The Innocent Party Read online

  THE INNOCENT PARTY

  THE INNOCENT PARTY

  STORIES BY AIMEE PARKISON

  AMERICAN READER SERIES, NO. 17

  BOA EDITIONS, LTD. • ROCHESTER, NY • 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Aimee Parkison

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  12 13 14 15 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 184 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Design: Sandy Knight

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: Thomson-Shore

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parkison, Aimee, 1976–

  The innocent party: stories / by Aimee Parkison — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-934414-87-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3616.A7545I56 2012

  813'.6—dc22

  2011038425

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  for Abelardo Reyes Gurrola

  CONTENTS

  Paints and Papers

  Dummy

  The Glass Girl

  Locked Doors

  Murder on the Pasture

  Call Me Linda

  Warnings

  Allison’s Idea

  Shrike

  Chains

  Etcher

  Vision of Mirrors

  Theater of Cruelty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  PAINTS AND PAPERS

  Even before the boy attacked him, the artist preferred sleeping on the hills overlooking the shore, where the sea made sounds like whispers before the rain. In his old age, he painted as if every hour was his last, and he stored the paintings on the docks. Even though he remained alone, he felt the presence of heavenly beings all around him. The boy who tried to kill him seemed like a messenger. Even before the boy cracked the artist’s skull open, the artist believed in divine inspiration. He was inspired, yet he could not see the angels until the drunken boy hit him over the head with a lead pipe.

  The lead pipe did what some might call damage. For six days, the artist remained unconscious. On the seventh day, when he awakened in a hospital, he could not speak. Although he never fully recovered his ability to talk, he began to see what he thought were angels in every room. The angels were long angular forms of blue light leading away from the hospital. The light blurred as it moved. Occasionally, when the light stilled into focus, the artist could see faces smiling through the brightness.

  He followed the angels, and the angels led him back to the shore. He began to paint drunken children whom the angels gestured to with orbs of pale light. Surrounding the children’s bodies, the angels overshadowed all. The artist knew the boy was among the children, but could no longer recall his face.

  Even now, the artist is with the drunken children and the angels, hiding on the hills near the shore. Angels beckon to him. His eyes ache in light that only he can see. The children don’t know he is there—watching, staring, studying, sketching, painting all night and all day.

  Using his binoculars, the artist studies the sea and sky—strokes of blue overlaid with violet paint, black and red gently washing together. His vision blurs and the sea becomes fiery. Arranging his easel, he searches for a new vantage point. Drunken children by the sea are dramatic features arresting his gaze along waves. Children rise, tiny crawling bodies diving into deep rich blue reflecting sky. The artist’s binoculars have powerful lenses that never fail to reveal the children’s smooth symmetrical features.

  Despite all the years of practice, the best effects the artist achieves are spontaneous. As his eyes follow the children, he tilts the wet painting from side to side. His arms move like waves.

  The hills are his studio. In the morning, as the artist watches, girls and boys pass bottles, kissing between sips. For some reason, the children suddenly seem to love each other and can’t stop laughing. They slurp and burp. The colors of the shore grow more pleasing—golden sands, silvery horizon, blue waters, green trees, orange sun, white blossoms, pink clouds, bright blue sky as in a painting of a landscape where there is nothing but distant beauty.

  Blossoms break apart. Pale petals drift and flutter down to waves. The girls begin to dance. Petals swirl and sway. Hips shimmy like water. Boys throw sand, glittering, falling on the girls’ hair.

  Unknown to the children, the artist crouches with his paints and papers on the hills. To the artist, the children are handsome luminous figures that bring a thrilling quality to his imagery. The children become symbols to the lonely man. As symbols, they convey important messages. Bringing clarity and vision, the children remain strangers to him, even though he paints and sketches and studies them for years.

  With intricate masking, he captures and preserves the pure white light sparkling on water. Paint splatter becomes blossoms and leaves, crabs and shells and birds shaped by fleeting movements, impulsive sensations and reactions in his sensitive weathered hands. By creative intuition, he captures the ebb and flow of darkness along with a continual vibration of light. Touching every image, soft light falls like young hands caressing his filthy body. He falls asleep beneath the easel.

  When he wakes at dawn to study his paintings, the children’s flesh seems rendered in an impressionist style—pastel brush stokes that cause flesh to take on the white of blossom, the gold of sand, and the gleam of ocean. Warm sun tones bring out the blue-green and brown of intoxicated eyes. In images of those days on the shore, the drunken children seem to have no cares and no regrets. Unlike the painter, who knows exactly what he is, the children don’t know they are winos.

