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By Root 469 0

when Ursula no longer wanted to play. Ursula keeps expecting her to come out of the act now, to let her soul once again reassert itself behind those lost eyes. But all that emerges is little pieces of the former Ivy—here a knitted brow, there a tongue tip poking from flattened lips, occasionally even the trembling top half of a toothy smile—momentary shapes half recognized in choppy water, continually raising and dashing Ursula’s hopes. The doctor has told her that Ivy will probably have periods of remission, perhaps even very long ones, but that even in these times she will never be the same person she was; henceforth her mind will be more like a weather system than a transit system, and living with her will be a matter less of regular time-tables than of perpetually shifting forecasts. It will be up to Ursula to find a way to give this convocation of clouds that once upon a time was a sister some semblance of a worthwhile life.

Picking up the other spoon, Ursula joins her sister in the excavation, making a couple of minor forays into the strawberry. Ivy redoubles her efforts, swallowing a heaping mouthful, puffing her cigarette, and then digging into the chocolate once more. She leans over the carton as she digs, and her hair gets between the spoon and the ice cream. By the end of the visit her fine honey-blond hair will be a cloying mass of chocolate and smoke. Ursula has never seen Ivy eat with such determination, and this actually pleases her a little. At least in this one limited sense, Ivy can enjoy herself more than she has ever been able to before. It was always a struggle getting Ivy to eat. When she was in kindergarten, a round-cheeked child full of smirking secrets, she’d hide in the coat closet to avoid snack time. It drove the teacher crazy. Ivy never explained this behavior to anyone’s satisfaction. It had something to do with the sharp odor of the apple juice, the sound of the Graham crackers cracking apart between fingers and teeth.

“We won’t touch the vanilla today,” Ivy whispers, her voice as arid as the smoke rising and dissipating from her lips.

“Why not?” Ursula asks.

“Looks cleaner than it is,” she says.

Her eyes go hollow. She puts down the spoon and rests her chin on her knees, rocking her head left and right. A frozen, fleshy chunk of strawberry that Ursula can’t swallow bleeds coldness into the center of her tongue as Ivy looks away into that other dimension, that cold, conglomerous future from which all the trouble comes.

Training

Sure, trendspotters are supposed to blend in, Javier explains as they cling to the pole of the jostling subway car and Ursula’s rollerbladed feet scramble out from under her, like chameleons in the urban flora, wearing gray suits in the banking district, green toothpaint down on Bissel Boulevard, fleshtone leather pants in the galleries, and so on, sure, one wants to observe without influencing, but he for one has no time for that anymore, no time, things are changing too fast, new species of trends evolving, slithering through the underbrush, taking wing, spinning iridescent shapes, bellowing at the moon, some even going extinct before they’re ever recorded, puzzled over, learned from, appreciated, and, yeah, sure, loved, loved by someone who understands them for what they truly are, those draped necklines and hemp pumps and zydeco rap tunes and poppy perfumes and gingko colas—namely, the pure dialects of human desire, the untrammeled expressions of the cultural unconscious, signs and symbols from the ideal world in which we hope someday to live.

He likes to go fast sometimes, he explains as they hand-over-hand the handrail, rollerblades splaying up the subway steps. He likes to shake things up so he can see them anew. For a while he switched to a go-ped, like everyone else, but the skates allow him more access, and he’s confident that everyone else will soon switch back as well. He likes to take the subway to the peak of Middle City and skate all the way down the mountain. Some days he skates down the streets of the West Slope, through the theater district