It snowed off and on all day today, which felt like a bit of a joke with all the flowers blooming. The Easter Market is set up in our square, and all the trees are covered in blossoms. I had a fairly busy day, but the kids weren’t too rambunctious, and Fran and Donut and I had a nice walk in the evening.
I’ve had the very pleasant problem of a thousand different projects to work on. I’ve been hard at work hammering out two different stories, both of which are due for submission on Thursday. These are open calls, so it’s a wait-and-see game once they’re turned in, but I’m pretty happy with both of them. The one I’m still drafting is a nautical fairy tale based on a sea shanty, and the other deals with ominous snowflakes.
Meanwhile, I’m still plotting the next scene of VOID, which has been startlingly complicated to manage: it’s essentially a long complication between two characters, but it’s unfolded some questions about the magical system that I never took the time to answer before, and I’ve spend weeks already just mulling them over in my head. I think I’ve got the answers more or less settled now, but chapter is still in the planning stage, and every turn of the planned conversation is surprising me. I’ve been working with these characters for more than three years (or thirteen, depending on how you count), and it’s lovely to settle into the world again after spending lots of time on other projects.
Fran and I have been watching Parks and Rec, and I’m trying to channel April and Andy just a bit more in my approach to life. It’s great to be a Leslie if you’re passionate about something, but devoting 100% of your energy to everything you do (and losing sleep in the process) is a quick way to make yourself sick. Taking more time for fun, couple time, and sleep is making me feel a lot better, and after I spent a few days trying to complete a “must-do checklist” of writing projects, I realized that if I tried to maintain a full-time writing schedule on top of all the other work I do I would never have time for anything else. And when you’re well rested, it’s much easier to work quickly and with full energy, so it’s a win-win situation in the end.
For a sample of what I’ve been working on, here’s a short clip from the sea-ballad story I’m writing:
“Have you ever thought of going to sea?” I said. “I’m first mate on the Golden Vanity—that lovely galleon there—and we’re leaving for Constantinople in the morning. We need a cabin boy, and you look like a likely fellow. What do you think of signing on with us?”
He tipped his head again, and for a moment there was no sound but the grind and squeak of his auger and the patter of shavings to the ground. I could see him measuring the Vanity with his gleaming gray eyes, judging and weighing it somehow, and in a way he looked much older than a child. Then, finally, he nodded.
It took me aback how easily he’d accepted, and I wasn’t sure he’d understood. “Better think carefully,” I said, “for it’ll be a long time before you see your home again. It’s possible you won’t come back at all. But there’s good pay, and plenty of room for advancement if you do your work well.”
He nodded again, almost impatiently, and beckoned, as if I were the servant and he the master. Well, I thought, I’ll teach him more deference than that if he signs articles. But I was curious, and I had a bit of time before I needed to see about the cargo, so I followed.
Hope you’re all well! Let me know what you’ve been up to in the comments. ❤
I wrote this for a flash fiction contest in 2021. It didn’t win, but it made the final round. : )
Please inform the Headmaster that he is not welcome at my son’s farewell.
The event will celebrate the life of a young man leaving Earth both bravely and too early. Tomorrow, when Hell’s emissaries return, those waiting should be Jeremy’s friends, mentors, and family. No one wishes to see the man who doomed him.
It is a deep shame to this Academy that the man entrusted with guarding the Stone Gate ‘yea unto his very death’ abandoned his post just when the Gate’s opening was imminent, leaving only a half-trained student in his place. Jeremy’s compact with Hell has saved the world, and history will look upon him as a hero. Though he is lost to us, we can still support him as he prepares to go where no living soul has gone.
We always knew our Jeremy was born to be a legend. He is young for this journey, but there are young explorers on every new frontier. We know his letters will be a wonder to the world, whenever the world is able to receive them.
As for the Headmaster, he may wish to consider who will guard the other portals now that his best new champion is leaving on Hell’s compact. The Stone Gate may close, but other emissaries are coming, and our family has already given all it can.
Thus, perhaps it is for the best that the Headmaster will not attend Jeremy’s send-off.
I’m working on a short story for an anthology my friend Sonya is putting together. It involves murder, ghosts and other spirits, romance, wind chimes, and a dark forest. I hope you’ll enjoy it when it comes out.
Anthologies are difficult in general. Some other friends and I were trying to put one together, but more than a year on it’s still in limbo because it was so difficult to allocate responsibility. I’m really proud of two stories of mine that were published in recentanthologies, but I’m not sure how they were received because neither book has gotten very many reviews. It can be a little discouraging. But then I realize that I myself haven’t read that many anthologies recently–I haven’t even finished reading the ones I was published in. So maybe everyone’s just busy.
Anyway, anthologies are an incredible way to discover new authors, and I haven’t been doing enough reading lately. Are there any collections you’d recommend?
On a completely different subject, I realized last night that the publication of “In the Nevergo” qualified me for an “Affiliate Writer” membership in the Horror Writers’ Association. I applied and was accepted today. I have a few more dark fantasy pieces in the works, so I’m hopeful that I might be able to upgrade to an “Active Writer” (i.e. full) membership before too long. I’ll see if there’s a badge or something I can put on my website. There aren’t a lot of concrete benefits to joining writers’ associations at this point in my career, but it’s a nice boost in a field where it’s hard to feel like a working professional.
(***I just checked and saw that under the updated membership requirements I also qualify for an Associate Membership in SFWA. I’m not quite ready to pay two sets of dues, though, so I’ll keep working towards a full membership there for now.)
This was another story written for my Seoul writers’ group (this one in February 2019). We used to use a random word app to generate a three-word prompt. The prompt for this one was “countryside, coast, autopsy.” It’s extremely weird and never got much attention, but I’ve always been fond of it.
Following the direction ping on her phone, Teresa turned off the highway onto a rutted lane that ran toward the cliffs. The van bumped and stumbled over gullies drawn by floodwater in last week’s heavy rain. The fields were deeply green, the sky rain-soaked. Most deaths requiring a medical examiner’s opinion happened on the highways or in the confines of lonely homes–nowhere this scenic.
After a mile, Teresa pulled up beside a pair of empty police cars and parked. Wind curled around her ears as she stepped out of the van, balmy air full of pine and clinging sea salt. Waves soughed below the cliff. There was no other sound but the soft tromping of Teresa’s bootie-clad feet on the muddy turf.
She murmured a greeting to the cops, and nodded to the coroner’s assistant. Hilbert was leaning against his own van, doing something on his phone. Teresa opened her mouth to greet him–then stopped, gaping, as she saw the body.
One of the cops grinned. “Fucked up, huh?”
The body was nude, male, and a bit round around the middle. It was also completely hairless, lacking even eyebrows. The face was calm, eyes closed. Every inch of skin was a deep, bright violet.
Teresa tried to process what she was seeing. “Is it… human?” she said. “It looks like a mannequin. Or something.”
“Nope, it’s human.” Hilbert crouched, pinching up a fold of skin on the corpse’s arm, showing its elasticity. “Just… something happened to it. Don’t know what. Out of my expertise.”
Teresa looked up from the rock-studded meadow and out over the sea. The horizon was dim, smudged in the distance with storm clouds. The crashing of surf below the cliff was louder here. “Are there any clothes? Any… artifacts, or anything?”
“Nothing. Looks like a body dump. A hiker found him this morning. Not many people come out this way, so who knows how long he’s actually been here. He doesn’t smell, but…” Hilbert nudged the body with the tip of his bootie-covered shoe. “He’s… solid.”
Teresa frowned. “Don’t do that.”
Hilbert withdrew his foot, looking amused. “Think it’s going to bother him?”
Teresa leaned down–then coughed, covering her nose with one gloved hand. A haze of perfume hung over the body, so strong it made her eyes water. “He does smell.” She moved back into clearer air. “Like someone dumped perfume all over him.”
Hilbert blinked. “Huh. I didn’t notice. Guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks. Ready to take him away?” He beckoned to his assistant, who came forward with a collapsed gurney. The three of them lifted the body onto the lowered frame. It was tremendously heavy, and oddly rigid.
“Where’s Albert?” Hilbert said, grunting with exertion as they ratcheted the cart back up. “Could really use his help.”
Teresa sighed. ”He retired last month. They haven’t okayed a replacement yet.”
Hilbert frowned. ”So you’re working without a diener?”
“For the moment, yeah.” Teresa stepped back, wiping her brow. “So please try to discourage anyone else from dying in mysterious circumstances till we get one.”
Hilbert hesitated. “Do you need help? I’m not really trained for it, but…”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I should be able to manage. I’ll let you know what turns up.”
As she wheeled the overloaded gurney back to the autopsy room in her tiny office, Teresa felt the roof closing over her. The tang of disinfectant pervaded the chilly air, and the echo of her footsteps and the gurney’s squeaky wheels quickly overshadowed the memory of her brief escape. Maybe it was time for a vacation. She thought wistfully of the windy green hills she’d left behind.
As Teresa unzipped the bag, a cloud of perfume rose up, making her choke. It was a woody odor, more reminiscent of incense than cologne. Quickly, she put on a mask, remembering the Gloria Ramirez case in the 1990s, where toxic fumes from a body had put several people in the hospital. Teresa had never heard of toxic fumes that smelled like perfume, but whatever this was, it probably wasn’t healthy.
She stepped back and surveyed the body. She couldn’t get over the color. It was pure, vibrant purple all over–an even tone, not the dull settling of livor mortis or the pale blue splodge of cyanosis. She thought briefly of argyria, remembering the effect of colloidal silver. But this wasn’t that blueberry shade, or the light tinge called “blue” or “purple” in other conditions. This was the color of boiled red cabbage.
She couldn’t lift the body by herself, and had to soap the examining table, heaving and sliding the rigid cadaver out of the bag and off the gurney. Each part of it crashed onto the steel table like a box of bricks. Teresa thought grimly that she ought to send Albert a fruit basket. She’d never appreciated the value of an autopsy tech as much as she did now that she had to do everything herself. This was going to take her all evening.
She measured the corpse, then heaved the wheeled cart over to the floor scale. She was stunned to see that the man, who wasn’t much taller than she was, weighed in at 400 pounds. At five-foot-eight, even as round as he was, he should have weighed closer to 200. Teresa checked the scale, wondering if she’d forgotten to zero it, but it seemed to be working fine. Where had the extra weight come from?
She dragged the cart back off the scale and over to the light. Routinely, she took fingerprints, and clipped a skin sample for DNA testing. She tried to open the eyes to check their color, but the eyelids were stuck shut–she’d have to cut them open later, or leave that part of the report blank.
She looked the corpse over more thoroughly. There was no sign of external injuries–no scratches or bruises that she could see, though bruises might not be noticeable under the purple. Beyond the color, and the lack of eyebrows, the face seemed undistorted. If someone came to identify this guy, they should be able to recognize him easily.
She set up her workspace and started the autopsy. She tried to get a block under the cadaver, but had to give up. Anyway, the body was so stiff that it probably wouldn’t have helped. Leaving him flat, Teresa took up her scalpel.
As she began the Y-incision, the cadaver’s odor got much stronger: woody, sweet, with a slight overtone of licorice. In that smell was not a trace of decay; were she not cutting through what was surely skin, Teresa would doubt that this was a human body at all. Only a trickle of thin, winelike blood ran from the incision, tinged purple like the skin. She swabbed up a sample and kept going.
The scalpel met resistance just beneath the epidermis–blade’s tip dragging across a surface hard as bone, causing the skin to slither disconcertingly. Teresa pulled back a flap from the incision. The lab lights gleamed on livid fuchsia tissues, barely touched with that dark blood. Tentatively, she knocked with gloved knuckles on the hardened dermis. It sounded hollow.
She put the scalpel down, not wanting to snap the blade. She tried again with the long knife, but the serrated blade snagged on the resin. Frowning, Teresa put on safety goggles and turned on the bone saw. Its whine was loud in the closed room. To Teresa’s relief, it cut smoothly through the petrified tissues.
When the incision was made, she used the hook of her hammer to pry open the edges. They parted with a dull crack like a split coconut. A spiky, lemony odor, like furniture polish, rose from the gap. Wrinkling her nose, Teresa set down her hammer and looked at what lay beneath the skin.
Everything in the thoracic cage was yellow: intercostals bright as turmeric stretched across golden ribs, with amber abdominals underneath. What must have been subcutaneous fat trailed over the muscles in smooth white clouds, hard and resinous as the rest. Running her fingertip across the intercostals, Teresa thought of the resin-soaked bandages of ancient mummies. Maybe this, too, was some form of mummification–an embalming experiment? She took time to photograph the strange landscape of the thoracic wall. Then, regretfully, she picked up her loppers and began to cut open the chestplate.
The ribs gave more resistance than they should have. The loppers creaked alarmingly with each cut. Teresa wondered if she should stop–bring someone to help, in case she hurt herself–but curiosity, and a sense of strange urgency, drove her on. In the end, the loppers survived, and she lifted out the chest plate, exposing heart and lungs.
The lungs were pale pink, with a tinge of lavender. The heart was brilliant red–veins, arteries and pericardium all one crimson mass. The pericardial sac seemed to have fused with the muscle; it didn’t shift at all when she touched it. Teresa cut open the pulmonary artery to check for obstructions, but found it dry, completely empty of blood. The opening stank of leather and roses.
She took a few more pictures, and then picked up her saw again. The abdominals were as rigid as the dermis, but she had the knack of cutting through this stuff now, and the incision was much faster. She pulled apart the severed muscles, and found a rainbow underneath.
There was no blood, no other fluids–just smooth forms nestled together among pearly clouds of petrified fat, like a life-size children’s anatomy model. The liver was emerald, the gallbladder lime-green, the spleen and pancreas different shades of orange. The large and small intestine were two shades of blue, and the stomach was a cheerful carnation pink. The perfumes that rose from the cavity were so strong that Teresa had to turn up the ventilation. She thought again of embalming–but what process could make this?
There was no point in tying off the empty arteries, so Teresa began removing the organ block. She freed the larynx and trachea first–delicate structures wrought in violet, not too different from their original forms. A soft whistle rose from the larynx as it passed through the air. Teresa shivered, thinking of flutes. She detached the diaphragm–its pale yellow ripples reminding her oddly of a cartoon jellyfish–and cut the organ block free.
She tried to lift it–then dropped it, gasping as it crashed back into place. The organs were heavy–the block weighed two or three times what it should have. Albert, who’d thrown around 200-pound cadavers like they were teddy bears, had always teased Teresa about her needing to exercise more. She wished she’d taken his advice. She’d have to remove the organs one by one.
The lungs actually weren’t that heavy–they felt brittle and porous, like the dried coral her mother kept on her dresser. When Teresa tried to take a sample, the tissue crumbled like dry earth under her saw, releasing a choking wave of cedar-balsam. Coughing, she turned up the ventilation again, hoping the fumes weren’t toxic. She packed the lungs away quickly, breathing through her mouth as she picked up the crumbling fragments.
