merryfates

[merryfates]

I adore your stories. Thank you for brightening my day.

[merryfates]

Today is the release date of The Anatomy of Curiosity. 

I’m going to tell you a story about this book and how it nearly didn’t exist. It involves magic, blood, and friendship and is completely true. 

Once upon a time, there were three friends, Brenna Yovanoff, Maggie Stiefvater, and Tessa Gratton, and they were witches. 

 No, I began that wrong. 

 Once upon a time, there were three friends, Brenna Yovanoff, Maggie Stiefvater, and Tessa Gratton, and they were writers. 

They had been writers for as long as they could remember and friends for only a little less. The idea for the Anatomy of Curiosity — a show-and-tell writer’s guide for teen writers — was spurred years ago, when Tessa and Maggie were in the middle of an epic fight. The fight spanned states and months and involved battles with dragons in the Kansas sky, and it was mostly Maggie’s fault. I can say that, because I am Maggie. 

 Finally, when all parties were spent and bleeding out, the two witches reached over and clasped argument-bloodied hands. 

 “Let’s make a book together,” Maggie said. “That will fix all our problems.” 

“You’re a problem,” Tessa replied, which meant yes. 

And Brenna was tired of the bad weather, so she patted Maggie and Tessa’s heads and the book was born in the blood of friends. The problem with ideas made under duress, however, is that they are often incomplete, and the project fumbled and faltered even as the battle that spawned it was mostly forgotten. The thing that made the book the most interesting to us — that we were three different writers with three very different approaches to writing — was also what made developing a useful format impossible. How to balance teaching and entertainment? How to show three entirely different ways to get to a story? 

By summer of 2014, we were on the verge of calling our agents and canceling it. It was a fraught summer anyway. The three of us were on a road trip — this was Maggie’s fault, and I can say that, because I am Maggie — in a sky blue ‘73 Camaro that was too small for three adults and too broken for a 7,000 mile road trip. Maggie didn’t believe in the concept of impossibility, though, and Brenna and Tessa believed in Maggie, so they were doing it anyway. 

We were soaring across the Nevada desert when a raven flew over the top of the car. The Camaro’s engine bucked once. No, thought Maggie. We proceeded for several dozen more miles without incident, and then a second raven flew over the top of the car. The Camaro’s engine bucked again, and then it shuddered in a death rattle. 

 We coasted into Winnemucca, Nevada. 

The car made it to the shade beneath the only tree growing in Winnemucca. We climbed into the bristling hot day and I threw open the hood. As I discovered that a single bolt had fallen from the alternator and stopped us, we heard a laugh. A third raven was sitting in the only tree growing in Winnemucca, Nevada, and it was laughing at us. 

The bolt was gone, of course. It had probably fallen out on the highway back when the first raven had flipped us the bird. 

We began to walk. It was over one hundred degrees. There was no one else in Winnemucca. They had probably all died. It was just us and the raven. We walked a mile to the closest auto parts store, where we bought a bolt and some lock nuts. On the way back, a Jack in the Box rippled into view. We recognized a mystical oasis when we saw one, so we entered and ordered drinks. As we melted, we talked Anatomy. This, we felt, was the moment of truth. We were stranded in Winnemucca, which might have not even been a real place, and it seemed like we might never escape if we didn’t solve the riddle. Did we choose to hurl ourselves against it one more time or did we choose to give up? 

This is the release date of the book, so, spoiler. 

We walked back to the Camaro, certain in our new plan. I put in the brand-new bolt and the Camaro started at once. The shade had moved from the only tree in Winnemucca and the raven was gone. 

Fast forward to this fall. Tessa, Brenna, and Maggie are still friends, and still writers. The book is about to come out. I am in Virginia, states away from both of them, but I’m thinking about them. I have just come back from Colorado, where Brenna lives, and I have my eyes on my next trip to Kansas, where Tessa lives. I am rummaging in one of my backpacks for a hair band and my fingers touch something cold in the bottom. It’s heavy, and it’s cold, and it is not a hair band. I can’t imagine what it would be — this is just my tiny backpack that I carry clothing in for my overnight trips, and I had just emptied it the weekend before. 

I take the object out. 

It still had a little bit of rust on it. There was no raven around to laugh this time, so I did instead. 

So we hope you enjoy the Anatomy of Curiosity. It’s got magic, blood, and friendship in it, and also some stories and advice.

[merryfates]

Jack’s Field of Bargains - story by Tessa Gratton

There was a farm off highway 32, just north of the road, that the Linwood High School cross-country team drove past every Tuesday and Thursday during the fall semester on their way to the six-mile course near Lake Archer.

The farm was just a two-story cabin with peeling white paint and a collapsing barn out back. The silo’d been stripped of its tiles and looked like nothing more than a fat concrete smoke stack, and a massive old cottonwood shaded a pond covered in lily-pads. Between the silo and the tree was a fallow field a half-acre square, full of junk. It was organized in haphazard rows, and varied from tin can sculpture and tire flower beds, to trunks of porcelain baby dolls and old rotary telephones.

A hand-painted plywood sign declared JACK’S FIELD OF BARGAINS.

Tom Vanderpoel sat in the backseat of his teammate Evan’s rusty Chevy, forehead pressed to the cool window, as they sped at least ten over the highway limit. He’d only been running cross country for a couple of weeks, having moved to Linwood with his mom after she and his dad divorced over the summer. Up front was Evan’s girlfriend and star of the women’s team, Mary Jo. Her feet were up on the dash as she hummed along with some emo singer-songwriter and Evan performed a monologue on the injustice of Mr. Summers, the U.S. history teacher’s, epically long final exams. Tom didn’t mind, since it kept him from having to talk back, and he was struggling with himself for thinking Evan in no way deserved Mary Jo.

When he saw the sign, he interrupted. “What kind of bargains?”

Mary Jo set her feet down into the well and twisted around. “Oh, Jack’s. My mom says her dad used to be friends with Jack Dalling, and he used to say you could find your destiny in his field.”

“Seriously?”

Evan snorted. “It’s junk.”

She narrowed her eyes dangerously at her boyfriend, and Tom said, “Pull over.”

There was a dirt turn off about fifty yards down, and Evan swerved as his wheels fell off the pavement. He cursed, but continued on. The car filled with the crunch of gravel as the wheels kicked up a solid cloud of dust as they backtracked. He pulled to the side, the square nose of his Chevy pushing at tall yellow grass. Tom and Mary Jo shoved their doors open immediately, spilling into the same grass. It scratched at Tom’s track pants and he considered the likelihood of ticks.

Mary Jo was in shorts, and squealed as she dashed to the tractor path where all the grass was flattened out. “Asshole!” she called back at Evan, who snickered as he stepped onto the safe gravel and came around the car to join them.

Crickets chirped and tiny winged bugs scattered around their heads, buffeted by the dry breeze. Overhead the sky was pristine blue, unbroken by clouds. As sorry as Tom usually was to have come here instead of going with his dad to Wisconsin, he had to admit at least to himself that this much sky was awesome, in that old sense of the word his Junior High English teacher had tried to get her kids to understand.

The three of them stopped at the junk field, near where a man sat in a beach chair. His face was tanned and cracked with wrinkles like a dried up riverbed, and an old John Deere baseball cap shaded his sharp blue eyes. “Hey there, you kids. You come to trade?”

“Trade?” Tom said. The man stood up by pushing his hands against his knees. “I’m Jack Jr. Here we’ll trade money, but better than that is goods. You take something, you leave something behind, that’s where the magic is.” Jack Jr. gave an exaggerated wink.

Evan laughed, but Mary Jo smacked his arm. “Thanks, Jack Jr. We’ll take a look.” She grabbed Evan’s wrist and dragged him into the first row of the field.

Tom stood by, just watching the glint of sunlight across the lines of junk. He saw a hollowed out TV full of candles and a framed print of that famous Van Gogh night sky. There were metal boxes of costume jewelry and crystal wine glasses and unopened bottles of amber liquid – probably moonshine. Leather bags, footstools, dog dishes, a toilet, stained glass, brass lamps, a couple of violins… all kinds of random things. “What happens when it rains?” he asked.

“Everything gets wet.”

Startled at the new voice, Tom nearly stumbled in the matted grass. There was a younger man beside him, Tom’s own age, and there went Jack Jr. at least fifteen feet off, headed back for the farmhouse.

“Sorry,” the new teen said. He held out his hand. “I’m Jack, Jack Jr.’s son.”

Tom shook Jack’s hand slowly. “Your dad is Junior?”

Jack laughed, and it was a thick sound, which wasn’t normally the kind of thing Tom noticed. It sort of wrapped around him though, and Tom smiled, too. Jack explained, “Granddad was Jack, Dad’s Jack Jr. and he didn’t know how to respond to anything else when I was born, so, it was back to just Jack for me.”

“Not very creative though, you gotta admit.” Tom shaded his eyes with his hand to study Jack, as Jack nodded his chin at the field.

“All our creativity goes into that.” He was in jeans and the kind of cowboy boots with the pointed toes, and an old t-shirt that read Jayhawk 1978 in faded blue letters. Tom supposed he was good-looking, especially with those same blue eyes as his dad. But what the hell was it like to grow up with this kind of junk field in your front yard?

Mary Jo came skipping out of the field with a can that shook with metal as she skidded to a stop. “Oh, hi.” The smile she put on was flirtatious enough Tom was sure he was right about Jack being good-looking.

“Hi, there. You want a ring?” Jack took the can from her.

She held out her hand, fingers splayed. A giant silver ring covered her forefinger from base to first knuckle. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What do you have to trade?”

Evan tromped out behind her. “I only have about ten bucks with me.”

Jack cocked his head, ignoring Evan, eyes straight on Mary Jo. She sighed deep enough to lift her shoulders. “I’ve got these old cleats in the car, will that do?”

“Sure thing,” Jack drawled and Tom felt like there was something pinching between his shoulder blades. As Mary Jo ran back to the Chevy, Tom put his head back and stared up at the all-the-way-blue sky so he didn’t have to look at Jack.

He kept up his ignoring while Mary Jo made her trade, and Evan pointed out dismissively how the ring was just gonna turn her finger green.

They piled back into the Chevy, and as they left, Tom glanced out the window to see Jack lift a hand goodbye.

***

That night, Mary Jo called Tom, and the moment he picked up she said, “Tomdo you know what? I was getting out of the car when Ev dropped me off and was leaning in to get my bag when he slammed the door right on my fingers – but that ring! It saved my whole hand! It’s bent just a little bit, and I felt that vibration all through my entire body and I just know if I hadn’t had that ring on all four fingers would be just in pieces! I’d never be able to write again or beat my brother on the X-box.”

“Wow,” was all Tom said.

“I know! And Evan just said how lucky I was, but it wasn’t just luck, I know it. It’s this ring. I’m going back tomorrow, and taking Casey and Delia, you want to come?”

Tom thought about Jack and that silent wave, and the pin-prick between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, sure. After school. I’ll drive.”

***

For a week Tom drove different people out to that farm, every day after school, and it wasn’t long before they were a whole caravan from the parking lot. Casey Parks traded a set of plastic bangles for a little dog statue exactly like her puppy who’s been hit by a car a few months back. David Sanderson found a baseball signed by his favorite player Tom had never heard of. Amanda Chopin took home a hand mirror just like one that had been her great-grandmother’s and Amanda shattered it when she was five. Every day at least one kid discovered something they’d never thought to find.

Tom tended to just stand and wait while the others scoured the Field of Bargains, and Jack stood beside him, talking a little bit, but mostly not.

It was always Jack there, too, or if Jack Jr. started out, as soon as the high school kids showed, father and son traded places for the duration of the teenager’s stay. On Monday afternoon, while he looked up at a bunch of haphazard clouds, Tom asked, “Your dad doesn’t want to be out here while there’s a bunch of kids around?”

Jack laughed his thick laugh and clapped an arm around Tom. “About twenty years ago, he was sitting out here next to the sign and my mom pulled over. She got out of that car and touched foot on the land and never left again. It’s how my grandma ended up here, too. So Dad says, ‘Jacko, get out there and see if any of those pretty girls takes a shine to the place.’”

“God.” Tom shook his head, and accidentally caught Jack’s look. Embarrassed for no good reason, he stepped away, then crouched as if he just wanted to stretch.

Crouching beside him, Jack said in a quiet, conspiratorial voice, “I’d rather somebody take a shine to me than to the place.”

***

Everyone who wanted to had the chance to stop, and the senior-class fad for Jack’s bargains passed by late October. They all told wild stories about it, and even Evan found, on his third trip through the rows, an old stuffed dragon with the initials E.B. sewn onto the left foot. He hadn’t seen it in ten years, and he wasn’t too proud to trade his watch for it.

It was only Tom who never traded anything.

For two weeks he stayed away, sinking down into the back seat when he rode with anybody out to Lake Archer for cross country, and on the occasion that he drove himself, Tom turned his music up until it shook the windshield and looked straight ahead.

But Mary Jo asked, out in Topeka at the regional cross country meet, what it was that Tom ever found in the rows of junk. “Nothing,” he said, and she looked at him for so long he promised to head back out there.

The afternoon he showed up was gray enough to make all the prairie grass as yellow as egg yolk. The massive old cottonwood had spilled its leaves into the bargain field, and the pond was stiller than stone. Jack sat in the beach chair, slouched down and reading a thick paperback, but he popped up the moment he saw Tom get out of his mom’s Toyota.

“Tom!” Jack strode to meet him, but Tom nodded without smiling and said, “I just wanted to look for myself.”

Frowning, Jack backed out of the way and watched as Tom escaped into the field. For twenty minutes Tom paced along the rows, not really looking at the radios and folding chairs, the brooms and teacups and silk flowers. When he’d moved too quickly through the last row, he hurried out and said, “I’m late, sorry,” and got back into the car, driving off without another word.

***

He went back, though. For days after, Tom felt guilt gnawing at his backbone for being rude, and every time he closed his eyes he saw Jack in those jeans and cowboy boots, in a tight t-shirt, covered now that it was cold with a flannel jacket.

