“But why?” I asked. “It does not feel twisted, as you name it, Lizzie. Is it not love we are feeling?”
“My father would not call it love,” said Lizzie. “And if your mother and father were still here instead of with the angels, they would not call it love either.”
“What do you call it?” I had whispered in the dark of our room, my hand resting near hers, my fingertips barely brushing her tender wrist.
But Lizzie would not answer. She simply turned her back to me, as she did now on the path, turning to lead us the rest of the way home.
“No,” I whispered, and turned toward the music instead, turned toward the goblins and the fruits they had assembled upon their tables under the trees in the glen. “This is my way,” I said, and stepped off the path to join them.
Behind me, Lizzie gasped. I could imagine her hand, too, delicately flying to cover her mouth as it did whenever she was shocked or frightened. “Laura!” she said, but I continued on my way. At the edge of the brook, I took off my shoes, parted the reeds with my hands, and stepped down into the water. It was ever so cold, but on a day as hot as that one had been—both from the sun and from the strong words we’d exchanged—I welcomed the shiver.
The water rose no higher than my knees, and it took only nine or ten strides before I had reached the other side and could release my dress, which I had bunched within my fists as I crossed over. Immediately, as I came to stand on the other side of the brook, the goblin’s music came to an abrupt halt, and they all turned in unison to stare at me.
At first I worried they would not welcome my intrusion, so I began to apologize profusely for interrupting, but even as I unrolled my pleas for forgiveness like a long scroll before their strange faces, the cat-whiskered goblin man lifted his palm and said, “My lady, no apologies! You are our first patron of the evening, and you are welcome to our party. Come, look at our fruits, so succulent, and so deliciously dripping with juices! You will not find such fruits sold in any town. Will you try a pear or an apple or a melon? Won’t you taste this peach?”
He produced a perfectly golden peach in his hand, and stretched it across the space between us. At first, he had seemed to be standing too far away to reach me, but in the next moment he stood inches before me, the peach already lifted halfway to my mouth. I could smell its ripeness, and my mouth watered, hungering for its juices.
“I have no money to buy your fruit, sir,” I said, turning my face to the ground to hide my embarrassment. Here I had come in order to hurt Lizzie, here I had come to join the goblin festivities, and yet I was not prepared to purchase their goods at all.
The cat-whiskered goblin’s fingertips found my chin, and lifted ever so gently, so that I stared up into his yellow-green eyes, which seemed to sparkle in the fading light, and in that moment I saw that his whiskers and his fur were no more than a mask he had placed upon his face. “You need no money here, my lady,” he said. “That is the currency of humans.”
“Are you not human, then?” I asked, and could not help but hear a quiver enter my voice.
The cat-masked goblin shrugged, pursing his lips as if he’d tasted something sour. “I have not lived as those in towns live for a long time now, and I do not miss their ways. They are ever so proper, don’t you think? And ever so dull-witted with their cordial and celebrated proprietary agreements.”
He sighed, grinning with only one corner of his mouth as he removed his fingertips from my chin, and offered me the peach again. “I would take a lock of your hair as payment,” he said, almost breathless. “No coin could contain the value of the gold in those locks.”
I blushed, for more reasons than I would have liked to. I blushed because he had found a way into my center, into the soft and tender part of me that wished others to see me as valuable, as something beautiful, as something that could not be ignored or forgotten as Lizzie ignored and forgot me. And I blushed because I had let him see my weakness. No woman who sets her sights on a better life should be so visibly vulnerable, yet there I was, blushing as though I were worth nothing.
A tear fell from my eye as I stood there. He caught it on the edge of his finger, then lifted it to his lips to sip at it.
“Exquisite,” he said, after swallowing the tear in a theatrical gesture, and I laughed a little in nervousness, but his eyes never strayed from mine during our entire exchange. Not even when he put out his hand to offer me a pair of scissors, and said, “One lock, my dear, and you may join us.”
