SHINY APALARIS
Rudy Wilson
They took Shiny away from me. I never saw her again.
It was because of what I did with her, and to her, once, in the small world we made. And our mother died of it. Then there was just me, left, to think about her from then on.
Shiny cut her hand, holding to the sharp, wooden fence post when she saw me taken away. She watched me for a long time. And still, she watches. I was her older brother, once good. Her—she was the best. She was my sister.
I still see the little cut on her hand. It was like her colors, the red ones. She put all these separate red ones into a big crayon box, together on her shelf, with her collection of elves, angels and faeries, a picture of Dad, and said redcolors: like the blood of her child’s heart, of our one wrong-heart that beat always together…and still does…
She stared at me one morning at the breakfast table. Her feet just touched the floor. I look now to see, to remember. Her hands—I could see them both. One rested flat, curled some, now that I thought of it, there on the table.
Her eyes glassed up. Her straight hair was cut, even, down to just below her chin. As she watched me, I put down my fork. I couldn't eat. I felt bad, but tender, like when there's fever. Shiny cried about me.
"What's the matter with you two?" our mother asked us.
"I don't know," I said. "There's something here. Something I see."
"Tell me," she said. "What is it, Carl? Tell me."
My mother leaned over to me. Shiny held her fork in the air, in her thin hand.
"A man," I said. "By himself. Walking in the nighttime. He's not happy. He's sad."
"Who is it?" she asked.
"It's me," I told her. "It has to be me!"
Shiny yelled across the table to me, "Am I there! Am I there with you?"
"No," I told her. "I don't know where you are."
Then she had a lonely mouth.
Me and Shiny: what we were, we were, without then knowing what, or even really when, and certainly never why.
_____
My little house, where I sat now, and thought of Shiny, from twenty-five years, was brick-wooden, with two doors on either end. One was never opened, and so the bushes and vines grew all over it. It could be opened, but never was. I had to try it, and it was hard, and dirt-filled, messy. It was the police that made me do it, out in the view and sunshine of everyone.
My house smelled of smoke, from burning paper in the bathroom. I spent the morning on the bathroom floor, looking through cardboard boxes. I squinted to see my old handwriting, and to remember the years.
Out in front of the regular front door, was someone's back yard nearby, hedged in by a row of bushes. In them was a crawl-place where the kids got through, to go between the yards.
I watched that place sometimes out my window. And at night I looked at it. I wanted to use it and be a part of it, its entrance to somewhere else to be.
Some policemen came and knocked on my door. They knocked hard and said who they were. I thought of the crawl-place, and the back door I had. I got up and threw on some pants, shoes, and shirt. I forced open the door. Dirt fell in, and wild green pushed in at me. I got out and into the thickness. It was a wide, big yard behind me. I went out. I could have run away.
Slowly, I went over to the side of the house and watched the police, two of them, standing at the mat on the front step, a piece of carpet, old, and worn. They stood and waited in the morning air. When they saw me they asked if I was Carl Apalaris, and I said that yes, I was.
"I am, for now," I said. "Who are you guys?"
They said they were the police. They had names that were like Witherspoon and Indiana. They arrested me for window-breaking, for destruction of private property.
I said I didn't know what to say.
They said I didn't have to say anything at all.
I knew I broke down a door, and broke some windows. The moon had shined on them. I saw that. Then when they broke I still saw it, jagged, slanty, reflected there still. I saw myself, too, there, wild, and not like me.
I ran away. I was scared. I had loved a woman, and had done what I had done. She was married to someone there. He hurt her, his lonesome wife, and I had been there to see it. So, I hit the glass.
I locked the house, and while I was inside I took a quick look out the window at the crawl-place. It was there. In the car, as we passed it, I tried not to see it. I looked away. I felt small in the back seat. I leaned into a corner. I didn't want to see it, riding with them in a car.
In the blue car we rolled slowly over towards the jail. I was going to jail. There would be the narrow slit of a window, facing out to the street.
Light came in it, but you couldn't see out of it. It was serious glass. It made me a prisoner. It denied me.
"You were easy to find, Carl. Real easy."
