You reach out, fur dragging through the water-maybe-sewage and touch him with the tip of your finger.
He does not pull away and so you gather him into your arms.
You take him home, into the deeper woods, far from where humans call you Bigfoot or Grassman, where oak trees give way to evergreens and the air is full of sour earth and rotting leaves. You shoulder into your copse, the sunlight distant and pale above you. The only musk you smell is your own.
It’s been so long since you’ve had another someone in your home. Your kind have wandered off or withered away, and the humans are so terrified of you that you don’t dare approach. The scent of you is enough to frighten them, the sight of you enough to make them scream.
The straw man doesn’t seem to mind.
You lift the stone beside your bed of pine and moss. You choose a needle, the one Lucy abandoned last week, and a piece of thread and you begin to mend the holes in the straw man’s body. There is a delicacy to it your big hands can’t quite master, but you understand the mechanics.
You’ve watched Lucy do this so many times before.
Lucy mends her ragdoll daily.
Every morning you watch her from the edge of the gully as she escapes the trailer at the end of the road, the one with the rusted siding and broken rocking chairs huddled against the outside wall. The one with the ragdoll in the bedroom window. Lucy eases the screen door open, clicks it closed, toes her way down the cinderblock stairs. Quiet. Careful. Her legs and arms are thin. Some days, they are bandaged. Some days, welts wind up her thighs and bruises spread across her cheek and lower lip, blue-black and raucous as crows mid-flight.
At first, she moves as if a fist is chasing her, arms crossed over her breasts, eyes wide and darting, head drawn back, but as soon as she clears those trailer steps, Lucy swaggers. She juts her chin. She laughs too loud. She crows.
“You kiss your momma with that mouth?” she says to the boys draped over the picnic tables three trailers down. The ones who call her ‘crazy’ and ‘honey.’ The ones who take her into their pickup trucks for twenty minutes each when Husband Casey is at work.
“This place ain’t so bad. Just gotta know how to play your cards is all,” she says to the women at the beehive mailboxes. The ones with puckered eyes and cigarettes clamped between their lips. The ones who cackle when they think she’s out of ear shot and call her ‘slut’ and ‘dirty whore.’
“I didn’t do nothing! I’ll be good. I swear, I’ll be good,” she says to Husband Casey at dusk when the trailer is dark except for T.V. flicker blue. You watch the shadow play, Husband Casey’s swift hands, the tangle, the struggle. You hear the muffled blows. A beer bottle collides with a window, makes the frame shudder. A thump. A dangerous thud.
Every night, Lucy reemerges when the sun is setting, her ragdoll in hand. She marches away from the trailer park, strides along the edge of the gully.
And she rips her ragdoll apart.
Sometimes it’s the arms, jerked off one after the other mid-stride. Sometimes it’s the hair, fat chunks of yarn yanked out in short, furious bursts after she’s dropped herself onto the dry earth. Sometimes it’s the whole body, wrenched in two, her hands clawing and digging through the cotton like there are answers buried in the poly-fil.
When Lucy finally stops, red faced and panting, she raises her head.
Sometimes she looks directly at you.
You are downwind and so deep in gully shadow that she can’t possibly see you, but something about her narrow focus pins you. Her eyes climb over your height, wind around your breadth. They grapple with the darkness you have hidden in for so long and you imagine emerging, soft and quiet as morning fog, through the evergreens to settle beside her, but you don’t dare move. Eventually Lucy’s eyes wander, listless with the impossibility of you, back to the mangled doll in her lap.
Slowly, she fishes a needle and thread from her pocket and, as the dark folds over her, she stiches her ragdoll back together again.
Sometimes she pockets the needles.
Sometimes she lets them fall.
You don’t anticipate the crows.
You have taken your straw man to the edge of the abandoned field south of the trailer park, so he can dry in the sun. He’s been through so much already. So many days rotting and alone. So many nights in the damp belly of that creek with no one to talk to, nobody to touch or hold. He deserves to be warm and dry, especially now that you’ve mended him so carefully.
