Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  The return to awareness is lonely. Even the Plier Keeper is gone. The Church seems empty, save for maybe a helper working in one of the back rooms. The clanking of cold metal reverberates in the woodwork. I don’t try to stand just yet. I know it will be of no use. My knees will give like reeds, bowing against the wind. The pain is too great. It fills the open space the people left behind. I look at my clothes, turning wine red, and barely stifle a scream. My hands are crusted with dry blood rivulets. It didn’t work. It will never work. The suffering seems to bear children in my body, even if I can’t.

  “Hello?” I croak into the emptiness. Not even I understand me. Blood dribbles from my mouth. My gums feel raw.

  Usually, by this time, the crowd slowly crams out of the Church, bodies brushing against each other, shuffling and growling in their pain, waiting for the Fay’s song. Thirsting for her gratitude. But I can’t hear any roaring crowd. Maybe it’s the hum inside my skull that hasn’t fallen quiet yet. Footsteps echo from the back room and the father of the girl emerges, blood-coated and panic-driven, clutching his face as he stumbles to find the door. He doesn’t even see me.

  Moments later, the Plier Keeper appears as well, out of breath. He is not his usual self, calm and sardonic. He takes one quick look at me and sighs.

  “Come on,” he says. “The Fay will be coming soon. No time to waste, we’ve got to find the girl.”

  I look at him, at the outline of him, confused. Then a fresh but blurry memory settles in me and things start to make sense. He glances around worried and helps me up. Droplets of sweat and blood have crystallized on his face or maybe my vision is still blotchy, I don’t know. I stand on my feet, straining as he ushers me to the door. We go as fast as I can walk.

  He eyes me suspiciously as if I had anything to do with it. “I saw you looking at her. Do you know where she is?”

  Not every sinful act stems from me, I want to say. But instead, I let more blood gush out of my mouth for an answer. Now I am sure some of it is on his face.

  “She still has all her teeth,” is the last thing he says before he leaves me in the Church’s yard and goes looking.

  I don’t know what that means. Neither does he, I am sure. In my time—and his—nobody who was of age escaped the duty, except perhaps him. But certainly not anyone else. I can hear distant conversations and shrill cries of panic. They are coming from the woods and from the narrow alleyways, from the dew-infested rooftops and from the sunless cellars. They are everywhere.

  Nobody knows what is going to happen. Maybe something terrible will befall us all, or better, only her. They will cry of course, lament, and wish it were different. But since it’s not, it would be better if it were just her who got the blame.

  An old couple passes in front of me, holding handkerchiefs against their lips and noses. They are my neighbors from two houses down. I suddenly panic and pretend I am searching as well. I don’t want them to think I am involved in this somehow. But they don’t even notice me. They are still so dizzy from the pain, they barely register my presence. They pass me by and disappear in the alleyways around the Church.

  Maybe she left. Left, as in abandoned this place completely. Escaped. That thought seems so bizarre, I laugh at myself. Nobody believes that. This is simply a non-thought.

  We are not built to want to leave. Nobody really knows how the world is out there. Across that forest, beyond those hills, and over the river. We used to know, once. There are dregs of whispers, hidden inside rumors, inside fables, inside stories. But somewhere along the way, we traded something. Something more than teeth. And the Fay’s magic rose and unleashed itself into the world. Uncaged.

  It’s strong, her magic. An invisible thread that goes taut every time you overstep the boundaries she has set for you. If you don’t believe that all this pain will go away. And it never really does, does it? Or if you feel you don’t know the person who’s sleeping next to you, even if the Fay chose him just for your sinful soul. The pious and the wicked, a perfect match.

  Still, she knows. And she punishes you for it.

  The wind picks up and dusk begins to settle all around. The voices sound more distant now. I rub my bruised jaw as I stare at the open door of the Church and wonder, how does the Fay come inside to feed? Nobody has seen her enter, ever. We only see her exit right before she starts her sweet song.

