Magnolia Mulqueen — Prose

The Dance of the Fleas

It was June when Carlton brought the fleas in. Carlton the family dog, the two-year-old mut who spent most of the day outside while Mary’s father was at work. Through a hole in the back fence, he would often trot out into the woods, likely to chase small animals and pee in new places, though after a few hours he would always return home like a good dog always ought to. The man of the house didn’t know about the hole in the back fence, if he did he might have gotten the wood to fix it back up. It was probably out in those woods where Carlton picked up the initial flea in the first place.

Carlton gave the fleas to Patrice and Francine, the two family cats, and from there it became out of control. The fleas lived in all the carpets. They would jump out on unsuspecting feet and they would jump on sleepers as they slept.

They lived in big black colonies on the pink under-bellies of the pets, suckling at the goods inside. Soon the pets all wore little plastic gray collars that were meant to kill the fleas. Or keep them away, but still, they remained. And the collars remained on the pets long after the fleas were gone.

But in the summer there were fleas.

Mary was spending the summer in her room. She had nowhere else to be after all. The room was depressing, utterly. The walls were stark white, aside from one which was painted sky blue, partially, the edges remained unfinished. In the center of the room, there laid a mattress topped with frayed and faded sheets, the floral design once printed upon them now only recognizable as pastel blobs of color, void of meaning. Around the bed, along the edges of the room was a sparse scattering of artifacts that Mary had carried with her from house to house. Among these, near the door, was a rusting ballet bar standing on two wobbly legs.

Mary, had always had the desire to become a great ballerina. Though every time she brought this up, her father would remind her that they could not afford lessons. Instead, Mary had made do with a home-made bar that her father had engineered out of scrap metal, a torn ballerina costume from Party City, and a pirated VHS copy of the Russian ballet Swan Lake. From the time she was five to the time she was twelve she had watched that video well over a thousand times and she knew the ballet and its choreography by heart.

Her days usually went as such: She would wake up at approximately three in the afternoon. The house would be empty, of course, not that the house wasn’t always empty, devoid of any portraits or paintings on the walls, devoid of any interesting artifacts aside from the IKEA furniture which decorated the living and dining areas. She would make herself up a glass of lemonade and a cup of ramen noodles. She would eat at the dining room table, her back to the window which looked out on the backyard.

She knew about that hole in the fence. She hadn’t seen it herself, but she knew it was there. As if someone had mentioned it to her off-hand in a conversation “oh, the hole in the fence, the hole in the fence , ” she knew there was a hole in the back fence. And she, like Carlton, didn’t see the hole in the back fence as being much of a problem for anyone, after all, at the end of the day, Carlton would always return home like a good dog always ought to.

In the beginning, Mary resented the fleas, though she never blamed Carlton for bringing them into her house. They still felt like a punishment to her. She knew of no other girl who had ever had a house, a whole house, that was infested with fleas. She had never heard of any other girls having to spend their days picking fleas off of their ankles and twisting them between their fingers, breaking their legs, because that is the only way to kill them, after all.

In June, Mary spent all of her time obsessing over getting the fleas off of her body. In the hot house, where there was no air conditioning, she had to wear short pants and t-shirts, her arms and legs always exposed. She could not get any peace because she spent every second of the day just picking the bugs off, twisting their legs, and flicking them away.

When she realized, at the beginning of July that the fleas were something she would have to live for an indefinite amount of time she made the decision to stop fighting them. As she sat eating her ramen noodles and drinking her lemonade she would let them bite at her ankles, and she would control the urge to scratch them away.

Through exercising her will power in this way, she began to grow a sense of empathy for the fleas as well. She realized it wasn’t their fault that they were born as fleas. She knew it wasn’t their fault that they were born. She saw herself as a sort of Buddhist monk in her own little way. Letting the fleas bite at her passively the same way Carlton and Patrice and Francine all did. She didn’t scorn them for being what they were.

Sometimes in the afternoons, after she was finished with her meal of ramen noodles and lemonade, Mary would ride her bike around the neighborhood, though she didn’t like the way the humid air weighed her down, she never did. She knew people, other kids who had grown up in the South who loved the way the wet air made them feel. She knew one girl from her middle school, a girl named Joanne Franks, who would always say “ I love the humid air, it sweats so that I don’t have to.” But Mary wasn’t born in the South, she had only moved there with her father a few years earlier, and as it was, southern summers usually ended up making Mary feel quite miserable.

Even so, sometimes she would ride her bike to the neighborhood park where she would kill time swinging solemnly on the swings, the way young teenage girls often do. Sometimes she would ride her bike around all the different offshoots of the neighborhood.

