Consolation Miracles: Stories

By Aaron Tillman

Fantastic transformations, mysterious musical spirits, and other titular miracles abound in this collection of fourteen stories from Aaron Tillman, author of Magical American Jew and Every Single Bone in My Brain. Smart, witty, dark, and daring, these tales will challenge, inspire, and excite you with the affecting power of their craft and prose

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gateway Literary Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781087979564

Book preview

Consolation Miracles

Consolation Miracles

Consolation Miracles: Stories

Copyright © 2022 by Aaron Tillman

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

This is  a work of fiction.  Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Some stories included in this collection have been previously published; page 133 is an extension of this copyright page.

Book design by Kristen Bradley.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tillman, Aaron, author.

Title: Consolation Miracles: Stories / Aaron Tillman.

Description: First Edition / St. Peters, MO: Gateway Literary Press [2022]

Identifiers: 9781087979540

First Edition Paperback January 2022

Published by Gateway Literary Press

Gatewayliterarypress.wordpress.com

Consolation Miracles

Stories

Aaron Tillman

publisher logo

Gateway Literary Press

For Shira, Jonah, Livya, and Mia. You fill my life with boundless love, miraculous creativity, and wonderfully rich stories—you give this work meaning!

Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had

already ruined the angel’s reputation.

–Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

CONTENTS

PART ONE

When the Books Turned Into Butterflies          3

Flight of the Jewbird                                                7

Believing the Attic                                                   11

The Angel of Zucchini                                           33

Consolation Miracles                                             43

Her Eyes Misted Music                                          51

PART TWO

Solo                                                                              55

My Daughter’s Music                                            63

Urges and Monsters                                               67

A Mind to Make the Ties Untangle                  83

Look Into My Eyebrows                                      117

Unseemly                                                                 119

Happy Thanksgiving, Motherfucker               123

EPILOGUE

A Life, A Story                                                       129

Acknowledgements                                                 133

Part One

When the Books Turned Into Butterflies

The shelves had been creaking for days, but no one got close enough to hear them. When they started to shudder, I was the only one who noticed. Franny’s old picture board books were the first to take flight, sprouting wide, textured wings and flapping off the top shelf. I watched the red rug and the great green room stretch into fore and hind wings, yellow letters merging into a bowling pin body, head made of moon with orange antennae angling between the blinds and out the window. The books from my parents’ college shelves flew in unpredictable directions. There were those that huddled together by the wall, flapping like sisters before taking flight, and one that seemed to descend from the ceiling in what looked like a blaze of fire. Others refused to move at all. I watched the row of travel guides and reference books and encyclopedias stretching into paper-thin wings, plotting their courses across the room and into the open world. It wasn’t until the cookbooks started to rise that I was compelled to move.

Mom hadn’t used the cookbooks in years, but there was a time, when I was a little older than Franny is now, that we used to comb through the pages together. I remember we made marzipan cookies once. Mixing butter and sugar and flour and almond paste. We rolled and squeezed and pinched the batter into circles and droopy stars, placing them on sheets to bake. I can still feel the heat on my cheeks as I watched them through the oven door. From the words that I couldn’t even read yet, we had created something real. Something we could taste.

It was the taste of that day that drew me across the worn floor of the study where I lunged after an eggplant wing, my fingers nipping the smoky edge before it flapped away from my hand and into the belly of the sky. As others fled the room, and more books began to stir on the shelves, I ran to the window and pulled the screen down. I was stopping the others from leaving, but creating a whole new problem.

*

I first saw the books twitch a few days before. I had heard the soft squeaking from down the hall and crept my way to the study—the room that mom had always kept closed. When I peeked my head inside, an arm of sunlight was reaching through the open window. There was a thick, musty smell, but also a cool breeze. I remember mom saying she wanted to air the room out, but I guess she hadn’t done too much more than that. I stepped over the braided oval rug, the knots poking into my bare feet, and stopped at the grainy oak desk, standing in the wedge of a shadow. That’s when I saw the shelf twitch.

The books in the top row seemed to be vibrating. Dust was sprinkling onto the hard wood floor. My mouth fell open, but I couldn’t take a breath. I had to tell mom.

