by James Keegan
Thirteen-year old Anna, an only child, wished she had a baby sister, some plaything, someone to keep her company, someone to hold her hand. The afternoon is long. Quite strange, Anna thought it quite strange that the new servants up above on the third floor, talked so loudly and even late at night. Anna’s teachers told her she thought too much about pablum things. Anna, thought herself too skinny, thin like a wrapping of butcher’s paper and as white. Anna kept a cigar box of, ‘tittles,’ as she called them, her drawing pencils and conte crayons. Anna thought about her ebon hair, that she had to matt down with water; she thought too about a chip in the water bowl; sometimes she’d sit afternoons and think about habiliments, clothes or clothing. Or, Anna would think about the number of times, in everyday conversation, that people used the word, ‘that.’
Anna positioned the furniture in her room and her personal things as cities on an old-world map. Paris held her toiletries, perfume, hand mirror, fingernail jar. Vienna her books and flute. St. Petersburg her poetry. And, London, her used underwear.
The room smelled of spent candles and sweat on blankets from a night of sleep.
The blankets felt of mohair. Anna could taste the place like cold saliva from a mouthpiece. The room felt of hand-me-down curtains and pages from the family bible. Anna thought of the place like a bellows box, necessity.
Sitting in the window, Anna moved in swollen knee motions and cracked her knuckles and her neck.
Anna saw outside, below, the two servants leave, the two young women, whom Anna named, “Jejune and Yes-Person,” jejune meaning without significance.
“Probably gossiping about me.” Anna watched the two servants. “I hate you two bitches.”
A sound like a door being opened, and foot steps.
Anna asked, “Is someone there?” She listened.
There it was again. This time it sounded like something scratching.
“No one is supposed to be upstairs, just Jejune and Yes-Person. Maybe they have a cat. They will get in trouble if mother finds out. I wonder if they’d let me play with the cat.”
Anna stood up on her bed. “No, the sound is not coming from upstairs.” Anna put her head against her own bedroom wall. “Who’s there?”
Distinctly, Anna heard two voices.
“That’s unlikely. It must be coming from outside. It’s a twenty foot drop. Maybe some craftsmen. Maybe father is having tuck pointing done again.”
A single voice again, and Anna says, “I cannot hear what you are saying?” No answer. “What could it be?” Anna knocks on the north facing bedroom wall. And, after she does, then, she hears nothing. I should not have knocked, Anna thinks. For fifteen minutes, Anna sits on her bed, but there is only silence. The girl stares at an old toy, a favorite toy, a wooden carving of Noah’s ark with the little wooden miniature animals, two by two, all in a row, splayed out on the floor. Anna stares at Noah’s wife.
The little boat is hand painted.
Anna understands the trick; yes, after thinking about it, she understands. The girl gets up and feels the surface of the wall, works slowly.
“Obviously,” Anna says, “It is a parallel universe.” On her hands and knees, Anna crawls into the next world, all of her upper torso, right up to her belly button.
Anna looks around. “An alien world.” There is a room, like a bedroom, but cavern like, mostly seven sided, except for the ceiling which is one plane, made up of hundreds of panels all at odd angles, but the ceiling itself is on a fifteen degree slant. Every thing is iridescent. Anna thinks, the colors here are those of a turkey mushroom. Everything changes colors slowly, or all at once if Anna moves herself. Also, a waterfall drains from the ceiling. Anna looks up, and there is a pool of water above her, and Anna can see fish-like creatures, except with tails like kites and no eyes. And there are bathers there too, swimmers. Anna can see their naked silhouettes. The bedroom smells of nutmeg. Centered, the bed is a living animal, a cross between a mule deer and a horse with a saddle-like bed. In the center of the bed is another little girl, but younger, a twelve-year-old.
“Hello, I’m Anna.”
“Hello,” says the alien, “I’m EkFpRa.”
The twelve-year-old alien looks like a dragonfly but with transparent membrane bat-like wings. Series of eyes like compound eyes, and eight sets of these wrap her head.
EkFpRa says, “I didn’t clean my room, so I have to stay here until it is clean.”
Anna feels a little motion sickness. She strains to turn her head like carrying a feed bag. “I will help you clean it.” On the floor are papers, like sheet music, folios, and other things like broken open music boxes.
“Will you?” asks EkFpRa.
“Only if you’ll be my friend.”
After an afternoon of cleaning, earth Anna crawls back into the Milkyway and home to her bedroom.
-The Second Visitation-
Anna awakes the next day and on her floor next to her Noah’s ark is a small cube, smaller than a snow ball, but coal dark. Anna picks it up, and it makes music. The harder she squeezes, the faster the beat; if Anna stretches it out the rhythm changes. “I wonder who put this here.” And that’s when she remembers. “Ow, yes, I forgot about the parallel universe.”