I took the cold metal in my hands and lifted it to my head, pinched a long strand between thumb and forefinger, then slid the blades of the scissors closed. The lock shorn, I dropped it into his outstretched palm, and he closed his hand upon it.
“Your peach, fair maiden,” he said, and then placed the fruit into my palm. He held my hand between his own for a long moment, lingering, still holding my gaze steady. Eventually he lifted my hand, and the fruit with it, up to my mouth for me.
I hesitated, but then opened my mouth to take the fruit between my teeth, and when I bit through the downy skin, juice sweeter than any honey from the rock, juice stronger than any man-rejoicing wine, juice clearer than any water flowed into me. Within a moment I was dizzy, but I could not resist the taste, and so sucked and sucked and sucked at the peach, until only its wrinkled pit remained, which I let fall to the ground as I turned toward the cat-masked goblin man’s table, to pluck up another and another and another of his fruits, sucking and tearing at the flesh, swallowing as if my life depended upon it, and could not tell night from day any longer, as strange lights filtered through the canopy of the trees, spreading leafy shadows across the masked faces, and the goblins again struck up their music and began to dance around the glen.
One took me by the arm and twirled me into the center of them, where yet another took me up and I gasped to see her long yellow hair and soft round lips before me, the rise of her breasts beneath her tunic. We danced and danced and danced, she and I, spinning and twirling until I could no longer see anything but her face, until I was spun out of the circle like a whirlwind, and only by chance did I catch hold of a tree trunk, where I braced myself against its sturdy body and breathed heavily for a long time while the fireflies fired their bodies around me.
The female goblin left the dancing circles when she noticed I had not been able to continue twirling, and came to find me at my steady tree, still gathering my wits, as if I had just awoken from a deep dream.
“More fruit?” she asked, switching the tail she wore on her bottom back and forth. “I have fruit of my own you have not yet tasted, mistress.”
She leaned down and placed her lips upon mine, and sucked at my flesh as I had sucked at the flesh of the fruits. I nearly fell into her arms as she took me into her mouth—I felt myself collapsing a little more with each kiss—but I managed to pull away before she stole my last breath from me.
“I must be going,” I said, wiping my lips clean of her, blinking, in shock a little. Beneath the white moonlight, the smear of juice I had wiped away glistened on the back of my hand.
“So early?” the female goblin said, raising one sharply angled eyebrow. “But the moon has just now risen.”
“My sister Lizzie,” I said. And as soon as her name left my mouth, I began to remember myself, to recollect the argument Lizzie and I had had that afternoon, to remember my love for her, the love she said no one would call love should they ever discover it.
“You may find other sisters here, if you join us,” the goblin woman said, trailing a fingertip down my cheek.
“But that is not love,” I said, as if I knew what love was wholly from my feelings for Lizzie, as if that were the only love that could ever be.
“Love,” the female goblin whispered. She smiled with what might have been sympathy, had I been able to see her entire face behind the mask and know what the rest of her features might tell me. A mask, I thought, was perhaps what I had needed when facing the cat-whiskered man. A mask would have hidden my weaknes
s. “Love,” the female goblin said, “comes in many different shapes, my dear. Why approve of only one? Particularly when no one else would approve of the shape of your love anyway?”
I stood, trembling, wishing for an answer, but her question pierced my reasoning through and through.
I turned quickly, and began to run, taken over by a fear that grew in me like a dark tide. I had come to the brink of something. A great chasm of darkness lay before me in the glen, an uncertainty that invited one to throw oneself into it, to lose my self, if I so wanted. But I ran from the sight of it, ran to rejoin the world I knew, regardless of its limitations.
Behind me, the goblin woman shouted, “Do not forget us!” But I did not look over my shoulder or give her a word in return, and only once did I stop to pick up the hard pit of a peach I had dropped earlier that evening, the first fruit I had tasted, which in the momentary madness of my fleeing I thought I might plant and grow into a tree of my own, to have that fruit available to me forever.
