In the Land of Birdfishes by Rebecca Silver Slayter Read Free Book Online

much …”
    A woman’s voice from the seat behind me said, “He’s teasing you, honey.”
    I turned around to see a brown-haired woman who was either young-looking for her age or old before her time—there was some war being fought on her face but it was unclear who was winning.
    “You don’t need a winter coat in Dawson in June,” the woman said. “We got plenty of winter when it’s winter, but we sure as hell get summer. I left three weeks ago and it was already getting warm.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “I got a load to pick up in Whitehorse, before I head up to Dawson, but you can ride beside me if you want. I’ll be driving all night, so if you can stand another six hours on the road, I’ll get you there first thing in the morning. Annie.”
    I was confused for a moment before I realized the woman had reached a slim hand around the back of the seat. I took the hand. “I’m Aileen.”
    “So, you like to dance, Aileen?” asked the beautiful-faced man.
    “Oh, I love to dance,” Annie said.
    “Aileen here looks like a dancer.”
    “That long neck,” said Annie.
    “I don’t dance, no,” I said quickly.
    “I saw this movie once,” said the man. “Or was it a dream?
Pomegranate
, it said at the beginning, like in this old-fashioned writing. Must have been a black and white movie.”
    “Oh, I saw this one,” said Annie.
    “Starts out, there’s this pencil making a line down a page. It’s all quiet, so you just hear the scrape of the pencil on the paper. And then the line bends a little and it’s drawing the side of a face, you realize. Just one line to stand for the side of someone’s face.”
    Annie nodded, as if she were helping him along. For a moment, all I could hear was the man’s low, gentle voice and not anything else. Not even the sound of our front door, closing again and again.
    “There’s a voice, but you can’t see who’s talking. He says, ‘I draw no one but her. I draw her always.’ And then you see a woman dancing, and she’s young and beautiful. Oh she’s so young. She’s a ballerina. She’s dancing and dancing in this studio and all the light gets in from the windows. And there’s this man, he’s a different sort of dancer. But he gets in there and he’s dancing with her, in this different sort of way. It’s beautiful, the two of them together. They go on and on, they dance everywhere, all over the room, for days and years. There are things going on around and behind them, because they go so many places and such a long time goes by, but I don’t know what those things are. Then one day he looks for her there and she’s gone. The room is full of little girls dancing, children in skirts spinning around and around, but none of them is her. Even though he knows that, he grabs one of the girls, so he can see her child face and look at it up close, and he says again and again, pressing his cheek to her little-girl face, his voice so sad you know his heart is broken because it isn’t her, but he doesn’t even know that, he wants it to be her so bad,
‘Pomegranate
…’
    “And then you see a bus making its way down this skinny little road around this big hill. Coming down the hill. And the sides of the bus, it’s all covered in ads like they are. But the ads are drawings of the dancer’s face. All over the bus. And at the back of the bus she’s sitting, with the road just sort of disappearing in the glass behind her. With her ballerina hair and her ballerina face and her ballerina eyes that could be anyone’seyes. Just looking. All finished something. And you hear the voice from the beginning, and he says, ‘It is not so very hard to draw a woman who was happy.’”
    “What a great movie,” said Annie. “I love that one.”
    “I think it was a dream,” said the man with the beautiful face.
    “It reminds me of something,” I said. I tried to remember what it reminded me of and then I realized. “One time my husband was driving and we saw this man just