Magic for Unlucky Girls

by A. A. Balaskovits

  I had no dress for my wedding. They used the yards of silk and lace to make trim for my hair, and for days ladies strung pearls and tied bows and weaved white and yellow blooms into the strands. When they had finally finished, and my hair was so heavy that I had fifty women in cotton shifts holding sections of it to march into the cathedral, the royal seamstresses said there was nothing left to cover me. Their stores were empty and the fields were barren stems and leaves. So I stood bare in front of the priest and my husband and my husband’s mother and the harlequin courtiers. I considered being embarrassed but no one looked at my body. The men touched my hair and took discreet turns yanking on it—and how I could feel their soft hands, the little pulls growing into urgent tugs when I was to say my vows—and the old women weeping into its thickness with such passion that patches were drenched with their joy.

  I did not sleep with my husband that first night, nor the next, not for a week after that. The ladies in waiting worked tirelessly to untie the silk and lace and drooping flowers and unknot each pearl, which they dropped into baskets to be given to the townspeople as a sign of our eventual generosity when my husband took his throne. But I saw the baskets with pearls go in a different direction of the castle, not to the front gates, but to the coffers in the dungeon, so that they might waste there with the thieves and murderers.

  When we stood in front of one another, naked, expected to come together and form a child, our bodies glistened with the oil the servants rubbed over us, so that in the candlelight we looked like melting wax statues. My hair piled up in every part of the room, and when my husband made to approach me I cried out, Don’t move, don’t move, I can feel your heaviness in my strands.

  We lay in bed as careful as baby birds. When he reached for me I felt the tugging at my scalp, and so I carefully unwrapped the strands from his wrist. He went on top of me, and he said, Sweet hummingbird, sweet girl, lovely late cherry blossom. He tried to be gentle but with each bounce my hair pulled underneath me, and when he was finished and lay next to me I reached up to soothe my head, and when I brought my hand to my face there was blood sliding off the oil on my fingers.

  When my husband closed his eyes, I put my fingers in my mouth. Oh, auntie, I miss you.

  My husband is a boy. He takes care to shave each patch of skin on his body, and sometimes he uses silver tweezers to gorge their roots. Then he lets the servants into the boudoir, and they slather him in pale paint, filling in the holes, so that there is not a speck of red on him. He mumbles for days that he itches. At the long dinner table I see him sneak his hand into his trousers and scratch deep and long there, and then he sighs and smiles a bit. This is an ugly act, even my auntie would have agreed with me on that, but in these ugly moments I think I love him, and I want him to hold me down and scratch the gold between my legs, where it curls and knots and smells like sulfur.

  My prince has taken to brushing my hair into a shine devoid of curls or knots. Then he splits my hair into three and carefully, reverently, his eyes wet and his hands trembling beneath the intricacy of the act, twists the lengths under and over one another. He does this for hours, never tiring nor stopping to relieve himself or to take a cup of warm milk, his favorite taste upon awaking and before retiring to his silk bed. When he reaches the split end of my hair he yanks it (sometimes so hard that I cry out, but I try to guess when he is about to do this and bite my lips together, for he looks so sad when I make such ugly noises, and he is so ugly when he is sad). Then he twists the end of it into a large loop, each time getting larger and larger, and ties it off with ribbon.

  Look, he tells me, throwing the hair around his shoulders, we can fit both our necks in this.

  Are you playing executioner? The hangman?

  Don’t be silly, he says. It is a scarf. Look how tight I have made the braid. Not even air will get between the strands.

  I think not even our bodies will break them apart if we fall the entire length of the castle. I smile at him, for it is a beautiful noose, and I am proud that my prince can make such beautiful things.

  When my clothes grow tight around my belly, I curl up in the barren room with my husband—what need have we of decorations, or a bed, or a blanket to cover ourselves, when my hair is so thick we can sleep on it and have no need for down pillows—and I tell him of my auntie.

