The Semaphore

Pontis Inoue leapt from the fire escape, landed hard, and came up running.

The Matis twins scrabbled down the fire escape’s bottom ladder, their identical faces knotted in identical frustration, hurling obscenities at Pontis and at one another and at anyone else in earshot.

Pontis sprinted through an alley and caromed onto the avenue. A group of women parted to let him pass, calling after him to slow down. He zagged around a vendor selling nuts and seeds and jumped over a bicycle strewn on its side. A pair of stray dogs flanked him, matching his pace, their tongues lolling and their ears trained back.

The Matis twins would never catch him now. He could slow down if he wanted. But running felt too good.

The avenue opened onto the plaza. Pontis plunged into the tall trees growing through the plaza’s broken asphalt. Ahead: people gathered on blankets and folding chairs, enjoying the shade of the canopy. Pontis could have stopped, or changed course. But he did not want to stop. He did not want to deviate. His heart pumped him forward. He leapt mid-stride, grabbed a branch, and hauled himself up.

The strays circled the tree’s trunk, barking after him.

Pontis planted his feet on the branch and took long strides. He leapt from one to another, tracing his way through the canopy. People below oohed and gasped as he passed overhead. Someone called his name. He jumped and swung from branch to branch. A family of pigeons squawked and burst into flight. The sunlight through the leaves was golden.

The trees grew right up to the wall of the tenement on the far side of the plaza. Pontis climbed upward into the thinner branches, which sagged beneath him. He willed himself to be lighter, to be the air itself. He gripped a windowsill and shimmied along the side of the building, up an additional story, and then entered through the open window of his bathroom.

#

His knee clipped a shelf just inside, causing its contents to crash to the floor. Pontis grimaced and stooped to gather them up. But it was too late. His Ma’s voice lurched through the apartment.

“What in the world?!” She appeared in the bathroom’s doorway, her thick hair braided down one shoulder, the paisley fabric of her overalls flecked with batter. She planted her knuckles on her hips and glowered.

Pontis offered a smile and set a bottle of shampoo delicately back on the shelf.

“Don’t they teach doors in school?” His Ma wiped her hands on the front of her overalls. Piano music issued from the kitchen, and the aroma of half-baked bread.

Pontis managed to reassemble the shelf’s contents, then stood bashfully, still breathing hard.

“Look at you.” His Ma took him by the shirtsleeve and stood him at the sink. “Can’t even run errands without getting all dirty.” She brushed leaves and twigs from his hair into the sink’s basin. “And speaking of errands…”

Pontis slapped his forehead.

“Unfathomable.” His Ma tsked. “So what’ve you put your time to all morning?”

Pontis reddened.

“Dope.” His Ma sighed through a grin. “Those brothers’ll get you one day. You might be quick, but you’re scrawny as your Pa.”

Pontis flexed his biceps. His Ma patted his cheek.

“Focus now.” She picked the leaves and twigs out of the basin and tossed them through the open window. “Darian’s arriving. Errands won’t make themselves. No more detours. Where’s your voice pad?”

Pontis patted his front pocket and gave his Ma a thumbs-up.

His Ma started back to the kitchen, then paused in the doorway and looked over her shoulder. “And Pontis. Use the door to leave, and to come back.”

Pontis followed his Ma down the short hallway. Harper sat at the cluttered woodblock table in the kitchen, drawing on a sheet of paper. Delicate piano music played from the phonograph on the counter. The window over the kitchen sink overlooked the trees of the plaza—where cliques of pigeons rose and fell—and the low brick city of Lowood Den beyond.

Harper looked up from her drawing. “Mama, did Pontis break something?”

“Nothing,” said Ma, gathering batter-covered bowls and placing them in the kitchen sink. “But if he doesn’t run my errands, I’m gonna break something.”

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Pontis made a face at his sister. She giggled and tried to do the same, but she hadn’t figured out yet how to cross her eyes.

#

Pontis skipped down the concrete staircase and cut through the courtyard with its ferns and saplings and beams of sunlight. Birds chattered from their nests along the courtyard’s old ledges. Another hot day. Pontis thought about taking a walk to the pond after he ran his Ma’s errand. Maybe Ien would join him. They could race from one side of the pond to the other, or compete for which one could hold their breath the longest. Or they could just lie on the bank, the outsides of their hands barely—but undeniably—touching.

Pontis pictured Ien’s face, his blonde hair damp with pond water, sparkling in the sunlight or darkened by the shade of the bridge. His teeth. His ears. He broke into a jog. What was he doing right this second? Probably reading on his roof where Pontis had left him. Pretending not to wait for him. He pictured his eyelashes.

He turned a corner to take a shortcut through an alley toward the market—but a dark shape swooped over his face. Something struck him hard in the belly, forcing his breath from his lungs, and his vision filled with a thousand flickering stars.

