Mostly, he wanted to someone to ask him what he was doing, so that he could tell them. But no one called, and so he was left with M*A*S*H* and looming Armageddon until dawn.

Trillium didn’t accept his apology. (Trillium was not really her name. Actually, Helix was not really his name either. The names of gods are impossible for humans to spell, much less pronounce. Our lips and voice boxes aren’t made for it. Curiously enough, the lips and voice boxes of the Madagascar Aye-Aye, a specialized lemur that retrieves grubs from trees by means of an elongated middle finger, are made for it, but no one asks them). Trillium told Helix that she’d been thinking, and she had this theory that Helix had only triggered the end of the world to get attention.

“That’s ridiculous,” Helix replied. He was in his pajamas. Not pajamas like you or I wear, but the original paijama, from West Asia. He’d paired the trousers with a hideous bright blue calf-length sherwani that he liked because a mortal had once told him it brought out the blue in his eyes. His eyes were no longer blue, but the memory of the flattery remained.

Trillium, on the other end of the phone, said, “You’re like a puppy. Even negative attention will please you.”

Helix considered this. He didn’t feel like this was true. He didn’t care for Trillium’s angry voice, and he didn’t particularly like apologizing in general. His father had never apologized, and his father had done many more things worth apologizing over. Anyway, Helix knew when he was doing things on purpose, and this particular apocalypse didn’t feel like he’d done it on purpose. And he didn’t think he’d done it subconsciously. Gods were all subconscious.

“Oh, stop,” Trillium snapped. “Fine. Just tell me where this damn volcano is.”

He told her. She made an irritated noise.

“Don’t you think that was a bit dramatic?” she asked. “Don’t answer that. Fine. I’ll take care of it. Don’t say thank you, by the way. You don’t really mean it. How long do I have?”

Helix told her.

Trillium made an irritated noise. “Well, I guess I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

Helix said, “We never do things together anymore. Don’t you miss that?”

She made another noise, and then she hung up on him. She didn’t call him back, either. Helix would’ve thought he’d imagined the entire conversation except for the fact that the world didn’t end. He peered out the window a few times, anxiously checking the sky for a smothering cloud of ash and noxious fumes, but it remained blue and clear. Helix was simultaneously relieved and disappointed. It wasn’t that he had wanted humanity wiped off the planet, it was just that he’d been hoping for something to happen to pass the time.

Then there was a knock on his apartment door. It was Trillium. She was dressed entirely in white, which made her skin look inky, and and her lips were painted the color of the blood of innocents. She looked dangerous, which she was.

“I cannot believe you’re wearing that,” she told him, before he’d said anything. “You should’ve told me it was that bad.”

In his kitchen, she sorted through the cabinets until she found the good stuff (technically, “the good stuff” was called ambrosia, but calling it “ambrosia” gives people the wrong idea. It’s cloudy and gritty, although most of the chunks stay in the bottle if it’s poured right. The ambrosia has to distill for at least two centuries to even be drinkable, and even then, drinkable is a very subjective term. I know you don’t have a sensitive stomach, but I won’t tell you what it’s made from regardless). Trillium lounged with a glass and watched him.

“Aren’t you going to get dressed?”

Helix drew himself up. “I am dressed.”

“Aren’t you going to get dressed?” she repeated.

“What for?”

Trillium said, “You said you missed doing things together.”

Helix was quite thrilled, but it wouldn’t do for him to be quite thrilled, so he shot Trillium a filthy look and stalked to the bedroom to change. He took everything out of his closet and began to try them on in front of the mirror. Gods have a different sense of time than mortals, and so it was Tuesday when he emerged from his room, resplendent in Cary Grant’s suit from North by Northwest. Of course it was the real thing, made by Kilgour, French, and Stanbury of Savile Row, and pinched from the hands of collectors decades before.

Trillium, who was still savoring a glass of Ambrosia, tipped the ice around in her glass and raked her eyes over him. “So it’s to be North America, then.”

“I can change,” Helix said.

“Oh,” Trillium said, “No, I think it’s quite obvious that you can’t. Shall we?”

Together they journeyed out into the noisy city Helix had chosen for his home. It was choked with people and all of their hopes and fears, people of every different race and status and gender. To humans, it was a cacophony of identities. To the two gods, however, the city was an ant hill, populated by frantic occupants with common goals. It was tedious for Helix to tell them apart. Luckily for most humans, it’s more difficult than one might think to catch the eye of a god.

Finally, though, the same boy caught their attention. Both gods at once. He’d been tasked by his mother to pawn her good china and bring back the proceeds for groceries.  The boy’s name was Jack, and this reminded Helix of a story. Gods adore stories, especially ones about them. It’s like a favorite movie that you watch again and again, never getting tired of the ending. So Trillium fetched some magic beans and gave them to Helix, and Helix possessed a street vendor to sell them to Jack. The two gods had no giants or magic harps or enchanted geese yet, but they had time. The beanstalk always took weeks to grow, and it seemed like it might take a little longer in this concrete city they’d chosen.

After the exchange had been made, Helix pranced back to Trillium with some falafel. He didn’t say that he was happy with his work, but his face shone with a joy that brightened the sun, rose the temperature of the closest ocean a quarter of a degree, and caused a shelf of ice to melt from the polar ice cap.
“It has been a long time,” Trillium admitted. As a god, she was more immune to Helix than most, but even she had a hard time turning her eyes away from his fierce happiness. The joy of a god was a powerful thing: it started wars and ended winters, murdered monarchs and melted hearts. So when Helix unleashed his ebullience on her, Trillium had no choice but to kiss him with her stiletto lips.

Helix had not been kissed by a god before. He felt he’d spent the last few centuries kissing statues. The most curious sensation was bubbling up inside him. It was as if now, standing on this busy sidewalk, every face around him became distinct and noticeable. Every human caught his eye, suggested stories. Every life seemed like an opportunity for the two of them to insert themselves and play.

“I thought,” Helix said, “that it was the end of the world.”

“Not yet,” said Trillium.

_______________

Author’s Note: my last Merry Sisters of Fate story! Based on our common prompt of Jack and the Beanstalk.

Image is by icliff.

His hair hangs short and ragged about his face, his skin is as pale as blind earthworms. Father once explained that this sort of creature abhors the clothes of men, and to tie his own trousers and lace on boots was what he taught the man-eater first.

He still strips naked before meals, though.

Of all the things Father collected this is my favorite. It exasperated Father that rather than play the golden harp or admire rainbow diamonds and butterfly lace, rather than groom the razor swans and cuddle the exotic blue cats, I’d lean this stool against the iron door to climb up and watch the man-eater.

When I was younger I didn’t believe he was dangerous. He was only a skinny boy my age, putting together intricate puzzled on the stone floor of the tower room. He didn’t read, but surely it was only because no one ever taught him. One morning I watched him flip through an illuminated book so carefully and eagerly that I stole the key from Father’s study and arrived with an alphabet primer under my arm and candy in my nightgown pocket.

