Cait drives several blocks. They stop to ask a guy on a bicycle if he’s seen a barefoot boy in a red toga running past. Barefoot. Iph has a moment of certainty that this is all a dream. There is no reality in which tender-footed, easily grossed-out Orr would walk barefoot anywhere, let alone run.
“He went up Lovejoy,” the guy says. “Is he training for the Olympics or something?”
“Thank you,” Cait says and takes off.
The streets in this part of the city behind Powell’s are alphabetical. Iph checks them off as they pass. On Lovejoy, Cait floors it. At Overton, she stops again to ask a group of smokers outside a restaurant. “I saw him,” a guy says. “He was headed that way.” The man points toward Northwest 23rd.
They keep driving, but Orr is nowhere in sight. Cait pulls over to regroup. Iph’s hand goes to her pocket. Matches? No, it’s the little book of poetry she picked up at Shiny Dancer. The moon comes out from behind a cloud, illuminating the inside of the car. Iph opens the tiny cover. On the title page it says:
Fragment from Ferenc Juhász’s
“The Boy Changed Into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets”
On the next few tiny pages she reads:
He stoops over the pool
stares into the moonlit water—
a beech tree with the moon in its hair
shudders—the pool reflects a stag!
Iph can’t breathe. She flashes for a panicked second on her inhaler, left in her nightstand drawer. Her quiet, empty, messy room. She needs air. Gets out of the car.
“You all right?” Lorna is beside her.
“I’m scared.”
Lorna takes her hand. “Think about him. You know him. Where would he go?”
Iph hands Lorna the matchbook poem. Lorna nods as she reads it.
“Is there an entrance to Forest Park around here? Maybe a trail with a creek?” she asks through the car’s open windows.
“On Thurman,” Josh says. “The trail to the Witch’s Castle.”
7
Journey to
the Provinces
Iph waits alone in the dark forest, sitting on the steps of the Witch’s Castle. Cait, Josh, and Lorna offered to stay, but she sent them back to Taurus Trucking to update George. She has the flashlight and blanket from the trunk of Cait’s car. The butterflies in her stomach—well, maybe bats, considering her location—tell her Orr is close by.
The air is sweet with the breath of trees who tower over the tumbledown stone house like whispering giants in fringed pine-needle party dresses, their limbs silvered in moonlight. The Witch’s Castle was once part of an 1880s homestead, then a rest stop for hikers, Cait told them. Now it’s a burned-out stone structure layered with graffiti and moss that glows highlighter bright in the beam of Iph’s flashlight. She runs her hand over the springy stuff and tries to send a psychic message to Orr. He is in this forest; she knows he is.
She draws her knees up and makes herself small. The forest is singing its midnight litany of swish and woosh and chirrup and snap. Iph looks up, hoping for stars, but the branches are too thick above to see more than a few patches of sky, a grayer black than the forest’s darkness. Iph leans against the mossy wall and closes her eyes.
She’s walking through the lavender light of the predawn forest. A lanky white hound, the sort of regal beast you’d see on a Medieval tapestry, is a bend ahead. Every time the path curves, Iph sees the feathery tail flick and disappear.
The path follows a creek, which ends at a wide, deep pond. Iph must cross it. She undresses. Takes off the rose-painted boots. Wades into the pond, deeper and deeper. The cold is profound.
The still water ripples with her approach. A court of swans, moon-white and black-beaked, surround her. She crouches until her chin grazes the water, digging her toes into the slime. She gathers herself and rises, winged now and powerful. She flies from the pond, wings spread over the wood, and lands in a meadow. The grass is dew-damp and sun-warm under her wide, webbed feet. She stretches like a fern unfurling—tall, then taller still, wings to forelegs, webbed feet thickening to large, razor-tipped paws. She ambles to a tree to scratch her back, fur against fir, like Baloo from the movie The Jungle Book. She drops to the ground and shambles forward on all fours. Comes to a gate.
