Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  “A robot?” I asked. It was a word I’d heard several times from several people over the years I’d been gone; a word the boy Peter had used when he whispered to me about his secrets and dreams.

  “Not quite,” he said, swallowing a laugh.

  “I don’t understand.” I finished my bread and licked my fingers clean.

  “I installed receivers in her rear brain,” he said. “I can control where she goes.” He turned and looked at me, so close that he was mostly eye. “How many brains do you have?”

  I started to jump from his shoulder, but his hand was there in my way. “I’d like to go now,” I said.

  “Why? Did I say something wrong?”

  His hand was in my way, no matter where I turned. Unless I turned toward his face, and then his mouth loomed close, too close. “I just . . . I need to go,” I said. “Please let me go.”

  “Tell me why,” he demanded. “I can’t fix it if I don’t know what I did.”

  I turned into the woman, making myself too heavy for his shoulder to support. He fell backward and I leaped up, standing over him. “You turned that creature into a toy,” I said.

  “So what?” he asked, still sitting on the floor, staring up at me with his mouth half open. Staring at my skin. “How is that different from what you do?” I didn’t know how to answer, and he took my silence as an answer. “That’s right,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I’ve been reading. All these years. I know what your kind does. You turn people into toys, don’t you? Why is that better than me steering a stupid bug around?”

  I took a step away from him, toward the window. It was closed, but I could open it with my human hands and then jump out of it as a rabbit or a sparrow. “It’s different,” I said. “I don’t turn humans into toys. I just let them do what they already wanted to do. You’re—you don’t even know what you are!” My voice was shaking. I rested a hand on the windowsill and then flinched away as my skin sizzled. I looked down—the sill was an inch deep with iron shavings.

  “What am I, then?” He stood up and moved toward me. “What am I?”

  I changed, a different form with every breath. Him as a little boy. Him on the cusp of manhood. Him on the night of his father’s funeral. Him now. “You claim to be you,” I spat. “Just you. But what are you? Are you a fat little boy whose parents don’t love him enough to stop fighting? Or are you a youth who can’t escape home? Or are you a man whose father died before you could make him love you—”

  I was still in his shape, speaking with his voice, when he slapped me hard across the mouth, knocking me-him to the floor. My head struck the corner of his desk, rattling the maze and the roach inside it, and I saw stars, and I lost control.

  I lost control.

  “Oh my god,” he whispered. I blinked hard and realized my mistake.

  I was me.

  No disguises, no glamours, no fur or scales or feathers. Just me. Nothing like the little watercolor girl sitting on the toadstool. Wings, yes, but not like a butterfly’s wings at all. More like . . . leaves, I suppose. Like leaves when the beetles have been at them, but beautiful. Fine-veined and translucent and shimmering even in the low light of his house. Strong, supple, quick. Flashing.

  I am thankful for the pain that brightened the inside of my head in the moments after I fell, because it dampens the memory. His hand on the back of my neck. His knee at the base of my spine. His fists at the place where my wings met my shoulders.

  The noise they made when he tore them off.

  I tried to change my shape to protect myself. When I wasn’t in my true form, my wings were hidden, and in that terrible moment when his weight was on top of me and the tearing hadn’t begun I thought that maybe I could escape by shifting. I went back to the woman-shape, because it was what I had most recently been before I was him, and it was all wrong, and it hurt, and my wings hurt—

  And then he was laughing.

  “I didn’t think,” he said, panting with exertion, “it would be so easy.”

  I screamed.

  “They’re beautiful,” he said. He shook my wings—my beautiful, strong wings—and braced a hand on the desk to pull himself to his feet.

  I screamed.

  “Wow,” he breathed, running his fingertips over the delicate frills at the top of one wing. “Just . . . wow.”

  I screamed.

  * * *

  He put my wings into a cabinet with an iron door, and he locked the iron door and wore the iron key around his throat.

  The first night, I stayed on the floor of the maze room, and I screamed.

