Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 32

by Kelly Link

  Hazel brushed off dirt and grass. Fairyland on this side of the fence didn’t look much different: the same overgrowth of weeds, the same rusted hulks of old rides, cracked pavement winding paths around them, the same leaf-filled fountains, crushed Coke cups and crumpled cellophane wrappers. After the talking fox, Hazel had been expecting something wonderful.

  “Fairyland isn’t what it used to be,” the vixen said, coming up alongside Hazel. “But then, magic is like that. It fades the moment you try to pin it down. Only new blood can wake it. Come. The Carousel is this way.”

  Hazel followed the white-tipped tail along twisting concrete paths that seemed inclined to loop back on themselves if you let them. The mica in the path caught glimmers of starlight. The cracks and weeds tripped her.

  Down the Midway they went, past striped canopies that sheltered forests of hanged animals, their cotton guts spilling from their bodies, their fur dark with mold. Hazel and the vixen skirted behind the back of a many-armed ride—The Octopus—that twisted on its axis with a hollow metal groan and watched them pass with depthless ocean-eyes. They crawled through the black bones of an old coaster. Paint flaked off its serpentine coils and ridges. Hazel might have stopped to snatch something from the hoard of loose change and lost keys and sunglasses strewn underneath the tracks, but the vixen barked, and she hurried along empty-handed.

  The Carousel stood at the center of Fairyland; the winding paths meeting in a knot around it. The canopy, striped blue and red, swooped down from the star-topped center pole to a gaudy rounding board of gilt-winged cherubs and silver-lined clouds. A frozen menagerie hid in the shadows, some shapes familiar—horses, dogs, cats, a leaping emerald frog—but most creatures Hazel had never seen and didn’t have names for. A rainbow-feathered serpent launched into frozen flight beside a merman with two tails instead of one. A half horse, half sea-monster chased them, tail twisted into a corkscrew shape, a ruby-scaled dragon opened its mouth in a silent roar, and more and more, all pinned to the red lacquered platform by pillars of twisted brass.

  A breeze lifted Hazel’s hair. Leaves skittered across the pavement with an anxious, ticking sound, like the fleeing of spiders.

  “Don’t agree to anything unless I tell you to,” the vixen said, and she darted across the plaza.

  Hazel followed, racing the leaves and crumpled wrappers and smashed pop cans blown by the wind. She hopped over a newspaper tumbleweed that threatened to tangle about her ankles. The trash and leaves caught against the railing that ringed the carousel, a great lump that quivered and rattled like a prisoner against his bars.

  The vixen stopped before it, and Hazel halted beside her.

  The Ticketman rose to his feet, one hand—a skeletal branch of bark-stripped sycamore—gripping the railing for balance. Newsprint curved over his cheek; he peered at them with eyes the concave bottoms of pop cans. He wore a coat of mulched leaves, mottled black and brown and smelling like slugs and old rainwater.

  “A child comes to Fairyland,” he said, his voice the crunch of stale kettle-corn underfoot. His twig-fingers drummed on the railing. “Only one, thin on imagination. I woke for this?” He sniffed, and a wind cold as autumn pricked Hazel’s skin.

  The vixen nudged Hazel forward, wet nose at the back of her knee.

  The Ticketman was as tall as any adult, and glared at her with the same don’t waste my time impatience.

  “I . . . I’ve come to take my parents back.”

  “You’ve come by the wrong path, then. You get your ticket at the gate.” He twirled a twisted brass pin between his bone-thin fingers and glanced at the menagerie held in place with their brass posts: dragons and scorpions and a roaring lion. “Is this your mount? I don’t yet have a fox.”

  “And you won’t,” growled the vixen. “Tell him we’ll ride free.”

  The Ticketman shrugged, mulch dropping from the folds of his coat. He pocketed the pin. “You’ll both be flung off before you can reach the center. The longer you ride, the faster the carousel goes.”

  Hazel glanced between the frozen menagerie and the vixen at her side, too small to ride, pinned or not. The Ticketman rustled and waited.

  “We’ll ride free.”

  “Silly child, to trust a fox,” said the Ticketman, but he opened the gate. Hazel entered. The vixen’s claws tick-ticked when she hopped onto the platform.