The heart was as heavy as a cinnabar sculpture. It thunked loudlyon the dissection table. When Teresa tried to open it, she found no chambers, just a mass of deep red resin. The aorta and the other great blood vessels were hollow, though, and crumbled like the lungs had under Teresa’s saw. Not wanting to damage them further, she packed the heart away.
She decided to leave the larynx and trachea for later, not wanting to damage them. She packed them up gently, and moved on to the liver. The deep-green form came loose easily. It had a pleasant, almost piney scent, and weighed over four kilograms. Teresa shaved off a sample and dropped it in the save jar, watched the green lump bob in the formalin. She added a fragment of the crumbled lung, and a small wedge she’d taken from the heart. A sliver of gallbladder was next. It had a strong medicinal smell, and she put it away quickly. Then she moved on to the gut.
Here was a problem. The intestines were petrified, inflexible in their coils. Hosing them out would be almost impossible. Resolving to do her best, Teresa carefully cut the intestines free. They were immensely heavy, and she thought she’d have to get a cart to move them to the sink. Then she looked into the large intestine, and saw there was no need: the gut was as clean as the arteries.
She shined a penlight into the deep blue opening, but there was nothing to be seen. She had held her breath reflexively–the odors of “running the gut” would be stamped on her brain until she died–but the intestines had only a slight earthy scent, not even unpleasant. Disbelieving, she lugged them over to the scale. They weighed more than twelve kilograms together–over three times what they should have. She sealed them in her largest specimen tub and moved on to the stomach.
Unlike the other organs, the stomach was not unnaturally heavy. It weighed almost exactly two kilograms, which suggested it was mostly empty. Methodically, Teresa tipped it over a bin, but nothing came out–it, too, must be dry inside. But she thought she heard a faint rustle.
She set the stomach back on the table and ran her saw delicately around the outer edge. It felt strangely like cracking open a geode. At last, very carefully, she opened it.
Out of the stomach rose a puff of honey-scented air, which glowed rosy-gold for a second before dissipating. In the stomach, atop a nest of golden down, sat a bird.
Teresa put down her saw and stared. The bird was blue, and sparrow-sized–a fledgling, it looked like. Its black eyes glittered under the lamp. Cocking its head, it watched her.
Enchanted, she leaned closer. The bird’s throat swelled. After a second, it began to sing.
It began with a soft chirp, sweet as a flute. Then it rose, and rang like crystal in the empty room, rang in Teresa’s bones. It shifted to a run of smaller notes, tripping across a scale both alien and familiar.
Teresa suddenly remembered herself, an undergrad, sitting in a dim auditorium, watching a girl she loved rehearse a Vivaldi flute concerto. The melody still ran through her dreams. Closing her eyes, she let it wash over her. The song went on for a very long time.
At last the music stopped, leaving only Teresa’s breathing to fill the silence. For a long time she stood with her eyes closed. Her heartbeat slowed, grew stable. The tension she’d carried for many years–maybe her entire life–evaporated. The world had reoriented itself. Suddenly everything made sense.
When she opened her eyes, the bird was watching her again. “Do you want to come home with me?” Teresa said.
The bird tilted its head, but made no protest as Teresa carefully slid her fingers under its body. Its warm, downy weight settled trustingly into the curve of her hands as she lifted it from its nest. She cradled it to her heart, and looked for a way to take it home.
She needed something soft. Shifting the bird to one hand, she eyed the golden fluff that it had nested in. She took up a bit of the stuff and found it soft and formless, taking and losing shape like fiberglass or cotton candy. She collected it all into a little cardboard box that had once held test tubes, and then lowered the bird into the makeshift nest. On impulse, she took the two halves of the stomach to the sink and rinsed them out, wiping them dry to leave them as clean as the gut and arteries. Then she put all the organs in the fridge, and wrestled the half-dissected body into a drawer. Finally, she tucked the precious cardboard box into her tote bag, very conscious that she was now committing a federal crime.
In the lobby, she waved goodbye to the receptionist, murmuring excuses about a migraine. When she turned towards the door, Jeremy Hilbert stood in front of her.
“Dr. Bowen, there you are! Taking off for the day?” said Hilbert.
Teresa nodded, trying not to think too much about the box in her bag. “Yeah, I’m not feeling well. Think it might be the fumes. I’ll finish the autopsy tomorrow–it should be all right until then.”
Hilbert frowned. “Should we call an ambulance?”
“No,” said Teresa, “just need some fresh air. The body’s in drawer three if you need to see it.”
“How far did you get?” Hilbert said. “Anything concrete?”
Something about his tone made Teresa uncomfortable. “Um… got him mostly dissected,” she said. “Haven’t opened the cranium yet. Whatever has him looking like that should keep him pretty well preserved till I get back to him. We haven’t run the DNA, obviously, but the samples and prints are ready for pickup.”
Hilbert watched her for a long moment. She tried to look back steadily. Finally the coroner nodded. “I hope you feel better.”
She forced a smile. “Thanks. See you soon.” She hurried from the building, and felt his gaze on her back.
She tried to walk evenly across the parking lot. She didn’t know what the relevant laws were–she’d never before been tempted to break them–but leaving with autopsy specimens would at least get her fined, maybe fired. Maybe she would end up in jail.
But who would know? Why would anyone expect that a corpse’s stomach contained anything worth stealing? There were no security cameras in the autopsy room. As long as Teresa stayed calm, she should be fine.
A little thrill of triumph buoyed her to her car and out of the parking lot. After that, she was free.
She woke to dawn light and the soughing of a breeze–and the prick of tiny clawed feet on her shoulder.
Teresa opened her eyes. Somehow the bird had left the box on her nightstand and made it over to her bed. When it saw her watching, it chirped, and cocked its head expectantly.
Of course–it needed food. Though she hadn’t been able to identify it last night, her research had shown that at this age it should be eating about once an hour while the sun was up. Last night she’d stopped at a pet store and, after some rapid Googling, gotten a tub of mealworms and a bag of soft puppy chow. The bird had eaten both cheerfully, but had fallen asleep right afterwards. It must be starving by now. Teresa wondered how it had eaten in its nest of golden light, buried in its bizarre womb–but was quickly distracted when she looked around the room.
The air was cool, because a window was open. This should have been alarming–it had definitely been closed last night–but the screen was still in place. The sheer curtain undulated in the wind, the only motion in the quiet room.
Shivering, Teresa sat up, waiting for the bird to adjust its stance on her shoulder. The covers slid over her lap a little too smoothly. The blanket felt different–the dove-gray color was unchanged, but the fabric was richer and softer. Frowning, she flipped it back. The sheets crinkled, cool and crisp, a higher thread count than she could ever justify paying for. She ran her hands over and over them. “What the hell?”
At last she pushed back the covers and stood up, looking around in growing bewilderment. The carpet under her feet was deeper and softer than before. There were new slippers by the door, velvet mules with thick fleece lining. Teresa put them on and slipped on her robe–still her own, thankfully, the old purple terrycloth one she’d had since college. She resettled the bird on her shoulder and went out.
The mute shuffle of her feet on the thick hallway carpet was overlaid by soft music, though its source was unclear. The air was chilly out here. There must be other windows open, other cool breezes fluttering through other curtains. For some reason the thought didn’t bother Teresa much. She felt quite safe.
The living room smelled good–incense and potpourri, and a hint of the honey perfume from the bird’s strange nest. In a corner, a cut-glass vase that had always stood empty was full of long-stemmed roses. Teresa touched one, and found it damp with dew.
Other beautiful things lay scattered through the room: a woven silk throw on the back of the sofa, a crystal music box on the sideboard. A tiny bronze unicorn stood on top of the piano. Teresa picked it up and traced its contours with her finger: the age-brown metal, the whorled nostrils and neat-cut eyes, the perfect spiral of its dainty horn. She’d never seen it before.
She set the unicorn down with a soft clink. Half-dreaming, she walked to the kitchen–barely looking around, though more treasures filled the corners of her vision. She held her breath, not wanting to wake up.
She kicked her slippers off at the kitchen doorway, and walked barefoot across the red tile floor. She hadn’t swept in a while, but the tiles were clean. Here, too, were gifts from nowhere. The red cloth on the table looked hand-woven. On the windowsill stood a row of bright glass bottles–vinegars, she thought, infused with herbs and fruit. On the counter stood a plain brown bag of coffee. Opening it, Teresa found much better beans than she’d ever bought, with deep notes of fruit and chocolate.
In the refrigerator, Teresa’s aging vegetables had been replaced with new ones that looked fresh from the farmers’ market. The door held a row of interesting-looking microbrews. The dairy drawer was filled with fancy cheeses. Next to the milk stood a glass jug of what looked like fresh-squeezed orange juice.
She closed the door slowly. Deep in her head was a running list of everything that was wrong with this picture. Teresa ignored it. Whatever benevolent magic was at work here, she would enjoy it for as long as she could.
A chirp on her shoulder reminded her that the bird was hungry. “All right,” she said, “just let me find you something.” She looked around for the kibble, but the bird was already hopping down her arm towards the counter, beelining towards a bowl newly filled with fruit. Teresa supposed it knew what it was doing. She let it hop to the counter and began opening cupboards, setting out other things for it to try.
In one cupboard was a loaf of good bread. She scraped a few seeds from its crust onto a saucer (cobalt blue, exquisite). The bird pounced, devouring the seeds. Teresa added a few sesame seeds from the spice rack. Then she took a round green pear from the fruit bowl, cutting a sliver for the bird before slicing the rest for herself.
The fruit was as sweet and cold as the wind that blew in through the windows. The bird cooed as it ate, beak slicing neatly through crisp white flesh. Periodically it glanced at Teresa, and warbled, puffing its throat, as if pleased they were eating together.
When they finished eating, Teresa found her phone and called in sick to work. Then she found more groceries she hadn’t bought and made a real breakfast: toast, tomatoes, scrambled eggs. The coffee smelled even better brewing, wafting warm vapor through the house. Teresa started to pour a glass of orange juice–then, feeling extravagant, she took down a bottle of sparkling wine she’d been saving and made a mimosa instead.
It turned out the fledgling would eat almost anything. Throughout the day, it cheerfully accepted whatever Teresa gave it: bits of egg, fruit, wild bird seed from a bag she’d remembered in the garage. It even ate meat from her lunch and dinner. When it wasn’t eating, it followed Teresa, hopping and fluttering around the house. It looked almost ready to fly.
Late that afternoon, someone knocked on the door.
Teresa felt a stab of fear. She tiptoed to the window, keeping carefully out of sight, and peered through a gap in the curtains. Hilbert, the coroner, stood on the front stoop.
Teresa stayed frozen. She couldn’t imagine what Hilbert must have gathered from her notes, from the half-dissected body and the petrified organs. She didn’t want to talk to him. She had an irrational suspicion that he’d come to take the bird away.
She waited there a long time. Finally, Hilbert left.
She called out sick again the next day. Then, hesitating only briefly, she emailed a formal request for a full week of leave, citing a personal emergency. The resin man’s autopsy could wait. In this beautiful house, with company for once, Teresa found she had no interest in returning to the autopsy room–taking its permanent stink up her nose, immersing herself again in the problems of the dead. She hadn’t taken a vacation in years–she had plenty of time saved up. And the strange corpse seemed unlikely to decompose. If Hilbert wanted results faster, he’d just have to send the body to another lab.
The house grew more beautiful every day. Breezes blew through sunlit windows over vases of fresh flowers and dried herbs. The music remained, always just at the threshold of Teresa’s hearing. Most of the time she didn’t notice it, but it was always there when she listened. At every turn, she found more treasures: paintings and tapestries of unknown flowers and fairytale landscapes; shawls, figurines, china, new sheet music for the piano. There was a new rug on the living room floor, with a subtle pattern and aged patina suggesting it was handmade. All in all, it was the kind of house Teresa might have made for herself if she’d had many years to collect the artifacts. She felt sometimes as if she were invading another person’s house, or standing in the waiting room of Heaven.
She rarely went outside, irrationally fearing to leave the house unguarded. She hadn’t needed to buy groceries yet; she never seemed to run out of anything, and every day there were new delicacies in the kitchen. She slipped out occasionally, though, to catch crickets for the bird. On the internet’s advice, she fed them in a bin for a few days, then froze them and fed them to her charge. The bird ate them rapturously, downing each in a few greedy gulps.
It grew until it was the size of a robin. After that, it got heavier, more solid, taking on strength and density. Its song became more resonant. More real. Teresa kept trying to identify it, but no pictures matched. It definitely wasn’t a bluebird. It might resemble an indigo bunting, but with a black corvid beak like a jay’s. Teresa thought of taking it somewhere–a university? a wildlife center?–but didn’t like to take it from the house. In the end, she stayed home.
The bird often rode on her shoulder, a solid presence in the corner of her eye. She was used to the mutter of its chirping now, the soft scent of its feathers. When she wasn’t carrying it, it hopped along the counter, investigated the curtains, fluttered in a crystal dish of water. The thump and rustle of its movements became part of the background music of her life.
Even so, the house was too quiet. To keep herself company, she began talking to the bird–about herself, her work, the mysterious resin man. After a few days, she had moved to other subjects: her loneliness; the years it would take to pay off all her loans; how she still wasn’t sure she’d devoted her life to the right career.
The bird seemed to listen, black eyes glinting. At length, it began to talk back.
It started as a whisper, soft as the ambient music. At first she didn’t realize what she was hearing. Then the whisper grew louder, and Teresa began to hear the words.
Bread, she heard, in the kitchen one morning. Just a suggestion, something she might have thought of herself.
She uncovered the loaf, broke off a little corner, and gave it to the bird. “No more,” she said, as if the fledgling had really spoken. “I looked it up. Bread’s bad for birds. You can have a cricket, or some fruit, or I think there are some peppers in the fridge.”
The bird huffed, devouring the bread. When the morsel was gone, it cocked its head. Cricket.
The voice was clear this time. Shaken, Teresa took a tub of frozen crickets out of the freezer and laid one on a saucer to thaw. The bird watched it for a minute, then gulped it down.
Teresa held out her finger for the bird to jump up. “Are you talking?” she said slowly.
It cocked its head again. To you. Talking.
“You are.” She exhaled shakily. “All right. How?”
The bird ruffled its feathers. Talking. Apparently that was all the answer she was going to get.
She didn’t ask anything else for a while, not sure how she’d process the answer. Finally, sitting that night with a book in the light of a soft new lamp, she said, “How did you get here? Where did you come from?”
Summoned, said the bird on her shoulder. I was summoned.
Teresa remembered the field beside the cliffs, the resin man’s organs like carven ritual vessels. She shivered, and didn’t ask more.
Hilbert came by three more times. Each time he stayed longer, shuffling on the stoop, trying more and more obviously to look through the windows. Teresa knew hiding from him was childish, but something in her rebelled against letting him in. She didn’t want to hear his questions about the unfinished autopsy, the hastily stowed specimens, the empty stomach. She wondered if he’d sent the body on yet.
