Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 38

by Kelly Link

  But she did, of course. The next day, I stood in the window as a girl, blood oozing from the four slits on my left arm, hair spreading down my chest and back, watching Lise lug her cardboard suitcase towards the station. And she never answered my letters. Not even a single one.

  Bears might be popular at parties this season, but long-teethed women who want to be bears are not. I edged towards the coatroom, playing the confrontation with Lise over and over as though it was the only record I owned. Lise with her razor. Lise, ashamed.

  As I dodged around some pouty girls doing a hand-swingy dance, I cycled back to the beginning of the conversation. Lise had said she didn’t blame me, exactly, for that last night, the night that she imagined had kept us part bear forever. But why would she blame me? She had transformed first, as always. She had led us until she didn’t want to anymore. How could she possibly blame me for that?

  She was glittering on the dance floor, laughing with Karl (I must say, I think her teeth, too, are still slightly longer than human teeth). Should I bother asking her, I wondered? Did it matter now? She certainly wasn’t going to lead us anywhere anymore.

  I stood by the door for a long time, but eventually, Lise made my decision for me. She noticed me, touched Karl’s arm, then wove through the crowd.

  “Why would you blame me?” I shouted over the music.

  Lise cocked her head. She did that as a bear, often. I remember. That, I’m sure of. “I said I didn’t exactly blame you.”

  “You know perfectly well that when someone says that, they really mean that they do blame somebody else. So tell me, why would you—”

  “Because it was that last night that did it, Mareike. The last night, when you transformed first, that kept us all with this.” She shook her clutch at me, the shape of the razor straining against its beaded side.

  I thought right then that her memory had gone loose, or else she had had too much champagne. “Me, transform? That’s—”

  “How can you not remember? You galloped to my window that night. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I thought it had gone on too long. And you—”

  Me? The woman who doesn’t protest when Jacobs calls me Gertrud or Anna or honey, the woman who came meekly to the Adlon even though she hates parties? The woman who’s been waiting years for Lise to come back and save her? Could it be that I once transformed first, my nails lengthening, my leg-hair thickening into coarse fur?

  These past six years, had I, too, undergone a transmogrification greater than that of girl to bear and back again?

  “I’ll see you, Mareike,” Lise said, in a voice that suggested that she wouldn’t. She shimmied back to Karl and never looked at me again. I watched them all laughing and singing and bobbing and weaving in a pattern that I really couldn’t see. And I realized something, readers: they looked happy. Maybe Lise’s silver dress carries its own power, analogous to that of bear fur—and after all, our mothers and grandmothers would have loved the freedom to dance in spangles, to flirt and drink champagne. Maybe this is all that Lise, the unloved girl, ever would have wanted.

  But still. Still! Jacobs, his big thumb on my cheek, and the lurid man with the parfait, and look, how Karl lays his hand on Lise’s as though it belongs to him—

  My readers, it’s fashionable to bring a bear on a leash to a party, but it’s not fashionable to show your long teeth at a party, and it’s definitely not fashionable to transform into a bear at a party.

  And so I didn’t. I left her there, in her new life. I burst into the night and I inhaled cigarettes and asphalt and my fingers lengthened into claws, my blouse split apart and the thick fur that always spreads between my breasts and covers my navel spread further, grew coarse, thick, my eyesight dulled and my nose sucked in the bitter smell of neon, my ears pricked to crows crying, trumpets wailing, trams rattling on their silvery tracks—

  I dropped to all fours and I ran, through trailing lights, past frantically beeping automobiles, over stone bridges spanning the flat silent river, into the narrow crooked streets leading north, where the smell of onions and spilled milk blossomed from windows and the stink of semen and blood bloomed from stone foundations. A blurred group of men stumbled at the end of a block and at first they didn’t hear me roar but then, oh then, they heard, and they scuttled away like leaves in the wind. Then the name Papagei loomed up before me in blurry black and white, and I burst through the front door, upsetting the bored bouncer who smelled of morphine balls, and thundered into the hooting audience, the floor sticky beneath my paws, and she was onstage, strutting in feathers and fur, and then she saw me and grinned, and, my readers, I whispered to her, in the secret language of bears: I’m hungry, Ida, I’m hungry in the way we used to be, will you come be hungry too?