  Then another thought crosses my mind, and I get up and stumble back inside. I am careful not to trip, my eyes still blurry. I cross the nave all the way to the innermost room. The Tooth Room. I fumble for the wooden door’s sides. I jam my fingers in the slit and crack it open.

  I hesitate before I cross the threshold. I jump at the flickering of shadows against the wall. It’s nothing, I tell myself. It’s nothing, yet. And, since I am already a wicked soul, what does one more transgression matter? I step in.

  Inside, the air is more oppressive than even in the nave. It’s putrid, like flesh melting from bone in slivers (and some teeth do have flesh still attached to them), metallic like swimming in a lake of blood, and foggy like an early morning in the mountains.

  And the teeth. So many teeth. A village worth of teeth. Some sharp and some blunted, some yellow and others almost transparent. I squint, trying to find mine, but it’s too hard. They all have a little blood on them, a share of pain. The table they are laid out on is covered by a big, embroidered tablecloth, the one the village women knitted long ago, stitch by stitch.

  But here is something else, too. A whiff of sweat and tears breaks the dampness with a stab of sourness. My steps are really slow now, bird-soft. I reach out my arm and lift the tablecloth just enough to see dark curls spilling onto the floor.

  Smart girl. Stupid girl.

  “Hey there,” I say, but I don’t think she understands me. My mouth is a damn pincushion. She looks up at me, shaking like a scared bunny. Her eyes swollen and gauzy. A single drop of blood has carved its way from the edge of her mouth down to her chin. She is cupping that side of her face with her small hand, and I know they took something from her. Did they hurt you? I want to ask.

  Stupid question. Of course they did.

  “P-please,” she begs.

  She looks meek, shrunken.

  “P-please …”

  How did she get in here? Did she hide in the shrubs outside and sneak back in when nobody was watching? I offer my bloody hand to her. Not the best choice, I know, but it’s all I’ve got for now. She takes it and reluctantly emerges from the shadows.

  We just stare at each other for the briefest of times. Not knowing what to do. I half want to talk sense into her and half don’t. In any case, I can’t. I don’t have time. I grab her hand and try to pull her towards the door, gently at first.

  Her hand is shut, palm down, like a vault, around something. Blood drops lace her clutched fingers. I look her in the eyes. She understands and bares her teeth at me. It reminds me of a dog, warning me away. Her eyetooth on the upper left side is missing. It doesn’t take much guessing to know what she is holding on to so desperately.

  As I tighten my grip, she is not as much pulling back from me as she is protecting the thing in her palm.

  “Leave it,” I manage to spit out. It's just teeth. It’s also pain and blood and a diet of mashed potatoes and soup. But I don’t say that.

  She must have understood me because she yanks her arm away, hurt.

  “No,” she says. “That’s how the Fay knows you exist. It’s how she binds you. It’s magic.”

  Of course, it’s magic. The Fay is a demon. But it’s a demon that protects us, however cruel. A demon we chose. I bet not many people can say the same.

  The faint smell of cinnamon and frothy milk slips in the room, unnoticed at first. What warns me is the girl’s smile cut short and a tug in my jaw all the way to my gut. A delicate and powerful thread, sleeping inside of me, has woken up.

  I clutch my stomach and search frantically under my clothes for the thread the Fay is pulling me from, clawing at my skin. I f
ind nothing. Slowly and firmly I turn around, against my will, to face her. Paralyzed down to the bone by fear and magic.

  I see her now in all her glory. And I understand why people call her the Hollow Fay. It’s not because she lives in a hollow place somewhere. I don’t know where she could possibly live besides the fringes of nightmares and in that thread in my stomach.

  She is without teeth, she is without hair, she is without eyes, and she is without bones. I know now why she needs our teeth. To fill her body with cartilage and bones and shape. Without them, she is hollow. Her mouth a purple sore, her eyes empty at the sockets, her flesh folded on itself in a way that suggests the absence of skeleton. Yet she stands in front of us, and her non-existent eyes pierce me all the way from the other side of the room. She moves towards us, towards the table with the teeth, in a fluid way that makes my skin crawl.

