Pageant Question: When you look into the mirror, what do you see?

The big, yellow wrecking machines were at it again, this time on the next street over, but Jenny still jumped when she heard their diesel engines roar to life.  It was her street that had been the most recent victim of the city's progress.  Her block, which in its heyday had shoulder to shoulder houses, was now toothless and grey.  Rocky lots with the tops of filled-in cellars poking through the third-rate fill the demolition crews used to fulfill their city contracts were more common than living houses.  Now the block behind Jenny's house was getting the same treatment; onward the machines would churn, block by block, until they hit the expressway that decades ago replaced what had been an award-winning park.  On the other side of the cement scar, people still prospered.  On Jenny's side, people hung on.

Jenny was lucky that she owned her house without a mortgage and she had enough to pay taxes and bills on time through her unconventional work.  She spent most of her personal days on the upper floors as her front rooms were devoted to her business: fortune telling.  Jenny shoved her feet into work boots and threw on a sweater before setting the house alarm.  Even a lived-in house wasn't safe from copper pipe thieves, even in the daylight.  The early morning dew from a devastated former front lawn dampened her boots as she scanned the last and newest empty lot on her street, created only a week ago.  While she liked to get to the demolition sites before the crews were completely done, she hadn't been able to get out because of a sudden string of appointments.  It seemed like the word-of-mouth was finally gaining momentum.

A sudden sparkle in  the mud caught her eye.  It was a fragment of mirror.  Jenny freed it with her right hand and planted her boots firmly against the rocky clods.  Angling it over her left shoulder, she rotated the piece from side to side, up and down, peering beyond the reflection.

Pageant Question 8: What one thing do you want people to remember about you at the end of your life?

Hadal was the eldest member of the tribal community, and he was dying.  He knew he was dying; he know a lot of things, though he didn't often have the words for them.  Hadal had kept his tribe safe through the years by his daily observations of the winds and sky, by his implementation of a scout system, and by his ability to find the underlying causes behind events.  Most in his tribe thought Hadal was in communication with the gods, and that he was given special knowledge, but he knew that anyone could do what he did, if only they would take a moment to think.

At this moment, Hadal was sitting in one of his favorite places along an overlook on the clifftop.  There was a tree and a stone and he leaned back in the angle they made and thought.  Hadal thought further forward than he had ever thought before, and he imagined the generations of decedents of his people.  He imagined what they would do based on what they would need when more children were born, and more elderly lived longer, as Hadal had lived longer than his parents, who had lived longer than their parents.  The elder imagined a future that he could not even name, and he saw the wind blowing the dust.  He saw the clifftop where he sat worn by the wind.  He saw the river that gave them life eating the world.  He saw the clouds gather and release, relentlessly through births and deaths.  He saw the world washed and his people taken.

He let these images wash over him, like the warm wind was at that moment, and he sat until the next thought came as it always did.  It was a question: what would remain?

340

I despise keeping the secrets of my ex-boyfriends.  Invariably, they have each confessed something to me, and I hold it in my memory, wishing I could tell someone, but feeling some sort of loyalty to the promise implied by love no longer felt; the promise that I would keep the secrets forever.

I suppose it bothers me because they promised to love me forever, and, clearly, that didn't work out.  To whom should I confess these secrets?  Certainly not a new boyfriend, if there even were one.  He would not understand.  These secrets are big, not in the scope of the world, but rather in terms of their intimacy.  How can I stand to keep their secrets?

I can't.  I will confess two of them now from from the worst boyfriend I ever had.  He was abusive, and I barely escaped him with my self intact.  I was in high school and he was only my second boyfriend ever, so I hope you can forgive me for my idiocy.  We'll call him Peter.  Peter, I can see now, was a sociopath.  He lied, and lied and lied to everyone, and especially to me.  He lied to his mother, he lied to his step-father, and he lied to himself.  He was stupid, but oh, so clever.  He could manipulate.  He had no emotions of his own, but he could twist yours into knots.  He was without remorse, but he could make you feel bad about anything.  He was without conscience and would drag anyone down into the darkness with him because you couldn't believe anyone could be so evil.  He would hold me down when I said no and he'd do it anyway.  He would hit me in the leg, though I wished and wished he'd hit me in the face so I'd have a "valid" excuse to escape.  He followed me and questioned me and lied to the police and stole and lied and separated me from my friends and family.  You can see why I don't feel bad revealing Peter's secrets.

