What are we going to do with Mary Ann?

by David

Mary Ann sat down at the dining room table. She waited for her father to say grace. He did not. He said “Mary Ann.” She was so surprised that she dropped her fork.

“Yes father,” she said demurely, eyes down.

“Mary Ann,” he said again, “I hardly know how to say this. Have you been… talking to… that young habilis boy?”

Mary Ann’s face turned red as her hair. Her brother giggled.

Her mother gasped. “They’re animals! That’s disgusting!” She jumped up from the table and ran out of the room. Soon she could be heard in the bathroom.

Mary Ann jerked her head up and glared straight at her father. “Pastor said two weeks ago that they are people just as much as we.”

“That ape has more hair than your dog,” her brother said, and laughed. “Does he use dog shampoo or people shampoo? Does he have to take walks twice a day? Do you pick…”

“William!” Her father said, “that is enough.”

“If you must know,” Mary Ann continued, “Peter is helping me with geometry homework. But he has asked me to the dance. And I said yes.”

William started making ape noises.

“I’m trying to be understanding,” her father said. “He’s 3 feet tall and covered with as much hair as a retriever. He is as strong as a gorilla, as smart as a chimpanzee, and probably won’t live past 40. Where did we go wrong?”

“Don’t you see dad? You taught me to see people as people. You should be proud.”

“Proud that my grandchildren will need to shave their entire bodies before they can go out in public?”

“No! Proud that they, or their children, will be accepted as equal, because you taught me that a man is a man, no matter what he looks like.”

Her mother, standing in the doorway, turned white and disappeared again suddenly.

“Dad. Peter and I are friends.” Mary Ann flicked a lock of hair off of her forehead.

Her father sighed deeply. “So. When are you going to invite him to dinner? Is he allergic to anything?

“Does he eat pork?”

The end

The New Language of Masks

by AlexM

In the city of sticks and glass, a girl sits bridgewise and trails images through the air with bone-thin fingers. Under her stony seat, gondoliers steer the city’s hidden ways, singing hexes for safe passage. Past her step the city’s people and the world’s people come to visit, unseeing of her fingers’ work. Their bodies brush the air-patterns, send them folding eyewards, and in bursts like the flashed sun-reflection of a coin dropped to the ground she sees their masks.

Alphabets of colour and shape, a language of dreams and futures, paint their faces.

“Beware spiders,” the girl whispers, sibylline, to a woman whose silvery hair clings silken to her neck.
A hitch in the woman’s step, the only indication that she heard more than wind, kicks other air-patterns into spirals.

“I see…”

Something new. The girl blinks. “Music on your face, sir.” New language, of quavers and halves, written barwise across polished white cheeks-paper. She reads, and does not like it. “Bad music, sir.” Fingers draw handkerchiefs in the air, and the two men with music on their faces pause and stare at her until the church clock’s chime draws them onwards.

She sees it everywhere, now she has noticed; it baritones into masks and the skin beneath, trebles in the air between shoulder and shoulder.

At twelve chimes the architect comes to her, bearing a plate of food and a question: “What do you see?”

“Music.”

But not in her images. Laughing suddenly, she twitches her fingers in curves and in their wake forms a cat, mirror-image of the one hopping after a butterfly across the bridge. Then she sees a semi-quaver sneaking up the tabbied tail and looks away. “Too much music.”

The architect is smiling.

Fingers shaking, she tugs her hip-long hair in front of her face. Black curtain. She doesn’t want to look at him. Music stains his face, his clothes, his hands.

“It’s in my food. You’ve put music in my food.”

“Tell me what it tastes like.”

Fingers tangle a quilt of No into her hair. She tips the plate, watches spaghetti twist and fall and plop into the canal. “Bad music, sir.”

He laughs and walks away.

There is music in the water, too. The gondoliers’ songs are different.

The girl sits bridgewise, trailing images from her fingers, and waits.