On the Border, In Between

Once, there lived a people on a land quite a bit smaller than a square mile. The people had small houses, one school, one prayer house, one convenience store and a food market every Sunday where they came together and fed each other for the week. The town had a sheriff who was not so much a sheriff as a mayor that mediated and reprimanded and occasionally taught lessons at the school. There was a fire marshal, a school teacher, a doctor and town gossip. And in this way the town lived, quiet and guileless.

One year, a group of graduates from the school formed a band and began to host town dances every weekend. The whole town came together and danced to songs of deserts and mountains and pretty girls. The same year, the school teacher’s son, inquisitive and tall, set out from the town, walked to the nearest train track, hopped a train and spent the following year and a half wandering the lands. When he finally returned, bearded and taller, his mother was so overcome with joy that the school was closed for three days in order to celebrate his return. With the school closed, the entire town celebrated the traveler’s return, and soon after, a second school teacher was employed, as the people were reproducing at an exponential rate.

Daphne was born on the same day that a stranger visited the town for the first and last time. She chases rabbits, but were she to catch one, she would not know what to do. Luckily, this happens only once. She and the rabbit make eye contact, and only when Daphne whispers “Hello,” does the rabbit finally wrinkle its nose and disappear into the bushes. Daphne’s mother has a raspberry bush, and when she is not running, Daphne eats raspberries straight from the bush until her teeth turn red and the seeds cut up her tongue. When the town begins to build up, Daphne remembers the days of running and raspberry bushes with longing and sore knees.

Over the next century, the town school expanded and the children asked more questions. The prayer house was converted to a Spiritual House because there were people in the town who were not religious but spiritual. Then one day, the town fell completely silent. The town gossip watched from her window with her mouth shut; the school teacher paused in the middle of a sentence that diagrammed a sentence; and every person in his or her house shushed every other person. With one pair of eyes, the town watched the stranger pass through the town gates, down the main street, past the houses; residential, fire and spiritual, between the two schools and up the steps of the town hall where the sheriff, a different man from when this story began but similar in character, sat at his desk. The sheriff jumped a little and stood to shake the stranger’s hand.

Daphne does not mind heights, but she does not enjoy climbing stairs, nor climbing anything, for that matter. Daphne enjoys walking and running and taking strides as long or short as she wishes. On some days Daphne walks swiftly, taking strides so long that she rotates her hips back and forth as moves; first the right faces forward, then the left, then the right. And sometimes she walks slowly, taking small, lazy steps. And occasionally, she mixes the two, taking one long, stretching stride for every three small, quick jumps. But as the town builds up, she moves vertically more often than horizontally. Her knees grow tight from lifting one, straightening it and lifting the other, straightening, pulling upward, pushing down, pulling up, push down, pull up. The creak of stairs is muffled by the creak of tight knees.

The town would have to relocate. While the people had lived quietly in their nameless, governmentless town, the rest of the world fought, conquered and formed borders until somehow, one day, someone discovered that the town quite a bit smaller than a square mile was cut right down the middle by the border of two countries. This sent the governments of the two countries into a condition of great distress. They wondered, “Where had these people come from?” and “How had they gone unnoticed until now?” and still, “How will we get rid of them and where will we put them?” Of course, neither country was willing to move its own border quite a bit less than a mile in either direction. They decided that the fate of the small town was not their concern, so long as the people emigrated somewhere else. The sheriff took this news quite calmly. He stood silently before the stranger for a long time before stating, without the slightest quiver in his voice, “We will not.” And just as the words flew from his lips, the stranger left as quietly as he had arrived. The sheriff did not know what to make of the brief encounter and decided not to tell the rest of the town until he had further news. He did of course tell his wife, and their children overheard, and because the town was so worked up over the arrival and disappearance of the stranger, the news spread so quickly that the town gossip scarcely had to leave her house. In their yards and streets, the people shouted at each other over what to do. The great-great grandson of the school teacher’s traveling son finally commanded everyone’s attention (because he was very tall and had a voice with a most pleasing tenor) and stated simply,“We will just wait and see.”This calmed everyone for a while, but for the weeks that followed there was a thread of tension that held every townsman to his neighbor and hissed in the wind.

When Daphne first notices the building being built next to hers, she remains seated in her windowsill barely leaving to eat or use the toilet. Its presence creeps onto her, filling her window and devouring her sky. The clouds are tucked away and the horizon covered up until all that are visible from her window are more windows, like her own.

The two countries between which the town was wedged argued and spat until one agreement was reached:The town cannot expand beyond its own, existing borders.If the town obliged, the countries would leave it in peace. And so, the first piece of mail to ever arrive from outside the town was delivered to the steps of town hall. The document, so heavy it required four men to lift it from its blinding white envelope, stated the law implemented by foreign, indomitable forces, and the town could only agree.