She kept thinking of how the body had been found–how lonely the site had been. A body dump, Hilbert had said–but who had dumped it? How had the man died? Without finishing the autopsy, there was no way to know. Perhaps Teresa should feel ashamed for abandoning her job, but for now she just wanted to hide in this nest, thinking of nothing.
Whatever happened, she could never reveal what she’d found in the resin man’s stomach. If anyone learned about the bird, Teresa would have to hand it over. That was impossible–the thought of losing her bird made her desperate. She couldn’t imagine living without the fledgling now. And she knew instinctively that, if she lost the bird, the spell would break. She didn’t know if she could take living in the real world again.
On the fifth day, Hilbert’s tone changed. “Teresa,” he yelled through the door. “I need to talk to you. Let me in.”
They have him now, whispered the bird from her shoulder
Teresa jumped. “What?” she hissed, easing back from the window.
They who summoned me. He is theirs. Wants to know what you know. What you took.
“You,” said Teresa. “I took you.”
The bird nuzzled her cheek. Good.
Hilbert pounded on the door. Wincing, Teresa hoped none of the neighbors were watching. “Let me in, Dr. Bowen!” Hilbert shouted. “This isn’t funny.”
Teresa thought of the phone she had ignored all week. Maybe she should get it, in case she needed to call the police. She started to move.
Be still, said the bird.Teresa froze.
Outside, Hilbert shuffled. Teresa sank to the floor and leaned her head against the wall, listening to the coroner pace around her porch. He stayed for almost an hour. Finally, after a long silence, he left.
Teresa was left with a feeling of deep foreboding. She remembered how Hilbert had stood above the resin man, playing with his phone. She wondered who the coroner might have been talking to. “Who was he?” she said, watching Hilbert drive off. “The… man. Where I found you.”
A murderer, said the bird. Don’t worry. Not for him. Deserved it.
“Deserved what?” Teresa said, queasy.
Transformation. The fledgling nuzzled her cheek. To create happiness. He became an egg.
Teresa shivered. There was something about this she shouldn’t condone–a darker and more frightening aspect to her new joy than she’d thought possible. But she still slept with the bird’s nest by her pillow each night, and each morning she woke to find the fledgling cuddled against her cheek.
On the seventh day, she woke to a whisper: They are outside.
“What?” She sat up, veins chilling. “Who?”
They who want me. We must go.
Teresa rolled out of bed and went to kneel beside the window. Through the gauze curtain she saw them, a long line of sleek black-clad figures, all heavily armed, standing in bushes or leaning against house walls. She craned her neck to see further out the window, picking them out one by one. They were ranged down both sides of the street, as far as she could see in both directions. They didn’t look like police or soldiers–they were too relaxed, too patient, as if they did this every day.
They were waiting for her to come outside, she realized suddenly. This was a siege.
She slumped to the floor, shaking. “Shit,” she whispered. “What am I going to do?
Go, said the bird. Or they will kill you, and take me. Go, and save us both.
But she couldn’t leave. They were surrounded. Heart pounding, she looked outside again, trying to count the dark figures. More appeared the longer she looked, a legion of shadows, armed and ready. She imagined the sound they must make–boots shuffling, shoulders shifting–ranks and ranks of half-seen soldiers, one more waiting for every one she could see. It would be impossible to get past them. There was no way out.
She was breathing too fast. She forced herself to calm down, stroking the bird’s feathers with shaking fingers.
Across the street, Hilbert stood in a neighbor’s driveway, glancing at the black-clad figures as if asking for instructions. All of them ignored him. At last, he strode across the street and stood in Teresa’s yard. When he spoke, his voice carried clearly through the window. “Dr. Bowen,” he said, rather pompously, “we know what you took. Bring it outside, or these people are going to have to come in and shoot you. You have twenty minutes.”
Teresa’s heart skipped. Not a siege, then. She hadn’t imagined, somehow, that they would come into her house. The walls of her sanctuary, last night so impenetrable, seemed to melt away. Would she be found dead tomorrow in a pool of blood–the bird gone, her home destroyed? She imagined someone else performing her autopsy tomorrow.
“How can I get out?” she whispered to the fledgling, barely managing to keep from hyperventilating. “They’ll catch me if I go out. I’m stuck.”
Go up, it said.
“On the roof?” Teresa said, confused. “I can’t. There’s no way up from the attic–no windows.”
Go up, the bird said again.
Not knowing what else to do, Teresa obeyed.
The attic smelled of old wood and the remnants of many summers’ rain. She never came up here–hadn’t collected enough possessions to make it more than a refuge for spiders. She turned on the light and scanned the empty plywood corners, trying not to despair.
Then she noticed the ventilation fan.
Her shoulders straightened. It would be hard, but maybe just possible. Running back downstairs, she found what tools she could in the kitchen drawers, and brought them and a stepstool back up to the attic. With a lot of cursing, and a bit of blood, she unscrewed the fan and dragged it from its moorings. It tumbled free with a loud shriek, and bruised her face and shoulders as it fell. She dropped it with a crash that must have been audible outside.
At that, she froze. “Won’t they know we’re up here?” she whispered to the bird, lifting it off of the beam where it was perching. “They’ll see us on the roof. How can we get down?”
Trust, said the bird. You have cared for me. Now trust.
Standing on the chair again, Teresa lifted the fledgling out through the gaping hole she’d made in the roof. Then she began to pull herself up.
It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, and it took a very long time. Her shoulders trembled–her arms spasmed–her core muscles tensed, shuddered, and failed, again and again. Time after time she let herself fall, thinking each time that this was it–she wouldn’t make it. But the bird was outside by itself, and it had never flown yet–if she didn’t protect it, it could easily be caught–and so each time she lifted herself up again and kept trying. Finally, remembering a movie she’d seen, Teresa began to swing her legs, building momentum with every swing. Eventually she managed to hook one elbow out through the hole, and then the other, dragging herself up and out until at last she collapsed across the roof.
For a long time she clung to the warm shingles, breathing raggedly, absorbing the sun’s heat from above and below. She didn’t know when she’d be able to move again. If they came after her now, she’d be helpless.
When she opened her eyes, the bird was staring at her.
Stand up, it said.
Teresa couldn’t. But she did. Heaving herself to her knees, she lifted the bird onto her shoulder. Then she struggled to her feet, careful of her footing on the steep plane of the roof.
The sky was a deep, flawless blue. The sunshine dazzled her. Blinking, Teresa looked around at the nearby rooftops, the neat patchwork gardens tended by neighbors she’d never met. She regretted that, but it faded. There was no point being sad now.
Below her, the shadows waited, still in the silence of her neighborhood. She felt their gazes in her bones. At first she wondered why they didn’t shoot. Then she realized they wouldn’t risk hitting the bird. Whatever they needed it for was important enough to let Teresa stand free a little longer.
She closed her eyes and stood quietly for a long time, breathing in the summer wind and the soft fragrance of her charge’s feathers. A deep quiet came over her. She found that she was entirely calm. Finally, opening her eyes, she turned to look at the fledgling, and stroked its belly gently with her fingertip. “Shall we go?”
Go, said the bird. It began to flap its wings.
A great wind rose. It came from everywhere at once, rippling through the trees and bushes, catching her clothes, whipping her hair. It smelled heavily of balsam. The smell didn’t sicken her now. She breathed it in, giddy, until it seemed to fill all of her, as if she were a balloon about to rise.
She seemed to be much higher than before. A pleasant vertigo made her sway as she looked at the people far below her. Sunlight glinted on the guns’ black barrels–irrelevant, like details in the backdrop of a play. They were nothing to do with her, nothing to worry about.
The wind grew, billowing, enveloping her body and buoying her upward. Her bare feet lifted from the roof. She grew lighter and lighter, until the wind caught her like a scrap of paper and whipped her into the sky. Alarmed shouts rang out below. She heard gunshots, but didn’t look. She was done with all that now.
She rose into a cloudless sky, so clear and blue she had to close her eyes against its perfection. The bird on her shoulder was singing, a deeper, brighter song than before. They rose up through cold, through ice, through something that sizzled like lightning. And then the air grew warm, and they entered a veil of perfume. Rose-tinged sunlight beat against Teresa’s eyelids. She heard bells chiming, and opened her eyes to a vision of gold.
This story is almost six years old and was definitely inspired by the year I spent working at Borders Books after university. Let me know what you think. : )
Life as a cashier stretched long before him. His break was over. Lunch wasn’t for another hour. Jeremy wanted to do something strange—maybe dance?—but he lacked the energy.
Mark drifted by, looking as detached and bored as Jeremy felt. “Did you get those DVDs tagged?” he muttered to his coffee.
Jeremy pointed to the pile of stickered DVDs on the counter.
“Good. Call all the special orders?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“All right. Um, clean up, get things neat…” Mark glanced at the counter, found some clutter to point at: a roll of tape, a few unsorted returns. “Call if you need any help.”
“Thanks,” Jeremy said, and knew Mark wouldn’t notice the sarcasm.
Nodding vaguely, Mark started toward the cafe to scold the baristas for talking.
What would it be like to just walk out—drive home, never come back? He could stand for a while under the summer sun, feel warmth for once instead of the curdled air conditioning of the bookstore. He actually considered it for a while.
But he couldn’t quite do it. If he did leave, he’d be fired within the hour. Then what? Hard enough getting this job—there wasn’t a lot Jeremy was qualified to do with half a college degree and a drug offense on his record. If he left, he’d end up working at Wal-Mart, and he had enough trouble paying the bills as it was.
So he stayed, counting minutes, and waited for people to buy books.
A young woman entered after a while, face stormy. She looked like the sort of person Jeremy would like to talk to: black bob, chain jewelry, chunky boots. He opened his mouth to ask if she needed help—anything for a conversation. Just then another customer appeared to distract him, though, and the woman kept walking. He didn’t see her again for several minutes.
When she returned from the back, she held a book—a thin, flat hardcover, dark-red velvet—under one arm. It was one of the ones from the bargain bin—a blank book, or one of the schmaltzy poetry collections no one ever bought. She carried it oddly, though, half-hidden, and after far too long Jeremy realized she meant to steal it.
The woman saw him watching, clearly realized he knew what she was doing. Now she’d turn around, put the book back, because it definitely wasn’t worth anyone’s time to call the police over stupid shit like this.
But she kept going, still watching him, as if she couldn’t stop. As if she had to take this book.
Jeremy shifted so that he could see her path clear to the door. It only counted as shoplifting if she actually took the book outside. If she did, then he’d have to call the police.
She was almost to the gates now. It didn’t look like she was going to stop.
He opened his mouth to call her back. He didn’t want her to get arrested, not over something like this.
But then… he didn’t call, didn’t follow, didn’t watch her take the book outside. Instead, he walked to the other end of the counter, turned his back on the door, and began clearing up. What did it matter if someone stole something—stole anything? The store was about to go out of business. Soon everything would end up remaindered, and it wouldn’t really matter what anyone took. The woman was just getting an early start.
When he turned back, she was gone.
The store was almost empty. There probably wouldn’t be more than twenty more sales tonight. Maybe Mark would bite the bullet and close early. It would be nice to go home a little early, though Jeremy couldn’t really afford the hours.
Suddenly, a tingle ran through the air. Ozone flickered across the back of Jeremy’s tongue. A storm? But the weather was clear, earlier—no storms had been predicted. He craned his neck, trying to see the doors.
Mark ran past, then, coffee abandoned. “You’re in charge, Jeremy!” he shouted, and went outside.
Jeremy abandoned the register and followed.
The woman stood in the middle of the parking lot, book open in her hands. She looked at the scattered shoppers as if she’d rather not be watched, but then lowered her head and began to read.
“Excuse me,” said Mark, approaching. “Miss. I’m going to have to ask you to—“
The woman kept reading, raising her voice to drown him out.
Jeremy couldn’t understand a word. It was… a poem, maybe, but not in any language he’d ever heard. But he felt like he should understand it, if he could just hear a little better. He started to move—then stopped, as a tingle of electricity ran across his skin.
The woman read on.
Clouds gathered. How had they formed so quickly out of a clear sky? One—enormous, and almost spherical—began to pulse, as if something could burst from it at any second.
Mark had stopped talking. He kept making little abortive motions, as if to grab the book, but never quite managed.
Jeremy hovered at the edge of the crowd. (Day or night, city or suburb, there’s always a crowd.)
The woman read on, voice rising and rising, until the great cloud opened and the dragons spilled out.
Like a swarm of bees, a vast colony of bats, they flowed towards the earth, descending to the streets and shopping centers—blue, silver, scarlet, all different colors, settling to the ground as graceful as the folds of evening gowns.
The woman lowered the book and squinted upwards.
The dragon that landed before her was the deep, rusting red of venous blood. Red-tinged shadows fell from its wings over the girl and the ground where she stood.
She raised her face, beatific.
The dragon lowered its sedan-sized head to nuzzle her cheek. Between its wings was something that, on any other animal, might have been called a saddle.
Two other dragons had landed here, too. One, sinuous, crouched by the Home Goods. It was gold mottled with red, an unsettling asymmetrical pattern like the spots on an alley cat.
The other, much closer to Jeremy, was almost as large as the bookstore, very solid. Its skin was a deep and satisfying black, like the tiny onyx beetles he’d played with as a child. Its head was shaped like a snapping turtle’s, less refined than the others’—but Jeremy liked it more. Somehow, Jeremy had barely noticed it land, but now it sat with its wings neatly folded, as if it had been there for hours.
It, too, had a saddle between its wings.
The mottled dragon surged to its feet and sauntered towards the store. Its gait was lazy, awkward—like a Komodo dragon, actually. Its wings stayed poised as if ready to take off.
The door of Home Goods was covered by a knot of screaming people—maybe barricaded by equally frightened people inside. Jeremy watched, mesmerized, knowing he was about to see violence but with no way to intervene. The woman by the red dragon watched, too. Her face was impassive, no more readable than the dragon’s.
The black dragon was watching him intensely. Its eyes were a deep, bloody crimson. They seemed to expect something, though he couldn’t tell what. Faintly, he could smell the dry odor of snakes, bitter herbs, cinnamon.
The yellow dragon was almost at the door. It lowered its head, as if to assault the building—maybe to assault the people. Jeremy couldn’t look away. Would it break down the door, rip it from the hinges—
Before the dragon could move, the door flew open. A young man ran out—tall and thin, stylish, with dark skin and a golden pompadour. He shoved past the screeching people and threw himself at the dragon.
The dragon froze drew back its neck and froze, oddly birdlike.
The man stood for long moments with his arms held open, as if he were barely restraining himself from hugging the creature around the neck. Finally, he stepped forward.
Someone grabbed his arm. Mark. Mark, who tried and failed to prevent the summoning, was trying to prevent whatever was going to happen next. Jeremy couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the gestures were clear: back away—dangerous—go inside. Jeremy wanted to laugh—trust Mark to bring a bit of the aggravated middle-manager into this event.
