HOW TO SEE WHATS THERE

11/16/2016 workshop version

Aaron Nuttall

Watching the two of them enter his tent, the mask maker didnt notice that his mask had
slipped and was not straight on the kilter. He struck falsely with his ball peen and ruined his mornings
work.
Molya Mothman lowered the door flap as I. stepped in. He asked for a weeping mask, taking no
notice of the mask makers frustration. Molyas skin was coated with white road dust except for the tip
of his nose where he had wiped it.
Quartz? the mask maker said. For the teardrops.
Rock salt.
The mask maker looked out the wind eye beside him. I. looked too. Dark clouds coming in over
the hills.
Theyll melt before the day is out!
Molya Mothman said nothing. I. had learned that that meant your last statement hadnt
changed his position, so there was nothing for him to add. The mask maker, though, could make nothing
of it. He waited for a breath. I. scratched his knuckle. The mask maker shrugged and placed another
swatch on the kilter.

Molya paid when the work was finished. The mask maker avoided his eyes like an unwelcome
kiss. In the puttock-yard outside Molya asked I. to tell him again about his dream.
Bees surrounded me, trying to drink from my skin.
Bees? Stinging insects striped like a jungle cat?
Yeah.
These are alien beings.
Molya took I.s hand and leaned over the bluish bump that had appeared on the knuckle this
morning. His nose brushed the back of I.s hand. I.s cheeks burned. He could think only of the mask
maker seeing them, even though the tent flap was closed. When Molya straightened his breath left I.s
finger cool and moist.
Have you felt a pressure on your chest?
Well, I. began.

In sleep or awake. Breathe into my mouth. He held his mouth open to receive I.s breath then
rolled his tongue around the taste.
A night goblin has made a broodmare of your heart. You will need a fetch-heart to draw it out
before it foals.
Theres a slaughter yard downstream in Eaton.
No.
Molya walked out of the puttock gate toward town. He passed several young men or mudswains
practicing expressionlessness in their hand mirrors. I. followed him through the streets and into the
public house.

The meg greeted them. Her kirtle was spotty and her swanskin mask was crooked.
Will you have our heartystew. A statement rather than a question.
Are we eating? I. said to Molya
You are drinking.
Just the aelfwine then, I. said.
The meg glanced at Molya. She straightened her mask and showed her teeth. Is must okay?
And a bullocks heart, Molya said.
A farmer, his face a black beard, leaned on their table with both hands taking all his weight.
What do you want a bullocks heart for? Surely you want a sugar apple or a cherimoya.
Something worth your time to chew.
I dont engage with assumptions about my motives, Molya said.
The farmer looked dazed for a moment as he considered how to respond.
Where you from? What kind of name is that, Molya?
Its Russian for moth. I am from Russia.
The meg returned and shooed the farmer away. She laid the big red fruit on the table with their
bottle and two cups.
Another bottle, Molya said. Then, to I., You must flush the evil insects out.
And what? Theyll swim out onto the table?
I will prepare the way. You drink.

After several cups I. was feeling mellow. The meg was back.

Youre strangers in Dayton? she said.

We came through Eaton. Were passing through to Xenia, Molya said. I. was surprised he
offered so much detail. And thatd hed gotten the order of their travel wrong. Molya didnt make
mistakes.
Ive got news from Xenia, said a drinker in the corner booth, a river-boater by her dress. A hat
shaded her eyes and mouth.
My sister worked the lumber barge, said a mother in town had her babe go missing overnight.
Said shed never heard such wailing. Said it mustve been the poor girls first. The next night the babe
was back, only its eyes had gone silver.
That was a changeling, Molya said to no one.
The meg poured I. a cup from the new bottle. Molyas cup was still full.
I. got up to relieve himself, jostling the table.
Outside, the daylight stung his eyes. He had thought surely it would be dark by now. Two
women in fox masks passed him holding hands and slipping in the piddling street. He found an out of
view place in the side alley. Someone had scrawled a novel on the papered yellow wall. He noticed one
phrase: curse the devil for checkered things.

