Writing Magazine Grand Prize - Runner Up

So, it’s finally happened.  Mother has turned herself into a human-sized pair of pruning shears.  
We should have seen it coming.  For three days running she’d complained of strange and shifting pains in her limbs.  Marek, my fiancé, and I attributed her grumblings to mere exhaustion:  she’d been up and down the ladder hanging crepe paper, fir and berry sprigs for her and Father’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.  But on this morning, when she didn’t stir from her bedroom, I went to investigate.  A cautious knock on the door, a groan on the hinges, and I found her perched on the edge of her bed.  My eyes roved over the sharp angularity of what had once been her legs, her once soft arms that now resembled the firm rounded grips of scissor handles.  The gun-metal grey sheen of her skin.    
    “How do you feel?”  I asked, setting a plate of eggs and black bread on her bed-stand.  
    She sniffed at the eggs then nudged the plate off the table.  The plate shattered on the floor;  the egg yolks trembled gelid orange.  Mother angled herself in the direction of the whisper thin sheers fluttering at the long window beside her.   Her handle arms and blade legs opened.  With a click her legs closed, slicing the sheers to ribbons.
     “I’m so thirsty I could drink a river dry,” she said.  Marek, who had been hovering all this time at the doorway, went to fetch her some water.  She looked at me.  “What I really want is a rusty nail and some stones.  Is that too much to ask for?”  
     Her voice, always a bit on the strident side, now had sharper quality to it.  Her eyes, too, held a hurting quality, like the nibs of sharpened pencils or the heads of straight pins. She seemed to be looking through and beyond me.  As if I weren’t even there.   
I pulled her bedroom door shut and went to Father’s woodshop.  
Transformations have never surprised me.  I’ve known several people who’ve woken up one day to discover they’d become a hunk of rusting baling wire or an oversized cobbler’s last.  One girl I went to school with married, and mere days after the birth of her fourth child, turned into a refrigerator.  One or two affairs later, many expensive sessions with a therapist, and she and her husband were back to their right selves, wiser and much poorer.  Marek had an aunt who turned into an iceberg.  It was slow going with her, but fortunately, the signs of a lowering frost had been evident for many months.  Marek said they donned protective winter garments and braced for glacial climates.  The aunt drifted west toward Greenland, by all accounts happy as a clam at high tide. But Mother’s metamorphosis, so quick and so complete—so ill-timed—was a bit of a shock.
Inside his shop, Father sat on his work stool.  His hands trembled as he plugged with woodworker’s glue the many holes Mother had augured into him in the pre-dawn hours. When he saw me, Father wagged his head slowly from side to side.  “We can’t call off the celebration.  All the aunts and uncles and cousins will be here by morning—if not sooner.  Also Pastor Perkimaaki.”  Pastor Perkimaaki had married them in a small stone church in the Finnish uplands.  He was known for his short, scalding sermons and also for making vodka from lichen and bottling the in beautiful Aleutian blue glass.  By all accounts the vodka was quite drinkable.  
“Well, winter is in the air.  We could hope for an ice storm,” I said reaching for some rusty nails we kept in a large stone jar.
“Ha,” Father dabbed at a particularly deep wound.  “What a funny thing, hope.”  On the workshop table the tiny wooden shutters of a cuckoo clock whisked open.  Father picked up his wooden mallet. Out came a yellow bird, shrieking “Cuckoo!  Down came Father’s mallet, smashing its bright little body.
I closed the door behind me.  Poor Father.  Exiled to his workshop of cuckoos.  He had in his hey-day made a name for himself with his songbirds whose necks were the winding mechanism.  The birds wobbled lovely tunes, but only if you wrung them for a solid minute.  And his tie collection!  A prominent Finnish fashion magazine almost chose to feature them in their glossy pages.  No one before or since had every thought to paint clouds on neck ties.  Lovely silk tings, those ties, the clouds over them shivering slightly at the touch, fleeting and fragile as memory.
Back at the house the situation hadn’t changed much.  Marek and I stood at the threshold of Mother’s bedroom.  As before she sat on the edge of her bed.  With a grunt, she heaved herself onto the sharp nibs of her legs.  She moved toward the window.   With each step, she gouged new divots into the birch flooring that had taken Father three days to lay and three years to pay off.  I admired her precision, her artistry of movement.   With a deft slice or gouge, a thing was irrevocably done , or undone.  I had always been a bookish girl, lost inside words that hovered between one meaning and the next, a girl who had a hard time making decisions.  Marek proposed to me four times before I finally said yes.  Even now, I had my doubts.
I rapped timidly on the door’s frame.  Her concentration broken, Mother clattered heavily to the floor.  
 Marek and I pulled her onto her bed.  He offered her a bucket of spring water.  I offered a platter of speckled stones and rusty nails.   Her mouth unhinged wide.  Down the hatch it all went and into her shovel flat belly where churching, grinding noises commenced.  