Then he looked again at the stranger. The laugh died.
The man watched the dragon as if transfixed—like a parent who’d just seen their child for the first time, or someone who’d just fallen in love. He lifted a hand, and the creature that had looked so fierce a moment ago nuzzled it like a giant cat.
The man curved his body towards the dragon. It leaned in, cuddling like a much smaller creature. They seemed bonded already, as if they were cementing some connection that had already been there before.
Jeremy couldn’t keep watching—the sympathetic emotions that were rising in him were getting overwhelming. He turned back to look at the other two dragons.
The red dragon appeared… bored, if anything. The woman, who had climbed onto the saddle, appeared to want to be gone. She would be gone soon—Jeremy was sure this summons was forever. Woman and dragon already looked like a unit—two parts of one being, inseparable.
That left the black one.
Jeremy turned back to the black dragon with… trepidation? Excitement? It was watching him as if he were the only person in the world. If the other two riders were chosen already, then the black dragon’s rider must be… Jeremy.
It felt like hours before he was brave enough to approach. Just as he started walking, a hand closed on his arm.
“Jeremy.” Mark’s voice, hoarse but recognizable—Mark’s average, muted manager voice. He stood at Jeremy’s shoulder, and clearly meant to keep Jeremy from leaving if he could.
Jeremy shook off his hand. The dragon watched solemnly, perhaps with a touch of humor. It must have seen many Marks throughout however long its time had been, would surely see many more.
“It’s dangerous.” Mark’s voice was hesitant, as if Jeremy had been compromised somehow and must be handled carefully. “There’s, like… some kind of spell on you, I think. You need to stay away… they’re too big…”
Jeremy started walking again.
The dragon inclined its head, as if it were a king greeting an honored guest or a welcome supplicant. Jeremy nodded back.
It was as hot here as under a blazing sun, though the day had been mild until the dragons came. The odors of snakes, herbs, and cinnamon grew stronger, along with a touch of brimstone now. Did they really breathe fire?
Mark made a sound of protest, but fell back. His protection apparently didn’t extend into the dragon’s shadow.
Jeremy walked until he stood between the curved, table-sized talons, and then looked up. The terrifying eyes were fixed on him.
He bowed. “I’m here to talk to you,” he said.
The dragon didn’t speak. Could it? In some stories they could. Maybe it would speak to him when it was ready.
“Are you here for me?” He knew the answer.
The dragon nodded once.
“I’m supposed to go with you.”
Another nod.
“Where?”
The dragon tipped its head—what was Jeremy doing standing, asking questions, when he could be on its back waiting to be taken away? And he wanted to go up there. Mostly. But he couldn’t leap without looking.
“Will we come back?” he said, after a brief silence. The lot was quiet; if anyone was speaking or moving, he didn’t hear. Nothing mattered in the world except this conversation.
The dragon cocked its head the other way.
This moment would define Jeremy. Would he go back in—go back to retail? Or would he sit between a dragon’s wings and be carried into the clouds? He felt that he could almost fly himself just knowing there was such wonder in the world.
But, thinking of his parents, he had to hesitate. Could he just leave without saying goodbye? They had always treated him well, supported him even now, although he’d disappointed them. And who would take care of his cat, if he left? He couldn’t just leave her. Of course, his parents would step in, but she was his responsibility. If he left on dragonback, he’d never see her again.
But it was a dragon.
As he considered, there was an odd dry huff across the parking lot, a scrape of talons on cement. When he looked up, the yellow dragon was bounding towards him. The rider, face hard and cool now, sat like a jewel between its shoulders. Like the woman, he seemed a part of his dragon, not an individual any longer. It was the most frightening thing Jeremy had ever seen.
He almost ran—but the black dragon wasn’t reacting, looked completely unimpressed, so it would be silly for Jeremy to panic. Still, it was hard to keep still, waiting for the yellow dragon to pass or kill him.
At the last second, the yellow dragon threw itself fluidly aloft, wings pumping down a hurricane wind below. Around the lot, people screamed and took pictures.
Next, the red dragon stretched, bowing nearly to the ground, back sloping upward like the side of a cliff. The woman gripped its shoulders almost absently. With a single beat of its wings, the red dragon flashed into the sky.
Then it was only Jeremy and the black dragon. Time to take his place, ride into the sky.
He couldn’t move.
The dragon leaned forward until its face was only inches from his. Its breath scorched him, but it felt comforting. The scent was everywhere—he breathed it in, and it seemed to spill out through his pores again, until he thought it would be a part of him permanently.
He leaned into the warmth. Slowly, feeling immensely shy, he laid one hand on the dragon’s snout.
The skin was bumpy, pliant, very hot. From that bare touch, Jeremy already felt a deep and subtle connection beginning to grow between them. He felt sure that if he didn’t back away now, he would never be able to.
The dragon head followed his hand with its head, quite delicately for something that size, as he tried to withdraw. Finally he pulled his arm away and hid it behind his back. The dragon lowered its jaw, great red eyes sorrowful as an abandoned dog’s.
“I have family.” With considerable difficulty, he stopped himself from reaching out again. “Parents. I have a cat.”
It looked at him as if he were insane. He probably was.
“Can I join you later?” It seemed unlikely, but he had to ask.
The dragon’s look was unreadable.
“I’m sorry.” Jeremy’s voice was rough. “I just can’t.”
He couldn’t bring himself to leave, and couldn’t bear for the dragon to leave, either. He wanted to touch it again, to feel that connection growing, but it wouldn’t be fair—they’d miss each other forever.
He almost begged the dragon to stay, but managed not to. If he couldn’t leave his family, make in a second a decision that would affect his entire life, he couldn’t ask it of the being that would have been his companion. And certainly he couldn’t ask the dragon to live here on earth—it couldn’t thrive here. Still, stepping back was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
“Goodbye for now, I guess.” Jeremy held his hands forcibly at his sides. “Good luck.”
The dragon’s look was deep and sorrowful, full of unreadable meanings. It turned and bounded away, surprisingly light, almost silent, and leapt into the air.
Instantly, Jeremy knew he’d chosen wrong. He started running, through the crowd of spectators (of which he was one, once again), past Mark (who tried to stop him), past the stricken, crying friends of the yellow dragon’s rider—waved his arms, hoped the dragon would somehow see him and return, take back his stupid decision. “Come back!” He knew it couldn’t hear him, but he yelled as loudly as he could. “Please. I was wrong. Please. I want to go, too!”
But the dragon flew on, joining its companions, and the lines of dragons, dozens and hundreds of them, rising from all the places where they’d landed, most with riders on their backs though a few without, converged on the spherical cloud that was now closing like a flower at sunset. Then all of them folded into it like shadows, and at last the cloud was only a cloud.
He wanted to curl into a ball and die—go lie in bed, never get up again.
Mark was touching his shoulder.
“Yes?” Jeremy managed to say. Was he somehow still on duty?
Mark seemed embarrassed, like he didn’t have the words to talk about what had just happened. “You made the right choice,” he said, more compassionately than Jeremy would have expected. “I’m glad you’re still here. Are you all right?”
“Fine. Thanks.”
“Listen, uh…” Mark scratched his head. Though considerably older than Jeremy, he seemed much more confused and wrong-footed by the situation (though much less grief-stricken as well).
“I’m going to go.” Jeremy took a step back. He needed to find some place where no one had heard of him, sit down for a year or ten and figure out what had just happened. “Is that okay? I can’t work any more today.”
“What? Oh…” Mark clearly wanted to keep talking, but to his credit said quickly, “Of course, sure. Ah, take tomorrow, too, if you need to.”
“Thanks.” No knowing what else to say, after a moment Jeremy left. Mark didn’t call him back.
A few people tried to stop him. He ignored them. They had no connection to him anymore. He’d never come back here again—every time he saw the place he’d remember… could it be called disappointment if you could blame only yourself? Heartbreak, certainly.
Jeremy was halfway across the parking lot, and was considering walking home, when his foot struck something on the ground. He stopped.
On the asphalt, surprisingly clean and undamaged, was a cheap-looking book—flat with a dark red velvet cover.
It was in his hand in seconds. He began to open it—then stopped, aware of the crowd, wanting to keep this piece of magic to himself. He glanced around to see if anyone had noticed him pick it up. Some people were watching him, but that didn’t mean anything: they’d been watching him him since the dragons left, probably long before.
Holding the book firmly closed, Jeremy began to run—out of the parking lot, across the street, past the bank where his paychecks were deposited, past the grocery store. There were people here, too, many more than usual at this time of day, all talking and pointing at the cloud (indistinguishable now from the others, maybe not the original cloud at all). There had been dragons here, too. Jeremy wondered if they’d taken anyone.
He ignored everyone in the lot. They ignored him, too. He was no one special here, just some kid late to work in one of the shops.
He ran around to the back of the strip and found a quiet space behind the pharmacy. He sat down and held the book a long time.
He had to open it—find whatever the girl had read, read it out loud, bring them back—but what if… what if it wasn’t there? Maybe this book would turn out to be nothing—some other thing, “Poems About My Mother” or a blank diary or something? What if it could no more call dragons than he could on his own?
“Just open it,” he muttered. He took a deep breath and opened the book.
Immediately, he was disappointed: the book was in English. He was sure the girl had spoken a different language, so this couldn’t be it. But as he kept turning the pages, he realized that the poems inside were very unusual.
“The Lay of the Mermaid.” “Under a Cursed Tree at Midnight.” “The King Approaches.” “May the Spirits of the Damned Soon Fall Upon Your Enemies.” All were different; some weren’t poems at all. Some—“History of a Lost City and All That Tragically Befell It”—were walls of text, pages and pages that his eyes skimmed over without absorbing anything. Others were extremely short. One, “Awakening,” had only two lines.
Here and there Jeremy paused, suffused with the urge to read aloud—but he wanted the first poem he spoke, if he spoke any, to be the right one.
And there it was: “To Summon Dragons from the Sky.”
It was two pages, lines laid out neatly like the couplets in Beowulf. It looked approachable—would take only minutes to read. He could choose the perfect place and time, say goodbye to everyone, find a home for the cat…
But as he stared down at the page, he found that his resolve had wavered.
With a twinge of guilt, he turned to the next poem. “Lullaby for an Elfin Child Found Sleeping in a Bower.” He was careful not to read too much of it, feeling that too much attention could unlock the magic early—but it looked like a beautiful poem, very tender, full of starlight and sentiment.
He turned to another poem. “A Song to Breathe Underwater.” Deep echoes bubbled through his mind, and he felt that someone was calling to him.
Carefully, Jeremy closed the book and smoothed his fingers over the cover. There was time to decide. He’d look at them all—beginning to end—before reading anything aloud. He wouldn’t waste this choice. He had time.
Tucking the book under his shirt, Jeremy started towards home.
This is one of the ones that never got much attention. It’s a quiet story, and most of the action is internal, but it meant a lot to me when I was writing it. I think the ending is a little ambiguous, so I’d be interested to know what you think will happen.
The shutters in the hearth room were already drawn. A bright fire had been laid, filling the round room with shadows and chinaberry smoke.
Bas stood by the hearth, chewing on a grass stalk. He looked up when Amir came in, then back at the fire. His face shone with sweat; he’d been out running, or pacing.
Amir crossed to the sofa and sank into the joint of its two halves. He leaned his face against the cool, cracked leather. “I’m nervous,” he said, surprising himself with the admission. A tight knot had grown in his stomach for days. He’d barely eaten anything at supper, though it had only been herbs and lentils—a simple meal meant for contemplation. Traditional on century nights.
His cousin laughed. “Don’t worry. You’re very clever; I’m sure great things are ahead of you.”
“Lots of people are clever,” said Amir glumly. “Mother’s brother was clever. A horse kicked him, and he lost half his wits. One-Eyed Ahmad was clever, and he was a muck-hauler. What if I’m a muck-hauler?” His breath was speeding up, but he couldn’t slow it. “We don’t know what any of us will see.”
Bas inhaled sharply. Before Amir could try to reorder his words into something more positive, his cousin stalked from the room.
He thought of following, but didn’t. Bas would be unapproachable until this was over. In the unlikely event that the fruit didn’t send him after Isra, he’d leave tomorrow anyway. He’d only stayed this long because he hoped that the century fruit would give him a direction to start in.
He stood and walked, running his hands over the old furniture, the hangings, the pottery. Here and there were crude objects made by generations of the family’s children. A clay figurine of an old traveler with a bird on his pack had been Amir’s gift to Grandmother three years before. Beside it was a lopsided coil-pot Aunt Gili had made when she was five or six, painted with wobbly olive branches under its cracked glaze. Other things were so old no one knew their stories. How many people had left this house over the centuries and never returned?
The adults still lingered over their tea in the kitchen. The mint was a cool thread under the tang of woodsmoke. He could hear Mother’s voice, quick and strident, rising over the rest. Again she said that this was all too sudden, too breathtaking. She’d wanted to put off cutting the fruit, at least till tomorrow, but Aunt Gili had gently reminded her that it would rot after just a day off the tree. Bas had found it this morning. If they didn’t eat it tonight, they might go another century without guidance.
He sat back down, inhaled again the familiar scent of old leather. It seemed harsh, almost crude, for all of them to eat the fruit where they could see each other’s faces. Kinder if they could take their visions in their rooms, their private spaces. He thought of the fig tree outside the kitchen, where he could sit in fragrant breezes as the sun set over the desert. He’d rather process his fate alone.
Was it fate that they would see? Mother insisted they could ignore the visions if they didn’t like them. Father said she wanted them all to stay within calling distance, but Amir was sure Adi, at least, would go farther.
He slouched down in his seat. He wasn’t sure he wanted to try the fruit at all. His family probably wouldn’t push if he refused, though they’d be disappointed. Twelve was young. But though a full century didn’t always pass between one fruit and the next—once it had supposedly only taken 20 years—he probably wouldn’t see another in his lifetime.
His muscles were tensing up. He eased them deliberately, though his heart still raced. Which would be worse: to see a vision, and have to leave the farm—or pass it up, and stay here forever?
Hani stomped in then from the kitchen, scowling. Amir straightened. “Hey, little. What’s wrong?”
His brother climbed up next to him, sliding down on his first attempt. “I’m angry,” he announced, glaring at the fire. His face looked sticky from the honey pear he’d had for dessert. At five, Hani had nothing to contemplate.
Amir smiled, but lacked the energy he usually had to entertain his brother. “Because you don’t get to try the fruit?”
Hani kicked his heels back against the sofa, nodding. His lip trembled.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Amir after a moment. “Tomorrow, when our chores are done, we can go for a long walk. All the way to the west field, if you like. Maybe we’ll find some flowers for Mother.” The adults generally preferred that the children not wander to the west end of the farm, as it bordered the desert and was mostly unguarded, but they would probably make an exception.
Hani looked marginally cheered by that idea, but his face soon clouded again. “Why do you get to eat it?” he said, kicking his heels again.