As I slipped in, he stood and backed up to the wall, those large dark eyes of his locked to my face. I smiled, offering him the primer. He reached out with one lanky arm and curled his fingers around it. Dried blood stained his cuticles, and I nearly dropped the book. But I straightened my shoulders and strode to his small desk as confidently as I was able with bare feet. I set three pieces of candy onto the table, red and gleaming like rubies, and said, “I thought I should teach you to read letters.”

The man-eater slunk beside me, his mouth firmly closed. This near to him – nearer than I’d ever been – I could see the gray sleepless hollows beneath his eyes and the gentle blue veins at his temples. He stared at me, just taller, but skinnier, and then slowly, slowly, put the primer onto the desk. He reached for one of the candies and brought it to his mouth. When he slipped it between those pink lips, I glanced away.

I opened the primer and smoothed the old parchment. “Here is A.”

“Ay,” he whispered.

“Yes! Good!” I smiled proudly, and the man-eater smiled back.

His teeth hooked like fangs, every last one of them sharp. I felt my face drop and my fingers splayed flat against the primer. The man-eater closed his mouth and focused onto A. He traced it with his finger, giving me time to calm.

We managed our slow way through the entire alphabet that night, and I left the book there.

The next, I showed him how to spell my name, using water spilled onto the table to trace near-invisible letters.

Then I brought ink and blotchy paper from Father’s study, to show the man-eater how to write.

I arrived on the fourth night with another handful of candy and my oldest, most loved storybook, full of drawings of winged princes and mermaids and dragons. The man-eater waited for me, displaying a strip of parchment upon which he’d written J A C K.

“Jack?” I said. “Is that your name?”

And he smiled as widely as he could without displaying his teeth, then pulled the storybook I’d left nearer. He flipped it open to a story of a prince cursed to wander the world in silence. The prince’s name was Jack.

A tiny chip of guilt pierced my heart. He’d wanted a name, but was never given one. To Father, the man-eater was only a monster, yet here he was naming himself. I held out my hand. “‘Tis a pleasure to meet you, Jack.”

He took my fingers and raised them to his mouth. First he kissed the tips, barely touching, softer than butterfly lace. Then he bit me. Pain blossomed and I gasped. Jack sucked gently at the wound and my knees weakened. My heart raged but I only pulled away gently and he released me. The cut slashed diagonally down the tip of my forefinger, leaking slow blood. It throbbed and I grasped his hand. I brought it to my mouth and bit. But my teeth were only a girl’s teeth, not made to so easily break skin. Jack stepped nearer, though, and trailed his finger down my chin.

Father found us then. He shoved through the iron door and went wild, terrifying Jack back into his corner with sparks of fire and dragging me out.

“Sophia,” he spat my name in a way he never had before, his eyes spinning and head shaking. “Do not ever again!”

His anger was so violent he could not tell me what to never to: I guessed he meant everything.

Two days later, after leaving me locked alone in my chambers, with only the company of bluebirds perched on my windowsill and the golden harp with her thin crystal voice, Father led me silently back to Jack’s tower.

He said, “Watch,” and lifted me onto the stool. His hand remained warm against my shoulder as I looked through the slat.

Jack stood naked with his back to me, dripping blood from a red mass in his hand.

A heart.

Splayed across the stone floor in a muddle of skin and bones were the bleeding remains of a man. Jack hunched over him, and bit into the heart. It squelched and dripped. From this angle I could just see the flutter of Jack’s lashes as he shut his eyes in delight.

My knees went weak and I tapped my fingers ineffectually against the iron door, but Father held me pressed there and when I shut my eyes he whispered, “Watch, Sophia. See.”

I did. As the man-eater feasted, stripping away flesh and snapping off delicate bones to gnaw and suck, I stared.

I raised my hand to my mouth, pressing it in to keep from screaming, to keep from saying his name. The healing wound on my finger throbbed from the pressure, and I kissed it.

That was nearly three years ago, and since I’ve only seen him through the door-slat. Father magicked the key into his own fingerbone, and it could not be stolen. But that didn’t keep me from visiting. We whispered to each other through the door, me on the stool, Jack crouched on one of the high-backed chairs or eventually just standing on his own two feet. I handed him hard-candies and let him kiss my fingers, I dressed in the most intricate gowns, with corsets and bustles and a hundred pearl buttons, and he was my audience as I practiced dancing in that dark hallway, as I used magic to transform the cuffs from silver to red embroidery and back again, as I wove tiny swans out of my breath and sent them flying about my head. I brought to life miniature stars to flicker in time with a simply hummed melody, and once or perhaps twice I brought him perfect little dove-hearts, rescued from the kitchens and bundled into linen napkins.

Jack said little, but sometimes slipped me notes he’d written, comments about the clouds he could see from his window, or sketches of the men he’s eaten. I recognized few: they’re trespassers, always, here to steal from Father’s collection. And Jack is their punishment.

He’s starved for nearly three weeks, but I’m here today to rectify that.

Three nights ago, Jack passed me a roll of parchment and upon it was a drawing of me, gripping the bars of a cage. You’ve been happy he wrote, and so you do not see.

I frowned and looked up at the slat, but he’d gone. I climbed onto the stool to search for him, but Jack hunched over his desk, faced away from me, and when I said his name he didn’t respond.

Down and down the tower stairs I ran, until I burst into the courtyard with its cobblestones of frozen clouds and trees spun from rainbows. The sky lightened in the east, spilling soft sunlight through the cloud-towers, and I ran down the road. It twisted toward the sun, toward our neighbors, and I picked up my skirts to go faster. My shoes left swirling prints in the foggy path, and the morning dew kissed my cheeks.

I ran until I could see the gate that led into the starry forest, through which all the visitors came. Gathering my breath, I blew apart the lock and the iron spires spread open, widening like arms that reached for the trees.

But I could not pass. My legs dragged, feet heavy as gold, and my heartbeat didn’t quicken as it should, but fell slower and slower, and my lungs tightened.

I could not go on.

Twenty paces from the gate and I could not will my body forward. Even my thoughts seemed sticky.

Until I stumbled back and landed with my face to the sky, laying spread on the cloud-road, and I thought, Father collects things. What am I?

And how did Jack know?

I remembered that night, when I was young, that he bit open my finger and gently tasted my blood. When he didn’t tear me apart or dig into my chest. He might’ve, even when he heard Father arrive, killed me and licked up the last drops from my heart.

All the rest of the day I sat in my chambers before a silver-wrought mirror. I studied the contours of my face, the smooth peachy hollows around my eyes. I skimmed my tongue along my flat teeth. I was not a man-eater.

The bell rang for dinner and I dressed in my favorite gown. It’s creamy and white. The collar rises high with ruffled lace and underneath the jacket is a silk paneled skirt with delicate black flowers embroidered along the edges. The bustle is yards and yards of wide-pleated satin, and velvet bows hold the sleeves halfway up my forearms. I wear it with pearls in my ears and fingerless gloves.

