashed it on the floor.
It shattered in large pieces, the large blue void still intact. Did the fragment look like a heart-shaped face? Maureen looked at the other plates. She had a hunch. She watched as the ceramic animal faces—eyes, whiskers, and noses—blurred inexorably into pools of azure underglaze.
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Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), the young adult novel Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013), and The Nectar of Nightmares (Dim Shores, 2015). He lives in his native Washington, DC, in a library hoard full of weird books. Website: craiglaurancegidney.com. Instagram, Tumblr & Twitter: ethereallad.
The Vestige
Lynda E. Rucker
David woke as he was roughly jarred in his bunk. Halfway between sleep and wakefulness, he cried out—and was surprised when a soothing female voice, heavily accented, replied in English. “They are just moving us to a different rail gauge,” she said. “They are going to pick us up with the crane now.”
Gauge. The rail. He was slowly coming back to himself. He was on a night train out of Bucharest to Moldova, and he must be at the border because he’d read about this, that car by car, they would actually be picked up and deposited on a separate track.
The voice said, “It is for defense, you know? From Soviet times.” He said, “How did you know I speak English?”
“You woke up once and you said, ‘What’s happening?’ That—what is it you say? That let the cat out of the bag, right?”
He smiled at her, even though the light in the sleeping compartment was too dim for her to see him, and rolled onto his stomach to gaze at the sullen debris of the rail yard and the grey lightening sky raked by bare winter branches. Through the night, he had imagined that he wasn’t sleeping at all as the heater blasted stifling hot air, leaving his lips and skin and eyes parched. But now he remembered stirring out of fitful dreams once, when someone came in and claimed the opposite bunk. He’d felt briefly disappointed before falling asleep again; he’d been lucky to get a compartment to himself, and he hated the idea of sleeping with a stranger so close and the inevitable awkwardness that would ensue in the morning when they couldn’t communicate. It hadn’t occurred to him for some reason that it would be a girl, which changed everything. Although he didn’t actually know what she looked like, she sounded attractive.
“I’m Anna,” she said and stuck an arm out across the gap between them. He reached out as well. Her grip was surprisingly firm. “You’re American, right?”
“Anna,” he said. “That’s my cousin’s middle name. The one I’m visiting. She used to call herself that sometimes when we were teenagers.”
She said, “I don’t care what your cousin is named. What is your name?”
“David,” he said. “How’d you know I’m American? The air of general cluelessness, right?” She laughed. He had made her laugh. That was good. He wasn’t used to being the kind of guy who made attractive girls laugh. He could tell she was rummaging around for something and then her face bloomed pale and ghostly above a flashlight. “This is me,” she said. He’d already made a picture of her in his mind, and the face before him didn’t match it—and why would it? She was less conventionally pretty than the Anna he’d conjured up. On the other hand, her features were more interesting, and the imagined-Anna couldn’t quite hold her own before her flesh-and-blood counterpart and disintegrated with less than a whimper. The girl across from him had dark hair and wide eyes, a strong nose and chin, and an interesting scar above her left eyebrow that, like its right twin, was decisively unplucked. As she grew older, he thought, she would be what people used to call a “handsome woman.”
He said, “Let’s turn the lights on.”
“No, it’s more fun like this. Like secrets. Here. Now you.” She passed the flashlight across to him. He had the absurd sensation that he was auditioning for something.
“Ooh,” she said. “You are very handsome. This is good news for me, I think.”
He was a little taken aback, even though he’d heard somewhere that European girls could be more forward than American ones.
“Oh!” she said. “Listen!” He did, but he couldn’t hear anything. “Now we must turn the light on. They are coming to check our passports.” She was rummaging in her bag again, and he reached over by the door and fumbled for the light. They blinked at each other in its dull incandescence, at the drab fake wood paneling of the train car, the worn and not-quite-clean look of things. He said, “You were right about not turning the light on,” and rummaged for his own passport.
But it wasn’t in the pocket of his backpack where he knew he’d stashed it; it didn’t seem to be anywhere else either, he quickly established, checking his bunk, the floor around him, digging into the bag itself and pulling out fistfuls of socks and T-shirts and underwear.
“It’s gone,” he said, “someone’s taken it.” Someone had come in while he, or they, were sleeping and taken his passport. But who would do that? Who would know he had a passport worth taking? Had someone overheard him buying his ticket and followed him to see which compartment he took? Not Anna; what kind of thief stole from somebody and then bunked with them? He could hear something now in the corridor, voices as they neared.
Anna tossed her covers back. “Get in my bunk!” He was too astonished to protest, even when she reached over and killed the light and demanded, “Give me your blankets and pillow!”
“What?”
“You cannot travel without a passport and visa! Are you crazy or something?” She was acting as though he’d be thrown into prison, put up before a firing squad. He said, “I’ll just explain—” but her panic was contagious. “Get down under my covers!” she said. “They will think I am the only one in the compartment. A messy sleeper, maybe, but alone.” She snatched at his arm across the gap between them.