#

When they pulled the sack off his head he was blinded by sunlight. Dark splotches swam in his vision like little storm clouds. His stomach ached. He was moving. He craned his neck forward.

The Matis twins dragged him on his back by his ankles. They were in the yard of warehouse ruins just east of the tenement. Pontis’s head skidded on the patchy ground.

The twins shared none of their younger brother’s soft features; their jaws were square and their eyes narrow, their noses wrinkled as if perpetually smelling something foul. Everything about them was different than Ien except for their hair, which was the same curly blonde mess.

“Faster,” grunted Brig—the one with the orange birthmark blotting his neck.

Byer’s face was red. He said something that wasn’t quite a word and hauled harder, and for a few steps the two of them were fighting each other as much as dragging Pontis, jerking him one way and then the other so that his shoulders caught and skidded on the dead grass. Pontis kicked out. Brig kicked back—into his side—and then looked for a second like he wasn’t sure why he’d done it.

They dropped him, clumsy, over the lip of the culvert. Pontis rag-dolled to the bottom. By the time he thought to run, the twins had slid down and were standing over him, each one blotting out a crumbling smokestack, breathing hard.

“We warned you,” Brig said, his face backlit.

“You know what you did,” Byer said.

Pontis looked from one to the other.

“With Ien.” Brig said the name as if it finished the thought on its own. “Making time with him. You never asked a one.”

“You never asked us,” said Byer.

“What’s he to you, anyway?” Brig’s voice climbed and cracked in a way that told Pontis they’d hauled him all the way out here on the strength of something neither could put a name to, and now they were down in the culvert and it was too late to think it through.

Pontis pointed to his front pocket.

The twins looked at him, then at each other.

“Go on,” said Brig.

Pontis worked the nub of charcoal from the crease of his voice pad and drew. The twins bent to watch. When he tore the page free and held it up, it was two stick figures holding hands—one marked Pontis, the other Ien.

He hadn’t meant it as anything but the truth; they’d asked a question, and he’d answered. But the twins seemed to take it otherwise. Byer’s jaw worked. Brig went still in the way the air gets before a storm. Then Byer knocked the pad from Pontis’s hands and Brig had him by the collar, and Pontis had time to think that he had never been hit in the face before, and to hope they left him teeth to chew with.

Byer struck him. Pontis’s lip split against his teeth and his mouth flooded with the warm metal taste of blood. Pontis rarely dwelled on his muteness. But in that moment he felt it, heavy. Whatever the twins did to him, he had no way to make a sound about it.

Byer drew his fist back again, and for half a breath something crossed his face at the sight of the blood, something like alarm, as if he’d caught himself in an act, but then it passed, and his eyes narrowed and his fist tightened—

A rock thwacked off the concrete beside them.

“Off him!” a voice called from the rim of the culvert. “Now!”

Pontis and the twins all looked back. Varia Longley stood among the crabgrass at the top of the culvert—the twenty-year-old daughter of Lowood Den’s Mayor and the frequent minder of Pontis’s sister—another rock already in her hand. When the twins did not move, she threw it, and it went wide, but the next, followed immediately, caught Brig on the hip.

The twins let go of Pontis and backed up the slope, unhurried, wiping their palms on their trousers. Byer spat near Pontis’s feet and leveled a finger at Varia.

“Don’t you have your own life, Longley?” he said. “Grown woman creeping round out here. Minding babies. Throwing rocks like a child.” He shook his head, almost pitying. “Everybody says it. You’re not right.”

Then the twins were gone through the overgrown yard, in no hurry at all.

Varia half-slid down the slope and crouched over Pontis. She tilted his chin toward the light and studied his lip. “You’ll live,” she said.

Pontis got up—dizzy for a second—and retrieved his voice pad. The charcoal was gone, and he searched his pockets until he found a fresh nub.

‘Why’re you down out here?’ he wrote, turning the pad toward her.

“It’s quiet.” Varia brushed her hair aside. “Unless a one’s getting beat.”

Pontis touched his lip. ‘Thanks,’ he wrote.

She lobbed her last rock underhand at the culvert wall, where it cracked and dropped. “What’d you do to earn it?”

‘They don’t like me making time with Ien.’

Varia looked briefly at the sky. “As if he’s theirs to say what he makes of his time.” But there was a hurt in her voice, and Pontis understood that it wasn’t Ien’s time she was speaking of.

Pontis remembered, suddenly, his errand. ‘Need t’go,’ he jotted, tearing the page out and pressing it into Varia’s hand as he took off across the yard.

“I’m coming out to mind Harper this afternoon,” Varia called after him. “So don’t look for saving if you fall around again.” A beat. “Watch yourself, lovey-boy.”