Father rose from his chair at the head of the table, holding out his hand to me. Instead of a curtsy and smile, I grabbed a knife from the place setting and stabbed it immediately into his stomach.

“What am I?” I asked as he clutched at his guts and fell. As his shoulder hit the floor I pushed him over with the heel of my very delicate boot. “What am I? Where did you collect me? Do I have a real father?”

He pinched his eyes and shook his head. When he parted his lips blood dripped out.

“What am I?” I demanded again, kneeling. The white skirt billowed around me, the ruffled hem touching that growing pool of blood. Redness sucked into the material, in line with the tiny weave, stretching up like tiny fingers to cover the pristine silk. It was beautiful.

Father said, “Some other kind of monster,” and flicked his fingers. Magic sparked around us and I jerked free the knife in his stomach. The effort wrenched a gasp from me, and I fluttered my lashes, recalling how Jack did the same when he devoured that heart.

“Was I always one, or did you make me so?” I asked, not expecting an answer. I climbed to my feet to walk a wide circle around the wizard, until I stooped over his head. I took that left hand and press it flat to the rug. That finger, the forefinger, that is where he put the key.

It was too easy to take. I put the blade to his bottom knuckle and leaned in. The entire finger popped off and Father groaned.

With the key I came here. I clutched it in my fist, hissing magical words to burn it there in my palm. By the time I reached Jack’s room, it was stripped and bleached as if months old.

I slid the stool into place and looked through the slat. There he is, the man-eater, crouched in the corner. I smile at him, though he cannot see my mouth, and get down.

The bonekey shines like the moon as I put it to the keyhole. Under my eyes it lengthens to reach in like its own tiny hand, into the lock. I hear the clinking of the tumblers, and the iron door swings open.

There’s Jack the man-eater, and he stands quickly out of his crouch. I smile and he bounds over to me, grabs me up and leaves two red smears down the sides of my corset as he lifts me and kisses me.

His teeth cut my mouth and I pull back, give him my hand instead. I touch his starving cheeks, the soft gray hollows under his eyes. Licking drops of blood from my lip, I put my hand over his heart.

“Sophia,” he says in his sibilant way.

Curling my fingers, I dig my nails into his chest, gouging open his skin because I can. There is his blood, darker and thicker than mine. It smears down nearly as purple as sunset.

“Jack, you must be so hungry.” I draw him out of his tower, and take him back to the dining room.

***

Our April prompt is Jack and the Beanstalk. I swear to you this started out that way. I merely got sidetracked by the most interesting part: cannibalism. Obviously.

But I won’t make you hold your collective breath any longer. Our winners are:

Jazmin of Wonderful Bookshelf of Jaz

Claudette the Future Librarian

Winners email me at tessa.gratton@gmail.com with your address and we’ll send out your prize! CONGRATULATIONS!!!

My brother Jack said, “Is it sold out?” and after he said that, I could kind of backtrack the guy’s mumble and break it into words.

Tickets. The guy was holding a pair of show tickets. They glowed paper-white under the streetlights. You boys need tickets?

I shook my head, but Jack was already digging around in his pockets, searching for his wallet.

“No!” I said, and I said it fast and loud, grabbing for his elbow like that might actually stop him from doing whatever the hell he wanted.

Jack only laughed and pulled his arm out of my hand. “Hey, what’s the problem? You love Giantkiller, right? And you’ve been yowling all day about your stupid guitar, so this makes us square.”

I just looked at him. Square would be my Fender back.

Square would be if I could have a new brother.

He looked right at me, smiling in the way that when we were little always meant he was about to hold me down in the swimming pool or take my candy bar or lock me in the basement. “Acting like a whiny little bitch isn’t going to get your guitar back.”

There was an empty Schlitz can lying in the middle of the sidewalk and I kicked it hard so it went bouncing along the gutter and down into the storm drain. “If you’d have just stuck to pawning your own shit, I wouldn’t need to get it back. And yeah, I liked Giantkiller in the eighth grade. ”

Jack shrugged and smiled like none of that even made a difference. He handed the guy a couple of twenties and punched me on the arm. “Stop moaning about the guitar. We’ll get you another one.”

He passed me a ticket. It was crumpled and worn soft from being held in the guy’s gloved hand all night.

Also, Jack is an asshole.

*****

Inside the club, the crowd was packed in all the way to the back bar. The whole place was dim and smelled like stale sweat and old beer and drying blood from the mosh pit.

Jack pushed straight through the swarms of people like they weren’t even there, and everyone just let him, even though two feet away, I saw a guy get punched in the face just for trying not to get crushed against the wall.

When Mason Tyler came onstage, the crowd screamed like they were being eaten alive.

I remembered how when I was fourteen, all I wanted was to be him, with the torn T-shirts and the dyed hair and everything. Now though, purple guyliner and leather pants just seemed kind of embarrassing.

Around us, the crowd was shrieking and jumping, slamming into each other. They were covered in tattoos, with facial piercings and dyed-black hair. It was hard to tell who was in makeup and who was just pale and who might be something not quite human. In the dark, it all started to look real.

The band was all girls, except for Mason. They came on in single file, marching across the stage. The keyboard player was this tiny, spritely creature, with a high little ponytail and a short little skirt, but the kind of boots that could kick your ass all by themselves. Her arms were stacked to the elbows with studded bracelets and leather cuffs. When she came up to the keyboard stand, her ponytail bobbed like it was counting off the beat.

The drummer waved her sticks above her head and for one electric second, everyone went dead-quiet. Her hair was bleached ash-white, streaked purple with lipstick to match, but under the flashing lights, her mouth looked black. Then the sticks came down and the screaming was back and louder than ever. Her nails were long and sticky-looking, like a wicked queen in a story—like she’d been digging around in a carved silver box for someone’s heart.

At the very edge of the stage, the bassist was staring off into the floodlights like she wasn’t quite sure she was in the right place or if this was an accident or if she even knew the object she was holding was for making noise. Her hair was piled high in a candy-yellow beehive, stuck full of so many cheap plastic toys and cocktail umbrellas and fake flowers it was impossible to tell whether it was a wig or not. It looked like it might just have sprung up like a mushroom or been built by hand like a wedding cake. She picked out the baseline with vague, uncertain fingers, like it was always two seconds from getting away from her.

Then Mason hit the first chord and the whole place shook like autumn leaves, howled like the gates of hell.

“My God,” I said, even though a second ago, I’d been ready to spend the whole night being pissed off and totally unimpressed.

The guitar was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen, though. It looked like it was made out of magic and blood, like a sacred object. It looked like it was made out of dying stars or dragon tears.

Jack leaned over to shout into my ear. “Pretty cool, huh. You want it?”

I shook my head, but I shook it clumsy and slow, like I was floating around underwater. My mouth wouldn’t close.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and right when he said it, I was so, so scared that he would.

I turned and stared at him, and this time when I shook my head, I did it fast and certain. “You can’t just take something because you decide you want it. You can’t take people’s things!” Which was a pointless thing to say, because taking people’s things was kind of what Jack did in life. “That guitar does not belong to you!”

