Balance - NYC Midnight CWC 2009, Challenge 3

NYC Midnight: Challenge #3
Group 7
Genre: Open
Location: Abandoned Factory
Object: Stick of Butter


She seems, from below, impossibly tiny. Arms little more than twigs. Prominent knees protruding from beneath her skirt. Faded pink sundress hanging from too-thin shoulders. She should look ridiculous up there in the rafters. I should laugh at the sight of her, hand-me-down clothes and cropped blonde locks, hacked with the scissors she found in my mother’s sewing basket.
Something about her silences me. Her white toes curl around the edge of the beam. She tilts her chin up. She lifts her arms in a slow fluid motion, thin fingers reaching for the watery sunlight that filters through the grimy windows above.
In this moment she is beautiful.

*

It was the only place I was ever alone.
At home it was Karen’s mushy music and Karen’s giggling friends and endless sighing and eye-rolling about the trouble with little brothers.
I liked the old factory, even though it was three miles by bike out the old town line. O’Neill’s Shoes, it still said on the outside, the faded white paint peeling off in flakes.
It smelled inside. Not bad, exactly, just stale and musty. There was dust everywhere and the floors creaked, but I liked the beams that criss-crossed the room high above and the rows of small square windows that let in a spooky, shadowed half-light.
One day when I got there, another bike was leaning against the building. It was small and pink.
I tiptoed inside and looked around, but I didn’t see anyone.
Then I heard a giggle above.
I looked up and saw the short girl from school, the one with the blonde curly hair whose mom had left town. (Right about the same time that Mr. Wilson the principal got thrown out by his wife. I knew that bit because I heard Mom telling Aunt Dot.) The girl was sitting on a beam, swinging her skinny legs.
“Hey,” she said with a grin that seemed too big for her face. “I’m Cora.”
I found myself grinning back.
“I know,” I said. “I’m Simon.”

*

We always biked out together after that. Cora brought stuff along in her old green rucksack, like a camping lantern and some old cushions for us to sit on.
Once she brought a picnic – pickles, baloney, apples, two buns and a stick of butter. She forgot a knife for the butter, though.
I laughed at her. She laughed at me back.
“Who needs a knife?” she said.
She unwrapped the butter and took a great big bite out of it, as if it was a chocolate bar.
“That’s gross,” I said.
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’s good. Try it.”
Her thin hand thrust the butter at me, and I leaned forward to take a bite.
It was no Baby Ruth. But actually it wasn’t bad.

*

I almost kissed her there. Just once.
We were fourteen.
She climbed into the rafters like she always had, using an old countertop and shelves to scramble up until she could reach the iron rail she used as a handhold.
I never did like climbing. I watched from the ground as she mounted the beam and got to her feet, hands on hips, pointed elbows jutting out.
She twirled on one leg in a slow, effortless spin that stopped my heart.
She was grinning triumphantly when she climbed back down.
The triumph faded when she looked at my face.
“Don’t look so worried, silly. As if I’d ever fall.”
She hugged me then.
She felt soft. I caught a whiff of something in her curls, something sweet and flowery that reminded me of summer.
She lingered for a moment. I had lost my ability to move or speak.
She drew away.

*

The first time we drank beer, we were sitting cross-legged on the old cushions in the darkest corner. She brought four bottles in her rucksack. Her dad wouldn’t miss them, she said.
It tasted awful. I didn’t finish mine.
She was on her third when she blurted it out.
“My father touches me.”
I didn’t get it. I just stared at her.
Then it came pouring out, the words a staccato volley that ricocheted off the walls and fired back at us so hard they hurt. I sat with my knees drawn up tight against me, hugging them to my chest, as if I was the one in need of protection.
I don’t remember the words she used. Only these:
“I don’t see why. I’m not even pretty.”
I reached out and stroked her cheek, then buried my hand in her hair.
“Yes, you are.”
We sat like that for a long time.
The next day she came to my house to get Mom’s scissors.

*

I could have asked her to live with us. I could have called Karen. She was living in the city by then. She could have helped Cora get away.
For a long time those thoughts ran around my brain in an endless circle until I wanted to scream. Sometimes I did scream. I’d pedal out to the factory as fast as I could and I’d stand in the middle of the room and I’d yell until the birds flew out of the rafters.
I thought, then, that I could have stopped her.
I don’t think so now.
I think everything that was in her, all the pain and the darkness that was swallowing her up, I think that’s what propelled her. I think the force that made her take that step was too big, too powerful, for me or her or anyone else to overcome.
In my dreams I never see the end. The slow-motion plummet. The thin white crumpled body.
I see her in that one moment only. She’s poised there, luminous in shadow – toes curled around the beam, chin uptilted, arms upstretched as she reaches for the light.
She is always beautiful.