  And the girl? The girl whimpers and clutches her tooth tighter. And she has pissed herself.

  If I could, I would collapse. I would double over on the floor and kiss the bloodied wood to avoid looking at the Fay, and hope she spares my life. Which she probably would, but not before she made a greater punishment out of it. But I can’t because her invisible thread has me upright. I want to be released of the burden of having eyes. But she won’t let me.

  The Fay continues to worm her way to us. I try to keep my eyes on the girl. I want to know that there is someone else here, that another person is seeing this, an anchor to reality. That I am not alone. The girl can move; she is stunned by fear but squirms like a fish out of water.

  She can move.

  In the edge of my vision, I see the plum and pink and pus-yellow of the Fay, fluttering inches from me. Her substance leaks onto the floor in soft drips, and she floats past me like I am nothing. Like I don’t even exist.

  She kneels in front of her, in front of the small girl. And the girl becomes even smaller, falls to her knees, heaving in fear. I can’t tear my eyes away even though I want to. The Fay stretches one viscera hand towards her, one ribbon of pink flesh. Her manner, supple and patient like she is asking. But she is not asking. I know that, and the girl knows that, too. She demands the tooth. And all those that will come after.

  The girl was right.

  I wish I could just move my arm. Just one arm would be enough. Only, I wouldn’t know what I would do with it. Would I use it to pull her back from the Fay, or tear out my eyes and hope I forget?

  When the girl doesn’t move, when her spit drips to the floor from her parted lips and pools next to her piss, the ribbon of pink flesh unfurls even more. It stretches and pulls and becomes a string that wraps itself around the girl’s wrist. And then it tightens.

  It squeezes until her hand becomes as purple as the Fay’s mouth. Until it doesn’t look like a hand anymore, but a bright and strange flower.

  I move, too, I writhe and I seizure and bang my feet on the floor. But only in my head. None of it changes what is really happening one inch.

  The girl screams in pain and her hand finally opens, the flower blooming.

  But it is not a tooth she is holding. It’s a small, rusty knife.

  And it clatters to the floor.

  If there is anything in my body that can still move, it’s my gut. And it twists and churns at the sight of it. I want to laugh and cry at the innocence of the girl, at her stupidity. But it’s still a knife, and a plan. More than I ever dared to imagine.

  The Fay is taken aback by it. The strip of sinew that is her arm quivers and all her cavities moan at once.

  Then she squeezes harder.

  But I press harder, too. First, it’s my gut. It bubbles with anger and screams when my mouth cannot. Then it’s my skin. I didn’t know that skin could do that. That it can seethe and fume and threaten to fall apart like a husk. And finally, it’s my arm, the one that’s closer to the Fay.

  I don’t think about my eyes anymore. There are no eyes in this form I inhabit. There is only boiling rage, and there is a flaming arm that’s now free, and a rusty old knife digging into my scalding palm.

  And I stab her, I do. It might be once or a million times. I am not sure. I open plum mouths everywhere. But she won’t die, and my anger turns to numbness fast.

  I am about to fall in a hole deeper than the Fay’s mouths could ever be, but then the girl touches my arm. My flesh where she touches it settles back to human. She looks at me with her billowing eyes and says, “Let’s go. Let’s run away.”

  Smart girl. Stupid girl.

  But perhaps …

  Perhaps, it’s worth a try.

  I grab her or she grabs me and we falter our way out of the Church and into the woods, leaving the Fay behind to feed from her pile of bones.

  The world is a hazy cloud, and the people stumble around in pain-stupor. It’s not the tooth pain, though. This one is all-consuming. The Fay’s pain has branched out to everyone like the tendrils of a vine. A bunch of them have fallen in the thorny bushes and fumble their way up, clothes torn to shreds. Others are a hair’s width away from us, eyes blurry from agony. The girl sucks a breath as we brush past them.