Mother caught my unguarded gaze.  “This is what men do to women over time.  This is what women do to men.   When you’re my age, Kaari, you’ll understand.”
I nodded, though I did not understand, not even a little bit.
“I was the second prettiest girl in my class.  My essay on Goethe’s poetry won an award.  I could run faster than anyone in the whole village, boys included.  I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”  Mother’s voice was hard and flat as the stones she had swallowed.  
“I never knew,” I said.
She looked at Marek.  “I’ll be there’s plenty of fine things you didn’t know about Kaari.”
I looked at Marek.  I didn’t like the way she said fine things.
“For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that I cut Kaari’s umbilical cord with my own teeth.”
That Marek did know.  Where other girls had cute and tidy belly buttons, mine was an oversized knot.   This, I told him, was why he’d never see me in a bikini.
 “Mother, what’s happening to you.  You used to be so nice.”  
“I’m tired of nice,” she said. And as if to prove her point, with the top of her leg she skewered the cuff of Marek’s shirt.   “What this I hear about you parading about in ridiculous costumes?”  
Marek hung his head.   
For several weeks, Marek had worked as a mascot at a dock-side ice-cream shop down.   The penguin suit they’d outfitted him in came with a built in air-conditioner for the hot days and a mini heater for the cold ones.  Children adored him and I couldn’t be any prouder; none of the men we knew would have ever taken such humble work to help their fiances pay for their weddings.
We pulled the door shut.  We needed a contingency plan.  Begging Mother to change herself back seemed out of the question:  the flat fury in her voice announced how much she preferred this version of herself over the former one.  But how to keep her dressed and decent?  Father had some sail cloth in his shed.  I had a full-body wet suit, a hold-over from university days when I took a stab at body surfing.  Marek had parachute cord.   The three of us sat at the kitchen table, fashioning sheaths of various thicknesses when Pastor Perkimaaki appeared at the door.
“Glad tidings on the day!”  Pastor let himself in and set a blue bottle on the table.  “How are the lovebirds?”  he winked at Father.  Father brought his finger to his lips and motioned for Pastor to follow him to Mother’s room.  Pastor stood on the threshold and watched, spellbound.  Digestion having worn her out, Mother snored softly, her snores a mechanical whining that gently rattled the windows in their wooden sashes.    
Pastor followed Father back to the kitchen table.   “I’ve witnessed many a metamorphosis in my time.  But generally speaking, they were spiritual transformations, and as such, so subtle there were nearly imperceptible.”
“Perhaps there’s a lesson in all this,” Father suggested.  
Pastor uncorked a bottle and took a long drink.  “If there is, I can’t see it,” he said handing the bottle to Father.  Then Pastor grabbed his coat and hat and left.  Father rummaged around in a kitchen drawer and withdrew his yellow gun-cleaning rag that smelled of cloves and linseed oil.  He headed to Mother’s bedroom where I knew he was going to polish her legs as, he liked to say, everyone knew a dull blade does more damage than a sharp one.
 Marek and I went outside and headed for the shore. Dark clouds lowered on the horizon; sky and water were a single slate gray thing.   The temperature was dropping and the shallow water had frozen fast to the shore.  Beyond the shore ice’s greasy ledge, the frigid water heaved in slow oily sheets, what salt water does just before it freezes.  
We stood and threw rocks past the ledge.  Each rock was something we didn’t know.  
    “When I was ten I shot my brother in the ass with a rubber arrow.”  Marek lobbed a stone.
“I cheated my way through university,” I said with a wince, tossing a rock onto the ledge.  The water beneath the ice lifted in slow undulations.   
Marek lobbed a stone.  “I peed in the penguin suit. Twice.”  
We laughed so hard that we fell to our knees clutching our sides.  
Marek turned to me. “If I thought you’d turn into something sharp and hurting, I would still abide with you.”  
 Abide.  What an archaic word.  How I loved him for using it and with that single word something shifted behind my ribs.    We all have our weaknesses.  Mine was to be loved in spite of my flaws, or perhaps, because of them.  But I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that marriage righted all wrongs.  I just needed desperately to believe that it made the wrongs bearable.   
We stood without speaking.   We could hear the ice lacing.  In a few hours it would turn from oily black to a slushy grey, then cloudy white, then glare white.   Soon after, for those who had faith, it would be strong enough to walk on.  
What would happen next, what kind of man would Marek be, what kind of woman I might become, we couldn’t know.    I twisted the ring on my finger.  With some work, I could force the ring over my raw knuckle, I could toss it onto the ice ledge.   I could set Marek free.  
Marek saw my bloody knuckle.  He pulled a mitten from his hand and slid it over mine.  
This, I decided, is what abiding looks like.  A decision proved by a series of small actions.  Father with his yellow rag.  Marek and his mitten.  From the house we heard violins shivering plaintively through one of Sibelius’ symphonies.  And loud scraping and stumping.  And laughter.  Mother and Father were dancing I realized.  
Marek bent and loaded his pockets with stones.  I did the same.  Together, we turned back for the house.
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