  She was a witch, I told him. She wrapped her hands around the cord that connected me to my mother and pinched.

  Was she an ugly woman?

  I’ve never seen my mother. I suppose she looks like me.

  Your auntie.

  Oh yes, I said. She had a turnip for a nose, and her skin was as rough as leather. She had coins for eyes—copper; they glowed in the night. And under her skirts she kept spiders. I leaned close to him and whispered, She used to say she liked the way it felt when the eggs hatched on her legs, all those little babies scrambling on her skin.

  What a horrible woman, he said.

  No, I said. She was lovely. She had cool hands, so cold, and at night she sang songs of the cave people. That is where they discovered fire, dark inside the bowels of the earth, and when they saw it for the first time they all went blind.

  What a horrible story. Come, my love. He put his hand on my belly. Tell me of sweet things, you sweet sweet cherry stem.

  I told him of the thing that was not in my heart: each strand of my hair was made of gold pounded thin, sprinkled with magic dust, and all who viewed it would fall instantly in love.

  No one shall look at you then, he said, yawning and throwing his arm over me. As it grew darker, my skin numbed to him, and I could not feel the weight of his royal arm.

  My daughter came out of me in an agonized splash. Auntie, I wish you were here to pinch the cord between us, to take her away from me, for she cries and cries. I cannot hear the sound of my own cries over hers. When the women reached to cut the cord with golden knives I screamed them away and reached between myself and strangled the cord apart.

  I’ll see her after she is cleaned, my husband said. Wrap her in cloth, white, and continue to wrap her until it is only white cloth.

  Did he mean our daughter, or did he mean me?

  Is her nose crooked? He asked me.

  Oh, no, I said, and wrapped my hand around the braid he was tying off at the end. It will straighten. All little girls are born twisted, but they become like poles.

  When my daughter was a golden two and clung to my legs, my husband’s father died, and his queen, the dower lady of the castle, quietly followed him. The minstrels were ordered to make ballads of the intensity of their love, the sort that caused a worm to be wrapped around the heart and, when the other is gone, the worm begins to devour.

  The crown my husband wore was gold and studded with rubies. The metalsmiths and jewelers, under my husband’s whispered orders, cut the very ends of my hair, all of them split four or eight times, and after they slaved over their magic they trapped those snippets in the rubies so that, when the light hit them a certain way, you could see me trapped in so much red.

  He was a kind ruler for a time, as all new rulers must be kind at first. He wanted nothing from our subjects, not their land for their food, or their daughters for his bed, and not even their sons for his army. Instead, he gave them seeds for the ground and dresses for their daughters and shoes for their sons. He raised his arms high, like he was reaching for the sun, and released the pearls from the coffers, and spread them like rain across the bodies of our people. Produce, he told them. Produce such lovely things.

  Our daughter burrowed her head in my leg to hide her slanted nose.

  After so many years he said, let us play a game, my golden egg.

  All of his subjects were brought before him, no matter their age or station, from the shepherds to the ladies in waiting, and they stood before him while he looked them over and made his judgment. The sun hit the golden crown on his head and the light shined thro
ugh the ruby, so that when they stood before him there was a red light on their faces or their breasts. And my hair, trapped in that light, split their bodies in half.

  With my braid on his lap he said, Now this one, my little tulip, look how his face is scarred. What has happened to you, dear boy?

  A wolf, my lord, said the boy. His knees trembled when the red light hit his eye.

  No woman will want you, isn’t that so?

  I don’t know, my lord.

  Be kind, I said. He is so young.

  He turned to the woman next to the boy and said, You are very horrible to look at.

  Sir? She bowed her head.

  Yes, your hair is string. Your face is sweet potato mush. Very dreadful.

  Oh, I told him, she only needs a good scrubbing. These things will right themselves.

  As do noses, my teapot?

  Later, as I cupped my daughter’s ears and hid her under my hair, she asked me, Mother, what is a sharp thing?