"I know," I said. "I don't care."
"You're in for it, you know," said one cop.
I took glass from his cut hand, the last time. He got some of it. I helped him when I could have run. I broke more of Joey's husband's windows this time. Now he looked at me.
"This time, I can't help you much."
"It's alright," I said.
I remembered what someone had said about me. I sat littler in the car. Someone I knew. I hardly knew anyone in this town. I lived in the dark side of it. I knew only its night face.
She had said to me: "I saw you the other night, in your house. I was walking by, and it made me so sad."
"Sad?" I asked her. "Why sad? The house? It is the lowest in town, I guess."
Now, leaving it, I felt a love for it, for its ugliness, and how it held itself up—it didn't know—it held itself as well as it could.
"No," she said. "Not that. I saw you through the window, because the light was on. I could see an outline of you. You were standing up, by yourself. You were leaning against something, at a strange angle. It just made me feel sad."
I turned now to look back at it, but we were too far away. I lived there for years. No one visited much. A girl named Cokie had, some. She never judged me.
_____
The past many years were a blackout, they were mostly cut-out shapes. There was a small school picture of a boy I knew. He was a dishwasher in town; he was so shy. His picture was stuck in a mirror, and in it he was an adolescent, and he had that look, awkward, and sad, and trying, and with a knowing, about pain, the pain of being young. And he knew it would never lessen. He wore glasses, he had a frozen smile. I joked with him sometimes. He watched me once as I walked away, for several blocks. I felt him watching me. It made me feel terrible.
We passed a dead squirrel on its side. I looked at the back of his head. He looked like he was asleep in a little bed. But he was smashed dead in the street.
I couldn't see the cops anymore. A shape was coming in my eyes. It got blurry, that shape I could never escape. Why did I only see the sad? I tried not to, but there was always that pain that became a shape inside my eyes.
Where was Shiny? I never, never should have told anyone about her. Never. Did she go through adolescence that way, like I did? Was she sad?
I heard, "—and you're on a thirty day suspended sentence already, you know."
I couldn't see them anymore, only feel them out there. I could hear. I never should have said a thing about her, about what happened.
We curved in and parked. I wanted everything to turn red, or any color, an all-over color: us, the car, the lot, the jail, that slit window, the air, and the Earth. I could walk away, I could be alone. I'd see Shiny riding her bike through it all. I'd run after her inside the one color of the world. She couldn't ride a bike that well. She wouldn't ride it down the big hills.
When I walked to the station door between the two men, I thought of her. I slowed, I resisted the door. I thought of my sister. I thought about Shiny:
The Point was a place we walked to when we were little, a place where five streets came together at one point. It was near our house. There was a drugstore there. It was called The Point, too. We looked at stuff inside, through the window. I held Shiny's hand. It was small. I loved her. I only hurt her one time—when it was them, at her heart.
Shiny.
We moved away from the Point.
Then after Mom fell, we lived our lives separate. Shiny was in a corner all day, watching me watch the shape that came out of Mother's head.
I always see her backed into that nice corner. There was wallpaper there. It was pretty.
Shiny sat, and watched, and she listened, but she never got close enough but once, to know the shape. I took her by the hand, and she closed her eyes. I guided her face to the spot where she could kiss, one last time, her mother's lips.
_____
Why I was in jail was because of glass. A small, painful X-shaped scar on the palm of my hand marked it—and the pain spread out, too. And when the policeman picked me up that first time, he fell, into the glass of one of the windows I had smashed. I broke them, where Joey lived. I helped him take out a large piece. It wasn't him that had done it, had hurt. It was a woman, and it was her husband's glass all over the house, and spilled all over the yard, where we found ourselves. When I looked in his palm for the glass, in the dark, it took on the shape, and it got big, much, much bigger than me, or my mind, even. I felt like a tiny, gripping thing, holding to a piece of glass as big as Texas, or bigger, almost infinite, like from a deep forever, when the little things, like a thumb, become huge, unimaginably large, and windy.
_____
For part of a day, the three of us in that room, Shiny in the corner, and me very near—and at times completely absorbed in that shape on the floor—the three of us quieter than ever before, than it ever could be again, as quiet as my mother, without any breath.
