"Bach in the Barn" (Excerpt) by Leigh Ellis
Image Description: A waterfront pier on the ocean lined with lobster traps, warehouses, and commercial fishing boats
From the chapter “The Girl from Beyond the Shield” in Bach in the Barn by Leigh Ellis
For my tenth birthday, Mom had taken me into a city on Maine’s southern coast to buy a new mattress. I was less than thrilled to go mattress shopping on my birthday, but it was one of the few times I got to escape the confines of The Shield. Plus, she said a mattress had to be replaced every ten years.
We had fought a lot that year. About clothes. About music. About anything, really. I wondered if she might replace me, too, just take me to The City and leave me there. I wouldn’t have minded. I loved The City. I loved the dark angles of buildings and the pristine concrete creases in the sidewalk. But mostly, I loved the people. Mom said city people were of a different species. She said it like it was a bad thing, but I wished I was a member of their species. The streets told these people secrets, and they kept them close. I wanted to be let in on the secrets of The City. The City had a name, but Mom always called it “The City,” capital C, so that’s how I always thought of it.
She splurged on bus tickets, and we traveled to a nearby town with more stop lights and a functional bus depot. We definitely could have just bought the mattress there, but she wanted to take me somewhere special to celebrate my first decade; she just couldn’t bear to admit it. I knew she was in a good mood that day because she let me have the window seat despite her motion sickness. Head against the cool glass, I watched wisps of my breath disappear into the grubby fingerprints of previous passengers. Staring into the clone of my face etched against the evolving landscape, I decided I looked distinctly un-city-like. Did city people think of country people, of me, as belonging to a different species? I looked at my cavernous dimples and the piece of my upper lip jutting out where my misshapen front tooth pressed against it, then at the dry skin crusting over my eyelids and the sunburn blush scarring my nose. I decided they probably would.
I tucked the split ends of my curls into my beanie. Long hair would make me stick out in The City. Mom watched me do it out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t make me take it out. Not this time. Not on my birthday. The halfway point to The City was marked by a haggard uprooted tree, casting strange sickly shadows over the placid water of the swamp beneath it. The branches still clung to life, but the bark was shrinking away from the core bit by bit and floating away on the water. The death of a tree is not a spectacle. Day by day, it slowly transitions from living beast to driftwood artifact. I imagined placing my palm firmly against the bark, touching this half-alive thing. I’m starting to think Mom’s death was a little like the tree’s. She didn’t die in the river. She started dying long before that. But when exactly? And was it because of us?
We got to The City by noon. Just as I started to wonder how we were going to get the mattress back on the bus: “I didn’t take you here to get a mattress,” Mom confessed. “I wanted you to see the ocean.”
I had never seen the ocean before.
We bought a loaf of bread from an Italian bakery and ate it on a pier, side by side on a sun-melted metal bench. The apartment buildings were all crooked and twisted in the ripples of the water. For the most part, they were all the same, their reflections dyed an industrial, muddled green by the gasoline-tainted seawater. There were little things that made them different, though—a cactus in a window, a bike on a balcony. I liked that. I wondered what I would put on my windowsill if I lived in The City.
The ocean wasn’t like the river. The river only went in one direction, and the ocean seemed to go in all directions, forever. Mom looked to the water with the same longing stare with which I looked to the apartments, as if she yearned to live inside of it in the same way I hoped to someday reside in a wharfside brownstone.
“Have you ever come here before?” I asked, knocking my knee against hers and taking a bite of the bread. It was somehow warm but tasted stale. I choked it down and tried not to make a face.
She laughed. “It’s sourdough. It’s supposed to taste like that.”
She didn’t answer my question. I imagined her sitting on this same bench ten years earlier, watching the ships disappear into the fog-clouded horizon, hoping she might have someone to share it with someday.
I took off my shoes and pressed the soles of my feet against the rotting boards of the pier. It almost felt like human skin, weathered and cracked, aged by the elements. Maybe taking off my shoes in public wasn’t the most city person thing to do, but I didn’t care. The wind smelled like a combination of the algae clinging to the hulls of the boats and the gasoline spewing from their guts.
The pier was empty except for a cluster of older kids walking toward the docks. They looked like they weren’t supposed to be there, but they didn’t seem to care. They didn’t seem to care about anything. They shed school uniform layers like they were shedding skins, gray blazer cocoons peeling from hunched shoulders to reveal white tank tops and flannels, wadded up around the midriff from where they had been squashed by the oppressive blazers. This was the first stage of metamorphosis.
The second stage was completed once they reached the docks. This is when they sprawled out on the splintered wood and spread their beaten-down angels’ wings and let the sun lick the wounds acquired from keeping their wings hidden inside scratchy fabric all day. There were four angels in total. One, a guy, wore an earring, just one. I wondered who owned the other half of the pair. Dad had a saying about guys who wore only one earring: “Left ear is right, right ear is wrong.” I didn’t understand what was so wrong about it. Maybe Dad didn’t either. Maybe he just said it because it was the thing to say. Two of the girl angels were kissing, kneeling across from one another now and holding each other by the wings. I had never seen two girls kissing before.
The angel farthest away from our bench sat several feet away from the others. Their legs dangled over the dock’s edge into the water, but they didn’t bother to roll up their jeans; the water tainted the lower half of the denim. Their shoes rested on the dock next to them: thick, black platform boots they could crush someone with. They wouldn’t have, though. They wouldn’t hurt a soul. Their chin-length hair, parted precisely in the middle, curtained their features. If anyone could shapeshift, it’d be them, transitioning effortlessly from boy to girl and back again, eventually landing somewhere in the muted middle.
I wished I looked like them. I would have traded my freckles and sunburn for a disguising mop of hair any day. I wanted to wear boots that could crush souls. I wanted to plunge my feet into the water and not care if my jeans got wet. But most of all, I wanted to shapeshift.
But at the time I was only ten. At that moment, if I had told Mom I wanted to look like the shapeshifter, she’d have just told me I was too young to know what I wanted. So I never told her things like that.
Leigh Ellis is a rising senior at Windham High School. Aside from writing, they enjoy making art and listening to music, especially punk. Leigh’s work has been featured in two Telling Room anthologies, See Beyond and Shadowboxing. They were also a Maine Literary Awards finalist for both Youth Poetry and Youth Fiction. They hope Bach in the Barn will resonate with young queer readers who have yet to see themselves represented in books and media.