Imagine us in the swamp.
Slogging.
Our few possessions held high on our parents’ bent backs.
To keep them dry but—
Nothing is dry.
We are melded together like one cancerous snail. From a distance, we are.
We are holding on to our parents’ exhausted hands. We don’t want to drown. We don’t want to die.
Steps. In wet, heavy rags.
Our tears rolling down dirty faces from memory, falling into the bog. I remember—I don’t want to remember—
My sister—
struck, torn up by the hair and tossed into the bloody mud outside our home. The soldiers on horseback laughing. In a midnight burning, the horse reared up, and the hoof came down onto her back. Mama screaming. Papa lunging—hit, as my sister lies, paralyzed, the soldiers laughing, mama screaming still and papa gasping for burnt midnight air. I see it again. In this horrid swamp, in every step, her body unmoving in the crimson mud. Oh, sister. Oh, dearest sister!
Night haunts us.
Slogging, not one of us speaks.
All weep.
And we know we are the lucky ones. We know. We are survivors.
To where do we so solemnly, raggedly go?
To the border.
To safety.
To the great coastal city of Anaki Ro.
We arrive—no longer all of us—one evening, hungry and cold but relieved to have found sanctuary. The people here do not speak our language but there are some from our own land who do. They help us, share with us their foodstuff. I eat rapidly, greedily with eyes darting protectively like a rat’s.
Anaki Ro has an unpleasant smell, like fish oil and sulfur.
The people here ignore us.
They live in the neighborhoods. We, in the gutter alleys and slums. Sometimes the elderbangers try it with us. Mama stuck one in the gut with a knife once. He bled out. There wasn’t this in our land. No, there was not any of this.
Papa steals.
Mama pleases men.
I come to know the sound of counted coin.
Some of the others disappear.
Never return.
The group that crossed the swamp grows smaller and smaller. I recognize so few faces. Others, arrivers from before us and arrivers after us, join us.
One of the new arrivers and mama disappear. Where is mama? I ask papa, but he does not answer. He weeps. Like in the swamp, he weeps, and I with him, holding each other in the night which hangs over Anaki Ro like a guillotine.
One day a gendarme catches papa stealing.
The execution is quick.
In the street.
Before a gathered crowd, they cut off his head, with which the crowd, laughing, plays before kicking it away into one of our alleys. No one dares retrieve it. With a rat’s darting eyes I dig a hole in the dirt and bury it.
I am alone now.
The elderbangers linger on me.
Some of the people from our land, who speak our language and shared their foodstuff, hold my hand, kiss my cheek, want to exchange foodstuff for holding one another in the night.
It is not safe for me here, a woman tells me.
It is not safe for me anywhere.
My home is gone.
My family is gone.
I am alone now. I am alone. I am alone and the city is just another swamp, composed of putrid, inhuman frothbubbles—popping. Like a dream, popping—
I am awakened by rough lecher hands on my leg.
Kicking, I loose and flee.
I need a place to live. I ask but no one will answer me. I ask in their language. I have picked up some of it. Home, I say. Shelter, I say. Help, I say.
Finally someone directs me, but the lodgings will not have me. One look at me and no, and the same for the next and next, until a man in fine clothes takes pity on me, but his fee I cannot afford. No money, I say. Work, I say.
He shakes his head.
I exist outside in the rain and the fog, and the fear of a winter I know is approaching. I am the ghost of Anaki Ro. I walk along the coast and imagine a life across the sea.
I eat rodents.
Which upsets me because I feel they are my brethren. When I die, I want rats to consume my body.
I dream about the rats in Anaki Ro making exodus from the city, descending to the sea and swimming across, so that the sea is not of water but of rats, and I am a single among them in the black and the grey and the fur and the fangs.
First snowfall.
Shivering.
There is foodstuff on the other side of the glass, the warm side. I long for it.
Hunger gnaws at my bones.
Pressing my face against the glass I—
am yanked back.
Tossed.
Like my sister. The gendarme laughs and kicks me in the ribs before I can protect myself. Kicks me in the face. Blood trickles out of my mouth. I taste shattered teeth. Behead me, I wheeze.
Then the gendarme collapses in on himself.
Against a background of falling snow the silhouette of a man stands holding a wooden staff. The gendarme stirs. Go, says the man.
To Telltale Tower,
says the man, driving the end of his wooden staff into the stirring gendarme’s chest, then he is gone, and it is as if I also am gone because the falling snow, falling harder, has whited out the world, and running now I remember those words I will never forget. Telltale Tower.
I ask about it.
I ask everyone I pass, until someone mercifully points the way.
I will never see the silhouetted man again, but as I have learned since, it does not matter. I possess the power to eternalize him.
As I have the power to bring my sister back to life.
To bring papa back.
My—
Telltale Tower stands white and magnificent on a square cliff overlooking the sea.
The smell of Anaki Ro does not reach here.
Approaching the entrance, I see exit a girl holding two heavy bags of coin.
As we pass, she glances at me with sad, dejected eyes, and I fear that even here there will be no place for me.
I enter.
An old man arranges books behind a large desk. He is the only person here. Do you let rooms, I say. Yes, he says. Behind him are more books. But I haven’t money, I say. The old man opens a book and asks my name. I give it. Here, says the old man, we do not let rooms for money. We let rooms for stories.
One story each month, he says.
I do not know what to say.
Do you have stories, he says after a time.
I have stories.
Wait, I say, do they have to be true stories?
He laughs. There are no untrue stories, he says. Just as there are no untrue paintings. Truth becomes in the telling.
You must meet the Narrator, he says.
Who’s the Narrator?
He is the one to whom you’ll be telling your stories, the old man says.
The Narrator lives on the top floor. He is ancient and not of this world, or so he claims. He is certainly blind, but he hears well. The first time I spoke to him he told me I had a beautiful voice.
You will need to tell one story now, as first month’s rent, and record one story in this book, as last month’s rent, the old man says, passing me a book just like the books I saw on the ground floor.
I don’t have a story ready, I say.
I must sound nervous, because the old man stops—his gnarled hand resting on the knob to the Narrator’s room—and says, Everyone has at least one story. Her own.
Then he opens the door.
And I find myself standing before the Narrator, who says, Do you have a story for me?
Yes, I say.
Closing my eyes I begin, Imagine us in the swamp…
When I am finished, I wait.
The Narrator is silent. For a long time he is silent, until he sighs and I say, Was the story good enough? Do I have a place to live here?
You already had a place before telling your story, he says.
All stories are good, he says.
For the first time since we set off with our belongings on our backs, the glow of a burning, broken past behind us, I feel I am out of the swamp. I feel I am holding mama’s hand and papa’s hand, and sister is among us. The soldiers on horseback cannot kill us. The gendarmes cannot punish us. Even the people of Anaki Ro, they no longer can ignore us.
Why do you do this? I ask of the Narrator.
The question surprises him.
I hope I haven’t erred.
Because I am not of this world, he says. Because in this world I give you shelter but in my world you become my characters, and I tell your stories as my own. He pauses. I am not a good person. I am a taletaker.
What is your name, I say.
In my world, he says, I am known as Norman Crane.