I don’t know. Amir drew his knees up to his chest. It was a lot of pressure for someone who’d never been farther than the city—to know that in a few years he would either leave forever, maybe for someplace he’d never heard of, or settle in for the rest of his life.
Then Shani and Shai came arm in arm through the curtain to the back wing, trailing a cool cloud of perfume. Shani was whispering, Shai giggling. Fais followed, smiling. Amir shifted to make space for him, but Fais followed his sisters to the bench by the hearth, and sat closer to them than he usually would.
They might be gone tomorrow, Amir realized suddenly. Both his girl cousins were seventeen. The visions were said to fade quickly, and it was best to start as soon as possible if your path lay elsewhere, especially if details were unclear. Amir might wait three or four years, until he was better prepared, but even that was risky.
And Adi… His sister appeared then, a silhouetted against the warm light of the kitchen doorway. It was still startling to see the abbreviated outline of her hair. All the other women in the family kept theirs long, but Adi had seen something in a magazine that made her chop hers off at chin level.
She was wearing the new outfit Father had brought her from the city. To Amir, she looked very sophisticated—shoulders bare under the cropped blouse Mother hated, full silk trousers swishing as she walked. He had expected Mother to scold her for wearing something so frivolous tonight, but Mother had only sighed, and looked at Adi with a sort of desperate fondness.
Adi, too, would probably waste no time in leaving.
What would that be like? They’d never been particularly close, but Amir supposed they loved each other as much as siblings usually did. He would miss her if she left. He thought she would miss him, too, at least when she remembered to.
The adults filed in from the kitchen: Father, Mother, Grandmother, Aunt Dar, Aunt Gili, Uncle Rabi. Lutfi and Siva came hand-in-hand, whispering. They sat in the shadows a little apart from Lutfi’s sisters.
Grandfather came last of all. In his hands was the covered silver dish he’d brought out and polished that afternoon.
As the adults all sat on the couches, Bas slouched back in. He leaned against the wall by the doorway, not looking at anyone, as far from everyone else as he could stand without leaving the room.
Everyone stared at the dish Grandfather had balanced on his knees. He was running his hands along its edges, uncharacteristically hesitant.
Father cleared his throat and clapped Grandfather on the shoulder. “Here we all are.” He’d dressed especially well tonight—formal silk, beard neatly trimmed. He seemed to expect good news.
“Here we are.” Grandfather glanced at Father. Father removed his hand.
Hani slid from the sofa and ran to Grandfather’s knee. “May I open it, please?”
Grandfather hesitated, and then held the dish out so Hani could reach it. “Go ahead,” he said.
Hani’s fingers smudged the silver as he groped for the handle. At last he got hold and opened it.
The fruit might never have fallen at all, especially from a tree as high as a century tree. Its burnt-golden skin was flawless. It had a flattened spherical base with a little dome on top where the stem was. Strange. As it ripened, it had been a fig-sized green lump, high in the branches. Now his hands wouldn’t have circled it.
Hani reached for the fruit, but Grandfather shook his head. “You’ve helped enough, dear. Go sit with your brother.” Hani obviously wanted to protest, but even he wouldn’t argue with Grandfather.
Grandfather’s wrinkled hand sagged under the fruit’s weight as he lifted it from the dish. He offered it to Grandmother. “Well, my dove.” He cleared his throat. “Why don’t you cut it?”
Grandmother had laid out a plate, a fruit knife, and a pewter saucer on a tray. She took the fruit and looked around, moving her lips as she did when she counted. “Fifteen, then,” she muttered. Setting the fruit on the plate, she picked up the knife and began to cut.
Mother shifted. Always calm and reasonable, she’d been unusually agitated about all this. Father watched her, but didn’t move or speak. They hadn’t spoken much lately, and today they’d hardly looked at each other. Father, uncharacteristically quiet, had mostly sat alone in his courtyard, writing materials untouched beside him.
Bas fidgeted, shuffling and tugging at his clothes. He was sweating again.
Everyone else was rapt and quiet. Adi watched the fruit as if it were the only thing in the world. Aunt Gili and Uncle Rabi held hands.
Grandmother cut precisely, methodically. The sound was shht, shht, shht, shht, like eastern pears when you cut them. Drops of juice flew out from the blade as it sawed. Some landed on her spotted knuckles, but she ignored them.
A strong perfume floated out: apple, honey, something floral. Pears, too? He couldn’t tell.
The knife reached the bottom. Grandmother began another cut. Shht, shht, shht, shht.
The first segment finally fell away. The flesh was brilliantly white: whiter than apples with their green overlays, or pears with their brown shadows. Would it be tart like apples? Sweet like pears? Grandmother sliced away the core, coaxed out the black seeds with the point of her knife, dropped them into the saucer. Plink, plink. She offered the section to Grandfather.
He shook his head. “Cut the rest, dear, and we’ll all eat together,” he said. “I think it’s best, don’t you?”
Grandmother set the section on the plate and began cutting again. She worked so slowly, pausing each time to cut away the core, to drop the seeds into the saucer. Plink, plink…
Amir’s mind wandered. What would he see? The city? He’d been there once. It was interesting, but smelly— manure and smoke and bodies, all familiar but too concentrated. Too much dirt, too much traffic, even at night—no quiet time when the ground could rest. He didn’t think he could stay there for long.
Maybe a distant village. Even another country—Masra? The fruit was supposed to keep the family from entrenching too deeply in any one place. They had to send out their own seeds, find new soil in other places. It was said that they had kin in every village, every city—even across the border in Ardunh, and in other countries, too. Wherever he was sent, some of those scattered kinsfolk might be there.
But after so long, it was unlikely they’d recognize him. He certainly wouldn’t recognize them. Long ago it was said that the family had carried tokens to identify each other, but those were long gone; only the trees, and tradition, remained.
Maybe he would be told to stay on the farm. It was a good place. He’d always been happy heree, and his family loved him. Of course, many of them might be gone tomorrow, but… some would surely stay.
In the stories, someone always stayed. Grandfather, of course, was from a branch that had. The century grove by the western fields was said to be 800 years old. Someone had to tend it. It wouldn’t be so bad, to be that person. It was an important duty.
Grandmother stopped. After a moment, Amir realized she’d finished. She offered the plate to Grandfather, and this time he took a slice.
The plate went around the room. No one spoke. Amir turned to make sure that Hani wouldn’t take a slice after all. Incredibly, his brother was asleep.
He studied the little boy’s round face, long eyelashes, grubby hands. Hani didn’t realize, yet, that Amir might be leaving home soon. To a five-year-old, “three or four years” is the same as “forever.” But even if he stayed awhile, Amir thought knowing he was to leave must somehow alter their relationship. Who would take care of Hani, if he left? If Adi and Bas left? If all the other cousins left, and only Hani remained?
He brushed a few curls from Hani’s face, and reached to gather him up, carry him to their room as he’d done so many times—but now the plate was beside him.
It was Father who held it. He smiled nervously at Amir, as if seeking reassurance. Amir smiled weakly back, took one of the two remaining sections of fruit, and gave the plate back to Grandmother. She took the last piece, set the plate down, and nodded to Grandfather.
Grandfather closed his eyes. “May we all be blessed, whatever our futures hold. Let us partake.”
Amir lifted the fruit to his mouth. He still couldn’t trace the fragrance. Had he imagined that it was like an apple’s? It was more delicate, like a cucumber or a winter melon, like nothing in particular. Then it came back, strong as honey. Like honey—and then a tang of citrus, and then an amber scent. Then those went away, and he smelled apples again.
Everyone was waiting, eyes darting to each other’s faces. No one wanted to do this all together—everyone wanted to see their fortunes alone. The juice was sticky on his fingers. He wanted to throw the fruit away, bury it, give his share to someone else.
But he was a son of this house. As he had been privileged to grow up here, now he was bound to face his future bravely. He put the fruit into his mouth.
Juice pooled in his mouth as he bit down. The fruit was crisp, grainy, sweet and tart. He closed his eyes.
He didn’t know at first that the vision had started. He began to feel hot, firelight scorching his face, though he was far from the hearth. There was an odd mix of smells—tar, salt, rotting fish, something frying nearby.
He opened his eyes. A broad stretch of white sand… leading… to the sea.
It had to be. He’d never a lake so vast, so alive. Blue-green, rolling in white foam onto the shore.
A few ships rocked in the shallows, lazy in the sunlight. Men were loading them with crates and bags.
His shoulder ached under the weight of a heavy sack. His clothes were light and crisp. He felt full, happy. Spiced milk lingered on his tongue.
Men called to him from the nearest ship.
Blinking, Amir saw the fire, smelled chinaberry smoke, heard his family’s hushed breaths. Shutters creaked as the wind swept the desert. He could still taste the fruit, but he must have swallowed it; his mouth was empty, drawn by the tartness of the juice.
Could that have been it? Everyone else was blinking, shifting. Had they waited a century for so little?
Details were already fading. He tried to fix them in his head. White sand, blue-green sea—the shape of the shore, the brief line of ships. Smells… spiced milk… a blue sky, a punishing sun. Men shouting. He’d been a little taller, though not a man. There had been the sense that everything he owned had been in the bag he held on this shoulder.
How could he base his life on… that? Search without stopping, until he saw that scene exactly? It was said that some looked for years, even decades.
He’d never heard of anyone failing entirely. But he only knew of his ancestors, who had succeeded—who had, at least, planted their seeds, started a farm. The remains of the old farmhouse were still by the grove. The skeleton was almost full of sand, but you could see it. Eight hundred years ago, they’d come. And it was a good place.
Probably others had died before finding anything. Or—
“I’m going abroad!” Adi crowed.
Everyone looked annoyed. He knew he did, too. Couldn’t she have kept still a few seconds longer?
But the spell was fading, so he listened.
“I think so, at least,” she said. “I’m almost sure. It was night. We were in someone’s house. There was a big fire, and we were eating some sort of sweet on little plates. There were glasses of… I don’t know, it was gold, and full of bubbles. Everyone was wearing these beautiful clothes, like in a magazine. I didn’t know the language we were speaking, but it did sound familiar. My flute was in my lap, like I was going to play, or had played already. And I had this gorgeous dress…” She rubbed at her trousers.
Amir turned to see how his parents were taking this. Mother was looking at her hands, mouth tightly closed. Father smiled, but it looked forced. “Well… ah, that’s wonderful. I…” His smile faded. He looked at his own hands, then raised his eyes to Amir. “And what about you, Amir?”
Amir’s mind went blank. “Ah… what about you?” He was sure Grandfather would scold him for impudence, but Grandfather didn’t seem to have heard.
Father’s forced smile returned. “I’ll be here, of course. Playing the fool as usual. Here, forever.”
Amir wondered what Father had expected to see. Though it wasn’t respectful, he’d always thought of his father as… unfinished, somehow. Childlike. It was sad to think of him sitting in his courtyard forever, writing his rare poems, entertaining his friends with pipes and backgammon. He’d never been as close to Father as he was to Mother, but he loved him. If he left, he might not see Father again for… ever.
Now Shani said, “Shai and I are going to the city! Right, Shai?”
“Right.” Shai’s smile, strangely, was a bit sad. “It looked like a shop. I don’t know if we worked there, or…“
“Oh, you saw the shop, too?” Shani squeezed her sister’s hand. “Maybe we’ll own it. And we’ll be close enough to visit…“
“And I’ll be there, too!” Fais broke in, grabbing his sisters by the shoulders. “Isn’t it great? Probably I’ll come later—I was grown up. I think I was a student.” He turned to Mother. “Maybe I’ll be at the University, Aunt Mor. You’ll tell me about it, right?”
Mother nodded, but didn’t look up.
Abruptly, Bas straightened, crossed the room, and knelt by Grandmother. He whispered something in her ear. She murmured, and touched his forehead.
Bas bowed his head, took Grandmother’s hands, and kissed them. Then he took a seed from the pewter saucer and left the room.
The first seed. Bas would plant it, someday, if he reached his destination. He’d probably leave tomorrow.
And he hadn’t looked at Aunt Dar, or at Grandfather.
“Well.” Aunt Dar’s voice was bitter. She stared after Bas with a look of angry satisfaction, as if she’d seen exactly what she’d expected. “There goes my son. I’ll be lucky to see him again.”
Mother looked up suddenly. Amir thought she would snap at Dar—but her face was stricken, almost gray. Her eyes darted around the room—landed first on Adi, then on Hani, then on him. They looked so tortured he lost his breath. She lowered her face again before he caught it.
“Elder sister,” said Aunt Gili, formally. “You knew from the beginning that this could happen—“
“And who are you to speak?” snapped Aunt Dar. “You’ll barely be separated from your children—the city is only two days’ ride from here. I may never see my son again.”
And whose fault would that be? Amir couldn’t help thinking. Aunt Dar had disapproved violently of Isra, had been just as active as Grandfather in blocking the marriage. She and Bas had rarely spoken since.
But maybe having Bas not there to not-speak-to would be different. It already hurt Amir to think about losing his cousin. If he thought about it much more, he’d probably cry.
“Let’s try to think more positively,” said Aunt Gili, more gently. “What did you see, elder sister?”
Aunt Dar hesitated. “Lahm. I’ve been considering…” She looked around as if she felt the need to explain herself. Her voice took on an appealing tone. “My friend’s husband died. She has a farm, and… I can be useful there.” She turned to Grandmother and Grandfather. “Mother, Father,” she said earnestly, “I would never disrespect the memory of my dear husband— I will miss him until I die— but—“
Grandfather roused from his trance to smile vaguely at Aunt Dar. “You honor his memory. I am sure our son smiles on you from Heaven. And now, since you have had a vision, you must go. We will bless your path as you travel.”
Aunt Dar bowed, but then looked away, as if unnerved. There was an odd blankness in Grandfather’s expression that had not been there before he’d eaten the fruit. Grandmother looked at him, and they shared a long glance, in the way they did that seemed more intimate than holding hands.
Amir remembered suddenly that the century fruit also gave visions of death.
Aunt Gili cleared her throat. “Ah… Lutfi…” She turned to her eldest son. “I don’t want to pry, but…”
Lutfi and Siva had been smiling blissfully at each other all this time. Now they turned their smiles on Aunt Gili.
“We’re staying.” Lutfi said. “Just a few miles out, not even to the edge of the farm. The mountains were the same. And…” He looked at his wife.
“We’ll be parents.” Siva laid a hand over her stomach, as if the vision had somehow placed a child there already. “A girl. And others, too—two or three, at least.”
Lutfi’s parents were beside them in seconds, pressing their hands and patting their cheeks. Aunt Gili seemed already to be giving them advice. Uncle Rabi just smiled, though his eyes were strangely melancholy.
In the wake of all this, Amir stood, and went to look down at the saucer on Grandmother’s tray. Grandmother watched him.
Eight seeds remained: black-brown, glistening. He could take one and go, or kneel and ask for a blessing as Bas had done—or he could sit down again, and pretend he’d never stood.