“So what? They make what, like millions of dollars? They can afford to replace one stupid guitar.”

I turned my back on him and stared off into the thrashing crowd. “That is not a reason.”

*****

Backstage, there were girls everywhere, but mostly draped across Mason Tyler.

Jack walked straight into the middle of the party like he belonged there. He’d barely glanced at security when they’d tried to stop him. He’d said, “Do you know who I am?” and they’d backed right off, because any time Jack said that, people stammered and fell all over themselves trying to figure out where they were supposed to know him from.

At the back of the room, the drummer was standing by a long table covered with huge catering trays of little frosted cakes and elaborately cut fruit. Up close, her fingernails were so long they looked poisonous. Her eye makeup was wine-purple and bone-white to match her hair.

“And now we’ve reached the portion of the evening reserved for party crashers,” she said when I came up next to her, but she smiled when she said it. She didn’t tell me to leave. All the food was shaped like human organs.

Over in the corner, the bassist was sitting on the edge of a metal folding chair with her tower of hair wobbling above her and her ankles crossed. She was holding a tiny china plate with a glistening red-frosted cake in the middle. When she cut into it with her fork, the filling spilled out over the plate in a deep, oozing puddle. She licked it off her fingers and smiled when she saw me watching.

Jack was across the room now, talking to Mason Tyler like they were best friends and there wasn’t a random girl sitting in Mason’s lap.

I stayed exactly where I was, flat against the wall, trying to look invisible.

“Your friend must be brave,” said a voice beside me. “Or anyway, I prefer to think he’s brave, because otherwise he’s just stupid.”

The keyboard player was standing right by my elbow. She had bright, wicked eyes and freckles on her nose. Her stare made me think of all the stories I’d ever heard about pixies or leprechauns. I tried to remember if there were any where the leprechauns ate people.

“He’s not my friend,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

“Well, either way,” said the keyboard player, “he’s about to reach the extent of our hospitality.”

I looked where she was pointing. The groupies were crowding together now. Their faces had hardened, lengthened into the sharp beaky features of reptiles or birds, but at first, Jack didn’t seem to notice. They moved closer, reaching for him, catching hold, and when they put their mouths against his skin, for a second I thought that they were kissing him.

But it was more predatory than that. Not devouring, but exploring. Tasting.

The drummer rolled her eyes. “And there they go. Vicious little cannibals.” She might have sounded amused if she didn’t sound so bored. “Just stay quiet and don’t make any sudden movements. They’re sort of like dinosaurs that way.”

Her smile was wide and ferocious and I couldn’t tell whether or not she was joking.

I was trying to decide if I should make a move anyway, go plunging across to Jack, try to drag him out—if that would even be possible—when the bassist came drifting over to me, carrying Mason’s guitar. There was blood splashed across the fretboard.

“You can have it,” she said, holding it in her arms like she was holding a huge, unwieldy baby.

I shook my head.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

I stared back at crowd of hands and mouths, where Jack was buried deep in the hive of bodies, somewhere at the center. “Do you mean it’s like a bargain? Like a trade or something? I take the guitar but I have to give you my brother?”

The bassist shook her head and the flock of plastic toys shook too. “Oh no,” she said. “He’s made a meal of himself either way, so you might as well get something out of it. He’ll entertain them for awhile and then they’ll be done with him and send him home, and maybe he’ll even still be a little like himself. Or maybe not. It’s hard to say.”

I watched as Mason’s groupies crowded around my brother, but by now, I could hardly even see him anymore. The bassist stood in front of me, blinking up expectantly.

I took the guitar.

*****

On the corner of Grant and 23rd, I stood alone under the streetlight. There was no one lounging against any of the buildings now, and no one scalping tickets. I held the guitar by the neck, feeling unsteady, like the ground I was standing on might not be real ground.

Even here, in the still, icy night, the guitar seemed to be humming.

It wasn’t what I came for, but maybe fairytales weren’t the kind of thing you knew the moral to ahead of time.

It wasn’t what I came for, but it was close enough.

*****

Our common prompt for April is the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. Also, I took many liberties. Which surprises approximately no one.

Photo by leonelponce

We are so happy with the cover, and with the final product! 

A vampire locked in a cage in the basement, for good luck.

Bad guys, clever girls, and the various reasons why the guys have to stop breathing.

A world where fires never go out (with references to vanilla ice cream).

These are but a few of the curiosities collected in this volume of short stories by three acclaimed practitioners of paranormal fiction.

But The Curiosities is more than the stories. Since 2008, Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff have posted more than 250 works of short fiction to their website merryfates.com. Their goal was simple: create a space for experimentation and improvisation in their writing—all in public and without a backspace key. In that spirit, The Curiosities includes the stories and each author’s comments, critiques, and kudos in the margins. Think of it as a guided tour of the creative processes of three acclaimed authors.

So, are you curious now?

But it’s not just our stories, it’s full of our own brand of craziness and fun: 

And cartoons we’ve personally drawn!

Woo hoo! But wait, there’s more! Our publisher, Carolrhoda Lab, made a trailer in which we babble with slight coherency about Merry Fates and one of us has obscene amounts of eyeshadow. LINKY LINKY!

You can also watch the making of the book itself and our shenanigans here: WHEN THE FATES COLLIDE WITH MAGICAL PENS!

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

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

The beast was the most frightening thing you could imagine.

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

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

“Because he looked afraid,” her mother said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss being the beast.

________________
Author’s Note: I don’t know why I keep writing unpleasant stories for Merry Fates. This is possibly my most unpleasant to date. I swear I will end on a happy one. Our monthly prompt was “Rose Red & Snow White” or “Snow White & Rose Red” or whichever it is.

Image courtesy: EddieB55

The nightmare.

But waking up gave him no outlet to scream, for his throat could only whimper and roar. His tongue pressed against sharp teeth, yellowed and stained as though he’d spent a lifetime swallowing rabbits and deer-livers. He had no lips to form words, but sometimes in that moment before consciousness, he remembered language.

What he’d say: the snap and pop of fire makes me remember what it was like to change.

One of the sisters always heard him, slipping out of their loft on silent bare feet. Her shawl reminded him of something blue he used to know, and her silky white hair curled like the rapids in the river beside his…

She touched his muzzle unafraid, hissing little reassurances and digging her fingers into the thick ruff behind his ears.

The other sister came shortly, always aware of the first’s absence. Her lips were red and her eyes darker than… another thing he used to know. Together they teased him, tugging his fur or blowing lightly in his ears. The dark one painted pink on his claws. The quiet one tied glass beads into his fur.

***

It was a woman’s hands.

The dream.

Caressing his face, his smooth human skin. He could never see a thing, but only feel her fingers fluttering his lashes, drawing a line down his nose, tracing the corner of his mouth. There was no need to remember language then.