  “Mount up,” she said.

  “How?” But Hazel’s question was answered the moment she stepped up onto the platform. The vixen had grown, or Hazel had shrunk. The fox came up to Hazel’s shoulders, her patchy coat now lush and bristling and bright as a new penny.

  Hazel stepped up to her. The red lacquer paint must have been wet; it sucked at Hazel’s sneakers like the floors of the dollar movie theater. She dug her fingers into the vixen’s ruff and pulled herself onto her back. Her sneakers left mottled diamond patterns in the painted floorboards.

  “Hang on.” The vixen loped ahead between the frozen mounts, the bones of her haunches digging into Hazel’s butt. She lay flat against the fox’s back and pressed her legs against the fox’s sides.

  With a rattle of expelled air, the carousel shuddered into motion. Like riding through honey at first, slow, sluggish, the poles creaked, the horses and other creatures rose or fell. Music, slurred and off-key, dribbled out of tinny speakers. Tiny light bulbs flickered on, dimmer than candles.

  “Don’t get knocked off,” said the vixen, dodging the hoof of a pegasus circling down at them. “When the mirrors light up, find your parents and snatch them free. I’ll get as close to the center as I can, but you won’t have much time before we’re flung free.”

  Hazel ducked under the belly of a shaggy grey wolf with a man’s hands and feet. Something dangled from his belly. His saddle girth and stirrups, she thought, and didn’t look closer to be proved wrong. Beyond him, dark save for the occasional reflective flicker of a passing mount, was the central column of the carousel. Gilt carvings framed each mirrored panel, brambles and choking ivy, glistening sundew, drooping pitcher plants, venus flytraps that yawned open and closed. Hazel caught sight of her own face in a mirror, blanched and half-buried in the vixen’s ruff.

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “There will be.”

  Faster went the carousel, or faster loped the vixen. Hazel couldn’t tell. It felt like she was in the middle of a race, all the creatures around them rising and falling. The shadows from the flickering lights gave them movement where there was none.

  When the first creature jerked and moaned, Hazel yelped and nearly slipped from the vixen’s back.

  “Here we go,” muttered her mount, and dodged a convulsive strike from the scorpion’s stinger.

  Moans first, and then screams as the carousel sped up and the menagerie came to life. They struggled, kicked, writhed on their impaling posts. The twisted brass grated against bone. Lumpy ropes, slick and red, dangled in loops like sausages, threatening to catch Hazel and yank her from the vixen’s back. Her mount’s paws slipped and tripped in the wet lacquer paint. Most of the howls were unintelligible, but the merman burbled pleas at Hazel each time they passed. He reached out for her with webbed hands and wept pearls.

  “Now do you see the Ticketman’s game?” The vixen dodged under the dragon’s lashing tail, slipping to the inside like a greyhound at the track. “Pin your mount near the edge, and you’ll never reach the column. Pin it near the column, and you might get your parents but never get off.”

  Hazel saw. Hazel saw more than she ever wanted to see. She kept her eyes on the mirrors. The green-glow flickers resolved into eyes set in gaunt faces. Flies buzzed around the glass, flinging themselves at the trapped corpses. Desiccated fingers pressed from the other side, clawing to be free.

  The flytraps and pitcher plants feasted.

  “Do you see them?” The vixen’s hind legs thrashed in place as she scrabbled for traction. The circling of the carousel pushed them toward the outer edge, away from the mirror. The vixen crouch
ed and crept closer.

  Hazel peered at the ghosts pressing up to the glass. “I . . . I can’t.” Her parents couldn’t be among them. Her father had a thick beard and laughing eyes, not sunken cheeks with jelly crying down from empty sockets. Her mother had shining dark hair and full pink lips, not dried swampgrass that sloughed away in clumps and a smile that was parchment and bone.

  If her parents were here, she didn’t want them back.

  “Call them. Bring them—” Flame erupted from the writhing dragon and seared an arc of scorched blood and flesh across their path. They slid, fox and girl both, across the slick platform toward the outside rim of the carousel. Hazel clung to the vixen. She couldn’t make herself let go to grab for one of the blood-slick poles, the sagging belly-flesh, or a loop of entrails.

  The merman caught her by her hair.

