The Artstars by Anne Elliott

Author:Anne Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253044389
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Stone Floor

THE STEPS OF THE QUAY DROP RIGHT INTO THE GRAY-GREEN WATER. She says she wants to descend those steps, into the cold rush like her favorite writer, pockets full of rocks. Since we were kids, she talks like this, strolls along edges and fake laughs. I don’t slap her. Not anymore. Nowadays, I push the counteridea: I want to descend the staircase nude, cubist, flattened and orange, with my nose over there and my hip up here.

Rebecca swats my head. “Sara, really. Make it yours.”

“You’re filling your pockets with rocks,” I tell her. “That’s not yours.”

“They’re my souvenirs,” she says.

I don’t say. I’m done saying. Hers, or not hers—who gives a hoot. They are weighing her down. Everything she touches weighs her down.

Down is where she looks nowadays. She scans the gravel for souvenirs, misses the monuments. She misses the meringues too: jumbo, pillowy meringues, a windowful in Easter-colored drifts. “Becky, look. Cloud cookies. Look up.”

She does not look up. She snatches a rock from the ground and rubs the dust off with her thumb. The rock is crusty white, like the hilltop cathedral behind her. She holds the rock up and squints, like a drawing student, to compare the rock to the domes. “Look, a scale model,” she says.

I am done saying. It is not a scale model. It is a rock. I like rocks. I have nothing against rocks. This is something beyond rocks. She spit shines the rock, then drops the find in her overcoat pocket, and it clanks against her collection. I can see the bulge of her pocket. She scans the gravel for another.

I step to the shop to buy a cookie. “What color you want, Beck?”

“Color, not flavor?”

“That’s not an answer.” I don’t wait for an answer. I buy her a yellow, to eat with her dirty fingers.

The sky darkens, then opens up. Umbrellas dot the air over our sidewalk: black, black, red, black. Up the hill, the cathedral weeps salt. “I’m going inside,” I say. There are saints I want to see. I want the high shelter, the placid faces overhead, the gilt halos.

“I’m staying out here,” my sister says. “I don’t want to get converted.”

“You won’t be converted. They can’t make you believe anything you don’t want to.”

A puddle forms around her feet, where the street won’t drain. “You believe everything,” she says.

I hike up the stairs to the church without her. It is a wrought wedding cake thick with frosting, pearly and crowded. At the threshold, I turn back and see her under the bakery awning: slight in her black sporty raincoat, with damp red ringlets framing her face, looking into the depth of her puddle, nibbling the very edge of her airy cookie.

My cookie is the blue of a songbird’s egg. I gobble it, there on the cathedral step, as the rain and blue food color stream down my hands. The sweet is so strong it curls my lips into something that must look like a smile. I step inside.

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