  Vain Beasts

  A. B. Young

  The unheard-breach of faith not

  Feigned feeling to fill other vacancies

  — Gloria Frym, Mind Over Matter

  Dorian Gray forgets to pray most nights, listening instead to the cat caw on the back porch; listening with the cat for the crows to caw back. Wind whispers to the tired plaster walls, and sweat drips from the roof to the carpet of browning roses.

  Dorian Gray crosses the village square on shoes that click as they lift from the cobblestones. The seamstress and her beau, with fingers curled around the edges of each other’s pockets, pause to watch him pass but don’t notice that the footsteps sound out of time. They look, instead, at the mask he wears beneath his hooded cloak. It is the taxidermied face of a fog-white wolf, fangs bared, eye cavities excavated. He walks with long, sure strides in the fading light.

  He speaks to no one, but does turn to look at those who stop to watch him. The wolf mask sits slightly crooked on his face, and the long snout tilts, as if the wolf’s head is cocked. Murk glares out from where eyes should be.

  When he reaches the edge of the woods, he follows a hard, worn path through the trees and to the grove of the moon goddess. An altar sits beside a shallow pool, and on it black roses float in a bowl of water.

  He stops walking at the edge of the pool. The sound of his clacking footsteps continues for several seconds after.

  He waits, silent, still. He waits for six minutes.

  “Your vanity makes you patient,” a woman’s voice says from behind him. He starts just slightly, his intestines pressing up and out against his ribs. Then he feels a palm pressed flat on his back before the fingers curl to grope his cloak. “And you smell of blue salts. Of neem,” the voice continues, moving closer to his ear, carried on warm breath. “How odd you are, Dorian Gray.”

  “You smell of cinnamon and coal,” he replies, because she does. He stays very still.

  The hand moves, cloak still clutched in fingers, across his side. Around to his front. She splays her palm across his belly. His shirt is thin linen, but he can feel no warmth at all from her skin.

  “You have a request for me, Dorian Gray. Speak it.”

  There is a moment of quiet and her order lingers. Something smells vaguely of burning.

  “Beauty,” he whispers, and her hand presses more firmly into his gut.

  “Tell me, Dorian Gray,” she says, and her voice is scattered flour, settling into crevices, “are you afraid of wolves?”

  “No,” he replies.

  She says, “One day you will be.”

  Calluses capture splinters as the woodcutter handles his kindling. His hands are deft, like pliable bark; firm, but flaking. The blanket of felt is spread on the dirt and the leaves, and it’s green in the light of his lamp, black in the light of the moon. He bends at the waist, gathers firewood to his chest, and turns to place it on the blanket. He grunts with the effort of straightening. He rolls his neck, the sweat slinks down, the pain in his strained muscles scrapes up.

  It is this night, as he trudges home, that he meets the fairy. She opens her arms, opens. She says, You are tire
d, let me hold your axe. Her voice is melting snowflakes on the tips of his ears. The woodcutter wears boots lined with deerskin, a coat of stiff green linen, his beard perfectly trimmed to the shape of his chin. He opens the blanket and lets the cut wood shatter on the dirt. The blanket falls to the ground like a dead leaf.

  She opens her arms, clothed by moonlight and not clothed at all.

  Their bodies fill to the threshold with splinters.

  The first night he is missing, the woodcutter’s wife lets her stew solidify to slush. The table smells of roses, pine, and cinnamon. She sits, back pressed straight, with the two wooden bowls, the two copper spoons, the firelight joyous and dying. Her deerskin shawl mutters to her cheek. The base of her back whimpers.

  His wife waits for him for a decade. When she marries again, her dress is cumbersome and cream.

  There are many nights that the woodcutter does not meet the fairy. There are also many nights that he does, and never returns.

