FOR DAISY, AFTER SHE SAVED ME
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Daisy was my third ever story, and I feel like it was when I started to find my way. Reading back now it’s tempting to rewrite a lot but in the spirit of sharing messy progress I’ve shared the original imperfect version!
For a long time I thought my voice was going to be based around ‘impossible things happening’.
My first story was about a girl finding a lever in the middle of a field that finally made the sun rise.
The second was about a man who reached into the centre of the earth, wrapped his fist around the burning core and used it to heal everybody.
And then I arrived at Daisy. Daisy who cries stars and planets and transports us all to new places entirely.
RJ
There used to be a theme park just outside of town, between the railway line and the old canal. The park is long abandoned but the eager billboards still line the roads nearby, with thick outlined letters promising affordable family outings and death-defying corkscrew rides.
Only at Caído Del Cielo!
The huge signs would still be convincing if they weren’t so faded, but the slogans didn’t work so well without the fluorescent colours.
I was an engineer for the trackless rides at the park. You know the ones - where your feet dangle just inches above the fake sharks and canyons. It was my team’s job to make sure the ride didn’t collapse on you and your hotdog-filled family, but I also played a part in making it scary. Sure, the artists painted ocean backdrops and the lighting crew could turn an old rusting warehouse from jagged rivets and girders into a western saloon, but we were the only ones who knew how to make you really feel like something could go wrong. We could make you feel out of control, and our rides were always creaky enough to make you regret strapping yourself in.
This was before the days of regulations and monthly inspections, before the park was managed by boards and investors. We held that place together and put on a hell of a show. The false danger was the reason the punters came back. The overdramatic peril helped them forget about their daily lives and had them excited for a change.
•••
The night I met her, that was the last night I worked at the park. Back then my shifts ended with safety checks and maintenance. Only surface stuff, restraint systems, nobody takes the detail seriously anymore. The chances of you being badly hurt in a theme park are one in 25 million, yet people still pass out during the climax of OMG Bees! A ride for kids under ten.
The last check of the day was always The Leafy Lake, and that’s where I met her. A shoeless bundle, crumpled into the corner of the bench by the boathouse. All I had to do was make sure the boats were all properly attached to the long wooden jetty, it’s a ten minute job and I would have been out of there by sundown if I hadn’t have heard what I heard.
Have you ever noticed how you always hear your name even if it’s from the other side of the room? It ought to get tangled up in the other conversations but somehow it breaks through and gets your attention. It’s the same thing with despair. Through the xylophone sounds of the boats knocking against the jetty and the radio chatter from my walkie-talkie, I heard the tiniest sound.
Truth be told I hadn’t even seen her, and yet I’d walked right past to get to the gate. I remember looking around for somebody else to take responsibility. One more job and then I was home for the weekend. I had leftover shepherd’s pie. Half a bottle of Eerie Kansas. Ice fishing on Saturday, Mass on Sunday. Surely somebody else could deal with it.
They say that even fatal injuries in a theme park are mostly caused by previously undiagnosed brain conditions. That means, it’s not our fault, it’s yours. We give you the warnings, after that it’s up to you. I remember when a four year old boy once managed to sneak into Abattoir 3D. Hs parents complained for months afterwards saying that we were the cause of his nightmares and sleepless nights. And where were they while he was sneaking into the adult movie? In the gift shop.
•••
I walked over to the girl and asked her if she knew where her parents were, but all she could do was look at me and cry. Her tears rolled around her blushed cheeks like huge planets and they ran through her fingers. She’d had her hands over her face and the sleeves of her white cardigan were soaking wet. I asked her what her name was and she still didn’t answer.
Under the cardigan she was wearing a yellow dress. It looked like a uniform. I wondered if she’d become lost on a school trip and they just hadn’t noticed. As she moved slightly on the bench I saw that there was a dark grey scarf tied around her leg. All I remember thinking was Good God she’s hurt herself too. If it wasn’t one thing having living breathing lost property to deal with, now I had to play doctor?
And I had shepherd’s pie at home.
