Speaking to Skull Kings

by Emily B. Cataneo

  Genevieve clenches the black rose that’s pinned into her hair. She shivers and longs for Bird to drape his black wings around her like a blanket.

  As she and Joseph crunch through the snow, a carcass looms behind the hoarfrost trees. It’s made of rusty metal, with four rubber tires, no roof, and snow drifting over leather seats.

  As Genevieve edges forward, wings rustle. Her stomach leaps at the sight of feathers, of a beady eye—

  But the bird that rises from the metal carcass is tawny, with short prickly feathers and a dilapidated crown of wilting black flowers. This bird cocks his head at them. One of his eyes is milky and floats in its socket.

  “Children,” he wheezes. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  “We’re looking for a bird, a black bird, with a black rose crown.” Genevieve’s voice sounds small in the snow-muffled forest, and she clears her throat and says louder, “He’s left for some reason, and we’re going to find him.”

  Not-Bird’s good eye roves over the leather seats of the metal carcass. “I had children, once.”

  “What happened to them?” Genevieve says.

  “They left you, didn’t they?” Joseph says.

  Genevieve frowns. “Why would they leave him? He was their protector.”

  “It’s a big world.” Not-Bird scrapes his wing against the snow that’s accumulated on the carcass’ metal rim. “Beyond the ghost forest there’s another forest, of glass and steel, called a city, and still other forests of salt water beyond that. I suppose...I suppose they wanted to see the glass and steel forest. I told them that’s where they came from, and they began asking so many questions.”

  Why would those children leave? Why would they forego safety and brave the skull kings to journey to this glass and steel city forest?

  Had they grown weary of the same seasons marching by, year after year after year? Had they wanted to know why their mothers and fathers abandoned them?

  As Genevieve ponders this, tires screech in the snow.

  A skull king veers towards the metal carcass. Gray moss flaps from its eyes, from its gaping mouth.

  It cackles as it careens towards them.

  Genevieve swivels towards Not-Bird, who rises from the carcass, emits a weak caw, flaps crooked wings.

  The skull king is only five paces away from them.

  Genevieve snatches her black rose from her hair. Her rucksack tumbles from her shoulder and flops into the snow. Her fingertips tingle as she thrusts the rose in front of her. “Stay away from us,” she shouts.

  The skull king veers to the left, wheels skidding, then corrects course, heading for them. Genevieve flings herself in front of Joseph, knowing one rose isn’t enough, the skull king is going to crunch her, eat her, destroy her...

  “I know,” Not-Bird shouts, rising out of the carcass, and then he shrieks and spits in the skull king’s language. The skull king screams back, and as it reverses into the forest, its tires crunch over Genevieve’s rucksack.

  As the skull king vanishes, Genevieve falls to her knees at the rucksack and paws at the fabric with trembling fingers. But the berries are crushed, juice stains Joseph’s sketchbook and most of the walnuts are broken. As Genevieve picks pieces of their meat from shattered shells, she aches for Bird to return so she can shake him and scream, You left us, you left us to starve, the people who were supposed to be our mother and father asked you to protect us and you failed...

  “What are we going to do?” Joseph says. “Gen, we’re going to be so hungry. We’re going to...to...”

  “We’ll manage.” Genevieve wants to scream at him too, because of course she knows they’re going to be hungry, and she can’t watch Joseph’s cheeks grow gaunter.

  “You’re a protector,” Not-Bird says, good eye roving over Genevieve. “You, with your black rose.”

  “No, I’m not,” Genevieve says.

  “I wish I could offer you food, lost children,” he wheezes.

  “I have none. But I must give you something else.”

  He plucks a shriveled black rose from his crown.

  “I have four of them,” he says. “You need it more than I do.”Genevieve accepts the rose from Not-Bird’s wing, her fingers tingling. “Thank you,” she says. “But I’m not a protector. I just want to find Bird.”

  Not-Bird avoids her gaze.

  “What did you mean, when you shouted at the skull king that you knew?” Joseph says.