  “Let go! Let go!” Hazel’s fingers dug into the vixen’s ruff as her mount’s hind legs went sliding off the edge. The world beyond blurred into nausea. Hazel shut her eyes and dragged the vixen back onto the platform. The merman caught her shoulder and released her hair. He pulled her closer. Pearls rained on her face. She couldn’t catch his whispers for the screams around them.

  Then he shrieked and released her. The vixen jerked her head, tearing a chunk out of one of the merman’s leg-tails. Her feet back underneath her, she darted away. Hazel clung hard and hid her face in the vixen’s ruff.

  “Call them. Catch them.” The vixen barked between pants.

  Hazel lifted her head. “Mom? Mommy! Daddy!” The names rose in pitch.

  She glimpsed her father first. He pressed against the glass. Thin white patches bristled from the corners of his mouth down his chin. His frowny-patches, she called them, though he never frowned.

  “There!” Hazel leaned out. The vixen veered closer, under the sagging, rent belly of a young elephant painted with flowers. Hazel’s hand plunged through glass that cut like ice. She snagged something wispy as spiderweb and pulled it free. It struggled in her grasp. She dug her knees into the vixen’s sides so she could use both hands to wrestle it.

  “We have to go.” The vixen used the menagerie’s poles for traction, bracing herself against one and leaping through thrashing hooves and tails and claws and teeth to the next.

  “We can’t! My mom.” Hazel pointed to a gaunt-faced cadaver with a coral smear painted across her shriveled lips. She nearly lost the amorphous cloud that had been her father. She wrapped him about her lacerated hands like candyfloss. Her fingers turned purple and numb.

  “Right then. Ready?” The vixen’s haunches bunched for another leap.

  “I can’t. I’ll lose my dad. I can’t hold them both.”

  “Then choose.”

  “I can’t. Please. It’s my mom.”

  The vixen whined as their chance passed in another revolution. The force of the carousel’s spinning left them pressed hard against a pole spiking a golden carp. The fish couldn’t threaten them, only open its mouth and gills in desperate gasps, but the friction of the pole was a fire against Hazel’s thigh.

  “Idiot kit.” But the vixen waited for the mirror with the clown-lipped ghost to come around again, leapt for the glass. She yelped as her nose broke the surface, but her jaws snapped shut. They all went tumbling past gnashing crocodiles and thrashing tigers, thrown free off the end of the world in a spray of blood.

  Hazel woke to the best day ever. Her mom made coffee, face clean of make-up but lined with worry. Her dad argued into the phone, trying to make it clear that yes, he was reporting the theft of everything they owned. Then Uncle Bill woke up, and the police arrived, and there was a lot of confusion on everybody’s part. Hazel didn’t care because mom’s cheeks were full and pink, and dad kept stroking his beard when he couldn’t come up with an explanation for how they’d survived the car crash and being cremated. Clearly, somebody had made a mistake. That was the only logical explanation, wasn’t it?

  Hazel’s dad made a run to the corner market. Hazel’s mom made sandwiches because all the pots and food had been thrown away or sold or given to Goodwill, and she swaddled Hazel’s hand in iodine and bandages and didn’t even demand to know how Hazel had cut herself so badly. Uncle Bill and dad sat on the carpet in the empty family room to start sorting everything out, but it was all okay, because there were lots of tears and hugs for Hazel. Dad promised that no, they weren’t going anywhere, and yes, she’d get to keep her playhouse.

  Late that night, after mom and dad had tucked her in, but before she’d fallen asleep, something tapped at her window. The vixen stood in the planter that ran alongside the house.

  “I need to show you something.”

  Hazel knew she shouldn’t sneak out, but she was a hero who’d saved both her parents from death. There were allowances for people like her. She slipped on her ballet flats—nobody could find where her sneakers had gone off to—and crept out to meet the vixen.

  The fox led Hazel into the woods beyond the yard, down into a hollow filled with shadows and old leaves. The canvas sack that Barnabas had used to capture the vixen’s kits slumped against a root. Lumpy shapes wiggled inside.

  “You got your kits back!” Hazel clapped and beamed at her friend.

  “Hm. But the bag is shut tight.” The vixen looked down at her paws, and up at the rope knotted about the top of the sack.

