Free Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll Page B

but I can’t move. Are you okay?”
    My mother hadn’t answered at first and then she told me that she was fine. She told me that she was sorry we’d argued about college. She trusted me to make the right decision for myself. “Marguerite,” she said, using the French version of my name, which she always pronounced like an endearment, “always trust your own instincts. You’re a rare bird . . . unique . . . think for yourself . . .”
    She’d said something else that I lost in the blare of sirens that suddenly surrounded us. The face of a man in a fire helmet appeared at the driver’s-side window and my mother saidsomething to him that I couldn’t hear. Then the man was at my window, his face a menacing red from the emergency lights pulsing behind him.
    “There’s something else I need to tell you,” my mother was shouting over the sirens.
    “It’s okay, Mom, they’re getting us out,” I screamed back at her.
    “Yes, yes, but just in case, honey—”
    Whatever my mother was about to say was obliterated by the screech of tearing metal. Something rammed into the twisted doorframe. It looked like the snout of a giant beast and as I watched in horrified awe, it spread its jaws and let out an anguished scream.
    Later I would understand that the rescue workers were using a hydraulic spreader and cutter—the so-called Jaws of Life—to cut me out of the wrecked car, and the sound I heard was the sound of ripping metal. But to me it would always seem as if the thing itself had opened its jaws and screamed.
    When the fireman pulled me out of the car, I was screaming too, yelling at the man to go back and get my mother. We’d only gone ten yards or so when the car exploded into a ball of flames that narrowly missed us. Later I would learn that my mother had been impaled on the steel rod of the crushed steering wheel. She wouldn’t have lived even if they’d gotten her out. Guessing that, my mother had told the fireman to get me out instead. I’ve always felt, though, as if I had been snatched from my mother by that screaming, snapping
thing,
the Jaws of Life.
    A few years later—in my senior year at FIT—I found the one I had now and knew immediately what I wanted to do with it. I had taken it home and using chain links and spare automobile parts welded it into a fire-breathing dragon. I calledit Jaws. I thought it would be cathartic to turn my worst nightmare into a piece of art. After all, isn’t that what art is all about? Turning chaos and pain into something meaningful? Looking at the creature now, though, all I saw was how scared I’d been in the days right after my mother had died, terrified that if my father were sent to prison, I’d be as good as an orphan. And here I was back in the same place. I’d almost lost my father last night. If Roman was convicted of arranging the robbery, I’d lose him to prison. How long would a man his age survive there? I might have been ten years older than when my mother died, but I was no more ready to be alone.
    To be an orphan.
    The words were in my head, but they were voiced in a sibilant hiss, which wasn’t my own.
    It was the voice of the monster. Its red reflector-light eyes were leering at me, its serrated, rust-stained teeth grinning, mocking me for any hope I’d ever had that I was strong enough to make it on my own.
    You’re a rare bird,
my mother had always told me.
    You’re a lame duck,
Jaws quipped.
    . . . unique
. . .
    . . .
a freak
. . .
    . . .
you’ve accomplished so much
. . .
    . . .
you’re about to be out on the street, bankrupt, alone
. . .
    I turned away from the metal monster toward my worktable. I caught a glimpse of myself in the befogged windows, my long black hair wild and scraggly around a pale, gaunt face, my eyes hollow black sockets.
A witch, a hag,
the monster hissed. I picked up the soldering torch that I’d used last night and then put it down.
No, it was too small
. I needed the welding torch. I’d