He went back and walked the rows, picking up a tangle of beads or a bright red Kitchen-aid mixer. Then he’d walk out empty-handed and Jack would ask, “Did you find anything?”

“Not today,” Tom would reply, watching Jack’s face for some sign the other boy knew what he was feeling.

***

The last day of school before winter break, Tom almost couldn’t get the little Toyota onto the gravel road because of the thin layer of snow. The sky was brilliant and the sun low enough in the west to make the ice shine. He tromped through the frozen grass in scuffed old combat boots, his fingers cracking in the cold and his breath surrounding his head with thin mist. The limbs of the old cottonwood creaked in the wind, and when Tom saw the field of bargains it was like the North Pole’s own landfill, with everything covered in a thin sheet of ice and perfect white snow.

There was Jack, standing at the end of a trail of footprints, in gloves and a long duster like he’d just come off some cowboy movie set. “Tom! I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I’m not coming back,” Tom said. Every word was visible in the frigid air, and his voice seemed to hang there just as long.

Jack didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Tom noticed how ice pellets clung to the ends of Jack’s shaggy hair like he’d been waiting all day while it snowed.

Finally, Jack sighed. The hot air make him look like a dragon about to breathe fire, but his expression wasn’t so fierce. ���Why not?”

“I don’t have anything to trade for what I want.”

“What do you want?”

Tom dug a fist into his stomach as if he could hold in everything just with one hand. He didn’t say anything, but tilted his head back to look at the sky. But he squeezed his eyes closed.

Then Jack’s bare hands were on his face, pulling his head down again. Up this close, there were flecks of gray in those sharp blue eyes, just like tiny little clouds or icicles or maybe fragments of a mirror. “Tom,” Jack said. “I’m not sure you understand how trading works.”

That made Tom smile, and then laugh, and then before he could change his mind, he leaned his cheek ever-so-slightly into Jack’s palm.

When Jack kissed him, Tom kissed back, and understood.

_____________

originally posted October 10th, 2011

image by tunnelarmr

[merryfates]

The Brimstone Dog - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

You get to know the people who come in. If you spend long enough behind a counter, you get an idea of what they like, not just in their coffee, but of what makes them happy. You can look at someone once, and see all the commonplace joys and the tiny miseries that make up their lives. You learn to see these things, even when you don’t want to. I was nineteen, working at Thatchman’s in the Village. Vietnam had ended, the horror was over, and there was still a giddy sense that we’d won—not Nixon, or the US Army, but we, the people. We had called for peace and they had heard us. I’d done nothing. Oh, I’d marched—I’d shouted and dyed my clothes and grown my hair like everyone else. But I hadn’t prevailed in any real sense. I was at Columbia that year, studying comparative literature and 18th Century French poetry. If I’d done something remarkable, actually done something, I was certain that my life would have been fundamentally altered. The difference would be there on my skin, trembling in my voice, writ large on my face. My sense of justice would shine out my eyes. People would see my immutable strength of will, righteous and pure, like Joan of Arc. Instead, I was just a girl in a cafe, pouring coffee and serving sandwiches, while out on Bleeker Street, the world went on and on in one long, greasy smear.

The man was older and always wore the same suit. Or maybe it was a different suit and he just had a lot of them. Either way, his clothing was conspicuous. No one else was wearing suits at all. He kept his hair shorter than the men who worked the docks and the warehouses, and much shorter than the men in the Village. At first, I had a notion that he only came into Thatchman’s at all because of the dogs. There were two of them, black and gold, like Rottweilers. They were bigger than Rottweilers, though—massive through the shoulders and as high as my hip. Side by side, they padded after him. When he snapped his fingers, they sat. When he nodded, they got up and followed him. On the first day he ever came in, it was raining. He walked in under the jangling bell, shook himself in a giant, glittering spray, and took off his hat. He was the kind of person wore a hat. I was perched on the wooden bar stool behind the register, making notes in a history of the French Revolution. At the counter he took a seat, winking in the most indecent way and leaning on his elbows. “Can I trouble you for a cup of coffee?” His voice was low and rough, with a certain kind of accent. English, but not the bright, sophisticated kind from the movies. His coat was expensive, but the way he said his vowels was working-class. “You’re not supposed to have dogs in here,” I said. “It’s against health code.”

That made him smile, and he gave me a sly, sideways look. “As dogs go, they’re uncommonly behaved. And Thatchman doesn’t mind. We’re old friends and he owes me a long list of favors.” The pronouncement was less remarkable than you’d think. I didn’t know much about favors, but it was an open secret that in his early days, Joe Thatchman had been a bag man, cozier than cats with Don Vito and Tony Bender and the Genoveses.  It was a dirty business, but business was good, although no one knew for sure just how much money had changed hands or how much goodwill it had bought him. Those days were long gone though. Thatchman had moved down to Florida a year ago and was easily in his seventies. I poured the man his coffee and went back to marking up my book. “La Terreur,” the man said after a while, glancing out at the rain and then smiling his sly smile. “Il pleut, il pleut, bergère, rentre tes blancs moutons.” His French was bad, but he spoke it with a lack of hesitation that proved he knew the words, if not the finer points. “I’m not a shepherdess,” I said, closing the book. I’d been underlining dates in an account of the execution of Fabre d’Églantine, who had gone to the guillotine singing verses from his own songs and distributing handwritten poems to the crowd. Singing the one about the shepherdess and the rain, but the man at the counter was sitting with his head bowed and I was holding the book so its spine faced him. He couldn’t have known. He sipped his coffee, then made a steeple with his fingers. “And what would you rather be in this sorry life? A shepherdess, or a sheep.” The question stung, though perhaps he didn’t mean it to. There were no shepherds, no one to tend the flocks, and I was beginning to lose faith in idealism, just like everybody else.

But still, a small, bright truth beat deep in my heart—that I would do it if I could. If I thought the act of doing it would matter. I didn’t answer, but he kept smiling, like he knew what I was thinking. “What’s your name, shepherdess?” “Claudette,” I said, and was startled to recognize that up until that moment, I’d been planning to lie, to say Marjorie or Carol or Betty. But his eyes were a dark, thunderous gray and I told him the truth.

After that, he came almost every morning, sweeping off his hat and bowing. He always said the same thing: “And how is the lovely Claudette today?” And every time, I expected him to say My. How is my Claudette? But he only took off his hat and snapped his fingers and made the dogs sit obediently at his feet. Out in the streets, the city still hummed and flickered, but the sense of passion—of power—was fading. Things were slowing. I could feel the energy draining away, bleeding out with every faltering beat. The man with the dogs was constant, though. Through all the aimless noise and the indifference, he never changed. We talked together over the counter, drinking coffee. I read him Manon Lescaut, and the letters of Saint Augustine.  He told me about the Middle East and the Congo, but he never told me his line of work. I liked it better that way. The child’s fantasy that his place in the world could still be something good. “I was in the war,” he told me once, leaning on his elbows. His eyes were paler than usual and I looked into them a long time, trying to see the villages burning, or the bodies, but there was nothing. His irises were strangely flat, without the splintered interruptions of filaments or striations. I didn’t ask which war. His mouth was close to mine, and he smelled like burned metal and oily smoke. I wanted to taste it, to lick it off his skin, but I just turned to the back counter and poured the coffee. I had never been in love. At fourteen, I’d blushed giddily over Peter McCourdry who lived down the street. He was five years older, and when his mother got a telegram saying he’d been killed in Hue, I cried with the rest of the girls from my block, because it was a sad and ugly thing, but I didn’t feel the raw pain of heartbreak. I was crying because he was dead, not because I’d loved him.

He came in one day—my man with the dogs—smiling and whistling like always, but his eyes were sober.

“I’m not long for this city,” he said. “Autumn is come. My contract is up.” “Let me send you off right,” I said before I could stop myself. “Come over and I’ll make you dinner.” He shook his head, and in that moment, he suddenly looked so grave. “We could meet at Alexander’s for a drink,” I said, horribly aware that I was starting to sound desperate. “It wouldn’t have to go anywhere. It wouldn’t have to be serious.” He reached across the counter and took my hand. “Do you know what a brimstone dog is?” In his eyes, I saw the bodies then. Not only the grisly casualties of land mines and napalm, but others. There were so many. I saw machetes. Axes, bayonets, hoes and rakes and sickles. I saw revolutions, howling mobs, all the things they tell you in history classes, but which never take on the staggering proportions of fact. I shook my head and let him brush the back of my wrist with his thumb. His touch was warm, and I closed my eyes. “A brimstone dog doesn’t rise above his station. He doesn’t own anything, he doesn’t want anything. His job is not to desire or to covet or to ask questions. He always does exactly as he’s told. Now look at me.” His voice was harsh and I did it. He leaned over the counter. His eyes were dark now, almost black, and I thought that he would kiss me, but he only bent his head to whisper in my ear. “A brimstone dog is no shepherd. His business is destruction, and he destroys the things he touches. But girls like the lovely Claudette have glorious years ahead. They have steadfast hearts and ferocious souls and true callings, and if they wish it, they have the inalienable right to try and save the world.” And I nodded, knowing that this was the end. Without him, I would not be young, useless Claudette, always waiting. Righteous in only the stubbornest, most childish sense. Naive.

Knowing that in another greater way, it was the beginning. He left with his dogs trailing after him, and I cried in the storeroom, harder than I had ever cried for anything. It was months before the jangle of the bell stopped sending my heart soaring frantically, cruelly, every time I heard it.

I thought I saw him once, years later. I was guest lecturing at NYU that spring, and had become all the things he’d talked about; activist, scholar, humanitarian—called to the proverbial carpet, in the thick of it, heart and soul. My hair was gray by then, and short. I saw him across the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Bleeker, standing on a crowded corner with his dogs.  The light changed and I stopped to watch as the rest of the city plunged on around me. He did not look one second older than he had on the day he had promised me my future. He did not look like a man at all. His face was the calm, impassive face of some terrible storm. An engine of destruction, but in his way, he had created me. The dogs of war were side by side, padding after him. It was raining.

Story originally posted September 14, 2009

Photo by roujo

I picked this as my very last story before The Anatomy of Curiosity comes out on Thursday because it’s one I can’t ever seem to leave alone—I just tinker and tinker with it forever. It was originally part of a common prompt where we each wrote a story about hell hounds. Also, as you can see? I tend to be kind of liberal in my interpretations of prompts. (And other things.) (Everything, really.)

[merryfates]

The Deadlier of the Species — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

Jamie hated Andrew Murray. She didn’t feel that he had any redeeming qualities, unless you numbered an ability to wear extremely pointy man-shoes and an annoying chesty laugh as positive features. She hated the way his nostrils flared before he made a joke. She hated the way he talked about women. She also hated the way he talked about men, midgets, babies, and nuns.

To be fair, Andrew Murray also hated her. He found her politics appalling — well, he had, politics were not quite what they used to be. He thought her voice was too loud. He had once, memorably, called her a fat, ugly bitch, which was slightly unfair as only one of those things was true.

The only thing they had in common was Annette Quinton. Jamie’s best friend. Andrew’s fiance. What she saw in the other was a puzzle that mystified each of them.

“Well, this place is a dive,” Andrew said. He laughed. Chestily. It was not a promising beginning to the evening.   Jamie didn’t answer. The place was not really a dive. Only eight months earlier, this had been one of the snobbiest areas in the city. She’d applied for an apartment only a few minutes away and had been turned down for bad credit, the only thing her last boyfriend had ever got her for her birthday. Now, of course, it was less than it had been: weeds overgrowing the medians and windows broken out on some of the shops. There was nothing left in Gap except the racks.   Andrew slammed the door of Jamie’s old Escort and Jamie said, “Are you trying to break the door off?”   “Yes,” he said. “Right off.” He stepped around the back of the car in those ridiculous, long shoes of his — he had an identical pair in some exotic skin like rattlesnake or hamster, Jamie couldn’t decide which pair was worse — and retrieved the rifle from the trunk. He offered it to her but Jamie shook her head.

“Did you see the latest Now Boarding?” Andrew asked as he put the rifle in the crook of his arm. He had to know she hadn’t. It was one of those stupid sitcoms that people watched so that that they could tell people they’d watched it and those people would know that the person saying it was young, single, and wore long, pointed shoes and skinny Italian pants. “Diane was checking this dude’s bag because the x-ray picked up something that looked like a weapon, and Edgar was headed over with a cup of coffee and –”

“Murray. I don’t care,” Jamie said. “That show is for men with small members.”   “So you and your boyfriend used to watch it?” Andrew asked. This amused him so he laughed again.

Jamie didn’t want to warn him not to step in the puddle in the middle of the parking lot, but she did anyway. “Don’t step in that.”  

Andrew stepped around the shallow puddle and checked the bottom of his shoes. They looked dry, but he scraped the soles against the asphalt, hard, anyway. “Why do you think she’s here again?” He stopped to look in the window of an American Eagle. It, too, had been vandalized, though mostly it was just the jeans that had been stolen.     “Her voicemail said that she could see the IKEA from her window.”   Andrew paused and turned in a full circle, squinting through the gray-green light of the evening. “And the IKEA would be . . . ?”   Jamie pointed to the building that had once been the IKEA. Now its identifiable color scheme had been painted over by dozens of enterprising graffiti artists, big blocks of color and patterns to symbolize different gangs. Large bubble letters said THE WHORES EAT US ALIVE.

Which was not quite a fair statement, as only one part of it was true.

Andrew raised his eyebrows; his nostrils flared but no joke followed. He turned to follow Jamie around the end of the shopping center. “Okay, so if she could call you and she was here, why couldn’t she get to us?”   They rounded the end of the shopping center, and Jamie said, simply, “Because it rained.”

The lot in front of them was flooded. Unlike the glossy shopping center behind them, it was pocked and uneven — an old gas station in the middle of the new development. There were tiny islands of asphalt surrounded by puddles. Some of them were shallow enough to see the pitted lot through, but others were deep enough that they could be any number of inches deep. Something smelled. But then again, now, something always smelled.

“She’s in there?” Andrew asked, with dismay. “Why wouldn’t she just run over to the shopping center as soon as it started to rain?”