  How could children understand? Only the painter knows drinking red wine changes the shore in imperceptible ways.

  At first, it paralyzes the taste buds in ecstasy as overpowering as it is relaxing. A tainted aftertaste conceals a touch of cork rot. All is masked under delicate tones of chocolate, vanilla, and raspberry with hints of dried herbs and spice.

  He senses when inebriated children begin to feel the tingling. On their tongues and in their loins, the mysterious hunger brought on by wine is only an erotic joy increased by thirst. Later, sensual memories of drunken days will become a sexual elegy only the painter and the young winos know.

  As they explore each other’s bodies, the painter feels them moving against each other—tormented, stroking each other’s flesh, never realizing they are only as lovely as they are lost. Becoming lost is what makes them exquisite, even to each other.

  Searching for isolated coves, pairs of children stroll. Upon returning, they leap and scream, rushing into
the sea to kiss beneath moonlit waves. As their bodies entangle, they seem unaware that angels watch as their lives slip away.

  It will take them years to die by what gives them joy. In the meantime, the artist sees the young winos dancing and is revitalized, enlightened by their splendor. They remind him what it is like to be free.

  He would give anything to become a child drinking stolen wine on the shore.

  The painter believes that the wine has been placed on the shore by angels. No matter how intoxicated, the young winos will never believe what the painter has become convinced of—that the angels test the children, yet in drinking the wine, the children have failed. The angels’ test will go on for years of joyous excess. The children destroy themselves with angel wine.

  Slowly, then quickly, the children drink more. With every gulp, the angel wine tastes better. The wine churns and burns their little bellies, swirling inside. Their chests feel light, and they give the painter a dizzying sensation of falling from great heights, even though they are rolling on the shore. They braid each other’s hair and kiss each other’s backs, feet, legs, necks, shoulders, breasts, and faces. Tiny kisses land like dragonflies on water.

  Angels mimic the children’s wobbly stances. Angels pretend to be drunken children while laughing and singing with unheard voices.

  The more wine the children drink, the better kissers the angels become. They become master kissers, locking lips in ecstasy. To the painter, the kisses are more intoxicating than the wine. The children have no idea what the kisses are doing to them, as the kisses flow from one mouth to another. They will never kiss this way again after the stolen wine is gone. No kisses and no other wine will ever live up to the memory of this day. Their lives will be ruined by joy. The initial bliss will go unmatched while angels watch, hidden in the sea. No matter how much more wine the children consume, they age. The first bliss never returns, even to those who live decades beyond the first drink.

  Angels watch the painter with knowing eyes, tears glistening like stars.

  Because of the expressions on the angels’ intelligent faces, the painter knows that no other shore will ever seem like this shore. Once the children leave it, they will never be able to find it again.

  Boys and girls pass green bottles. They spill and lick wine off each other’s bodies, and the painter writhes alone in extraordinary ecstasy while painting the lovers. Studying gesture, the painter learns to capture suggestions of even the smallest sighs, the first hints of seduction, the gentlest of embraces. He becomes obsessed with painting the swimmers’ legs entangling underwater—what he can only imagine and cannot see.

  A midnight renewal continues until dawn. When boys carry girls across sand, they shatter glass. Laughing and crying, they hold each other. Dancing, they sway, attempting to stand. Shattering glass glimmers, emeralds on sand. Children dance barefoot among shards, cutting their feet. They fall on each other. They pick velvety white blossoms from trees. Their hands are dusty with butterfly scales.

  Angels weep for the painter.

  The children will always be failures. After tasting the angel wine, they become weak, loving wine more than they love work, money, food, or each other. They love the wine more than they love life itself. Intoxication becomes their birthright. Afterwards, they will always secretly suspect that all wine, like all kisses, should be glorious and free and found on any shore.

  Although the first days linger endlessly, the last days keep getting shorter. Eventually, all of life seems short, and all the short days blur together. Later, the children wish to return to that moment of the first sip but can never find a way. The painter yawns as the wine warms him inside so that there are flames in his body. It feels good—so good, too good—so that he overflows with laughter. His breath smells like smoke as the children kiss each other, slowly, burning him with sizzling tongues.

  The children fall on the sand. As the sky darkens, they sleep in each other’s arms.

  One of the children gets the idea to take off his clothes. Naked, he stands before the others. He tosses his clothes into a barrel of fire and watches the worn fabric burn. The other children think he’s a genius—a naked genius. They all want to become like him, so they all follow his example. Burning all their clothes and laughing, they sip and slobber and kiss.

  As ashes float into the sea, the girls cover each other’s nakedness in shells like jewels.

