Our Missing Hearts (24)
In desperation, the boy looked around the deserted street. At the end, just past the outskirts of town, he spotted a small building he hadn’t noticed before. What about that, he said, that deserted house? Surely I can stay there just for the night.
The old woman seized his hands. That place is dangerous, she said. Cursed. It is said that a monster lives there. No one who enters at night ever returns.
I am not afraid, the boy said, and anyway, I may as well be eaten by a monster as freeze to death out here in the street.
The old woman bowed her head and gave him a torch lit from her cooking fire. Take this, she said. And keep to the small. Then she blessed him and wiped a tear from her cheek. May you see tomorrow, she said. And if you do, I beg you forgive us.
The boy made his way to the deserted house. Snow had begun to stick to the ground and to the bare branches of the trees, and when he reached it he found a small drift just beginning to form at its door. But it was unlocked, and he let himself inside. He lit a fire in the fireplace and looked around. There was only one room, with only one piece of furniture: a small cupboard, the kind that his mother had once kept their blankets in. There were no carpets on the floor, no decorations on the walls: only whitewashed walls, a plain dirt floor swept clean.
Well, he thought, this place may be cursed, but at least it’s dry and warm. He was about to unroll his blanket on the floor and go to sleep when the white walls caught his attention. They seemed so bare, so empty. Like a face without features. He dug into his pocket and pulled out his brushes, and before he had thought it through, he had painted a cat on one of the walls. Just a little one, a small striped gray-and-white thing. A kitten, really. There, he thought, that’s better. And again he prepared to go to bed.
But the cat seemed lonely, all by itself on the wall—and there was so much wall. He painted it a friend, a bigger cat, a tabby sitting beside it, licking its paw. Then he forgot himself completely. He painted another cat, a big orange tom, asleep by the fire. A black cat ready to pounce, a white cat watching with big blue eyes, a calico clambering among the rafters. He painted cats until all the walls were covered, a whole coterie of cats to keep him company, and only when he ran out of space—and the fire was sputtering down to embers—did he put his brushes away.
The boy was tired—who wouldn’t be, after conjuring a hundred cats out of nothingness? He unrolled his blanket, but despite all the cats, he was lonely. He missed his parents, and he wished he were at home again, in his own house, in his own bed, with his parents sleeping beside him. He thought of his brushes, made from his father’s bamboo, his mother’s hair. He remembered the small gestures about them he missed the most: the way his mother raked her hand through his hair, smoothing it from his face; the way his father had hummed while he worked in the field, so quietly it might have been the buzzing of bees. He felt small, and suddenly he remembered the old woman’s words: keep to the small. He took his blanket and opened the cupboard and made his bed inside it. It was as close to his own little bed as he could get, and he crawled inside, with all of his things, and pulled the door shut behind him.
In the middle of the night he awoke to a terrible wordless wailing. It was an unearthly shrieking: like the groaning of old trees splintering as they fell, like the howling of a hundred winter winds, like the screeching of the earth as it shifted and tore itself apart. Even his eyelashes stood on end. He put his eye to a tiny crack, but all he could see outside was a ghastly red light, as if the whole room were full of blood. He shut his eyes and held his breath and pulled the blanket over his head. Whatever you do, he thought, don’t make a sound.
After a long time—he didn’t know how long—it was quiet again. Still he waited in silence. An hour passed. Two. He put his eye to the crack again and this time, no red: only a faint sliver of sunlight. Hands shaking, he pushed his way out of the cupboard. His cats were still there, on the walls, just as he’d painted them. But every cat’s mouth was red. All over the floor: the prints of hundreds and hundreds of cat feet, pressed into the dirt, scrapes and smudges and marks of a battle. Flecks of blood and foam sprayed on the walls. And there, in the corner—a huge dead shaggy thing. Still now, clawed half to shreds. A rat the size of an ox.
So what does it mean, Bird thinks, as he lies in his bunk that night. It’s well after midnight and below him his father snores once, then turns to one side, and is still. Outside, the city is quiet, except for an occasional siren wailing its way through the dark. We promise to watch over each other.
Bird tiptoes into the living room, pushes the edge of the curtain aside, slips behind it, and looks out. All he sees are the hulking forms of buildings, the far-off specks of streetlights. The flat dark band of the street. Newly blackened, but somewhere beneath it, a painted heart still blooms. So risky, he thinks, and what was the point? When a few hours later all trace of it was gone.
But the truth is: it isn’t gone. He can’t see that bare stretch of ground without thinking of it, the bright splotch flashing into his mind, sharp as a wildcat’s snarl.
Hadn’t they been afraid?
He tries to imagine what it had felt like, to be that painter. Tiptoeing into the street. Breath dragon-hot beneath a mask, heartbeat a deafening roar. Slapping stencil to pavement with shaking hands, spraying a sizzling cloud of red. And then running, lungs aflame with fear and fumes, finding a small sheltered corner to hide. Red paint like smears of blood on his hands.