Inside is a beehive, a siren on the rocks promising every sweet thing she could ever want. She rambles forward, works the gate handle, and reaches for the gold. Honey to tongue, throat to heart, and she is shrinking like Alice, folding into herself until she is a golden unit of pure desire. She flies over the meadow fragrant with wildflowers that glow psychedelic with sunrise.
A stone cottage peeks from behind a copse of trees. The flower world buzzes with morning work. Iph flies through a glittering cloud of pollen to land on a sunlit dais, velvet-draped with the scent of summer. Here, she sleeps.
Waking, she rises on her two feet again. Slowly, processionally, she makes her way toward the large dark shapes in the shady border where the meadow ends and the forest begins.
There, in the midst of a sleeping family of deer, is her brother.
The toga is gone. He is wearing a pair of torn red-and-black striped leggings and somehow still has the crown of roses he wore onstage. His head is leaning against the haunch of a large doe half-hidden in the trees’ shadow.
Iph takes a step closer. The deer are awake. Have been since she began her approach. One step more, and the deer rise. Orr awakens. The stately animals walk slowly away, leaving Orr in the meadow, shirtless and barefoot, roses twined between his newly budded antlers.
8
Where the
Bone-Branches
Budded
“Iph, where are your clothes?” Orr’s voice sounds different to him. He’s surprised the words make sense when they come out. He touches his ears. The earplugs must have fallen out when he ran. The morning sun is so warm. He is so tired.
Iph spins in a circle. “I . . .” she says, scanning the meadow. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” She sits and pulls her knees to her chest, hiding her body.
“I don’t care,” Orr says. “Just pretend we’re at the hot springs. Anyway, it’s kind of the least of our worries.” His ears twitch. As in, actually move. He feels for them. They’re in the same location and the same shape as always—just keener and more mobile. He reaches up to touch his forehead, but he isn’t ready. He knows this. Knows he must wait to confirm such an outlandish, impossible change.
At the far edge of the meadow is a flash of white. It moves closer. A single dog, the smaller companion to the leggy hound from the cemetery. Orr is certain it’s the same animal—he knows it by smell. The thick-ruffed dog is a little larger than the coyote Orr met on the mountain, with a long snout and the golden eyes of a wolf. He—this is another thing Orr knows from the smell—is carrying a basket, handle in his mouth. He trots a respectful distance from Iph, sets the basket down, and bows, playfully wagging. Iph puts out her hand, and the dog comes eagerly forward, pressing his blocky head into her shoulder.
Orr picks up the basket and brings it to Iph. “My clothes!” She pulls out a dress and her underwear, bra, and socks. There is a blanket folded in the bottom of the basket. And a flashlight.
“This stuff looks like it came straight from the cleaner,” she says, turning her back on Orr to dress.
The dog bows and bounds off, returning quickly with a pair of boots in his mouth. Dropping them at Iph’s feet, he races around the meadow like a puppy, clearly pleased with himself, then speeds away again into the woods.
“Orr,” Iph says. Her voice is shaking. “What happened last night?”
Orr stands, paces. Twitches again, the animal sounds around him distractingly loud. The squirrels scold. Birds forage for their fledglings. And the deer. The deer breathe a few bounds away, hidden in a cluster of salmonberry bushes inside the dark, fragrant grove.
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Last night.
Last night.
How to even think about it?
Last night wasn’t the ending he’d meant it to be—a graduation from this adventure and a way to take responsibility for himself. No longer a burden to the Furies. No longer hiding from his family. In that way, it had been an end. But in a vast and terrifying way—he can’t explain it—it was also a beginning.
“I saw myself in the glass,” he says to Iph. “I ran.”
“Right,” Iph says. “But Orr, those deer . . . ”
Orr crouches in the dewy grass, clipped short by the deer who were sheltering him. “I don’t know how, but I knew where to find the forest. I didn’t stop until I came to that stone structure. I was panting and crying. I was so thirsty. Then I felt them, all around me. Quiet until they were close enough to touch. But I didn’t move. I was scared! They’re so big. Iph, they’ve been living right here. Animals in the city with us all this time.”
