Kate looks nearly translucent under the stage’s spotlight. But she knows this. She doesn’t wear a getup like the others. No tattered cloak, candlestick prop, bone jewelry clacking together. She uses subtlety and juxtapositions to craft the uncanny. Like, how she’s small in frame, even frail. And then, as usual, the audience will be surprised when her voice booms.
Nothing about this moment is about me. Nothing ever is. Nevertheless, she recreates the moment I fell in love with her. And I still love her, but my resolve just has to survive this last performance. Then, I can let go.
I sit in the front row with the other storytellers’ spouses. The crowd is large. Bigger than the usual competition. For the literary horror fan, there’s household names here. There’s also a cash prize, but Kate never cares about money. She only cares about her craft.
She cares about it obsessively. To the point she called off our engagement three separate times. During each faux breakup, she would cry in my arms. It’s inherently miserable to be a storyteller, she'd say. Those dramatic episodes seem pretentious to me now. But I was warm then, so I’d smooth her thin hair. I’d tell her I didn’t care that she’d lock herself away for days to write, that her nightmares paid the bills, that she never wanted kids. What an idyllic idiot, but I understand my mental gymnastics now. She saw me like no else has and so I made all the concessions possible. During the good times, I’d lie in her arms and marvel at the feeling of being read like a story book, and she’d whisper that she doesn’t read me. She’d say she listens, like all good storytellers do.
Kate lowers the mic. The projector flashes the red words in Blackadder font, “Presenting: Kate Zelenskaya.” She’s always used her maiden name for her authorship. For the first time, I let it bother me.
A woman behind me whispers, “Ableman, Hatahali, and now Zelenskaya! This might be the best Halloween of my life.” In the meanest of spirits, I imagine turning around and saying, “And, this is going to be the worst Halloween of Zelenskaya’s life.” But the uncertainty of that actually being the case, after all is said and done, sinks me back into a state of malaise. A malaise which I thought anger would propel me out of. It’s like standing in an exposed field. An empty one where a fog has rolled in; air too dense to breathe. I think I’ve been here and breathless for a long time.
“I dedicate this story to my husband, Foster.” She doesn’t even know where I’m sitting and so she smiles into the sea of strangers. “His support knows no bounds.” The fog in me becomes too heavy for even a scoff. She straightens.
“'The Language of Angels' by Kate Zelenskaya.”
She’s a master of pauses; she’ll cock her head and tilt her right ear up. Looking at the audience with side eyes, it’s like she’s considering whether or not they can handle the tale. It’s like she’s giving them a chance to cover their ears. She’ll never not be beautiful like this, despite what I’m feeling.
“This is the tale of how fallen angels created their language. For the sake of ease, we’ll call the untainted angels the Virtuous and the fallen angels, well, the Fallen. But right now, they’re falling, cast from Heaven and… Falling…”
She does her signature pause, but something is different... Her eyes emptily gaze at the ceiling, rather than being enlivened by the audience’s attention. She must not be on her A-game tonight.
“Falling… Yes, through clouds pregnant with darkness. The Virtuous dip in and out of the masses of clouds, plucking at their forsaken siblings’ wings. Lighting strikes, scattering the Virtuous, scathing the falling. Yes, they’re falling…
“Now, they hit the ground and become the Fallen. They land in rolling fields of thorns, tearing their crisped skin further, gouging out their eyes. They untangle themselves, struggling to stand, wings unwilling to give a single flap. They look like hell.
“Despite the Fallen’s deep pain, a pain down to the quick, this is not enough punishment in the Virtuous’s eyes. The clouds part and a terrible bright light shines. The Virtuous swoop to torment more. The Fallen are running to hide in caves, jungles, even drowning in the deep sea. The Virtuous eavesdrop on the Fallen's escape plans and thwart the hideouts before they are built. The fallen are…drowning…”
She’s scattered and stalling. Again, she tilts her head and this time her face scrunches. She’s running the pause too long as the audience shifts. My knee-jerk reaction is to worry, but then something mean in me feels like it’s being fed. Kate nods slightly and continues.
“The Tower of Babel was abandoned recently, so the Fallen are making a plan. A plan to find a new language which the Virtuous cannot understand. Forget what they told you in school about the ages of languages. In our story, it is well known that the Abrahamic divine speak Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. And so, the Fallen seek the animal teachers of the land for a new language.”
“First, they dig for the snake. His tongue appears and is followed by his large gray body. He’s digesting something rabbit-sized. He teaches them how to slither and hiss, promising them the language is too airy for the Virtuous to utter. But, in their eavesdropping, the Virtuous learn to speak it and find it delightful. They call it Latin.
“So the Fallen leash a wild dog instead. Reluctantly, she teaches them to growl and howl. ‘The nuanced reverb is too low for the Virtuous to hear. Now please let me go,’ she says. But again, the Virtuous can hear it and find the deepness heavenly. They create Akkadian.
