{ 1 }
Some people think just because you swan around Queens with a tinfoil magic wand and glue-on wings, you can mend broken mirrors; you can save their lives, even. But let me tell you, I am No Special Being whatsoever. I am not flying, dear reader. I’m just being blown around my very own circle of hell like anyone else, on my way to Hoboken, or a breakdown on my mother’s couch, where I’ll sit and chain smoke and watch soaps, hoping to better my life by ending it. But I don’t know this yet. For now, I am the first-grade reading fairy, and early, every morning, I walk the rat-scratched streets of Astoria to get to the R train, then the J train, then the M train, hell, the whole alphabet soup of obscure lines, lines I’ve never even heard of that squirm right into the bowels of Queens, my bag full of stories like wind I would unleash upon the world.
{ 2 }
I live with a woman named Dolores who’s got exactly three stories and she tells them over and over until my ears hurt. The first story is: “Here, look at this picture. It was from when I was married. God, I was so fat it was disgusting.” The second story is: “I used to have so much money, God, anywhere we wanted to go—the Bahamas, Jamaica—anywhere, we just went. Oh yeah, five-star hotels, clothes, whatever. Then I blew it all on a man. And now I got nothing. Yup. Nothing.” The third story is: “God, my stomach is so disgusting, you should see it. It’s from the twins—they stretched me out so much. God, I’m like a monster. I can’t even have the lights on when Tony and I have sex. Wanna see? It’s so gross.”
{ 3 }
Tony’s a track worker for the MTA down in the guts of the tunnels at night. MTA. That’s a good job. That’s civil service. That’s a job for life. Tony comes home with stories. “This one retard,” he says, “tried to kill himself on the tracks but he jumped at the wrong place.” You’d be surprised how many people get killed on the tracks every day. You’ve gotta know how to do it, how to jump, and where from, and this takes some study. Tony says you have to jump at the end of the platform where the train comes in. That way, the conductor can’t hit the brakes. That’s the only way to do it. Some poor schmucks can’t even get that right. They jump from the beginning of the platform and though that train’s humming along, the conductor’s got time to pull the emergency brake, and then lots of times you don’t get killed. That means you’re a permanent hospital job. Maybe your legs get cut off. Maybe your arms, too. Maybe you need a metal plate in your head and your face is gone. But you live. And besides the trouble of being all messed up, you gotta learn how to walk on your knees for the rest of your goddamn life and who knows how long that will be.
{ 4 }
Once Dolores took sleeping pills but her oldest girl found her and called 911 and they pumped her out. It’s a big joke now. Her girl says, “Yeah, retard, what you gonna do about it, take some pills? Slit your wrists?” And everyone laughs.
{ 5 }
Five bucks, I’ll tell you a story. Ten bucks, a true one.
{ 6 }
I was the book-fairy lady for the first grade and let me tell you the children were crazy. They rocked back and forth, talked to themselves, and stuck onto me like snails, and sometimes they walked around with their hands in their pants and called me mommy, and I went home to Astoria and cried and cried, because there is no cure for crazy or lonely, and I was just the book fairy: Today is Monday, says the page. Today is Tuesday, says the page. And The Very Hungry Caterpillar ate up all the days and weeks and years and years, honey.
{ 7 }
Some Friday nights, the whole family comes over; I mean Tony and also Dolores’s kids from her over-with marriage. The kids don’t live with her; they live with their father. We all gather in the kitchen of that second-story apartment. Someone brings Cokes and Doritos. Even the evil Goth twins show up—stout girls glossed in black, glinting like matching knives. An upstairs neighbor throws garbage out the window in a Glad bag, and no matter how many times it happens, I think it’s a human body jumping out a window, but it’s just garbage. And one dirtbag lands on top of all the other dirtbags that have accumulated for years. You couldn’t kill yourself even if you tried to jump off the roof. All that garbage would just be waiting to break your fall.
{ 8 }
I get very good reception on my tinfoil wand. Space stations, amateur ham radio operators from Hungary. You have no idea how many lonely people bump up against space. I carried that tinfoil wand around even after the star broke off and my left wing tore. Even as we speak, dear reader, there are voices which you may or may not be able to hear. Say you can’t hear a damn thing, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, that doesn’t stop perfect strangers from rubbing up against you.
{ 9 }
At school, I read a story about an old lady who has a magic pot and it keeps making spaghetti and the spaghetti fills the whole town and no one can eat that much spaghetti and everyone gets fat. The children stare into space. No one here knows what too much means.
{ 10 }
Dolores hangs around in the doorway of my room. We have the same birthday. The same birthday! Dolores thinks this makes us best friends. She says, “You’re good luck. I could tell the minute I met you. Yup. Good things are gonna happen now that you’re here. Yup.” Scorpio. Most screwed sign in the universe. Sign most likely to wind up toe-tagged, blue at the morgue. Cop told me that, and he would know. Dolores enrolls in secretarial school.
{ 11 }
Tony begins to drink and he’s one mean drunk. One time he came over and smashed all the mirrors in the place, which added up to something like 77 years bad luck, and really, we were fucked enough, so, like, who needed that?
{ 12 }
The world is full of sad stories and these sad stories stick to the world like flies on a dead thing.
{ 13 }
One day, on the train, I begin to vibrate. No one pays much attention as I stand in the middle of the car—vibrating—except a small man with a burlap sack in his lap, which contains something small and animate, like a snake or a chicken, and every couple of minutes he looks into his bag then closes it tightly and winks at me, then claps happily. Soon, I am vibrating all the time: in line at the deli, at the public library, the post office, the Greek take-out place. To vibrate nonstop for a whole year is no easy thing, I’m telling you. It requires a great deal of energy and attention, and it is hell on your eyes.
{ 14 }
I was convinced I was battery-operated and remote-controlled by vastly Superior Beings. As a consequence, I was emitting a faint light; I may have been angelic; reader, I think you should know this, but I wasn’t good luck.
{15 }
Are you looking for a happy ending? Well, listen up. Dolores eventually took a whole bottle of sleeping pills and threw them all up; she dropped out of secretarial school in the middle of Shorthand 202; I quit my job, and I still couldn’t wash the kids off. One day, I stopped vibrating. I took a bus to Jersey and stayed for a year. I watched daytime soaps and threw away my wand. All that damn time and I never saved anyone.
Sharmila Voorakkara is a poet who lives in Austin Texas. Her first book full-length collection of poetry, "Fire Wheel" was published by the University of Akron Press.
Photo by Paul IJsendoorn