“Right?” Iph says. “There are all kinds of things happening we never imagined tucked away in Forest Lake.”
Orr is pacing again. “They have a hierarchy. The one in charge—her granddaughter came to inspect me first. Then her daughter. Then, finally, the oldest deer came over. Touched her nose to my nose. Then licked me.” He stops, remembering the sweetness of it. “My headache . . . it went completely away. And now, I feel . . . right, but also not right.”
Orr is shaking. He is so exhausted. He drops onto the grass beside his sister. Lies down. She folds the blanket into a pillow, and he rests his head in her lap.
She touches his shorn hair. It has grown into a short, thick pelt in the week since the men on the mountain sheared him. Her cool, strong fingers find the place on his neck where the migraines start. Her hands are as familiar as his mother’s. Since the moment he took his first breath of air, Iph has been there. She was never a jealous sister, never a judgmental or rejecting one. She begged Mom and Dad for him. Lobbied for him. Loved him before he even existed. His first memories are of her holding him. Holding his hand as he toddled around the house. Holding his foot when he rode in his car seat. Memories so early he’s not supposed to have them—but he does. Not of Mom. Not of nursing or riding in a sling. But of Iph, curled around him in their puppy pile of sister and brother.
Now she traces his forehead, fingers running over the substance that has mossed the skin there. “It’s so soft,” she whispers. “I’m going to press down a little—is that all right? I want to make sure you’re not hurt.”
Iph is always gentle with him.
“Orr,” she says, “what do they feel like?”
“Before they came out, they felt achy, like a loose tooth. Now there’s a little pressure, but it’s sort of . . . a relief.”
“Orr, these look like they’re antler buds. I think they call this stuff around them velvet. They seem like they’ve grown since last night.” Her words are calm, matter of fact. It’s the same voice she uses to help him figure out the source of a meltdown. Orr has always appreciated her talent for being able to see the big picture and finding a way to talk about it that makes sense.
“I think you should touch them,” she says. “Mostly for me. I want to be sure this is real.”
Orr grabs Iph’s hand so it covers his. This is how he learned to hold a crayon, then a pencil. He touches the velvet first. It is so soft and sensitive, the way the inner part of his forearm and earlobes are, but more. Then he touches the antlers, only single horn buds at present, one by one. The right is slightly larger than the left, but both are about two inches long. They are like teeth, he realizes, growing in the bed of velvet on his forehead like teeth grow in gums.
“I’m so scared, Iph. But also . . . I kind of love them.”
9
Concentration
& Attention
Stroking Orr’s forehead, Iph is filled with purpose. The chaos last night after the mushroom tea is one thing. It is morning now, and they are here. Her brother is changing, and he needs help. Things could have gone so badly for her alone on the street that first night when she ran away from Dad. It was luck, maybe fate, that she met George when she did—but it was also Iph. She’s learned to trust herself more over the past year.
She extricates herself gently and stands.
“Orr,” she says. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Over there.” She points to the cottage.
The path leads through the meadow and into the copse. Iph feels comforted among the trees. Last night’s dream is still looping through her mind—swan, bear, bee. Lying on the path is a long, curved white feather. She picks it up and puts it in the basket, then continues out of the fir trees into a small grove of cherries with gnarled trunks and rustling leaves. At its heart is a bright cottage garden, meant to look wild but carefully tended. The garden path curves to reveal a small stone house, constructed similarly to the Witch’s Castle, but as maintained and tidy as the castle is derelict.
Iph grabs Orr’s hand. Together, they approach. The red-painted door is slightly ajar.
“Hello?” Iph calls. The place is silent and feels empty. But it’s warm inside, and Iph is chilly after the walk through the dark grove. She pulls Orr in behind her.
Iph has always loved the sort of house Dad calls fairy-tale rustic. They often stayed in cabins or beach houses with a handmade whimsical feel when they traveled, but those all pale in comparison to this cottage. This is the real thing.
