Erika Mikkalo

A Ballad of Beautiful Creatures

So my palms go all warm when I see her, and she sees me looking, and it’s okay, because her face thaws a little from all deadpan cold Noxzema girl to a small smile, although she’s no model, and that’s okay, because I’m not Captain America. The girl’s got a face as round as a serving dish and this yellow-white hair with long roots, jagged edge of it hanging past her chin, and some funky-budget thrift-store attempt to look cool dress that could have been applied with aerosol. She loses the “Fuck you, Jack” stare and conjures some of that coy bullshit, corner of the mouth folding, glancing down at the bar surface and back up, come hither boy, and no problem, I’m on my way over. Her finger circles the rim of the glass and then her hand slides down the side to raise, lift, and sip. I read all this from my peripheral vision, stopping by the jukebox to be cool, you know, arm out leaning on its right, flip a couple of records and choose a dark, dramatic, ballad, yeah that’ it. I can tell she likes it: she’s smiling as I walk up, I have made music litmus, and the Australian Goth thunders in the background. The song’s sort of stupid, two men fighting over a chick one’s just met. The singer has knuckle-dusters and a deer gutter, and the other guy has a gun, but the singer offs him anyway, and the woman – they never mention her name – pulls flowers out of her hair and drops them on the floor. Completely reprehensible Cheese-Whiz, but all good songs are that way.  Just think of “Long Black Veil”. No one would write a song like that today. Would they? Nick Cave covers that, too.

So I say do you play pool, and she says not well, and I say I didn’t ask you if you played well: I asked you if you played, but all the tables are taken and an hour later the bitch is making fun of my tattoos. Sort of a before/during/after thing, covered with conversation pieces. I explain that I did the one on my right arm myself, the jagged sketch from a turn-of-the-century Viennese etching, a woman looking as kind of rough as this one, except in a green slip and black stockings, not a red dress and the lacy things, but that’s all right, I’m not complaining.  No source of dissatisfaction, here: not shy, not fussy, all fun. When I tell about doing the ink on my right arm myself she says so you’re left handed and takes my left hand and puts it between her legs and clamps down like a spring trap on some rare-skinned creature, but it’s her pelt I’m thumbing.  I had too much to drink, anyway, so after a while I say are you hungry and she says sure so we go get in the van and drive to the Manhattan Diner on the corner of Southern and Broad Street.

The light’s always too bright in those places. The corner diner’s a rectangle or an ‘L’ shape lined with about ten booths and a counter, backless stools on steel poles, clock over the window to the kitchen, a rotating wheel for tickets that whirls your order back to the grill man in his white envelope cap, linoleum floor in an intentionally dirty industrial color so that slop doesn’t show. They’ve put a couple of pictures of flamingoes up on the walls, prints, not photos, deco-styled pink feathered pretzels on stilts in front of turquoise palm trees -- an attempt at something ‘classy’ I guess -- in narrow brass frames. We sit down and she gets an omelet and I just have coffee and toast and decide that me and Scilla are going to be good friends, really. Priscilla is definitely not a Priscilla or a Pris, she was right to introduce herself as Scilla, and I’m thinking of the Odyssey, of Scylla (not Scilla) and Charybdis and all those woman-monsters who eat everything in sight or suck everything down or sing so sweet you die or turn men into pigs, but I keep quiet, because I can’t think of how to mention this in a way that sounds nice. Sometimes, everything you’ve read and know seems useless. Instead, I peel the foil back from one of those white plastic squares and flip out a red cube of jam and scrape it on the toast, but only eat one piece.  She’s an actress, apparently, and is telling me about her last performance, on stage with this group I know, the space is in a coffee-shop basement, but I’d heard of it, so I tell her, yeah, I think I saw it.

And she said oh really, mouth going to a definite ‘O’ and penciled eyebrows climbing up her forehead, and I say yeah and she said well what did you think and I don’t answer right away and then mutter some phrase from the review, pretty much just the title, anyway. Scilla concentrates on zipping and unzipping the left cuff of her motorcycle jacket.  The waitress – talk about something looking sad and old, the waitresses at these places look like long-lost fossil fish – a species that knows what it’s like to work too hard for too little for too long and put up with too much. So the waitress, coelacanth prostitute, fills our cups with the brown water they call coffee and Scilla is gazing at her own reflection in the window. I take another bite of greasy toast. Then I talk about the band, our last tour, our next gig.