Those were the mornings he woke quietly, the banked fire pushing gentle warmth at his back. He heaved up onto his paws and trundled to the door a few steps before settling back into this monster’s shape.

And remembering he couldn’t turn the handle. If he wanted through the door, out of the cottage, he’d have to break through. Easy, with his bulk. But then the winter would rush in.

***

The world outside was built of diamonds. Snow and ice glaring the sun back at him, but the sisters ran ahead, leaving shadowed footprints for him to follow. Sometimes he did, vaguely knowing it was a game, a game he’d played before, hunting… hunting deer on the back of a horse with gray muddled eyes. Named…

He didn’t know his own name.

Just Bear.

Maybe his memory would blossom with the flowers.

***

It was easier to sleep.

Today’s story based on the common prompt: Snow White and Rose Red
image by Roxnstix via flickr CC

“I’m awake,” I say, before I even really know if it’s the truth.

Her voice is careful in the dark, like she’s afraid she’ll startle me, breathing the words instead of speaking them. “There’s someone at the door.”

The way she leans over me is careful too, like she’s trying to keep me calm. It’s silly, though. Of the two of us, I’m the one who’s never loud. I’m the one who keeps still and doesn’t make a fuss.

Outside, the night is strangely pale. Snow has collected on all the window ledges and made its way up the glass, shutting us in like a tomb. In the clear space above the little drifts, it just keeps falling.

Then, without warning, the pounding comes again, echoing from downstairs, booming through the front hall.

“Wait here,” she says, taking her cardigan from the back of the desk chair and after a second, the heavy wooden bat.

She leaves, and the whole house is as dark and still as the dead. The power’s been out since this afternoon. After a second, I reach for the Coleman lantern beside the bed and turn it on. Then I throw back the covers and follow her.

The lantern casts a dim circle of light, making shadows in all the corners. At the top of the stairs, I stand and listen.

Her feet are light, almost soundless on the floor runner. Then I hear her voice, loud and ferocious, speaking close to the door. “Who are you and what do you want?”

The answer is muffled, low. A man’s. “Please, my car went off the road. About a half a mile up Ashbury Drive. It’s stuck in the ditch and there’s nothing around. Please, if you don’t let me in, I’ll die out here.”

The door distorts most of the sound, but I can still hear the way his voice catches on the last part. Outside, the snow is falling in huge, silent washes, drifting up the sides of the house. It collects in deep hummocks, heavy, soundless, and by morning, we might be buried completely.

“Coral,” I say, because if we leave him there on the front steps, he’ll freeze. “You have to let him in.”

She turns and sees me, standing at the top of the stairs. It’s too dark to see faces, but the way her head moves side to side, I can almost watch her making up her mind.

“Oh, all right, fine.” She turns the thumb lock and the deadbolt, then steps against the wall before opening the door. Her other hand is tight on the handle of the bat.

The man lumbers inside, shaking the snow from his hair. He’s so big that for a second, he seems to fill the doorway, looming in dark silhouette against the white night sky behind him. Then he steps into the light and I can see that it’s just his coat. It’s a huge down-filled sausage of a coat, swelling out around his body.

He marches in place on the mat, stomping his feet to knock the snow off. He’s wearing gray canvas sneakers. A heavy winter parka, but canvas sneakers.

“May I hang up your things?” I say, starting down the stairs.

Coral gives me a quick, incredulous look, but doesn’t move to stop me.

The man is peeling out of the coat, dropping snow all over the hall runner, sprinkling the deep wild rose pattern with white.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking truly abashed. “I’m so sorry about the floor. If you want to get me a towel or something, I’ll mop it up.”

“Why don’t you have boots?” I say, coming close enough to see the stubble on his chin, dark and slightly uneven. A little monogram on his shirt cuff, the letters HLD intertwined in navy thread. To smell the wild, acrid tang of his wet hair.

His face is long and almost delicate, younger than I would have guessed. His eyes are brown, dark-lashed, slightly close-set. “Excuse me?”

“Boots. You’re wearing a heavy winter coat, but you have no boots.”

“Oh,” he says, glancing down. “God, would you look at me. Poor planning, I guess.”

But the tone of his voice is apologetic. He doesn’t meet my eyes when he says it.

“Would you like something hot to drink?”

He nods, letting me take the coat. He’s very tall and almost as broad, but he keeps hunching his shoulders like he’s trying to make himself smaller.

“Your shoes have no laces,” I say as I start for the kitchen. Behind me, I can feel Coral move, choking up on the bat, but she doesn’t do anything. It’s just an observation.

In the kitchen, I heat milk in a saucepan and add sugar and salt and chocolate syrup. I do it in the dark. As I stand there, warming my hands over the stove, waiting for it to boil, the stillness comes suddenly alive with the sound of breaking glass. When I look around though, the source is mysterious, hard to make out in the dark.

Then I see it.

One of the panes in the kitchen door is gone and a hand is reaching in through the empty space to turn the lock. It’s a square, stubby-fingered hand and I go across to the knife block and take out the cleaver before coming up to the door.

“Who are you and what do you want?” I say, leaning close to peer through the glass.

There’s a man on the back steps and when he sees me staring out at him, his eyes go wide. “Oh good lord!” he yelps, almost stumbling into the drifted peony bed. “You scared the bejeezus out of me!”

I rest my hand against the door. The wind blowing in through the shattered pane is frigid. “I think that’s something I’m supposed to say, considering that you’re the one breaking into my house.”

“I didn’t know anyone was here,” he tells me. “No cars out front and the whole place looks deserted. I didn’t mean to cause trouble, just needed to find somewhere warm.” His teeth are chattering and he’s trying to work the feeling back into his hands, rubbing them up and down his arms.

I slip the cleaver into the pocket of my robe and open the door.

We’re standing in the kitchen, facing each other across the linoleum, when there’s a flare of light and Coral is behind me, holding the lantern and looking thunderous. “What’s going on?”

“This gentleman was just looking for someplace to shelter for the night and then he stuck his hand through our window. I thought that since he wanted to see our kitchen so badly, he might as well come in.”

Coral says nothing, only holds the lantern up, studying him with her jaw set and the bat hanging menacingly in her other hand. He’s a small man, with a hard, foxy face and a high go-to-hell arch in his eyebrows. His hair hangs in a ragged shock over his forehead, but he keeps his beard trimmed in a neat little patch just around his mouth. He’s wearing no coat at all.

The other visitor has followed Coral and is standing back by the refrigerator with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slumped. It doesn’t really work. He still looks very big.

“Well,” I say, looking around at all of them. “It seems to be a bad night for passing through. I’m sorry, you two haven’t met.”

Our first visitor steps away from the wall, moving with the slow, weighty grace of an animal. “Jim Maxwell,” he says, offering his hand. Their eyes meet in a fast, furtive glance, highly charged and gone again.

“Carter Boyd,” says the other and then they both drop their hands and look away.

On the stove, the milk has begun to hiss and foam in the pan and I go to pour it while Coral covers the broken window with a piece of cardboard and the men sit across from each other at the table with the lantern plunked down in the middle.