Father watched him, eyes wide. Amir’s hand hovered above the saucer.
Grandmother waited.
Amir looked at Mother.
She sat hunched over, arms wrapped around herself, head bowed. A hank of her long hair covered one cheek. Her eyes were tightly closed, but there were tears in her eyelashes.
Amir bit his lip. Still his hand hovered over the seeds. When everyone who was leaving had taken one, however many remained would be planted in the century grove. No matter how many trees grew, there was never more than one fruit at a time. One tree, more or less, wouldn’t make any difference.
Mother would be all right. She had to have known, marrying Father, that this might happen. She must have known her children might leave.
He reached for a seed.
Hani shifted in his sleep.
Amir’s heart stuttered. Could he leave, never to see his little brother grow—maybe never to see him again?
With Bas gone, Lutfi would probably inherit the farm; Hani was too young. But Grandfather had considered Amir, too, especially after falling out with Bas. To live here, run things, marry and have children like Lutfi—that wouldn’t be so bad.
He thought of the sea, the rocking ships, the sailors’ voices.
Mother’s shoulders were shaking.
Amir let his hand drop. Swallowing, he smiled at Grandmother. “I’m staying here.”
Grandmother blinked, but nodded. Impossible to know what she was thinking. Amir hoped she hadn’t guessed what he’d just done.
Grandfather didn’t seem to have heard. He was looking around the room, as if seeing it for the first time, with something like fear or wonder in his face.
Shivering, Amir looked at Mother, who hadn’t responded. He thought she hadn’t heard, but finally she lifted her head, and gave him a strange, cloudy smile. “That’s good, Amir. It’ll be a good home for you, all your life.”
All your life. It wasn’t the response he’d expected. He looked around. He would be as old as Grandfather one day, might never travel as far as the sea—might never go beyond the city. He would live in this house all his life. Become an old man, and die here.
All his life.
Father was watching them with a mix of alarm and disappointment. Though Mother was smiling, it was obvious from the quality of her smile that she wasn’t the least bit happy.
Amir knew that he had miscalculated somehow. “I’m going to bed,” he said, at a loss for what to do. “Good night, everyone.”
He heard Mother stand, but didn’t turn as he left. He didn’t want to hear what she might have to say.
Bas stood outside the door, watching Amir with obvious disgust.
“What?” Amir muttered, though he suspected Bas knew exactly what he’d done.
Before Bas could speak, there was a gasp in the room behind them. Whirling, Amir saw his mother standing in the center of the room, fists clenched. Father was behind her, one arm outstretched, as if he’d tried and failed to catch her.
Mother saw Amir watching, and gave him that strange smile again. She turned one hand over, and opened her slender scholar’s fingers. In her palm lay a century seed.
I try to write a Halloween story when I can. Someday I’d like to do regular holiday pieces and put out more of my own story collections. This story is ten years old, so it’s not representative of my current style, but I still like it. I wrote it while I was living with my mother and stepfather in their house in the woods in central North Carolina. It’s quiet there at night and gets a bit spooky if you’re the only one awake. I don’t think the story itself is that spooky, though it is a bit bittersweet. Let me know what you think.
Sabrina couldn’t sleep with the moonlight shining in her eyes.
Her friends were having no such trouble. Jenny and Mark were sound asleep, cuddled up in their zipped-together sleeping bags. Brian had been snoring for half an hour. But Sabrina, pressed against him, was as alert as ever.
She’d tried snuggling closer to Brian, and moving farther away. She’d unzipped the bag for a breath of air, and zipped it back up when she’d gotten too cold. She’d rolled over, covered her eyes, counted sheep, and tried to meditate. But wherever she turned, the halogen light of the full white moon shone through her eyelids, keeping her wide awake.
At last she couldn’t take it any more. She eased herself out of the doubled sleeping bag she shared with Brian, patting his shoulder when he whimpered in his sleep. Shoving her feet into her old yellow Crocs, she walked to the edge of the woods.
The air was cold tonight. Shivering, she rubbed her arms and stomped her feet. She’d put on sweats over her flannel pajamas, and the socks she wore were the fluffy SpongeBob ones her sister had given her for Christmas, but the wind cut through everything like scissors through gauze. Strange that it should be so cold: usually it didn’t get below fifty this time of year.
She supposed she could go into the house. It would be warmer. But the door was probably locked,and she didn’t want to wake Jenny for the key. Anyway, what if she encountered Jenny’s parents? They seemed like nice people, but she hardly knew them, and she didn’t feel like making small talk. Better to stay out here.
She could stir up the coals and roast some marshmallows, but she’d already brushed her teeth. She hadn’t even brought a book.
Frustrated, Sabrina stared into the forest. The moonlight fell in broad beams through the leafless trees, chasing the shadows from the underbrush. Far below, at the bottom of the hill, the Little River glittered like tinsel. They had walked along the shore this afternoon, before sunset, but the place looked very different at night–fairy-haunted; forbidden.
She paced restlessly around the edge of the campsite, peering through the trees for a better look at the water. Every few steps she saw a flash of moon-bleached sand, a twinkle of water. Then, suddenly, a path came into focus.
She didn’t know how she had missed it. It was a wide, straight track between the trees, leading right down to the water. It looked much more passable than the glorified deer-trail they’d followed that afternoon. She could probably make it in her Crocs without twisting an ankle. And it wasn’t that far: the murmur of the water carried clearly over the chilly night air.
She could go down now, have a little walk, and come back without waking anyone. It would only take a few minutes. She might even be tired enough to sleep when she got back. Still, it seemed wrong to go off and leave her friends without saying anything.
Sabrina turned to wake them–let Jenny or Brian, at least, know where she was going. But they were all sleeping so peacefully–and she knew they’d tell her not to go. It wasn’t safe to wander by herself at night.
Making a quick decision, Sabrina shoved her hands in her pockets and started down the trail.
—
On the shore of the river stood the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
He was a little older than she was, tall and broad shouldered, with a swimmer’s body–clearly visible, as he wore nothing but a pair of soaking-wet jeans. The moonlight was generous, highlighting muscles that might not have been visible by day. Half mesmerized by his abs and deltoids, Sabrina stepped closer.
His face would have been at home on a Grecian urn. His nose was aquiline, his complexion umber, his mouth sensuous and a little cruel. He had a satyr’s beard, and his thick dark curls shadowed his face like little horns. As she approached, he pushed his hair back, and his sharp black eyes nearly stopped her in her tracks.
“Hey.” His voice was deep and lazy.“What’s up?”
She couldn’t speak. She felt as she were being studied, as if he were assessing her fitness for some unknown purpose. She groped around for words, and finally came out with, “Aren’t you cold?”
His laugh rippled through her skin. “I’m used to it. Where’d you come from?”
“Up the hill.” She pointed toward Jenny’s house, though she couldn’t see the path anymore. “We’re having a campout. You know. For Halloween.”
“Very nice,” he drawled, sounding entirely uninterested. “What’s your name?”
“Uh… Sabrina.”
“Nice to meet you, Sabrina. I’m Cyrus.” He held out his hand. “Well met by moonlight, et cetera, et cetera.”
Sabrina took his hand, found it warm and dry and strong. “You live around here?”
He laughed. “Sure. Over the river. We’re having a party, too.” He pointed at a spot far upstream, where the opposite shore was mostly obscured by a clump of deep, dark forest.
Sabrina couldn’t see anything over there that looked like a party. She moved closer to the water, and a wavelet swamped her shoes, soaking through her socks in seconds.
Cyrus laughed as she cursed and staggered backward. “Don’t get wet.”
“Thanks.” She kicked off her shoes and peeled off her socks, rubbing her feet on the sand to try and dry them. She felt like she’d been frostbitten, and knew she should probably go back to camp. “How’d you get here, anyway? I didn’t see a bridge.”
He shrugged. “Walked. Ain’t that deep. I’m about to go back…” He looked her up and down thoughtfully. “Want to come with?”
She should say no, of course, but found herself stammering. “Uh… I… I don’t know.” She dropped her shoes and socks on the sand. “What kind of party is it?”
“Oh, you know. Just a small gathering–food, beverages, entertainment. Kind of a yearly tradition.”
Sabrina glanced back towards the house again. Would her friends wake up, if she went with this stranger? Would they find her gone, panic, and call the cops to search the river? “I probably shouldn’t. Didn’t tell anyone I was c–”
Cyrus grinned, and she stopped speaking abruptly, realizing that she should have kept that information to herself.
But he only turned away, and said, “You’re probably right. Best to go on home. Could be dangerous over there–you might meet strangers.” He patted her arm. Her whole body tingled. “So long…”
“Wait. I…”
He shook his head. “You probably wouldn’t like it. I mean, you’re already scared…”
“Scared?” She looked down at herself, as if that accusation might be visible on her shirt. “I’m not scared. I just…”
But was she? A chill was running through her veins–but she didn’t think she was frightened. Excited, maybe. Intrigued. “I’m not dressed for a party,” she hedged.
Cyrus laughed. “You look fine. No one over there’s going to care what you’re wearing.”
Sabrina stared across the water. The moonlight was so bright that in places the surface of the river looked almost opaque. It rippled so smoothly she knew it had to be deep. “Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Not if you’re with me. I can carry you over.”
He probably could, she thought, looking him up and down. He was as tall as Brian, and looked stronger, though Brian had been a football player before his injury. Cyrus looked like he’d never been injured in his life.
She turned away, wondering if he could see her blush by moonlight. “What are you, the ferryman?”
He laughed again. “If you like.”
Well, he was a cocksure bastard of the first degree, but she had to admit he was oddly alluring. Unconsciously, she moved a little closer. “How do I know you won’t drop me in the river?”
“You don’t.” He held up two fingers, a Scout’s-honor gesture. “But I swear I’ll do my best to keep you dry.” Then he lowered his hand and leaned quite close, so his breath ghosted over her face. “I’ll keep you dry,” he murmured, “as long as you pay the toll.”
She breathed in, then exhaled, distracted by the smell of his hair: moss, dry leaves, and something animal. “Wh-what kind of toll?”
“Well, what have you got?” His lips curled into a teasing smile. His face was nearly touching hers. “I can’t work for free.”
Sabrina shivered, but stepped back, trying to conceal her disappointment. “I guess that settles it, then.” She tried, and failed, to smile. “Don’t have any money.”
“Oh, it doesn’t have to be money. Could be anything. A silver coin. A loaf of bread.” He pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Even a kiss.”
Even as her whole body came alive with interest, she thought guiltily of Brian, sleeping by himself at the campsite up the hill. She should walk away now–shouldn’t even consider the offer. But the moonlight made the river seem like a different world, and Brian had no part in it. “All right,” she said, surprising herself.
Smiling, Cyrus opened his arms.
He was hot, and strong, and his warm lips tasted like river water. It was the best kiss she’d ever had.
Without taking his lips from hers, Cyrus gathered her into his arms. Despite his heat, a chill ran through Sabrina’s body. She realized, very faintly, that he was walking–wading into the water, his feet sinking into the sandy riverbed. Her heels dipped into the river, and cold water soaked the hems of her sweatpants, but she didn’t open her eyes.
Finally, when Sabrina was quite breathless, the kiss ended. They were on the opposite shore, and Cyrus was setting her down on the hard-packed sand. The cold ground was like an electric shock on her bare feet. She staggered, clutching his arms for balance, and opened her eyes.
While they’d been crossing, the moon had passed behind a cloud. The shore was entirely dark, and very quiet. Thick bushes crowded them like thugs. A strange bird cried in a nearby tree. Even the river sounded odd–its voice a sullen murmur, as if heard through a layer of ice.
She hadn’t realized, from the other side, just how wide the river was. It had looked small, and passable–an inconvenience, but not really an obstacle. From this shore, though, it looked wide, and deep, and dangerous.
She turned back to Cyrus, suddenly unnerved. He was wet from the ribs down, and the muscles of his abdomen gleamed like oil. Unconsciously, she reached out to touch them.
He pushed her away, almost gently. “That’s enough now.”
Embarrassed, Sabrina pulled away, confused by the distance that had come into his face and voice. “What’s going on?” Her voice, in her ears, was childish. “Where are we?”
“The other side. Come on, now.” He turned away, and started upstream without waiting for her to follow.
—
Sabrina was suddenly, overwhelmingly conscious of the dangerous situation she’d walked into. She opened her mouth, about to ask him to take her back, but he was far away by then. His strides were swift, unfaltering: he seemed to have forgotten she was there. When she called to him, he barely slowed.
As they walked, she started hearing voice, laughter and conversation and even song echoing out of the darkness. Far ahead, faint golden light reflected off the river. “Is that the party?”
Cyrus nodded.
Then they came around a bend, and there it was.
The shore had broadened, and the air was warm, fragrant with woodsmoke. Tiki torches had been set out in a large square across the side. Inside were dozens–perhaps hundreds–of people, sitting around bonfires and under striped pavilions.
She rubbed her eyes, but the picture just got clearer. How could they all have gotten here? This was parkland–she was pretty sure no roads led in or out. Had they come by boat? A few were tied up on the shore, but not nearly enough to have brought so many people. And the sound should have carried–why hadn’t she and her friends heard the party from their campsite? And who were these people, anyway?
They looked, at first, like a historical reenactment society with a very relaxed dress code. Their clothes spanned the last two or three centuries, and seemed to have come from a number of cultures and walks of life. Most of the guests were dressed as farmers–in shirts and homespun trousers, calico dresses, or T-shirts and overalls. A few, however, wore hoop skirts and frock coats. Some of the black people wore old cotton clothing, and had a beaten-down look that made Sabrina think of slaves. A number of the guests looked like full-blooded Native Americans, and wore beaded shirts and dresses with feather-topped hats for the men. There were soldiers, flappers, hippies, businessmen, and even a few people who might have come from Sabrina’s own street.
Then there were… others. Firelight flickered off of faces and bodies that weren’t entirely human. There were small, nude people with bald heads and jagged teeth; there were enormous men with branches that looked like clubs. A woman in the corner had three or four arms, all pouring drinks for the crowd around her. There were even people who seemed to have animal heads: dogs, cats, birds, foxes. Sabrina thought they were masks, until she saw one blink.
She turned to Cyrus, meaning to ask she-knew-not-what, but he was already gone. A moment later she spotted him across the campsite, accepting a mug of something from the woman with too many arms. Even he looked wilder here–the curls that had shaded his face like horns now looked like horns indeed. She waved to him, but he didn’t even look at her.
Despondent, Sabrina crossed the line of torches. Friendly face surrounded her immediately.
“Hello, dear,” said a little round woman, whose skin was wrinkled like tree bark. “Is this your first time?”
“Of course it is,” said the person beside her, a Native American man in a beaded blue shirt. “Look, she doesn’t even know where she is yet. Bet the riverman brought her.”
He beckoned to a young Black woman who was pouring herself a drink. She approached, handed him the pitcher, and gave Sabrina a curious smile. Beneath her calico kerchief, her eyes were large and sad.