She had figured out, by riding on her bike, that if one were to look at the neighborhood from above that it would look like a lucky clover, with four main sections to it, all connected by one main road in the middle. Within each section, there were lovely patterns of dead-end roads and culdesacs all decked with houses made from the same six designs, painted in the same pre-approved colors.

Sometimes she would ride her bike to the store and get ice cream. She loved ice cream.

Mary didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood. She and her father had only just moved there in May. Before they had lived by the water, in a little town where everyone knew everyone else. Where all the kids were kind and happy and visible.

The new neighborhood, which was an hour away from the old one, felt empty. Mary never saw anyone walking around or mowing their lawns. She never saw anyone in the parks or using the neighborhood pool.

Simply put: Only sometimes did Mary go out, because most of the time going out made her feel hot and alone. So when Mary chose to stay inside, which was most days, she would retreat to her room and watch T.V. and let the fleas bite her.

Mary and her father were not on speaking terms. Their relationship had been on the rocks since they moved into the new house.

On the Tuesday marking the end of their first week in the new house Mary ran away from home. That Tuesday had also been Mary’s fourteenth birthday.

Mary at the time felt as if the relocation to this new house had been nothing more than a cold power move by her father. His reasoning for the sudden move, the reason he gave to Mary, was that he was spending too much time and money on the commute to and from his office. Mary had plotted it out on a map and found that from their new location her father’s commute was, in fact, a whole two miles longer than it had been from their old house, and from that, she came to the conclusion that the man simply did not want to see her happy. She had a suspicion that was why they had come to the South in the first place. Just because Mary was so intrinsically opposed to even the idea of residing below the Mason-Dixon.

So she ran away. Or she attempted to run away. On that night, after her father shut his bedroom door, she sat in the dark hallway outside and watched, and waited. She waited an hour for the light to turn off. After that, she waited another fifteen minutes, she could hear him breathing inside, his breathing was always loud. She waited until he sounded fast asleep.

She had packed a backpack with a jacket, clean underwear, clean socks, Dial hand soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, and two-hundred and seventy-two dollars she had saved over the years, everything she would need to survive until she could eventually settle down somewhere.

Her plan would have worked better if she had known where she was going, but when children run away their only true destination is away . Though Mary’s true downfall was that her father was a light sleeper. And when he heard the garage door opening he came down from his room as fast as he could, and he saw Mary on her bike, riding away from him as fast as she could. But he didn’t call after her.

Instead, he waited. Maybe, you can choose to think, that he was just waiting for her to come back on her own. But if you were to ask Mary she would tell you that he had only been waiting for her to get far enough away before he called the cops. Mary had made her way twelve miles North West before she got stopped by a state trooper.

“Are you Mary Marshal?” he had asked her.

She told him no.

“You sure look a lot like her.”

She asked him how he knew what Mary Marshal looked like.

“Your daddy provided us with a picture of you . ”

She stared at him. She didn’t want to cry. She always cried when things got difficult. When she got in trouble. To fight it off she just stood in shaky tense silence.

“You’re pretty far from home,” the trooper said, “Why don’t you just come with me.”

She had gone with him only because she knew she had no other options. She knew that she couldn’t outrun his car with her bike, and she knew she probably couldn’t outrun him on foot, she had never been very athletic. So she resigned. She returned home at 1:45 in the morning. After thanking the state trooper for getting her home safely, her father shut the door and proceeded to scream at her until dawn. They had not spoken to each other since.

Mary, who rarely paid much attention to what was actually playing on her television, found many exciting ways to spend her time. She had written volumes of enticing and dramatic suicide notes, all of them pointing an ever unforgiving finger at her father for being unreasonable, cruel, cold, for not loving her enough, if at all. She had finger crocheted, out of bright turquoise yarn, a rope which she had planned to hang herself with, eventually, when she felt satisfied in her suffering.

She would stay up all throughout the night suffering. She would keep herself up crying and writing in her diary about how awful everything felt all the time. She would watch the sunrise and think about how much her heart hurt and how sorry she felt for herself to be so alone in the world. She would stay awake until eight in the morning every morning.

She had also taken up drawing, though the fleas gave her trouble in this too. See, the fleas would often jump on the paper on which Mary was working, and Mary would always find herself getting distracted, trying to brush them away without hurting them.

Hurting them was the real problem. Oftentimes, as she would brush the fleas off of the paper, she would accidentally break their legs and them would die, and this would weigh heavily on Mary’s conscious for at least twenty minutes afterward.