It’s good to do something she says, and puts some cream into the coffee, so it’s a cup of this dirty white lukewarm stuff. You have to do something to survive, you know.  She stretches her arms along the top of the booth and tosses her chin up. "We have art that we will not perish from actual reality," she says and tells me that’s something Oscar Wilde said and I say “Wild” and smile and then she smiles and then she laughs and drops her forehead onto her hand and keeps laughing, at something funnier and sadder and scarier and bigger and darker than anything that either of us could ever say. When she slumps forward I can see out the window by the entrance that this cop car’s pulled up.  Rotating blues make me want to freeze and bolt at the same time, and I hear a plate hit the counter by the grill, and the slam of the register drawer and Scilla’s choking on the last of her laughter as I wonder who they’re looking for, and what they’re going to do to him when they find him.

Well I wouldn’t want Scilla to perish from actual reality or anything else.  It’s like that joke: “In the old days, do you know why they sacrificed virgins to volcanoes? – Who’d want to get rid of the sluts?”. I don’t think she’d appreciate that right now, though, so instead I pull my eyes away from the flashing lights and say, hey, well, do you want to go to the museum some time, then? They have a portrait of Dorian Grey. The painting took the guy twenty years, or something, it looks like it’s all cobwebs glued to black. She stops laughing and hiccups once or twice and lifts her face from her forearm on the tabletop. Her make-up’s all smeared around her eyes. She says sure, she hasn’t been in awhile, what’s showing, and I say I don’t know, and she says, well you can always look for earrings for a Christmas present for your Mom or whatever. Then she says that she likes to go and see all the postcards and books, that they make her wish that she was a thief, but she’s never been a good one.

Have you ever stolen anything? I ask, and she shrugs and says sure, just pretty much booze from the places she’s worked, grab some wine as a tip for herself or a bottle of scotch as a present. Then she asks me if I’ve ever stolen anything and I raise my shoulders and say no, not really, because those cars that we’d hotwire in high school and drive around don’t really seem to count. We never sold them, just borrowed them.  Except Jimmy Clemente needed a battery for his Mustang once, so we took one then.  Scilla’s lips curl and her eyes narrow and she gives a small nod, so I know that she knows that I’m lying, and she asks me what I would take if I could steal anything in the world. I brace my elbows down low and put the heels of my hands together and rest my chin on them so that I’m looking at up at her and say your heart.  She falls back in the booth and looks at the empty plates between us and picks up a fork to play with, shaking her head, but the corners of her mouth are up. I don’t know if I have one, she says. I think I lost it.  And I say, no, I know you have one, and reach over the dishes and trace her left knuckles with my fingertip.  She’s wearing some antique ring on her pointing finger, gold-colored with a little china oval with a pink blossom painted on it. Okay, then, she says, I’ll take your word for it, and makes like she’s going to stab my hand with the fork and I pull it back and say hey what did you do that for and she laughs and says I have to protect what’s mine, then, right?

If you really think that it’s necessary I say then I guess that’s what you’ve got to do. Then the waitress comes by and pours more coffee and slides the check, face down, between us.

When I drop her off at her place I make sure to get her number: I have a little spiral notebook in my trenchcoat pocket, for writing down tunes and song ideas and things, always listening. While I’m sticking it back in she asks about the rose-wreathed Virgen de Guadelupe and the enamel rectangle of the mezzuzah and the golden plastic St. Christopher with a little infant Christ on his shoulder all glued to the dash along with the Tazmanian Devil and Gumby and the Road Runner beep beep sodomizing Wiley Coyote and I tell her that I need all the help I can get. She smirks and moves her head up and down, slouched back in the seat, hand burrowing in her pocket in a hunt for keys. Ten strands of green and orange plastic beads hang from the rearview mirror so I ask her if she’s ever been to Mardi Gras and Scilla says no and I ask her if she’d like to. She says what and I say it again: would you like to go to Mardi Gras? And she says you mean in New Orleans and I say well that makes more sense than Duluth and she barks a short laugh and says sure, of course she’d like to do that. We’ll have to do that sometime. Then we kiss good-bye. I tuck a strand of her shattered straw hair behind her ear and kiss her again. She tastes like gin and coffee and cigarettes and sweat with a trace of egg. She tastes like life.

The engine sputters as the van starts, coughing before it kicks. Rosy-fingered dawn is lightening the wine-dark sky to zinfandel pink in the east, a horizon line of black block buildings beginning to glow. Scilla trips up the stairs, hand on railing, unlocks the door, and flicks the light on and off once she’s in to let me know that she’s made it all right.

Erika Mikkalo's writing has received the Tobias Wolff Award for short fiction from The Bellingham Review, and has appeared in Nimrod, The 2nd Hand, Exquisite Corpse, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Texas Review and other publications. Her interest in literature has proven so lucrative that she's pursuing the logical next step: performance. She lives and works on the south side of Chicago.