Jamie turned to him. “It’s Annette, Andrew. I assume you know the girl by now, or you wouldn’t have asked her to marry you.”

Andrew had no answer to this. Annette was intelligent, neurotic, and completely bereft of common sense. She collected packaged pastries — Andrew’s apartment still held several hundred Twinkies, Snowballs, Ho-Hos, Ding Dongs, moon pies, and Little Debbie snack cakes that she’d acquired over the years. Some had held up better than others. The durability of a Honey Bun had to be seen to be believed. Anyway, Annette had a small but honed skill set that didn’t extend to survival in this new world.

They stood on the sidewalk for a moment, each attempting to devise a plot to get across the lot. Andrew crouched and looked at the standing water closest to him. “Maybe it hasn’t been long enough.”   Jamie made an irritated noise and scouted about for something to dip into the water. She considered breaking a branch off one of the trees in the grassy area beside them, but  she didn’t recognize all the leaves that were growing up through the bushes and around the tree branches, so she didn’t want to risk it. Instead, she sighed and removed her belt.   “Oh, don’t do that,” Andrew said, when he saw that she meant to dip the end in the puddle.

“I can always get another one at Gap,” Jamie said, sarcastically.

Andrew shook his head. “I meant your pants might fall down and I’d have to see things I really didn’t want to.”

Jamie said, “I should just push you in and then I’d know. I could use your body as a bridge.”

Andrew was too distracted to hear her threat, however. He was looking, pensive, at the glass front of the convenience store. “If she’s in there, why is she not waving or something?”

Jamie could think of several reasons, some harmless and some the opposite of harmless, but she kept them all to herself. She crouched next to Andrew and dipped the end of her belt into the water. The tip of the belt parted the pollen that floated on the surface. Jamie counted three and then lifted it back out again. They peered in to look at the result. Andrew said, “Gilded” at the same time that Jamie said, “Skunked.” This made Jamie thought that Andrew watched too many of those commercials that had piano music, soft focus, and drug names plastered in the corner. Andrew thought that Jamie read too many left-wing periodicals.

Regardless, both names meant the same thing: A thin layer of slime clung to the end of the belt, and in the nearly transparent gel, small green and yellow parasites milled and spun, working their way into the leather of the belt.

Andrew looked back to the parking lot, at the thirty feet of puddles, full of barely visible parasitic swimmers. Jamie thought he was probably thinking that he didn’t really love Annette that much, was too young to die, and that he’d ruin his shoes. Which was an unfair statement as only one bit of it was true.

“The car,” Jamie said, finally.

Andrew, after a pause, said, “I’d rather have Annette. You can keep the car. Also, you can have her sugar collection and weekend visitation rights. I can be reasonable.”

“I’m always stunned at how funny you think you are,” Jamie said. “I meant we could get in the car and drive it to the store. We’d have to go up over the bank and we’d have to both get out on the same side, but we could drive through all this if we’re slow and don’t splash. You’d have to mind that you don’t get wet.”

“Me?” Andrew looked at Jamie and made a little pincer motion with his fingers. “How about you?”

Jamie had to admit that both options were not pleasant. As they went back for the Escort, she felt a faint prickle of irritation at the rest of the world, for the news with its images of tidy, dry cities — albeit it far more empty ones — out on the west coast. Bright, upbeat reporters told the world that the economy was picking back up after the epidemic and that the leader singer of Shimmer had just begun a new clothing line that was expected to be a hit. Then they’d cut to a commercial for a four piece chicken meal with fries — feed your family fast! While here on the east coast they were being forced to travel with guns and check puddles with sticks.

It was Jamie who drove the Escort through the lot. Although the threat to Andrew was more immediate, she just didn’t trust him to be able to control the speed with those pointy shoes on the pedals. And in the end, it was uneventful. A slow, creeping progress across the lot, and then parking in the shade of the awning, front tire scrubbed against the sidewalk.

“I’ll get out first,” Andrew said. “I’d rather not get another look at your ass.” He climbed cautiously out onto the sidewalk, stepping well clear of the car. Jamie followed.  Andrew cautiously called Annette’s name and Jamie found herself oddly and irritatingly touched. He used a different voice when he thought Annette might hear; one that seemed less prone to chesty laughs.

Jamie and Andrew went into the convenience store at nearly the same time — there was a bit of a fight to see who would go in first, and neither won — but Jamie was the first one to discover the arm.

It was deeply tanned and wearing a sweat-stained t-shirt sleeve. Presumably the rest of the body still had the rest of the shirt. It was also the source of much of the smell.

“Andrew,” Jamie said. “Something has been eating here.”

Andrew pointed the rifle at the arm as if he thought it might be a threat. “Man?”

Jamie’s expression was withering. Of course it was a man. All the mutilated corpses were men. The parasites in standing water killed men immediately. And then, dead or alive, men made good meals for the Skunkers.

“Something else has been eating,” Andrew said then, in an entirely different voice. His rifle was pointed down toward the aisle, where boxes of Ho-hos and Zebra Cakes and Strawberry Rolls were torn open. He poked one of the wrappers with one of his long toed shoes. “Annette?” he said.

Jamie thought, suddenly, that it was probably better to not call Annette’s name.

But it was too late, because there she was. She stood in the front doorway they’d just entered by. Her arms and face were battered. Where the skin on her arm was torn, pus dribbled out, bubbling with green and gold swimmers. Her eyes were full of it. She was eyeing Andrew with hunger and Jamie with calculation.

Annette had been Jamie’s best friend for more than a decade, but Jamie didn’t hesitate. “Shoot her, Andrew.”

“I can’t,” Andrew said. They backed up together, shoulder to shoulder, toward the counter.   Jamie snapped, “You pussy.”

“No really,” said Andrew. He tapped the trigger. “I can’t. It’s stuck.”   And Annette advanced toward them still, slow, lazy. She’d made a meal off whatever was attached to the sweat-stained arm and was still metabolizing it. For a Skunker, she still looked good — she must have turned into one not too long ago. Unlike men, who died instantly and painfully at the touch of contaminated water, women underwent a slightly longer — but no less painful — process when they were infected. Then, they had only two missions: eat. And: infect. Depending on what your gender was. The only positive was that the Skunkers were not cunning.

Jamie reached over and undid the safety on the rifle. Andrew made a face — his nostrils flared, but Jamie could forgive him for that at this point — and pulled off a shot. It neatly took out a standing display rack of Frito-Lay products. Annette didn’t flinch. Pus dripped from her arm onto the floor. Green and gold particles scattered from the drop, wiggling to find water before they died.

Andrew said, “Jamie, watch–”

Jamie froze. The counter behind them was covered with open bottles and glasses of water. Her eyes swept the store and she realized that every surface was covered with open bottles of water. It took her a long moment to realize that it was a booby-trap waiting to happen.

Jamie turned to look at her best friend, just as Annette threw a bottle of water in Jamie’s face. Green and gold burrowed into the fabric of Jamie’s shirt. It was that moment when you smash your leg on the coffee table and realize that in two minutes it’s going to hurt, a lot.

Andrew looked from Jamie to Annette, and he laughed his chesty laugh that Jamie now saw was the one he used when he didn’t really find things funny.

“This is fantastic. Now we’re all going to die. She always did like you better than me,” he said, and he aimed the rifle.  

Which was slightly unfair, as only one of the statements was true.

__________________

Story originally posted July 14, 2010.

Image by Jenny_Downing.

___________________

This story was right in the middle of when I was really studying 3rd person for Raven Cycle purposes. This is also the last of the stories from Merry Sisters of Fate that I’m reposting before The Anatomy of Curiosity comes out next week.

[merryfates]

The Vampire Box - story by Tessa Gratton

We have a vampire living in our basement.

It’s my job to feed him while Dad is in Palo Alto at a convention. At six a.m. I pad into the kitchen in my bare feet and jersey nightgown with my robe hanging off my shoulders. I yawn, wishing I could crawl back in bed after the chore. It’s the last week before finals, and I’m already in at Northwest State, so I don’t really have to focus much. The motivation to show up at school is as low as it gets.

Half the freezer is piled with Tupperware blood-packs, and I dig out one from the bottom, grumbling to myself that Mom still isn’t packing them with the oldest on top for easy access. I should just take over the butcher store runs. Then she could just forget about it – which was all she wanted.

While the blood heats in the microwave, I heave myself onto the counter and stare at the basement door. It’s painted soft yellow, but most of the color peeled away a while ago. I went through a phase when I was in Junior High where I stripped a thin line of the paint off the door every time I passed it. The lines were like prison bars holding me back.

The microwave beeps and I hop down. I grab the lancet from its hook over the sink and pull the Tupperware out onto the counter. I yawn again just as I’m pulling off the plastic top, and get a lungful of coppery pig’s blood smell. I gag like a cat and dance back, making a show of myself because there’s no one around to see. When I calm down, I put my hand on the counter, palm up. I take the lancet, which is a thin triangle of steel about as long as my thumb, and put the tip to my pinky. This is my least favorite part. I grit my teeth and ready myself with a massive grimace, then jab the lancet into my finger.

Blood wells instantly, and I let a couple of drops fall into the Tupperware.

I’m supposed to be using Dad’s blood. He drained a quarter-pint of it before leaving and it’s hanging in the pantry with whatever his favorite anti-coagulant is keeping it sort-of fresh. But it’s bad enough our vampire is trapped in a cage in the basement. To not even give him the two drops of fresh blood he’s promised seems un-Constitutional.

With the Tupperware balanced carefully in my hands, I face the basement.

***

I was only five the first time I met Saxon.

For a week our water pipes had clanged in a staccato pattern that echoed throughout the house. Dad promised it was bad plumbing, but I woke up in the middle of the night and recognized the pattern of clangs matched the rhythm of my favorite clapping song. I’d been playing it by myself against the kitchen floor just that afternoon. And now the house pipes wanted to play with me.

I crawled out of bed, snuck past Mom and Dad’s room, and all the way down into the kitchen. We kept the door locked in those days, but I knew how to climb up onto a chair and from there onto the kitchen counter to reach the key Dad kept hanging inside the spice cabinet. I managed it quietly, and unlocked the basement door. It was where the pipes lived, because it was where Dad went every time he tried to get them to be quiet.

I couldn’t reach the light switch, so it was very, very dark. Here is all I remember:

The floor being rough concrete.

The tiny red light bulb dangling in the center of the room, not making it any less scary.

Calling out, “Pipes?”

And he said my name. Nicole.

I clapped and ran forward. I tripped on something and fell against the bars of his cage. He caught me in both hands, and his eyes were right there in front of mine. Glinting red in the light. With his arms through the cage, he set me back on my feet and smiled.

He played a clapping game with me, longer than any grown up had ever played before. We didn’t stop until I was the one too tired to go on.

I curled up on the floor with my backbone pushed up against the bars, and falling back to sleep. He tapped the rhythm of the song gently into the metal.

***

The wooden stairs are spongy under my bare feet from all the dank basement air. We need a new set, but Dad can’t exactly hire a builder to come down here. Not unless he plans to feed the unlucky worker to Saxon.

I can reach the light switch, of course, but I don’t flip it. I prefer the gentle red light. We have a carpet now, a long runner leading from the stairs to his cage. It’s thin and the chill of the concrete foundation still seeps up.

Dad uses a long pole to scoot the blood to the cage without getting near enough that Saxon could grab him. But I walk straight to the black bars.

Saxon is standing with his back to me. He’s watching the square of that fades in through the single window high up against the ceiling. The glass is shuttered over, but pink morning slips through the slats. It makes an aura around him, and I say, “Hey, angel. Breakfast.”

He moves slowly, lethargically. But not because he has to. There’s only about ten square feet inside the cage, and half of it is covered with stacks of books and magazines. “Morning, sunshine,” he says back.

We smile.

I put my hands between the bars, offering him the blood. He could grab my wrists instead and tear fresh blood straight out of me, but he won’t. Dad tried to make me fear Saxon, after finding me asleep against the cage, but I knew at any time Saxon could have pulled me through and eaten me. I’d been small enough then to have fit between the bars. He’d have sucked the marrow from my bones before Dad woke up.

Saxon dips a finger into the blood and paints it across his bottom lip. He told me when I was eight that the blood tingles against his skin. I’d put a dot on my cheek and been disappointed when it only felt wet and sticky. That had been the first time he’d laughed at me, the first time I’d seen his rows of sharp teeth. When I scrambled away, he’d painted dots of blood onto his own cheeks, and a long line down his nose, in solidarity.

I sit down cross-legged, with my knees against the bars. He sits, too, cradling the blood in his lap. As I tell him about the TV show I watched last night where they had a mock battle between a Samurai warrior and a Roman Gladiator, he keeps dipping his finger into the blood and letting drops fall onto his tongue. He’ll spend hours consuming every last bit.

When I move on to complaining about my trig teacher’s bad habit of putting questions on the quizzes we never went over in class, Saxon holds up his hand. The musty gray sleeve of his shirt falls back. Dad brings him new clothes once a year, saying nothing more is necessary because Saxon doesn’t sweat or pee or do anything but read all day. None of the normal stuff that makes a person dirty. But I wonder what he’d look like in a tailored suit, or a really sexy pair of jeans.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says when he has my attention, and dips his finger back into the blood. “When you leave for college, I won’t have any reason not to rip your father to pieces.”

I laugh.

But Saxon doesn’t. He sets the Tupperware onto the concrete floor of his cage and stands up. He wraps his hands around two of the bars.

My laughter turns into rocks that plummet down toward my feet. “You wouldn’t.”

“I might.” He snaps the end of the word sharply.

I stand up and curls my hands over his. His skin is warmer than mine. “Saxon.” To this day neither Dad nor Saxon will tell me how he came to be trapped here. All I know is that Dad feeds him and somehow having a vampire locked in a box in your basement is massive good luck. Dad shot from junior partner to CEO in six months, and now basically does whatever he wants. The only reason we haven’t moved into a huge house in some gated community is because of Saxon. “It can’t be that easy,” I say, “Or you’d have done it before now.”

His fingers move under mine and I swear I hear the metal creak. “The fool’s been feeding me his blood for years.”

