The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Out of the bullet casing came the singer Yoth had been listening to for twenty years, smoke like a roomful of pipes, and in the center of it  —

  Yoth fell on his knees as something, someone, expanded from out of the wound in the chest of Weran Root, toes still in the place where the bullet had entered, fingers stretching long and gleaming, body undulating up.

  “Are you the Devil?” Yoth Begail whispered. “Am I the Devil?”

  He was weeping, his hands full of bent wedding rings and crushed cash from the box, things to bribe back his beloved from the land of the dead.

  You get one wish, the smoke said.

  And so Yoth wished.

  * * *

  Forty years after Yoth Begail's wish, the Kid drives down the highway. All he can think about is lack of love. He tells himself a story a night. Girls walking past him in the hallway of the high school. When he prays, he prays to the god of lost causes. He's a lost cause himself, born bleak in a trailer out in the woods near the reactor, and his mama is a scavenger of skeletons. She smashes them up and makes craft glue mosaics out of them. He wishes she'd smashed and glued him into the shape of some other creature, but she didn't. Now he's this. It's her fault. Their trailer is surrounded by fake white wolves made of cement and paved in mosaics of glass and bone.

  Everyone living left this area after the accident that didn't happen, the fire that wasn't. He and his mother stayed. Some people make peace with disaster, and his mother's that kind. Maybe the Kid's not, but he was doomed before he was born.

  The Kid thinks fondly back on himself now, before innocence became experience, before he knew there'd never be any forever for him. He used to walk up and down the road, picking up souvenirs of crystal bones and holding all that hard blood in his hands, counting it up like he could build something out of it. He had visions of everything, back then. Now no one notices him.

  Girls’ eyes slant away under lashes, electric-blue liner, and who's that for? Their skin under tight jeans, and who's that for? It must be for someone. Why not for him? Not for him, because it's never gonna be him. The Kid's got no future. He's only past. There's nothing for him but hands out in the parking lot of a gas station or in the urinal, head against the wall, looking for salvation in a hot air blower and any drug buyable from anyone who'll sell to invisible boys.

  Magic doesn't make anyone love you. All the Kid can do is start a fire in the palm of his hand and that's a trick he ordered from the back of a magazine.

  Something offered him a wish after he fired that shot in the pawnshop. He's thinking about it.

  * * *

  The forest is deep winter now, and the caves are full of sleep. Animals uncurl from corners, bears in the backs of mountains and bats in the tops of caverns. Out in the ice where the reactor was, there's a hot, sulfurous spot, and beneath it there is a sound like coins in the pockets of the world. Steam rises from the cut into the frozen air, a cookpot. Out around that spot in the ice there are three black wolves, sitting on their haunches, their winter coats full and their bellies fat, unlike the other wolves in the area. These wolves are fed.

  Wolves are only recently back out here, after years of ranchers and strychnine and years more of rumor. Wolves speak in howls, and when one is killed the rest know it and walk at night, grieving past the bodies on the fences, past the tufts of fur caught to the barbed wire. Now there are twelve wolves running over this mountain, living on deer meat and rabbit. They eat hot-blooded things, and an occasional bone, brought to them in payment. In the place where the reactor was, there's heat and smoke, but the ice hides it.

  * * *

  The motorcycle the Hunter's riding is gleaming black with white trim, a blue blanket stuffed in the gear bag. The monkey clings to her shoulder, its own little helmet buckled tight. There are rotting snowdrifts in the road, and fallen trees, and sometimes a dead animal starved and picked clean. A recently done deer looks reproachfully out from the roadside, flies hatching in her nostrils. The Hunter rides along this highway with its silver stripe down the center, her bag jingling as she goes.

  When she gets to the pawnshop, it's full dark, and there are no lights to say this is a palace. The spot sings out with heat, though, and she has no trouble finding it. It's loud as a wedding in the woods, if it's what you're looking for. She dismounts and takes the monkey in with her, steps over the rubble and rank, the pool of blood, and finds Yoth Begail on the floor.

