The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Well, I’m not either!”

  He looked doubtfully at her wig, hiding its secret flowers.

  She waved her hand. “I’m not. Honest. Thomas, we’re only different to look at. It’s like how you’re a boy and I’m a girl, but it doesn’t make any difference. We’re both people.” Tamburlaine clapped a hand over her mouth, as though she’d just accidentally let a curse word slip. A wicked excitement flooded her eyes. “Only we’re not. I’m not. You’re not. I’m a…” She trailed off just as he had done, and he realized all at once that she had never told anyone about herself before, either.

  Be kind, Thomas. The first time is always hard.

  “I’m a Fetch,” Tam finished. The word sounded like a light switched on in Thomas’s head. “At least I think I am. I don’t know what else I could be, really.” She picked at her fingernails. “My mother is a gardener and my father is a librarian. That’s nice, don’t you think? She minds trees while they’re young and he minds them when they’re old. There’s a logic to the two of them. It’s almost like magic. Sometimes they joke that they should have known something like me would come along. Altogether too much time in the woods. Well, they fell in love and my father built a house made of books and roses and radishes in tidy beds beside the Postbox. They had a baby girl and when she came along they compromised. They named her after a play and a flower—my middle name is Violet. When the baby was a year old, she got very sick, so sick her ears were red and her face was red and her belly was red. She burned up with fever and redness, day and night. And then one morning, they woke and the fever was gone—and so was their daughter. In the crib lay a little poppet made out of wood and branches and green leaves, screeching like a barn owl. Not all Changelings are meant as a fair bargain, a child for a child. Some are just dumb dolls meant to scream and turn the teakettle into a rattlesnake and burn the house down, not necessarily in that order, but as quickly as possible.”

  “Did you burn your house down?”

  “No,” said Tamburlaine slowly. “But I want to. All the time. I was built to wreck things. I like to wreck things. Nothing feels as good as the moment right before you break something. Every day I try like the devil not to wreck anything. It’s so hard. I got to painting because paint wrecks a white wall, so I like it, but it wrecks it into something better, so my parents like it. The thing about Fetches is we aren’t meant to last. We’re meant to go off like a little stick of dynamite after a few months and that’s it. Do you understand? We’re a kind of joke There plays on here. Like a buzzer that zings when the worlds shake hands. But my parents are strange people.” She laughed. “If I’m a joke, they have a really good sense of humor. That’s what comes of loving books and plants—things alive but not alive. My father was pretty certain he knew what had happened. He’s read just everything in the world. They mourned for her. The other girl. Their real daughter. In the quiet and the dark where they thought I couldn’t hear. But Mum knew how to take care of a tree and Dad knew how to take care of a chapter from a fairy book. When I wouldn’t stop screaming she took me out in the rain until my leaves unfurled and drank up the sky. When I tried to eat the woodstove, he gave me a rapier and a straw griffin to fight. And when I broke…because Fetches always break…she grafted me and wound me up with twine and put me in the sun till I got well. I’m fragile. Like a motorcar that breaks down after ten years, not because it couldn’t be built to go for fifty, but because Mr. Ford likes people to buy new cars. Planned obsolescence, that’s called, and that’s me. I bet your parents don’t even know you’re not their son. I think that would be nice. Easier. To grow up thinking you had the whole world in front of you.”

  “It’s not,” Thomas said, too loud and too fast. “It just means there’s something wrong with you and you don’t know what and they don’t know what but if you were a better son, a better man, you would be able to fix it. It’s funny, you know, they’re always telling me to be a man, take it like a man, act like a man, like they’re afraid if they don’t keep reminding me I’ll grow up to be a centaur or a dining room table, like they know, somehow, that I’m not a man, like it’s a spell they can cast, if they say it enough I’ll be tricked into being a man forever.” And that was the first time he had let himself say he wasn’t a man, say it, and know that it was true. He wasn’t like Tamburlaine, but he wasn’t like his parents, either.

  “Yes.” Tamburlaine nodded. “They always say: be a lady, speak like a lady, behave like a little lady, that’s not very ladylike, is it, dear?”