-The Third Visitation-
“Who is it?”
“It is us, the servants; open up Anna.” Jejune speaks.
“It is we.”
“Do not correct our grammar. Please child where have you been? We were worried about you.” says Jejune.
“Jejune and Yes-Person worried about me?”
“Don’t use that language with us.” Says Yes-Person.
Anna says nothing.
“Do not go silent on us.”
“Why is the door locked? We’re you’re friends. We love you,” says Yes-Person.
“Please come down for dinner, tonight.”
“I will,” says Anna.
“Promise us” says Jejune.
“Yes-Person, what do you think I should say,” asks Anna.
“I am not a yes person. I can think for myself,” says Yes-Person.
Anna keeps after her, “What should I say?”
“Yes,” says Yes-Person.
Anna laughs at her from behind a closed door. “I’ll be down for dinner.”
“Good,” says Jejune, “and, bring your appetite.”
Anna looks at the alien EkFpRa, who is sitting on the bed, and Anna says “I will.”
The two servants are heard walking down the stairs.
EkFpRa says, “I have to tell you something.”
EkFpRa does not even have lips, does not talk, and Anna does not understand how she can understand or speak English. “What is it?”
EkFpRa says, “Today, I tried to enter through the portal. I could not. I thought you and your world were lost to me.”
“What?”
“Yes. I think it is closing.” EkFpRa blinks all of her eyes.
“The portal is closing?”
-The Fourth Visitation-
At dinner time, father enters and mother follows behind him. Anna is already at the table. Father sits down first. The table as well as the sideboard is set. Behind father is a bronze clock garniture. The two servants enter carrying sterling flatware. Anna takes a good look at everything, the Russian bronzes. She is quiet. She stares at mother and at father, then the table. The table, twenty feet of walnut, and the pomp, of tureens, rose tinted glass and the glint of crystal decanters. A rack of lamb. Whale oil lights brightly burn. Half way during the meal, when the two servants are in the kitchen, and when mother and father are not looking, Anna switches places with EkFpRa who hides under the table. Anna sits under the table and giggles, thinking herself such a smart one. Anna cannot wait until her mother and father scream. Anna has it all figured out. EkFpRa will fly around the room and out an open window and up to the second story and into Anna’s bedroom window. Everyone will have seen; scared, people will flee; people will tell stories later to dismiss it. It must have been a dog. Others will say it was a monkey or some such. Someone, Anna giggles, may even croak. EkFpRa is under the table ready to do her part.
-The Fifth Visitation-
Anna cries in her own bed.
EkFpRa says, “Are you still crying? So what? So we switched places at the dinner table, and your mother and father did not even notice. So what?”
-The Sixth Visitation-
Anna speaks, “The portal is speeding up. It is dangerous for us now.”
EkFpRa shakes her head in agreement.
Anna continues, “Every hour it used to be closed to us for seven minutes. Now, every hour it is closed to us for forty minutes. And every day it gets worse.”
EkFpRa, “Tomorrow should be the last time we cross over.”
The two hug.
EkFpRa gets up and looks out the window, “I will miss this world. I will miss the beauty of your insects, but I will miss you mostly.”
Just then, the door opens, the servants, Jejune and Yes-Person scream. Jejune has a plate of sugar cookies which she lets fall, and Yes-Person holds a glass of milk. Jejune and Yes-Person have seen EkFpRa. Anna can hear movement downstairs, too. Without saying goodbye, EkFpRa flies back into her universe.
Everyone stands still.
Then, Anna hears EkFpRa calling, “Anna, come live in this universe. You are more at home in this world.”
And Anna does. She crawls feet first into the portal. On all fours, looking up, Anna screams to the servants, “You two can come along. What are your names in this world, Jejune and Yes-Person? Do not be afraid. Follow me.”
-A Subsequent Visitation-
As the diplomats and ambassadors sit before the musicians, here on the cusp, Anna walks the balcony; below her are the one thousand spiral staircases carved in solid rock, and hundreds of walkers walk skyward toward her. And, like a flamingo flock, thousands of EkFpRa’s people hover here and there, some at altitudes of hundreds of feet. Below, a confluence of three rivers works itself into a delta of brackish water, and pink sea foam rolls in over purple stones. Anna stares out at blue yachts, each with hundreds of small sails, and thinks it a wonderment that the yachts are all organic, living tissue married to energy. There is the drone of the floating colonies, some three hundred family members to a cloud. Anna waves. Tonight, she thinks, she will eat a blue boar’s heart, a delicacy. Seated to her left is her accompaniment, her sister, EkFpRa. And, at the distance of thirty walking paces, Anna sees a familiar human form of a once servant walking toward her.
Anna rises and kisses another human hand. The two human women hug.
Anna speaks, “VoLanThon, it is good to see you again.”
“And you.”