Peter has two related secrets.  One: he once reached into the toilet to squash his own poop with his hands to make it look like diarrhea, so he could get out of going to work at Burger King.  Two: he faked abdominal pain to get out of going to school, but he faked it hard and couldn't back down, so his mother, a nurse, took him to the hospital.  He doubled down on his lie and kept faking for the doctors who performed a needless appendectomy.  Peter was a committed liar.  Pity the poor high school girl, so innocent and desperate to please and be liked.  Pity her carrying the sociopath's secrets and her own hidden hurts.

314

It was firmly set in Jessa's mind that men who behaved badly in cars were not meant to be permanent partners.  The first boyfriend she had when she could drive was clearly a psychopath to everyone but her.  She was with him from high school and into college, standing by him through a series of last straws.  One of the final last straws happened while she was driving, nearing his small house with his mother and stepfather.  Little kids were on a walkway overpass, dropping snowballs on cars.

"When they hit your car, stop and let me out; I'll get them."

"No, it's okay, they're just dumb kids.  I can..."

"Let me out!"

"It's all right, watch..."  Jessa slowed just before the overpass, and after the kid dropped his snowball harmlessly on the road, she sped up and prepared to make the turn to her boyfriend's road.

"I said STOP!"  He grabbed the wheel and jerked it to the side of the road.  She had never felt so mad at him.  She was so mad she yelled, and he punched her in the leg.  She let him out and drove away.  Jessa wished she had never gone back with him after, but she did.  It wasn't quite the last, last straw, but it was the first realization that men who behaved badly in cars were not meant to be permanent.

301

My grandmother told me they used to laugh at people in Asian countries for wearing surgical masks in public.  I asked why, and she explained about the newness of an ever-changing and ever-more-potent flu season and about the recognition of carbon pollution, but what I meant was why did they laugh?  Later, when I got to think about it, I guess it was because only people in Asian countries wore them.  I never really thought about it much, since only uncivilized people don't wear masks.

I was always Grandma Briella's favorite because I would unplug just for her.  I feel guilty about it now because sometimes I didn't; I only said I unplugged, but I never thought she'd notice.  Thinking back, I'm sure she noticed.  Grandma Briella noticed a lot, even when she didn't always call me by the right name.

231

The night that Clara was hit by a white SUV was the same night Jack lost his virginity and the two became indelibly linked in his mind.  Two divorces, five therapists and countless hours of self-loathing could be traced directly back to that night.  Of the five therapists, three suggested there was a link, one was a lousy therapist, and the last had only met Jack yesterday.

183

Long ago and far away there was a land that is no more.  Its location is not marked on maps.  Its name is not written in the history books.  The bloodlines of its people is scattered and thin.  But every so often, there is a thought.  A tiny thought bubbles up in the mind of a person whose blood contains those thin markers of the people of that land, and that thought is a breeze on his skin, or a color in her eye, or a name on the tips of their tongues.

181

I know what I will look like when I am old.  My eyes have acquired time travel, and I can see it.  I can see the skin, thinning and wrinkling into a thousand tiny creases on my face, my arms, my legs, my belly.  I can see my bones protruding, knuckles swelling, muscles weakening.  My skin is discolored with age spots, nicks and scars, and is blue with veins and bruises.  My shoulders roll forward and I will move stiffly and sit, one arm stiff, one hip raised.  I see my friends and family deteriorating faster and faster.  Buildings age before my eyes even faster than the humans.  I see other things, too.  Things I don't understand and that don't seem to concern me.  I know these are the things I will shake my gray head at, careful not to turn too far.  The eyes of my mind see through future time, too, and I can see how it will turn back to the memories of my past.  I know which experiences I will recount over and over.  I know what I will regret and what I will cherish.  Time travel is heavy.  It weighs on a body.  My eyes get a far-away look that has nothing to do with vagueness of sight or cataracts.  It is time travel.