“Topsy-turvy, this life I lead, down below the grid. You’ve saved the soup for last. Soup of the evening.” Her words are a singsong. He slops bisque into her bowl.
“So in this storybook of your life—” he starts.
“Storybook: oh, Howie, you really are too much!” She bats at his arm playfully. “The proper term is fiction.”
“In this fiction of your life, what’s your character’s dark secret?”
“She doesn’t have a dark secret.”
“Sure she does. She’s gotta.”
“Why?”
Sharkey tastes his tea at last. Even with his tolerance, he can tell it’s strong tonight. “Makes her interesting.”
“I suppose,” says Swanny, gazing into the depthless opacity of the mushroom cream, “she wished her mother dead, and then the wish came true.”
Without further ado, Swanny face-plants into the soup. Sharkey grabs her by the hair and flips her backward before she can start the whole drowning process. He swabs her face with a napkin then, with a grunt, slings her over his shoulder.
There ain’t much he can’t lift.
He lights a candle when he gets up to the attic and stands over Swanny with it for a long time. The cascade of her curls, her soft body. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear. But fear he does, because beneath it all is what he glimpsed tonight, another dark secret even Swanny doesn’t yet know about herself, a secret he hopes she’ll never know.
He blows out the candle and descends through the trapdoor, to the world below. Even though he’s just going to his room on the second floor, he feels like he’s headed to a subterranean dungeon, a lightless, lifeless cell where he’s condemned to do his time in solitary, unless he can tempt another to descend.
Swanny’s secret is this: she can hurt him.
* * *
Corona uses the butcher knife to slice open a fresh-caught rabbit on the countertop. It’s like a pomegranate inside, only instead of ruby-red seeds, its viscera glistens with rows and rows of pearly white teeth.
“Oh, La Diabla,” Corona breathes, and dumps the body into the garbage, where it lands atop the potato peelings and last night’s bones. Little Swanny reaches out to stroke the silky ears, the brown tufted fur of the corpse, but Corona slaps her hand away. “No, gordita. It is sickly. Do not touch.”
“Will it bite me?”
Corona chuckles to herself, humorlessly. She wipes blood off the rusty metal jaws of the rabbit trap with an antiseptic towelette. “It just might.”
* * *
You can tell a lot about a community by its currency. Torchtown’s is entirely without standards—without any sane, agreed-upon norms. It’s a language consisting entirely of slang.
Swanny’s had half a dozen customers this morning, and she’s had to consult the barter chart for every last one. She’s grown tired of staring at it, scanning the list for whatever bizarre array of tender the most recent patron has just plunked down. And then the math: well, Swanny’s never much cared for arithmetic, it’s so clerical. Even Pippi Dahlberg, with her calculating mind, always used an adding machine.
Pippi’s adding machine, the rat-a-tat-tat of it above Swanny as she sat playing beneath the ballroom table. The rat-a-tat-tat above Swanny as she fled down the helical staircase of the Ripple mansion.
“Hold on one moment,” says Swanny, banishing the thought, scratching out numbers on a scrap of brown wrapping paper, eyeing the most recent offering, an assortment of salvaged screws (equivalent with nails, Sharkey’s told her), bottle caps, coins, and incongruously, a rabbit-foot keychain. The paw curls, prehensile, fur worn off in patches, but instantly recognizable: Swanny had similar playthings in Wonland County, where the proliferating cottontails accounted for most of the protein in one’s diet, as well as most of the crafting materials at one’s disposal. Corona acquired a knack for tanning the bunnies’ hides and restuffing them to serve as Swanny’s teatime companions. They wore aprons and waistcoats, doll clothes; her favorite boasted an old necktie of her father’s. But it’s not Mr. Archibald Long Ears she’s thinking of now. It’s last night’s dream. A dream with teeth in it.
Back to the task at hand: “I’m afraid I’ll have to consult with the management before I honor this keychain.” She reaches for the bell pull to the basement room where Sharkey’s making chaw.
“N-no need to do that,” stammers the chawhead in question, a moonfaced junior in a fraying burlap kilt. “Lady. Mam’selle.”
Swanny rolls her eyes in exasperation. Out on the street, even in the saloons and open-air vacant-lot markets, these “sparkers” run feral, rabid, even, but inside it’s as if the shop itself doses them with an odorless gas of docility. If they speak it’s when spoken to, and then to apologize. Swanny wishes that every once in a while, one of the less unseemly young men would assert himself, look her in the eye. Work is a distraction, but it would be better with some repartee. Does she so scream respectability that she doesn’t even warrant a little idle flirtation? She’d die of loneliness if it weren’t for Howie. Sometimes, at the end of the day, when they sit side by side at the counter in the Chaw Shop, counting up the coins and beads and IOUs that make up the day’s returns, she feels the most unsettling impulse to rest her head on his shoulder and, as he instructed her that first afternoon in the shadowy town car, to shut her eyes. What a comfort it is to have someone to talk to—to know and to be known.
Perhaps tonight he’ll make her another pot of tea.
“Then that’ll take you to just under an ounce.” Swanny turns to the mason jars on the wall behind her. “What flavor did you say?”
“R&N. Please.”
Swanny takes down the jar labeled RESPITE & NEPENTHE and unpops the seal. A whiff of dried flowers and chalky earth greets her, funereal but enticing nevertheless. Sharkey is a poet of scent, she must admit: the chaw doesn’t just smell, it evokes. “One pennywidth or two pennywidth?”
“Double-P.”