FINALIST: 2007 COLORADO BOOK AWARD, BEST FICTION

A Fish Full of River
Stories by Janet Bland
ISBN: 0977803422
$15.95

Book Description: Poignant and life-affirming, Janet Bland’s stories brings their colorful ensemble of characters to life. From headless chickens to heartfelt moments, seemingly ordinary events are inhabited by fresh observations and unheard voices. These funny and fascinating tales entice us to seek the power and meaning of the unusual in everyday life.

About the author: A longtime Colorado resident, Janet L. Bland earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she also taught for many years. Today she is teaching fiction writing at Marietta College in Ohio and at work on two books, a novel and another collection of stories.
Blurbs: “A rare and unusual book. [It] speaks to our closet fascination with life’s cruel jokes, uncanny incidents, and overwhelming strangeness.With her flair for the absurd and inimitable style, she transports us to worlds both intimately familiar and grotesquely alien. Janet’s last name is, truly, one of life’s great ironies.” Alexandre O. Philippe, filmmaker: Chick Flick: The Miracle Mike Story; Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water

“Some Native American fiction works on the simple notion that story is more real than what surrounds us-reality, history, or solid objects. Italo Calvino says, “I believe that fables are true.” Janet Bland plays elegantly with this old and fruitful opposition: History vs. Mythology. The stories have a wonderfully eerie calm, built from the ground up, pieced together with idiosyncratic historical detail, quirks of character, and humane integrity.” Brian Kiteley, author of Still Life with Insects and The 3 a.m. Epiphany

“Herein carouse innocents and wheedlers, scolds and soft-soapers, dreamers, real monsters and frauds. Upended, the classic American short story is delightfully savaged into a genre unforgettable: American Anomalous.” Rikki Ducornet, author of Gazelle and The Fan Maker’s Inquisition

Story

1906

My Niagara

On October 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The number of people who gathered along the banks to watch was neither large nor adoring-several false starts and delays had thinned the crowd into a hard knot of hostility. Nobody cheered; they had come to watch her die. She was not beautiful, even when the lies Annie told about her age where taken into account. Driven by financial desperation, Annie climbed inside the barrel; then she lifted her eyes up to the heavens and cried out to God for “either fame and fortune or instant death!” They hammered on the lid, gave the barrel a shove, and then the water took her.

It’s hard to explain Niagara Falls to someone who has never been to see it, never been awed by the stunning vision of so much falling water, never been cheated by the human flotsam and jetsam bobbing along its corrupted shores. Niagara Falls was the greatest outdoor freak show in America. There wasn’t a con man, woman, or child who had a fast one to pull who hadn’t come up to the falls for at least one season to pull it. When Annie Taylor arrived, it had only been forty years since that Blondin fellow walked the high wire and stopped mid-way to fry an omelet right over the falls-people expected more than just natural beauty, even then. Everyone came up on the train to see the falls and Barnett’s Museum with its collection of stuffed oddities and natural unmentionables. The elite stayed at the Clifton House, and the foolish stayed at the Table Rock Hotel to be fleeced by Saul Davis. By 1900 over a thousand people had committed suicide in Niagara-throwing themselves into the surging water quite spontaneously. It was the perfect place for corruption, betrayal, and last, desperate gestures.

Eighteen minutes is an eternity for those waiting between life and death, but it took that long to recover Annie Taylor’s barrel below the falls. Her assistants were amazed to find her alive. Bruised and bloodied but nevertheless the first person to ever survive the falls, this otherwise unemployed dancing teacher expected a whole new life of international notoriety. She imagined a lecture tour; she believed that the society clubs and university associations would want to hear of her experiences. Instead, she found herself traveling with a bedraggled sideshow and sharing the stage with dubious psychics, survivors of train wrecks, and people who charmed snakes. Her audiences were loud, drunk, and largely unimpressed with her story. She was robbed by her numerous business agents who took first her money, and then her barrel. Finally, Annie lost even her name when her last manager replaced her on stage in Kalamazoo with his mistress-a younger, prettier, “heroine of the falls” who had watched Annie’s afternoon show for two consecutive weeks and thus managed to memorize her story. The mistress performed in a bathing costume. Attendance was tripled. And Annie slunk out of town to avoid paying her manager’s debts.