Later he would wonder why he obeyed her so unquestioningly. It must have been the disorientation of being woken, of the strange surroundings, of the lost passport. He burrowed down in her bunk. If it hadn’t been so unbearably hot, it might have been intoxicating; he was tangled up in her bare legs, which were hard and muscled. She snarled at him, “Don’t say a word,” moments before someone rapped at the door of the compartment. He had a final moment of wondering if it might not be a better idea to come clean with the passport officials, surely they’d seen it before, but the door slid open, and it was too late. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying; they were speaking either Romanian or Moldovan, but there were two of them, a man and a woman. Anna made her voice sound sleepy and reproachful, and he could tell she was saying no, no, no as they reached for the light switch. She must have convinced them, for they stepped into the lighted corridor to examine her documents. They all sounded awfully chummy, he thought. Maybe it was some kind of trick played by all three of them. Maybe it was an elaborate scheme to get him into some kind of trouble, plant drugs on him, disappear him to some unknown cell block in the former Soviet Union. Maybe it was like that one movie he saw about the rich people who paid lots of money to torture tourists. Maybe they were terrorists. Maybe he was really, really paranoid.
Anna was laughing now, and a twinge of jealousy surprised him—hadn’t he made her laugh the same way just a few minutes ago? She hadn’t thought he was funny at all. She was making fun of him. Briefly, dangerously, he thought he ought to jump out and surprise them all.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, they are gone.” She flicked back the covers. “You can go now.”
He said, daring, “I was hoping that was what passed for a courtship ritual in your country,” but she didn’t laugh again, and maybe the vocabulary was too difficult, but he felt himself flush as he settled himself back on his own bunk. She tossed over his blanket and pillow and reached into her own bag.
“Hungry?” she said. “Thirsty?” She passed him something wrapped in a napkin and a tall, plastic water bottle. The thing in the napkin proved to be a bit of sweet, crumbly cake.
“This isn’t water,” he said, and she laughed. “Of course it is not water,” she said. “It’s wine. My family made it. All Moldovans make wine.” He took an experimental sip—he didn’t know anything about wine, but it seemed okay. She laughed again. “In Moldova, we drink it like shots, like this,” and she mimed doing it.
“But I don’t have a shot glass,” he said.
“Never mind,” she said still laughing. “Noroc! You have to say it. It means good luck. Drink some more, and then give it here to me. You need some good luck.”
He did as she said and passed it back. She took a swig as well and returned his “Noroc!” Now she was looking at him intently as he finished the slice of cake. “Do you have any money?” she said. “Or have you lost that too?”
He checked. This time at greater leisure, if indeed it could be called that, with the frantic taking and shaking out of everything in his pack to discover that no, he had nothing: no passport, no money, no credit cards, not even his phone, which he’d dutifully used to photograph all of his important documents in case of just such an incident.
“We will need money to bribe the officials when we get off the train in Chisinau,” she said. “I have some.”
“A bribe, really?” he said. That sounded dangerous. And unnecessary. And dramatic.
“Of course,” she said sharply.
If this was a scam that she was a part of, it had to be one of the weirdest ones ever. Maybe it was some kind of mail-order bride thing. David tried to figure out how that might work. He said experimentally, “I’m engaged, you know. To someone back in America.”
She was counting out her own bills, and she looked at him. “What has that got to do with anything?”
He was embarrassed, self-conscious, suddenly all too aware of his helplessness in a foreign place. “I don’t know,” he said. He thought about Claudia back at home, prickly and impatient, to whom he was sort of engaged. In a manner of speaking.
“Right,” she said. “I will pay the officials. You can pay me back when you get back to America, whatever, okay? Once we are off this train, just follow me and don’t talk. And do what I say.”
He said, “My cousin’s meeting me at the station actually. That’s what I’m doing here, visiting Natalie. She works here. With the Peace Corps.”
“Good, then your cousin can fix things for you I am sure, but”—Anna’s tone darkened—“let me get you off the train first. Trust me on this.”
Did he have any choice?
2
The sun was reluctantly burning its way through the clouds when they arrived at the station in Chisinau. In their tiny cabin prior to deboarding, Anna had dressed with skilled modesty and made herself up, transforming into something formidable in a miniskirt and spiked heels and (David thought) too much makeup. She ushered him past officials as she said she would, shoving small wads of cash into their hands and chattering away, and then they were safe and outside the train station, yet there was no Natalie.
“Perhaps you can phone your cousin,” Anna suggested, and he’d had her number but stored in the phone that was missing along with everything else that mattered.
“I have her address!” he remembered, and he dropped his bag and went pawing through it again, and this time, thank goodness, finally something going right, he found the little memo book where he’d scribbled it down in case his phone battery died along with a folded-up map he’d printed off Google.
Anna took the memo book from him and looked at the address with an expression he couldn’t read. When she lowered the paper, she said, “Is this some kind of joke?”
He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.
Anna said, “This is my address. How did you get my address?”
This was too much. This was too far. This was definitely an elaborate scam although he couldn’t make head or tails of it.
He said, “You must think I’m an idiot,” and he heard Claudia saying it to him as well. Lost your passport? And your money? Went off with some woman . . . honestly, David, do you expect me to believe this?
I don’t really believe this, he thought. “It must be some kind of mistake,” he said. “I must have written the address down wrong,” although he knew he hadn’t, knew he’d been painstaking because he’d been so worried about getting lost in a foreign country.
Anna looked both angry and hurt. Of course she was pretending, he told himself. “What is wrong with you?” she said. “I helped you when I didn’t have to. Go on then. Go to your embassy, or go try to find your cousin at my flat. I have had enough of your problems.”