I think of the drops of my blood in the Tupperware. And how often I’ve used the lancet. “What does that give you?”

“A taste for it.” Saxon leans closer and it’s exactly the way it was when I was five years old. His eyes gleam in the red light. But this time, he doesn’t seem old or strange to me. He’s young. He’s my friend.

***

I used to sneak down when Dad left and help Saxon pick up the million pieces of rice Dad dropped on the cage floor to keep him occupied all day. We’d count them, and drop them one by one into a tin mixing bowl. Sometimes I got bored, but Saxon didn’t seem capable of stopping before every grain was collected. He’d start making up little rhyming songs to keep me down there, and tell me stories about people he’d known and lives he’d lived. My favorites were the ones where he had human companions who guarded him during the day, and who he guarded at night. Probably because I could pretend he’d chosen to be here with my family, instead of imprisoned.

When I was in Junior High I had a fantasy of breaking him free, bringing him to my school, and letting him go to town on all the teachers who made me talk in class, and possibly break the windows. Then we’d run off for New York or something, and I’d be a famous actress while he leaned back in the darkest balcony box and watched me. We’d spend the long hours of the night at private parties, the toast of the town. And all day we’d sleep in a quiet, dark room, waiting for the sun to go down again.

It was the only way I made it through Spanish class.

***

“What do you want?” I ask him.

He doesn’t reply except to sigh very softly. I can smell the blood on his breath, and see a small streak of it at the edge of his bottom lip. It’s not as overwhelming as it was upstairs when I first took the Tupperware out of the microwave, but I still don’t like it.

I rephrase. “What do you want from me?”

“To go with you.”

My very first instinct is to go to the workbench and get the key. To free him. I don’t, of course, but I try not to ignore my instincts. Sophomore year, somebody told me to always go with my first guess on multiple choice tests, and after that my grades improved noticeably.

I tighten my hands around his. “And then what?”

“Carefree nights and peaceful days?” he says with a smile.

I back away step by step. I’m off the carpet and the concrete is rough under my toes. Like I’m five again.

“Let me tell you a secret, sunshine,” he whispers, leaning against the bars. His cheek presses into one, and he wraps his arms casually around it and folds his hands together. “An imprisoned vampire is good luck.”

“I know.”

“But.” He holds up one finger, the one he uses to feed himself. “A willing vampire – ah, sunshine, a willing vampire is what Washington had. What Charlemagne had. Elizabeth. Cleopatra – she got one from Caesar.”

I don’t know if I believe him. I want to. I imagine him again in new, clean clothes. Clothes he chose for himself. “I don’t want to be those people.”

“You wouldn’t have to be. Hundreds of people you’ve never heard of made friends of us, too.”

He could have killed me so easily, anytime over the last twelve years. He hadn’t. Did that mean I could trust him? Or was he only biding his time for this very moment? Waiting because to him, twelve years was nothing.

My brain – my dad’s voice – is screaming at me to go back upstairs. But the rest of me wants to know. Wants to know if he was my friend. Wants to know if I was his friend. Because if I am, wouldn’t I free him?

If I run upstairs, I’m using him. Just like Dad.

If I let him out, he might kill me. Kill my family. Everyone on the block, everyone in the city, for all I knew.

If I run I am afraid.

If I stay, I risk everything just to prove to myself what I am.

“Nicole.”

I blink. I’d been staring at him so long the light shoving through the slats of the window is strong and bright. Saxon stands unmoved, caught between the light from the window and the red light of the basement.

I walk into the sunlight and pick the key up off the worktable.

_____________

originally posted June 7th, 2010

photo by Jacob Haas

[merryfates]

Cut - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

My mother cut my heart out and put it in a box.

If this was a story, that’s how it would end.

It would begin with snow and the tragic, impersonal death of a young trophy wife, and fade into a montage of the replacement-bride, how she drenched her hair with honey and washed her face with milk.

That part’s true.

When my father remarried, the woman was unapologetically vain.  She spent hours in front of the mirror, looking all alabaster and perfect.   On Wednesdays and Saturdays, she went downtown to the day spa, where they shaped her fingernails and peeled the top layer of her skin off with various kinds of acid.

I stayed home and dyed my hair.  I caked my face with powder and drew black lines around my eyes to show everyone the difference between us, that I wasn’t like her, that she wasn’t really my mother.  She kept buying me dresses in pink and turquoise, and acting like we could be best friends.

Let me start again.  My father’s wife had my heart cut out.  She put it in a box.

The secret is that it wasn’t really my heart.  Her slim gigolo boyfriend took me out to the Presidio, where the salt wind blew in off the sea.  He touched my face and breathed licorice and aftershave on me, which made me want to scream.  Then, he bought a pound of lamb’s heart from a butcher in Greek Town and took it home to her.  He told her he loved her.  He told her that the dense, membranous muscle belonged to me.

Okay, that last part was a lie.  Can you tell that I’m lying?  My stepmother doesn’t have a boyfriend.  But if she did, he’d be young, with wavy hair and bad shoes.  He’d be the kind of guy who knows where to buy organ meat in primarily-ethnic neighborhoods.

This is more like it: my obscenely vain stepmother put on her fifty-dollar Dior eyeshadow and her Manolo Blahnik pumps and reached for her Gaultier clutch.  She cut her own heart out and dipped it in lead or mercury—one of those metals that poisons you and makes you go crazy. She fed it to me in sly, careful moments, in pieces, so that I would be like her.

I sat in my room with the shades pulled down and the venom of her heart moved like poison, getting under my skin and making me all drowsy.  She spent hours by the country club pool, trying to look younger, but washed-up socialites never do.

I lay with the blankets over me, so heavy I couldn’t move my head.   My dye-job was starting to grow out and the roots were showing.  I stayed so long, it felt like I was turning into stone.

Then one night, she came to my room like a silent film-star, slightly crazed, smelling like gin, and yanked me out of bed.  She sat me in front of the ruffled vanity, studying me with bleary eyes.

“I just want you to like me,” she said.  “I just want us to do things together.  Why don’t you like me?”

The whole time, she kept touching me in that clumsy, drunk way, tugging at my hair.  I watched her reflection so I wouldn’t have to watch my own—the crumpled way her mouth seemed to just collapse.  Her eyelids were dark and greasy-looking, like she’d bruised them.

She took me by the shoulders and shook me hard, suddenly.  “Why are you doing this to yourself?  Why do you insist on looking like a freak? Are you determined to embarrass me?”

She brandished a handkerchief—white, petal-soft—and began to scrub my face.  She scrubbed hard and fierce, until my mouth got pink and so did my cheeks.  She wiped my makeup off like she was scrubbing me back to life.

“Answer me,” she kept saying, but her voice sounded weird and shrill, and the words had stopped making sense.

When I opened my mouth, it felt like a tiny version of a black hole, where light disappeared and nothing could come out.  She shook me and my head rocked back and forth.  I couldn’t stop nodding.

She swept from the room without warning and came back with the scissors. I closed my eyes.  The blades made a whispering noise, snick, snick.  I felt lighter.

When she dropped the shears on the carpet, I didn’t know how to feel.  It was the worst thing anyone had ever done to me.  I had a sudden thought that no one had ever really done anything to me.  It was glorious and shocking.  I didn’t feel like myself, but for the first time in years, I didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone else.

In the mirror, my hair was brutally short.  It stuck up everywhere, patchy-black in places, but most of it was blond.  My mouth and cheeks were hectic, and my eyes looked wild.  My blood felt like electricity.  Like I could do anything.

We sat in front of the mirror, staring at my reflection.  She was crying now, sloppy and horrifying, asking me to forgive her.

I wanted to tell her not to cry.  That I forgave her for her smallness, for so many reasons.

I was something breathtaking and rare now, while she would never be beautiful again.

Story originally posted August 25, 2008

Photo by John Abella

[merryfates]

The Wind Takes Our Cries — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

My Eoin was sixteen years when they rode through. Eoin, I loved him, he was my seventh, and the others nearly killed me coming out, but not him. He slid out like a fish through a fisherman’s hands, and like a fish, he never did cry, just twisted in the goodwife’s arms. Later, when he was older, my husband and master did his part to beat a tear from Eoin’s blue eyes, but he wouldn’t cry for him either. I did the weeping for him, while I listened from the other room, and the wind took my cries away. My husband beat the others as well, but when he beat them, it was steady, methodical, rhythmic sound, like weaving, or intercourse, or raking up hay. When he beat Eoin, it was the unpredictable scrabbling of a foal standing for the first time, or the chaotic crashing of the ocean on cliffs. The beating would stop whenever Eoin stopped getting up, but Eoin never seemed to learn to stay down, any more than he learned to cry.

Eoin was like a stubborn green willow wand, he would bend but never break. I was proud of all my sons, but I was proudest of Eoin, partly because I was the only one who was. And love means more if it is hard to do.

The day they came in on their horses was summer at its end, ripe and crisp as an apple, the sort of day that makes lords long to be chasing foxes to ground and maidens to bed. There was no mistaking them. Who else had chargers like they, their coats every color of oak leaves? Who else, in this season, had brilliant caparisons draped round their horses’ shoulders and cloaks pinned on their own? Who else rode with the faerie-woman on her chestnut palfry, her face proud as a man’s?

My sons all watched the knights process along the edge of our fields, their horses pressing up against each other and then dancing away, restless with their own strength. My daughters watched them too, but like me, they were not fair of face, so I told them to keep their eyes to themselves. That the knights of the table would not want to be ogled by maidens without flowered cheeks and bee-stung lips, by my daughters with hog-chins and hair fine as an old-man’s. They paid me no mind, and all labor ceased while everyone waited for a glimpse of Arthur.

Here he came then, on a mighty dappled gray stallion draped in green, a faerie’s color, and he was more splendid than they had said. His bearing — proud! His face — kind! His mouth behind its trimmed ginger beard was set with both good humor and with the weight of responsibility, a face every mother should wear. I was in love with him at once, but everyone is. It is easy to love Arthur. Still, I flattened by skirt and pressed my hands to my girl-flushed cheeks and was glad that my husband was not about to see me undone so by the heroes.

I barely had time for this first glance when I realized they were coming this way. My son Aodhan was pelting toward the house, fast as a hound, and his voice carried well to me, full of terror and adulation. The king wants a drink. The king wants water.

My heart leapt inside me as I began to weigh the request — the king could not have water, the king needed wine, did we have wine fit for Arthur, we had the mead that the Deutscher had brought — and then, as the dapple grey horse approached, I realized with sinking heart that I could hear the uneven thunder of a beating from the house behind me. Though Eoin, as ever, didn’t cry out, my husband made up for it with grunts and bellow, insults and crowing, loud enough to hear outside the threshold. Oh! Eoin was never his son, not with eyes like that, oh, did he think that a king would want to look at him, a boy finer than a maiden, oh! a surlier son he hadn’t bred.

The shame stole my words as Arthur’s shadow fell across me and my doorstep. For a long moment there was silence, the king and I listening to the crashing inside. My husband had fallen quiet as well, and now there was only the sound of a beating in earnest.

“Lady,” Arthur said, after a space. His face was hidden in shadow, the afternoon sun a nimbus behind him and his commander beside him, tall as gods on their horses. No one had ever called me Lady. “Could I trouble you for water for our mounts?”   No one could say that we did not do well by him. Once I had stopped the boys’ mouths catching flies and dragged the girls out of Launcelot’s gaze, we watered those horses and we watered those men and I have to say that watching the knights drink, their hands young and unlined, their eyes grateful, I realized that they were just boys like my own.

Arthur thanked me then, but instead of giving a coin in return, he said, “I am needing someone to tend my hounds, Lady. I would ask you if you could spare one of your sons. We will be back through here, again, in good time, and I would return him again.”

And here I had given all our mead to his men, and he wanted my sons as well? What kind of deed was that in return, this king who was so known for his benevolence? I said, “I would be hard pressed to survive the harvest without my sons, my lord.”

The king’s eyes followed the vines up the side of our house, and he did not look at me as he said, “The hounds are skittish this year. They have given us trouble, staying with us as we travel.” His eyes returned to me. “I need someone quiet.”

And I understood the bargain he meant to make, the kindness he meant to offer. That is how Eoin came to join the knights that year.

Oh, I missed him. I missed him as we harvested and rolled hay. When the frost lightened the fields. When the snow covered the branches of the trees that edged the lane. When spring came and the thawed world smelled of animals rutting, flowers budding, carcasses rotting. I missed him every time I heard one of my other sons gasp in pain under my husband’s hand. I cried for him, too, and the wind took my cries and brought him back to me in summer.

There were fewer knights with Arthur this time, but they were no less splendid. His smile was magnificent in its benevolence. “Lady,” he said, as I wiped my eyes, “Did I not promise you I would return your son? I daresay he has refined his silence in our service.”

And there was Eoin, dismounting and making his way through the others towards us. He had become a willow tree rather than a wand, my Eoin, that year.

“Thank you for returning him, my lord,” I said.

Arthur merely smiled and turned his horse. Launcelot, however, remained, his horse half-turned away as he looked over his armored shoulder at Eoin. “Do not forget what I told you,” Launcelot said. And then he spat on my husband’s doorstep. “My apologies, Lady, no insult meant to you.”

Then they were gone, with nothing to prove that they had been there but this new Eoin. He was quiet as a churchman, steady as rain on the roof, and when night came, he cut my husband’s liver out at the dinner table. My husband made no sound, gutted like an animal. Eoin twisted the knife, however, and we both wept, as the wind took our cries away.

________________________

Story originally posted January 18, 2010.

Image by N. C. Wyeth.

[merryfates]

Skinned - story by Tessa Gratton

I can’t drown, but it is not for lack of trying.

***

I return to the coast where I was born, for college. I am eighteen and Dad can’t stop me. He tries.

“Meris, all that waits for you there is long sorrow,” he says.

I kiss his cheek. “That’s all I have now.”

It isn’t true, but it’s close enough.

***

Our house is gone. Torn down and replaced with a row of identical villas, purposefully weathered to appear decades old.