But when you return from foraging, the crows are there, ripping and tearing your straw man apart, a swarm of blue black feathers and raucous voices. Orange cotton and plaid are flayed open between them. A chaos of straw. A wide, churning circle of it. The crows stab into him with beaks and claws, launch themselves off the ravaged lump of his head, wing toward their nests with his insides clutched in their mouths.
You chase them.
Full of anger, rage, hurt, you chase them. They have ruined everything. You thunder through the field, startling rabbits and sparrows and a covey of quail. They have ruined everything! You charge into the woods. You shake them from trees. You barrel through the gully.
They have ruined everything.
You burst into the open, crows and straw scattering in the air above you and there, standing near the edge of the trailer park, is Lucy. Her hair is gnarled. Her lower lip is bitten through. A fresh bruise purples the hollow of her jaw. A severed arm is clutched tightly between her fingers, the rest of the doll torn apart around her. A breeze teases shredded cotton over Lucy’s bare feet. Yarn clings to her ankles and the naked curve of her shin.
You cringe and wait for the fear, the scream, but Lucy only looks at you, eyes wide and dark. She inhales slowly. She uncurls her fingers and drops the remains of her ragdoll.
The sun is setting.
The air is heavy.
The crows have winged silent before either of you gathers the courage to move. When you finally do, it is hesitant and hopeful. It is soft and quiet as morning fog. It is with fingers outstretched like fractured stitches and whispered promises to mend.
About the Author
Lora Gray’s writing has appeared in various publications including Shimmer, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and Flash Fiction Online. A graduate of Clarion West, Lora currently lives in Northeast Ohio with a handsome husband and a freakishly smart cat named Cecil. When they aren’t writing, Lora also works as an illustrator and dance instructor. You can find them online at loragray.weebly.com.
Pinecones
C.A. Barrett
Elida told no one when she first saw the water’s heartbeat, a thrum of bright points piercing the still surface of the pool with their light. When the adults found out, she would sit at the table beside the other students. She would be watched, and she wouldn’t be allowed to dawdle at the dryad’s pool.
Elida loved the dryad. She was a flicker of blushing flowers among the dark conifer trees, softness and light in a hard, dark forest. When Elida lay very still and pretended to sleep in the summer sun, the woman-shaped flowers came so close that Elida could smell white trumpet-honey blossoms and freshly trampled mint. She always ran when Elida turned her head, making great speed look effortless as her branch-like legs grew to touch the ground and then snapped off as she ran. Each afternoon, Elida filled her bucket at the pool and then held still a little longer than the day before. Each afternoon, the scent of flowers was a little stronger when she could no longer resist opening her eyes.
The dryad’s water sparkled more than any water that Elida had seen since waking to the heartbeat. She tried to catch as many of the motes as she could, so that Racker would keep choosing her to fetch water. Today she had brought a tight pinecone from the forest as bait to trap them. Racker said that the pinecones opened when there was a fire, but the forest had not burned since before Elida was born. She knew them as tight green eggs, knobby and scaled like a lizard’s back.
She knelt and held the pinecone out over the sparkling water. Elida
felt the water’s attention as lights gathered under her hand, forming a luminous shadow. She placed the pinecone on the water’s surface, and the bright motes touched it.
“Lift it,” she whispered.
The pinecone did not sink. As soft ripples echoed its shape across the pond, more motes gathered to reinforce the net of light.
Elida raised her iron-bound bucket and started a smooth and careful movement toward the water. At the instant that the rim touched the water’s surface, the lights recoiled, clustering on the other side of the pinecone. “Get in,” said Elida, shoving without words in the way that raised the water, sometimes. She felt a very small tingle run up her neck.
She felt the water’s will push back, like gentle hands on her shoulders that nudged her away from the pool.
“Get in,” she said. She shoved harder, leaning forward. “You have to do what I say. You’re little.” The bright specks scattered and the pinecone dropped, sinking.
