Cry of the Nightingales |
Issue 6
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They came for the dogs and they left with a girl.
It struck me as a sort of cruel twist of fate because I’d recognized her the moment I saw her. I knew that face. But I’d never met this girl before, only her doppelgänger from my hometown. The girl I knew, the one from home, used to look up to me. She used to ask my advice about boys and school and theatre. She even called me her sister once, in a letter she wrote me. Her name was Ashley, and at the time I saw her double, I didn’t know if Ashley was doing okay. Last I saw her, she was in a bad relationship with an older boy who was in love with some other girl he used to date and always talked down to her. Last we spoke, she asked me if she should leave him. There’s a heavy responsibility that comes with being someone’s older sibling, and I had never realized this until I was one, until I had failed at being one. I told her she should give him a chance. Because I knew him too—he was my friend—and I didn’t want to believe that he was a bad person. I should’ve been looking out for her best interests, but I was a kid too and I didn’t understand that people could be both good and bad, that not everything was black and white, that he could hurt her and be nice to me. I never imagined that the ghost of her would haunt me more than that decision ever did. I met her double on a Sunday afternoon, after I had just come back from the schoolhouse. I’d been looking for a lost book (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; this one wasn’t even mine, I’d borrowed it from a friend), and when I opened the door, one of the staff members told me a new girl had arrived. She stomped up the stairs from the offices, sunlight catching on strands of her dark auburn hair, and I froze where I stood. She couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible. This was a place where bad kids went, a place where parents sent their rebellious children. Not nice girls like Ashley. Dread pooled in my stomach at the glare on her face. She looked exactly like her, but it was obvious she’d changed. Her edges seemed rougher, eyes harder, shoulders tenser than I’d ever seen them. I remember thinking, You cannot be her, and then, after a moment, This is my fault. Somehow, in my addled mind, I thought my misguidance must’ve led to her downfall. A million questions bubbled up in my throat, scraping at my lips: I wanted to ask what she was doing here, what happened to her, if she was here because of me. Instead, I clamped my mouth shut and scrutinized her as she crossed her arms and leaned against the kitchen counter in a rather aggressive attempt at looking bored. Her glare pierced straight through my armored walls. I felt the faint tremor in my hands start up, and I folded them into my pockets to keep from looking too affected. It took me a few moments of staring to realize that her jagged glances were not directed my way, and that through her hostile front, there was no recognition in her eyes as they swept over me. “This is Julie,” said one of the administrators who had followed her up the stairs (though at a much calmer pace). With that revelation, I suddenly saw the differences: she was taller than the girl I knew, her hair redder, her face a finger thinner, and her eyes—her eyes were what sold me. They were slanted upwards just slightly on the outside corners. That couldn’t be passed off by lighting or aging. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Ashley in this awful place, but the girl in front of me lit my nerve-ends on fire. Run, they screamed, and don’t look back. The five months she lived there, I kept my distance. As all human beings are plagued by an itch to believe in superstition, I felt an aversion to her. She was an omen, and I was wary to find out of what. ~
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MALIA WESSEL won 1st Place of the Non-Fiction Writing Contest. Malia is a recent graduate of the University of East Anglia in England with a Masters in Theatre Directing; they also studied with the Creative Writing: Playwriting and Screenwriting department there. Their first play, Tony the Fantastic Fireman! LIVE: One Show Only was produced at their undergrad University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and nominated for the John Cauble Award for Outstanding One-Act Play at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.
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Before I get into the story of Julie, I feel obliged to explain the circumstances of our meeting. We were in a boarding school in Utah for troubled girls, and I think by that description alone you can understand that we didn’t want to be there. It doesn’t matter what brought us there in our own lives, but that whatever those things were, they led us both to this purgatorial place together.
In retrospect, maybe I was the omen, and this girl didn’t know it.
In retrospect, maybe I was the omen, and this girl didn’t know it.
~
It happened months after she arrived, on one of those sultry, stifling days where you don’t expect anything to happen. The murmur of flies draped over our heads like veils, an insistent white noise that wormed into our skulls and coerced us into lethargy. I wouldn’t have gone if my friend Emma hadn’t jumped up and insisted we get some air. The school grounds were vast, and we made a habit of skirting the edges, as if always on the verge of simply walking off the campus and into a much larger reality. As we ambled along, we alternated between chatting idly, kicking pinecones back and forth, and wallowing in the silence. Silence, it seems to me, has never been absolute—it was just the absence of human intrusion on nature’s soundscape, with only the breeze whistling by and the flora swaying, the fauna humming and cooing from their perches. It was in one of these silences that we heard a whining drown out the rest of the din.
