Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY MOLLY PEACOCK

  ARTWORK © 2014 BY KARA KOSAKA

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request.

  Print ISBN: 978-0-7710-7015-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-7710-7018-1

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For all who imagine alternate lives

  for Joan Stein, late-life painter

  &

  for Mike

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Birth of a Genuine Article

  Portrait of a Letter as a Young B

  C, the Softie

  D and His Deer

  E’s Encyclopedia of Emotions

  The Flibbertigibbet’s Flaw

  Gallimaufry

  Hotel Religion

  Doctor I and the Illustrator

  While Jiggle Juggles, J Makes Jam

  A Knight’s Knack

  L at Her Pool

  M’s Dream House

  The Negativo Trio

  O’s Full Circle

  The Poet

  Q’s Quest

  R and her Great Egret

  The Sister Sailors

  T’s Diary

  Useful U

  The Plunge of V

  Wacktastic!

  X Marks Her Spot (with Lipstick)

  yet, Yes

  Z at the Satisfactory

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  The Birth of a Genuine Article

  Nobody much noticed her as a child. Nobody’s supposed to notice a small a. Born an athlete, she grew up on long, slender legs to her point, becoming a capital of quiet beauty. Now A was pregnant, ascending the Alps with her husband THE on their very last climb for a while—since even A-1 members of the Alpine Club never mountaineer in the third trimester.

  THE threw her a rope. She caught it as auras of auroras sky-skipped around her, and THE sang out possible names for their little one, while the mountains echoed back: “Alpenglow—glow-glow?”

  “Apogee—gee-gee?”

  “Something so …”—the altitude made it almost too hard for A to talk—“… so commonplace it’s … extraordinary.”

  “An audacious appellation,” her husband announced as she approached him. “That’s what we need! How about Acrophile?”

  For the apple of our amour? No! A didn’t say.

  As a little girl she couldn’t wait to jump into things, to somersault behind an e to make an eagle fly, or pirouette before twin ps to make an apple pie. Oh, for the chance to leap three times and make an aardvark!

  When she got a little older, she loved nothing better than to arrange an assortment of letters and cap them with herself, climbing up an I, then a D, then an E to send an idea into the world. But now she was shy to anticipate. She was expecting—but she tried to avoid expectation. Naming a first child, she despaired, it’s one of the most original acts of a lifetime.

  When they reached the crest at last, they perched and ate their snack of almonds and dried apricots. “How about Artichoke?” THE said blithely as he chewed. “Or Argyle?”

  A tucked her point under the broad shoulders of his crossbar. “We need something almost invisible,” she mused, “for our little anonymouse.”

  THE always napped at the summit, but A felt awakened to the child inside her. Aware of the one to come, she also remembered the child she’d been. It was a slow, slow avalanche of realizations.

  She’d proceeded through her early years almost invisibly, except in the eyes of her Aunt AN. It was she who came to recognize wee a’s abilities. “My acrobat,” she would say to her niece, “my tiny mouse.” AN, who was solitary, childless (and quite a bit older than A’s astrologically mismatched, acrimonious parents) trained little a for her roles in life. She taught her the arabesque, the front and back attitudes, the boost. AN’S affection warmed A like a beloved angora sweater. The girl learned her bridge, her cannonball, her handstand, her headspring, her twirl.

  But as the old woman became even older, her A began to lose its firm slant. Absorbed with tumbling lessons, her young apprentice hardly noticed. Eventually the valiant elderly article suffered such ague that the legs of her first letter collapsed. She was rushed to St. Anne’s hospital, her surprised niece hovering at her side.

  “Will I,” A asked her ailing aunt, “collapse, too?”

  “Highly unlikely. Remember, you’re special, you have two jobs to do, unlike the rest of us. You’re a letter, but you’re an article as well. You make words, but like me you introduce them, too. You’ve got to learn to pace yourself. It’s a long life.”

  A quaked at the prospect. Two roles—she’d never realized. She’d just pirouetted her way, protected by her elder.

  “Put one foot in front of the other,” ancient AN continued, nearly out of breath. “That’s how to live.”

  As a child interprets adult wisdom, A decided then and there to be careful always, calculating each and every tumble. She would try her hardest never again to anticipate or leap.

  Aunt AN went on for a while but began to lose her point. “You’ll have to do it for me …” she whispered. “You can, you know … You’re the genuine article.”

  After hearing those last words, young A descended in the battered hospital elevator to a life in the absence of the anchor of her world. Her parents were so absorbed in arguments she barely saw them. Her friends were uniting with vowels and locking themselves into the interiors of words. She found herself alone.

  In anguish A joined the Alpine Club, to refresh herself in the mountain air. Everybody at the club went about their business, and nobody really noticed her—except THE.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You’re the genuine article.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  Suddenly she leapt into his arms.

  “That was unanticipated!”