  “I can help you.” That’s what heroes like her did. Hazel crouched atop the root and picked the knot free.

  “There is something else,” the vixen said from behind Hazel.

  “What’s that?” Hazel pulled open the sack. The mouth yawned wide, darker than any sack should be. Something slammed into Hazel’s back, toppled her over, and she tumbled down, down, down like it wasn’t a bag at all, but someplace deeper and darker.

  She landed on a heap of bones wrapped in something jelly-soft.

  “Oof,” said Barnabas. Hazel could just make him out by the light of the moon. He shoved her off him. “What’s going on? Where’s that stupid vixen?”

  “Barnabas? It’s me.” Hazel looked up at the moon, but it crumpled and shrank into a pinprick. The world lurched, and she fell against Barnabas, and they both tumbled to the unstable canvas ground as it moved over rocks and leaves and dead branches. “The vixen. She tricked me.”

  “Fucking foxes.” He raised his voice. “You better run before I get out of this bag, bitch, ’cause I’m gonna sling your ass into the lake, too.”

  Hazel’s tummy rolled like she was still on the Carousel. “Oh Barnabas. You didn’t. You promised to take them to the shelter.”

  “What? I told you she’d be better off. The world doesn’t need more vermin.”

  Hazel kicked him and rose to her knees. “Vixen, please. Please let me out. I didn’t know he’d—”

  The sack settled. The moon dilated, and the vixen’s snout poked through. Cuts criss-crossed her nose and spiked her fur with blood, just like the hand Hazel had used to catch her father through the mirror. “You didn’t care. Well, I don’t either. I’m getting my kits back.”

  “No,” Hazel whispered. “Take Barnabas. Not me.” Her parents, they wouldn’t understand her empty bed. They wouldn’t know about the Carousel.

  The vixen’s eyes flashed amber. Her pink tongue curled around the blood spiking her whiskers. “I don’t have hands to catch and hold them. Two kits, two of you, two runs on the Carousel. I don’t need a mount, but I still need to pay passage. Did you notice, the Ticketman didn’t have any children in his collection, either?

  The vixen pulled back her head, and the opening clamped shut, cutting off the light.

  Marrying the Sea

  Kodiak Julian

  Now, even Vivian is dead. Even Vivian, with magic like whiskey and dark chocolate. You are eighty-seven years old, and the only one left.

  You haven’t fed the hummingbirds in the years since your husband died, yet they still fight between the larkspur and coral bells. The back porch’s wicker chair is warm in the June sun. Your knu
ckles ache as you open the medicine bottle with the last of the magic, stored in your china cabinet for thirty years. You have never before used the magic without all four of you together, but this time is different.

  The magic in the bottle smells like Irene’s magic, like rain on pavement and birthday candles just blown out.

  In the magic, you are fifty-seven years old. You and Frannie and Vivian sit on either side of Irene’s hospital bed as she says aloud what you’ve all known: that she won’t be making it home. In the magic, Frannie digs through her purse to find empty medicine bottles to hold the last magic you four will make. She finds two bottles, her grandson’s Ronald McDonald acrobat figurine, reading glasses, stamps, white musk perfume. Vivian runs to the hospital gift shop to buy cold medicine, to pour the medicine into the sink, to rinse the bottle. Now there are bottles for each of you who will live.

  In the magic, you are forty-two years old. You are all together in your kitchen. It is evening, after Roger’s funeral. You and your husband buried him with his teddy bear, Cereal. Roger made it all the way to twenty. If he had been well, then he and Frannie’s son might have played street baseball together. They might have shined flashlights at each other from their bedroom windows. You were always sweet for Frannie’s boy. But it’s 1968. Frannie’s son will die in Vietnam, and your son won’t have to mourn anyone. In the magic, Vivian sits beside you in the breakfast nook. Her hair is still brown, a perfect bob. She has brought a man with her from Buenos Aires. You all secretly hate him. He sits in the living room with your husband, watching the war on the color TV. Frannie washes the casserole dishes. Irene clanks the Pyrex pans into the cupboard with one hand and holds her cigarette with the other. Vivian wears a ring shaped like a bull’s head. You imagine you will all be together in happier times. You’re wrong. This is it.