They must have been mutts, Emma concluded, since they didn’t look like any particular breed. I cannot corroborate this as I know nothing about dogs, but all four of them were motley-colored and short-furred and wouldn’t stop licking our hands. As most would in this situation, we led them back to our house.
There were three houses on campus where the students lived, called “Teresa,” “Sacagawea,” and ours: “Nightingale.” They were all named after influential women in history, which seemed sort of mean since our lives were being held in stasis. The staff helped us bring the dogs water and food, and called the number on their tags. They said the man who answered the phone sounded terse and angry, and as we sat by the dogs, we realized one of them was limping.
“She’s hurt,” Emma told the staff. “On her leg.”
The staff members frowned at each other, and after inspecting all four of the canines briefly, they decided to phone the police as well. As students there, we didn’t hear much news, but apparently there’d been an animal abuser in the area whose horses had recently been taken away from him due to severe malnourishment. Looking past their affectionate exteriors, we started to see that these animals weren’t faring so well either.
The owner arrived before the police came, but the staff made us all wait inside. We watched through the window as he took the dogs away. Most meekly followed, but one growled and cowered as he approached. He grabbed that one roughly by the collar and shoved it toward his pick-up. We watched his truck disappear down the road in silence. Several whispered conversations later, the cop car pulled up.
They must have been mutts, Emma concluded, since they didn’t look like any particular breed. I cannot corroborate this as I know nothing about dogs, but all four of them were motley-colored and short-furred and wouldn’t stop licking our hands. As most would in this situation, we led them back to our house.
There were three houses on campus where the students lived, called “Teresa,” “Sacagawea,” and ours: “Nightingale.” They were all named after influential women in history, which seemed sort of mean since our lives were being held in stasis. The staff helped us bring the dogs water and food, and called the number on their tags. They said the man who answered the phone sounded terse and angry, and as we sat by the dogs, we realized one of them was limping.
“She’s hurt,” Emma told the staff. “On her leg.”
The staff members frowned at each other, and after inspecting all four of the canines briefly, they decided to phone the police as well. As students there, we didn’t hear much news, but apparently there’d been an animal abuser in the area whose horses had recently been taken away from him due to severe malnourishment. Looking past their affectionate exteriors, we started to see that these animals weren’t faring so well either.
The owner arrived before the police came, but the staff made us all wait inside. We watched through the window as he took the dogs away. Most meekly followed, but one growled and cowered as he approached. He grabbed that one roughly by the collar and shoved it toward his pick-up. We watched his truck disappear down the road in silence. Several whispered conversations later, the cop car pulled up.
~
I like to remember this story as Emma being in the lead, making the decisions on what to do, and me just following behind without contribution. However, I know that’s not what happened. Emma wanted to go outside, but I suggested we walk along the road. Emma was going to turn back after a few minutes and visit Sacagawea house, but I insisted on walking a bit longer, too drunk on the taste of freedom to be selfless. When we found the dogs, she was going to leave them, because they were probably close to home and their owner would come for them soon, but I wanted to feel like I was doing something useful for once.
And she didn’t notice the limp; I did.
And she didn’t notice the limp; I did.
~
In a way, I don’t know how it happened. The police were there for a while, asking about the dogs, and then they were asking about Julie. The transition was so seamless I almost missed it.
“Is she your roommate?” they asked (and I should say They, the They we all know and reference but never specify beyond that because They never earned the dignity of being someone; They are the worst of authoritarians and dictators, They who rule over our lives with iron fists, who try to mold us into mini-versions of Them, and They will not be granted identities by the likes of me).
“Yes,” I said, “she is,” and it felt like a death sentence in my mouth.
Another damning thing I failed to mention: we now shared a room. It had been an unexpected change, since our previous roommates had both left quite recently and that somehow meant we had to fall in with each other. Our forced proximity had been going on for about a month, simply, I think, because the weavers of our lives yearn to be seen. In this time, she had dyed her hair a shocking blonde, and I had started to forget the specifics of Ashley’s face. When I tried to conjure up her image, all I saw was Julie. Without the two to compare, I’d begun to forget how similar they really were.