In the middle of the night, Daphne wakes up when something is thrown into her bedroom. She jumps with a start and by moonlight sees an aluminum can in the middle of her bedroom floor. When she picks it up, she finds that a string is attached to it and a voice is inside that shouts “Hope I didn’t wake you!” She drops the can, startled, and then hears “I didn’t mean to startle you. But could you please pick up your can so that you can hear what I’m saying?” Outside of her window, in the window of the new building next to her own, is a boy in his new bedroom with a can attached to hers by the string. She looks at him, the can still on the floor, and states, “I can hear you just fine. What do we need those cans for?” He shakes his head, points to his ears and then gestures “I don’t know what you’re saying!” with a shrug.

And so the town built up. At first, unable to expand, they simply did not build at all. But soon the people desired a market open five days a week. And a bookstore for those graduated from school. And then a town radio station that made everyone feel very modern and proud. Everything was built narrowly. Doors and windows were built five inches narrower and five inches taller. Buildings that would have been two floors with five rooms per floor became five floors with two rooms per floor. The school expanded with each classroom on a separate floor. The new grocery store was built with the produce on the first floor, the meat and dairy on the second, and the bread on the third. Quickly, many of the older buildings were cut in half and rebuilt vertically rather than horizontally. Up was development. Up was progress. Up was modernity. Up was the future.

Sometimes Daphne and Mace sit in their windows; hold their cans without speaking. Daphne rolls up a note around the string between the cans and slides it to Mace. It reads, My knees ache. Mace asks Daphne to dance and he sings loudly into his can while shimmying and shaking about. Daphne jumps up and down, smiling, swinging her knees in circles and squares until she melts into the floor. She laughs with side-splitting vivacity.

Quickly, the town transformed. The people made walkways between giant windows-made-doors as it was quicker than climbing down a mile-long staircase and up an almost mile staircase to visit your neighbor who lived next-door one floor below your own. The trees, having less room for their roots, stretched thinly to record-breaking heights. They curved and bended about as if searching for a direction in which to grow other than up. A branch no larger than Daphne’s pinky finger finds its way through Daphne’s window. Twisting through her curtains it reaches toward all corners of her bedroom until the whole trunk of the tree, as thick as her wrist, holds out its leaf-tipped hand.

Mace taps the tin can telephone and Daphne wakes to the twinkling of silver. “Daphne.” She hears his voice twice: It travels through the window and the can. She replies “What” “Daphne!” He whisper-shouts. “Mace,” She whispers back. “That tree,” Mace says quietly. “I can hear it scratching up your window through your tin can.” He emphasizes the word “tin” rather than “can.” “Yeah, I can hear it in your tin can, too.” Daphne says this to the window while holding her can to her ear. She watches the string between cans quiver with Mace’s breathing.

As soon as the town began to build up, everyone knew that it would never stop. The people wanted five more rooms with every one that was built. They wanted more than one market because this one had better produce and that one, better pastries. They wanted separate schools for different age groups, and shops for every object: book shops, clothing shops, map shops, radio shops, pen shops, hat shops, rope shops, walkway shops. The buildings, taller and narrower, leaned on each other and swayed in the wind. The once quiet town now resonated with the sound of metal. Hammers hit nails when footsteps would have been heard, and the whole town shook a little as if on a tray being carried away.

Daphne is the only person in the whole world who is awake. Outside the moon is a sliced lemon and the sky red and only the faint hum of electricity and tapping of metal tiptoes between the buildings. Daphne sits in her window, staring into the darkness of Mace’s window. “Mace!” Her voice sails out her window and into his. She waits for a moment; nothing. Through the dark, Daphne gropes for her tin can. She taps on it three times. “Maaaaaaace.” A muffled grunt comes through the window and the can. “Are you awake?” Daphne asks. “No. Are you?” Mace speaks clearly now. Now Daphne does not answer but only laughs when Mace begins to sing. “Mace, why don’t we put a walkway between our windows?” Daphne asks. He does not answer. “That way, we could really dance together and we wouldn’t need this tin can telephone.” Silence. “And we would only need a couple feet or so—we wouldn’t even need a long one . . . Mace! Aren’t you awake?” She annunciates directly into her can.

The tree in Daphne’s room, whose roots are far away, continue to grow, filling the space between the two buildings, filling Daphne’s room. And one day, Daphne and Mace will have to squint through the foliage to see each other and the string on their tin can telephone will tangle in the branches.

This story is part of a collection of short fiction entitled,

Things That Lose You. I wrote, designed, illustrated and

bound this collection into a book for my thesis.