I stand with the sand spilling away under my bare feet, ocean wind at my back, and stare at the low fence between two condos where our house used to squat. It is exactly the same place I stood thirteen years ago and saw a patch of color shining on the roof. It hugged the chimney, glistening silver and gray. “Mama,” I asked, when she joined me for tuna sandwiches, “What’s that?”

***

When I return to my hotel I call Dad. “Did you know they turned our house into cheap tourist holes?”

“I sold it to that contractor on purpose. It’s better this way.”

I am quiet until he asks me about the airplane, and when I’m driving down to college to get settled into my dorm. I tell him, and we have a conversation filled with facts but lacking in any real purpose.

***

At dawn the next morning, I go for a run on the beach. Dad used to, every day before work. It’s hard. The sand does not want to propel me forward, but rather suck me down. I splash my sneakers through the edge of the surf, hopping over strings of seaweed. The rhythm of the waves seeps into my bones and I want to cry with relief. I’ve missed it more than anything, trapped in the center of the country. Pink and lavender and mauve spread over the horizon like lipstick, and the thin silver moon dangles before it. The moon is the same color as her skin.

I search for seals, a hand shading my eyes.

There are large, flat, pock-marked rocks dozens of meters off the shore. Perfect resting grounds. I imagine them rolling with harbor seals. Mama and I used to play in the shallows, slapping our palms onto the surface of the waves. Sometimes, the seals would slap back. I always laughed, but Mama would lift me in her arms and hold me so tight I couldn’t breath. She stared out at the seal rocks, caressing my hair, tears green with brine and salt slipping down her face.

***

After she vanished, I swam out to the seal rocks. But the seals had gone. I dove down as low as I could – three minutes or more, eyes open, fingers reaching through the water like it was just shadows I needed to tear away from my eyes. They did not come. I choked and fled to the surface.

Again and again, I dove. I swam straight out to sea, as far as I could, resting and them pushing on. I slapped the surface and called her name. It was dark before my legs and arms grew too tired and my lungs too tight to breathe. I lifted my face to the moon and thought of the shining patch of roof. I relaxed, and slipped under the ocean.

I woke up on the seal rocks, and Dad was there with his canoe, dragging me into his arms and kissing my face with his rough lips. His beard scratched my raw cheeks.

We moved away that week.

***

I swim out to the seal rocks again, in the afternoon when the beach is peppered with vacationers. The water is cold, like I remember, and no one else does more than dip their toes in. I don’t mind the cold. This is how the sea is supposed to feel. I let it run its tendrils through my long hair and stroke my skin.

It does not take long to reach the rocks. I grip them and haul up. I spread out in the sun and let it tingle my back. It is warm. Gentle. After a moment, I go to the far side of the rocks so that none of the beach-goers will see what I do. Crouching, I pluck a small glass phial from between my breasts and uncork it. I tip it over the sea, and seven drops fall out, splunking and vanishing. They’re my tears.

I wait. I tap the surface of the water with my hand, sending out a sharp echo.

It is a long wait, and even my hair is dry when the seal pops its head up. I smile. He is pale gray with a spread of dark freckles down his neck, a face like a friendly dog, and round, black eyes. I back away, and he hobbles up onto the rock. He is not afraid of me. “Hello,” I whisper.

The seal slaps one flat fin onto the rocks and closes his eyes. I stare as his skin breaks open under his chin, and a long tear grows down his breast and lower. His head raises, and the seal face lifts back like a hood. The rest of his skin falls off, pooling on the rock like silk and laying before me is a man. He lifts his head and his eyes are dark like mine. Like Mama’s. One hand grips his seal-skin and with the other he pushes himself up to sit.

The low sun shines in his face, and he raises his hand to shade his eyes. “Cousin,” he says. His voice is a whisper of water on sand.

My mouth is moving, but I have forgotten everything I want to say to him.

“You are sad.”

I nod. “My – my Mama. Is she with you?”

“No.”

“Why did she leave us?”

“It is the way.”

“That you always leave the ones you love?”

“She did not love your father, she was his prisoner.”

“Not mine.”

“It is the way,” he insists.

“She could have stayed.”

“No.”

I wrap my arms around my stomach. “She could have visited.”

“No.”

My fingers curl into fists. I want to hit him or grab him or take his skin and hide it until he tells me. “She could have taken me with her.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He is quiet, his eyes glancing me over and then out to sea. He longs to put his skin back on, I can see it in the way his lips turn down. “You don’t have the skin,” he finally says.

“Then what can I do?”

“Nothing.” He shrugs. “We are born with the skin we shed. I am sorry.”

I don’t think he is. He doesn’t care. I reach my hand toward the spill of sealskin across his thigh. His fingers tighten on it. I touch with only a finger, caressing the fine, slick fur. I close my eyes. It feels like Mama’s hair, brushing my cheek when she leaned over me to kiss me good night. “Thank you for coming,” I say with my eyes still shut.

I don’t move or look until I hear him splash into the sea. Then I sit, staring toward the horizon until it is full dark. I swim home when the ocean and the sky are both black, and indistinguishable from each other.

***

I wake with an answer.

We are born with the skin we shed.

I go down to the beach. Dawn is a bloody strip at the edge of the world. I sit where the waves lap at my feet and I am surrounded by foam. I wonder what happens to seal-people when they die.

With a knife from the hotel breakfast, I cut a slit in my chin. I hiss at the pain and feel blood pour down my chest. But I do not stop. I cut down, shallow and long, all the way to my breastbone. My skin is on fire.

I use my fingers to push at the wound. I whimper, and there are tears on my cheeks. I dig in with my nails and grip the edges of my skin. I am panting with pain and I am dizzy. The waves drag at my ankles and the sand tilts under me.

I bite my tongue to distract myself and, holding my breath, I pull.

_____________

originally posted November 19th, 2008

image by Markus YK

[merryfates]

Rest for the Wicked - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

For the stone-cold sum of five hundred dollars a week, Richard Casey hired me to watch him sleep.

I know what you’re thinking, but not every help-wanted ad ends in depravity.  It wasn’t like that.  When I called, the voice on the line sounded hoarse and exhausted.  The listing wasn’t even in the kink section.

I was looking for placement as a personal assistant—making calls or taking dictation, arranging dentist appointments for old, rich men who can’t be bothered to buy their own socks or pick up their dry-cleaning. What I got was Richard.

He was tall and sullen, with three days of stubble and forty years worth of shadows under his eyes.

The first night, I brought a thermos of coffee and two sandwiches and a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five.

“What is that?” he said, staring at the book.

I gave him a long look. “An American classic.”

“Put it out on the steps and don’t bring it again.”

I did what he said because it was his show, and because I needed the money.  I’d read it twice already, and anyway, there are all kinds of eccentricities you’ll put up with if you really need to get paid.

For six hours, I sat bolt upright on a hard kitchen chair, and he slept curled in the exact center of the bed, with his hands tucked against his chest and his pillow over his head, and I drank my gritty coffee with the sludge at the bottom and tried not to nod off.

Except, along about four o’clock, I started to hear small noises from the closet and from the space beneath the bed.

At first the sound was just a steady scraping—the scratch of a nib pen or a fingernail.  But gradually, the noises got louder.  When I knelt down to look, something moved far back in the shadows.  Then it was gone.

In bed, Richard began to toss and mumble, tangled in the covers.

I stood up and kicked the footboard.  “Hey, wake up.”

He gasped himself alert, looking wildly around the room, staring into all the corners.  Then, with a glance at the closet, he sighed and let his shoulders slump.

“What was that under your bed?  No, what the hell was that?”

He scrubbed a hand across his eyes, already right back to sullen.  “Look, you might be here in a pretty strange capacity, but my personal life is none of your business.  I don’t pay you to ask questions.”

“It is my business,” I said.  “It’s my business if you’re losing it, and it’s my business if all kinds of nasty crawlies want to come sneaking into your room, because either way, I’m the one who has to deal with it.”

Richard stared up at me.  There were gray shadows under his cheekbones and he was grizzled and tragic, but not in the good way.   There was nothing deep and brooding about his gaze.  He just looked sick.

“Tell me, or I won’t come back.”

“I’m not a good man,” he said.  And left it at that.

It was less than half an answer, but it was honest.  He hadn’t bothered to lie, and that much I respected.

The next night, he was waiting for me with a basket of odds and ends. There was a bundle of dried sage tied with string, some candles and chalk and strike-anywhere matches.  Sewing shears and salt.

“What is this?”

He set the basket beside the bed. “Consider them necessary objects. They might look harmless, but they’ll keep back the creatures of depravity.”

“Excuse me?”

“In my younger days, I ran with . . . a rough crowd.  I mean a whole pack of less-than-savory associates.  They did my dirty work, but now my time’s used up and the deal works both ways.  Now they’re looking to collect on my debt.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, but are you out of your damn mind?  Are you trying to tell me that you sold your soul?”

“I was young,” he said, with a shrug, like that meant anything.  “I wanted insight and knowledge.  I wanted to know that I wasn’t trivial, and I bought their service because I thought I could afford it.”

“So am I.  Young, I mean.  But I’m not about to lease myself a demon at a high interest rate and very little down.”

He climbed into bed and pulled the covers up.  “Sometimes the long-term consequences don’t really hit you until later.  I was in the market for a different kind of life, and they were offering.”  Over the quilt, his grin was pale and empty like he was already dead.

So I took the basket and put it under my chair, and at two or three in the morning, the scratching started.  This time, though, the sound was louder and more insistent and when the thing under the bed showed signs of getting a little too friendly with my feet, I reached for the necessary objects.

I sprinkled salt over my shoes and lit some tea candles.  When I stuck the scissors point-down into the carpet, the scraping stopped.

“Very well,” said a low, soggy voice from the closet.  “But tell me this, at least—why do you protect him?”

“Because it pays better than Kinko’s.”

“But the cost to your dignity, my dear! And where are your scruples?  Do you know of his sordid past?  Only look at his hands.”

In the bed, Richard sighed and rolled over, flinging out an arm.  His hand was wet to the wrist with blood.  It ran in sloppy rivulets and dripped down onto the carpet.

“I hope that’s metaphorical blood,” I said.  “Because otherwise, it will be devilish hard to get out of the shag.”

“He gave us his eternal soul in return for wisdom, and then squandered that same wisdom in favor of power,” whispered a voice under the bed.  “He gave himself over to vice and hedonism when it were better he craved knowledge.  Even in retreat, he is despicable and clever.   For a pittance a week, he owns you, and you accept that when you could surely rise above it.”

“And you figure you’ll snatch him away to hell because he had the audacity to live his own life instead of curing cancer and blessing lepers?”

“Hell has no circumference,” said the thing in the closet.  “It is where we make it and this room is as good as another.  Hell can be as vast as the sea, or as small as the head of a pin, but I promise you one thing: we will never let him sleep.  Go back where you came from and leave us to our work.”

“What’s it worth to you?  I mean, are you here for profit, or just for fun?”

“Is this the face?” whispered a voice from somewhere in the shadows.  “The face that burned the topless towers of Ilium?”

“No,” I said.  “But that sounds like a good time.”

“The power could be yours,” said the voice under the bed.  “Imagine, all the cities of men—yours to own.”

“I wouldn’t give up my soul for that,” I said, thinking of home and bed and my book.  “But I might could sell his.”

“Then let us have him, and we will give you New York and Chicago.  We will give you London and Persia and Rome.  Don’t you want Rome?”

“We don’t call it Persia these days.”

I stood up and kicked the salt off my shoes.  I blew out the candles.  I took away the scissors because people’s debts are their own and a job is only a good one until you find something better.  Because I am not a good person, and that’s something I never lie about.

Story originally posted June 29, 2009

Photo by Steve Prakope

[merryfates]

The Absence of Light — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

MACY DELL. Yesterday, Mr. Colquitt knocked on our door and told my parents they were blowing up the moon. He and my dad stood on the front porch and my mom came out afterward and gave Mr. Colquitt a sweating glass of iced tea that matched hers. They watched minivans drive down the street and talked about the piece of moon that had hit the bus in California. Then they were mumbling and boring and Brendan texted me and said to come onto chat so I did.

Brendan is not cute. He is fourteen and has acne. Anyways I am sort of in love with Mr. Colquitt. Sometimes Mr. Colquitt will drape an arm around Mrs. Colquitt’s shoulders and she will lean up against him, and I will think, aww, that would be nice, in the way that you look at clouds and think about running across them barefoot and you think, aww, that would be nice.

I’m not sure what I think about them blowing up the moon.

MR. FRANCIS DELL. Ben Colquitt came over two days ago and said they’d decided that destroying the moon was the best course of action. What the hell do I know about the best course of action? All I know is that the moon is suddenly shitting pieces all over us and now you don’t know if you’re supposed to go out to work with an umbrella or a tank.

Forty-two years and I told Sara that the worst thing that’s ever happened to us as a family is this recession.

And now look, the damn sky is falling.

What the hell are we even paying NASA to do anyway?

BRENDAN COLQUITT. Recently, I’ve been doing tarot. I try to pretend that it’s because I really want to know more about my inner self and my future, but I know it’s mostly because my parents were talking about tarot and how it was an evil thing. They said the same thing about the Playstation, and that’s been fantastic, so obviously, I had to try tarot. I have been doing spreads for my future, but they aren’t really very specific. I spend a lot of time reading the book that came with the cards. I keep getting The Tower, which is confusing because it’s about things falling down that you’ve built up and please, I’m fourteen and haven’t had time to even build up my arm muscles, and Death, which is confusing because they say it’s not really about Death. So I keep reading the book. And my parents keep talking about the moon. You know what the book says about the Moon? It says that it’s the eighteenth card of the Major Arcana, and that it represents “confusion and uncertainty rooted deep in our subconscious, demanding change.” Whatever the hell that means.

I say hell because my parents say that’s evil too.

Hey, you know what’s not evil? Macy Dell. I texted her: come here i’ll tell you your future.

She texted back: my future is this bowl of cereal.

