EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
BY SOPHIA SCANLON
His spine was the problem.
There was a word the doctor used: Elongated coccyx. A pseudotail.
“Everyone has it, in one form or another,” Jonás was told at the clinic. “Only, as in your case, it is more than vestigial.”
For years before, as long as he could remember, it had been there. At first merely flesh, an embarrassment behind his leg, pale green as new moss.
Then scales, like scorches of lapis lazuli, began to appear in alarming succession. During sleepless nights, Jonás felt he was experiencing death. Metamorphosed, the tail grew wider. Resplendent, it glittered in variegated gem tones. He began to evade school, hanging around movie theaters, places dim and obsolete where he could hide from the world.
It was in this way that Jonás became an elevator operator, a job superfluous and outdated.
Requiring no skill, only by title did he operate the three elevators, in hourly shifts. The manager told him he need only turn a crank, open the iron grate, and wait for the passengers to clamber in and out. It was a role requiring a costume, a bellboy suit. An image of refinement, an echo of the industrial past.
He was invisible, though. Standing with his back against the brass rail, the tail rested against his leg, blending into the chartreuse wool of his uniform.
Years slipped by in the dark. In adulthood, to his horror, Jonás understood that his tail was only the beginning of an overwhelming transformation. Spreading over his belly, a stiff carapace of deep purple. No longer capable of bending at the waist, Jonás managed to climb the stairs like a lizard, scuttling on his hands and knees.
He requested a change in his schedule, and began working from midnight to six o’clock in the morning.
When the scales began to encroach upon the underside of his chin in a mosaic of amethyst, Jonás despaired. When nubby horns emerged, though, he could hide them tidily beneath the bell-hop’s cap. The wings caught him by surprise. Disregarding at the first signs of his skeletal development, one morning he found himself amazed at the wings gnarling his back. Grimacing, the length of a giant, they were an ugly yellow shade.
He was a panoply of color: Green tail, purple scales, black horns. A compendium of error. Jonás started hiding from the other lobby attendants.
Even the coat staff manager, a man deformed in a totally different way, with a humped back, began to wonder. If not for the two signatures, scrawled at the beginning and end of his shift, “JJ,” Jonás might have been forgotten entirely.
More humiliating still, his hunger. A deep, squeezing need for bitterness and bone wrapped him. He ate anything he could find: german waterbugs living in his drainpipe, mice in the hall, once, a whole fox. Afterwards he crawled about his room in a reptilian frenzy. It was a rented studio, with only a sink, a toilet, and a bed in the corner. He had long been living in neglect.
Avoiding mirrors, dreaming of death, his skin warped entirely with scales, Jonás began to devise elaborate ways by which to destroy himself.
But Fate would not have it. One night, at four o’clock in the morning, he heard the bell ring for the seventh floor. In a tremor, Jonás felt the lurch as the metal box grated upwards. As the elevator doors spanned open, a cool wind washed Jonás. From the shadow, he saw: Two opal eyes, an oak-hard face, ridged wings enormous as banana leaves.
“Who are you?” Jonás asked the figure standing in the hall. He was, after all, asking his own name: The beast resembled himself.
There are elements of creation that remain riddles. He saw then the thick scabbard tail, white, ice-flecked, glinting from the stranger’s back.
The child in Jonás, who had undergone tremendous pain for almost a whole lifetime, at that moment began to sing.
When, in the early hours, Jonás failed to sign the book, no one noticed. It was only much later that the coat clerk said:
“What became of our solitary graveyard worker?”
But the question ended there.
On the night of his disappearance, a little girl, sleepless, looking from her window, saw two figures in the sky. For the rest of her life she remembered the sight—the immensity of the wings and tail, mapping the sky—as one remembers the sudden flash, a memory of the earth’s magic.