  Somewhere in the haze, I think I make out Yason, or maybe it’s my guilt playing tricks. He is dragging his feet to a cluster of trees, not far from here. His frame shakes and he clutches his head. He screams, but the voice doesn’t carry through the cacophony of people. I freeze for a moment; my steps become unsure.

  “I am sorry,” whispers the girl, the edge in her voice completely gone. All there is now is a child, timid and lost.

  I squat in front of her, pull down my sleeve and wipe the blood that’s still trickling from the side of her mouth. I wonder what happened to that tooth of hers. Did she leave it behind?

  “Your name?” I mouth.

  “Elpida.”

  She turns around and pulls something from her pocket. It is a glassy white canine. It’s perfect.

  “It’s yours now. A gift.”

  I bow my head awkwardly and take the small tooth. I take it because I know I am not going to have any more teeth sprouting from my jaws now that the blessing of the Fay is not with me. This will be the only tooth I’ll ever own for the rest of my life—however long. And, above all, I take it because this will be her first and last sacrifice.

  “Come,” I whisper.

  She nods, obedient, and takes my hand. I mumble a goodbye to Yason’s shadow and pick up my pace.

  We walk towards the clearing. My gums are killing me, my mouth is a festering wound, I stumble in the undergrowth, but I have her to help me balance myself.

  I already feel the thread tugging at me. I try to move faster and faster, daring it to stop me. It doesn’t.

  I know I can’t go on forever. I don’t fool myself like that. I am a fertile field. The Fay will catch up to me eventually.

  But I’ll go as far as my feet can carry me. Through the thick forest, over the steep hills and across the icy brook. We’ll walk until she is safe. To a place where nobody can take from her what she doesn’t want to give.

  And then I’ll be done. My smile will be toothless but joyful. Almost divine.

  Witch’s Star

  by Alethea Kontis

  Right from the start I started out all wrong

  Exotic me, all stardust, joy and rhyme

  Newborn unto a witch of curse and vile

  One horrid hellion burned before her time

  Untried, untested in my native craft

  No one would ever teach me, no one could

  Courageous and impetuously, I

  Embarked upon a quest for sisterhood

  * * *

  Embarked upon a quest for sisterhood

  My dark past left behind, I came upon

  One young witch friend I dared to call my own

  The power she possessed was bright as dawn

  I loved her so, more than I loved myself

  Officiously she broke my heart in two

  No sister here so devastated I

  Searched high an
d low for someone that was true

  * * *

  Searched high and low for someone that was true

  One lonely soul burned hollow, lost at sea

  Repentant gods then granted me a gift

  Odd, stardust-filled and sunny—she was me!

  Respect and common interest forged our bond

  I told her of my quest, she understood

  Treasured, I sailed off to seek more stars

  Instead I found much bad and little good

  * * *

  Instead I found much bad and little good

  Night fell and no stars rose above my head

  Fair-weather followed foul as friends arrived

  And didn’t leave until great tears were shed

  Manipulative this menagerie

  Of snakes, rats, pigs and weasles, leech and shrew

  Unraveling my heart from outside in

  Some loves are not the loves we thought we knew

  * * *

  Some loves are not the loves we thought we knew

  There was naught left to do but save my mind

  Arm up with magic mirrors turned away

  Reflecting back the hate they gave in kind

  Defended, I considered my reproach

  Unhesitatingly I let my love

  Shine bright as sun and stars and show the world

  Those charlatans and cheats aren’t worthy of

  * * *

  Those charlatans and cheats aren’t worthy of

  Rare magic of this kind that calls to kin

  Exotic like the stardust in my veins

  Angelic form without and grace within

  Sweet she-wolf first, then panther did emerge

  Unmoved by sour sirens’ toxic song

  Remarkably they each took up my hands

  Enchanted women, powerful and strong

  * * *