After the debacle in Kalamazoo, the Queen of the Mists had eventually returned to Niagara Falls-the scene of her one triumph. I only mention this because when I went to Niagara that first time, back in 1906, I lived just across the hall from her at Kathleen Harrigan’s boardinghouse. But we had no actual contact; what little I know of Annie Taylor and her tragic experiences came from Kathleen Harrigan, our mutual landlady.
An innovative storekeeper with an eye for creative displays hired Annie. Thus did the Queen of the Mists come to spend her days sitting next to a small barrel of Shredded Wheat in the front window of the dry goods store on Falls Street. She was getting old. Sitting in the window gave her a bruised, haggard look, as if she were subject to daily blows, not just a few half-curious stares. Autographed picture postcards of Annie and the most famous breakfast food in Niagara Falls were for sale at the counter, but under no circumstances could she be prevailed upon to speak. Perhaps Annie Taylor had nothing left to say. Sometimes local children gathered in front of the window. They knocked on the glass or stuck out their tongues, but they were quickly chased away by the storekeeper.

Each night before dusk, Annie shuffled home to the boarding house and took the stairs to the second floor one slow step at a time. I almost always heard her as she went to her room, but one night she paused before my unlatched door. I can only imagine how lonely she must have been to risk talking to a stranger. However, her timing-much like her show business instinct-was terrible. My door was open, but no more than an inch or two. In knocking, she accidentally pushed it open and looked in at me just as I depressed my hypodermic syringe-sending morphine into the vein. She disappeared before I could explain my medical situation or beckon her forward, and my door was softly but decidedly closed.

But I had not come to Niagara Falls to see that poor, used-up woman, no matter how much she became involved in later events. In the beginning, I came to Niagara Falls because I was still looking for my place in the world. Like so many good men before me, I had found it quite complicated to be the second son of a prominent family. I’d tried studying medicine at Harvard College for several years, but that interest faded. And then I took a half-hearted stab at painting during an extended stay in Europe, which ended disastrously as my cousin Lucy had to come get me out of Italy. In utter desperation, I even worked for my father at Mayfield and Company. The family brokerage firm is a place (I must mention) where the silence lay so deep and portentous on the floor a man could easily lie down and quietly drown in it before lunchtime. How my older brother lived through each day, I still cannot imagine. I was not sorry the day Father let me go-due to what he called my Olympian indifference. Nor was I not discouraged. For outside the stifling chambers of Mayfield and Co, the entire twentieth century spread its vast fields and mountains like wings of fertile American promise.

Not three days later my cousin Lucy wrote to me from Philadelphia. She had taken over Baker Thread and Textile the previous year, after the death of her father, my mother’s older brother. And she offered a remarkable proposition to me.

