Free Stunt by Claudia Dey

lightning cleaving a tree, and briefly the smell of burning. Immaculata is transfixed, her mouth a loose zero. She directs me to my door frame, presses my ruler against the top of my head, lilts, ‘Don’t move,’ measures and makes a mark. Three inches. She adds an exclamation point and dates it: June 9, 1981. ‘Whoa.’ She fumbles the ruler; it hits the hardwood floor and with everything around it – clay pipe stems, snow globes, my neat piles of feathers and shells, my owl lamp, my black corduroy dress – it is instantly a remnant of a previous life. My room smells like storage unit. I do too.
    As we fall asleep on my bed, curling into the shape of fiddle-heads for the night to pry apart, Immaculata wrapped around me, stiff and suited, this is what she tells me, her voice a balm, her mouth suddenly full of hard stops: ‘Take a duck. Pull her feathers. Save for the head and neck. Baste her with butter. Make a fire around her. Not too close so that she chokes. She will run, walk and fly meekly amidst the flame. Cloistered in a roast, her heart and head will thirst. Wet her with a sponge. When she begins to stumble, she is quite cooked. Present her before your guests. She will cry as you cut into her and be almost completely eaten before she dies. It is mighty pleasant to behold!’ Immaculata twines a strand of her floor-length white hair around my wrist. It is thick as fishing line. And then she says, ‘Meat is said to be more tender if it is made to suffer first.’
    I wait for her to say something more but she doesn’t.

two
    It all started with Sudbury.
    June 1, 1980. One year and seven days before you duct-tape this note to your studio door,
    gone to save the world
sorry mink,
immaculata,
sorry
yours
sheb wooly ledoux
asshole
    and leave us with fish (mostly bone), Mink is called away to shoot a film. When she gets the call, she exclaims, ‘Oh,’ as though something agile just flew up her skirt.
    It is a B movie. Mink used to be Joan of Arc. She used to be Masha. She used to be Ophelia. Now she will be in Sudbury for seven nights shooting
Murder in the Tundra.
She shows me the whites of her eyes whenever she says
Sudbury.
She will stay in a college dormitory. It will smell of sneakers and spaghetti, rank as leftover childhoods. She will sleep on a cot under a poster of a fantasy girl who is not her. The walls will be white cement blocks. There will be fire routes everywhere. She will pack her own bedding. And her robes, morning and night, which she will wear while walking to the communal bathroom. Everyone will fall in love with her. Of this, she is almost sure.
    Mink is to play the dim-witted but kinky Austrian prioress of a motel named the Lay-He-Ho and she must have sex with a demented dictionary salesman who is passing through town.His name is Laird. But because of her station in life, she must call him Herr Laird.
    â€˜We all have our station in life,’ Mink tells me, offering her profile. It should be printed on thousand-dollar bills.
    â€˜How true,’ I say, not offering mine.
    Mink hands me the script. She wants to rehearse. I rifle through the pages. It is mostly about dying and disrobing. When I remark that the film calls for full nudity, she slaps her thigh, a prize cow.
    â€˜But aren’t you being exploited?’ I ask.
    â€˜Pshaw. Doing nudity is high praise, Genie. High praise.’ She says
high praise
like it is contraband. Like it is what everybody wants but only a few know how to find. This was not always the case. Once, when Mink had not had a call for months, she asked me if I thought she could pass for my sister. I said yes. My lie became every lie that had ever been told to her.
    â€˜Swear on Sheb’s life.’
    It was up to me to undo them all. I couldn’t. Mink kicked a cupboard door closed and told me that her industry did not know what to do with her as she got older and so it had abandoned her. Then she pulled on