MR. BEN COLQUITT. They are going to blow up the moon tomorrow. My wife Margo is wondering if this will just make more pieces shower down on us. I am wondering, myself, what this will do to the tides and to the circardian clocks of animals and the night animals in the ocean who had moonlight to rely on. On the news, I saw a scientist say that it is going to tilt the axis of the earth. I don’t know if that’s because of the moon being gone or the effects of the explosives. Margo switched the television over to the Disney Channel before they could explain. Margo said she didn’t want to frighten the Dells’ children, who were here while Sara and Francis went shopping. Macy is too old to be frightened. She’s headed for a whore house. And Billy is four and oblivious. Margo worries too much about things that don’t matter, but I guess that’s one of her charms. Anyway, the scientist said the Earth’s axis will be changed and it will make the Earth spin faster and give us a seventeen hour day. He said that was better for business anyway, and would help with the recession.

I don’t remember voting for this guy.

MRS. SARA DELL. We watch from our backyard. The sky is a very lovely dark purple, and the moon is full above the black leaves of the oaks. From here, you can’t see anything wrong with it. It looks round and two-dimensional, a communion host. Brendan is slapping mosquitoes on Macy’s arm — I think he likes her, I think he’s a nice enough boy — and I’m sure the mosquitoes are biting me and Billy too. But I can’t really focus on that. On myself. All I can think, at this moment, is that the moon is mysterious and essential, and that four-year-old Billy on my lap will probably forget that he ever saw it in anything other than a book. It seems like a crushing loss. I feel like man was never meant to do this, to play God, crushing satellites in his fist. I wonder if the Earth will really turn like they say on the news; if we’ll feel it happening. I wonder if the tides will stop. I wonder if plants will still grow. I look up at the moon, so far, far away that we shouldn’t be able to touch it, and I wonder.

MACY DELL. For one second, the moon is dim. Like someone has turned down the brightness on a computer monitor. We have to squint to see it through the shadow.

Suddenly, for the first time since I heard the news, I realize I am very, very afraid.

I clutch Brendan’s hand, which is sweaty. I feel even more powerless than I usually do. We never said we wanted the moon blown up. We never said we wanted things to change. No one asked me. No one even asked my parents. I thought we lived in a democracy. Doesn’t that mean there should be a box you check that says, yes, change the planet’s rotation?

Everything is silent, because the play is being held thousands of miles away from its audience.

Then there is acres of dust and an empty night sky.

__________

Story originally posted April 26, 2010.

Image by Alan L.

[merryfates]

Stains - story by Tessa Gratton

It’s Varro’s idea to steal the unicorn.

We are too old for pranks now, me just fifteen and him a year past that, nearly ready to take his initial trials. But the way his jaw sets as he suggests it, the way he makes his voice sound off-hand and won’t meet my eyes; instead gazing out over the garden as if he only cares that the rows of crabapple trees are pruned just right and the petunias haven’t overgrown their boxes.

“A last lark while we’re children, Ginny.”

Sitting with my corset pressing my ribs together, I know better than to think I am still a child. They’ve already stained my lips with spell-dye so all will know my words are power.

Varro’s, too, of course. He turns to me. The black on his lips suits his face in a way it never will mine. His hair twists in ropes like black snakes around flat, foreign cheekbones the color of burnished gold, and his up-turned eyes are as black as his hair. As if Nature knew what he would be and said: Let this Varro be born in two tones, gold and black, so that when the mage-artist paints his lips it will be the finishing touch on my own perfect work.

***

His parents had been foreign magicians, here on ambassadorial business with the council. The whole family had come for dinner at our country house, and I remember the vibrant colors embroidered into their robes; orange fish and teal ocean waters; cool mountains and black branches heavy with pink and scarlet blossoms. Mother had said much of their magic was in their clothing; woven into the threads, telling stories if you knew how to read them. None of their lips were dyed, but instead their hair curled with elaborate braids and thick black snakes. The father even had copper and silver wires twisted in his to make it flare out behind him like a rooster’s crest.

I’d been most impressed with Varro, just my size and smiling all the time. He led me on a merry chase through my own house after I’d discovered him hiding under the dining table chalking magic into the wood so that all the food would turn to dust. While I’d been down there, chastising him, Mrs. Antigone had entered and caught us both. We’d fled, my hand in Varro’s, until my heart raced and I could barely breath from running and terrified laughter. I’d flung my arms around him and danced deep into the orchard, only compounding our punishment by making us so very late for supper. When we appeared in the sitting room through one of the several secret passageways, waiting there with our backs straight on Mother’s favorite ruby settee and our hands clasps in our laps, they’d not been able to force the truth from either one of us. “Miss Genevieve introduced me to the house,” Varro said, meeting all their eyes. I was less of a liar, and glanced demurely at the rose-patterned carpet. “Yes, Father, I’m certain we must have passed where you were looking several times. Just missing each other.”

We had, of course, been sent to our rooms hungry, with only ashes to eat for our unkind joke.

***

“Why the unicorn?” I ask him, reaching up to tease at the curl fallen down my neck. I wrap it around my finger so tightly the tip turns pink.

He leaps to his feet, whirls around to face me. “Because nothing in this house is innocent.”

I shrink from his ferocity, pushing my shoulder blades back against the wrought-iron vines of the bench. Immediately, Varro kneels, taking my hands. His pulse pounds in the hollow of his palms, and I clutch at him, feeling my face draw down into fear. “Varro,” I say, pulling him closer, and attempting to regain control of my expression, “What has happened to you?”

Instead of answering, he turns one of my hands over and traces the heart line creasing my palm. “Do you know, when I arrived here, your Mother set a spell into my teeth so always she might know where I am if she looks?”

Grasping his head, I stare past his black lips as he pull them back into a snarl. I can’t look at his eyes as I reach through one of the slits in my heavy skirts to find the inner pocket. Bringing out my stylus, I tap the tip of the thin crystal to his front tooth; once, twice, and on the third beat, black spell-writing swims up over the ivory of his teeth, fading in and out against itself and weaving around his gums.

Slowly I raise my eyes to his and he lets his black lips close over the evidence of imprisonment. “How did you discover it?”

Without blinking, Varro tells me he went into the bathroom to set a potion in the copper tub. He drew a circle on the tiles and bit into an enchanted fig. “I was treating it with butterfly dandruff to make the taste hold to your tongue for hours.” There he blinks. Figs are my favorite. “The mirror caught the reflection of the spell words when magic touched magic.”

***

Varro’s parents died in the Promethean Killing Fire that destroyed a quarter of the capitol, including all the ambassadorial suites in the palace. Varro had been with us, and so he stayed. But his smiles dimmed and for long weeks all he did was stare dry-eyed through the skylight in his room. Father arranged with the new ambassadors to keep Varro on as an apprentice, in a complicated cultural exchange I didn’t understand at the time. All I knew was that Varro wouldn’t leave us. I remember Mother lifting him onto the settee beside her and kissing his temple and finally, finally saw him cry. She held him for hours, cooing and comforting and promising her love.

I did not understand how she could have laid such a spell into his teeth.

***

“Maybe – maybe it is a standard spell, Varro.”

“For all magic children?”

“To temper our power as it passes through our teeth? While we are so young we might not control it properly.” I say it firmly, as if perhaps certainty might transform the words into truth. But I saw the marks on his teeth, even as they drifted; far-sight and mirror-magic, not dampening or control circles.

Varro waits for me to draw my own conclusions, not arguing because he knows I’ll come around to the only possible answer. He sees it gather on my face, and opens his mouth to speak, but I hold up a hand and say, “Wait, there’s one way to know for sure.” I part my lips, breathing in the cool taste of the garden air. And I close my eyes.

His finger rubs over my bottom lip, and I open my mouth more for him as my innards melt into warm honey and pool in the bowl of my hips. His stylus taps against my teeth. Once, twice, a third time. I wait. My fingers beg to curl in the folds of my skirts, but I hold them flat and rigid against the iron bench.

“Nothing,” Varro murmurs and I snap my eyes open just in time to catch the fading note of disappointment before he offers a ferocious smile. “Aren’t I the lucky one.”

***

Mother and Father keep their unicorn in the tower, in a room made of marble. Tapestries depicting wild forests and untended gardens gave the walls the feel of a deep, dark storyland. There are no windows, so the only light came from the enchanted globe hanging against the ceiling like the moon.

Varro tightens his hand around mine as I close the door behind us, shutting out the loud, shining afternoon.

It’s easy to pick Father’s locks. He is teaching both of us magic, after all, and I take after him in my talent for intricate diagrams. Using my stylus, I redirect three tiny lines from sunwise to widdershins and the spiraling ninepoint lock shifts from glowing purple to a quiet blue.

“Do you see it?” Varro whispers, letting go of me to walk across the thick green rugs. There’s no one to hear, but I feel the same urge to whisper when I reply, “No, perhaps she’s behind the pillars.”

We move through the room, silver light and shadows teasing at my vision. The wires in Varro’s hair glimmer. I take the left side, and trail my hand around the pillar. There are seven in all, made to look like the trunks of royal oaks. The stone bark is rough under my fingers, and smells of pine trees. The entire room smells like a pine forest; perhaps it was on the side of a mountain where Mother met the unicorn, and caught it with her magic.

“Here,” Varro calls.

I join him where a dozen feather pillows made a thick nest. There rests the unicorn, half buried under the pillows. Its velvet nose twitches and it lifts its delicate head to peer at us. The creamy fur glows dully in the false moonlight, scratchy and thick looking like a mountain goat’s. It has solid gray eyes as smooth and empty as river rock. Although it reclines, I know that if it stood, I could once again marvel at the tiny cloven hooves and bird-bone legs. Unicorns were made of magic, generations ago, supposedly to capture the most lovely features of a half-dozen animals. Perhaps the first had been glorious, but this, our unicorn, is gangly and strange.

But the horn.

The horn bursts from between its eyes, striped in thin lines of black and white. The black is magic-dye, like on our lips, stained there for the same reason: to warn us that it was not an animal, but magic.

***

After the artists dyed my lips, leaving them swollen and hot, they put obsidian stylus against Varro’s. He kept his eyes open and watched the woman’s furrowed brow. I couldn’t help staring, watching and knowing he was feeling the same burn I had, as the stylus pressed against his skin. My mouth throbbed, and I sucked on the sliver of ice I’d been given, knowing this marked me in my path forever: an Anaximander, a wizard of shapes.

The artist left us alone when she finished, and I took the bowl of ice to Varro. I offered it, nodding so he knew it had helped me.

Instead of taking the bowl, he put his hands on my neck and kissed me with his too-hot lips. They sucked the cold from mine, and everything between us fell into balance.

“My mouth is stained for you,” he said. “Will you help me braid my hair into the forms of my family?”

I did, of course, fingers shaking. We braided and twisted, using thin copper wire from Father’s workroom, and barrettes of silver and crystal, until his long black hair swallowed itself in a miasma of coils and ropes.

***

“Get up, unicorn,” Varro says, dragging a velvet pillow from its back.

The unicorn flicks its white lion’s tail.

“Get up!”

I kneel and hold my hand to the creature. It lips at my palm, searching for something sweet. “Come away with us,” I say, “and we will give you figs.”

It sighs. The warm breath tickles up my wrist, raising the hairs on my arms.

Varro dashes back to the tower door and flings it open. “Here, unicorn! The door is open! Your mountain awaits.”

Rolling its river-rock eyes toward him, the unicorn shakes its head. White mane, thin as spider-silk, catches the moonlight. But it doesn’t move.

“Freedom!” Varro’s voice cracks. I push off the carpet and go to him. His wide eyes stare past me, and I see the white glow of the horn reflected there. “Go, you bastard, go,” he says.

“We can get one of the silver chains and lead it, and perhaps when it sees the sky it will run,” I pinch the lapel of Varro’s jacket, smoothing my thumb against the material to rub chalk dust away. “Perhaps it doesn’t understand it’s trapped.”

He looks down at me. “Perhaps she doesn’t.” His hand comes up and he brushes his fingers along my mouth. “Sometimes the signs aren’t obvious.”

I stare at the unicorn again, and never want to close the door. 

_____________

originally posted February 8th, 2010

image by Oliver Degabriele

[merryfates]

Marine Layer - story by Brenna Yovanoff

Rose hates the bougainvillea, which grows in wild sprays of red and purple, swarming over the railings and the walls.  She hates the oleander, with its sweet-smelling flowers and its toxic sap.

She hates sightseers and tourists, weekend-giddy and winter-white.   She even hates the hotel, although there’s nothing really terrible about it—after all, it’s just a hotel.

Mostly, she hates the fog, always forming beyond the breakers, always waiting.

“Marine layer,” her mother says, with her head bent studiously over the books.  She tallies up the cost of two hundred cases of wholesale ketchup, scratching out a number and replacing it with something different.

To Rose, the phrase sounds soft: marine layer.  The kind of thing of thing you drift into just before you fall asleep.

It sounds wrong.

The fog sits on the edge of the world, too far out to matter, but it creeps.  Faster than is right or decent, it rolls in over the water and covers everything.

The cliffs, which minutes ago looked out on a wide open sea, are bounded in by nothing.  By stark, pale gray.  A person could walk right out into the ether.  They could disappear.

The hotel is blanketed by fog.  And things change.

In the ground-floor suite, the ceiling seems lower and the walls don’t look right.  When the light gets blue, Rose can see marks around the air conditioning vent, long rents in the wallpaper, like something has been trying to claw its way out.  

The fuses go and so does the cable.  Calls drop.  Things go missing. Invoices and bills sit on the counter by the register, then disappear.

In the mornings, the sun is high and savage, bleaching the beige stucco of the hotel to golden-white.

Rose makes the rounds with her cart of fresh towels and her bottles of disinfectant and detergent.  She wipes down the mirrors.  In the sunlight, the world looks friendly, far from secretive.

But when the fog is in, Rose never cleans the glass.  There is always the possibility that when she looks at her reflection, she will see someone else looking back.

The girl is Rose as she would rather be, ethereal, silver.

The other Rose has fine, pale hair that sticks to her shoulders and the outsides of her arms with weblike resolve.  Her skin is translucent and perfectly smooth, unmarked by sunburn or freckles.  Her eyes are not blue, but a pure, ringing gray.  When she smiles, she exposes teeth of an uncommon whiteness, a moon-white.  This would be pleasant and reassuring, except that Rose is not smiling back.