Lucy had always been a socialist, but not the bomb throwing sort of socialist, as my mother had often pointed out in Lucy’s defense to various disbelieving relatives. More of an offer the message of Jesus Christ to the poor through the example of kindness sort of socialist, Mother would elaborate as she poured tea for cousin Adelaide and Aunt Winkie. Spend enough time on the floor of the mill there in Garment Square in North Philadelphia, Mother would suggest to those who doubted her word. Imagine being choked by the damp air thick with fiber, shouting to be heard above the deafening roar of the machines, or being constantly surrounded by immigrants who didn’t speak English or believe in the right God, or for that matter, bathe. The nicest, most well bred girl could, in honest confusion, think she was a socialist. The pressures of the industry killed poor Lucy’s father. Who among us, Mother murmured with a knowing smile as she passed the cucumber and watercress sandwiches, could keep her gloves tidy in such a situation? Broad Street-North Broad Street particularly-was no place for a Main Line young lady. If only she’d had a brother to take over for the family, Mother would say and look at me pointedly. She was convinced that if I went to Philadelphia and took Lucy’s place on the factory floor, a variety of benefits to the family would accrue. I would be working at a respectable job and with Lucy’s day free of commercial pressures, this socialist nonsense would fade away like last year’s fashions. From this, Mother was certain, would inevitably follow marriage to a most appropriate young man.
Lucy desired no husband and needed no help in Philadelphia, despite Mother’s insistence. Rather in her typical manner, Lucy’s letter offered me the opportunity to open a new textile mill in Niagara with its cheap, unending supply of power from the Niagara Falls Power Company. I immediately wrote back and accepted the position. Mother was overjoyed at the prospect of my employment. Not wanting my mother to worry that her niece was in the process of giving away the capital upon which Mother depended for her income independent of Father, I didn’t tell Mother that Lucy had proposed to offer ownership shares of the mill to the workers. Lucy was also in favor of votes for women, free milk for tenement children, and the eight-hour workday. Why wreck Mother’s perfectly pleasant afternoon with the truth? As for Lucy, had she not been my cousin-and raised as if she were my sister-I might have been just a little bit in love with her.

Lucy easily beat me at tennis, but she made it a delight to lose. She dove in the ocean without fear and danced along the shore like a bird. If she only asked for it, I would have offered her my life twice over. It was she who came to Italy when I had fallen deeply into my morphine dependence-a habit I unfortunately had acquired while in medical school. For many weeks in a rented villa, I had, with the aid of a local veterinarian, done nothing except inject morphine and hallucinate endless waves of Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, blowing softly across the tile floor in an imaginary Italian breeze. Lucy evicted the veterinarian, then helped me through withdrawal-the vomiting, fever, anxiety, and the sweating, teeth-chattering insomnia. She brought me home to New York and never said a word to anyone. I was alive and free of morphine because of her; I would do anything for her.

My dearest Lucy didn’t wear gloves, and her letter reminded me just why she dispensed with that frivolous convention. No longer dependent upon steam to drive our machines or tyranny to build our industry, she wrote, we had entered a new century. Niagara County, with its current-producing turbines-the world’s largest-was the industrial future. In the previous decade, Niagara Falls had become a Mecca for both the Electro-metallurgical and Electro-chemical industries, all because of cheap, plentiful power. Change was happening all around us, Lucy wrote. Niagara would soon become, as logic and technology prevailed, the textile-center of the continent-why not also the center of social change? With Lucy I imagined mills as far as the eye could see, all driven and lit by the power of the falls, all owned by the workers. I sent Lucy a telegram in the affirmative and packed my bags. The next day I found myself in Niagara Falls, ready to transform America. Anything could happen in Niagara Falls. That’s how I began with the chickens.
Red Springfield supplied fresh eggs and chickens to the local hotels and restaurants of Niagara, and the acre behind his house was filled with his birds. Harrigan’s boarding house was right next door; in fact, my room looked out over Red’s back lot. The yard was filled with uncountable hundreds of chickens-a seething mass of wings, beaks, shit, and feathers wafting through the air. They clucked and squawked, fretted and flapped at each other. The roosters crowed and postured and mated indiscriminately with the nearest available hen. The hens pecked at the ground with a mindless consistency. They laid their eggs, sat on their eggs, and never protested when Red or his wife Edith came out with a basket and collected them.

Why did I look out of window all day long at these birds? Wasn’t I supposed to be out setting up the mill of the future? Less than a mile away, Henry Perky’s modern sanitary factory-with countless bright windows and endless shredded wheat biscuits born of machine (untouched by hands human or divine)-provided the ideal model for our prospective textile mill. If I wanted something to stare at, why not Perky’s factory? What better way to rally the workers toward an enlightened tomorrow but by example?