  “Well, I won’t be a man, or take anything like one or act like one!” The troll inside him rubbed his hands gleefully, crackling with anticipation.

  “Come on, then,” Tam urged. She grabbed Inspector Balloon off his desk, opened the cracked red cover to a blank page, and pressed it and his pencil into Thomas’s hands. “Don’t let’s be men, or ladies either. Don’t let’s act like them or behave like them or speak like them.”

  “But what else, then? If you’re a Fetch, what am I?”

  Tamburlaine shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. I’m not an encyclopedia. Maybe you’re a Fairy. Or a Minotaur. Or a spriggan or a Glashtyn. It’s like a Christmas present you can’t open till the twenty-fifth. And that might bite. We’ll find out together. But now, right now, be a Fairy. A bad Fairy.” Her eyes glittered like rain on new leaves. “Write out what you want. Like a letter. Use your good handwriting—your real handwriting. Make it short and really specific—magic sort of squirms into the cracks in what you want and fills them up with trouble.”

  “No eye of newt or frog’s heart or belladonna?”

  “If you’d picked a ladle or a gravy boat or a wooden spoon, maybe. You have to use a wand the way it’s supposed to be used. Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it’s easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don’t make frog soup with it.”

  “But I’ve written loads of things and nothing’s ever happened.”

  “Well, you have to sort of…get it ready first. With a pencil, I suppose you’d have to…um…sharpen it? That sounds right.”

  “What’s yours? Your wand.”

  Tamburlaine reached into her satchel and produced a beautiful wooden paintbrush with thick badger bristles and a copper band around the neck. Of course. That room, those walls all bright with the colors of There.

  “I don’t suppose you mean to use a sharpener,” Thomas said.

  “No. Magic is something you do with your body.” Scratch tucked his bell under Tamburlaine’s arm like he really was an Irish setter who just wanted a good petting. Tam laughed softly and hugged her gramophone to her side. “Like if you open a music box and a little ballerina dances. You opened the box. You made her dance. You made a dance where there wasn’t any before, but that doesn’t mean you’re dancing. It’s always something to do with your own body. And…well, it’s usually something a little disgusting. I figured I had to get mine wet, like you do when you’re painting watercolors. So I cut open my arm and rolled it in sap.”

  Of course, Tamburlaine could not know that only Wet Magic works this way. There are many other sorts that turn up their noses at such unsanitary conditions as spilling blood of any sort, such as Dry Magic, which mainly confines itself to books and sandstorms, as well as Fan Magic, which can’t do a thing without lace.

  But Thomas was impressed. He could imagine her running a paint knife across her biceps, wincing, believing hard. He considered it, trying to think like magic might think, if magic was a funny little person who lived next door and stayed up all hours playing the radio too loud and throwing books across the room. Experimentally, he stuck the tip of his pencil between his teeth. It tasted metallic and dirty and woody and awful. For a moment that was all it did—and then a rolling, tumbling, swollen feeling surged up in his chest. His troll-self stretched and reached up from his belly, popping its aching joints, pushing aside all the bits of him which were not-troll, straining toward the pencil with jaws open. The troll was rea
dy. Finally, it was his turn. The troll in Thomas seized the end of the pencil in his own sharp teeth and chewed it into a fine point, delirious with the happiness of having something to do. It felt like biting into a quarter and spitting out pennies. Thomas coughed, then gagged, then tried to wipe the pencil out of his mouth with his finger, which only made him gag harder. Had he done it? Was his Magic Pencil really magic now?

  On the blue lines of Inspector Balloon’s paper, Thomas and the troll within him wrote together in glorious big looping, leaping letters:

  Dear Blunderbuss:

  Please wake up right now this moment and be alive like Scratch and be a real wombat and be able to talk and walk and bite and do marvelous things like firing passionfruits and horseshoes and whiskey bottles out of your mouth at our enemies and singing the ancient songs of the Land of Wom, which we both know is the most beautiful Land that ever was a Land. Please like me (and also Tamburlaine; she is very nice and even though she is made of wood so you oughtn’t gnash her or play catch with her or bury her in the yard but instead be very careful as she is splinterable. But you can gnash me a bit if you like). Please be as real as I am and not a doll or a robot or a puppet who can only do things because I say so. You can be cantankerous, I don’t mind. If you don’t like waking up in the morning I shall make you a bucket of coffee. Please be wild and wonderful. Please be fierce and stubborn because I am also those things, and if we are both fierce and stubborn neither of us shall mind when the other is especially one or the other.