  “I know, I gave up anticipation,” A answered. If you give up hope, you give up agony.

  “Gave it up?” THE was incredulous. “But that’s what articles do. We go before any person, place, or thing that needs an introduction.”

  “Well, I’m not only an article,” A explained. “I’m also a letter. I prefer letter work, actually.”

  And so they began climbing together. A was in peak shape, THE certainly didn’t have to be told.

  One thing led to another …

  Now, while THE slept, A let her legs stretch, her point perk. Her aspirations, if she could admit she had them, glowed like ascending horizons. Aunt AN, A thought, she had aplomb. A felt a fizz of excitement and didn’t quash it. She heard the merest suggestion of applause, and she smelled something, too. The perfume of her aunt’s affection seemed to waft toward her.

  Approval seemed to wrap around A, and just as she was relaxing, an outline appeared in the air. Gradually the outline filled in—it was the ghost of Aunt AN materializing, and her robust voice declared: A NAMER AS WELL AS A BEARER BE.

  J
ust as A was about to call “Aunt AN!” the ghost smiled a beneficent smile, and waved, sailing off into the alpine mist.

  When she heard him say, “Careful!” A realized THE had woken and, in the haze of her epiphany, he’d already helped her begin the downward slope.

  “Whatever will we call our little appaloosa?” he worried again. A just concentrated on her footing.

  At last, on the bench at the foot of the mountain, THE moaned, “I’ve never had to name anything before, let alone a child! I precede things. I’m a readiness …”

  Slowly A said, “At the apex I—” could she bring it into being? “—apprehended … an apparition.”

  “Oh, what of?” THE asked, helping her off with her climbing gear, as if she encountered an apparition every day.

  “The ghost of my Aunt AN appeared,” she said, “and the sun was ablaze—this seems absurd, I know—and she said: A NAMER AS WELL AS A BEARER BE.”

  “Easy for an apparition to say,” THE sighed.

  “But we don’t have to be specific!” A whispered. “We can name our little acorn something as elemental as our own names.” The name could introduce each fresh thing as it rises into the air, could help each reach its apex …

  And so she anticipated an advent necessary but not apparent, the sound that’s uttered before an arrival—and taken by all as an article of faith.

  “Let’s call our little one AN,” she said.

  “Amen,” THE happily breathed.

  Portrait of a Letter as a Young B

  Every morning the fonts gathered for breakfast in the big house before strolling to the studios in the woods where they did their work. But B was brand new and didn’t understand that a font had to bustle in promptly to get the right seat at the right table. She came so late to breakfast on this breezy summer morning that there was no more room with any of the serif font groups—and no seats at any table of young fonts at all.

  B was left to beg the last spot at a table of elderly sans serif Lucida Grandes.

  “Hey, a Bembo in our midst,” an old Grande said.

  B smiled shyly.

  “Welcome to the colony.”

  The long, large-flowered curtains ballooned. At the other tables, the breakfast chatter was all about font shows, font magazines, font editions, and font awards, and where a sans serif had the best chance. But with the Grandes, B calmly ate buttered bread, burnt bacon, and blackberries from a little bowl, recalling her grandmother’s table.

  Some of the fonts at the older Reject Table (as B came to think of it) resented every new font from Comic to Zapf, but others had a soft, dedicated glow. To entertain young Bembo, those oldsters talked about their work on Bs. They still liked forming better, best, and the babbling triple B words like bubble and bobble. Soon the whole table unabashedly hummed, “Baubles, bangles, bright shiny beads.”

  After a few days the groups were so completely formed that B never got to sit with her peers. Even if she arrived early, she knew that barging into someone else’s chair created a displacement, and forced the other font to sit with the blistering, bitter Times New Roman, as she once had to do. Times sat alone at the far-end table. In a single morning meal B learned how he loved his bite, like an acid sauna. His favorite words? Bilious and blight. B had barely thought about the honors for which Times so mordantly resented being ignored. How dare people call him “B-list.” He was the best. He deserved the Bulitzer, the Brillium, and the Bovernor General’s Award, not to mention the Bobel Prize.

  After the ordeal of breakfast was over, B went to the press shop with relief. She spent the day becoming word after word, showing each its possibilities in a font from her graceful old family, Bembo. She had yet to choose her favorites, but brillig would be one of them.

  Gradually B learned to love the old Grandes’ stories of the beggars in the roads who voluntarily gave up everything—all blathering, all bothering, all bamboozling. B would have liked to avoid those vices, but she had not yet learned to go only toward the positive.

  What she did learn that summer was to flee the negative, and she developed a Bembo prayer:

  Don’t let me B like U.

  Don’t let me B bitter.

  Don’t let me break against the wrong words

  until I am bent and bruised.

  B was so young, she had yet to learn to love. Right then she was just learning to work, and the old, benign rejected ones impressed her. Not much they had done was remembered anymore, but they were persevering at being, engaging themselves from bramble to Beelzebub.

