Little Micky has scabs up and down his arms because he won’t stop scratching. There are no bugs in his hair. We’ve looked and looked. Nor on his body. We even made him strip to nothing once and checked all over. We hated doing it, but Micky didn’t seem to care. He chewed on a piece of plastic he’d found on the ground and stared at us without blinking the whole time. He didn’t look naked so much as dressed wrong, as if he’d come from a far away place and was making no effort to blend in.
Of all of us, Little Micky is the most mysterious, and the scariest.
It was Yam-Yam who found him. She was in a bad phase at the time. She’d be gone for days, and then when she finally wandered home she’d be wearing a necklace made of dead bees, her throat purple and ravaged from the stings, as if she’d spent the night howling away with some buck-toothed, over-zealous lover. Or if not the bees, then something worse. Maybe her eyes glazed like a fancy apricot pastry from one of the bakeries in town that know us by name and start to shake their heads before we even rattle their bells. Everyone was afraid she’d started playing mad-scientist. Afraid that her body-- already as skinny and see-through as a pipette-- had become her test tube, and that strange chemicals were purring in her stomach. Then came the time that she stayed gone so long that we started referring to her in the past tense.
“That Yam-Yam sure was a crazy bitch,” Polluck would say affectionately, then spit on his feet to emphasize the point. Polluck-- like all of us at Little Island-- is an interesting character. He’s always covered in so many splatters of mud and paint and bird shit and blood and spit that he does indeed look like a Polluck painting. Everyone knows he is in love with Yam-Yam. It is nothing more than one of the myriad unspoken theorems that govern the gravity and politics of our wayfarer’s world. The laws of both Nature and Man are a little different than everywhere else where we live.
But I digress. Tend to do that. They say I’m ‘all brambles and rambles’-- whatever that means. Guess I always do have more than a few burrs in my hair, so maybe that explains the ‘brambles’ part. I don’t have as nice a name as the rest of them though. I’m no Yam-Yam, no Polluck. They just call me what my mother did. I’m Rue. That means regret. I don’t even want to know what my mother was thinking when she named me that. I like to believe she had no idea what it meant.
As for Little Micky, that’s simple enough. Yam-Yam asked him what his name was when she found him, but instead of answering, he just cried and cried. So she called him the first thing that came to mind. He never really took to the name, honestly. It was like trying to name a cat. You can call Little Micky whatever you want and he’ll listen to you the same amount. Which is to say: not at all. He listens only to Yam-Yam, and that’s that.
So as I started to tell, before all this business about Polluck and naming cropped up, it was Yam-Yam who found Micky and brought him home to Little Island. When she showed up with him, we were doubly surprised. First because we hadn’t expected her ever to come back, and second because there was a little boy clinging madly to her hand and walking on his knees.
But there she was, and there he was. She told us to call him Little Micky. When we asked why he wasn’t walking right, she told us because she couldn’t make him. Then we asked where he’d come from, and she sighed and said, “Just found him, is all. Christ, why are y’all so ask-y today? Must have been a slow, slow while I was away. Don’t you have your own shit to gossip fuss about?”
So we’d learned good and fast not to ask too many questions about Little Micky.
That’s one thing that can be said about the lot of us. We’re adaptable people. Fast learners. We never have to ask the same thing twice. The world keeps getting rearranged around us all the time. It’s like we’re living in a rub-ix cube, only whoever is playing it isn’t very smart and can’t ever get the colors to match up. But no matter how many times we get twisted around, we never lose our footing.
We’re strong like that.
That’s why we’re here.
Still, it’s not often someone new comes to stay with us, and I couldn’t help my curiosity. So I kept listening hard for any clues. From what I’ve gathered, Yam-Yam found Little Micky crossing an alley in town, on his knees like he was praying or proposing, and sobbing violently. There was no one else around. Yam-Yam asked him about his mother, to no avail. Maybe the thing to do then would have been to take him to the police, but Yam-Yam had apricot-pastry eyes and never did trust the cops. None of us do. I know she meant well when she took his hand and led him here instead. I’ll give her that. However, whether or not it was a good thing, in the end, is as much your call as mine.