I tracked her down in the dining room where she was pacing in conversation with a client. She kept waving me away, until I made myself too much of a distraction to ignore.

For Christ’s sake, sweety, what? she said with the phone on her stomach.

I told her what I had seen. The dust was dropping to the floor and jumping up in a spray of light! I said, trying to make it something she could see, something she had to see.

You were dreaming, honey.

But it’s day time, I reminded her. I was awake!

I thought I told you to stay out of that bloody room. All your father’s old shit in there. Where’s Franny? she said, unwilling to give this any more of her time. I thought I told you to watch Franny!

He’s in his spot, I replied, though I hadn’t really been watching and wasn’t entirely sure. When I stepped into the living room and pointed to the space beneath the glass end table, there he was, stabbing his finger into the screen of his blue, rubber-encased tablet, occasionally swiping a violent hand across the glass to trigger a new set of pictures to puncture and attack.

Just make sure he doesn’t break anything.

But what about the books? I said, but mom had already spun back to the dining room, her thumbs in a rapid dance on her phone.

*

After I had lowered the window screen, the study started filling up, the light flickering beyond the flap of anxious wings. There were butterflies swirling in patterns by the ceiling, casting a roiling glow against the walls—a spectrum of horror and beauty—and others on divergent courses, darting between the door and the wall, appearing crazed and creating a chaotic vibration that I felt in my chest. As the books continued to turn, images forming beneath the skins of the covers—a continuous course rising off the shelves—the space in the study seemed to shrink. I was on the verge of panic when the door creaked open and Franny toddled in, his eyes the size of his belly and cheeks. He dropped his tablet to the floor. I pulled him in and shut the door.

Franny’s head was shifting in all directions, watching with awe and delight at the colorful swaths of butterflies that moved throughout the room. A creamy yellow butterfly with violet eyes in the belly of its wings flew up to Franny, hovering beside his shoulder. They stared at each other, Franny nodding as if in silent conversation. But when he turned back to the chaotic swarm, Franny began to fidget, tugging at the soft skin beneath his elbow. Then the grunting. He picked up his tablet and pulled at the door. The violet-eyed butterfly followed him into the hall. I tried to wave it back in, but when the others started veering toward the door, I had to slam it shut.

The patter of Franny’s feet as he moved away from the study mixed with the chorus of flapping wings. Moments later I heard my mom shriek, then the slap of her shoe against the wall and the squelch of a butterfly’s body bursting. I felt it in my gut. The room became frantic. I heard Franny start to cry.

I ran to the window and opened the screen wide. The closest butterflies filed outside. Others seemed to battle with the breeze, weaving and bobbing and arcing around the window.

Go! I pleaded, hoping the room might empty as fast as it had filled up. But I had no real control.

The room was still alive with butterflies. The bookshelves were bare except for one book. The atlas, weighted to the bottom shelf, too heavy to move. I walked to the desk and slumped to the floor. That’s when the atlas fell, its wide frame smacking the edge of the wooden shelf, the book sliding to the floor. Covers sprayed open, belly exposed to the light. The pages inside were stirring. Countless beating pockets, fluttering independently. All a part of a single body. Wings stretching as wide as the window.

I crawled over to take a closer look. Reaching out to touch one of the wings, I felt the pull of each eddy, and found myself drawn into the center, into the spine. I could feel the hum and buzz in my fingers and in my legs. It was surging through me. I was surging through it, fusing with the body of this enormous butterfly.

We rose from the wooden floor into the air of the study, taking a slow, labored flight toward the window. I heard Franny crying and mom’s heavy step in the hallway. With a flap that sounded like a flag in the wind, we lit outside, hovering over the sidewalk and street. I was flooded with fear and adrenaline.

We turned back to the window just as the study door opened. Franny and mom were standing beneath the threshold, staring through a screen of butterflies.

Get down from there, I saw mom mouth as we edged away from our building. Angled against the grain of the wind, we pored over pages of sky, air stinging our eyes, raising the hairs on the flesh of our wings.

Flight of the Jewbird

He looked bedraggled as ever, his feathers unkempt, as though he had just flown out of a snowstorm.

–Bernard Malamud, The Jewbird

Schwartz had been harassed before, been forced to respond when assholes made fun of his beak of a nose or made him the butt of