  Not to be bitter, Bembo prayed,

  and just … just … to stay,

  to do what I do.

  So she bumbled through the rest of her summer.

  C, the Softie

  When there was something little c wanted to say, but he could only see it, he’d tell his father, Capital C, “I can feel the answer in my mind,”—and he could, a colt cavorting on a cold morning—“but I can’t capture the words for it.”

  “Then you can’t know the answer,” Capital C would say. “You can’t have an idea except in words.” Yet c did too have ideas, whole constellations of them gamboling above him as he fell asleep …

  Many years later, on the phone with his girlfriend, c’s complicated thoughts concatenated. What could he say to her? Her voice was crisp as a cotton shirt, but c liked to curve his thoughts, to caress an idea’s shoulders the way he liked to caress this girl. In his mind his longing curved, as much an opening as an enclosure, a harbor, like a c of land around water.

  Then his father’s credo crept into his mind: Say it in words.

  “Ohhh,” he whispered to her, “I love you.” Those three words stood as confused as three capsized boys, lost, then captured, brought to shore, and charged with uncommitted crimes. His idea wasn’t really I-love-you, but it was the closest he could come.

  His girl took the words wrong. She couldn’t help thinking of satin and crinolines, cream-colored bouquets, and a triple-tiered cake.

  And so they were married.

  And soon conceived their son.

  But nothing ever crystallized between them, for confusion is necessary before conclusion, though c had yet to learn that, and Capital C had forgotten it, and c’s wife, still crisp as lettuce, wilted at the very thought.

  Not everything charms into words instantly. Some things whinny inside you or skitter out as hooves of color and later clang like horseshoes against a forge. Some things can’t be crammed into a concept. They just have to be cried.

  Excuses were concocted and clashes avoided. Their couples counselor could never persuade them into confrontation or cajole them into apologies. And so they crumpled …

  But at his release from false commitment, c felt the value of his silences. He was a soft c, while Capital C had been hard, and his son’s mother, now his ex-wife, was hard. Hard cs had their function in this world: they marched with hs to challenge and charge; they climbed with rs to crest and crown. They linked with ls to clatter. But soft c preferred contemplation and slipping into a word to alter it, say from sent to scent.

  Now, himself a grandfather in a cloud of spicy aftershave, c often did not bother to speak, except when he hooked his grandson under his arm and carried him up to bed. He tucked the boy in, but left the light on, and the child waited for c to go down to the kitchen. When grandpa returned with the kiddy cup of hot chocolate, he murmured to the curious child, You see, little caterpillar, we soft cs don’t like to close up our thoughts. Then he adjusted the sipper spout and continued, We like to leave things open and receive.

  D and His Deer

  D always felt, somehow or other, double. He was an upright line, but then again, he was a curve. When he looked in the mirror straight on, he saw the dapper features of the diplomat he was. But sideways, if he took off his horn-rimmed glasses, he imagined he could be taken for a rather distinguished Dame. He always saw both sides to everything.

  Would he ever find his dæmon—the divine spirit within? Did he rea
lly have one spirit? D seemed to be singing a duet with himself.

  Seeing both sides made him a champion procrastinator. D dilly-dallied. Waited till the last minute to decide anything. At every posting, he drove the staff crazy. But that was diplomacy.

  Now dusk dropped on the gated embassy grounds. D flipped on his desk lamp, and the pool of light shut out the trees, looming and dissolving. D drew the drapes, deaf to the delicate drone of insect wings. He returned to his desk, trying to distract himself from a strange little pain that had come to him all his life, like a recurrent dream. (Except, he had to confess, he never dreamed.) The pain was a distinct tiny stab in a spot, well, what would you call that? D called it down there.

  For years, since he was a little d, he considered all the options about this strange pain. It was nothing, really. He went long times between feeling it. Maybe it was too slight to worry about, but then again … At last D decided to see a doctor. As a matter of fact, he saw a number.

  “Tell me your dreams,” the first doctor said.

  “Don’t bother to ask me, I never dream,” D said.

  “In dreams begin responsibilities,” the doctor quoted.

  D demanded a referral.

  “I’ve got a very specific pain,” he said to the next doctor. He pointed to, well, down there.

  “Your testicle,” the physician said. Which required a test. Several. And more.

  Finally the second doctor read all the results and announced, “Aha, a dermoid cyst.” What? Inside the cyst were hair follicles and an eye-type thing with eyelashes and a tooth.

  “Do you think I was a twin?” D wondered with a weird kind of delight as he examined the x-ray.

  Well, the doctor wouldn’t go that far. These dermoid cysts were usually removed in childhood. No reason, however, to remove it now. D wouldn’t dream of having it removed! It explained everything! That slightly creepy darling little creature in there must have been a twin, someone D had grown around as she dissolved. D was convinced it was a twin sister.