There was a small white label at the end of the scarf, and the name Daisy was written in blue marker pen. Somebody must be missing her, surely somebody is looking for her? I called into my radio. Had anybody called reception? Nobody answered.
I looked over at the jetty. Suddenly ice fishing seemed so far away.
It was now too dark to check the boats so I asked Daisy again, “Who were you with at the park today? Where do you live?”
She looked up at me for the first time. She looked exhausted and she wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
“Nobody and nowhere.”
That’s all she said. Nobody and nowhere. Her voice was shaking and the words seemed to catch in her throat as they battled their way through the sobs. I asked if she was hurt and she screwed her face up and hid behind her hands. The scarf around her leg slipped and I saw a blood smeared cut which ran right up to her knee.
Daisy reached down and tied the scarf tightly back around her leg.
She whispered, “I don’t think I landed very well.”
She was staring into her hands, as though seeing something in the distance. I watched one of her tears as it collected in a pool on her eyelashes. She blinked, and as it rolled down her face it followed the rivers down her cheek and landed on the peeled varnish.
It had been a long day. I was definitely tired and the only light was now coming from the old neon signs above the jetty. In the flickering light I could have sworn I saw her tear shatter as it landed on the bench. It seemed to crack and then break like a bead of glass.
As the next tear fell, I reached over to catch it without thinking. I held out my palm under her chin and waited until it rolled into my hand. It was perfectly smooth and light as a soapy bubble, but it was solid and I wrapped my hand around it. Tears were now cascading from Daisy’s cheeks and they crashed against each other as they smashed into tiny fragments and fell through the gaps in the bench. Some rolled around my feet and others bounced into the long grass. They became brighter with every passing second and surrounded us in spinning shadows.
As I watched, paralysed to the spot, I noticed my own tears. Normal, watery tears that seemed so dull and useless. It’d been years since I’d even come close to crying, but there I was, standing there in the freezing evening with stinging eyes and uncontrollable sobs.
I frantically began to pick up the glowing tears from around the bench and underneath the fence. I could only hold a small handful before I feared breaking them against each other so I filled my pockets. The shallow pockets inside my jacket were soon bulging so I emptied my jeans of loose keys and coins and filled those pockets too. I took off my shoes to gather more of her glowing teardrops inside them and I held any that remained in my shaking hands.
•••
Daisy was still sitting hunched up on the bench, and was holding her hands to the scarf on her leg. I remembered the first aid box on the jetty and I regained my composure to find some bandages there.
I laid her teardrops in the grass and walked to the jetty as quickly as I could with my bare feet scratching on the sharp gravel. Daisy let me carefully clean the cut and wrap some bandages around it, but didn’t say a word. I fastened it with two small safety pins and placed her scarf next to her on the bench.
The lights in my pocket flickered across the lake whenever I moved and made the evening fog seem thick and suffocating. As I stood back I saw something move behind her.
She seemed uncomfortable at first, but sat completely still as something pushed her away from the bench. She leant forward and I will never forget what I saw.
Two long, dark blue edges, which unwrapped into honeycomb hexagons of amber and silver. They were bright, but not so bright that I couldn’t see the porcelain-like vines that wrapped around the centre and disappeared into her clothes. She stood up on the bench and the edges flared as though taking a breath. She clenched her fists. As she did, the amber shell broke open and right in front of my eyes a pair of sugar-white wings unfolded which hummed as though full of an electric current.
Daisy stood completely still with her eyes closed.
“Thank you” she whispered, so quietly you’d have mistaken it for breathing.
Her white cardigan was torn and hanging from her body, so she pulled it from her shoulders and dropped it on the bench. The twisting vines weaved through those perfect white wings like veins, carrying the crackling energy from end to end and I could see that they wrapped around her waist.
In the night time fog, we stood there in silence. Lit up by the purple florescent lights above the jetty and even more by the teardrops in the grass, and in my pockets and shoes.
I wasn’t even thinking about going ice fishing.