“Do you two ever think about moving closer to town?” says Jim Maxwell in low, conversational way. “It’s pretty lonely out here.”

“We don’t mind it,” Coral tells him. “I’m good around the house and Bianca keeps a nice garden in the summer. We manage.”

“Your name isn’t Jim,” I tell him softly, handing him his cup. “Or else you’re wearing someone else’s shirt. Maybe both.”

He doesn’t answer. For the next few minutes, both men hunch over the table, drinking their hot chocolate, avoiding each other’s eyes.

Coral is sitting at the head of the table, looking tired and annoyed at having company in the middle of the night. “Bianca,” she says, getting to her feet. “Do you want to go ahead and bring some blankets down from the attic while I get a fire started?”

“I’ll give you a hand with that fire if you like,” says Jim Maxwell, whose name is not that and whose shirt belongs to someone else.

Out in the front hall, I start up the stairs, then hear the floorboards creak when Carter moves behind me. He catches me by the elbow and pulls me into the alcove under the staircase, pressing his hand against my mouth.

“You have to get him out of here,” he whispers, and I can smell the chocolate on him, and something else too, all fear and sweat, and over that, the light, clean smell of snow. “It’s not safe having him in this house.”

I take his hand away from my face. “What are you talking about?”

“Look, I don’t want to scare you, but right now, you got to listen to me. I guess you know that he’s not Jim Maxwell and I might as well tell you that my name’s not Carter. Me and him, we’re both off the same transport truck. They were moving us out to Willby, but then the roads got bad and we went off the highway.”

“Weren’t there any guards with you?”

“There were,” he says. “But you don’t need to know the details. And now there’s twelve real bad guys wandering around this godforsaken stretch of country in the snow. They’re all hard customers, but he’s the worst. I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed some poor sucker to get that fancy coat he came here with. Man’s vicious as a dog and he’ll kill you too without a second thought.”

The way he says it is supposed to make me shrink in terror. Remind me that the other visitor is big, eminently powerful. That he’s alone with Coral, who is stoking the fire and doesn’t know the man beside her is a criminal.

It would be reasonable to think all that if both of them didn’t look so thoroughly disreputable. If Coral were a fool.

I look up at the man who isn’t Carter. The maddening thing is how I can’t see his face. If I could, I’d be able to read the truth in the shape of his mouth, see his secrets in the lines around his eyes. “How did you know that he came here with a coat?”

He doesn’t answer, just draws in his breath as I step past him and out of the alcove.

“Come back here,” he says.

But I don’t, just start for the sitting room, and he follows me. He’s not panicked, not hurrying, but I can hear the soft fall of his footsteps. I can feel his hand when it reaches to catch hold of me, inches from the back of my robe.

“I was kind to you,” I say. “So was my sister.”

We’re standing on the hall runner, with the wild rose pattern damp under my feet and the cleaver in my pocket bumping gently against my thigh. He moves behind me, sly and cautious, edging closer.

I touch the cleaver handle, the worn-smooth wood. “How long have you been escaped, really?”

“Two weeks.” The voice is lower, the soft, apologetic pitch of the man in the monogrammed shirt. He’s standing ahead of me, filling up the sitting room doorway. “The part about the transport truck is true. There was a break on one of the state pen trucks two weeks ago and a whole bunch of us just ran. I’m real sorry. You have to know that no one meant to bring this to your door.”

But I’m not so sure he’s right about that. The foxy one is so close I can feel his breath stir my hair. The air coming off him smells like rage, and there may have been a man on that transport truck who seizes opportunities and kills indiscriminately, but he isn’t the man with the stolen shirt and the apologetic eyes. No, if he’s anywhere, it’s standing right behind me.

Soon, he’ll reach for my throat, but just now, we stay still, deep in the thrall of the silence and the snow. With our arms limp and our eyes open against the dark, we might as well be sleepwalking.

When Coral appears, it’s like a whisper. A slender shadow behind the man in the doorway, bat in one hand, the fireplace poker in the other. The end of the poker glows red-hot, and I know the strange electric calm can’t last.

She swings the bat in a short arc, more precision than force, and the man in front of her hits the floor with a soft gasp and doesn’t get up. Behind me, the foxy one grabs my collar. His hand is rough, but uncertain in the dark and I turn out of his grasp.

“Ungrateful,” I say as I sidestep him, swinging the cleaver so that it slashes across his outstretched hand. “I let you in after you broke my window!”

He hisses and yanks his hand back. I hack again and this time connect with his shoulder, but it’s only a shallow cut. I’m not strong enough to sink the blade anyplace bony. I need to find his soft spots, but the hall is dim except for the fading glow of the poker and the lantern light shining weakly from the other room. And then he’s right in front of me, beating at my face and my neck, trying to hold me.

Coral is dancing around us. I can hear her there, see the dark frantic shape of her, but the hall is dark and narrow and she won’t swing the bat. I could actually die in my own front hall because my sister is too scared to hit me.

Then the man in the monogrammed shirt is between us, fighting his way in front of me and ripping the cleaver from my hand. Behind him, Coral is screaming, screeching, beating at him with her baseball bat and then her hands. But the big man doesn’t even glance at her, just stands over the smaller one and buries the cleaver in his chest.

For a long, painful, moment, there is only the irregular pattering sound of blood falling in a sloppy cascade, and then the foxy one slips heavily to the floor and the other man falls with him, kneeling over the body, breathing in huge, whining gasps. Blood is running down the back of his neck from the place where Coral hit him, soaking into his shirt. I sink beside him, feeling weightless and numb. Time passes.

Then Coral is standing over us, lantern in hand. The light shows a festival of blood, spreading on the carpet in huge, ragged-edged splotches. They look like roses.

“Who are you,” I say to the man beside me. “And what do you want?”

“I’m the hard case from the transport truck,” he says, sounding tired and drowsy. The cut on the back of his head isn’t slowing. “I’m the hard customer that our friend here told you about. But I ain’t the only bad man in the world.”

“What do you want?” I say again, and my voice sounds very small.

He shakes his head, eyes slipping closed. “I just didn’t want to freeze to death.”

Our common prompt for March is the fairy tale Snow-White and Rose-Red.

Photo by p-duke

The bearded tech assistant gave a little laugh. “Well,” he said, “If I don’t do this right, you will be in fourteen different places.”

It was the laugh that annoyed me, actually. It wasn’t a laugh that indicated any particular deference or uncertainty. It was a — dare I say it? — yes, chuckle. It was the sort of gentle chuckle that bearded young men tended to give when they were around other bearded young men of the same social status and educational background. It was a chuckle that said we all know what’s going on here, man, and it’s that we’re getting the shaft by fate, so let’s have a beer and let it work itself out.

Only I was not a similarly statused bearded young man. I was August Mowbray, son of Justice Mowbray, who, for all intents and purposes, was the closest thing to fate this assistant would ever touch. And I had, as I mentioned before, fourteen other places to be besides this gymnasium-sized greenhouse full of corn. The entire room smelled like chemicals, modified soil, and, beneath it all, possibly, plants.