Back inside he asked Molya why he bought a mask if he wasnt going to wear it. It was a black
domino that parted around the nose with three crystal tears on either side.
I watch what the mask makers do, Molya said. They know what a mask says. That its the
opposite of what its meant to say.
The ripples in I.s cup sparkled in the candle light.
Molya continued. Do you think her magpie mask means a meg loves to chatter with the
tosspots in here? Do you think that man-grub there buys gilded wigs for his moll because he fears the
other swains will think her too smart?

It was much later when I. knew he couldnt handle any more. He hadnt had much must before
tonight but what he had had had had tectonic repercussions the following day. Tonight it seemed even
worse.
Can we stop now?
Finish this bottle.
The shadows worked on the wall behind Molya.
Youve got wings, I. said.

Molya covered his pomander with his hand. He seemed alarmed for a blink but he flattened his
expression again before I. could be sure hed seen it.
I. emptied the cup into his mouth but he wasnt sure there was any room for the drink to go
down when he swallowed.
Feeling his musth, he let Molya lead him toward the door. The straw on the floor seemed to be
covering deep holes, pits that hed know about for years, all his life until tonight. He wasnt at all sure he
wanted to walk over those holes.
Outside the rain had started. No one was in the streets now that it was dark. The ichor of the
cobblestones rose like damp. In a circular garden at the center of town a bell tower stood above the
other buildings. The prismoidal blocks of the tower walls, jutting one above another, made alternating
patches of tooth white stone and shadow.
A woman shrieked in a house nearby. I. stumbled. Where was Molya?
A moon-lighted knight chased a hart out of the gay woods. They galloped up the street to the
preceptory where the mad prior leaned on his curtana, its blunt point in the ground. Steely eyed, he
watched the butchery not an armspan from his feet. The dying deer cried with a dulcian voice.
When he had crossed the garden grounds, I. leaned a hand on the tower stones. In the rain the
stone showed topographic yellows and browns. The stone is one with the ocean; the earth is one with
the sky. The thought rose in him like a rush of fear to the chest, like insects were flapping their wings in
his belly. He felt the world spinning. He closed his eyes, but instead of comforting darkness, phosphene
nausea. He looked up and let the rain clear the road dust from his eyes.
Queasiness bested him. He held himself up with hands on knees, grimacing at the tingling on
either side of his jaw, and disgorged an impossible saurian bulk, a combination of bull and frog, but
huge. He tasted the lime-rind skin and a seizure of tartness took his breath.
Turning away, he heard the enormous neck and tail ramming through the outer walls of
buildings and flattening hay carts. The slick flagstones reflected the night, yellow and brown leaves
floating on the surface. He drank in the void and saw that the void was him.

Inside the bell tower a little stairway went up in darkness, round and round the inside of the
walls. At the top the hatch lay open. In a wedge of orange lantern light Molya was holding his arms
above his head offering the dripping bullocks heart, incanting, to the moon and the rain and the night. A
flash of lighting burned his white scarecrow limbs in negative on I.s eyes. In silhouette Molya had four
wings.
Molya wasnt holding the bullocks heart but a squealing baby. A mass of bees hovered around
its cabbage face. I. wanted to rush forward to stop whatever Molya was doing, but his legs were
submerged in tar. His bladder was painfully full and he feared the warm tar and the rain would keep him
from knowing hed wet himself. The tar swallowed him.
The carillon pealed the hour. Each of the forty-seven bells pressed his skin like a finger. They
rang in a red key area that shaded to yellow, then a brown chord that tolled again and again. Between

each brown the heaven full of stars grew old and died, birthed heavier and heavier things with each
generation. First gasses then gold, the gold in his bones and the iron in his blood all the same as the
hearts of stars.

He woke up with the chord still sounding in his mind. His head and whole being ached; his
mouth was gritty like hed been breathing dust. Morning was showing in rays through the clouds. I.
stirred and saw he was dusted with the husks of bees. He scratched the bump on his knuckle. It had
drained, leaving behind a fleck like the tip of a thorn or a stinger. He brushed it off.
He stood and stretched and took in the view from the top of the tower. The swains and riverboaters meandered from their homes to their days work. The low river was so smooth it was still, the
clear water frictionless to the eye. I.s body could no longer hold his spirit. He breathed out over the
town, the woods close by, the cattle, the fields of grain.