  Thank you,

  Thomas Michael Rood

  Thomas breathed in great awful gulps. Would it work? It wouldn’t work. Would it? It couldn’t. It could. Never. Never. Perhaps?

  Tamburlaine showed him how to rip out the page so that it was all one piece, with a very straight edge and no tears through any of the words. She showed him how to fold it as small as it would go and put it in the scrap-yarn wombat’s mouth. He could feel the paper poke through the loops in the yarn and press into Blunderbuss’s stuffing. Down, down it went, into her fuzzy heart. It wouldn’t work. He would feel something if it were working. But maybe the magic was only in the writing. Maybe it was already outside of him, whispering its work where he could not hear. Please, please, please.

  The troll inside Thomas peered up through his eyes like a child pressing his face to a shop window. Tom and Tam held their breaths.

  Blunderbuss’s left eye was a pearly magenta diamond-shaped button with a thistle carved on it (which had belonged to one of Gwendolyn’s spring dresses) and her right was a thick round brass button with a sailing ship stamped on it (which had come from one of Thomas’s peacoats). This meant that she always looked as though she was winking at something secret and funny. She looked that way now, and Thomas couldn’t help it—he winked back, as he so often did when the world was baffling and only something big and soft and grabbable could make him feel better.

  And Blunderbuss winked back.

  The chocolate-colored yarn over her magenta eye bunched up like a real eyebrow and shut. Then it sprang open again. Next, the bold blue yarn over her brass right eye tried it. Finally, the scrap-yarn wombat waggled her pea-green and tangerine ears. She waggled her maroon muzzle. She waggled her lilac tail. She pounded her gold and turquoise front feet on the bed, then her white and black back feet. She dropped her front half down and wiggled her motley, patchwork rump in the air. At last, Blunderbuss the wild and wonderful wombat opened up her cherry-red mouth, showing two long, powerful cloak-clasp teeth, and gave a chittering cry, like a pig and a songbird snorting and singing at the same time.

  Blunderbuss gave a great leap, which was slightly less great than she expected it to be as wombats have quite short legs, but can never seem to remember the fact, and pounced onto Thomas, knocking him to the floor. She landed on his chest with a weight like a heap of cannonballs, her dense, muscley chest crushing him, her breath smelling like wet wool and a little, just a little, like bush grasses and a blazing hot sun beating down on dry dust.

  “Troll! Troll Troll!” the scrap-yarn wombat chortled. Her voice was just perfectly rumbly and throaty and grumbly, like wool all frayed and felted together. “Yes! No! Yes. Yes. No. No. Maybe! Green. Pineapples. Gin.” Blunderbuss banged her front paws on Thomas’s chest, making him cough all over again. She beamed. “TA-DA!” the wombat cried, and, quick as a pub-dart, dove in and bit him on the neck. Thomas squealed.

  “You said I could!” Blunderbuss grumbled. “You said I could gnash you. If you get mad now that’s like breaking a promise. Besides, in the Land of Wom, we bite to show we like a thing. And that we don’t like a thing. And that we think a thing is delicious. And that we think it is ours! Because anything you bite is yours, that’s just obvious! We bite when we are angry and hungry and joyful and excited to go to the cinema and frightened of wild dogs and because it is Tuesday but also because it is Sunday and especially when we are DELIGHTED but NERVOUS. Nothing says I AM HAVING FEELINGS like a bite! And I bit you so you are mine, Tom Rood. I own you. Wombat Rules. I own a troll!”

  Blunderbuss sprang off of him like a firecracker, circled the room twice, snagging her worsted claws on the floorboard nails. She jumped with all her might, forgetting once again that she was not, in fact, a kangaroo, and thus missing the desk, whacking into it mid-belly and pumping her hindpaws in the air till she could clamber up and collapse on top of the red notebook with balloons on the cover, panting, her eyes shining and wet and alive.

