My Bonny

There's a song about a man missing the woman he loves. I don't remember it exactly anymore. I think it's Scottish. I've had to fit the words to the tune I remember:

My bonny lies over the window
My bonny has thirteen feet
My bonny is not human
Please bring back my bonny to me

I fell in love with a woman I met at the Iguana Cantina, and I will never see her again.

I used to go to bars and draw women. At least one usually became curious and came by to see what I was doing. We'd talk and see where things went from there.

I'd been drawing this particular woman for the better part of a half hour. Her hair spilled across her shoulders in a black shroud, she was lithe and wore a faint hint of a smile. A long red summer dress flirted with her ankles. The dress was slit up the side, so I could see her legs dangle. She was the sort of beauty dreams are made of.

She moved like smoke, drifting this way and that, a hand twisting up to her face with her drink before she stood and made her way through the ruck to my table. She tasted her drink, nodded, drank some more and set the glass down. Her little smile twitched toward my pad. "You've been drawing me."

"Trying, but you're too beautiful to catch on paper."

She shook her head at my response, disapprovingly. "I bet you've better lines than that."

"How about these?" I took up my pencil and sketched a line drawing of two hands, mine and hers, holding each other. No wedding ring; sketching hands is a good excuse to check such things. "My name's Don."

My name's not Don; it's Lazlo. But I liked the lie better then.

Her eyes caught mine. Beautiful eyes. Onyx jewels speckled with white--eyes people paint pictures to remember. Her hand lifted, leading my gaze away, around the room. "No security cameras. No watchers making up little tales about who and what you and I are. None. Except you. You and your drawings." She looked at me. Her smile stretched.

Kids do stupid things. I lit a fire under Dad's car the day I turned eight. The smoke looked interesting to me as it snuck into the car and filled it up.

Dad did not think so. Dad didn't get angry often, and this was the first time I really remember it happening. He had this big grin. He was talking, and I could hear the anger behind the voice, grinding at the syllables. But he was trying to control it, see, and his grin would not go away. The grin made me feel safe, even though I knew he wanted to toss me in a dumpster as a failed experiment in reproduction.

I asked Dad about it later. Much later, when I was a teenager and reviewing some of the greater stupidities of earlier childhood. He told me, "The best way to hide what you're feeling is to plant a grin on your face. No one can read through that. The stronger the emotions, the bigger the grin."

She kept that big grin planted, waiting.

I tried to change the subject. I pointed to the big plastic iguana by the entrance that greeted newcomers with a cheery, "Welcome to my cantina!" I said, "You like the iguana at the door?" She simply tsked at the response in a way that said, You're not doing better, and the smile didn't go away. She sipped her drink and watched me through the glass.

I decided to talk about her appearance. People like being complimented on their appearance, and I'd never seen eyes like hers. There were constellations in them, galaxies. I looked into them. "We are made of stars. Sometimes, you look into someone, and see that. I look in your eyes and see that." The best lines are the ones that are true.

She slid her hand over mine, clasping it. Her hand felt hot--not warm, but hot like something left too close to a stove. "Most of the stars we see are dead. They died to make us. Every piece of us came from them. People take pictures of them, and they are dead. Do you think that's how something so magnificent would wish to be remembered? A spot on a piece of paper? It degrades them. But this," her hand moved over mine, tracing along the skin. "Our lives, as long as we burn, that honors them. So thank you." Her fingers darted back to her glass, and she drank deeply.

I did not like her words. "If they could, I don't think the stars would mind being remembered."

She set her drink down, a little smile playing with the edges of her lips. "Paper, photographs, digital representations are not memories. They're poor reflections of the past. No, not even that. They're what the photographer wanted to see. What they chose to see."

I sketched with my finger on the table, using water from condensation rings to draw a starscape. "You can capture the stars with your eyes, your mind. What I do with a piece of paper is the same thing. Just slower. Maybe more permanent. It's not as good as a memory, but it's a good reminder. People need reminders, otherwise they forget, they let the rest of the world drown out things from their past. They forget, that's why I do this. So I don't forget. Maybe, when I die, it will survive. Maybe, when you die, it will still be here. And then you will still be here."

"No, I won't. And neither will you. Just the lies about us you left behind." She leaned over, ran her hand over my starscape. The water smeared and evaporated.

We both sipped our drinks. The conversation was going poorly. Too much serious talk.

"Some people," she said, and that little smile was definitely not a flirty smile, "don't like being remembered. You should be careful."

I smiled back at her. "You, I can't help but remember." I pushed the pad aside. "I don't need paper to remember you either. But I would like to have a name."

She laughed. "A name," she said in a voice thick with meaning: This entire conversation was a mistake. Why did I come over here? I could be quilting right now.

"It doesn't matter what name. A lie you can leave behind."

The smile changed subtly, a softening around the lips and eyes. She drifted into a seat. "Call me Love." She nudged the pad with an elbow. "Does this ever work?"

I've learned a few tricks about women and bars. If she asks you about something you don't want to talk about, roll with it. Smile. Compliment her shoes.

I grinned at her. "Love," I said, "those shoes are fantastic."