  Not-Bird flutters his thin wings. “When the skull kings speak, it’s painful, little children. What they know...it hurts my heart.”

  “What do they know?” Joseph asks. But Genevieve grabs his hand, thanks Not-Bird again, and pulls her brother north, deeper into winter, her pockets weighed with their last remaining bits of walnut.

  * * *

  The night Bird disappeared, summer mosquitoes buzzed around Genevieve’s neck and ankles. She stood beneath the clearing’s tallest oak, staring at a branch three feet above her head. She’d been trying to climb this tree all summer, and she ran her fingers over the bark, searching for a pattern of footholds.

  “Genevieve.” Bird rustled next to her and Genevieve’s stomach leapt. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “You’re not the sort to fall asleep easily.” Bird’s wing fell against the back of her hand. Genevieve’s skin prickled. “You’ll sort out a way to climb it. You always do.”

  Genevieve felt a smile spreading her mouth, the kind of smile you can’t control.

  But then Bird said, as though the thought had just dawned on him: “You’re going to run out of trees to climb in this clearing eventually.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  His beady eyes roved towards the ghost forest. In the dark, his eyes reminded her of the skull kings’ eye sockets. And the question tumbled out.

  “Bird, why can you speak to them? You never told Joseph.”

  Bird didn’t answer. A mosquito landed on her ankle and she ignored it. The air between her and Bird was too thick, and her cheeks burned. Was it ordinary, for a girl to feel this way about a bird? She didn’t know. No one had ever told her.

  Bird shifted, and then a pinch on her ear: his beak closed around the soft skin there. She bit back a gasp, and then Bird shrank away, his eyes not meeting hers. He padded into the clearing, until his black feathers blended into shadow and she couldn’t tell where he ended and the night began.

  * * *

  Genevieve and Joseph reach the new clearing after three weeks and five days in the ghost forest, a week after the skull king trampled their rucksack.

  The trim oak trees, the slender birches, the bare-branched maples, all resemble their clearing. And high above their heads hang glowing winterberries, the last overripe walnuts, the bounty of early-winter food that Bird once gathered for them.

  But Bird is not there.

  Genevieve stands beneath the trees, snow plopping off their branches into her hair.

  What would he say, if he could see her here? Her ear has healed, but her boots are broken. Her ribs protrude against her coat. She is so small, in this clearing so empty of Bird.

  Joseph’s hand lands on her shoulder. “Gen, I’m sorry. I knew...he didn’t want to be found. He left us, all right? I know it’s...”

  He left them. Bird left them. He left me. He doesn’t love me.

  The truth settles on Genevieve’s shoulders like the snow blanketing the forest.

  He left me. And now there’s no one to keep us safe.

  Except for the black roses blooming in her hair.

  She drops Joseph’s hand. She stumbles into the ghost forest, ignoring Joseph’s shouts.

  Bird left them, with his black rose crown.

  He left. He’s gone.

  Genevieve kicks at the snow. She scrapes it away, down to the dirt beneath, her fingers scrabbling against thorns. No soft stems or velvet petals curl from the frozen earth.

  She stands and runs on, farther from the clearing, ig
noring Joseph’s shouts, searching for the last black rose she needs to become their protector.

  * * *

  The skull king watches the girl zigzag through the forest, tears freezing on her pale cheeks. The skull king’s gray moss trembles and it senses something else: a crust growing over this girl’s fragile heart, like ice freezing over snow. Something soft seeping away from her, forever.

  The skull king started out its life much as this girl did. Its parents brought it to the ghost forest, searched for a bird-protector to take it off their hands.

  But unlike this dark-haired girl, this girl who grew up cosseted and loved in a bright clearing, this child’s parents gave up before they found a bird-protector, and they left it at the base of a ghost-tree and disappeared. Starving hurt, but thirst choked the child first, and after all that was done with, the child curled beneath a tree, and watched an animal skull roll by on a simple set of wagon wheels.

  “Help me tell everyone,” whispered a voice from inside the skull. “Help me tell everyone how they left us.”