“What is this place?” said Sabrina, helpless.
The wrinkled brown woman had produced a mug from somewhere. She held it while the man in blue poured. “It’s a party, dear,” she said, quite kindly. Her voice creaked like ancient branches. “Haven’t you ever seen one?”
Not knowing what to say, Sabrina took the mug and stared at it. It was very simple, and looked handmade–plain red clay with a clear glaze that gleamed in the firelight. Its sides were cool, and wet with condensation.
“Take a sip,” the old woman urged her. Sabrina obeyed.
It wasn’t beer–she wasn’t sure what it was. It had a strange, spicy flavor she couldn’t quite place. Was it mead? Some kind of cider? She took another sip. “I’m Sabrina.” It seemed suddenly important that they should know that.
The three strangers nodded. “We don’t use names much here,” said the girl, “but I’m pleased to meet you, Sabrina. I was Hannah.”
“I was Tom.” The man smiled.
The old woman smiled, too, but didn’t give her name.
A few feet away, a girl with red curls paused to give Sabrina a filthy look. She was very pretty, and wore a tight sweater that showed off an excellent figure.
“Who was that?” Sabrina said, when the girl had moved on.
The other sighed. “That was Kelly,” said Hannah. “The riverman brought her last year.”
“Sour grapes,” said Tom, smiling again.
The old brown woman just shook her head, and filled Sabrina’s cup.
Sabrina took another drink.
—
Time passed in a pleasant haze. Whatever was in the mug proved mildly intoxicating, and she didn’t get sleepy no matter how much she drank. From time to time she thought to look for Cyrus, but he was never nearby. He moved from fire to fire, greeting friends and smiling mysteriously at everyone. Once she saw him pat Kelly on the shoulder and kiss her cheek. Another time he seemed to be exchanging secrets with a beautiful dark woman in an old-fashioned dress. Not once did he look at Sabrina.
She soon forgot her disappointment, because it turned out her new friends were excellent company. They constantly asked questions about her life, and seemed fascinated by every answer, even things as simple as “I go to State,” or “I have three sisters.” Soon others joined them, and greeted Sabrina like one of their own. They all plied her with drink, and with food in little clay bowls: deviled eggs, cornbread, muffins, brownies. Everything was perfect, and she never felt full.
Before long she was in the middle of a large crowd of people, roasting homemade marshmallows over the largest bonfire. Its heat scorched her face, and the air was rich with smoke and sugar. Someone had remembered an old drinking song, and was teaching it to the others amid waves of laughter. “‘Twas on the good ship Venus–by Christ, you should’ve seen us…’”
Halfway through the song, Sabrina noticed that the crowd was getting a bit thin. Several of the more flamboyant partygoers were nowhere to be found, and most of the fires and pavilions had been abandoned.
As she watched, two Native women who looked like sisters embraced, sighed, and disappeared altogether. Before she could move, a little blond boy ran into the shadows and didn’t come back. Then a person in a long white cloak, whose face she’d never seen, bowed once to the crowd and vanished.
One by one, the guests disappeared. Some of them just left, walking from the torchlight into the darkness. Others faded slowly from sight, waving sadly to their friends. Others still were there one minute, then gone the next time she looked for them.
She knew, in whatever part of her brain was still active, that this was not right, but she couldn’t make herself move. The disappearing guests seemed like someone else’s problem–an unfortunate fact of nature that no one could really change. Framing a comment along those lines, she turned to Hannah–and gasped.
In the last few minutes, Hannah’s lovely oval face had shriveled like a month-old apple. Her dress hung from her body like a tablecloth, and she smelled of sweat and illness. She seemed to be dying of some wasting disease.
“What happened?” Sabrina said.
Hannah smiled faintly. “You know, I almost made it,” she whispered. “I got as far as the river–then I broke my leg. So…” With a sigh, Hannah disappeared.
Tom, next in line, was covered in blood. It poured from a fist-sized wound in the center of his chest, which must have taken out at least one vital organ. “Bastards were waiting at the river.” Blood flowed through his teeth as he spoke. “We–” Then his eyes widened, and he too faded away.
Desperate, Sabrina turned to the old round woman, who was watching her sympathetically. “What’s going on? Why–”
“Don’t worry, dear.” The woman patted her hand with broad, soft fingers. “They’ll all come back next year, you know. You will, too.”
“I…” Her brain was spinning. She shook her head, but couldn’t clear it. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s just the one night, you know–before the winter starts. When the veils are thin.” She yawned, smiled apologetically, and stood. “But I’d probably better go, too–I’m getting sleepy. Lovely to meet you…”
“Wait,” Sabrina said, reaching for her hand. “Please–”
But the old woman was already strolling towards the torches, nodding goodbye to the few remaining guests. Her wide back swayed, and her brown skirts rustled across the ground like leaves. Before Sabrina could stand, the woman had left the campground, and vanished into the darkness of the woods.
In a few minutes, all the other guests had left–fading like mirages, or simply walking away. Sabrina could only watch, pinned in place by shock or confusion or whatever she’d been drinking. Finally, as the sky began to lighten, she was alone, still sitting on her log beside the abandoned fire.
Or almost alone. There was Cyrus, standing at the edge of the campground, surveying the site with satisfaction.
As if a spell had broken, Sabrina finally stood. “Cyrus! What happened?” She ran over to him, tripping on feet gone suddenly numb.
He smiled distantly. “Hello, Sabrina. How’d you like the party?”
“It–where is everybody?”
“Oh, they all went home. Back to where they died, you know. It’s almost sunrise.”
“To where…” Her voice guttered like a candle.
Cyrus laughed. “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you didn’t guess?”
“You mean they were…”
“Sure.” He gave her a pitying look. “You already knew there was no one over here–no one human, anyway. Where’d you think they all came from?”
Sabrina shook her head, sure there must have been something in the drink. “But… How do I get home?”
“Oh, you don’t.”
“What?”
“You are home, now.” Cyrus gestured around him at the abandoned campground. “You paid the toll, remember? Drank the brew, ate the food? It’s a one-way trip–you’re one of them now. If I were you, I’d just get used to being dead.”
“I… but…” Dead. The word echoed in her mind like a church bell. “But… you didn’t… I didn’t… why did you bring me here?”
“Because you wanted to come,” he said, smiling. He leaned close, and pressed a chaste kiss against her cheek. “I’m an equal-opportunity ferryman–I’ll take anyone over, as long as the toll gets paid.” He patted her cheek, then stepped away. “And it was a good party. But it’s over, now.”
Her mouth opened. The words fell out of her head, and she just stuttered. “I–but–we–”
“It’s not so bad, being dead–from what I hear, anyway. And you picked a good place. The river’s lovely, and you might even find some company if you look. If all else fails, you’ll see them all at the next party.” Then he yawned, stretching his exquisite muscles like a sleepy cat. “Afraid I’ve got to go. Got a drowning to take care of tomorrow–today, that is–and then a suicide after that. No rest for the ferryman.” He grinned. “Later, Sabrina.”
She reached for his hand, but he was already gone.
It was getting lighter, and fog was rising from the dawn-touched river. Sabrina watched the moon set behind the trees, and listened to the calls of awakening birds. The torches went out one by one, and the embers of the bonfires slowly turned to ashes.
I wrote this during a mini writers’ retreat with my friend Brittany Harrison back in 2010. We’d decided to do a Frankenstein-style writing challenge, since it was spooky season and our isolated rental cabin in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina was very conducive to imagining horrors. When I decided to put out a few short stories as an ebook a couple of years later, this was one of the ones I included. I think I’ve grown quite a lot as a writer, and I wouldn’t call this representative of my writing now, but people have enjoyed it and I think it has some good moments. Let me know what you think!
“But you said I could go!”
“I said you could go if you kept your grades up, young lady, and I told you what would happen if you didn’t.”
“But Aunt Laurie–”
Adie’s mother folded the report card and set it down on the pristine kitchen counter. She clearly would rather have thrown it on the floor. “I will call Aunt Laurie myself and tell her why you’re not coming,” she said. “Or you can explain to her why shopping with your friends was so much more important to you than your visit next month.”
“That’s not–”
“Don’tyou raise your voice to me, young lady, or you’ll regret it.” Her mother pointed out the door. “Now go upstairs and do your homework. Dinner’s in an hour.”
Adie glared. “I’m not hungry.” Her stomach rumbled as she spoke. The air was heavy with the aromas of baking bread and homemade tomato sauce, and she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. But some things were more important than her mother’s spaghetti, and New York was one of them.
Adie’s mother looked heavenward, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “All right. Then go upstairs and go to bed. I don’t want to see you until morning.” With that she turned back to the cutting board and began dicing celery with harsh, uneven strokes. Adie knew that the conversation was over. She grabbed her backpack and stormed from the kitchen, down the hallway and up the towering stairs. She made sure to stomp hard on each beige-carpeted step. When her mother didn’t come out and yell at her, she stomped even harder. All right, she would go to bed– and then she’d get up early tomorrow, eat breakfast and leave the house before either of her parents woke up. Right now she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see them ever again.
The trip to New York was a long-delayed birthday present from her Aunt Laurie, who had been one of Adie’s dearest companions until she’d moved away last fall. The thought of calling to tell her aunt that the trip was off was enough to make her gut clench. Tears blurred her vision as she opened her bedroom door. She threw her backpack on the floor, then went down the potpourri-scented hallway to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She would go to bed. Right now she’d rather be dead than face the knowledge that her own stupidity had lost her New York.
In the bathroom, Adie squeezed a healthy glob of toothpaste onto her toothbrush and shoved it into her mouth. She winced as it rammed the backs of her gums and bruised the inside of her cheek. As she brushed (tops… bottoms… insides… outsides… twice all over…) she watched the reflection of her face in the mirror.
The girl in the mirror was an unfashionable sixteen. She had frizzy hair and an awkward nose, and her shirt was stained from a spill at lunch.. Her cheeks were wet with tears; her eyes were red and swollen. This was the kind of face you had when you were hopeless. When you weren’t going anywhere. When you would spend Christmas break alone with your own stupid parents… and when, worst of all, you weren’t going to New York because you were stupid.
She spat her toothpaste into the sink, then spat again to clear the remnants from her mouth. Now the girl in the mirror had little dribbles of toothpaste foam all over her lips and chin. Her nose had begun to run. She looked ridiculous.
Adie wrapped her arms around herself and stood staring at the girl in abject misery. So stupid. Why had she ever even thought she would make it to New York? She was probably doomed to stay here and rot, like an unharvested pumpkin in the world’s worst field.
A little more toothpaste ran down the chin of the girl in the mirror. Despite her foolish appearance, there was a glint in her eyes that Adie didn’t much like. She looked mocking. Mean. She could understand why people wouldn’t want to be around a girl like that. She wouldn’t want to be around herself, either. She just made everyone angry. It was probably for the best that she wasn’t going– Aunt Laurie would probably have regretted inviting her even if she’d gone.
Adie glared at the girl, and the girl glared back. “Fuck you,” Adie whispered. She wiped the toothpaste from her mouth with an angry fist.
The girl in the mirror watched her dumbly, as if she hadn’t understood what she’d said.
On a whim, Adie licked a fingertip and wrote– in big, neat block letters– on the surface of the mirror: FUCK YOU.
Then, to make it even clearer, she wrote it backwards.
When she looked back at her reflection, her stomach dropped. The girl was not looking at her. She was looking at the message Adie had written, and her lips moved as she read the words. When she’d finished, her eyes widened. Slowly, she lowered her eyes to stare at Adie.
It was not a nice look.
More than an hour later, as Adie lay shivering in bed with the blankets over her head, her mother came into her room. She knew that it was probably her mother because she could smell her mother’s neat floral perfume over the faint tang of her own unwashed laundry. Well-pressed chinos swished efficiently to the center of the floor and stopped.
The woman who was probably her mother stood quietly for a long time. Adie lay in the warm darkness under her blankets and wished that she could be sure. “Still mad?” her mother said finally. The sound of her voice was blessedly familiar.
Adie shrugged. She hadn’t actually thought much about the argument since seeing what must have been a hallucination in the bathroom mirror. She still shuddered just to think of the malice in her reflection’s eyes.
“Do you want to talk about it?” her mother continued in her calm, reasonable way.
Adie snorted. Tell her mother she was hallucinating? Sure, that would smooth things over.
Her mother sighed. It was a soft, gusty sigh, quite restrained: the sigh of someone who has too many troubles to welcome another one. There was also that extra trill of exasperation at the end that had always been reserved for Adie. That, more than anything, convinced her that it was safe to come out.
Adie pulled the covers from her face and sat up. The air was a cool shock against her face after more than an hour between the blankets. Her mother, who had already started to leave, stopped in midstride, looking surprised. Adie didn’t usually get out of a sulk until at least a day after she’d started it.
“Still mad,” she said quickly, lest her mother wrongly assume that all was forgiven. “But I’ll… I’ll come downstairs.”
“All right,” her mother said, looking bemused. “Go wash your hands and then come set the table.”
Adie approached the door to the bathroom as if it were a dragon’s cave. Her heart was pounding. The light was out, and since the room had no windows it was as dark as a real dragon’s cave would have been. Adie snaked her arm around the doorframe and felt for the switch. For a harrowing second she was sure that something would bite her hand off, but then she found the switch and light flooded the bathroom.
Her hair stood on end as she crept inside. There was something wrong with the mirror. At first Adie couldn’t make sense of what she saw. There was a strange crosshatching over the surface of the glass, so thick in places that it almost looked frosted. It covered the entire surface of the mirror, top to bottom and edge to edge. It took her a moment to realize that the marks were scratches, gouged into the surface of the glass as if with a screw or a nail. They grew larger and wilder the farther down they went, until at the bottom they were a nest of angry gouges that took up half the mirror.
Adie reached out automatically to touch the glass. The scratches were quite deep, rough to the touch. It would have taken a lot of work– and a lot of anger– to produce them. Gradually her mind found patterns in the chaos– and then it all clicked into place. From top to bottom, side to side, the scratches spelled out the same two words, written over and over again until they culminated in a ragged scrawl across the bottom:
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU
Something moved behind the glass, and drew Adie’s eyes to her reflection. The girl behind the mirror was almost hidden behind the destruction she had wrought, but it was clear that she was pleased with herself. She smirked at Adie, and mouthed two words. Though Adie could not hear them, she understood them clearly.
“I just don’t see how you did it,” Adie’s mother said the next Saturday. “You were only up there for an hour– some of those scratches were a quarter of an inch deep!” She was leaning against the kitchen counter, overseeing Adie’s punishment breakfast of cold cereal and milk. For Adie’s parents there were pancakes and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The smells in the kitchen were a glorious torture to Adie, who usually looked forward to Saturday breakfasts all week.
She watched wistfully as her mother sliced fresh cantaloupe and poured real maple syrup into a jug for the table. “I didn’t do it,” she muttered for the thousandth time.