The questions seemed innocent enough, but the fact that there were questions at all had me on red alert. My answers became monosyllabic and vague, a feeling of foreboding foxing along the edges of my mind.
Finally, They (They, They, They—say it enough times and it means nothing; let’s show Them how it feels to be us) went outside to talk to Julie herself, who at some point earlier in that afternoon had wandered out onto the lawn. The windows were pulling at me and I drifted toward them as if in a trance, my limbs moving without prompting, a marionette whose only thought was to obey the strings. I landed at the cozy bay windows with a cushioned bench attached—the ideal spot to read a novel in inclement weather; just add pillows, a favorite sweater, maybe a hot cup of tea—that looked out over the porch and the grounds beyond.
I saw her there, standing with her back to the house, looking up at the sky, her clothes ruffling around her in the wind like feathers. Her white-gold hair blazed painfully bright, a second sun competing with the one above. Icarus, I thought distractedly, you’ve flown too close. Yet there was a strange kernel of hope in me that believed she would spread her arms and fly away into the sky where she belonged before the men in uniform reached her. I wondered if she knew these were her last moments of freedom, at least for the foreseeable future. But then again, were we ever really free? Liberty is not a state of being, but a constant state of becoming—and our becomings had all been nipped in the bud. I felt, for a moment, that I was witnessing her becoming, and that these shadows of men were descending to cut her down.
I never saw that familiar face again, except with a different pair of eyes. (And by then, Ashley didn’t really look like Julie anymore—they had grown apart in appearances—and anyway, they weren’t ever really alike, were they? Just enough to draw me in, to make me grasp and scramble at the walls of this chasm I had fallen into long ago. Because behind those features they were vastly different people, so much so I marvel how I ever confused them: Julie with her raucous, unchecked laugh I rarely ever got to hear, and her wild nature, and the way she would never give in to the Man, never let anyone tell her what to do, that flawed and galling wonder, that firework which burned itself out too quickly to enjoy being a firework, that incredibly human human being; Ashley with her saucer-wide eyes and naive statements, like a floppy-eared puppy tripping over her own feet, a crowd-pleaser, especially to parents, and ever-coaxing smiles from the people around her, a good girl, They called her, such a nice, good girl, and I think secretly she hated that, but would never say so, would never want to seem rude. Of course their eyes were different, of course, because eyes are the windows to the soul, aren’t they, and their souls were nothing alike at all.)
The policemen talked to Julie for a short while, before she tried to run. She didn’t get far. The first officer grabbed one arm, and the second grabbed the other. Her hair flashed as she whipped her head down to the second officer’s arm, and by his pained exclamation and sudden recoil I think she bit him. By the time They’d wrestled her to the ground and clamped handcuffs on her wrists, she had stopped fighting. The sunlight left her hair, and she looked to me like a broken doll smashed on the floor, but even through the double-paned glass, I could hear her keening. The wail of lost souls, of banshees in the dark, of a small bird fallen from its nest, too young to fly.
The staff ushered me away from the window at that point, so I never saw her leave. We were all made to sit at the table or at the couch away from the windows (herded together like livestock, caged in our own shit and sick) so we couldn’t see what was happening to Julie. But we could still see the sky. It was the lightest powder blue, with wisps of white clouds pinned against it. The tips of mountains cleaved the air, their peaks lined with the last vestiges of snowfall. And swooping across the stagnancy of it all was a flock of tiny birds, so far away they looked like white lines, so close I could see the tilt in their wings as they turned.
Around me, the other girls were either silent or crying, not understanding what was going on, lashed together in a shared grief. At that moment, we were her lost disciples and she our martyred savior. No one else could live up to the legend of Julie, this girl who was always too guarded to let any of us in. We barely knew her, but we all remembered her.
In the end, They never told us why They took her away. Knowing her history, I could assume many things. But to me, it seemed like a warning to us all: that even in the arms of Florence, we would never be safe.
“Is she your roommate?” they asked (and I should say They, the They we all know and reference but never specify beyond that because They never earned the dignity of being someone; They are the worst of authoritarians and dictators, They who rule over our lives with iron fists, who try to mold us into mini-versions of Them, and They will not be granted identities by the likes of me).
“Yes,” I said, “she is,” and it felt like a death sentence in my mouth.
