Coverage In Sporadic Light

Glitter dust gives her sinewy hair a faint shimmer as she crosses the room—better in this dying light than in the heat of day. He recognizes it from early decades frequenting dingy clubs, where the glitter goes on bodies, too. But not hers: a white long-sleeve blankets skin, with blue overalls covering the shirt.

It is a look that comes in cycles, its vogue determined by what the parent would have continued if they hadn’t borne a child, and the mantle is for the child to reclaim.

It takes twenty years for a return of this style—albeit derivative—the result of having nowhere else to take it. Pieces you might have worn in youth—and it depends on whom you presently see as youth, he thinks.

She never says how long she’d adorned such glitter—hair, anywhere—and he can indulge questions like that no longer. He is out of indulgences.

“Can I have my water now?” he says.

“Will it bring you health?”

“I suppose,” he responds.

“Do you have a pre-existing condition of parchment?”

“How can a person be paper?” he says, forgetting—until the bilabial stop—that he shouldn’t get smart.

Her top lip wavers on both sides. Not a twitch. “You may not. Have water now.”

She resumes the stare, a woeful deadness. When her head tilts, he notices the returning shimmer and thinks of Halloween costumes his daughter wore. Not the same luster—these are thin flakes. A princess ordinarily stitches glittering jewels on her sash while fairies affix theirs to wands. Adults place them atop their hair and breasts.

Uncomfortable minutes elapse. When he’s done studying today’s disposition, finished looking for answers he knows aren’t coming, she retrieves her recorder.

“We’ll try again. How do they do it?”

“For the hundredth time, who are they?” he asks.

She doesn’t like when he inflects his tone. This time is no different. She walks toward the speaker and light fixture.

“No. Not the strobe. Not again.”

“Then tell me how they do it.”

She has bored out most of his soul by basking him under a lamp head designed to give quick, alternating-bright-then-dark-then-bright sequences of light while aurally displacing screech rock music at higher-than-physician-recommended decibels. All night.

During the day, he faces the sun, its high arc pegs Earth at the midpoint between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. There are no cars, trees, or people visible through the vaulted window. He prays a power company rep comes and asks why she runs the heater all day. ‘Help! Help!’ he would yell if that knock comes at the door.

She has a job or goes somewhere during the day. Her car starts not long after the front door shuts, itself occurring shortly after she leaves his side.

He has nothing left to give—not even excrement—which she cleans in a plastic bunny mask. He prefers her in the mask—its plastic vacancy, less dead. She scrubs on all fours, humming a jaunty tune. He senses the nearing end, so he resolves to go fishing.

“I started fifteen years ago. I hadn’t much experience in desk work. Sold phone cases in the mall. Before that, a little construction,” he says; the words come harder than they did yesterday.

“You told me that already! I don’t read traitor lit. I won’t feel bad for your family.”

“It’s context. Had no idea what to do with life or how to feed my daughter. She’s about your age,” he says, measured.

“She will not stay young forever. She will age and get sick.”

“Not if she starved.”

“Oh, please, if anyone’s done the starving, it’s been you. Fifteen years’ worth! Why did you let them do it? If you tell me, maybe it will save your soul.”

By now, she’s walked back from the wall and is standing over him. At this angle, her chin folds, and her face grows. It’s not the first time she’s mentioned this soul appearing to elude her.

“I will tell you again what I’ve told you a hundred times. I go to my desk every morning. I look at my list. I call my list,” he says, pausing for labored breath. “I ask the person on the list if they would entertain a better price. If they say yes, I ask them questions. Based on their questions, the computer gives me a price. If they say no, I ask why not and log the reason. If they say yes, I take their credit card number and help them cancel their existing policy.”

His hands fall to his side, and his head rolls away from the double-face.

Her jaws and fists stay clenched. Her eyes look around his body, also perceiving he’s at the end. The next question proves he won’t leave the table.

“And did you tell your list the other price—the one that comes later? When their child got sick? When their forms were not proper?”

“I—I, I need water,” he says. The sentence takes all the nothing he had left.

“When the Messenger wrote to me from his cage, he told me it would take more than just one person—it would take every puzzle piece falling into place to have our victory. The Messenger took matters into his own hands for me, for your daughter. Even you—and you ignored him. You won’t ignore me.”

Grasping her message—the last thing he ever will—he hasn’t the strength to part his lips. They are dry and stuck.

His shutting eyes suggest the reason for her shimmer. This woman heralds a deeper Message—one far older than the script he shared for fifteen years.

She’s a type of angel; he’ll give her that.