The chances of a fatal injury in a theme park are one in 1.5 billion. You might think yourself brave, strapping into Crocodile’s Revenge after three stale hamburgers, but if I’d done my job properly, you’d be in no harm at all. You are more likely to be killed by a meteor than a roller coaster. I looked it up.
We have twenty-two boats on the lake, all shaped like curly leaves, which pretend they don’t run on tracks but they do. They’re connected to a rail by a short rope. That’s why I was involved, to give the riders the impression that they steer the boat when actually they have no choice which way they go. It’s all pre-programmed. None of the dangers in Caído Del Cielo were real. Even the hand dryers in the restrooms were cold.
But now I found myself standing at midnight with my unwashed pockets full of an angels tears.
Yesterday it was cigars and ticket stubs.
•••
Daisy stretched her arms out and her wings rippled like twenty-foot sails. They raised high up above her head and reflected the light from her tears across the entire lake. Her feet were lifted from the wooden bench as her wings moved through the air towards the long grass. In panic, I shouted. I stumbled for the lights in my pocket and held them up for her to take.
She turned and flew silently over the lake. I ran along the fence and hurdled the turnstiles at the entrance to the leafy lake ride. They didn’t belong to me. She was half way across the lake by the time I reached the first boat and used my pocket knife to cut through the wrist-thick rope. With the small wooden paddle I splashed my way out to where Daisy was hovering, inches above the water.
I dropped the paddle and clutched the fake plastic stem of the boat. Daisy’s wings were dark and outstretched and she was looking right at me.
“I can’t keep these” I said, “I can’t keep them safe.”
I was holding two handfuls of the tears. Their light reflected in the lake and lit up our faces.
“I think,” she said, “stars are safest in the hands of the tired and broken.” She moved closer and whispered, “You need this galaxy more than I do.”
As she spoke, the tears became like fire in my hands. I flinched and let them all go but they stayed exactly where they were in the air between us. They spread out slowly into a spiral, each spinning with a heat that warmed the freezing night. I stood back in the rocking boat and watched as the spiral grew to cover the entire lake.
The teardrops, now burning as stars, formed into clusters and constellations, some tightly packed and others further apart. Gas and dust surrounded everything in thick clouds. There were red collapsing stars and white brand new stars, stars as big as marbles and some as small as sugar. As one of them passed closely by, I noticed eight darker spheres, surrounding the glowing centre.
I reached out and carefully held the star between my thumb and finger. It was hot and burned my skin, but I didn’t want to let go.
Daisy reached down and kissed me on the cheek. She touched her lips to my ear and whispered keep it safe before pulling the night sky around her like a blanket.
I was left staring at the sun in my hand and the planets that spun in circles around it.
That was the last I ever saw of Daisy.
A powerful feeling came over me. I was holding a brand new world, but all I could think about was the old one. The one I knew. As the tiny flames flickered, I held the star tight in my hand. As the fire made blisters on my skin, I held on tight. As solar flares erupted and burned into my palms, still I held on tight.
I knew what Daisy wanted to tell me.
As I looked out over the freezing, constellation-covered lake and felt the searing pain in my hand, knew what my life had been missing all along. I’d been so busy creating imitation adventure that I’d passed on having any of my own. I’d been so fixated on inventing counterfeit danger that I was far from at risk of it myself. Right there and then, standing in that tiny leaf-shaped boat, I promised myself that whatever I did from then onwards, I’d never let go of her star.
I wanted to crash into a wall. I wanted to build a house and get splinters in my hands. I wanted to dismantle the safety bars and cut the ropes.
I wanted real life exhilaration and real life danger, and I wanted to feel it all as it burned through my fingers, up my arms and into my lungs. I didn’t want the new galaxies that were spinning across the water, I wanted to swim back to shore and go home. I wanted to wake up the next morning with the star still in my hand.
I wanted to start again.
There used to be a theme park just outside of town, between the railway line and the old canal. The park is long abandoned but the eager billboards still line the roads nearby. I used to work there, years ago, until the night that I met Daisy, and through her ungraceful landing I found myself saved.