Unfortunately, my right leg was broken-the result of falling off the train platform just moments after arriving in Niagara Falls. Dr. Abel, the attending physician (and brother-in-law to my landlady) had pressed four strangers into service after he set my leg in the station and wrapped the splints; they carried me up to my second story room at Harrigan’s and dropped me on the bed along with my luggage. Hearing me gasp in pain, the good doctor filled a hypodermic syringe with my old nemesis, and there I was back in the poppy’s euphoric embrace. To be honest, from the moment on the platform when I fell and the pain came screaming up from my damaged leg, I had been wondering how I might get myself some morphine. It was legally available, but there were those who frowned upon its use. I could have made mention of my brief medical school experience at Harvard, or my tragically low tolerance to pain, not to mention a tendency towards insomnia. But in the end it was the good doctor himself who cleared the way for me, having been a moderate user of opiates himself for many years. He understood my needs all too well.

Many a better man, however damaged by the carnival atmosphere of Niagara Falls, was carried under the doctor’s direction to Mrs. Harrigan’s for nothing less than the best residential care. It is always better to be in hands that accepted cash, and I would later come to understand that nearly all of her boarders were invalids or captives of some sort or another-all paying the cost of their own imprisonment. Had I then thought more deeply of the quiet tragedy of the woman across the hall, I would have come to understand this captivity was true most of all for Annie Taylor.

For wasn’t she trapped in some terrible manner, much like the boats at the base of the falls, pulled in and under by the cataract which held any craft under the surface until all life had been extinguished? She was irrevocably connected to Niagara-the point not only of great failure also the point from which she got her last clear view of hope. She drifted between the boardinghouse and the mercantile window in silence. And yet, according to my landlady, she never once lifted her eyes as she walked along Falls Street, never once turned her head day or night to take in the majestic beauty of the falls. She had already seen it as no living being had. Only her despondent tread on the stair, morning and night, reminded me of her existence. As much as I wanted to, I did not know how to reach out to her.

I admit I thought primarily of my morphine. On Dr. Abel’s orders, the boy from the apothecary trooped up the stairs every morning with my morphine-as much as I needed. And I was left to inject it myself. In very little time I learned to recognize the joyful patter of his small boots on the stair. Our great plans of socialist industrial reform must be temporarily tabled, I telegramed Lucy. But soon, I assured her, soon.

Each morning, I bathed in the water from the pitcher with a cloth, thoughtfully provided by my landlady for an appropriate charge. Then I put on my robe, combed my hair, and painfully heaved myself into the chair by the window. Shaving being too awkward, I abandoned it entirely in favor of a beard. Thus settled, I usually took my first dose of morphine around eight-thirty. One push of the plunger and I eased into the familiar lightness and euphoria. The pain and anxiety faded, replaced by satisfied happiness and the familiar rush of color and light. With my leg propped up on an ottoman and my syringe nearby, I spent my days staring out of the window that overlooked the Springfield Chicken Farm.
Initially, I sought to ignore the chickens. In the first days of my forced confinement this was not so difficult because I had so many delightfully distracting ideas. I thought about the great energy of the falls, those grand turbines grinding out the power to light the world. I considered writing a provocative treatise on the terrible conditions of the working man, something that could also be made into an epic poem. I would be another Marx, or Milton, or perhaps both. My afternoon injection would bring another round of ingenious mental free-association. Initially I had hoped that Dr. Abel would join me in the afternoons for conversation, as we both wer intelligent, educated gentlemen who shared our peculiar dependency. But it soon became clear when he visited that he lacked the sort of dedication I required.