  Only one night does he get lost on his way home.

  The full moon drapes its light over Dorian Gray’s shutters, crawling like a rejected lover across his pine dining table, across his face. His cheekbones are set low, jutting against skin covered in crusted craters. His wolf mask hangs by the front door, and his metal-heeled shoes sit atop the stove. His cloak is on the floor beside his bed. He sits slumped in a hard wooden chair beside the table. He holds a small mirror in his pale hands, and watches, waiting. He sits very still. Then he hears a tapping at his door.

  The friar counts the witches who’ve been sacrificed to the devil. The devil counts his teeth.

  There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and at first he thinks it is the branch of a tree. He sits in his favourite chair, the one that closes around him like lips. He has lived here for years, in a house beside the grove at the base of the stream. There he built an altar, protected by a waystone. He tends to the altar nightly, leaving black roses for the moon.

  Juliet is picking flowers in a field when her father comes home. She picks only the white ones, breaking the stems close to the dirt. She intends to take them home and weave crowns for her sisters. The crowns will die tomorrow and the three girls will sigh in sadness, their breath blowing like a gale over shriveled petals. But Juliet does not think of that now, singing to the deerskin shawl that razes her cheeks.

  Her father calls to her from the barn.

  Her bare feet murmur to the soft spring soil as she lifts her dirt smeared skirt and races the breeze. Her father stands at the door, tall as a cliff-face, axe over his left shoulder.

  He says, “Come, Juliet, I have brought you a gift from my travels.”

  She asks, “Have you brought me a rose?”

  It is all she had asked for.

  He replies, “Yes, my beauty,” and produces a black rose to add to her armful of daisies.

  On the night he gets lost the woodcutter is caught unprepared by the speed of nightfall. He realises he has gone too far in the wrong direction, but he can’t remember the way he came.

  He wanders until he comes to the cottage of Dorian Gray. Except, this night, the cottage is a castle. The stone towers cast shadows for a mile, thin and straight, like pine trees stripped of their branches.

  When the woodcutter comes to the gate he places a hand on the rusted metal, and the grimy cold of it bites into his palm. The cobblestone path is covered in dirt, grey moss sprouting between its cracks. The high hedges, however, are pristine, bordering the path, rustling in the breeze. Moon-white flowers bloom amongst the dark green.

  The woodcutter follows the path, ignoring the prickling at the back of his neck, ignoring how the chill in his palm creeps up his forearm. He hears the crunch of the dirt under his feet. His footsteps echo strangely, and it’s as if he can feel them in his jaw, out of time.

  “Hello?” the woodcutter calls, but the word is instantly gobbled up by the wind.

  He notices the stone gargoyles peering down from the tower roofs. They mark his procession through the garden, and the woodcutter imagines that if he could get closer to their faces he would see the eyes were only excavated cavities, and their snouts were howling like wolves.

  The woodcutter sees the wall of a tower where roses climb. The roses are black, their velvet petals shimmering in the moonlight. They nestle among thorns that are long and curved like fingernails. He moves towards the wall, drawn to it. Enchanted. He reaches out a hand and presses it to a rose. He presses until he feels the thorns digging into his skin. He presses until they break his skin, until the rose petals are crushed and smeared with blood in his palm. The cold crawls further up his arm, nearing his shoulder.

  He withdraws, thorns embedded in his skin.

  A voice behind him demands, “What have you done?”

  Black roses shrivel with brown, drift on brown water, ensnared in brown bowl.

  There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and at first he thinks it is the branch of a tree. He sits in his warmest chair; the one that closes around him like a curling tongue. His knees shudder as he clambers to his feet. In a nightgown of felt, he shuffles and creaks to the door.

  He grasps the oyster shell knob; its edges nibble his palm. He opens the door and the leaves of the trees applaud. The smiling flames in the hearth make the room glow gold, and when he opens the door, her hands look copper.