  It is coiled, I told her. It waits to strike.

  At the end of my braid I felt the weight of that boy, the old woman, and so many others, hanging, stretching my neck back until I feared it would snap. And, in the shaking tremor, I felt my husband’s fingers stroking its thickness, gentle, like a bee landing on a petal.

  We lay still until the screaming stopped.

  They buried that young boy and the old woman, and so many others, under the moat. My husband worried that their bodies might bloat and rise up and stain the blue water brown, but the builders and buriers, with their hands placed across their moles, their scars, told him that once you are buried you will stay down.

  They are so lucky, my husband said. You were the last thing they felt. Such strength in these strands, such softness.

  Our daughter fears you, I told him.

  He was wrapping my hair in a bow—a noose with two sides, and a knot in the middle.

  Oh, my buzzing bee, my purple rose, you yourself cannot stand to hear her weep.

  She does not weep any more.

  When will she straighten? When she bleeds? That cannot be too long, now.

  He cinched his noose very tight, and I felt the old wounds open on my scalp. I reached up and brought the blood to my lips.

  Dream of the West, he told me, don’t do that. It bitters your taste.

  I waited until my daughter bled before I struck, the day before my husband was to have a grand party, to dress her in white cotton and parade her in front of him like any common woman born of the mud. I kept my hair in the braid he so loved and unwound it through the castle. He spent hours following it, like the string that led the man out of the labyrinth. When I felt his tugs growing weaker I shook the braid to renew his journey, and when he reached our bedroom he huffed and puffed like the old wolf from the story my auntie told me.

  Come to bed, I told him.

  He fell onto my braid-bed, and soon he was asleep.

  Gently, I raised the small flap of skin over his eye. What blue eyes you have, my husband, like moat water.

  Gentler still I reached behind his eyes with my nails—filed sharp, just like you would have liked, Auntie—and plucked them out. They were so small and delicate, real soft things.

  He screamed. And cried. I did not know you could cry without eyes.

  When he asked, pitiful bleats of noise, I said, it was the father of the boy, the one with the scar across his face.

  Hang him, said my husband. But that is too kind. Rip out his tongue first.

  But my husband, I soothed, he has such a lovely tongue. It is like the turning of the leaves, colorful, and to silence it too soon would be a crime, would it not?

  Something must he done, he said. Something must be done.

  It will be, I said.

  When he curled his broken head into my lap and grasped my thighs, I knew you would be proud of me, Auntie. You wouldn’t have done it any differently.

  My morning dove, my husband reached for me, what does this woman before me look like? Is she beautiful?

  He waved his hand in the air. I grasped it, rubbed it against my cheek, and placed it on my hair. He sighed.

  I looked over the woman before me. She scrunched her face into her hands.

  My lord, I told him, she is twilight. She is the moon. A pale beauty, like the sweet petal cheek of a chrysanthemum.

  My husband sighed again. How wonderful, he said. I held his hand down when he went to scratch at the bandage on his eye. And this man?

  He is iron, my lord. A sculpture made into flesh. His eyes are sapphires, his hands are fluttering butterflies.

  The old man before me wept, but quietly, so my husband would not hear.

  The guards brought me the heart of a thick-pelted boar. I kneeled before my husband and presented it to him, delicately squeezing it so my nails would not puncture the slimy thing, so that he would think it still beats.

  Is it his heart, he asked me, the man who stole my eyes?

  His heart lies at your feet, my husband, see how it quivers now, away from its body? Soon it will no longer move at all, and your revenge will be complete.

  My crooked-nosed daughter watched me present myself. She has eyes like coins, and whatever she sees, she counts and discards, only keeping the important lessons in her head. This is one, I know, she will remember.