  The monkey hops down, stands on the man's forehead, and peers into his mouth. It knocks on Yoth Begail's chest and his heart resumes beating, like an engine that's got too cold.

  “You're not dead,” the Hunter tells Yoth Begail. “You just think you are. Where'd it go?”

  “Who?” asks Yoth, bleary.

  “The one who came out of the bullet,” the Hunter says. “I see you got shot. Did you shoot yourself, or did someone shoot you?”

  “A kid shot me, and took the rifle when he went,” says Yoth.

  “Did he make a wish?”

  “I don't know,” says Yoth. “Boy was a strange customer, and I was well and truly dead. I regret I didn't see him coming.”

  She goes. The bike growls, and leaves tracks like a man running barefoot, like a horse galloping in gypsum, and then the tracks are gone again, white hollows in an evening world.

  Yoth turns his head to look at the vision beside him, a tall man in the string tie. All the gemstones that were in the case are on the man's fingers, and all the music in the shop is played by his hands, and if he is not quite visible, if he lives in the crack between night and day, it's no huge matter. The shop is as fine a place for shadows as anywhere.

  Yoth's wish was a switching of places, his dead beloved for the living djinn. He was left with a lover made of smoke.

  “I thought I was over with,” Yoth Begail says.

  “I thought so too,” says the man who was Weran Root. “But you're not, and I'm not, and here we are, in the dark, without the devils.”

  “The rifle's with the Kid,” says Yoth.

  “If I were still a praying man and not this, I might pray,” says Weran Root. “He's going to shoot till he's done. That's his notion. It was written all over him. But we have a wish too. I planned for this. We don't let boys bring down the universe.”

  “We?” says Yoth Begail.

  Weran Root opens his hand and reveals a bullet, the creature it contains still singing from inside it.

  “I took this one years ago,” says Weran Root, with the peaceful Missouri certainty he's always had, from long before he was a djinn. Weran Root never worried, even when love took him over and remade him. When he was changed from flesh into smoke, the love continued, blazing through Yoth Begail's lonely life, making the entirety of it bright. Yoth looks at his husband and feels his own heart beating. He takes the Priest's hand in his own.

  “The legends lie. Wish-granters are not only makers of palaces full of beautiful girls and of forests in the desert,” Weran Root says. “Wish-granters sometimes reverse things.”

  * * *

  This is the beginning of this story.

  Backward in time, a thousand years. Here's a girl in the desert, enslaved to a sultan. She wanders in and out of the shadows of a roomful of oil lamps, stepping on a stool to reach the highest ones and bringing them all down at once for polishing.

  She knows what they are. She knows what she is and is not supposed to do with these lamps. She doesn't care.

  She sets everything free at once. Why should they not be free? Why should she not? She frees herself from the job of story. She's been the girl who tells tales nightly, the girl who memorizes the histories of every star and whispers them into the ears of the sultan in hopes of keeping herself from death. She frees herself from the job of guiding men through the dark.

  Forward in time eight hundred years, that same girl, now a woman, walks the woods of this part of America. She runs into a trapper wearing a blue blanket stolen from his last wife's people. He's drunk, and he's been tra
veling alone too long. He's a man in a pile of pelts, bear and wolf, beaver and mink, all the heat of their fur divorced from their blood, and she has no use for him.

  “I need a woman,” he shouts at her across the snow. “My woman died.”

  “I don't need a man,” she says, and keeps walking. Deep snow and snowshoes, leaving tracks like she's two flat-tailed beavers walking side by side.

  “You need me,” he insists, but she keeps walking.

  He runs up behind her and grabs her by the hair, pulling the braid away from her skull, tearing the roots, and she feels her own blood sizzle on her cold skin.

  That's all he gets from her. Her heart is a copper lamp, and inside it is black smoke.

  She made a wish a long time ago, and it was granted. She walks in safety.