  And so the once-child floated into an abandoned beast’s skull that nestled in the soft soil. Burning with truths about the hearts of humans and birds, it rolled itself onto tire treads and set out through the forest, to tell everyone.

  The skull king has seen girls like this so many times, and it knows that its work will be easy. So easy. How many lessons has it taught to birds, to boys and girls, in all those years? Yes, two black roses glow in this girl’s tangled hair, but black rose crowns are flimsy bulwarks against the skull king’s dangling moss. Temporary, fleeting measures.

  They blame me, but I only tell them the truth.

  The skull king creaks forward, waiting.

  * * *

  Genevieve paws through snow and dirt, her fingers purple. She knocks aside a bundle of thorns, and then something glimmers.

  Genevieve yanks the rose out of the earth. Bird’s betrayal hits her again as her fingers clench around this last addition she needs for her crown.

  Something rumbles. Genevieve’s eyes rise from the black rose, to a wall of white bone. She cranes her neck up.

  The skull king’s nose arcs over her head like a sword. Its eyes are dark, and its fangs bare in a deadly grin.

  Genevieve doesn’t have time to raise the black rose.

  Tendrils of stinking moss snake from the skull king’s eye sockets and loop around Genevieve’s arms and burn through her coat and she doesn’t let herself scream. The moss raises her to her feet, her boots scrabbling against the frozen ground. The moss tightens and the skull king shrieks, a piercing shriek that rips through Genevieve’s eardrums and shivers her spine.

  And Genevieve understands what the skull king says: Someone always leaves, in the end.

  Genevieve’s first thought: I know.

  But she snarls, in the same spitting language as the skull king, You’re wrong. Not everyone is like Bird.

  You’ll see, shrieks the skull king. Black roses wilt. Girls begin to dream of other forests and boys decide their stubborn sisters aren’t worth the trouble. No one stays, in the end.

  Genevieve rips at the moss. She raises her right hand. The black rose glows and the skull king shrieks. The moss springs from her arms and she stumbles through the forest, cradling the third black rose in her hands, until she reaches the clearing.

  “Gen.” Joseph lunges towards her. “Are you...”

  She pulls the other two black roses from her hair.

  “I’ll protect us,” she says. “I will, Joseph. I will.”

  Joseph grins and Genevieve concentrates on her brother’s face, trying to ignore the far-off shriek of a skull king, in the language that she now understands all too well.

  * * *

  Genevieve crouches in the snow, weaving the stem of her third black rose into a nest of thorns and sapling branch. She adjusts the roses so they lie in a straight line, then settles the crown onto her head. She shudders as its vines and thorns scoop up strands of her hair and weave through it. She blinks in the glow of the roses above her eyes.

  Her heart aches for Bird but her fingers tingle hot with her new power.

  She leaps towards an oak tree and climbs, her boots finding the right footholds in the bark, her arms barely straining as she pulls herself up. She reaches a clump of berries and rips them down, then circles the tree and pulls down a handful of walnuts.

  When she returns to the ground with overflowing pockets, she and Joseph sit cross-legged and stuff their mouths, and when they are finished Genevieve wraps Joseph’s cold fingers in her newly warm ones.

  “I’m sorry about Bird,” Joseph says softly. “I truly am. But now...this is better. Now you wear the black rose crown, and you’re not going anywhere.” Joseph smiles, hopeful.

  She says nothing.

  Someone always leaves, in the end.

  The skull kings are not the true danger. They only echo truths, truths about Bird, truths about her.

  “Gen? You’re...you’re not going to leave me, are you?”

  No. She is not their parents. She is not Bird. She tells herself that she will be different. She lunges forward and embraces her brother, her hot fingers digging into his shoulder blades. “I’ll never leave you,” she whispers, and she squeezes him tighter.

  But as she holds him, snug against her heart, she’s already dreaming of the other forests.

  A GUIDE TO ETIQUETTE AND COMPORTMENT FOR THE SISTERS OF HENLEY HOUSE

  1. Each of the sisters of Henley House will use recreation time to pursue a particular activity.

  * * *

  Grace will handle the arrangement of the tinsel. Bell will amuse herself with her magnifying glass. I will write the etiquette book.