  I had my husband’s eyes covered in iron, and a crown of spikes cast for my head. At the center I placed his eyes, always open, never blinking, on top of one another. It did not fit on my head at first, for my hair was too thick, so with my husband’s tweezers I spent a year digging and yanking each strand at its root until I was as bald and smooth as his body. I had my hair braided and tied off and made it into a whip. When I wanted my husband to follow me, I shook it in front of him.

  My daughter’s nose did not straighten, and soon my skin became as cooked and creased as that indent on her face. I watched as my husband felt the skin of a young maid, not yet the age of bleeding, and sighed so happily when he ran his hands across her skin.

  I had the leather makers kill the calves as soon as they dropped from their mothers. They made a suit of baby skin, and I slipped into it each morning before I sat beside my husband, and at night he would spend hours running his hands and his tongue across the bellies of beasts and tell me what a smooth stomach I had, like water. The skin was thick. I felt nothing.

  Suburban Alchemy

  When he discovered the albedo in the moths’ eyes and not their little hearts he fell to his knees and wept. He had been so foolish. It was a beginner’s mistake; everyone went looking for answers in the heart. Most metaphors locked the soul in that rubbery, rhythmic thing, though it was little more than blood and salt. The walls of his lab were covered in tiny hearts pinned up, opened wide, drained, each in various stages of rot.

  He could hear his daughter stomping around upstairs by the door to the basement. She must have just gotten home from school. He turned back to his work.

  The early alchemists were obsessed with hearts, too. The greatest fallacy of the craft was that alchemy sought only to turn lead into gold, though any amateur could spin straw into glittering metal, and straw was easier to acquire than lead. That lie kept greedy rulers reaching their stingy fingers into coffers, funding the craft. But there was truth in the lie: alchemy was transformation, to take the worthless and make it worthwhile. And, the Alchemist thought, bitterly placing the extra, tiny hearts into Ziploc bags, what was more worthless than death? At least he could still use the fresh hearts in aphrodisiacs, or tinctures for jaundice.

  Daddy, his daughter whined from the door. Dad.

  Solanum, he called up to his daughter. What do you think moths did before light bulbs were invented?

  Uhm?

  Compared to its body, a moth’s eye is enormous and oddly structured, made up of tiny crystals that twist and bend, de
flecting the light. His current subject struggled in the tweezers. He asked it for patience while he spread a piece of wax paper over his work table, making sure there was enough room so as not to tip over the mortar and pestle, the looking glass, the spindle.

  Dad!

  I think they flew into the sun, he finished, using another pair of tweezers to pluck the eye. It thrashed so hard it tore the fine and fuzzy film of its wings. After he removed its other eye and gently placed it on the paper, he crushed the moth in his palm. Then he took a sharp knife and lifted his right sleeve where he had ticked off how many moths he had used in bright red slashes. He held his breath and made a quick stroke.

  When Solanum was young he had no trouble getting her to join him in his work—though he never made her hurt herself if that was what the magic required—and her participation always yielded better results. At eleven she refused to understand that alchemy was a bodily experience more than a science, one that required giving of oneself for an effective return. She said she was too old to be torturing animals, even if it was for a good cause. He didn’t think she was too old. Was eleven too old?

  I’m sorry, what was that, dear? he called up.

  I said I’m going to kill myself!

  Oh. He adjusted the fire under his beaker. Oh! Wait a minute! I’m coming up.

  He apologized to the moths in the jars along his worktable and ran upstairs. Solanum held a knife and a piece of paper. The latter she thrust into his hands.

  What is this?

  My suicide note, she said, holding the knife at her wrist, nowhere near the pulse point. Read it.

  He read half. Solanum, he said slowly, mindful of her mental state. This isn’t very good.

  What?

  This part, about your life breaking into meaningless pieces? You spelled it like peace-on-earth peace. Tumultuous only has one L, though I am proud of you for trying new words. Oh, and here your logic is faulty.

  He pointed to the second paragraph. See, you start off with the argument that you have nothing to live for because nobody likes or understands you, but then you go on to say you’ll be missed by—