Little Micky did O.K here-- and still does, for that matter. It was a week before he first stood up. His pants were in tatters below the knees, and his calves were rich with bruises and blood. His legs trembled like a violin string engaged in a frantic vibrato. We thought maybe he would start to speak not long thereafter, but to this day he hasn’t said a word. No one knows his language; or if there even is a language that he calls his own.
Nowadays, he walks strong, but still he bites his tongue.
And now, this scratching.
He has so many scabs that he looks like he has been tied to a car and dragged down the road. We don’t know what do with him. We’re worried, but it’s not like that’s helping any. Besides, to be perfectly honest, Micky scares me. I’ve always had the feeling that he’s seen something so ugly that it has burrowed deep down into him and is waiting to spring from his mouth like a lion from a lair. Then again, maybe he doesn’t even remember his life before he came to us. Or if he does, it might seem like someone else’s life. That’s what it’s like for me. My memories of my days before Little Island are cinematic: too pretty, too high budget, not real, and certainly not mine.
Earlier this morning, I tried to hint to Yam-Yam that maybe we should see if we could coax a word or two out of Micky, in whatever tongue he might choose, but Yam-Yam wasn’t listening. She went on with what she was doing as if I hadn’t even spoken. She was sitting on one of the three plastic rocking horses that we keep under the Umbrella Roof, swaying back and forth, pale as sea-sick. She had that look again: like her skin was humming and she was trying to make sense of what it meant. Between her insect-limb-thin fingers was a tangle of electrical wires and plastic tubing that she was distractedly pulling into a choke-tight braid.
“What’s that for, Yammy?” I asked, trying again to draw her attention.
Yam-Yam looked at me blankly. After too long a pause, she said, “One of the sky-beams in Blue House is falling. We need something to bind it back up.” As she said this, she tugged so hard on one of the wires that I feared it would snap. I winced. I love Yam-Yam, but she’s too ghosty to be a good builder. She does other things that help us, but every time she tries to work on one of the houses someone with calmer hands-- usually Polluck or me-- has to come by after her and fix up what she thought she was fixing up in the first place.
“You look tired,” I said; “Go lie down. I’ll finish.”
I reached hopefully for the braid.
Yam-Yam jerked away suspiciously, cuddling the braid to her hard, empty stomach. “But my blankets are in Blue House,” she whined; “What if the ceiling falls and kills me in my sleep?”
“Take your blankets to Red House. You can have my spot.”
Yam-Yam glared. “I was just trying to get something done around here,” she said, then added, furiously and under breath, “Not like the rest of you.”
“That was nice of you,” I said, “But you’ve been working hard lately. You deserve some sleep.”
I reached again for the braid. This time she let me take it. It felt alive, somehow, in my hands. Like a tangle of tendons and veins and curdled clumps of fat. I didn’t like it. The wires were warm, too, as if it was not long after the kill. I liked that even less. The thought struck me that the wires weren’t stolen or salvaged from town but rather harvested from Yam-Yam herself. A crazy thought, I know, but it felt so real. I stared at Yam-Yam, hungry as a suitor, trying to find a spot on her dress that shone like vaseline, indicating creeping juices beneath the cloth. Or blood. Blood would serve just fine.
I found nothing, of course. I did wonder if this was because she really was made of wire and plastic. I looked briefly for grease stains instead, or a queasy iridescent shimmer of oil. Likewise, nothing.
This looking took a second, maybe two. Then I came back to myself and wondered what was wrong with me. I thought back to the day before and I realized all I had had to eat was a chalky corner of scone. I wrapped the braid into a coil and closed my fist around it.
“Don’t worry, I’ll finish this later,” I said.