  “I’m a troll?” gasped Thomas.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE EMERALD THERMODYNAMICAL HYPER-JUNGLE LAW

  In Which Tom and Tam Host a Very Boisterous Party in Apartment #7, Play a Game of Red Light, Green Light, and Are Kidnapped by a Baseball Thomas and Tamburlaine played for seven hours, which is the proper number for this sort of thing

  It takes a span of seven, at a minimum, to make a new world.

  Seven days, seven hours, even seven minutes, if one has had a very good breakfast. Less won’t do; you spend the first bit just measuring fabric and trying to find the hammer you had in your hand just a moment ago. And if you go on and on and procrastinate and sleep in weekends, before you know it you’ve spent a year on one little curlicue on one tiny blue fjord and the whole thing starts to seem less interesting than starting over with a shiny new gas giant.

  Don’t look at me so suspiciously—you and I make new worlds, too. It is only that our hands are too small to manage seventeen moons at once, or a great red storm that goes on blustering for centuries. We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren’t Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren’t true, perhaps especially so.

  You and I have made a little world here together, a world only we know, with a lovely red door and glinting eyes peeking out from under the geraniums. A secret world all our own inside the one everyone knows about, and a very fine one, at that. A new world is always made when one creature speaks and another listens. There is no gravity in here, but oh, how everything flies!

  Thomas Rood managed two worlds in seven hours. We should, frankly, congratulate him on a new land-speed record. The first one was a matter of survival. He didn’t mean to do it. No one does, really. It’s only that when nothing is as you thought it was, a body has to cobble together a new universe out of the rubbish left over when the old one burst and turned into a wombat. Nothing could be certain anymore. New gravities were necessary, new boiling points, new E’s and mc’s and squares. Why settle for the second law of thermodynamics? That’s the old world’s tune. When gramophones dance and girls grow plums like earrings, the reign of the Emerald Thermodynamical Hyper-Jungle Law has come: Everything lives and grows and thickens, nothing decays, nothing fades, nothing ends.

  He didn’t
make his worlds alone, of course. No one does. Moving alone upon the face of the deep is awfully boring.

  And lo, in the first hour, Thomas and Tamburlaine went a bit mad with giggling and chocolates liberated from the high cabinet and egging each other on and committed a number of crimes against Apartment #7. Thomas excavated the ancient archaeological site of his closet and unearthed several half-used tubes of oil paint rolled up at the ends like toothpaste. Tam showed him how to use a bit of egg to freshen up the colors. Together, they pushed his tall bookshelf to one side, revealing a fresh, blank patch of easily hideable wall. Tamburlaine rubbed her arm from wrist to shoulder until the dark, polished wood of her real body came up. She squirted out lines of cobalt and vermilion and custard and olive onto her forearm and began to paint, while Thomas scribbled his notes to the furniture with the fervor of a grandfather writing letters to the newspaper editor.

  Dear Gertrude (my bedside reading lamp with the green shade and missing pane of glass through which you can see wires):

  Please wake up right now this moment and be alive like Blunderbuss and be able to walk and talk and remember all the books you read over my shoulder from the time I was tiny and you seemed as big and bright as the sun. Please like Tamburlaine and I and never pop your bulb again and forgive me for not ever dusting you even though every night when I went to bed I thought you really needed it.

  Thank you,

  Thomas Michael Rood

  P.S. Please do not be malevolent.

  Tamburlaine drew her brush upward in a long, graceful, custard-colored stroke, a stroke that if you or I or Thomas had made it, might only have been a stripe on a wall for which we’d have been rightly scolded, but when Tam did it, clearly belonged to a tree whose leaves and trunk would soon catch up with the rest. While she did it, Blunderbuss snuffled around the kitchen until she found the bread-box, whereupon she dove into the dinner rolls headfirst, her woolly feet waggling in joy. “Wombats have to fill their bellies! Priority one! An empty belly is an angry belly. You are my very first dinner rolls! I will remember you always and sing songs of your courage!” she cried.