This second Rose appears with startling regularity, materializing into existence at the sound of the horn.  She is calm and definite. She knows things.  She loves the hotel and she loves the fog.

If she can catch Rose’s eye, even for a second, she will want to talk, to have a conversation.  She says, “Come over here.”

She says, “Give me your hand, and I’ll do the floors for you.”

Rose scours sinks and tubs and pretends not to listen.  Her sense of self, like the fog, is tenuous.  A transparent creature, called into being and then interrupted before it could become substantial.  She wants her resolve to be steadfast, but in the end, she always reaches back.  Like the thing in the ground-floor suite, she puts her hands against the glass and considers clawing her way out.

The silver girl is there, pulling her the last few inches.  It feels like hitting the surface and then going under, falling into a slow murky dream.  Rose opens her eyes and finds herself looking out at a twilight-blue room and a silver girl.

The fog is in now, swallowing up the coastline, making it a different hotel and a different world.

Things change.

The silver girl gets out the spray cleaner and scrubs at the handprints on the mirror.  There are always so many.

Rose leans against the glass and waits for the sun to come back.

Story originally posted July 27, 2009

Photo by Neil Howard

[merryfates]

Beast — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

This is a story.

This is a story about two girls who lived alone with their mother on the end of a road at the edge of a forest. It was not a tame forest. The trees grew too close together for walking and by summer, the ground between the trunks was fast set with violent green thorns, rotted branches, and aborted saplings. It was not a pretty forest. There were too many trees in too small of space, all hedged in by foul-scented locust trees at the edges. The locusts were new. Tall and skinny, with leaves only at the top, like a broom, they grew ten and fifteen feet in a year and quickly hid anything the forest had to recommend it.

But the two girls were lovely: Rose and Lark-Louise were their names. You wouldn’t have thought they were sisters to look at them. I thought they were merely friends when I first met them, or possibly cousins. Twice removed, if cousins. They were that different. People expected Lark-Louise to be the wild one by her name, but she was slow and quiet as ripples in a pond. Dark-haired Rose was the fiend. The thorns in the forest had nothing on her for sharpness. Both of the sisters lived alone with their mother — I said that, didn’t I? — in a rambler at the edge of the trees. The house had four beds in it. Two twin beds in a shared room for the girls, an air mattress in the basement, and a queen bed that used to hold two. I know all this because I’ve slept in two of those beds. There was no father because a beast ate him. The girls don’t know, but he was trying to cut down the locusts behind the house to make the forest less ugly. It was easy for the beast to reach him from the snarl of thorns. When Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother found him, their father had a twelve foot spear run through him long-wise, and one of the beast’s pronged feet buried into his chest. Their father had managed to cut it off, you see, but the foot was still alive and angry and digging.

The beast was the most frightening thing you could imagine.

Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother hadn’t been a widow long before a stranger came to the house. He was young and dark and handsome, but also scruffy and skinny, and he looked to their mother like he probably smoked too many cigarettes. He had a gritty look, she thought, that deeply-lined, hungry look of a chain-smoker. He knocked on their front door as the street lights came on and he asked if they knew a cheap place to stay. But it was Ellwood, and there was no cheap place to stay because it was too close to the city. No cheap place you’d want to stay, anyway. He didn’t give a reason why he was in the outer suburbs without any luggage, but Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother let him stay anyway.

The stranger overheard them talking about him. In a voice soft as butter, Lark-Louise asked why he was allowed to stay.

“Because he looked afraid,” her mother said.

“Then he’s an idiot,” Rose had replied. “Because the beast only comes out in the day.”

But the stranger was neither an idiot nor had he looked afraid. He had crevices of eyes which found it difficult to convey emotion on purpose, much less by accident. Really, what Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother was saying was that shewas afraid. Even though she, too, was not an idiot, and knew the beast only came out during the day, it had taken a shovel and four gallons of gasoline to kill just the beast’s foot and she couldn’t forget the dappled sight of it.

For good reasons or poor, though, the stranger joined their household, sleeping on an air mattress in the basement, next to the water heater. The latter chuckled and groaned to him at night, reminding him of the sounds of the ugly forest during the day. In return, the stranger did what was expected of him and more — mowed the lawn, cleaned the basement, grilled dinner, opened difficult lids on jars. During the day he left when Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother left for work, and returned only moments after her, and during the long summer, the sisters missed him during these hours.

He didn’t talk much about himself. Rose had snuck into the basement and gone through his things once, and she found a little hoard of grubby bills wadded in pencil case. When she snuck down there a few weeks later, the bills had multiplied, but not by much.

“Drugs,” Rose said once, as she walked her bicycle down one of the side roads of the suburb. The street was lined with vestigial driveways; people had lost interest in the neighborhood before the developer had, and so this street was entirely made up of empty lots waiting for houses that never came. “Obviously he sells drugs.”

Lark-Louise disagreed with only a shake of her head. She secretly fancied the stranger and could believe no ill of him. “He’d have more money then. Drug dealers drive Mercedes.”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Rose snapped. “They drive Hummers now. And I’ll bet he rolls the money back into his own habit.”

This was not how the stranger came by the dollar bills she’d found. But at this point the two sisters had already been distracted from his occupation by the unusual site of a dwarf caught on a mailbox. More specifically, the dwarf’s beard was somehow snagged on the box. I’m certain at this point that you, as a reader, are wondering what sort of world this is that has both beasts and dwarves caught on mailboxes, and I’m telling you that it is the world you’re living in right now. It is full to the brim with beasts and dwarves and you can consider yourself lucky if you’ve seen neither of them up to now.

This dwarf was carrying on and howling as if he were facing his own death. He jerked and struggled against the wooden post, his dense body crashing against a FedEx delivery behind him each time he did. His distress touched the hearts of the two sisters. Taking care to keep her fingers from his mouth with its blunt teeth, Lark-Louise stroked the dwarf’s hair and whispered to him to be calm. Rose removed a folding knife from the ass pocket of her jeans and sawed his beard off.

Ha! I can tell you how that ended. The dwarf screamed as if they’d cut off a limb and began to shout abuse at the two girls. His beard! His beloved beard! The vanity of bearded dwarves never fails to amaze me.

“Some thanks!” Rose sneered. “We should’ve left you for the beast to eat and then seen how you felt about your beard after that!”

“The beast!” shouted the dwarf. His face was red as the beard wrapped around the mailbox and his voice dripped with loathing, not fear. It was as if he had met the beast and was offended by it. “I made the beast!”

“That was a bad idea, if it is true,” Lark-Louise pointed out in her soft voice.

“Pay no attention to him, LL,” said Rose. “He’s an ingrate and a liar and a short person. Leave him alone.”

The girls did just that and that evening they told the stranger all about it when he came home. He was amused by the story and for the first time they saw the hint of a smile in his craggy eyes. He had them tell it again, and then he vacuumed the living room before sitting down with the family to watch makeover shows. By then, they had all quite forgotten that was not a permanent member of their household. And it was true that the stranger himself had grown quite fond of the girls at this point. It had been a long time since he’d had a household of his own. It wasn’t something he’d missed until he had it back again, like a headache that had been invisible until it was gone.

If you haven’t guessed how I know all this by now, I will tell you now that I’m the stranger. It is my body that had been sleeping in the basement on the air mattress with its slow leak and my pencil case with the rumpled bills in it and it was my job they were discussing when they debated whether I would drive a Mercedes or a Hummer. It was me that Lark-Louise was falling in love with.

That summer day was not the last time the sisters saw the dwarf. Not too long after that, on a full-sun day, the best chance to the see the beast, the sisters came upon the dwarf again. Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother had told them not to stray so far from the house anymore, and so they were not wandering; it was the neighbor’s back yard where they found him. He was twenty feet up in a tree this time. A new locust that barely held his weight.

“Oh, ho,” Rose called, not without some humor. “Little man, what are you doing up there?”

The beardless dwarf shouted angrily down at her (beards do not grow back if you are a dwarf). Rose, as Rose tended to be, was unfazed by his many-faceted hostility.

“He’s stuck,” Lark-Louise said with sympathy. “Like a cat.”

“Like a fat badger,” Rose replied. This caused the dwarf to engage in a new paroxism of fury, which Rose endured patiently.

“I was trying to save her,” the dwarf snarled finally.

This was when the sisters noticed that they were not alone in the backyard. One of their neighbors was with them, only they had not noticed her because she was no longer particularly human shaped. The beast has fangs that hang from his mouth. Though his grip is powerful, his fangs are not. They are like strings or hairs as they hang from his jaw, drifting to and fro in the breeze or in the speed of his movement. At the very end of these insubstantial fangs are curved hooks as fine as a wasp stinger. Dangling a foot below his teeth, they brush against his chest constantly, but the beast is immune to his own poison.

The sisters’ neighbor, however, was not, and the poison had done its usual: first bubbled in the blood just below her skin and then been expelled as her body violently attacked itself in confusion. It would’ve ruined her for a meal, but the beast never ate his victims. He kills for pleasure. That is why they call him “the beast” and not “an animal.”

Lark-Louise made a soft and terrible noise. The thing she lost right then as she looked at that body was the worst victim of the beast so far.

“Don’t look,” Rose said. Then, to the dwarf, she added fiercely, “Why didn’t you warn us?”

“Of what?” asked the dwarf. “The beast is already gone.”

This reply angered the darker sister, who stomped to the garage for a telephone or a shovel or something that might mitigate the situation. Lark-Louise hugged her arms around herself and breathed very quickly. Her eyes were on the soft ground around the body; there were multiple foot prints from the beast that made it clear that he had two feet once more. Like the locusts, the beast grew very quickly. Finally she asked the dwarf, “Why did you make the beast?”

This story was never going to be told the right way by the dwarf, but the dwarf’s version was the only one Lark-Louise was going to get. He said, “There was a prince and he was wicked and so I cursed him.”

There was something making noise in the woods behind the dwarf’s tree just then. It growled and it chattered like the water heater in the sisters’ basement. Lark-Louise looked past the locusts into the forest, but she could see nothing but thorns gripping thorns.

“Cursed us!” Rose snarled as she came back, a shovel over her shoulder. There was no way that she could have done anything with the sisters’ neighbor with the shovel, but knowing Rose, it made her feel better to have it. She had not noticed the sounds from the trees yet. Anger was making her deaf. “That’s what you’ve done! How do we break the beast’s curse?”

The dwarf peered down at her from the height of the tree. He wore a very ugly face. His face was nearly always ugly, but most of all when he was talking about the beast or talking to the beast or imagining the beast before the beast existed. And it was very ugly just then. He said, “Only by killing me.”

Rose peered up at him, her shovel over her shoulder, her black hair blown straight back from her narrowed eyes. Both of the sisters could hear the beast now. They heard the chittering chuckle from his chest and they heard the drag of his metallic living feet, and they heard the groan of his spine contracting and growing, and they heard the moist part of his jaw.

“If that is true,” Lark-Louise said in a voice thin as a blade of grass, “that was a very bad idea.”

Then Rose chopped down the tree. I told you at the beginning that she was the blacker of the two sisters, harder in every way, and even if the dwarf hadn’t died when he hit the ground, I think she would’ve gone after him with that shovel. I cannot tell you if her action there was righteousness or self defense, but knowing Rose, it might have been the two glued together into something new and even more powerful.

So there was the formerly red-bearded dwarf dead upon the ground with the feeble split trunk of the locust broken beneath him and Lark-Louise heaving big silent sobs, because she couldn’t be loud even in her terror and sorrow. In the forest, there was still the sounds of something approaching, but in the end, it was not the beast the forest produced. It was me.

Maybe you’d already guessed that was where I went during the day. Maybe as soon as I said ‘prince’ you knew. Maybe back by the mail box, when the dwarf said he made me. Maybe back at the very beginning, when I first showed up on the sisters’ doorstep.

As you can imagine, this made the sisters both cry and they hugged me and whispered about breaking the curse and swore they’d never tell and they didn’t understand at all.

That night, back in Rose’s and Lark-Louise’s house, I climbed the basement stairs and padded into the dark kitchen. I silently slid open the drawer closest to the back door and I removed the barbecue fork. It was sharp. Not as sharp as my cursed fangs had been before, but sharp enough. I turned to the hallway where the bedroom doors stretched like an invitation.

After this, I thought, I would have to run. People would begin to recognize my face again. I had forgotten what it was like to hide.

I miss being the beast.

_____________________

Story originally posted March 19, 2012.

Image by EddieB55

_____________________

Author note: Possibly the most strange and unpleasant story I wrote for Merry Sisters of Fate, based upon our common prompt of Rose Red and Snow White or Snow White & Rose Red, whichever it is.

[merryfates]

Edge - Story by Tessa Gratton

Flying is like playing an Old Eur harpsichord.

My fingers stretch wide and flutter over keys and touchpads, my silver nails skim as if over smooth ice. I can watch with my own eyes and the thick oxy-smoke buffs against my pupils, keeping them from drying out in the absence of tears.

I watch the universe swirl by as I spin around and around in my forward arc back toward Earth. The spinning isn’t necessary this trip, as I left my mortal cargo on Fortune IX and all that accompanies me now are cubes of stri-rock and coated fossils in the cargo corridor. But I enjoy the spinning, so I never shut off the gravspiral.

#

When my last pilot began latching my wires into place in the warehouse under Fortune’s main dry dock, she’d said, “Ana, I wish I could go out with you, to see you dance.”

“You would not survive.” I sculpted my lips into a gentle frown. I liked her, and would gladly dance for her.

“I know.” She sighed, and the brown hair teasing her forehead fluttered up. I blew at it, laughing as the hairs tossed about in the low-grav field.

Her name was Jericha and she had flown with me between Fortune IX, Xerxes and Earth three times. Any more space time and her bones would collapse upon themselves.

“I have heard,” she said, “that they are working on a new generation of angels – a group born of human adults.”

I frowned. Early experiments had concluded that the post-adolescent brain could not adapt completely to sharing capacity through the dust.

#

We are called mech-angels, and we were born in fire.