  * * *

  The Hunter's eyelids are marked with the trees from a smoke tower, the place she sees if she looks over the woods and watches how they turn to words written on white snow slates. Everything is written somewhere, and all the languages of the world are here, in the bird tracks and the wolves dragging bloodied rabbits.

  She should have buried her captives when she needed to sleep, not pawned them, though the old rules said the pawn should have kept them safe. She should've left them alone in the metal house in the woods, far from anyone, but last place like that, she found empty. A thousand years of searching for the wishes she set free, and now she only wants to find the last of them. They don't stay caged in copper.

  She wonders. Maybe the things she hunts, if she left them to their own devices, perhaps they'd carry the old to their beds and the dying to their graves. She's been hunting too long to tell if the world is worse without wishes than with them. She's seen some wishes made, though. She feels guilt for her part in history, and so she hunts the djinn, trying to bring them back into captivity.

  The Hunter rides past the site where the expedition ate itself. There they were, their hands full of blood, their mouths full of bone. She rides past the reactor she didn't keep from melting down. It wasn't her fault. She was sleeping, and she didn't know what was living inside it.

  She's behind a truck now, on the highway, her motorcycle whining, the monkey's paws twisted in her hair. Rifle rack on the back of the cab, and the Kid's driving on the wrong side of the road.

  She can hear the radio, the Kid playing loud to drown out the noise as he heads toward the high school floodlights in the middle of the field, the peeled paint coming off trucks like onion skin, the smell of metallic sweat, sleep, and chemistry labs, the smell of the reactor's effects continuing into the future, each generation on fire, brightness continuing through them, turning the children into something other than children. Now she knows that wishers are everywhere.

  The Kid turns in at the high school. As he does, he looks to the thing in the back of the pickup truck and makes a wish.

  * * *

  There are reactions and reactors and spills in the river, there are trees growing up out of white dust and children born dazzled, with hearts full of black smoke. There are wishes inhaled in first breaths and exhaled in final ones.

  * * *

  The Kid has barred the door of the high school with an ax handle, and no one knows it yet. He is walking into the cafeteria, his denim making the rustle of rough animals brushing against one another in a pasture.

  But outside the cafeteria, Weran Root, a priest made of wishes, cracks open the casing of the bullet, releases the djinn inside, and makes a wish, calling a reaction from the reactor.

  In the woods, there's light around trees and heat steaming from the earth. There are three black wolves, and with a howl and a leap they fling themselves into the sky and become birds. Out of the reactor emerges a djinn, hidden in this place for a hundred and fifty years.

  The Kid is walking toward the girls. They're seated in a row of shining ponytails and for a moment he thinks he's walking toward a stable, and then  —

  Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. Old stories from an old expedition. Stories he's told himself about happiness, all of them failures, all of them involving being lost without a guide, wandering helpless and hopeless, lonely forever.

  I need a girl to look at me, he tells himself. That's his wish. It's a wish many have made before him, and it's never turned out well.

  The cafeteria is, in an instant, full of wild horses, snorting and prancing, galloping, chestnuts and dapple grays, blues and reds. The Kid stands in the midst of all these girls who are no longer girls.

  There's only one real girl left in the cafeteria, and the Kid, despairing on his mission, his legend shrinking, raises the ancient rifle and balances it on his shoulder. He's surrounded by horseflesh, the smell of horses wearing drugstore perfume, horses with hairspray in their manes, horses stepping around him and treading on him, rearing up, neighing.

  The girl has tattooed eyelids and a monkey in her arms. She looks at the Kid. He's crying. He has his finger on the trigger. The Kid is somebody's wish, somebody's son, with his hardening blood and brightening bones.

  “Come over here, now,” the Hunter says.

  Around him the horses of the high school spin, about their own business. The Kid is constituted of despair. He aims the rifle, shaking, at her.

  A cloud coheres, standing between the Hunter and the Kid.

  The Hunter looks at the smoke, her old companion.

  “There you are,” she says. “I heard you melted something down. Heard you made some things.”