“Growing tired, the Fallen approach a thrush high in the trees. They beg for help, and so she teaches them how to coo and caw so quickly that surely the Virtuous won’t be able to keep up. But of course, the Virtuous can keep up and they find the quickness tantalizing. Tamil is born.
“Tears fall from the Fallen’s eyeless sockets. The little thrush cries too. She knows what it is like to be tormented by hawks, and so she jumps onto a Fallen’s shoulder and whispers, ‘There is another like me, who makes such a terrible sound that the Virtuous will find no pleasure in it.’ She guides them to a group of trees bathed in the full moon’s grayness. Shadows of the Virtuous encroach onto the moon. They stay close, eager to collect another language; however, they scatter when a piercing noise drags its nails against the chalkboard of the night. The Fallen are afraid too, until a harmless barn owl swoops down to a nearby branch. ‘You needn't ask. I hate them too,’ he says…”
Silence again. Kate becomes more pale and translucent than I thought possible. She’s not only blanking on lines; she must be losing it too. Too many late nights. Too much isolation. Too much giving nothing to the people she supposedly loves.
Then, she locks eyes with me. She knows where I am sitting now.
“The barn owl says, ‘I hate anything that plucks another’s wings.’"
It’s not an accusation. It’s an apology. This time, she nails the pause and continues.
“'Take my language, but under one condition. Promise me; it is to be the language of fear. It’s the only way to keep predators away.’ The Fallen promise and learn the language well. Their wings grow able again and they swoop and shriek in the night. The Virtuous cover their ears and are frightened back to heaven for good. Now no longer prey, the Fallen take on a new name; the word ‘demon’ has an ultimate strength to it, don’t you think? Truth be told, you all already know the language well. Let us speak it…”
Kate lets out a piercing scream directly into the mic, which causes the mic to scream back. In the audience, reactionary screams echo and hands fly on top of ears.
Her lips tremble centimeters from the mic. We, the audience, recover and eagerly await the ending lines of her story, the ending that will make this clusterfuck make sense. However, the silence is stale and she lingers in that crooked neck position, like she’s dead and hanging… Then she whispers, “Thank you.” And walks off the stage as a handful of confused claps commence.
I don’t feel my usual triumph for my wife tonight. Rather I feel a tinge of embarrassment; the only heat in my empty field of malaise.
Mentally and emotionally I can’t escape the field. There’s no wind to blow away the fog. No water for the dusty plans. I always thought Kate stood beside me here, but all along it was just a lifeless scarecrow. We drive home in silence.
“I think that may have been too much...” Kate says.
“Probably…” I have nothing else to say. No reassurance left to give.
“I just didn’t know the story would go there,” she says.
An ember falls and finds the driest plant in me. It all starts to go up.
“What do you mean? You locked yourself in the room for nearly a month. Treated me like a ghost when you did bother to come out. Treated me like I’m nothing!”
I don’t know when I started pounding on the steering wheel, but I can’t stop.
“And now you’re saying you did all that just to make shit up on the spot? You’ve been blowing up our marriage just to improv, Kate? You’ve been hurting me, for what? For nothing!”
The fire goes out before it really starts, like rain is falling. I mean, rain is falling from my eyes. I look at her. I don’t know if she’s giving me a dramatic storyteller pause or just not listening. These days it feels like she’s too far away to hear me. She smiles sadly and says, “Storytellers are the best listeners.”
“Kate, I don’t know what you mean… I’ve never known what you’ve meant by that.”
“I mean… it screams, Foster,” she says. Her eyes look hollow. Her own rain is falling. “It won’t stop screaming, Foster. It used to, but now it never stops.”
“What do you mean by it?” I ask.
“I suppose maybe I can tell you about it now. Now, that…”
This isn’t a theatrical pause for once. This is raw emotion.
“I wanted success, so I prayed to God. That’s what the Greats said. 'The words are where God is.' But no words came, and so I looked in the opposite direction. I looked at something fallen and I think it looked back at me… But it doesn’t give the stories gently, Foster. It speaks in screams… It screams, and screams, and screams!”
She repeats herself until she’s screaming and thrashing in the passenger seat, so I pull over. I wrap my arms around her to make this stop. I almost believe her, but concern can’t grow here anymore. She is an award-winning liar, after all.
When she stops, her cold and wet cheek presses on mine. I finally say it.
“Kate… I’ve already started filling out the divorce paperwork.”
I expect a whimper, but she’s silent and I feel her head cock upwards. I decide to be enveloped one last time in her artful pause, the quietness where everything she fails to say lives. This is the only way she tells me that she loves me. But for the first time, I realize something… She isn’t pausing… She’s listening.
I don’t know if she shivers or I do.
Then, she says, “I know. The screams of our story have always sounded especially sad.”
Sunny Olds lives in her hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. Her livelihood is construction; however, her personal life is enriched by literature, reading her cat’s tarot, and writing. Her prose appears in Soft Star Magazine, while her poetry is featured in Aberration Labyrinth and Half and One.