  White blossoms flutter through wind across tides. Pale petals stick to wine-soaked bodies, shimmering pebbles in sand, and the painter paints blossoms for many evenings.

  Soon, more angel wine is discovered. Angels tuck bottles and bottles of wine into the grasses, nestling bottles into the nests of birds, burying them shallowly beneath sand with crabs.

  The children find more hidden bottles chilling beneath waves. The painter longs to warn those who swim too far. Instead, he watches them drown. Angels’ arms carry broken bodies, currents deep beneath water.

  Children skip and fall. Waves become shawls covering girls’ tiny breasts.

  The stolen wine lasts for years, until the children have more children and their lazy infants swim beneath frothy waves to the painter’s delight.

  For a long time, the wine seems to keep the children alive so that they forget their longing. Because so many of them have become desensitized and can’t feel anything anymore, they desire a touch beyond touch. Everything is sexual; nothing is sensual. They forget their own bodies and can no longer taste or smell, their senses dulled or gone. When they look at each other, it’s as if they don’t see. Everything becomes dim and hazy. They forget each other’s names. They swim deeper and deeper, farther from shore. As they fade, they begin to sense the painter’s presence and dream of brushstrokes.

  Drinking from each other’s mouths, the children sip from curled tongues like wet leaves. Blue-green waves conceal their nakedness, even from each other.

  Wine changes children over time. Even though they don’t realize it, as they hold each other, they become adults. They cling and moan and are no longer children. They shiver and cling to each other, as if for warmth. Yet they are cold, so cold. Something is leaving. Angels grow impatient, no longer entertained by watching winos dance. The shore changes, again, and the paintings—once full of light—become dark. One by one, winos lose each other in darkening water.

  DUMMY

  No one knows. I can’t say why she ended up loving me during the sad years. Or, perhaps, this is why—she had a scar beneath her long hair, a hollow that no one else could see, and the fact that the scar was there changed her in ways that no one but I could understand. Only she and I knew of the scar’s existence. As far as I know, I was the only one allowed to touch her there—the only one who could move back her hair and put a finger inside the hole in her skull while she laughed, her mouth wide open so I could see the cavities in her back teeth. She was beautiful and she loved me like no one else ever loved me—no big deal. Her skin and her hair smelled of the white roses that had covered her in the coffin, and I wanted to eat those white roses for dinner with a big glass of cheap red wine by candlelight.

  There was a gated elevator in that old building where she died, a door to the outside that would not close and a window that would not open, and a dusty record turning on a player that could be heard throughout the halls on the sixth floor. The song was a dead woman singing.

  “That’s Karen Carpenter, Dummy,” Belle said.

  I remember that woman. Like a bird, she died of hunger.

  People didn’t speak to each other in that building. They lived too close together, and the walls were so thin I could hear toilets flushing and voices murmuring. I could have spoken to my neighbors by calling their names close to the walls, and I think that was why no one wanted to know the other people who lived there.

  Later, I wondered if the other tenants thought I was responsible for the terrible thing that happened. I don’t know if I was or if I could have prevented what happened in the building before the city ordered us
to leave our rooms. We began to scream at each other through the walls, demanding that everyone lock the windows, demanding louder music to force out the silence.

  On the sixth floor, there was a man who lived with another man and a woman who lived with another woman. No big deal—the various forms and stages of fucking played out behind closed doors like movies in an all-night theater. But I was that woman. There was also a woman who lived her life as a man and a man who lived his life as a woman. Later, I found out the woman was really a man and the man was just as much of a woman as I was. But I didn’t really know them that well, and I didn’t think they knew each other. They were just people who lived near me at a time when I didn’t want to live near them.

  Then there was Belle, the beautiful woman with a tattoo of a blue iris on her left breast. She killed herself by taking a swan dive off the building’s flat roof. Her name was Jane—or rather, her name had once been Jane, before the fall—the jump, that is. She was my lover—no big deal. The night she died, I dreamed I was sitting on the balcony drinking cold coffee when a large white bird flew into my lap, its claws piercing my legs.

  When I identified her body, I couldn’t recognize her face because the back of her head was gone and had been replaced by a fractured brain. The blood and bone that had broken through her forehead revealed her brain in an odd pattern around her eyes resembling an owl’s face peering out from under her hair. Late at night, I keep trying to visualize this, but the memory doesn’t make sense anymore because she is still here in the room beside me, sleeping. She doesn’t remember the night that she killed herself—or at least this is what she claims. I have my own suspicions, but the neighbors are of no help because they refuse to speak of that night and did not attend her funeral. Who could blame them? It’s not like it was high-class entertainment or anything that they were missing out on.