She leaned toward me as if she knew I didn't care about the shoes. Her eyes moved over me, a subtle pressure, a tension in the air, a string of unspoken thought tied between us. Then she leaned back and kicked her feet up on the table. I blinked with the suddenness of the movement.

"These old things?" The shoes were not old. They were black leather open-top sandals, with a low heel made from what looked like blued steel. "The one on the left is Daisy. The other one is Spike. Spike likes you, but Daisy is convinced you're just a guy." A swirl of skirt and leg and motion and the feet were back under the table. "They both think you're trying to get something from me." She leaned back. "Are you?"

"I want you," I said, and I pushed my pad forward, "to tell me what you think of my drawings of you."

She swirled her glass, the drink sliding up to the edge, but not over. Her legs crossed and she tapped her foot on a leg of the table. She set the drink down, snapped up the pad, brought it close and looked over the drawings. A taste of something sweet and chemical wandered over with the gesture, then dissipated in the smoke.

"I'm not a good judge. We don't draw where I come from. We don't take pictures or make movies. We talk the old fashioned way." Her smile broadened. "This," she slid the drawing pad back across to me, "would make some people angry."

"Where do you come from?" She did not have an accent I knew. "The Midwest? Pennsylvania?" I had this idea that maybe she had been raised by the Amish, or Mennonites.

She finished her drink, gestured for another. "Far, far away, Donny boy."

"Oh, like Jupiter then."

The waiter brought her drink. She snagged his arm. She drank the drink, smiled a broad smile at him. "Another." She released him, he stumbled off, looking back at her, and her eyes came back to me. "Jupiter? No, I said far, far away."

"I grew up here, in Waltham." I kicked my feet up onto a chair, leaned back and told her things which were all true. "Love, I can tell you where the squirrels of Cedarwood hide their nuts, where the nuts hide, and where neither of them go. I've been to the cave on Bear Hill and found the hidden Native American ruins by the Cambridge Reservoir. I've fished clams from Stony Brook and built a fortress to defend Ravenswood. I've coded a gate to an empire's electronic castle, and flown my images as their pennants. This is my home. This," I tapped the table, "is where I'm from."

She didn't say anything for a long moment. Her smile had fallen away in my last words, to be replaced with something else, a crease between her eyes, a sad droop. "I want to tell you something," she said, softly.

"Okay." The bartender was glaring at me, and so I took my feet off the chair.

She took my hand. Her skin pulsed with heat, as if she were feverish. "Vision lies. All the senses, no matter how they are stimulated, can lie to us: pictures, books, memories, words, touch, taste. But here," she leaned back and traced the fingers of her other hand up her cheek, up past her temple, "in the mind, in the moment, the only lies we see are the ones we tell ourselves. When that's what you see of a person, the exterior doesn't matter anymore. Can you understand that?"

I pulled my hand free; her touch had been hot enough to redden the skin of my palm. "Of course I understand. It's what ugly men have been telling women for centuries: it's personality that matters, not appearance. And that, Love, is a lie."

She regarded me for a long moment. I wrapped my hand around my glass to cool the skin. Love looked around, as if to make sure we were alone. She set one of her hands on the table and folded back the nail. It moved as if hinged, and the inside appeared to be filled with long metallic-looking crystals rayed out from an internal skeleton to press against the skin: coppers, golds, silvers.

I sat looking at it, did not say a word.

She folded the nail back. "I could do the same," she said, plucking at the skin of her arm, "with most of this, but it's a pain to get it back in place afterward; you have to accommodate it to your biology, there's all sorts of tuning, and my machines are better at that than I am." The waiter came by with her drink. She dimpled at him and took it and he left. Love looked back to me. "Vision lies, Donny boy."

I reached out to touch her hand. Other than the warmth, it felt just like normal skin. "It feels--" I began, then stopped. I looked squarely at her. "You're playing with me, that's an artificial hand, one of those experimental ones I heard about on the news."

"You're right about one thing. I am playing with you. But that's why you drew me, didn't you? So I would come play in your pool."

An artificial hand made sense. I couldn't see the seams, but I knew that the technology for such things had gotten pretty good since the end of the last century. "Pool?"

"Your pool. The water of your soul."

"I don't understand." I slipped my pencils into their case and closed it. Early enough to find another bar.

She put her hand over the case and slid it across to rest in front of her. "When you look down on a lake, or an ocean, or a river from the shore, you see reflections. You see the sky, light on the waves, boats. You see yourself, and all the things the surface bounces back to you. It takes concentration to see beneath the surface. Just the right lighting. And even then, you can only see what's near the surface, the obvious things. Words, pictures, your drawings, all the things your senses present." She took up her drink, finished it. She held the glass in her palms. Ice cubes wilted away into water. "You have to jump into the water to see what is in it. In the water, all the reflections, the lies, go away. All you have is the water." She traced fingertips across my drawing pad. "This is just reflections of my Donny boy."

I thought of the files filled with drawings in my apartment, and all the other women, other nights. "You're wrong."

She cocked her head. The last of the ice cubes disappeared. Condensation evaporated from the glass in thin white wisps. "How?" She smiled wide.