In the Year 106 of Eternity a meteor shattered the left wing of the EFS PLUTARCH. The ricochets were felt throughout Mars-Com. When the remains were salvaged, traces of a new mineral were discovered fused to the metal. In a strange moment of serendipity, the mineral (designated S39-707, later known colloquially as angel dust) bonded with the exposed bones of the men and women killed in the crash.

Ten years later, the first angel was created. He was named Michael, and he was built into a freighter. He lived for sixty years and in many ways is my father.

#

In the empty, dead planes of outer space, we live unfettered by the boundaries of weak human genetics. Our blood is infused with angel dust, and our bones grafted onto its crystals in infancy. The dust poisons our brain, making us viable for implantation if we survive. Like parasites, we are bound into the hard-brains our ships, so that the dust flows between our bodies and the delicate machinery through tubes attached to our backs. When I breath into my clipper-ship for power-on, my silver blood fills the tubes and I am attached to the ceiling and walls by great, spreading wings.

#

The colors in space are impossible to describe. Bold flashes of psychedelic cluster galaxies against the black between pinprick stars. That’s the best I can do. The disconnect between the experience of beauty and the description of it is almost as overwhelming as the beauty itself.

But when I fly, alone in the vast mouth of beauty, the experience rips through me like electromagnetic shocks. It is the edge of everything, and I love it. I live for it.

#

I felt his arrival like a tropic breeze against my rear stabilizer. Warmth is not unheard of, when I am powered-on, because my sensors translate UV and some forms of quantum energy into temperatures for my meat-brain to interpret.

My heart picked up speed and the dust-blood flowed faster when he cut into my hull, along the smooth side beneath my designation numbers. I twisted and bucked, and hissing through my teeth as I heated my metal with an electric snap.

I heard his laugh rebound through the cargo corridor. It made my stomach tighten.

I locked down every door between him and my chamber. Red lights glowed hazy through the oxy-smoke. I caressed my touchpad and spun. Where was his ship? As he began to cut through the cargo doors into the inner circuits of the clipper, I scanned the space outside. I was nowhere. Nothing would hear any distress I sent for days. My tube-wings quivered as I shook and clenched my fists. He had no ship – how could he have no ship?

When he blew through the cargo door I felt the air suck out and spew into space. I was cold. I remembered the internal scans.

Visuals flickered to life before my eyes, wavering in the smoke.

He was beautiful.

An intricate metal suit clung to his body, melting against his muscles as he moved. It swam up over his face and slid back over his head to create a smooth helmet. On his back the metal pooled in a series of overlapping layers. Was it was new kind of space-walk suit? Could he possibly not have a ship?

When he reached the next door, instead of pulling out a heat-gun or explosives, he merely placed a silver hand onto the metal. His hand began to smoke. I screamed, in shock and fear. The noise cut through the scanners, and his chin jerked up. “Fear not, little angel,” he said.

I rallied my will and tripped the e-mag switch.

My body bent as the pulse of energy exploded out from me and my chamber. I saw all the colors of the universe, and the oxy-smoke vaporized.

It was dark then, and I was freezing. I blinked, my meat-brain reaching for the hard-brain, to connect with online functions and find out what I’d done to the intruder. Gentle red light flashed. One of my tubes had burst and silver ichor dripped lazily onto the floor.

And he was there. Standing in the arch of my chamber door. I opened my mouth but my lungs were too busy adapting to the oxy-deplete to form noise. He raised a hand and pressed a finger to his jaw. The helmet slinked back to reveal his face and head.

His skin was as silver as mine, his hair glowed like strands of Antrese pearl-fire. In his eyes were supernova bursts of gold and orange against a solid field of black. “I am Izrail, and I have come to free you, Ananchel.”

He knew my name, but I could not move. The gears that needed to shift so I could turn while plugged in were down still from the e-mag.

I shook my head. He was impossible. Rumors of an Angel of Death, of a free mech-angel, flying under his own power, had whispered at all of us for years. But it was impossible to function without a ship. Impossible. I leaned away from him. How did he breath in the oxy-deplete? “How…?” I managed.

“You will know, soon.” He put a hand to my back, caressing the bare skin between the tube-feeds. His fingers were warm. He twisted the clamp, and I gasped as the blood dust gushed out. And when he tore the clamp away from my flesh I cried out. Pain shot to my heart.

“Stop.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“You will fly with me, Ananchel, angel of grace. You will fly by my side for our own annunciations.” He slipped a finger along the ragged edge of my flesh, where the tube should have entered. I was distracted at the invasion, at the newness and horror of it. His warm skin centered all my thoughts on the hole in my upper back, where he’d removed the first of my tube-wing-feathers.

And I did not expect it when he tore the next one. Three – four – five – I lost count in the rush of heat as the thick angel blood spilled down my back. The pain was fire – like the fire in which we were born. He put his lips to my neck and kissed me there as he destroyed my wings. “Be born again,” he whispered.

The blood stuck to my skin, forming around my body, into a suit of silver-metal-armor. Like his.

“Be born again,” he repeated. “Breathe. Swallow your blood.” He held a dripping tube to my lips and the blood stuck to my tongue. I swallowed. It was tingling and warm, and when he put all his fingers into the holes of my back, I shuddered. It felt wonderful.

I stiffened when my meat-brain lost connection with the hard-brain. I was alone. The scanners – gone! I kicked and shoved at him, pushing, jerking back. My ship! My wings!

He took my hands and pulled me toward him. Together we exploded through the viewscreen and into nothing. I blacked out. I died.

#

My new breathing was harsh. The silver-blood-helmet slid in and out of my mouth and I breathed it. In and out from habit. I knew, my meat-brain recognized, that I did not need the motion of my dust-encrusted diaphragm. I did not need to breath.

I opened my eyes. I floated in nothing, spinning slowly around him like a satellite. His helmet reflected my own, and somehow I could see through it – the angel-metal bonded to my eyes, I could see anything.

Behind him stretched the universe.

I stood at the edge of everything.

_____________

originally posted August 20th, 2008

image by... NASA.

[merryfates]

Gingerbread - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

I learned the art of deception early and well.  If a person is to flout the law, one must behave sensibly.  Above all, one must be unremarkable.

The house was charming in an immaculate sort of way, with carved shutters and decorative shingles worked in a fish scale pattern.  The trim around the eaves was robin’s egg blue.

I’d been to fifteen addresses by then, and all were distasteful.  The kind of people looking to take on a lodger are not generally the kind of people one cares to live with.

The Ross Street house was quite different.  There were no unused gardening tools lying to rust in the yard and no indolent, flea-bitten dogs.  The lawn was small and tidy, with manicured flower beds and a flagstone walk flanked by rose trees.

The woman who answered the bell was easily in her seventies, but sturdy, pleasantly pink in the cheeks.  She told me that her name was Mrs. Kersh and she had advertised the room because her house was just so big and she did like to have some company every so often.  She currently let rooms to two boarders, a man and a woman, although they generally kept to themselves, and did I mind that she didn’t allow cats?  She kept finches, you see, and didn’t want them agitated.

When she inquired as to my line of work, I told her that I was a chemist, which was not a lie.  I was very good with chemicals of all kinds.  In the basement of a vacant warehouse near the loading docks, I manufactured the cleanest methamphetamine in four states.

Mrs. Kersh only smiled up at me, a doddering, oblivious smile, and exclaimed that I must be a very clever boy, although it had been years since I’d seen the near side of thirty.  I gave her a week’s rent on the spot.

There is no structure more satisfying than a well-kept Victorian.   From the first, I enjoyed my life in Mrs. Kersh’s house.  The floors creaked in a companionable way, and the quality of light was always a buttery yellow.

Mrs. Kersh liked to cook.  She made peanut bars and banana bread for school fundraisers and rummage sales.  She made hard candy so delicate and brittle you could cut your hand taking it out of the tray if you weren’t careful.  She mixed seafoam and fudge and divinity with a touch so light and deft that the sugar never burned and the thermometer was barely even a formality.  In her own way, she was every bit the chemist I claimed to be.

We of the rented second floor were a motley trio, pursuing our own interests in our own inimitable fashions.

Valerie Shaw was a seductress.  She liked to get her claws into rich, lonely business men, and bleed them slowly.  She was an expert at taking them for their money and their adoration and their dignity, and sometimes their warm, literal blood.  I’m given to understand that a handful of successful men crave that sort of thing.  However, I’m inclined to think most of Valerie’s gentlemen did not, and the revelation of her blood-lust must have been shocking to say the least.   She kept a porcelain cup by the sink in the bathroom, in which she soaked a set of eight steel cat’s claws in alcohol to take the smell off.

Carl Burton liked to start fires.  The proof of this was evident in his blank, piggy eyes and burned fingers, and in the distinctive odor that pervaded his clothes—kerosene, smoke, sulphur.  His favored implement was the strike-anywhere match.

We lived in relative peace for two months, before a pair of moon-faced detectives came for Valerie.  In a shocking turn of events, they charged her not only with fraud and infliction of emotional distress, but with the perverse and horrifying crime of bleeding several local children and leaving their bodies in a nearby wetland.  Valerie was led away in tears and handcuffs, hurling denials at the sky.

I watched from the veranda until the squad car had driven off down the street and turned the corner.  Then I went back inside.

Mrs. Kersh was in the kitchen, patting out a round of shortbread dough.  “We will have to put in another ad,” she said, reaching for the flour canister.  “Perhaps on Monday.”

“For a lodger?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, dusting a sheet of waxed paper with fingers dipped in confectioner’s sugar.  “This house is just too big for the three of us, and I do think it looks rather improper, an old widow lady living with two bachelor men.  And the impression one gives is so important.”

“Aren’t you at all surprised about Valerie?” I said.  “I mean, this really doesn’t seem like something she’d do—murdering children.  Other things, yes, but not that.”

“Oh, I don’t know.  I expect they’ll convict her just the same.  You see, dear, Valerie is a very difficult woman to believe.  At this stage in her life, lying has become second nature.  Only a fool would believe her now.  And she did have such a very particular proclivity for sadism.  Deviant to an almost obvious degree.  Would you like to help me cut out these butter cookies?”

The dough was dense and oddly fragrant. I leaned closer to the countertop and breathed deeply.  The smell roared up, luscious and familiar, making my head swim.  It was the distinctive bitter almond smell of prussic acid.

“That’s poison,” I said in the lightheaded rush that followed, trying to sort my addled thoughts.  “You can’t hand out those cookies.  The sugar—I think the sugar has cyanide in it.”

Mrs. Kersh smiled and nodded.  “I don’t care for children,” she said, sorting through a tin box of cookie cutters.  “No, I don’t care for them at all.  On that account at least, it is so nice to have a chemist in the house.”

Story originally posted December 1, 2008

Photo by Doug Wertman

[merryfates]

One Glass - story by Tessa Gratton

First sip: ambrosia.

Second sip: hints of black cherry and he leaned close to whisper into my ear, “How does it taste?”

“Like -” I didn’t want to say cherries or chocolate or any of those things that would make me sound like a wannabe connoisseur. “Like -”

Third sip: “Like a waterfall, or like whirling in circles til your head spins and you can’t find your feet.”

He stroked my cheek with one long, pale finger. “And?”

Fourth sip: “And cherries.” I turned my face and found his lips waiting. His mouth was cool velvet. I sat back, blinking down at my hands. They curled around the stem of the glass and I could see my rings through the amber wine, distorted into arrows of silver. “You make this?”

“My family does.”

I saw flecks in his irises the same color as the wine and I wondered if he drew it from his veins. But I laughed at the notion, drowning the giggle in a quick drink.

Fifth sip: flying. My heart fluttered, buoyant in a sea of honey-wine. My thighs could not feel the soft leather of the sofa beneath me, and I pressed my knees together.

I’d met him at a party in Heatherfield. His smile erased the memory of the shape of his jaw or the cut of his hair. The lights sparkled and the music was just loud enough that I heard what I chose to. I thought I was inviting him to dinner and following him home because I wanted him.

He raised his own glass and held his eyes on me while he drank. Half the cup in one swallow.

Sixth sip: I wanted to dance. I stood, swaying as vertigo swept up from my stomach. He caught me, pulled me to his chest. He smelled like the wine. Sweet, clean, promising.

Hands together, we turned in a miniature waltz, confined by the ocher walls and polished furniture of his slick apartment. I shut my eyes and wind brushed my face, tugged at my curls. He put a hand flat on my hip and stepped closer. He pressed the glass to my lips.

Seventh sip: We spun and I heard music; whistle and pipe and tinny drums. The hum of bumblebees surrounded us, and feathers tickled my bare arms. I opened my eyes and saw only his face, white and shadowed like a half-moon, with that Cheshire smile and honey-wine flecks in his eyes. Behind him a blur of dark forest, of black, narrow trunks and summer-time maple leaves. All around us the flitting giggles of sparrows and toads and fireflies.

My shoes sank into wet earth but in his arms I flew, around and around and my head fell back and my hair trailed, catching in twigs and tiny goblin fingers. They jerked and tugged and I cried out, but he swallowed my fear with a kiss, the way I’d hidden my joy in the wine. Hot lilac and wisps of rose-scent slunk up my nose and clung to my throat like a sticky aftertaste.

Around and around, his fingers cold and hot, his breath sweet. I released him and flung out my hands and they were caught in the whirl of the dancing. Fire licked at my fingers and the music was louder than the ocean in my ear. He held me and spun me. I heard his laugh lace through the melody and my heart was the metronome – they kept time with me. Their drums, their pipes, their tiny footsteps and

My hand slammed into cold glass. I stumbled. The tinkle of glass accompanied me down and my knees hit hard wood.

Silence.

I blinked. Beneath my hands was the worn floor of the apartment. Shards of glass glittered between my fingers as dim street light melted in through open windows. I pushed to sit back on my heels. Paint peeled off the walls and a ceiling fan dangled from electrical wires. The sofa was slashed and the decrepit coffee table was the only other piece of furniture in the room. I was alone.

I lifted the broken stem of my wineglass. It was solid and refracted red and blue and pale green light back at me. I bent and skimmed a finger through the gritty liquid staining the hardwood floor. Lifting it to my nose, I smelled mud and dank leaves.

_____________

originally posted June 25, 2008