Page 18 - WTP Vol. VIII#2

When Bluejay (continued from preceding page) cake yourself.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Jodi said cruelly, brought back to reality. “Why on earth would I do that? You know I’ve got better things to do than cook.” She thought of the alum crystals she liked to make in glass pie plates with Anya, sheer and clear; the pinto beans miraculously sprouting in jars lined with damp paper towels on a shelf in their garage; the rings of Saturn Aaron Frey had showed her through the refracting lenses of his telescope in January, when the skies were particularly clear. But not this coming year. Never again.
She’d be in ninth grade in the fall—after the burning of Zozobra, Fiesta. She’d be taking Algebra and Earth Science this year, besides the other stuff, at the prep school on upper Canyon Road with its low roofs that had been science labs before. In seventh grade she and Anya had climbed up Cerro Gordo (the “fat hill”) at lunch break to feed apples to an old swaybacked bay horse on the other side of barbed wire, while their classmates sat in closed groups in the quad, or in the smoking shack up by the river, trading stories in a language of their own. In eighth grade Quinn had taught her to play chess, touching her hand sometimes as if deliberately when taking a knight or bishop, and she would spend the hour trying desper- ately to beat him, to outsmart his quicksilver mind. This year—what would she do? She couldn’t even imagine. She’d be completely on her own.
But Rachel Dean was happy to write out the recipe for her. And greatly encouraged by that, by the promise of domesticity and household bliss for her unruly daugh- ter with no dress sense and no manners, Jodi’s mother asked their tall, immaculate hostess in an airy dress
of dotted Swiss if she would mind showing Jodi how to apply make-up. She’d been a model for Bonne Bell before she moved to Santa Fe; everyone on their block knew she had worked with Cheryl Tiegs.
“Foundation, eye-shadow, mascara . . .”
Jodi scowled at her mother, disbelieving and mortified. Dying of grief inside. At the Freys she’d had her face painted pine green and dusted with gold glitter by Quinn, her hands and wrists tattooed with henna by Olivia. Even little Bo had drawn the outline of a spar- row on her palm once with a Burnt Orange Crayola, holding it flat with his other small hand. She cringed at this unasked for intrusion on her appearance, her be- ing. She was rude, said in a cold, hard voice, “It’s okay, Mom—I know what to do. No big deal.”
She was so close to crying, all the while. Watching that alien landscape on the television screen. The picture
blurred, coming so far, coming through space, coming from where no one had been, ever, before this. Where science had taken them. It was supposed to have been a big deal, but it wasn’t when she had no one who understood to share it with. She wanted to be at the Freys, across town, farther even than the moon, it seemed, a place where knowledge was sacred. Seeing the future unfolding through Aaron Frey’s excellent telescope—not sitting here like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Like Bigfoot, Frankenstein’s monster, a bearded lady or some other circus freak. The rest of her life a joke without a punch line, like those stupid shaggy dog stories Anya delighted in.
The second astronaut to step onto the moon had said, from inside his dehumanizing helmet, “Magnificent desolation.”
That’s what Jodi was facing from here on out. That consequence once hanging in the stars had fallen plumb and silent as a falling star, a chunk of dull me- teorite, unspeakably heavy.
~
In the fall and winter that year she’d play “Golden Slumbers” from Abbey Road over and over and over
on the cheap portable stereo she bought with babysit- ting money, while she baked endless coconut cakes, leveling flour, breaking eggs, measuring a capful of vanilla, and tried to memorize the periodic table of the elements—never quite managing to get the frosting evenly spread, not like Rachel Dean, but masking her mistakes with extra coconut and knowing it was good enough, it really didn’t matter. The lyrics of the elegiac Lennon & McCarthy song would forever after trans- port her back to the day in July, 1969 when she was first divided from her soul, her heart; when she gave up on ever getting home again to the bright promise of that day, before the moon was stolen by malicious Bluejay with his bright, cold eye, hidden slyly in every shot behind the men in their protective spacesuits.
Once there was a way To get back homeward
Once there was a way To get back home . . .
Cochrell’s work has been published in Catamaran, Orca, Birdland Journal, Belle Ombre, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Tin House, among oth- ers, and has won several awards including the Literal Latté Short Short Contest. Chosen as New Mexico Young Poet of the Year while growing up in Santa Fe, she now lives and writes by the ocean in Santa Cruz, CA.
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