The harpy nods and turns away again. The harpy says, I know.
It should surprise me that the harpy knows, but it doesn’t. Harpies know things. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the harpy only loves me because I’m garbage. If it only wants me because my blood is poison. My scarf ’s come undone, and a button’s broken on my new old winter coat.
It feels weird to say what I just said out loud, so I say it again. Trying to get used to the way the words feel in my mouth. “Harpy, I’m dying. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But probably before I should.”
The harpy says, That’s because you’re not immortal.
I spread my hands, cold in the gloves. Well duh. “Take me with you.”
The harpy says, I don’t think you’re strong enough to be a harpy.
“I’m strong enough for this.” I take off my new old winter coat from the fire department and drop it on the fire escape. “I don’t want to be alone any more.”
The harpy says, If you come with me, you have to stop dying. And you have to stop living. And it won’t make you less alone. You are human, and if you stay human your loneliness will pass, one way or the other. If you come with me, it’s yours. Forever.
It’s not just empty lungs making my head spin. I say, “I got into college.”
The harpy says, It’s a career path.
I say, “You’re lonely too. At least I decided to be alone, because it was better.”
The harpy says, I am a harpy.
“Mama Alice would say that God never gives us any burdens we can’t carry.”
The harpy says, Does she look you in the eye when she says that? I say, “Take me with you.”
The harpy smiles. A harpy’s smile is an ugly thing, even seen edge-on. The harpy says, You do not have the power to make me not alone, Desiree.
It’s the first time it’s ever said my name. I didn’t know it knew it. “You have sons and sisters and a lover, Celaeno. In the halls of the West Wind. How can you be lonely?”
The harpy turns over its shoulder and stares with green, green eyes. The harpy says, I never told you my name.
“Your name is Darkness. You told me it. You said you wanted me, Celaeno.”
The cold hurts so much I can hardly talk. I step back and hug myself tight. Without the coat I’m cold, so cold my teeth buzz together like gears stripping, and hugging myself doesn’t help.
I don’t want to be like the harpy. The harpy is disgusting. It’s awful.
The harpy says, And underneath the filth, I shine. I salvage. You choose to be alone? Here’s your chance to prove yourself no liar.
I don’t want to be like the harpy. But I don’t want to be me any more, either. I’m stuck living with myself.
If I go with the harpy, I will be stuck living with myself forever.
The sky brightens. When the sunlight strikes the harpy, its filthy feathers will shine like metal. I can already see fingers of cloud rising across the horizon, black like cut paper against the paleness that will be dawn, not that you can ever see dawn behind the buildings. There’s no rain or snow in the forecast, but the storm is coming.
I say, “You only want me because my blood is rotten. You only want me because I got thrown away.”
I turn garbage into bronze, the harpy says. I turn rot into strength. If you came with me, you would have to be like me.
“Tell me it won’t always be this hard.”
I do not lie, child. What do you want?
I don’t know my answer until I open my mouth and say it, but it’s something I can’t get from Mama Alice, and I can’t get from a scholarship. “Magic.”
The harpy rocks from foot to foot. I can’t give you that, she says. You have to make it.
Downstairs, under my pillow, is a letter. Across town, behind brick walls, is a doctor who would write me another letter.
Just down the block in the church beside my school is a promise of maybe heaven, if I’m a good girl and I die.
Out there is the storm and the sunrise.
Mama Alice will worry, and I’m sorry. She doesn’t deserve that. When I’m a harpy will I care? Will I care forever?
Under the humps and pads of fat across my shoulders, I imagine I can already feel the prickle of feathers.
I use my fingers to lift myself onto the railing and balance there in my school shoes on the rust and tricky ice, six stories up, looking down on the street lights. I stretch out my arms.
And so what if I fall?
A love story that could only happen in New York.
THE TALLEST DOLL IN NEW YORK CITY
MARIA DAHVANA
HEADLEY
On a particular snowy Monday in February, at 5:02 p.m., I’m sixty-six flights above the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street, looking down at streets swarming with hats and jackets. All the guys who work in midtown are spit into the frozen city, hunting sugar for the dolls they’re trying to muddle from sour into sweet.
From up here I can see Lex fogged with cheap cologne, every citizen clutching his heart-shaped box wrapped in cellophane, red as the devil’s drawers.
If you happen to be a waiter at the Cloud Club, you know five’s the hour when a guy’s nerves start to fray. This calendar square’s worse than most. Every man on our member list is suffering the Saint Valentine’s Cramp, and me and the crew up here are ready with a stocked bar. I’m in my Cloud Club uniform, the pocket embroidered with my name in the Chrysler’s trademark typeface, swooping like a skid mark on a lonely road in Montana. Over my arm I’ve got a clean towel, and in my vest I have an assortment of aspirins and plasters in case a citizen shows up already bleeding or broken-nosed from an encounter with a lady lovenot.
Later tonight, it’ll be the members’ doll dinner, the one night a year we allow women into the private dining room. Valorous Victor, captain of the wait, pours us each a preparatory coupe. There are ice-cream sculptures shaped like Cupid in the walk-in. Each gal gets a corsage the moment she enters, the roses from Valorous Victor’s brother’s hothouse in Jersey. At least two dolls are in line for wife, and we’ve got their guy’s rings here ready and waiting, to drop into champagne in one case and wedge into an oyster in another. Odds in the kitchen have the diamond in that particular ring consisting of a pretty piece of paste.