“I would laugh,” I said, “But the intricacies of elevator humor escape me.”

“Elevator!” the assistant said. “If this was just an elevator, you’d be out of here and I’d be kicking back, man.”

Using every bit of my personal fortitude, I managed to avoid wincing at the word ‘man.’ “Enlighten me.” My father has an incredible fondness for technology and gadgets and, as County Principal, he was always looking for new ways to implement them in his benevolent rule. As his son, he’s exhorted me to show some interest.

This was me, showing interest.

The bearded tech assistant chuckled again. I could see it, the word, ‘chuckle.’ He said, “This greenhouse is forty-seven miles away from the building you came from. When you got into that ‘elevator’ back in the library, your molecules were dis-assembled, transmitted across the hi-4 wires your dad was so nice to lay out here to Meadville, and then put back together in the same configuration that you like ‘em in. Then the doors opened and you got out to look at some corn.”

I felt violated, and if Mercedes had been around, I would’ve told her so, in an ever-lasting attempt to get a laugh out of her. But the little viper wasn’t here, and I wasn’t about to joke with anyone who referred to me as ‘man,’ so I said, “I feel like there should’ve been a warning label before I attempted that.”

The tech assistant brandished a tool that I thought was called a wrench. Or a socket. I was sure I’d seen some educational and entertaining children’s program at some time in my youth where they’d established the difference, but I couldn’t remember it. “Not normally a problem, you know? Safe as airplanes. Safe as trampolines. Safe as hydro-boarding. Whatever, you know? But it doesn’t like the heat of the greenhouse. And the fan’s not really getting up to speed for some reason. Just let me try —”

He went to town with whatever the hell tool it was he had in his hand. I rolled back around to lean on the wall beside the not-elevator doors, the false sun from the high above illuminated ceiling hot on my face. Corn stretched and stretched in front of me, growing incrementally as I watched. It had already gained a foot since I’d first arrived, and tiny ears were beginning to swell against the stalks. The nearest row of corn swayed as a second, unseen assistant moved on the other side of it. I was meant to return to my father with a report of how the accelerated crops were doing here in Meadville. Why he couldn’t have accomplished the same thing with a Helyo visit was beyond me. Actually, it wasn’t beyond me. August, it’s important that we get out among them. They need to see that I — and after me, you — are just as invested in our collective well-being.

I was invested in our collective well-being. It was just that I could have been invested at the other end of a Helyo visit, nodding into a camera in the corner of my bedroom and then going back to sleep.

“So if your repair efforts are less than stellar, my molecules will be scattered across the County?” I asked.

The assistant strained against a meaty looking washer along the length of one of the metal tubes entering the not-elevator. “No way. Matter likes to stay with matter.”

“Rubin’s Theory,” I said.

“Very good,” the bearded assistant said with genuine approval, and this time it really did take all of my considerable self-control to avoid forcing him to ingest his own facial hair. Out here in Meadville, they didn’t even have the imagination to dream about the education I’d gotten. I’d tutored under Rubin himself for four months.

The bearded assistant shoved up his glasses and peered at me. “So matter stays with matter. If the molecules don’t all get assembled correctly, fast enough, that vacuum of matter-staying-with-matter is a killer, man. The people-mover will keep trying to put you together, but it’ll use what’s around. Last month some dude went through a malfunctioning mover, and it pulled some molecules from the board table he was going to. His whole arm, man. Wood and vinyl and shit. And of course, the desk looked like hell too. They kept finding fingernails places. How tall are you, man?”

I kept looking at him.

“Sir?” he corrected.

But the way he said ‘sir’ was as disagreeable as the way he’d chuckled. He said ‘sir’ like one bearded young man would say it to another, like it was a shared joke. I found nothing funny about ‘sir.’ When I got back to Philly, I was suggesting Meadville get a few more weeks of bad weather to give them time to contemplate their role in the world. It would be more snow, of course. My father preferred snow as punishment. I failed to see the punishment in snow. When I became County Principal, it would be tornadoes and hail.

“Five foot eleven,” I replied.

“Same as me,” the assistant said happily. I smiled thinly at him. Let him think anything about us was remotely similar, if it made him work more efficiently.

The second assistant emerged then — did everyone have beards in Meadville! — holding a forked soil collector by his side. He was a little taller than the first assistant, but he wore the sallow apathy of rural twenty-somethings in just the same way. When he spoke, he had the accent my father had always told my mother to eradicate in her own voice. You’re better than that, Ellen.

“How’s it going, Ben?”

“Oh, it’s nearly there,” said the first assistant. “I just need the, you know, the thing, man.” They both looked at me, and I realized I had been standing without considering my expression for several minutes, which meant I could still feel the shape of boredom and disdain on my mouth. I rubbed my lip.

The second assistant asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, man.”

The second assistant moved to a small, plywood shed that bore more resemblance to a dog house than to a supply shed for a hi-tech growing facility.

“What, pray tell,” I asked, “is a ‘thing’?”

The second assistant emerged with a flat, plastic-looking disk, its surface rippled and molded. A few bright green wires ran around the outside of it. “It’s a Fascia-Protector. It’s just a safe-guard, in case the fan’s not working. You’re going to hold it over your face while you transport. Ben’s going to go with you, to make sure everything’s good on the other end too.”

“You and me, baby,” the first bearded assistant said, punching his fist into my shoulder. My hackles didn’t go down this time.

“You’re sure this will work?” I demanded. “Let’s just get this over with.”

The second assistant handed Ben a second fascia-protector and hit the button to open the people-mover’s doors. We stepped in front of it. Inside, the mirrored doors reflected us: my courtly, proud form, the result of generations of good breeding; and Ben’s slouching, humble one, a man who knew his place in the world. Behind us stretched the corn, the cobs now bursting with ripe kernels.

Ben and I stepped into the people-mover.

“See you later, man,” Ben told the other bearded assistant. He leaned forward to bump knuckles with him. I’d had about enough of the outer County’s customs. I wanted to be back home. “Fascias up.”

As the doors slid shut, we both lifted the fascia-protectors. I saw now that the molding roughly corresponded to the dips of a face: bump out for the nose, chin, eyebrows. In the mirrors, Ben and I looked identical behind the protectors. Around us, the people-mover began to hum as it had before. Before, I’d thought I was traveling up floors or at light speed or — I’m not sure what I’d thought. I thought that I’d been moving as a unit, though, not as a collection of individual molecules. I hadn’t thought I’d been assembled.

The people-mover stopped humming, and the doors slid open, revealing the library of my father’s house.

Ben said, “I think both you and your father are sons-of-bitches, and you’re going down, man.”

I ripped down my protector at the same time that he did. I opened my mouth to snarl a response, but for once, words failed me, not because I wasn’t permitted to use them, but because I couldn’t find them, because my lips weren’t my own.