Another damning thing I failed to mention: we now shared a room. It had been an unexpected change, since our previous roommates had both left quite recently and that somehow meant we had to fall in with each other. Our forced proximity had been going on for about a month, simply, I think, because the weavers of our lives yearn to be seen. In this time, she had dyed her hair a shocking blonde, and I had started to forget the specifics of Ashley’s face. When I tried to conjure up her image, all I saw was Julie. Without the two to compare, I’d begun to forget how similar they really were.
The questions seemed innocent enough, but the fact that there were questions at all had me on red alert. My answers became monosyllabic and vague, a feeling of foreboding foxing along the edges of my mind.
Finally, They (They, They, They—say it enough times and it means nothing; let’s show Them how it feels to be us) went outside to talk to Julie herself, who at some point earlier in that afternoon had wandered out onto the lawn. The windows were pulling at me and I drifted toward them as if in a trance, my limbs moving without prompting, a marionette whose only thought was to obey the strings. I landed at the cozy bay windows with a cushioned bench attached—the ideal spot to read a novel in inclement weather; just add pillows, a favorite sweater, maybe a hot cup of tea—that looked out over the porch and the grounds beyond.
I saw her there, standing with her back to the house, looking up at the sky, her clothes ruffling around her in the wind like feathers. Her white-gold hair blazed painfully bright, a second sun competing with the one above. Icarus, I thought distractedly, you’ve flown too close. Yet there was a strange kernel of hope in me that believed she would spread her arms and fly away into the sky where she belonged before the men in uniform reached her. I wondered if she knew these were her last moments of freedom, at least for the foreseeable future. But then again, were we ever really free? Liberty is not a state of being, but a constant state of becoming—and our becomings had all been nipped in the bud. I felt, for a moment, that I was witnessing her becoming, and that these shadows of men were descending to cut her down.
I never saw that familiar face again, except with a different pair of eyes. (And by then, Ashley didn’t really look like Julie anymore—they had grown apart in appearances—and anyway, they weren’t ever really alike, were they? Just enough to draw me in, to make me grasp and scramble at the walls of this chasm I had fallen into long ago. Because behind those features they were vastly different people, so much so I marvel how I ever confused them: Julie with her raucous, unchecked laugh I rarely ever got to hear, and her wild nature, and the way she would never give in to the Man, never let anyone tell her what to do, that flawed and galling wonder, that firework which burned itself out too quickly to enjoy being a firework, that incredibly human human being; Ashley with her saucer-wide eyes and naive statements, like a floppy-eared puppy tripping over her own feet, a crowd-pleaser, especially to parents, and ever-coaxing smiles from the people around her, a good girl, They called her, such a nice, good girl, and I think secretly she hated that, but would never say so, would never want to seem rude. Of course their eyes were different, of course, because eyes are the windows to the soul, aren’t they, and their souls were nothing alike at all.)
The policemen talked to Julie for a short while, before she tried to run. She didn’t get far. The first officer grabbed one arm, and the second grabbed the other. Her hair flashed as she whipped her head down to the second officer’s arm, and by his pained exclamation and sudden recoil I think she bit him. By the time They’d wrestled her to the ground and clamped handcuffs on her wrists, she had stopped fighting. The sunlight left her hair, and she looked to me like a broken doll smashed on the floor, but even through the double-paned glass, I could hear her keening. The wail of lost souls, of banshees in the dark, of a small bird fallen from its nest, too young to fly.
The staff ushered me away from the window at that point, so I never saw her leave. We were all made to sit at the table or at the couch away from the windows (herded together like livestock, caged in our own shit and sick) so we couldn’t see what was happening to Julie. But we could still see the sky. It was the lightest powder blue, with wisps of white clouds pinned against it. The tips of mountains cleaved the air, their peaks lined with the last vestiges of snowfall. And swooping across the stagnancy of it all was a flock of tiny birds, so far away they looked like white lines, so close I could see the tilt in their wings as they turned.
Around me, the other girls were either silent or crying, not understanding what was going on, lashed together in a shared grief. At that moment, we were her lost disciples and she our martyred savior. No one else could live up to the legend of Julie, this girl who was always too guarded to let any of us in. We barely knew her, but we all remembered her.
In the end, They never told us why They took her away. Knowing her history, I could assume many things. But to me, it seemed like a warning to us all: that even in the arms of Florence, we would never be safe.