  The second night, I slept. The pain was unbearable. When I woke, I screamed.

  The third night, my voice was gone, and I tried to kill him.

  “Would you like some clothes?” he asked, his hand gripping my woman-wrist so tightly that I felt the flesh threatening to break. I tried to change—tried to become a mouse, or a viper, or a spider, anything—but I couldn’t. My wings were there—right there in front of him, on the table where he’d been studying them. But they were dead things. I would never get them back, and I’d never again have access to the power within them.

  My magic was gone. I couldn’t change myself. The knife I had stolen from his kitchen fell from my hand, clattering to the floor near his feet.

  “Death first,” I spat.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked. “You were never using your wings anyway. You were always hiding them, pretending to be some kind of animal. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  He tossed me aside and I didn’t fall to the floor, because his bed was there. The cotton of his quilt was so soft against the skin of this woman-body I was stuck in. He stood a few feet away, considering me, and for the first time I wondered what precisely it was that he wanted me for.

  “You might fit into some of my mother’s old things, if I still have them around,” he said. He walked out the door without a backward glance, and I screamed into his pillows. Every time I inhaled, I breathed in the smell of his hair, and I had to scream again to rid myself of it.

  * * *

  I tried so many times, but everything I did was too obvious, and I was too weak. I tried to strangle him in his sleep, but my fingers were made for weaving arteries together into necklaces, and he woke before I interrupted his breath. I tried to poison him with a kiss, but it didn’t work.

  “Well,” he said, his lips less than a breath away from mine, “I guess that’s another power you’ve lost.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s impossible.”

  “I’m not dead, am I?” he asked. He pushed me away, just a few inches, and he smiled. “Looks like you can kiss me all you’d like.”

  He stared at my lips while he said it, and I lunged for him with my teeth bared. He shoved me away. “Maybe later,” he called over his shoulder. He walked through the door and locked it behind him, and I was trapped once more.

  He didn’t need to lock the door, not strictly speaking. We were bound. Without my magic, I couldn’t have stretched the confines of that binding for more than a day.

  I would always have to come back to him.

  * * *

  I slept in his bed. I lived as his wife, or maybe as his pet. I had never been clear on the distinction, to be honest. I did not enter his lab, with the maze and the cockroach and, from what he told me, the increasingly larger creatures. I did not touch the iron door of the cabinet that held my wings. I ate the bread and the milk and the salt that he brought to me, and I tried to kill him again and again and each time I failed.

  He made me new wings out of metal and glass. He brought them to me and said they’d be better than my old ones—more efficient. He said he’d been working through prototypes, and that these ones were ready for something called beta testing. He said the surgery to attach them would only take a day or so. I leaped at him and almost succeeded in clawing his eyes out.

  It was nice to see the livid red wounds across his face for the week that followed. They
healed slowly.

  Not as slowly as the place on my back where my wings had been, of course. That took much longer—my skin was looking for an absent frame of bone and gossamer to hang itself on. The right side was a patchy web of scars by the time two months had passed, but the left bled and wept and oozed pus for another four before I realized the boy’s mistake.

  Before I realized my opportunity.

  I had taken to staring at myself in the mirror when he was gone. It was an oddity—before my magic was gone, I hadn’t been able to see myself in mirrors. Something to do with the silver in the backing, I’m sure. I had seen my reflection rippling in pools of water, and I had seen it bulbous and distorted in the fear-dilated pupils of thousands of humans—but never in mirrors. Never so flat and cold and perfect.

  The day I realized Peter’s mistake, I was looking at my legs in the full-length mirror in his bedroom. My bedroom. He wanted me to call it ours, but I didn’t like the way the word felt in my mouth. I did like my woman-legs, although they were too long and too thick and only had the one joint. I liked the fine layer of down that covered them, and I liked the way the ankles could go in all kinds of directions. I liked the way the toes at the ends of my woman-feet could curl up tight like snails, or stretch out wide like pine needles.