Lizzie. Oh how Lizzie will hate me for what I’ve done, I thought as I crossed the brook and took the path home. And I was right. As I approached the gate, she was already there, waiting for me with her arms folded beneath her breasts, her form a daunting silhouette in the silver moonlight, a guardian spirit to her father’s cottage.
“Laura,” she said, shaking her head, her voice filled with what seemed like loathing for me. “Do you know what time it is? Do you know how worried you’ve made my father and mother? Do you not care what others might think? Don’t you remember Jeannie, after all, and what happened to her? The fate she suffered for going into the night?”
I put my head down, shamed, and began to tear up a little. Jeannie. Of course. Jeannie. I had forgotten about Jeannie, young Jeannie, who had gone off one night with a dark-skinned young man who they said lived in the woods, and had returned home some days later, a broken woman. The lovely, poor, ruined Jeannie, who withered like a plucked flower until she died from either heartbreak or, as I secretly believed, from the coldness she was forced to endure from others after returning from the woods. This was what concerned Lizzie, then. What others thought of her.
“It was not as you think,” I murmured, preparing to explain myself. But Lizzie’s sharp voice rose up again, barring me from speaking.
“I will not hear any of it, thank you very much,” she whispered, shrill, in the late summer night air. “Do not speak a word. And do not return to the glen again, Laura, ever, or you will not be able to live here thereafter.”
I nodded, and wiped my face with the back of my hand, wishing Lizzie might take my tears upon her finger as the cat-whiskered goblin man had done and relieve me of my regret and sorrow, wishing she would at least be kinder.
After my acquiescence, though, she only turned and went into the cottage without another word.
What would I have done without Lizzie and her parents? I would have been an orphan in some other house, I’m sure. I might have been given over to an innkeeper and his wife, or I might have been placed as a worker in a factory, at the ripe age of sixteen, when my own parents fell ill and began to pass away before my eyes. Instead, Lizzie’s father promised my father, his oldest friend, a friend he called brother, that I would not fall into the hands of strangers and be left alone in the world to fend for myself.
And yet there I was, latching the gate to their cottage behind me, alone, and latching the door of the cottage behind me, alone, and creeping over the creaking floorboards until I could latch Lizzie’s and my bedroom door behind me, as if I were a stranger stealing through their property in the middle of the night. Lizzie had already put on her bedclothes and pulled the covers up to her chin. She lay with her yellow hair streaming out on the pillow like an aura of light, her body curled into itself in the same way babies are born into the world. I changed my own clothes and slid into bed beside her, felt the heat of her body warming her half of the bed, and nearly put my hand upon her waist as I had grown used to doing all that spring and summer, before Lizzie grew afraid of our passion and told me it must end or we would burn in hell like poor Jeannie, upon whose grave no grass would grow. I had once planted daisies for poor Jeannie, who everyone shook their heads about whenever her name was mentioned, but no blossoms ever came to bloom. Everything wilted and withered, as Jeannie herself had wilted and withered after she returned from the woods without her dark-skinned suitor.
“Are you awake?” I whispered into the dark that separated us.
Lizzie groaned and told me to be quiet.
“You shall see,” I told her. “Tomorrow, I will bring you the most delicious fruit—peaches, melons, fresh plums still on their mother twigs, and cherries worth getting—and then you will no longer feel such anger with me.”
Golden head by golden head, we lay in the curtained bed, like two pigeons in one nest, like two blossoms on one stem, like two flakes of newly fallen snow, like two wands of ivory, tipped with gold for awful kings, and heard nothing more from the night but the sound of our own hearts beating, and fell asleep without having reconciled.