One day, while Mary was trying to draw, a flea jumped onto her paper. She didn’t want to brush him away and accidentally kill him. Instead, she just set down her paper and pencil and waited. And it seemed to her like the flea was waiting too because the flea did not jump away as you would eventually expect a flea to do. Mary focused on the flea and the flea remained.

After some absurd amount of waiting Mary finally spoke up. “Move please,” she politely requested. And the flea obliged, jumping off of the paper just as she wished. This made Mary smile. She thought it was quite a funny coincidence that the flea had moved just at the exact moment after she asked it to. She went back to drawing.

After not too long another flea had made its way onto her paper and was crawling around all over the surface of her drawing. Mary repeated the previous exercise, setting down her pencil and paper. She waited and she looked down at the flea. This time she didn’t speak. She waited and waited and then finally thought loudly enough “Move please.” Just like before as if on cue, the flea left her paper.

Mary crinkled her brows. She looked down at the carpet, where the flea and many other fleas just like it jumped about. She thought with similar loudness as before “No, come back,” and just as you would expect, the flea bounded from the carpet right back onto her paper. Mary hardly acknowledged the flea which was now back on her paper, instead, she imagined dozens of fleas jumping from the carpet onto her drawing paper. She summoned them and they mindlessly complied. Like little soldiers they answered her.

Mary delighted in her newfound skill. She thought it quite convenient that she could simply ask the fleas not to bite her and they would stop biting her. She had also set up in the corner of her room, a miniature auditorium, out of bright white poster board on which the fleas would stand out individually as little black specks. At intervals, throughout the day Mary would call on her tiny subjects and she would practice with them. At first, she could only move the fleas in unison, as one big mound. It took her five days before she could break the fleas into two groups, and move them separately, and it took her another three to break the fleas into four groups.

Mary, before long, had become devoted to the fleas as a sort of project. The fleas were her favorite mind game. The more she could focus, the better she became. And playing with the fleas made her feel good. She felt powerful. After a week and a half, Mary was spending all of her time outside of eating and sleeping, directing the fleas. Even when she was using the bathroom or bathing, she would control the fleas in the bathroom, moving them along the tiles.

She was forming conga lines of fleas, she could move them to the tunes of all her favorite songs, she could make them dance on their tiny hind legs. Nothing had ever brought her so much joy as the fleas had. And she believed that she was bringing joy to the fleas as well. She believed the fleas loved her because they wouldn’t have been listening to her if they didn’t.

When her father knocked on her door that afternoon in August, Mary had been in the middle of her masterpiece.

Mary had been spending weeks perfecting her own flea performance of Swan Lake. Rehearsing every day for fifteen hours straight. The music was all in her head, but that didn’t matter to the fleas, in fact, it worked better that way.

When Mary’s father knocked on the door that day, she had gotten the performance nearly perfect, but the startle that the knock caused inside Mary caused all the fleas to scatter.

“Come in,” she said.

The door opened slowly, and there, in the darkness of the hallway was her father, home from work. “We need to get you registered for school tomorrow,” he said in a low voice.

“Okay,” Mary said. She wasn’t looking at him. She thought that if she looked at him, she would start crying. But he was looking at her.

He saw her sitting in the corner, facing the empty poster board and he asked “What are you doing.”

Mary barely whispered “Nothing.”

Her father’s tone immediately became harsh and accusatory, “Don’t lie,” he warned her “you are clearly doing something, I just want to know what it is.”

“Okay,” Mary conceded, she waved him in.

He entered and walked over to where Mary was crouched. He didn’t kneel down to her level, he towered overhead looking down at her.

“Watch,” she instructed.

She called the fleas and they all jumped one by one onto the poster board, forming one big mass in the middle before Mary dispersed them and got them back into the right order. She looked up at her father who looked down at her, with resentful disinterest, and she began to stage her first performance of her tiny, perfect recreation of the Russian ballet Swan Lake .

When Mary and her fleas finished the first dance she looked back up at her father and he, who heard no music and simply saw his daughter staring at fleas jumping around on poster board, said to her “You shouldn’t play with the bugs.”

The day after that Mary’s father called an exterminator and had all of the fleas extinguished. The two of them spent that morning and afternoon together waiting at the neighborhood park in silence. Mary, for all the hours they sat together, did not spare her father a single glance. Instead, she listened to the quiet noise of all the world around her. She listened to the spiders constructing their silver webs, she listened to the ants drilling their complex tunnels through the ground beneath her. She listened to the beating wings of the wasp which circled the air above them as it descended down to land on her father’s cheek where it bit him, seemingly unprovoked, bringing tears to the grown man’s gray eyes. Mary did not spare her father a single glance.