Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler

Author:Karen Joy Fowler [Fowler, Karen Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780698405486
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

DUPLICITY

They took Alice out every single day. Sometimes she was crying when she came back. Sometimes she was limp and had to be carried. This was not much like Alice.

Alice had been Alice the day she and Tilly had returned to the base camp and found it violated. The tent had been ransacked. The camp lantern had been taken and some of their more brightly colored clothes were gone. A box of tampons had been opened and several unwrapped. Alice picked one up, holding it by its long tail like a dead mouse. She laughed. “What do you suppose they made of these?” she asked Tilly. She stuck the tampon into one of her ears, plugging the other ear with her finger. “Very useful,” she said. “Yes? Sleep late in the mornings. Miss the birds.”

Alice’s cheerfulness was so marked it required explanation. Alice, who was an artist and amateur cartographer, had told Tilly that the blank spaces in maps were often referred to as sleeping beauties. This surprised Tilly, who had never given it any thought. She could not imagine anyone actually functioning with this optimistic attitude toward the unknown. Not without a lot of effort. Here be dragons, was Tilly’s philosophy. Expect the worst and you’ll still be disappointed. Her reaction to the intrusion into their camp had been one of barely controlled alarm. She had known this trip would be dangerous. They had come so casually. They had been very stupid.

But Alice had been Alice. “It was clearly investigative,” she told Tilly calmly. “And not malicious. Nothing was broken. If they had wanted us to go, they would have found an unambiguous way to suggest it. This was just curiosity. Though I do wish they hadn’t taken our light.” Alice had been sitting outside the tent in the sun, since she could no longer work at night. Propped open on her knees, she’d had a lap desk which folded and unfolded; she’d been penciling a curve in the Nhamundá River onto her graph.

The map Alice and Tilly had brought was based on high-altitude infrared pictures. The maps Alice was doing would be much more detailed. On that day she had been working on something whimsical, partly map, partly picture. She had noted the turn in the river and then, in the water, had added the head of a large river turtle—the tracaja. On the day of their arrival, a turtle like this had watched them for hours while they emptied the boat and set up camp. Alice had sung the turtle song from Sesame Street to it, bringing civilization, she said, to the backwards turtles of Brazil, who could have no knowledge of the advances other turtles had made globally. Alice had nieces and nephews and a predilection for information there was no reasonable way she could know anyhow. Tilly didn’t know that song.

Two untidy brown braids rested on Alice’s shoulders. A slight breeze blew the unrestrained wisps of hair into her face. She held them back with her left hand, added an arrow to the map with her right.

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