  I was looking at my woman-legs in the mirror, and I turned around to examine the way the flesh on the thighs dimpled, and my back caught my eye. It all fell together in my mind in an instant.

  How could I have been so stupid? But, then again, how would I have known?

  I twisted my neck around and reached with my short, single-jointed arms, and I couldn’t reach it. But I could see it in the mirror. The weeping, welted place where my left wing had been, the skin mottled with red. The sore on my shoulder, and the failing scars that attempted to form there.

  And then, just a few inches below it: a lump beneath the skin, where a spur of wing remained.

  * * *

  It’s a good thing the woman-body made so much blood.

  I didn’t want to go into the lab—I didn’t like the way all the creatures persisted in asking me to help them, didn’t like looking at them in their cages. Didn’t like seeing the sketches of my wings that covered the walls. Didn’t like seeing the attempts he’d made to re-create them with plastic and fiberglass.

  But there were tools in the lab, steel tools, and I had the beginnings of a plan.

  “Please,” a mouse with a rectangular lump under the skin of its back begged. “Please, it hurts, please.” His nose twitched and he scrabbled at the sides of his cage like a beetle in a jar.

  “I’ll do it if you tell me where he keeps the tools,” I answered.

  The mouse stood on my woman-shoulder, the door to his cage hanging open, the voices of his fellows raised in a chorus of pain and fear and desperation. “In there,” he said, pointing his nose toward a tall cupboard with frosted glass doors. I opened the cupboard and saw that the mouse had spoken truly: rows of tools, metal and plastic and sharp and blunted and every one specific. I held the little creature in my hand and his heartbeat fluttered against my palm.

  “Those are all the ones he uses when he puts the pain on our backs and makes us fly,” he whispered. “They’ll work for whatever you need. They’re worse than anything.”

  “Is it frightening, when he makes you fly?” I asked.

  I could feel the leap in his little mouse-chest. “Please,” he said.

  “Of course,” I answered. I twisted my woman-wrist and snapped his neck, and his dying breath was a sigh of relief.

  I dropped his body to the floor, where he landed with a soft paff. Then I thought better, and I picked him up, returning him to his cage and locking the door. His fellows huddled in the corners, burrowed into sawdust. They stayed far from the stench of his freedom.

  I did it in the bathtub. I stopped up the drain so that I would know how much blood I’d lost, and I tied up the shower curtain so that it wouldn’t stain, and I reached behind myself with fists full of tools. A sharp tool, and a long tool, and a tool for grabbing, and a tool for burning. It wasn’t as hard as I had expected it to be—I had enough experience with pulling things out of humans, had nimble enough fingers.

  I wouldn’t have expected the pain, but the boy Peter had ripped the other wing out without even using tools at all. So it really wasn’t so bad.

  I reached into myself with the tool for grabbing as blood pooled around my feet. It was warm and soft and reminded me of more comfortable times, and I was thankful for it. I gritted my teeth as I rooted around, cried out as the tips of the tool for grabbing found the spur. I clenched my fist, and I yelled a guttural, animal yell, and I pulled.

  An eruption of white fire. A gout of burning blood spilling over my spine and buttocks. And there, right there in my hand, a two-inch long piece of wing. All that was left. Not bound behind iron, not hidden away in a collection.

  Mine.

  I wept with pain. I wept with relief. I wept with joy.

  I did not let go of the tool, even as I unstopped the drain and ran water and washed myself, letting soap sting the wound in my back. I did not let it go as I dried myself. I did not let it go until it was time to bury it in the earth of the boy Peter’s weedy little flower garden. I had to force my fingers to straighten. I tucked the spur of wing into my cheek, sucking the woman-blood off it, and buried the tool for grabbing with a whisper of thanks.

  Before Peter came home, I walked back into his lab with my piece of wing poking at the soft flesh of my cheek. I opened the door and stood just inside, my hand resting on the doorknob.

  Squeaks. Squeaks and chirps and even a high, steady scream from the rabbit.