Lucy sent me an article from The Philadelphia Inquirer about a new sort of fiber called Rayon, and I spent the next two or three days thinking of important things to weave with it, like door hinges and button hooks and birds’ nests. My dreams were filled with swarms of windup butterflies-a species I decided to call Helen of Troy. I wrote letters to Czar Nicholas, Teddy Roosevelt, and King Edward, offering each my services. Three daily injections were necessary to keep up this mental pace, but I soon found I had to increase the injections to four.
Then all at once, it seemed I thought of nothing but the chickens next door. At first they had seemed beneath my intellectual pursuits, yet I found myself succumbing to their avian universe. Slowly I stopped bathing so often, and my interest in food waned, despite Mrs. Harrigan’s insistence that I eat. These activities only wasted my time, and I found that with a glass of water, I was content. I suppose it was at this point that the injections increased dramatically, requiring the boy to trip up the steps several times a day. Thank goodness for a fat wallet. Annie Taylor continued up and down the stairs, morning and night, but I must say I barely noticed. My heart and mind were entirely won over by the chickens next door.

I watched them all the time, taking a personal interest. I wrote my mother in New York and asked her for my spyglass, which she sent promptly. The first time I looked through my glass, the chickens were so clear, so close that I wanted to reach out to touch them or dance with them in the dirt. With my glass, I joined their world like a flea in the straw. I could see everything-how they would peck and eat, strut and fluff themselves in the sun. I found myself reflected in their bright eyes, and I longed to stroke the whispery texture of their individual feathers against my skin.
Red and Edith Springfield were not so personal with their chickens; they had no names for those glorious beings. But I would have known their names and recognized them anywhere-the lean and hungry Cassias, young Augustus, cautious Brutus, the wily Casca, sleek Antony, and of course the most corrupt and over-reaching Julius Caesar. I took note of each and used their names most carefully, for a poet such as I who sits captive just a window frame’s width from all eternity must ring the most meaning out of each word he chooses. Their world was mine, to observe and consider. Soon I recognized that all of the hens were members of Roman society-citizen and slave alike. When I slept, I dreamed we were all chickens-living in ancient Rome-the nest upon which Western civilization brooded. I wrote Lucy about all of this and by return post she sent me a warm note asking after my health and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. I used it to prop open the window.
Every day, all day, I watched them in between injections. Anything seemed possible. The chickens, created in the image of God, scratched for enlightenment in the straw. And in watching them my mind was gradually opened. That’s how I knew it was Caesar.

Caesar was a wretched creature-strutting, unmanageable, aggressive. He wouldn’t crow for the sunrise, but he would crow in the middle of the night just for spite. Once upon a time he had been a good rooster, maybe even a great rooster, if certain beaks might be heeded. But like the moon, chickens change more often than not. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that in his book, but the pages were wet from the rain so I had to work things out on my own.

Watching Caesar work his way across the yard, I came to understand his daily ritual for establishing dominance-crow and flap his wings, force the other birds out of the way such that the scattered feed fell on him like rain, mount one hen and then another, charge a smaller rooster and drive him off. With his bright red comb and huge tail feathers, I could spot Caesar even without the aid of my spyglass. There are good chickens and there are bad chickens, I wrote with a shaky hand to my dearest Lucy-and Julius Caesar was a very bad chicken.
One morning Caesar, for no reason beyond evil, charged at Edith’s little niece, Trudy. Poor thing tripped and fell she was so scared- but once she was down that black-hearted rooster pecked at her face! A chorus of hens cried out to an indifferent sky. The child’s screams brought Red and Edith out the back door into the yard-it all happened so quickly. Grabbing his hatchet with one hand and Caesar’s long, almost elegant neck with the other, Red slung the bird across the chopping block and whacked off his devilish head in one clean blow.
Red and Edith held and comforted Trudy, checking that her eyes were unharmed. I would have sworn I had remained silent through it all. But Kathleen Harrigan burst in the door; having heard me cry out, she thought I had fallen and broken my other leg. It took me a moment to explain what had happened with the rooster and the child. That’s why I didn’t notice right away, having taken a moment to instruct Mrs. Harrigan on the use of my spyglass with one hand while slipping my syringe into the pocket of my dressing gown with the other. Julius Caesar wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead at all.

