The Woman Dreamed of the Polished Box

by Chella Courington 

She’d gone to Carlito’s Traveling Show with her mother, a woman who would die young. Glossy red with white stars, the box rested on a carpenter’s table. Carlito climbed in. A muscular woman, like her mother, appeared from stage shadows and pulled a saw through the wood. But first came the long aah from the audience.

What did you like best?

The woman, her mother who died young, was still there then, gripping the wheel of a blue Pontiac, driving behind a curtain of rain while the girl clutched her yellow slicker. Her head hummed from hearing blades bite the pine. She chewed her thumb until she tasted copper. She said, the teeth.

You mean the saw.

Yes, she said, the saw that sings in the dark.