In that silent triangle, a friend of my mother's came in, walked in, and saw us. In a nice room, turned, changed, and holding, in the only way that we could, in our positions: our dear mother, who died over us: me at fourteen, and Shiny, she was only and forever thirteen.
I heard the woman say something about a tragedy, and I had a smile growing, not from me, but from the shape that had its own life and loved the taking over of my own.
Shiny's real name was something like Elizabeth.
I could smell something, now, like wax. I thought of how wax was, how it could be shaped into anything. I had the fear crawling.
"This way, boy—you know the way, I believe."
It was the policeman with the same scar on his hand as I had, shared. They called me a boy. I was almost a forty-year-old boy.
"What's in your pockets?" they asked. "Empty them."
"Nothing," I said. "I have nothing."
"Let's have it all. And your belt, and your shoelaces."
"I'm not going to kill myself."
"Well, we have to be sure. And we—we're not too sure about you, Carl."
"Well," I said. "Well."
We were in a little room, sectioned off. I pulled away. They held my wrists.
"Don't," I said. "You're not sure," I said, "not sure..."
"Carl," they said.
They pulled my hands, on my wrists, tighter. I could make out the shape between us all, how it was, how it moved, how it mocked me, and them not seeing it anywhere, how it danced.
"Don't take my watch," I said.
"It doesn't even look like it works," they said.
"It doesn't. It was my little sister's, a long time ago. I put it on when I saw you guys pull up at my house. I had it in a box."
"An old one, huh?"
"Yes. She was a little girl, but she wore this anyway. It’s got a neat band, too—the same one. I got it out to wear cause I might be in here for a long time. Can't I?"
"Yeah, go ahead. Go on with it. Don't cut yourself up with it."
"I won't. Not with Shiny's watch."
"That her name?"
"I hope so," I said.
There had been a year, many years ago, when my mother's death caught up with me. It was all I could see.
"Okay," they said, "sign here—on the dotted line, for your things."
I kept seeing things in a certain way. I kept seeing just that part of whatever there was to see, the part that looked like the shape.
They walked me down to my cell. I started to tell them about it: "...and even if I was looking straight at you, it's what I saw—it's all I saw, that shape, a thing in itself—it wanted to take me over, and I…"
And they closed the outer door to the cell and left me alone. I turned into the corner, standing. I lowered my voice: "…but it got in the way. It was around the time I heard about where Shiny was. They wouldn't tell me about her, just an address where she'd been kept all those years—it wouldn't let me go there to her."
I heard my own whispering: "...it took me over." I found out an amazing thing, amazing: "I became it."
I talked quietly to a corner where two cement walls met: "And it became me. It's all I was. I wasn't Carl anymore."
I had new borders, new color, and a new name.
I pushed myself into the corner. I always saw the red color of it, the blood-color, and its power, of what it was to me, and Shiny over in her corner, away from it, where she lived the rest of my life.
"Shiny," I said, "forgive me, please."
I felt her small hands. Her fingers spelled out her name.
"Shiny, where are you? I'm sorry for what I did."
I made her want to cry. I made Shiny go away.
"I spent that year without you," I said.
I leaned down in the corner, low near the floor. It was dark, quiet. There was the one, slit window.
_____
My mother's death had a shape like a jagged lake. It was cold. It got mean. It was laughing at me, sometimes pretty, though, and sometimes terrible, but always mine. I was a frozen, warm lake in a hospital for a year.
I didn't hear one word. I didn't see, or touch, or imagine. Maybe the lake had red-blood thoughts, but I didn't know them.
"Shiny, you were outside it. At a far distance, you were watching. It was all a memory. I guess it's all a memory, everything.”
No wind blew on the lake. It was stuck.
Now I could feel the cool cement on my face. I had ended up here. I felt for her, for it, we three—Shiny, and me, and the lake that came from my mother's death. We all came from her.
My mother—a Mother can never deny the Son—I asked her there, on the floor of the cell, "Please Mother, forgive me. Send Shiny back to me."