There were always a few hysterical steps before death-that dance go-round the chopping block. It was to be expected. But this was different. Caesar got up, shook the dust from his feathers, and wandered off. Headless and sightless, but seemingly unimpressed with his victory over fate. Once everyone noticed Caesar’s corporal persistence-not just Kathleen and myself but Red and Edith and Trudy-why the whole thing took on a new light.
It was into the Great American Carnival of Niagara Falls that Caesar was about to strut, headless and triumphant. As I watched, Red and Edith gestured at the headless rooster and then together they danced around the chicken lot. Before the day was out, little Trudy had carefully rinsed off the severed head under the pump and plunked it in a jar of clear corn whiskey to keep it fresh, while Edith had provided an eyedropper to squirt water and cornmeal down the open gullet of the rooster’s throat. Late into the night I sat by my window as Red hammered together something between a table and a stage to present the bird. He needed to perform no tricks-being headless was tricky enough; his triumph over the hatchet undeniable. What must Julius Caesar think of all this, I wondered-and could he do anything like thinking without a head? The sign went up and the lines formed early the very next day- See the Wonder of Niagara Falls-the Amazing Headless Chicken! The Springfields were in business.

Reporters from the Niagara Falls Gazette and the Cataract Journal were summoned, and the next day my landlady dropped the papers in my lap. I was paying the apothecary’s boy when she brought them, but I shooed him out promptly and scanned the papers. Caesar was front-page news. The Buffalo Courier quickly picked up the story; after that, there was no way anyone could stop it. In a matter of days the trains from the city were full and the lines formed early and loud on our street. Everyone wanted to see that headless chicken and it was all Red and Edith could do to keep up with the demand.
Was I the only one compelled to look deeper into the meaning of his headless existence? This was no Lazarus brought back, for Caesar had not left so much as he had insisted on the power of brute life divorced from reason. There was no joy, nor any justice, to be found here. And mistake this not for the resurrection, coming three days cold from the tomb. Even one such as myself knew it was not yet time. No, this was simply the end of reason’s reign, as we entered territory unknown.

Once again, old Annie wandered into my thoughts, like some long lost dog finally come home. Her room was across the hall, and her windows looked out over the chicken yard just as mine did. During the week she was absent from dawn until dark. But the lines of the curious continued on the weekend, and she must have been able to witness the spectacle. Did she sit next to the window as I did, taking in the wonder of it all? Or was she then plotting the end-his or perhaps even hers-during those long days? I had Mrs. Harrigan slip a note under her door. “What do you think?” I wrote her. Then in another I asked, “What shall we do?” But I received no answers.
The small table was replaced with a large tent, into which the long line of curious people filed through for a close look at Caesar and his severed head. One morning the apothecary’s boy told me that ruffians had attempted to steal Caesar during the night. According to his breathless account, Red had awakened just in time to chase the would-be thieves all the way down Park Street in his nightshirt. And my boy knew for a fact that the thieves were able to get away with the head, so the show was now one head short. I easily imagined their solution: Edith herself would yank a sleeping rooster-it was too dark to determine which one, but I cannot help but guess Brutus-off his perch and whack his head off while Red stood by. For a moment Brutus danced the chopping block jig, and they both leaned forward hopefully. Et tu, Brute? Of course not. History never repeats itself when you want it to. After a few more heartless flaps, the rooster keeled over dead-as God intended. They popped that counterfeit head into another jar of moonshine and went back to bed, taking headless Caesar into the house with them. The next day, Red hired a dozen local toughs to act as security. After that, several of them circled the tent night and day, and Red’s daily bank deposit was made in their dubious company.