  * * *

  2. Days for the sisters of Henley House will be orderly and regimented.

  * * *

  Each day, we Henley sisters awake and proceed to the Elephant Room, where we sit in a row before the elephant, an ebony statue whose tusks are white and who leans to one side because his front right foot has been broken off. After this hour of reflective matins, I lead calisthenics: ten minutes of jumping rope with the cord dredged out of the corrugated mud in the hallway, then five minutes of touching the toes, then ten minutes of ballet—pliés, first position through fifth position.

  Then comes dinner hour. Bell, Grace and I sit around a table that we found tossed on its side beneath a tangle of pans, dead unpotted plants, drowned stuffed animals and sodden inky paper. There is no food in Henley House, but that is not a polite topic of conversation for dinner hour. What do we discuss? We find shapes in the pattern made by the receding wallpaper. We discuss Grace’s plans for creating a mosaic out of the trapezoids and rhombi of china that strew the ground beneath our feet. We speak of how Christmas is coming, and how Grace is gathering tinsel to decorate.

  Bell may mention her magnifying glass—she may even take it out and place its condescending eye, its fat brass handle on the table—but only if she remembers to do so in an uncontroversial way.

  We then retire to the Recreation Room to amuse ourselves with our own pursuits for several hours. Then we once again reflect before the elephant; we have dinner hour; we wipe our faces with towels and retire to bed. The three of us sleep together in the great white porcelain tub in our bedroom. Bell is a year younger than I, but she is the tallest, and her toes curl around the faucet when she sleeps.

  On the second day, Bell said that the light outside the curtains never changes, so how is it possible for us to keep track of time? But I pointed to a horned amber insect crawling along the side of the uprighted table. I placed a cracked drinking glass over the insect and told Bell when the insect dies, one day has passed. Every morning I place a new insect under the glass, and a new day begins.

  * * *

  3. On occasion, the sisters of Henley House are troubled by unsettling dreams. It is considered impolite to speak of these dreams, and so it is forbidden.

  * * *

  It was afterno
on recreation time on the fifteenth day, and Grace was stroking her bedraggled and shredded silver tinsel. I was picking through a pile of books on the floor. The pages were warped and wavy, but still I ran my finger along the pocked leather of the spines, found the first word in each title, and stacked them in alphabetical order.

  I saw that Bell was sleeping on a floorboard that had come unmoored, stuck up at a twenty-degree angle from the floor. I tossed my book aside and lunged towards her, about to shake her awake and scold her for sleeping during recreation time.

  Then she howled.

  Grace dropped her tinsel and looked up, her blue eye a combination of hurt and annoyance.

  Bell writhed, kicked one foot in the air, and then opened her eyes.

  “No.” Her fingers locked around my wrist. “No, no, no. Nononono.”

  “Keep your voice down,” I said.

  “It wasn’t always like this.” Whites gleamed around Bell’s pupils. “I saw something, in my dream—before, in this room, everything glowed gold, and the curtains were whole.” She gestured at the periwinkle curtains, which were stained with black splotches. “But then all this dust blew in through the windows, and it got into my nose and eyes and I felt as though...as though my insides had been hollowed out.” She sat up and seized my other wrist. “What happened, Elisa? Why can’t we look out the windows? Why can’t we go up the stairs in the hallway?”

  I clapped my hands over Grace’s ears and told Bell to stop asking such disturbing questions.

  “I’m going to find out.” Bell scrabbled away from me, her magnifying glass sticking out of her overalls pocket. “I’m going to make it outside this house, and then we’ll see what happened.”

  I told Bell not to mention her dreadful dreams again, but she skittered away into the Elephant Room.

  * * *

  4. It is rude to remark on any idiosyncrasies in the appearances of the Henley sisters.

  * * *

  There are unmistakable marks of a Henley sister: a forest of mousy brown curls; blue eyes, although Bell’s are more grey, Grace’s dark and mine sapphire; a longness of limbs and a slump in the shoulder; moles peppering our forearms.