Elida whined and threw down her bucket. She threw herself backward after it, landing in the grass beside the pond. She’d pretend to nap until the lights came back. Maybe she’d see the dryad, too.
She pretended so well that she actually slept for a while.
Loud sniffing woke her. The feet beside her were large cloven hooves, and Elida looked up to see a mean little face. The man’s nose was smashed flat, and his red eyes were close and piggy. Wide animal ears jutted from either side of his head, under two ridged and curling horns. Thick hair circled his entire head, and a dark short beard flowed seamlessly into the fur of his muscled chest. He was squatting, hunched over Elida, scowling and sniffing.
“You stink, little milk-drinker.” His breath was hot and fetid. He stood and tugged the ash-blackened cloth around his body back into place. A horse’s tail emerged from the base, and he draped it over one arm. He carried a stick in his opposite hand, wrapped with ribbons, and on the end was a pinecone like no pinecone Elida had ever seen, its scales open to dark little caverns.
“Well, you smell like a goat that’s rolled in burned fish,” replied Elida, sitting up.
He hissed with laughter, grimacing widely over closed teeth. “This is not your water,” he said. “It smells of sweeter visitors. I have been following her scent for six long days, since I caught it on the wind. So tell me, milk-drinker child, where is she?”
“Which she?” asked Elida, her throat thick. “Our whole village comes to this pond.”
“Don’t play-act a simpleton.” The goat-man reached out and gripped Elida’s jaw in his fleshy palm. “I can see your power and I will have your dryad now, little water-wizard.”
“I don’t know what any of that is,” said Elida. He squeezed, and she yelped in pain. Then he stopped, his eyes looking over her head, and released her face.
She turned and looked across the water. The dryad stood at the edge of the trees, white in the dappled shade. Elida could see the fear on her open, pink-blooming face even from this distance.
The dryad ran, and the hairy creature sprinted around the pool, his cloven hooves packing the dirt at its edge. Both figures disappeared into the trees before Elida got her feet under her. She stared into the dark forest, already closed over the figures, and then balled her tunic in her fists and hiked it up to run up the steep hill home.
She went straight to the long wooden table where the learners hunched over their gilded bowls, and she shouted. Racker turned from his pacing as he supervised the line of students. Their faces lifted, every tendril that had been laboriously coaxed from the water splashing back down into golden bowls.
“Hush,” Racker said as he caught Elida by the shoulders. “Where’s our water?”
“There’s a goaty-man by the pool,” said Elida. “A monster.”
“A satyr has finally come,” said Racker. He released Elida and nodded to the others. “No more practice, today. We’ll tell the Elders and then we can help them protect the village.”
“What about the dryad? Who will protect her?” asked Elida.
“We don’t interfere with wild magic,” said Racker.
“But what is he going to do to her?” demanded Elida.
Racker exchanged a glance with the oldest boy at the table, and both their mouths quirked to one side in a leer. “Nothing you need to worry about, little one,” he said.
“She looked afraid,” Elida pressed.
“I bet she is.” Racker picked up a bundle of sticks and handed each student a thin switch. “That’s how things go, out there in the wild. Change is brutal and scary and tough. We stay away from it and protect our own.”
“We know her. She’s part of our village too,” said Elida. “She’s not wild.”
“We’ve seen her, but she’s not one of us,” Racker said. “We don’t owe her anything. Besides, it’s a satyr. Even the Elders can’t call enough water to fight a satyr. Go inside the longhouse, and wait.”
“I’m not a baby and I will not hide with the mothers,” said Elida.
“Everyone will be in the longhouse except for us chosen by the water,” said Racker, with a proud lift of his head. One hand went to the silver brooch on his homespun tunic, a thin boat with a dragon’s-head prow. It was a badge for the strongest student, given as a reminder to break the water to his will so thoroughly that, like the ship, he would not only float but dare to taunt it with a symbol of fire. The brooch was also a sign of his authority over the other children, because he was the tasked with teaching them what came naturally to him. “We will go with the Elders and keep the village from burning, and then you can all thank us.”