The longer I held the braid the hotter it felt. I wanted it out of my grip. I wanted Yam-Yam to go to bed so she wouldn’t see me throw it into the barren wasteland that is the rest of the park beyond the fences in which Little Island is built. I wanted to run. I wanted to go into town and see normal people doing normal things. Men with tidy mustaches and slouchy bellies carrying bags full of eggs and bread and wine. Bored kids banging their flared palms against shopfront windows just to get someone to pay attention to them. Women touching one another’s shoulders and complaining about their husbands. All these simple, sure signs of a real city and a regular life-- signs I usually avoided as surely as those people avoid signs of the sort of life that me and mine have in its place.
But Yam-Yam wasn’t leaving. She was sitting there twisting her fists around in her gut and looking at me in a way I didn’t like. It seemed like she had just come down and her senses were clearer than they should have been.
“Rue,” She said.
“What, Yam-Yam?”
“You don’t look so good yourself. Maybe you should go lie down in Red House instead.”
“I’m fine.”
Yam-Yam shrugged. When she shrugs, your eyes go right to her bones. You can see them moving beneath her skin, and beneath layers of muscle and fat that must be no thicker than that layer of skin. I’ve often described Yam-Yam as beautiful, but I think the Yam-Yam I’m talking about when I say that isn’t the Yam-Yam who’s around today. She’s vanishing before our very eyes, and it’s no magician’s trick. It’s gruesome and real and painful to watch. Her cheekbones make harsh corners on her face. She seems more a matter of architecture than flesh. Even her hair, which is so long and thick and ropy that it makes the story of a prince climbing up a tower with the help of a young girl’s tresses sound within the realm of possibility, is losing its luster. It has become the color of dead grass. Sometimes I think I see something moving in it, and that makes me feel itchy by proxy. It’s been a while since we’ve had bad bugs around here, but it’s getting to be springtime now, and we know they’ll be coming before long. Even though there aren’t any bugs on Micky, his scratching seems like a sign. And not a good one.
“You don’t look fine,” Yam-Yam said.
“Yeah-yeah, Yam-Yam, whatever you say.” I sounded childish even to myself, but I couldn’t think of anything better.
Yam-Yam eyed me suspiciously for a moment longer, then stood in a great flutter and confusion of long skirts and lose dirt. “You sure you don’t mind my crashing at Red House?” She asked.
“All the same to me.”
Yam-Yam nodded, but I don’t think she was nodding at me. I have no idea what she was thinking. Then she was gone. I was alone with the rocking horses. Yam-Yam’s was still rocking. It reminded me of how they say that if you cut the head off of a chicken, it will still run around for a while before it dies. This fact has always bothered me because it implies that someone must go around cutting the heads off of chickens, then standing back and watching what goes down. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that.
I reached a hand out and placed it gently on the nose of Yam-Yam’s rocking horse. The horse stopped obediently, which made me feel a little better. The rocking horse Yam-Yam had been sitting on is by far the nicest of the three. The plastic is harder, shinier, with fewer cracks. It’s newer, too; the sun hasn’t bleached all the color out of it yet. The other two, it’s hard to say whether they’re yellow or green or blue, but Yam-Yam’s is undeniably red.
Usually I love the Umbrella Roof. It’s the prettiest place in Little Island, in my professional opinion. It’s made out of dozens of broken umbrellas that we’ve found over the years, in all different colors. There are a lot of black ones, sure, but there’s rainbow ones too, and even a clear one that we positioned in the back wall like a window. The whole structure is the shape of a dome, with one side left open so you can get inside. You can’t lean back against the walls because of all the umbrella spokes and handles that stick out at odd angles, but that’s O.K. There are the rocking horses to sit on. I love to go there in the rain. Sometimes I face the open part of the dome; other times I turn around and look out the clear umbrella window and pretend I’m inside a real house somewhere.
This morning was different. The way the sun has rubbed the pupils off the eyes of the rocking horses made them look vacuous and robotic, almost like ants. The metal joints jutting here or there from the ceiling and the walls seemed more dangerous than normal, too. And still Yam-Yam’s wires burned in my fist. I sprang to my feet. I had to get out of there.
I felt like I was on a mission. I couldn’t have told you what sort of a mission, however, so it’s just as well you weren’t there to ask.