“Then who did, Adie?” her mother snapped, clearly losing patience with Adie’s protestations of innocence. “Only you and I were in the house, and I promise you I didn’t carve ‘Fuck you’ all over your mirror. Are you suggesting that some criminal broke in and did it?” She looked as if she wanted to throw something.
Adie rather wanted to throw something, too. She shrugged, looking down at her plate. What could she say?
The new mirror for her bathroom was delivered within a week of the old one’s demise. Under her mother’s direction, Adie had cleaned and polished the bathroom to a sparkling sheen, and the air was heavy with the remnants of chemical vapors. The mirror itself was larger and more elaborate than the other one had been. It had a beveled edge where the other had been plain, and a border of frosted-glass roses that Adie wanted to run her fingertips over. She stole glances at the glass as her father installed it, and as her mother polished it to a brilliant clarity. There was nothing unusual in their reflections. Adie began to hope.
After dinner that night, she crept toward the bathroom with butterflies in her stomach. Once again she reached through the doorway first to turn on the light. New mirror or not, there was no way she would ever set foot in that bathroom without the light on. Across the flawless counter, she laid out her things: toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash. Then she looked up.
For a long, still moment, Adie stared at her reflection, and the reflection stared back at her. Neither of them moved. Around them, the house was quiet. Downstairs she could hear the news, and over it her parents’ quiet voices. Nothing was out of the ordinary. She slowly let out the breath she must have been holding for ages. In the mirror, the girl let out a breath, too. The two of them smiled at each other, then reached for their toothbrushes.
But as Adie squeezed toothpaste on her brush, her reflection continued to smile. The smile grew until it was a savage grin, full of sharp white teeth much larger than Adie’s own.
Adie shrieked and leaped backwards. She hit the wall hard, and a towel rack jabbed into her back. The thing in the mirror shrieked, too, and then began to laugh. As Adie doubted her senses, the thunder of footsteps began coming up the stairs: her parents, coming to see what the matter was. Adie wanted to tell them to hurry, please, help her– but the thing in the mirror had wrapped its fist around the toothbrush in its hand, and was advancing towards the mirror. Adie covered her face just as the mirror shattered.
When her parents reached the bathroom doorway, they found Adie crouched amid a sea of broken glass, still covering her eyes and weeping hysterically. Of the thing in the mirror there was no sign– only a little flicker of motion in one of the shards of glass that littered the floor.
This time the mirror was not replaced. Instead, her parents began to talk about “special care” and “seeing a therapist” when Adie was around the corner. She barely heard them. She was too busy finding, to her horror, that reflections were everywhere. She caught glimpses of herselfin windows, in pot lids, in the blades of table knives. Though she kept her eyes lowered, and tried to avoid anything reflective, it always came to her, anyway: a flicker of motion where nothing was moving; a flash of teeth in the corner of her eye.
One night, as she was going up to bed, she paused in her bedroom doorway. Across from the door, next to the closet, was a full-length mirror that her mother had bought for her at a flea market years before. It was very pretty, with a carved wooden frame the color of oxidized copper. She had always loved it, but since the night the first mirror was defaced she had kept it well-covered. Now the sheet she’d hung over it lay on a pool on the floor, and the mirror stared back at her unguarded.
She was stopped by her reflection. It had grown pale and drawn from many nights without much sleep, and the skin under her eyes was so dark that it looked blue. Her hair was an unkempt mass, and her clothes were out of place: she never checked her appearance anymore. It was no wonder her parents had taken to talking about her in hushed voices from around the corner. The changes in her appearance startled even her.
Just as she remembered that she should probably look away, the girl behind the mirror stepped forward.
Adie was out the door and halfway down the hallway before she’d registered what had happened. She had just enough presence of mind to sneak back and yank the door closed. Something seemed to tug against it when it was almost shut, and she gasped and held back a scream as she wrestled it into place. When it was closed, she grabbed a handful of blankets from the linen closet, minced back across her doorstep, and pounded down the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her.
Her parents were in the kitchen, talking in low voices again. They stopped when they heard her go into the living room. “What are you doing, Adie?” her mother called, in that careful, sweet voice she’d taken to using when addressing Adie personally..
Adie spread the lightest blanket across the old tweed couch. “I’m sleeping down here tonight.” She’d given up explaining her actions; they never believed her explanations, anyway.
She heard a flurry of whispers. “Uh… all right, honey,” her father said. She heard him close his paper. “Good night.”
She stacked most of the throw pillows at one end of the couch, then spread the other blankets on top of them. As she curled beneath the covers in her makeshift bed, chairs scraped in the kitchen. A moment later, the kitchen light went out. Now the living room was black and infinitely vast, but Adie didn’t care: it was a familiar darkness, and felt safer than the compromised space that had been her room.
With her vision thus lost, Adie’s ears grew sharper. She listened as her parents climbed the stairs and continued down the hallway to their room. They were still whispering, as if they thought she didn’t know what they were talking about. Someone stepped on the creaking board outside her bathroom. She heard the hallway light click off, and the darkness around her deepened. A moment later, her parents’r door squeaked open and shut.
Now the living room was an alien wasteland, alive with black shadows that moved when she tried to see them. She pulled a blanket all the way over her head. It had the same vague odor of mothballs as everything else in the linen closet, although Adie’s family never used mothballs.
She tried to reassure herself that everything was safe. Her parents were probably still awake. They always sat up for a while after they’d changed into their pajamas, talking and reading and settling down to sleep. She could see the clean white light of their reading lamps in her mind’s eye, and could nearly hear the placid murmur of their voices. It made her feel a little better to remember that they’d hear anything out of the ordinary.
Then she remembered the menacing stare of the thing behind the mirror. It had come from the bathroom to her room so easily– had haunted the kitchen and the car and the corners of her mind. What was to stop it from traveling to her parents’ room, as well? Reassurance twisted into regret, and she wished that she could go and warn them.
The house grew very quiet, and into the silence there came a dream. Adie was walking, holding in her arms a long wrapped parcel: the mirror from beside her bed, safely covered once again in a sheet with little hearts all over it.
Something was thumping and thudding against the glass inside the parcel, struggling to get out. There was a sour, unhealthy smell coming from the sheet. Adie knew that if she didn’t lock the mirror away it would get her, and then maybe it would assume her face and go and kill her parents, too. She tried to shoulder open the sliding door of her closet, and as she did so fingers rose from beneath the sheet and began to pinch at her arms and shoulders through the cloth. She screamed, and shuddered, but at last the door slid open.
“You are nothing,” hissed a voice inside her ear, just as she was wrestling the mirror inside. “You are food.” Sharp teeth bit into her neck just as Adie hurled the mirror into the corner. She heard it crack, and saw the sheet start to fall. Heart pounding, she leaped backwards and dragged the door shut just as something began to emerge from the shower of broken glass.
For a moment, there was silence. Then something began to scrabble against the door.
Adie screamed herself awake– and then was not sure she’d woken up at all. She lay paralyzed in the darkness, soaked in sweat, listening desperately for some sign that what had happened wasn’t real. All around her there was breathing: sharp, harsh, desperate, as if the lungs of an animal had been ripped from its body and left to die on their own. Her heart pounded against the inside of her chest.
Gradually the breathing slowed, and Adie finally realized that it had been hers all along. The last black shreds of the nightmare soon lost substance and fell away. Adie realized that she was still curled up beneath a nubbly, scratchy blanket that smelled vaguely of old mothballs, on a couch that under usual circumstances she’d get in trouble for sleeping on. She was in the living room, not in her bedroom at all, and nowhere near the mirror or the closet into which she really should have put it earlier.
Her mouth felt like it had been wiped out with cotton balls. She swallowed, but couldn’t get rid of the sour taste that lingered in the corners. Taking one last, deep breath, she pulled the blanket off her face. Cool air rushed over her skin, drying her sweat and giving her goosebumps. Adie peered into the darkness, trying to assure herself that nothing was amiss.
The house was dark and still, and around it the neighborhood was silent. Even the crickets weren’t chirping. It had to be late– maybe three or four in the morning, she thought. She turned over uneasily, meaning to go back to sleep, but quickly realized that she quite desperately needed to pee.
For a split second she thought of waiting tilll morning. The house was vast and black and chilly, and in her nest of blankets she felt relatively safe. The pressure on her bladder, however, was too powerful to ignore, and at last Adie relinquished her safety and staggered wearily to her feet.
Clumsy with sleep, she toddled towards the bathroom. The hardwood floor was chilly under her feet. She wished she’d thought to bring sleep-socks. From the kitchen she heard the hum and groan of the refrigerator, the rattle of ice falling into the machine. Outside the kitchen window, a bright streetlight showed that no strange shadows were lurking in the street. Everything appeared normal.
It wasn’t until Adie had almost reached the bathroom that she remembered: Her bathroom might have no mirror anymore, but this one most definitely did.
Frost crept up her spine as she stared through the pitch-dark doorway. She almost retreated right then and there, but she knew that she’d never be able to wait until morning. A brief thought of going back upstairs was quashed by the memory of what she’d seen in her room. Downstairs it was.
Anyway, if the thing was in her bedroom now, then maybe it hadn’t come downstairs yet.
Somewhat cheered by this thought, she reached through the doorway and turned on the bathroom light. Its cheerful yellow beams spilled into the hallway, shrinking and clarifying everything they touched. Now she could see that the bathroom was, after all, just a bathroom. There was the striped wallpaper that her parents had picked out together. There were the gleaming brass fixtures her mother had shined, and the white tile floor that her father had laid down one sweaty afternoon a few years before. There was an unlit purple candle among the bath towels on a shelf above the toilet, and it filled the room with the faint mixed scent of lavender and roses.
Just to be on the safe side, she kept her eyes lowered as she stepped quickly past the mirror. Nothing flickered in the corners of her eyes, and nothing hissed or muttered as she raised the toilet lid and sat down on the icy seat. She concluded her business without incident and got up to wash her hands.
A morbid curiosity compelled her to look up this time. She raised her eyes fearfully to her reflection– but there seemed to be nothing to fear. She saw only herself– the same old Adie, frizzy hair and awkward nose and all. She smiled, and her own shy smile came back. When she lifted her arms, the reflection’s arms went up, too. She did a little dance, and the mirror mirrored it without a trace of mockery.
The thing must have been somehow confined to the upstairs– or maybe she’d even defeated it when she’d trapped it in her dream. Tomorrow she would ask her dad to take the mirror out of her room. Maybe a priest could even come to bless the house– she’d ask her mother about it.
Adie grinned at her reflection, happy that the end was in sight.
Her reflection grinned back, and turned off the light.
Hey, all! Over the next few weeks I will be posting some older stories here for the “Free Fiction” section. You can check the “Older Stories” list at the bottom of that page to see what’s coming up.
When I was little, I spent a lot of time reading the books my mother had kept from her childhood. One of them was an abridged version of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book illustrated by Grace Dallas Clarke.
The book was illustrated in a colorful 1950s style (I don’t have a copy now, but you can see some illustrations here.) I read the book multiple times, but my favorite stories in it were “Felicia and the Pot of Pinks,” “The Princess on the Glass Hill,” and “Diamonds and Toads.”
For some reason I have a strong memory of reading this book on an airplane, though I would have been young and I’m not sure where we would have been going. Anyway, I had lots of time to pore over the illustrations. “Diamonds and Toads” particularly stuck with me. I can see the glitter of the falling diamonds from one sister’s mouth, the other sister’s sassy expression, her hands on her hips. Later, cursed for her rudeness, she looks bewildered and ashamed, turning away defensively as snakes and toads fall from her mouth.
“Diamonds and Toads” is a “good sister/bad sister” story, a motif so common in world literature that you could fill a decent-sized book just with versions of Cinderella. Lately I’m starting to think more about the bad sisters in these stories than the good ones. Some of them are cruel, but their cardinal sins are usually greed, laziness, rudeness, and pride. In return, they’re often maimed or killed. Cinderellas’ stepsisters lose their eyes in some versions of the story, and “The Two Caskets” ends with the stepsister (along with her mother) being burned alive. Sure, she was rude and lazy, but isn’t that a bit harsh?
“Diamonds and Toads” is a classic example of this story. There are two sisters–one pretty and good, one ugly and bad–and their mother, who is also ugly and bad and thus favors the girl who resembles her. She and her daughter are cruel to the pretty sister, making her do all the work and fetch the water every day at the well. (I made the sister a little more sympathetic in my story, but I hope I still captured the spirit of the original.) At the well, the good girl meets and is nice to a fairy, and is rewarded with a shower of diamonds and flowers falling from her mouth whenever she speaks. The bad sister is rude to the fairy, so she’s punished: for the rest of her life, toads and snakes will fall from her mouth whenever she speaks. Eventually “even the widow was sickened by her older daughter, and drove her out, and she died alone and miserable in the woods.”
When my friend Sonya Lano told me that Fiction-Atlas Press was calling for submissions for an anthology about fairy-tale villains getting their own happily-ever-after, my mind immediately went to “Diamonds and Toads.” I can get a bit gloomy, but I’m not a dark fantasy writer: I wasn’t sure I could write a romance about a child-murdering witch or any other serious villain. But everyone’s said something they regretted, and something about this story has always spoken to me. Plus, snakes are cool. So I decided to try it out.
Next, I needed to find a romance for my protagonist. My first idea was to have her meet up with the girl from “The Two Caskets”–terribly scarred from the fire, but still alive–and have them hit it off. But that seemed a bit too complicated for a short story or novelette, so I needed something simpler. Fortunately, Sonya suggested another possibility that was right up my alley, and I got really interested in the project. But in order for this fairy tale to work, I’d need to get my heroine on a more equal footing with her love interest, and that’s what this story is about.
“Serpents” is a novelette of about 10,700 words that follows Fan’s adventures after she’s kicked out of her family home. (The original character’s name is Fanchon, short for Francoise, so Fanny would be a more natural translation, but for obvious reasons I decided not to go with that. Frannie is my partner’s name, which would have been weird, and Fancy and Frances didn’t seem quite the vibe, so Fan it was.) Once I had the idea straight in my mind, the writing process was pretty straightforward because I was happy with the story and how it played out. I’m still happy with it, and I had a lot of fun with it, so I hope you’ll feel the same
Once Upon a Wicked Heart is a collaborative anthology from Fiction-Atlas Press. There are twelve total stories in the book, most quite a bit darker than mine from what I’ve heard but a few with happy endings. Sonya has a story there, too–a dark (less dark? haha) retelling of “The Juniper Tree”–and all the others look really interesting. There’s a universal buy page here where you can check it out, or you can look us up on Goodreads. We’re doing a pre-release sale price of 99 cents (the full price will be $2.99), so it’s a good idea to preorder if you’re interested. You can also visit us online at the anthology release party on November 19 (that’s this Saturday) on the group’s Facebook page. Sonya and I will be posting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST that day, so drop by and see us.
There are lots of other fairy tales I’d like to explore in more depth, so I hope to do more projects like this later. Is there any story that really stuck with you?