  The woodcutter’s blanket is made of felt and the leaves and twigs come closer to feel the static, then stay. He wraps his firewood, and the bundle could contain an adolescent girl, all uneven limbs. He clutches it to his chest.

  It is this night, as he trudges home, that he meets the fairy. She wears a deerskin shawl. Her silver hair floats on the heavy air, and she says, You are tired, let me hold your axe.

  But he’s left his axe among the tree stumps.

  Dorian Gray has roses on his dining table. His cottage smells of cinnamon and pine. He was beautiful once, he remembers this. He looks into a shard of glass and sees pale hair, thin eyelids, mouth plucked at the edges of naivety.

  His wife sings outside, by the window, voice tumbling in with the sunlight as she tends to the roses. She sings to the sun of the moon’s envy.

  The cottage is all brown and grey. Wooden rushes on the floor, ashes in the hearth. Dorian Gray sits at his dining room table and listens to his wife sing and the cat mumble to itself on the window sill. The moments pass like cricket croaks and finally he shouts, “Oh, fair sun!”

  Juliet stops singing.

  ——

  On the night the woodcutter meets Dorian Gray, he meets not a man, but a wolf. A voice says, “What have you done?”

  In fright, the woodcutter presses the thorn of the rose further into his finger. He turns to see the fog-white wolf, eyes scarred and black. “I’m lost,” he replies, his voice small and glassy.

  “Do all lost men steal other men’s flowers?” asks the wolf.

  The woodcutter stutters. “You are not a man.”

  The wolf cocks his head and barks a laugh. His breath smells of blue salts and neem. He says, “Tell me, woodcutter, are you afraid of wolves?”

  The woodcutter is indeed afraid of wolves. He tells the fairy this, as he watches her chop firewood. She places a log on the stump then nudges it to the center with her mud-covered foot. Her temporal thigh pulls downwards, pulsing away from her bones in waves. The woodcutter says, “The wolves will come if we don’t leave soon. Oughtn’t you go home?” He brushes his nails against his bollocks, looking around for his linen jacket.

  The fairy says nothing, removing her foot from the stump. She raises the axe, both hands tight at the edge of the handle, and she flings it back over her head so her whole body must follow its procession. She balances on her toes, her body the waning crescent moon.

  In the distance, a crow caws, and a wolf whimpers back. The pressure of the axe blade splits the log and it crackles.

  The grove beside
the friar’s house shudders like dragonfly wings. The waystone flicks shadows over the base of the stream, wind fingering the water ’til it shimmers.

  There’s a tapping at the friar’s door, and this time he thinks it is the devil come for kindling.

  Dorian Gray looks up at the moon through the dark green leaves. He savours the scream in the base of his back and how it scrambles, all splintering nails, up, hollowing the muscles either side of his spine, to clench his shoulders. He feels the muscles pulled taut as bones try to escape his skin, pushing like the foot of a baby against the walls of his mother’s womb. He is warmed by the fur that breaks through his skin like goosepimples. The cracking of bones is drowned out by pants and howls. He listens, hoping to hear the caws of crows.

  The fairy tells Dorian Gray, I will trade you the greatest of pleasures for your beauty. He licks his lips. His eyes follow the fall of her black hair, hung heavy to touch the moss and tickle her ankles. He asks, “Are you afraid of wolves?”

  Her lips turn up into the waxing crescent moon.

  Juliet pulls the deerskin shawl tighter. Her breath, mist before her face, clears away to reveal looming towers and murky turrets that were not there moments before.

  “Tell me, Juliet,” says her father, “are you afraid of wolves?”

  Her back goes cold like there’s water seeping up, under her skin. Dorian Gray is very close behind her. If he were to put a hand on her, the heat would sear through her dress. His chin mists along her neck, and with lips at her ear, he says, “Juliet, you are beauty.” She swallows and the saliva won’t pass the stone she feels in her throat. It bubbles back up and she gags. His hand hits her flat in the center of her back. Her diaphragm seizes, her shoulders shudder forward, and the burp races up, spherical slime, through her chest and carries drool out and down her chin.