Inside, the entry is made of two miniature linden trees, white with blooms growing up through the stone floor to create an arched corridor, a miniature of the one Iph and George strolled through in Ladd’s Addition. Farther inside is a large woodstove glowing with a crackling fire, a pillow-stuffed window seat, and several worktables.
At the longest table are a typewriter and three stacks of materials. The largest pile is made of various unopened envelopes, the middle one a stack of manuscripts, presumably unread, and the third pile, the smallest, is made of manuscripts marked in red and held together with large brass paper clips. In the typewriter is a blank piece of stationery with a familiar letterhead—RCT, vined with roses and shaped around the silhouette of a leggy white hound.
Iph steps back and keeps going until she’s sitting on the window seat. There in the corner under the opposite window is a letterpress. In the middle of the room is a table piled with matchbooks—the source of the matchbook poetry Iph found at Shiny Dancer. At another table is a large embosser. Iph recognizes these archaic machines because Orr did a report on print methods for Mom as part of his homeschooling. He’d been obsessed with the Terminator movies and wanted to be prepared to foster the revolution after artificial intelligence took over and digital technology had to be abandoned.
“Orr, I know these books. I’ve been seeing them all over Portland.” Iph gets up and runs her hand over the creamy paper in the typewriter. “Orr?”
Where is he? She rushes from the workroom through a dining room and a large living room into a hallway, longer than it should be given the footprint of the house. The third door on the left is open. Orr is there in a modest twin bed, snuggled under a feather comforter and patchwork quilt.
“I’m so sleepy,” he says, then closes his eyes and starts to snore.
Iph backs away. Trapped in a fairy tale—well, she’s not going to sleep. She will explore. She’ll find the next clue. There has to be one. In stories like this, there always is.
She retraces her steps to the workroom. A dim corner opens into an alcove she didn’t see before. She walks in and the lamps turn on. It’s a library. She reaches for a random book.
Over here, says a very small voice.
She turns, but no one is there.
She moves closer to the shelves and sees they’re labeled. fiction, fairy tale, poetry, myth, memoir, political science, musicology, shamanism, radical psychol
ogy, performance studies, alchemy, etc. She yawns again.
Pssst, says the voice again.
Oh! Like at Powell’s, a book is calling her.
Of course it is.
She takes a breath and listens. Touches a possible source of the call. No. She knows somehow. Not that one. She tries again, but it’s for sport. Given the logic that is surely behind this situation, she knows her third choice will be the correct one. She pulls the book from the shelf.
Case Studies in Transmutation
What is that supposed to mean? A sound like a window closing draws her attention to a large dictionary on a stand, lit up by a perfectly placed sconce. The sound she’d heard must have been the book opening. She reads:
TRANSMUTATION, noun.
TRANSFORM, METAMORPHOSE, TRANSMUTE, CONVERT, TRANSMOGRIFY, TRANSFIGURE: to change a thing into a different thing. TRANSFORM implies a major change in form, nature, or function (“transformed a pile of scraps and snippets into a book of poetry”). METAMORPHOSE suggests an abrupt or startling change induced by or as if by magic or a supernatural power (“the silver-haired woman transformed into a tall, lanky hound”). TRANSMUTE implies transforming into a higher element or thing (“the alchemist transmuted lead into gold”). CONVERT implies a change fitting something for a new or different use or function (“converted the ruins of the cabin into a snug forest home”). TRANSMOGRIFY suggests a strange or preposterous metamorphosis (“the boy was transmogrified into a deer”). TRANSFIGURE implies a change that exalts or glorifies (“wonder transfigured her face”).
Well, then. Iph is definitely in the right quadrant of the enchanted forest. She opens to a page that reads:
Transmogrification has been reported to occur as the result of a curse or as an intentionally developed skill. We are not referring to either manifestation in this chapter, but rather the occurrence of temporary or permanent physical transformation as a result of psychological trauma.1
Summer in the City of Roses Page 23
