Tickets (from the Munich Tales)

TICKETS
By Michael Kroetch

The ones inside her were black. They were the reason she did so well in school and was always so well spoken of. They were the reason she did so many things—including going to Antarctica to study climate changes from ten thousand years ago. Or winning the state spelling bee when she was ten years old. The tickets had reasons for existing, of course they did. She knew all about them. She knew they had names and dates on them. She knew they were evidence. And she knew she could do anything she liked, go to the bottom of the ocean floor in a diving bell with walls three feet thick to hold up to the intense pressure of the water outside, or sail up into the atmosphere where the membrane between sky and stars was thin as an eyelash. She´d done both and it didn´t matter. The tickets remained inside her. Solid. Safe. Unfettered. Waiting. Over the years friends had tried to help, especially boyfriends. And lord knows, she´d wanted help. Wanted to be free of the terrible weight of the tickets. One boy in particular had gotten in close to them. He almost seemed able to touch them. This had never happened before and she was astonished he had somehow been able to do so—gotten so near. She´d felt a mix of fear and excitement about it. Then she´d closed her eyes. She could hear it raining outside. It had been raining a long time. She could hear failure in the sound of the rain and knew when she opened her eyes that the boy would be gone. He would have gone away and left her alone in the apartment. In his place would be another tiny black ticket inside her. A new one. His name would be on it. And it would not go away even if years from now she might not be able to remember his face or his name. That wouldn´t matter. His ticket would still be inside with the others. When younger she had cut her legs in small places where no one would see, to try and let the tickets out. She had used a special knife for this that she purchased in a shop on the other side of the city. The same knife had purportedly been used by a magic healer in some part of Central America to cure women who had problems like hers. In his healing the man had used the knife to sever the heads of live chickens. She did not want to cut the heads off of chickens and so instead had cut into herself. But apparently she had not been able to cut deep enough to get to where the tickets were. It scared her to cut that deep. She had not wanted people to know what was happening. She never told anyone about the tickets. None of her friends. Not even the boy who by chance had gotten so near to them. She felt people wouldn´t understand and that it would backfire, and instead end up producing more of the tickets. And so she did what she always did and pretended not to know they were there, and to have more and more success in her life. She found that more than anything else, success worked for awhile to keep the tickets quiet.