A Penny's Worth, by Donna Shanley

Thoughts of the Past, by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (England) 1859

 
A Penny's Worth
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From the time she was an infant, the auburn that crowned her had been an affront to piety. It was the amber of ale overflowing the barrel, the scarlet of the strutting rooster’s comb, the escaped flame that devoured the thatch. Her mother had scraped it back daily from her forehead, tamed it with spit and soapsuds, locked it tight in maiden’s braids. 
 
Words had been her forbidden joy. She’d kneaded dough, flicking furtive glances over her brother’s shoulder as he sat, hunched and resentful, quill scratching like a bewildered chicken. She’d echoed the letters in her head as he stammered their names, memorized the clumsy shapes he made. In her mind, she unblotted them, gave them wings, imagined flying with them to other skies. She etched them in the flour with a fingertip, then quickly smoothed them away when her father loomed. Too late. The slap rattled her teeth.  

The only reading she was permitted were the names in the family bible. Their faded trails were like the leavings of undernourished black snails: tracks from a grim-lipped past to colourless inevitability. Rainbow words shouted from posters in the town; she flew like a hummingbird to their sweet promises of far away. Threw off her apron one day, loosened her braids, and raced after the gilded carriages and the great draft horses in their red-plumed bridles, her ears closed to her father’s bellows, her brother’s jeers, her mother’s righteous snifflings—more for the loss of a light hand with pastry, if truth be told, than a daughter. 

“Penelope” she’d been named. Its primness had sat awkwardly on her, a lace collar on a falcon. Now she learned to dance in tasseled silk and spangles. “Penny Bright” they called her, as she somersaulted like a spun copper coin.  “Heads!” the crowds would roar. “Tails!” a few would snigger, their eyes small with desire. One day, amid the shower of farthings and ha’pennies, a gold sovereign fell, wrapped in a perfumed note laced with promises like spun sugar.  

Country-trusting still, she met him, loved him, followed him to the room in the spoiled city, beside the reeking river. In return for her body he gave her words; praised the graceful lines of her hand as it struggled with the pen, the new-fashioned steel nib gleaming in the candle-light. As her novelty tarnished, he came to her less and less. The coins on the dresser rang with contempt as they fell.  

A breeze crept through the torn window-lace and ruffled the letter wedged in the mirror frame. Her name on it was a wraith’s whisper; still, it had flown to her, found her- just three words inside from her newly-widowed sister-in-law: “He’s gone. Come.”  She snatched the paper from the frame, rubbed her forefinger around the rim of the ink-bottle, and overwrote the eight letters with five. No timid snails’ wanderings these: bold and dark, they stormed across the envelope’s sky-blue, filling it from horizon to horizon. 

His cane and glove lay on the floor where he’d dropped them in his hurry to return to the frilled drawing room of respectability. She picked up the glove and swept the coins into it. They barely filled one finger. Let the wind be her coiffeur; her hairbrush would serve another purpose. She swung it and smashed the window pane. Fish-stinking air poured in, the whiff of salt in its heart still striving. And from far off, the promise of different air, leaf- and clover-laden.  

Beads dripped from her broken necklace like orphaned tears as she strode outside to where the fishers were labouring. “Penny Farthing” they’d hoot when she walked by, the sum they figured of her worth, the price they wished they had. They had turned at the sound of  breaking glass. Their mouths opened to taunt her, then they saw her eyes and the cane gripped in her fist, and were silent. 
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The polished oak felt smooth and strong. It would beat off thugs, help her over slimed steps. It would write “farewell” in the mud.  
 
Donna Shanley
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Donna Shanley studied literature and languages at Simon Fraser University, and then (of course!) wild orangutans in Borneo. She lives and writes in Vancouver, B.C., where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her flash and micro-fiction has appeared in a number of magazines, including Vestal Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Milk Candy Review, and The Citron Review.
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