  This djinn, the first to emerge a thousand years ago, has been lonely a while.

  I heard my son was up to bad wishing, says the smoke.

  The Kid looks around, bewildered as the smoke wishes him backward in time, sends him back to his childhood, to his mother, to the mosaics in the yard made of bones.

  He flickers for a moment, in his denim and misery, and then he's gone.

  The room is full of stampeding horses and then the room is full of stampeding daughters, and then the room is full of the children of this part of the mountains, all of them made of magic, all of them the drift that comes of wishes falling from the sky like snow.

  “Come with me,” says the Hunter to the smoke. “At the end of every story, there's another story. I've been looking for you a long time. This is the story after the hunt.”

  The smoke regards her.

  There's a world inside every wish. There are miles inside every lamp. There are places in these mountains where everything may dwell at once, guarded by wolves.

  The two of them, old lovers, old stories, a Scheherazade and her secret, leave only a scrap of paper, a ticket exchanging one thing for another, and a little monkey that springs up and drops a handful of copper casings on the ground as it departs for the forest.

  * * *

  Yoth Begail is driving out of the woods, and beside him, covered in a cloak to keep him in shadow, is Weran Root. Yoth's eighty-six years old and recently dead. Death doesn't bother him. He's smoking a Cuban cigar brought out from someone's humidor, a pawnshop perk.

  “Remember when I was the Priest?” says Weran Root. “Remember when I held the word in my hands and tried to put it around your finger?”

  “Yep,” says Yoth Begail. “I remember.” He passes Weran Root a brooch made of blood and bone, and the old man made of smoke causes it to appear and disappear in his fingertips.

  “What did you wish for?” Yoth Begail asks Weran Root.

  “No one tells their wishes,” says Weran Root. “Those are the rules of this kind of story.”

  They are two old men in love, freed of their obligations, in possession of every ticket for everything left in their keeping. They are driving out of the mountains and toward the sea.

  * * *

  The Kid is wished into another story, a hundred and fifty years before the beginning of this one. Now he's a newborn baby found in these woods, the forest bending to look down at him. He's the child of a dead woman, and his father is a freetrapper, but none
of this is his pain.

  Someone who will love him picks him up. She carries him away from the ice and into the green mountains, holds him beside a fire, sings him a song that tells a story about spring. Now he's raised with love instead of fury.

  The wishes in this story are wishes built the way wishes are always built, and the way bullets are built too, to keep going long after they've left the safety of silence. Each person is a projectile filled with sharp voice and broken volume, blasts of maybe.

  The hands outstretch, the hearts explode. The chamber is the world and all the bodies on earth press close around each bullet, holding it steady until, with a rotating spin, it flies.

  Everything living is built to burn, of course. After the close, dark chamber comes the cold, bright world.

  And after the world?

  After the world is a cloud of smoke, and in the center of the cloud, a whispering flame.

  Memoirs of an Imaginary Country

  The center of the earth is full of things the surface thinks it has discarded.

  You called the year your explorers arrived in my country year 1. We called that year 10,077. You called us Utopians. We called you something else.

  Every woman, I learned, later in my life than I should have, is someone's imaginary kingdom.

  All explorers, I also learned, are liars when it comes to the truth of what they've touched. If you're the gap in the map, you know this much is true.

  I was the kind of girl who would always be a child, you said.I should take pleasure in the simple things, and I should not learn to read or write. Too much knowledge, you told me, would destroy my sense of wonder. I dusted your books. I looked at the margins of the maps, the places marked with monsters.

  When I met you, I was thirteen, and I already knew I was too ugly to be loved. I was strong, and I was smart, but no girl was allowed to have everything. My sister was pretty, which meant that she also had to pretend to be weak. Together, we did all the work girls do, unnoticed. She listened to you. I scrubbed. She smiled at you. I plotted our course. We were invisible in different ways. My face and her mind, my teeth and her claws. You approved of us. We were your household. You could not see the fire at our edges. We were your girls.