Days passed as the ghost of Caesar pranced for the mob-endless circles in blind pursuit of greatness. The Springfield family focused only on the needs of Caesar, and the rest of the flock suffered. They were fed and watered, but not with the same care or consistency as before. The noise of the crowds filled the birds with angst, and they ceased their laying. They were angry and afraid-and many words were spoken as to how they might bring about an end to this madness. This had once been not merely a flock but indeed a grand civilization, now teetering on the brink of ruin. For many weeks I’d watched them. The philosophers and teachers, their leaders and priests had walked the yard with a dignity well afforded them. But Caesar’s path brought them all low. More and more they resembled not so much God as men, and thus they limped about the yard, listless and apathetic in the rotten straw of their failures. Their only vigor was displayed in the routine pecking to death of one of their own; bloody beaks were the order of the day. The end was near.

Lucy’s letters came almost daily, but I no longer opened or answered them. (By this time my leg had healed, but I’d lost my desire to walk.) While changing my bed linens, Kathleen Harrigan complained bitterly about breakfast; it was difficult to get fresh eggs, as Red had been her primary supplier before he and his rooster went into show business. There was also a shortage of fresh chicken, but I could not trouble myself with her concerns. I gave her more money and sent her away.
The crowds grew larger and more agitated. There were demonstrations in the streets. The neglected chickens and I drifted together through identical days and unremarkable nights. Their feathers were dirty and dull. My hands shook as I injected my morphine, and I lived only for the sound of the boy’s feet on the stair. And it seemed to all of us that life was meaningless, everything was lost. Our dreams were filled with a vast blackness of empty night sky, and the ground offered no feed.

For most, the night Caesar died is shrouded in mystery. None among us were awake to witness the truth-was it the work of many or one? Red and Edith claimed he choked to death on a kernel of corn-they fed him several times a day by dropping corn down his gullet and giving him water with the eyedropper. Others, my landlady among them, saw larger and more terrible powers at work-and some reported a plethora of stars shooting across the western night sky. There was blood on the moon. Judgment day had arrived, they claimed, for sheep and goats alike. The crowds dribbled away in fear, and church attendance among locals increased dramatically. Many consulted Revelations and waited for the end.

But this is not the whole story. Consider another possibility-nothing so mundane as the kernel of corn but likewise nothing so apocalyptic as the hand of an angry God. I was dependent upon so many injections each day-not to attain euphoria but simply to escape the agony of withdrawal-so there was no action for me outside my own mind. But even then, I understood how the hand of man does some of God’s best and darkest work.

I imagined Annie Taylor reaching one last time for the stars-like the hero of an ancient tale I would tell for the rest of my days. Here in Niagara Falls-her last refuge, the site of her one and only triumph, wasn’t it the ultimate indignity-upstaged by a chicken with no head? Now utterly ignored in the store window, forced to fight her way through the crowds each night on her way home, wouldn’t the Queen of the Mists lose all control? Perhaps the storekeeper said he must let her go, or asked her if she would pose with a chicken. That would have been enough purpose, I imagined, to keep her awake far into the night and then carry her across the yard to Caesar’s tent.

Of course I am always asked, how could this old woman sneak past the guard; that, my friend, is always a foolish question. The woman I speak of went over the falls in a barrel, so surely she could get past a few drunken guards, grab that chicken, and wring what neck he had left.

I believe that Annie Taylor, however ignored and forgotten, was the one with courage and conviction. She refused to be eclipsed while the rest of us adjusted to pecking in the shadows. After he was killed, I was resolved to speak with her, to thank her-not just for myself but for all of us. She had brought down a monstrous tyranny for the greater good.

I gathered my courage to take those two steps across the hall where at last I would knock forthrightly on her door. But just as I took my last injection, my door suddenly swung open. I laughed quietly, thinking it was Annie herself coming to me, having heard my thoughts. But to my surprise it was my dear cousin Lucy-once more horrified by my enslavement to morphine and once more coming to rescue me; she announced she was taking me back to New York City to a hospital. The men she brought with her picked me up like a sack of feathers and floated me down the stairs. I wanted to call out to Annie, but the words would not form and so I drifted out of the boarding house in silence.