(NOTE: This story appeared in the 2006 edition of the Onion River Review)
"Magnanimous"
There is a building around here that people call "The House of Everyday Magic." It has twelve floors and four apartments on each floor. Two of the apartments are now vacant. The landlady, a first generation Russian immigrant named Anastasia Kukov, has taken out adds in the local papers to have them filled. Rent is cheap around here. Ms. Kukov, who has never married and who loves the hot smell that comes from the vent of the laundry room, chooses her tenants carefully. She wants only dreamers to live in her rooms.
On Thursdays, Ms. Ekaterina Mostovoi joins Ms. Kukov in her kitchen to drink coffee and talk about Russian tennis players. They are also learning to play the American boardgame "Risk."
At night, alone, Ms. Kukov likes to turn the lights off and paint on the canvas in her living room w/ her eyes closed. She smears her hands all over the painting when she gets tired. In the morning, when the sun is up, she dances w/ the canvas from the night before, hugging it close. "There are so many colors around," she says, standing in the bright sun-beams coming through her kitchen window. "So many colors together. So bright."
"Frozen Dreams"
On the 11th floor, in apartment B, there is a boy named Paco who lives alone. Nobody knows where his parents are. He pays his rent on the third Tuesday of every month. When he does, he shouts through the door, "Hello, Ms. Zukov! You are a very pretty woman!" He slips a check under her door and runs up the stairs like he's being chased by dogs, a nirvanic smile on his face, "You are very, very pretty!" shouting as he runs. Ms. Zukov, sitting at her kitchen table, smiles and blushes, sipping from her cup of beige coffee, plotting to invade Brazil.
Paco freezes his dreams in ice-cube trays. He places his nocturnal reveries, represented by figures cut from construction paper, fishes, and exclamation points, and clouds, he places these in the dry bottoms of empty ice cube trays then covers them with water. When he takes them out of the freezer the next morning, the cubes are filled with stories, resplendent with images from Paco's dreams.
Look in this one. Can you see Paco on riding a whale? He's got a cowboy hat on! And there, do you see on the horizon? Paco's grandmother dancing on her rocking chair with a commandant, the chair rocking on an upside down skiff! Oh, no! She knocked the commandant off with one of the oars! Paco kisses the whale and waves at grandma. And here's another one, where Paco is walking along the limb of a tree, trying to grab at the leaves which are all photographs and rustle in the strong wind that threatens to blow them away. As he reaches to grab one with the tips of his fingers he can see his parents smiling out from the picture, and then, suddenly, the wind picks up, and all the leaves are blown away.
Hurry up; drink your water, Paco. The ice cubes are melting, the dreams are fading.
"A Story About Oranges"
The hallway on the 6th floor of the House of Everyday Magic curiously appears to be longer than the building itself could possibly be wide enough to contain. Housing inspectors have taken meticulous measurements of the hallway and are always confronted with the dilemma it is a full twelve feet longer than the building, and so floor number six should, for all intents and purposes, jut out above Coventry Street on the north-side and Hudson Street on the south, a phenomenally impossible salient.
"You can't stop it being what it is," Ms. Kukov told Inspector Juho Eloranta, himself an immigrant from Finland, "With all your observations and second-guessing, and what do you know now?" Juho, holding his hat, a crushed, plaid fedora, in one hand, could only respond by scratching his furrowed brow and pursing his lips which made his big shaggy mustache rub against his nose, and in a herky-jerk spasm he sneezed into his hat. He looked despondently at Miss Kukov, who gave him a sympathetic little pout and a sideways tilt of the head, then they both laughed and she escorted Juho down to the front door as a gracious hostess always does, and she was ever graceful.
The walls of the hallway are decorated with paintings of Technicolor ducks w/ bright white smiles! They may be laughing at a joke one of them told; ducks are of course the stand-up comedians of the animal kingdom.
There are words scratched on the post of the stairwell's railing: "because," and "& Yet," and "maybe tomorrow," and "like our pure personalities."
There is always the scent of oranges on floor number 6 because Miss Julia Festival of 6C keeps several orange trees in her largely empty studio apartment. Her bed, nothing more than a mattress on the ground, is piled so high w/ comforters of motley hues and patterns that at its tallest point it reaches Julia's belly-button. Sifting through the covers for a sleeper is like looking through a deck of cards for the joker. The bed lay below a sunny window on the right, and across from it, on a desk she was given by her grandmother, sit dozens of tin cans, the labels peeling and worn, all filled w/ quality soil, all w/ their own tender young orange shoots, delicate like feathers. In the middle of the room, stand three mature and fruit-laden orange trees, growing right out of the wooden floor. "Take one," Julia will say, "Grab an orange. They're always in season up here on the 6th floor. It's on account of the fine weather."
Julia, a soft, waif of a girl in her young twenties, pale like cirrus clouds, w/ stringy brown hair, has eyes like polished emeralds, and is dieing. She is dieing because one bright summer day, while on vacation on a remote Micronesian island, she witnessed a full solar eclipse while being held close by the loveliest woman she had ever met. After the event, they had silly, fun sex on a beach and then fell asleep. When they woke up, under quicksilver skies glowing w/ the full spread of a galaxy of stars above, they went skinny-dipping in the ocean. A riptide pulled her friend out to sea from where she never returned.
The island's undermanned rescue crew was unable to retrieve her body.
Julia's plane was not scheduled to leave for three more days. She languished. She grieved. She composed an elegy that she read to the sea that was holding her dearest.
Understandably distraught, Julia sought the advice of a local medicine man, who told her that the belly of the sea was a warm place. This failed to console her. He gave her what he claimed was a philter of magnificent strength, a blessed concoction distilled from coconut pulp (and other unmentionables) to which Julia had a fierce allergic reaction which almost instantaneously reduced the size of her heart by half, and still now causes her heart to shrink. Today it is the size of a plum.
Miss Kukov, stirred by Julia's story, gladly welcomed her into the House of Everyday Magic and she moved in about a month after the incident on the island. She began cultivating orange trees soon after. She purchased the seeds from a toothless Chinese man whose tan skin was brown like paper-bags. He manned a booth in the Sunday open air market in Chinatown. "Make you happy," was all he could say, and he kept repeating it to Julia as she walked by, "Make you happy. Make you happy." She grew the seeds and planted the saplings in the cracks b/n the planks of the wooden floor.
If you open one, if you do take an orange—and Julia will insist that you do—you'll see that they are in fact blood oranges and you'll know that because of the vermillion tears that leak out. However, you will probably first see that the pulp of the fruit is a twinklingly radiant mix of silvers, blues, and greys.
"Delicious, aren't they?" Julia asks and smiles so big it hurts you inside like a punch. The leaves on the trees shake from a stiff breeze coming through the window and it sounds like breaking surf.
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