“I’m chosen too,” said Elida.
“I don’t believe you,” said Racker. “You’re lying. Go inside.”
“No,” said Elida. “I’m going to go help her, even if you won’t.”
“You have to do what I say,” he said. “You’re little.”
Elida turned and ran down the slope, back to the pond. She could see only the top of the dark green mass of trees, and as she ran toward them and dropped away from the village she heard Racker’s voice shouting, then adult voices. She ignored the shouts and looked past the pond toward the trees where the smoke was thickest.
Elida ran to her abandoned bucket where it lay beside the water. She crashed into the ankle-deep shallows, ignoring the twinkling motes. She felt their fear as they scattered, but they were thinking of the burning woods now, not her vessel. Elida scooped water in a single huge motion, using all of her strength. She hurried between the trees, pursuing the fire with the heavy bucket hitting her kneecaps.
She smelled crushed petals before she saw the two creatures. The satyr had run the dryad to ground in a dark bed of conifer needles, not far from the tree line. He crouched over her still, pale form, stroking a nearby seedling tree with his black fingernails. As he pulled his fingers along its length, the green wood began to smolder and flame. Trees behind him already burned, and the pinecone on his staff was aflame like a bright torch. He reached for the dryad’s back, a thin rib of stick with the petals ripped away, and caught one of her branches between his fingers.
Elida planted her feet and lifted her bucket.
The satyr raised his face to her in a grotesque smile, and she poured the entire bucket of water over him before he could speak. His staff was extinguished.
With a roar, the satyr launched himself at her. His two ram-horns caught Elida in the belly, tossing her into the air, and his curly hair hung wet and straight and whipped her as she flew. She hit the ground hard, breathless.
The wet satyr stepped toward her and ripped the bucket handle from her grasp. “No water wizard needs a bucket,” he said, sparking quick flame on his fingers and igniting the wood. He threw her bucket aside, new kindling for his fires, and seized Elida in his burning hands.
She screamed as the flames caught her shirt and hair. Smoke stung her eyes, and she struggled against the grip that held her as her flesh began to scald and broil. His hooves drummed at the dirt.
He st
opped abruptly, jarring Elida, who he still held aloft in her burning clothes. The heat was drying his hair even as it consumed Elida’s. Stinking like any wet mammal, it began to curl around his red eyes. “You are untrained. You are nothing,” he said. “Let’s see if you are so pathetic that you drown.”
The satyr threw Elida backward into the pool.
She heard his laugh start before the water closed over her ears. She sank, limbs struggling, the hot burns on her chest eased but still raw. She called to the lights. Lift me, she thought. Lift me! Lift me!
The motes gathered around her, trailing her sinking body like the bubbles that escaped her tunic. They didn’t understand the urgency. “Lift me,” she said aloud, angry at their curiosity, and her air escaped with the command.
She felt them push back, a wordless no.
Elida’s next breath was water. Her chest spasmed inward trying to throw it out, but her flaring nostrils and frantic mouth only took in more water. The motes pushed her down. Her rump touched the bottom of the pond, and Elida saw a cloud of sand rise up after the bubbles and motes, dimming her vision.
All she could see were the sparkling lights, and they were beautiful and wild and free.
“Do what you want to, then,” whispered Elida, her lips moving around the water.
The lights came crashing down on her. She felt the shiver start in her fingertips and collide over her heart as they drew something out. She was not commanding the motes. They were drawing something out of her for their own purpose.
The pond’s water surged up, and the light around Elida grew brighter for a breathless heartbeat as she approached the surface. The water dropped her on the shore and then all of it rushed into the woods, flying together in a great clear mass, even flowing out of her lungs. She took in sweet air, on her knees and palms, and stared at the empty bowl of wet sand that had been the pond. Then she turned her head in the direction of the water’s roaring.
Fell Beasts and Fair Page 28
