The Authentic Eclectic
Now That You Know
This wet, salty thing that she held in her hands could have been strung on a wire for a necklace. Or stretched between telephone poles to make a globular, shimmering bird. She wiped it on her jeans.
“You did not know this?” The voice was gentle.
“I knew.” Because the cat had been there since she was born, and last year it was gone. Besides, it was in movies and books and adults talked about it sometimes. But that was alright for other people, or distant relatives; and it was sort of alright for animals, too. Not for sisters.
The androgynous person in the wide-brimmed hat was a stranger. They had inserted themselves in the interval between the hospital staff and her parents. “Give her some time alone,” somebody had said.
But she wasn’t alone. She was with this strange old person.
“So now that you know,” they replied, as though her answer had been its opposite, “what will you do?”
She stared at them, lip trembling, fighting back another bawling fit. But there was something about this stranger that comforted her. It was almost a kind of aura, a cocoon. “Do?”
They wiped a tear from her cheek and brought it to their lips, then blew on it gently. It inflated like a rainbow bubble until it was larger than her head. They gave it a hard puff to send it bobbing into the air.
She gasped. “How did you do that?” Her eyes followed the mysterious motions of her tear, and its reflection in the mirror.
“What will you do?” they said.
“I’m not going to do anything,” she sighed exasperatedly, kicking a leg. “I’m gonna go home and play with Nell’s toys and hog the TV and it won’t matter and everything sucks.”
“Oh, no,” they said with a secretive smile. “No, no. You can’t do that, now that you know.”
She stared at them. Their eyes were somewhere between brown and blue. It wouldn’t manifest.
“People go to great trouble to learn what you know now. So young.”
“What’s the good in knowing that? So I’ll be like Nell someday. So what? Am I supposed to not go to school anymore or something?”
They twisted her hair up in their fingers like a balloon artist and produced a sensational braiding structure that resembled a swan. She gazed at herself in awe. Maybe this person did know something. It was difficult to imagine them cursing at the traffic like her father, or batting her away and falling asleep on the couch after work like her mother.
They lifted the fresh paper from the hospital bed and offered her the side of it. She took the waxy sheet in her fingers, feeling its texture. They nodded encouragingly.
They went to the sink and turned on the tap, beckoning. Together they ran her fingers under the cool water. The stranger was grinning as though they were jumping on a trampoline.
They crouched on the floor like a bat folded up under their long cloak and she knelt beside them. There was nothing at all under the bed. The room was tediously clinical.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
The sound of footsteps echoed in the hall. Swift as a swallow, they tore the paper sheet into a perfect square and pressed it into her pocket. “Now that you know,” they whispered with a trusting smile.
She couldn’t say exactly when they exited and her parents reentered, only that somehow it all occurred without them ever spotting the stranger in that long, narrow hall. “How are you doing?” asked her mother, whose own eyes were red.
She glanced at the mirror. Her hair was back to normal. The tear-bubble was gone. “OK,” she replied, though it still hurt like hell.
On the drive home, she took the paper from her pocket and carefully folded it into a frog.
“What’s that, sweetie?” her father asked the rearview mirror.
She rested the little frog on the seat beside her, pressing its back to make it hop. “Just something I know.”
