The Small Elf People

Flour boxed and honey on her nose, Maman stirs with her hands and talks with her feet. Bake me cake. Papa left too long ago but we remember his beard and bulges and growling at night under the mattress. Maman says she don’t know how to live, but Papa didn’t know how to survive and there is a difference. That was when she still wore red on her lips and pearls in her ears and her hair was a pale yellow cone always pretty.

Johnny says they come at night and watch him breathe. He says their eyes are glassed, their feet shaped like moons with clogs. He says, our Johnny, that their hands are oak snakes up Maman’s legs and that her breath is a cloud wanting to pour. He says they have little wooden tongues to lick away the wet. He says they watch but don’t touch me, that they heft the blood-soaked rags Maman leaves throughout like roots of her loss and put them in suede pockets in their little pants.

Our boy Johnny’s got a crook in his jaw. He says he tried to swallow the moon. He tried to take the mink lady’s necklace and fell deep, his jaw clean sweet space of a break. The asphalt city is round and hard and gray, and my best friend is the Bird Boy. He came over today and flapped his wings so hard he fell and hit the counter and Maman’s bowl full of eggs and cake and cried in peals like a sparrow who lost its crumbs. Bird Boy is small and blonde and wears vests too large that he gets from his brother too big and his father long gone, and his mother is a painted lady. Maman says that she loves the soldier men with big beards and pants that don’t fit with her teeth. That her hands are small and painted red like a parrot and she wears hoop skirts sometimes and on other days trousers and crushed roses on her lips that are shaped like the ring on my skin that Papa too long gone left below my navel. Maman says that the papa not quite gone is an Okay A Man, that he brings her flour and vanilla from Morocco and doesn’t mind her teeth and their pretty brown that glints against her mouth, which she colors with yolk and soot. She wears her hair in a pretty wire and sings O Lord Be My Lord under her breath.

At night we sleep on her favorite: a rug wadded up and an old fur that her papa shot. She tells us about how before we lived below this grate making bread and cakes for marble-chested women and blue-eyed soldiers in this city so filled with sparrows and painted ladies she can’t breathe, she lived in a flat with her papa and her dresses were made of finest yellows and pinks and she wore pearls every day and Sunday’s finest was a pale pink diamond dress full of lace. She says that was before Papa too long gone came, before he was ours and his only children were from painted ladies. How he offered her a flower then did things that though she didn’t recognize them didn’t feel unfamiliar but invisibly tangled and left spots of red dripping down and her own Papa saw the belly and unowned her. How she went to Papa too long gone’s apartment and a woman wearing roses and nothing else opened the door. But Maman was fifteen and her belly was the biggest thing about her and her too thin wrists wobbled against his, and he let her stay for a while, fed her crushed animals and pixie bones.

I tell her when I’m old enough I’ll have more painted ladies than him and her teeth show throaty and glinting and her laugh is a broken ruby and she coughs blood into her palm and her eyes are worm-brown moons. My boy Johnny thinks...