I had nothing left to say, really, because he wore my face.

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Author’s Note: Our common prompt this week was “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” This story began as a dream and went from there.

image courtesy: jcoterhals

Since, he’s come to rely on me. I sit at his knee on a three-legged stool, my ankles together, hair oiled and braided into as much of a crown as I’ll ever receive, in a plain but finely made dress there’s no question everyone can see. From there I observe his court, and when the king asks what I see, I tell him. For my eleventh birthday he bestowed upon my mother a small retirement cottage outside the city, and my uncle who helped raise me a stipend to open his own clock shop. When I turned fifteen I was granted the title Truth Sayer, and a tiny sapphire and emerald ring with the king’s seal. I’ve always striven to serve His Majesty well, never skimping on the truths I see or sparing anyone. My word has led to executions and revelry, to the king’s fury, consternation, and eternal gratitude.

Tonight will be the last time.

The moon hangs low and orange over the garden. I stare at it, listening to the voices from this afternoon echo in my chamber. Three hundred and seventeen dead, Violet. His priorities are changed. You know this is the truth. You always do. Three hundred and seventeen. Do you have to tell their mothers why they died?

My heart pinches, cutting off the memories. I shudder and stand, taking up the dagger from the windowsill. Its jasper hilt is cold in my palm and slippery. I slide it into my skirt pocket, through the thin slit. There’s a hilt strapped to my thigh, an assassin’s tool.

Bennett waits for me in the hallway, his fine jacket gathering dust for how still he stands. Like a shadow he peels away from the wall and holds out his hand. I ignore it, for the truth is I won’t accept any comfort for what I’m about to do.

We walk silently through the royal corridor. My skin feels expansive, billowing off my body to collect all the sensations around me: thick carpet through my slippers, a warm draft from the sconces, the scent of roasted meat and lavender perfume when we pass the princess’s suite.

A small group of courtiers sits in the round hall outside the king’s bedchamber as always, chosen for the honor by currying the appropriate favors with His Majesty’s staff. Red-suited guards stare at everything, their elegant long axes cradled against their shoulders and ever-ready.

The difference tonight is that I see the same truth on every courtier’s face: death.

It was the king’s niece Amber who began it, three weeks ago when the messenger rode into the courtyard wearing the uniform of her husband’s soldiers and a white armband tied tight to his wrist. All eyes of the court locked onto that signal and knew the general sent to us that the war did not go well.

She sits in a narrow chair with her hands folded in her lap and no pretense of being busy with anything while she holds the king’s dream vigil. I’d read the private letter the general sent her, detailing the facts from the front line. The truth had been in her tears and in the vacant smile my king offered when I told him we were losing.

Each of the five courtiers studies me as I enter, reassuring themselves their conspiracy is safe in my hands. But they all know once I see the truth it’s everything to me. I’ve become my role.

Edden Baxter the court physician keeps his mouth in a flat line, and he wants to say, This is not the only way. Let me do it, Violet. Not because he wishes to save me from it, but because he knows if one of the guards asks me why I’m visiting the king in the middle of the night I’ll tell him. Safer for Edden and Amber if I’m not here. But it must be me.

When I finished reading the general’s private letter it fell out of my numb fingers, fluttering to the rug, and I closed my eyes. A tear fell from each, hitting my cheeks with splashes I imagined were as loud and wide as fireworks.

No, Amber whispered, gripping my shoulders. I didn’t want to be right.

But she was. This was the truth: we were losing our war and the king couldn’t see reason, no matter what I or anyone else said. We were better off without him. With new leadership. They showed me the letter knowing I would not be swayed by my love for the king, or the general. That I would look through the layers and even if it was horrible, even if every breath of mine wanted to scream out against it, I would be loyal to the truth I found.

I am the nation’s safeguard, not the king’s.

Before I step up to the bedroom door, Bennett’s finger whispers against the nape of my neck.

A shiver streaks down my spine and I falter, but only for a moment. A fraction of a moment. I think of his mouth and its constant disapproving frown, of the square set of his shoulders and his constant silence as he does his job. Protecting the truth.

But I keep going, and neither guard challenges me. The one on the left, older and named Horace, flicks his eyes back to Bennett because where I have passage, he does not. I leave everyone behind and enter the king’s bedchamber alone.

The door clicks shut behind me and I’m in the dark but for that gentle blue light that’s the moon pushing through the king’s stained-glass window. Blue and pale green glass are cut together to create the ancient crest of his family. Just as is on my ring. I glance at it, wondering if I’ll be able to wear it in the morning, then make a fist and go to his canopied bed.

There is my king, my handsome Alistair. Who I saw for the first time when I was seven, strutting on the balcony before his people, as naked as a baby. Now he’s old enough to be my father, but with his face slack that’s easy to forget. He grew a beard last year and I touched it lightly, saying, It’s more silver than brown, sire.

Does it make me look older then, Violet?

Definitely. Though no less handsome.

He preened at that, but had his man shave it off the next day.

I perch on the edge of the broad bed. In his sleep he shifts toward me. Hair flops over his forehead and the one hand atop the blanket reaches blindly before settling again. His own signet ring clings to his middle finger, thick as my thumb knuckle, but it fits his hand as if grown there naturally.

My hand hovers over his face, and I imagine putting it to his cheek, stroking under his eye until he wakes so that I can tell him he created a monster in me. That maybe sometimes the truth is the wrong thing to rely on. That there are many kinds of truth. It’s true that he was never the best king. It’s true that the war will end if he dies.

It’s true that is this is wrong.

“What is the most true thing?” I whisper. I’ve never been so naked before.

The king’s eyelashes flicker and as he wakes I reach into the pocket of my skirt for the dagger. Edden said, You’re not strong enough to be sure of hitting his heart. Amber said, Here is a poison. You only must cut his skin.

Bennett said, This will change you, in the loudest voice I’ve ever heard from him.

“Alistair,” I say. “Wake up.”

He blinks hazily. “Violet? What are you doing here?”

I show him the dagger. “I came to kill you.”

Even the air between us freezes when the king stops breathing.

We sit. My blood rushes in my ears, and His Majesty sucks in a fast gulp of air. “And are you going to go through with it?” he asks evenly, as if there’s no fear.

“I don’t know.”

“Do I… deserve to die?” In his voice is the measured tone he uses when asking me for a truth he knows he doesn’t wish to hear.

Because he asked, I know the answer. But I can’t say it, so I shake my head, no.

Fast as a falcon strike, Alistair seizes the dagger from me. He throws it across the room where it clatters against the marble hearth. The king is on his feet, pacing so tightly he might as well go in circles. His nightshirt flaps around his knees and his hair flares messily.

“What should I do, Violet?” he asks.

I could say a hundred things that are all true: You should step down. You should end the war. You should let me go far away, far from you. Bennett will take me. Maybe in the mountains I can find the truth again.

But instead I avert my eyes and only say, “Put on some clothes.”

*************
This month’s common prompt is “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

picture via malias, flickr CC.