Young Writers Society

I can't thank you guys enough for the critiques--they're fabulous.

__

So I sat with him a while, and asked him how he felt.

He said, “I think I’m cured—

no, in fact, I’m sure—

thank you, stranger, for your therapeutic smile.”

___

Since birth, Margot had aspired to be glamorous. She’d wanted her head on a silver screen—enlarged and glittering with pearls and make-up and shiny white teeth. She wanted a slick-haired fiancée with a golden pocketwatch and polished black shoes. But then, in the midst of it all, she had stopped dreaming. She’d stopped dreaming and could see nothing but past or present--never mixed. Possibility was impossible; imagination was unimaginable.

The slick-haired fiancée made his exit from her subconscious.

Two years later she sat on a slightly-sticky plastic bench, a petty thief in a filthy cell of her peers. There was a smudge on the front of her dress, but the faucet in the corner of the room had long since been broken off and probably used to bludgeon someone. A carjacker in a grease-stained vest sat next to her, arms folded over his gut.

“Been here long, angel?” he asked, grinning. “Or did you just fall from Heaven?”

Margot ignored him and instead exuded silent loathing. She picked at her cuticles; she hadn’t had her nails done since she pick-pocketed a businessman on the tram three months back. Her tips were chipped and suffering for it.

There was a click as a policeman, dragging along a trembling figure in a schoolboy’s blazer, fumbled a key into the lock and shoved the boy in to the cell. Margot’s jaw dropped.

“Miles?”

He looked up. His grey eyes looked watery; swathed in puddles.

“Margot?”

His shoes clicked as he stumbled over fallen drunks. They groaned and swatted blindly at his pant legs. “Why are you here, darling?”

“Look, Margot,” he said, his voice still trembling, though he had lowered it to a whisper. “Do you still have my wallet? I forgive you and everything, but I need it, I really do.”

Margot looked at her shoes. “I’m terribly sorry. The police took it. They said they’d give it back to you, but they’re all liars--”

He let out a half-wail, half-sigh, and sank to his knees, vaguely targeting the spot of concrete not covered in a foul stain between her shoes. She pulled him back with her hands cupped around his underarms. He rested his jaw against her knee and she began to stroke his hair, whispering soothing nonsense.

The carjacker prodded her shoulder with a fat finger. “Fancy it my turn next?”

She didn’t bother to look at him and instead bent over toward Miles’ head. “Are you all right, darling? What happened?”

“Alexei,” he breathed, “Alexei is dead and they think it was me, only it wasn’t me, it was that vile nurse, she hated him, she did—“

“Who’s Alexei, dear?”

She could feel his tears soaking through her skirt. “I loved him…I loved him so much even though he lied and he clearly liked her better, but he told me he loved me even though I’m an ugly wretch and no one could love me, but now he’s dead and I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye, I didn’t even get a chance to thank him…”

The carjacker gaped. One of his teeth had rotted to a black stump. “You’re one of them fags, eh?”

Miles whimpered. Margot slapped him with the flat of her hand, against his damp, pock-marked cheek. “Bet you’re ‘one of them fags’—sure don’t know how to treat a woman right.” She wasn’t entirely certain it made any sense, but it got a few guffaws from the men on the fringes of the room. Her victim scooted to the right, where she could no longer smell him.

With trembling Miles on her knee and a gang of criminals crowded around her, she felt trapped, like a vengeful goddess bound to the mountaintop. They’d taken her purse away at the entrance, along with its voodoo dolls and lipstick. There were no heads to crush, no cosmetics to touch up. So she sat, curling Miles’ limp hair around his ear and cooing like a mourning dove that cried for no one but herself. “It’s okay, darling,” she whispered until her throat went raw. “You didn’t do a thing.”

He looked up, after a long while—too long to determine exactly how much time had passed. The clock in the corner of the room had been wrenched open and the parts had been scattered across the floor.

She could see herself reflected in his eyes—her face was now smudged and disheveled. “We have to get out of here,” he hissed, eyes darting to and fro like a discontented mouse. “It’s disgusting, and-and…I have to prove them wrong, I have to, I—"

“How do you propose we do that?”

He bit his lip. “Well, you’re a pretty girl, and—“ He sighed. “I’m…you know. A well-renowned faggot.”

“And what of the virtuous ones?”

“We…we let them cart us off to the orphans’ home.”

She bent over and kissed his ear. “You’re such a thorough planner, darling.”

___

Margot didn’t really worry for Miles, because she was selfish, and that was her nature. Besides, he wasn’t particularly attractive—being carted off to the orphans’ home in the back of some well-wishing policeman who had been alarmed by being solicited by two ere-rich teenagers in shabby clothes. Alexei had been a lucky catch, or a particularly desperate one—a fish who knew what awaited him was death, but would rather die fed than starving.

He was the one who wouldn’t be adopted.

“Filthy things, today’s youth,” the policeman said, glowering over the steering wheel. “Raised without mothers and fathers, left to rot in the churning cess pool of society…“

“Thank you for realizing our plight, sir,” Margot said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “How noble of you. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Lust, miss—that’s what that’s called.”

Margot hadn’t felt lust for anyone in her life, save the pool boy at one of her mother’s parties. He’d been skimming leaves off the water, vacant for the polio that lurked in its waves. “You look nice today, Miss Margot,” he’d said, smiling politely, and she’d pulled him into the cabana by his suntanned arms.

She didn’t mind that she smelled like chlorine when she emerged—it was an experience beyond her wildest dreams. Literally. All she ever did was an exercise in action/reaction; a chemist’s workbook with photographs for diagrams and smiles for ions. She wanted something, she did it. Improvisation was key when the space of time five minutes beyond the present was hazy and bright; too bright to look at directly.

There was a wood-hewn crucifix stuck in the lawn in front of Saint Mary’s Home For Troubled Souls, a monument to invisible martyrs and lost causes. She squeezed Miles’ hand as they walked, led by the policeman and his menacing stick, into the front hall.

A woman with her hair covered in a starched white scarf beckoned them inside. “What seems to be the trouble with these children, officer?”

“The blonde one’s depraved and the sickly one’s a homosexual,” he said, nodding matter-of-factly.

She raised an eyebrow. “Nothing we can’t fix, I assure you.”

Inside, the light was low and yellow, lit by kerosene lanterns that looked to be remnants from an archaeological dig. Women in white robes and shoes that made noises like slamming doors scurried through doorways, heads bowed, perhaps to make them a more aerodynamic shape.

There was one man-shaped shadow—broad shoulders, pressed collar, scar across his temple from an accident that ought to have killed him but didn’t. Margot recognized him immediately.

“Dr. Neuhaus,” she said, taking care not to look him in the eyes.

He stopped in his tracks and smiled. “Miss Margot Rosenfeld! My dear! Your mother must have forgotten, we had a follow-up appointment—"

“I don’t have a mother any longer.”

“Oh,” he said, thrusting his hands into the pocket of his jacket. “That’s a shame. She was always such a dear, I can see you for free, if the headmistress approves.”

She forced a smile. “We have some things to discuss, yes.”

“Come on back, Miss Rosenfeld—it’s the least I can do.”

She squeezed Miles’ hand and left him for Neuhaus’ shoulders and the dark of the hallway.