I said, "When you're right above, you can see into the water. If there's light beneath the surface, you can see beneath. You can't search the depths, but you can see some of what's there. I think drawings, words are like that."

She brushed my words away. She drank the water pooled in her glass. The waiter came by to ask if she wanted another but she didn't.

I said, "And, even if you are under the water's surface, you still see reflections. There's still a surface to reflect back at you, only it reflects back what's underneath. You don't see better, really, just differently."

She opened her mouth to say something, closed it. She nodded. "You're right. You're right, Donny boy, and I'm going to give you something because you are right." She smiled. "A little lie I want to leave with you."

She took my hand. "For you." Her grip was tight, I couldn't have pulled free if I'd wanted to. Her nails pierced my skin and metallic tendrils darted from beneath to slip into me.

The dumb thought in my mind was that it was more than an artificial hand.

I could not budge, just sat there. Things moved beneath my skin. Then the nerves in my fingers went dead, then my arm, the numbness shot up to my neck, encased me. It happened too fast to react. Black closed my vision, and I did not feel my head when it struck the table.

The City of Waltham Police Department has pretty good cells, as cells go: close walls, a hard-but-comfortable cot, and a disinfectant smell. Fairly quiet. Fluorescent light. If you've been single and had your own apartment, you know what it's like. They let me out without much trouble. They told me I'd had too much to drink. A warning. They gave me back my wallet and drawing pad, but someone had taken my pencil case.

I began the walk home.

I felt her gift in my mind. It sat in the back of my thoughts, an unopened box, like the faint thrill of an old familiar memory that you only have to think about to open. My walk became a run. It's about two miles to my apartment, and the May air held the scent of flowers and the first warmth of summer. Sweat beaded my forehead by the time I'd run back.

The apartment's an attic-shaped shoebox with a sparse scattering of furniture and neat bookcases lined with books on art, graphic design, programming; the cabinet with my drawing notebooks; and my computer on a desk by a window: everything I need to get by in a digital age. I set my things down, lay on the bed, closed my eyes and opened her gift.

Have you ever looked at your life, the person you've become, and been happy? Not just satisfied, but abundantly glad, proud even, at what you've accomplished? You run down the decisions you've made to get where you are, and nod your head, smile, and think, "I did well"?

I've had moments like that, where I've been happy, proud, of who I am. That's what the best of my childhood felt like, when I accomplished something new, something that stood out and made me feel I was special and good.

Those were the rare, glowing moments I held on to when I felt the world throttling me. Over the years, though, I've gotten used to a lot of things. Things that happen in the world stopped bothering me as much. I learned to get back a little of my own. I've a good job. My little talent let me pick up a lot of women. I'd forgotten enough about what it felt like to be happy with life that those moments didn't seem so important anymore.

The trees sang on her world. The leaves contained piezoelectric crystals, strung within protein membranes. At night, when the wind moved in from the sea, they shimmered with brief sparkles of color--reds, blues, greens--and they made soft tinkling crackling sounds. You could know a forest from its sound. Love knew the one near her home, near the water, nestled against the cliff. I remembered her life growing up there. I remembered a language shared in chemicals exchanged by touch. I remember what it felt like to be wrapped in my father's six pairs of arms, while his manipulator stroked my head.

Something happened, a disaster, something not clear, but I remembered riding up to the sky in a crowded vehicle, while my father fed me reassuring chemical signals. Remembered growing up traveling between the stars, looking for a new place to call home. Learning the ways of planetary investigation. Coming to a small blue planet loud with radio noise, and putting on the suit that looked like a human woman, designed so we could taste their thoughts the way we tasted each others: by touch. And I remembered setting down in a city to investigate the suitability of this world for cohabitation. One of the inhabitants drew a picture of my suit.

Her suit.

The suits are designed to look like people. In her native form, Love wasn't anything like us: a hard pill bug carapace crammed with neural tissue, scuttling about on tiny legs. The suit translated her movements and chemical signals into words, gestures, motion. The drinks helped the suit disperse heat.

I knew these things the way I know to hold a pencil: familiar knowledge deftly sorted to the back of the mind. I knew her the same way, the pride she felt at what she did. The sense of purpose. The love of life, the belief that she was good and special.

You're right. I probably am crazy. I can't prove any of it.

I still come back to the Cantina sometimes. Not often. Most nights, I work at a shelter in Boston's South End, part of the Pine Street Inn. I started going to church again, too, and there's a small group there I meet with. It's not much, but maybe I'm a bit closer to feeling the way she did. Maybe I'm a bit closer to where I should be.

I figure she's gone back to wherever she came from, wherever she's going, but I still come back to the Cantina sometimes to make sure. I draw women, I don't pick them up. I think about her, but she's never there. I walk home alone, along Charles and Felton Streets, where the immigrants are. People say they are dangerous places, but nobody bothers me. I walk and I sing a song whose words I don't quite know just right. I throw my pictures away.

J. F. Peterson lives in New Jersey, and his short stories have appeared in publications such as Absolute Magnitude, and upcoming releases of Postscripts and Aberrant Dreams. A Writers of the Future first place winner, he recently completed My Friend Molly (the mole), a novel about an unlikely pair of best friends.