Early in the morning, when the first cock crowed, we rose together and, sweet like bees, began our work for the day, neat and busy. We fetched in honey from the combs, milked the cows, flung open the shutters to air the house, and set to rights all that had fallen out of place the day before. With Lizzie’s mother, we kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, churned butter, whipped up cream, and then went on our way to feed the chickens before, in the late afternoon, we broke from our duties to sit and sew together for a while, and talk a little about nothing of importance, as we used to do, as modest maidens should, which I could see from the placid smile on Lizzie’s face, bent over her needlework, gladdened her. But no matter what we did that day, my thoughts were with the night to come, with the fruits my teeth would meet in, with the music and the dancing, and the goblin men and women who would spin me within their embrace.
When at length the evening reached us, Lizzie and I took up our pitchers to fetch water from the reedy brook, and did not speak of goblins or of fruit, but went along peacefully, as we did at the end of each day. Kneeling by the brook, we dipped our pitchers into the water to fill them with the brook’s rippling purple and rich golden flags, and when we stood again, the crags of a nearby mountain were flushed red with the setting sun.
“Come, Laura,” Lizzie said. “The day is ending. Not another maiden lags. The beasts and birds are all fast asleep, and soon too shall we be.”
I loitered by the reeds, listening for the sound of their voices, waiting to hear a bow eke a tune from the strings of a violin, or a first rush of breath fill the pipes and bring the glen alive with music. “It’s early still,” I said. “The dew is not yet on the grass, no chill has settled into the wind.”
Lizzie, though, was not having any of my excuses. “It’s them you’re waiting for,” she said, “isn’t it?”
I turned to face her, and said, “Yes,” and said, “If you but tasted their fruit, you would understand me as you once did.”
“Then why do you wait?” Lizzie said. “Go to them. They are there, after all, calling for us to join them. Come buy, come buy! It is an ugly sort of commerce, Laura. I don’t know what you are thinking.”
“Wait?” I said. “I wait to hear those voices. You hear them?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, and lifted her chin to gesture toward the glen across the flowing water. “They are there already, waiting for you to return to them.”
I nearly spun on my feet like a top to look where Lizzie gestured, but when I faced the glen, I saw nothing but the empty pasture where I had danced and eaten the night before. I heard nothing but the sound of the brook flowing by me. “Where, Lizzie?” I asked. “I see nothing, I hear nothing.”
“Good, then!” Lizzie said with a glee that angered me. “Come home with me. The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, each glowworm winks her spark. Let us get home before the night grows dark, for clouds may gather though this is summer weather, put
out the lights and drench us.”
I stood still as stone, and felt cold as stone through and through. “Really, sister?” I said, my eyes wide with fear. “Do you hear them truly, or are you trying to hurt me?”
“Come buy, come buy!” Lizzie said again, mocking their voices, making them sound like terrible creatures. “It is good that you cannot hear them,” she said. “It means your heart is still your own.”
She held her hand out then, and curled her fingers inward. “Come, Laura,” she said. “Let us be home again.”
I did not want to take her hand—I wanted to take the hand of the goblins whose voices I could no longer hear, whose masked faces I could no longer see—but in the end it was the hand offered me, and it was the hand I took.
We went to bed that night and curled around each other as we used to, and for a while I thought that I was better off for not hearing the voices of goblins. But before our twistings and turnings could reach a satisfactory moment, I felt all passion leave me, like a cork released from its bottle, and lay in the dark, wondering about the strange people who had shown me a glimpse of a life I would now never know. Lizzie patted her kisses upon my cheek, upon my shoulders, and stroked my side and waist with her nimble fingers, but the fingers I had longed for in the past few weeks when she had kept them from me, those fingers and their touch no longer held me in the spell they once cast over me.
When Lizzie finally fell asleep, I sat up and looked out the window at the moon hanging low, caught up in the branches of a tree. I cried, silently, and gnashed my teeth like a starved animal, and held the howls of yearning inside my body so Lizzie would not wake and ask me what was the matter.
She should have known. She’d been the matter. Now it was something else taken from me.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 25