  “What are you saying?” I whispered, my voice wavering around the spur in my mouth. “What do you want?”

  The squeaking intensified, rose to a fever pitch, and I smiled as the incomprehensible cacophony crashed over me.

  I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

  It had worked.

  * * *

  “How’s your back doing?” the boy Peter asked that night as he climbed into his bed. Into my bed.

  “Better, I think,” I answered, and my voice was almost normal. I had been practicing all day, learning how to speak around the piece of wing in my mouth.

  “Good,” he said. He kissed me on my empty cheek, and then he rolled over and he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed and he was asleep.

  He was asleep.

  And I was awake.

  I waited, waited, waited. I waited until he was deep asleep, so deep that a pinch on the plumpest part of his cheek wouldn’t wake him. And then I swung a leg over his hip, and I settled my weight onto the bones of his pelvis. I felt his hips underneath me and I waited for two breaths. If he woke up, I wouldn’t need to make an excuse. He would assume, and it would be over fast enough, and I could try again another night.

  Two breaths.

  He didn’t wake.

  I toyed with the spur in my cheek. It was sharp at both ends, broad in the middle. Too big to swallow whole. I shifted it with my tongue until it was between my broad, flat-bottomed woman-teeth. I breathed in once, filling my mouth with the smell of old blood and wet bone, and then I bit down.

  It tasted like me and like blood. It burned my tongue, and I bit down again and it burned my cheek. I chewed, chewed until it was a fiery paste, and then I swallowed, and I felt it. Underneath the lingering pain of the blood.

  I felt the magic.

  It flooded me, bright and brief as lightning, and there was so little time that I didn’t even have time to think, and I did it in that moment, and it was perfect.

  I changed.

  The boy Peter’s eyes flashed open. He looked at me, first through the veil of sleep and then through the veil of terror. I grinned down at him.

  “What the fuck?!” He struggled to sit up, but I clenched my new thighs, pinning him. He wriggled, caught, and it wasn’t until I rested a thick-knuckled hand on his ches
t that he stilled. “What the fuck?” he whispered again.

  “Yes, Peter,” I whispered back in my new voice. In his voice. “What the fuck.”

  “But—how did you—you’re—”

  “Don’t you like it?” I asked. I leaned down until our noses touched, and then I kissed him. He kept his eyes open, panic clenching his pupils. “Oh, come on, Peter,” I said, my lips moving against his so that he would feel his own voice humming across his teeth. “What’s the matter?”

  “But—you can’t—”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t. Not anymore. That was the last time. That was the last of my magic.” I kissed him again, brushing his Peter-lips with my Peter-tongue, and he flinched violently away.

  “Go away,” he said, but his voice was weak and I knew that he knew better.

  “Never,” I whispered, and I rolled off him. As I closed my eyes I smiled, because I knew he would not sleep that night.

  He might never sleep again.

  * * *

  I had never looked into mirrors before the boy Peter ripped my wings off.

  Now, every morning was a mirror.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said when he woke to find me perched on my side of the bed.

  “Like what?” I asked. “Show me. What does my face look like right now?”

  “Stop it,” he said when I climbed into the bathtub alongside him.

  “Stop what?” I asked. “What am I doing?”

  He hit me once, a closed fist and a slow, weak push of knuckles into my nose. It wouldn’t have hurt, but I leaned into him to make sure. He looked at his hand, and he looked at my face—at his own face—with blood coming out of it, and he whitened.

  “I didn’t mean to—” he started to say, and I wiped at the blood so that it smeared across my face.

  “I didn’t mean to punch you,” I said. He bit his lip and I grinned. “I didn’t mean to make your nose bleed,” I continued in his voice, saying it the exact way I’d heard him say a thousand things. “I didn’t mean to hurt you like that. You just made me so mad.” I licked my lip where my blood was dripping, and the burn was worth it. “You made me so mad,” I said, “and I lost control.”