The boat knocked against land and Peter rolled against me, which was perfect timing, actually, because I’d been getting worked up thinking about my mum. His body rolling against mine was a good remedy for anger, and I put my hands around his waist and winked. “We’re here,” he said, his stupidly smiling face so close to my own I could have kissed him. Instead I asked where here was. “Home,” said Peter. “The place we all come from.”
“Let’s make it quick then,” I said, losing interest since he wasn’t showing any in my hands being on him. “I really need to be going.”
Peter furrowed his brow. “You won’t be going anywhere until morning when they open the gates,” he said. When I gave him a look to pierce that stupid smile of his, he pulled back and said, “Well, maybe Solomon can help you. Maybe you can fly out. If you can remember how to fly, that is.”
“I can’t remember how to fly,” I said, “because I’ve never flown before.”
“Oh, but you have,” said Peter. “Back when you were a bird.”
I sighed instead of cursing. It was useless trying to reason with him. He was a character from a children’s story. He was a child himself, trapped in a teenager’s body.
We pulled the boat ashore to the cries of what sounded like a million night birds being disturbed, honking and chirping and cheeping or shrieking at our sudden presence. But when Peter lifted his hands and spread his fingers, they all fell silent. “Hello again!” he shouted into the blackness.
And all of the birds in unison said, “Peter!”
There was a great flurry of activity then, and I tried to stand behind him and not call attention to myself because honestly, I wanted to pretend this was all a dream, that I was really asleep at the base of the Peter Pan statue in the park. But the birds, unfortunately, wouldn’t let me be. They kept circling round and landing, cocking their heads at me and asking Peter things like, “Who’s this then, Peter? Another of your lost boys?”
“I’m not lost,” I said, getting a bit tetchy. “I’ve just been locked in.”
“Lost,” one of the birds said. A thrush, I think. I shot it a look and it ruffled its feathers.
“Where’s Solomon?” Peter asked once they’d all quieted.
“With the eggs, of course,” said one of the birds. “He’s got a very long list of expectations to fill, as usual.”
“Come on, then,” said Peter, looking at me. “Solomon will know what to do with you.”
“I don’t need anything done with me,” I said.
“You need to get out, you said, right now, you said. Right?”
I nodded.
“Well, then,” said Peter. “Solomon will know if that’s possible.”
We walked to the center of the island, where one particular tree grew taller than the others, and underneath it were rows of nests where birds sat on top of their eggs. Some of the birds grew startled at our approach and sent up a flurry of caws, then flew off into the night, leaving their eggs behind, some of which began to tremble. Cracks ran through several of them, beaks pierced through the openings, and suddenly there were these baby birds shrugging off flakes of shell like dogs shake off water. The baby birds looked back and forth between Peter and me as if one of us must be their mother. Then a gravelly voice boomed down from the canopy of the tallest tree. The voice shouted a series of numbers and street names, some of which I recognized, one in particular an address just round the corner from my mum and Marcus’s flat. As the addresses were listed, the baby birds stretched out their wings, one after the other, and flew into the night sky like sparks from a bonfire.
“What—“ I said. But I didn’t really know how to follow through with that question.
“They’re going to their mothers,” said Peter.
“Their mothers are here,” I said, looking at the empty nests where they’d been before we’d scared them. “Well, they were here, at any rate.”
“They’re going to their human mothers,” said Peter. “You did it once, too. Don’t look so horrified!”
Just then a stiff wind blew our hair back and a large crow circled the air above. After it landed between our feet, the crow looked up and said, “Peter, my Betwixt and Between, you’ve returned to us. And you’ve brought a friend, I see.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Peter said. “I meant it to just be me, Solomon. Why are you still in charge here anyway? Last time I saw you, you said you had your eye on a tree over in the figs and planned to retire.”
“My stocking of savings was stolen!” cried Solomon. “A hundred and eighty crumbs! Thirty–four nuts! Sixteen crusts! A pen–wiper and a bootlace! Everything gone! Everything! I couldn’t retire after that. I’ve had to stay on!”
“That’s terrible,” said Peter, shaking his head in commiseration.
“It is,” said Solomon, nodding. “Such is the way of the world, these days. A bird must work until his life expires. All of the mothers encourage their hatchlings to become human babies because of it, of course. Now for you, then. Why are you here?”
“I just came to see if everything was still the same,” said Peter. “I suppose I was missing the place a bit.”
“Caught in the webs of nostalgia?” Solomon said, chuckling. He flew up and landed on Peter’s shoulder, so that he could look him straight in the eye. Peter crooked his head to the side to make room for him. “You’ve grown quite a bit since last we saw you. I didn’t think you’d ever be able to grow up like a normal human child.”
“Up there,” said Peter as he looked up at the sky, “it’s possible. Not like a normal human would grow, of course. Much slower. But at least I’m not a baby any longer.”
Solomon turned to look where Peter was looking. So did I. And just then a star winked at us as if it had noticed us staring. “Even I haven’t flown that far before,” said Solomon. “It’s quite wonderful to think of it, it is.”
“It is a wonderful thought, isn’t it?” said Peter. Then he turned back to Solomon and said, “My friend here needs to get out tonight. Can you help him?”
“Can he fly?” Solomon asked, looking at me past the bridge of Peter’s slightly freckled nose.
“Of course not,” said Peter. “Have you lost your marbles? He’s human.”
“Quite human,” said Solomon, as if that were something you wouldn’t want to be, really. “Quite human, indeed. But you relearned how to fly despite being part human, Peter.”
“I can’t fly,” I said, interrupting them. “Really, I can’t. And I don’t think I’m going to be able to learn how to as early as tomorrow morning.”
“You’ll have to stay overnight then,” said Solomon. “Peter can take care of you, I trust. He always took good care of the lost children he found in the park if they hadn’t already died before he found them.”
“Brilliant,” I said, and sighed as I turned to start trudging back down the path we’d taken. “Just brilliant.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Peter asked as he slid his garden spade through the water again, paddling us back up the Serpentine a bit later.
“I just want to go home,” I said. I was looking up at the stars, trying to not be angry and trying to not feel stupid for feeling like a kid about to cry because everything seemed so futile. Getting out of here seemed futile. My family seemed futile. I felt futile. I just wanted someone to hold onto, and Peter wasn’t the someone I’d hoped to find that evening.
“I know what it means to want to go home,” said Peter. “I flew out of my mother’s window when I was seven days old and when I tried to go back she’d already had another child. And even now, after making a home up there, I know what it feels like to miss other homes. Kensington Gardens was my first, you know, not up there. But you’ve been steam–out–the–ears and arms–folded like you’re a statue since I met you.” He paddled a couple more strokes, then looked at me, very shocked, as if he’d been startled. “Are you a statue from the gardens come to life?” he asked, as if that would explain my stiffness.
&nb
sp; “What are you on about?” I said, snorting at the idea. “I’m not a bloody statue. Your head is broken.”
“No it’s not,” said Peter. “I’d know if I had a broken head. I lost my shadow once and I knew it when that happened, so I’d know if my head were broken as well.”
I rolled my eyes. “Enough,” I said, and slid a cupped hand into the water to help him paddle faster.
When we approached the spot we’d set off from though, Peter pulled his spade up and stopped paddling. “What’s wrong?” I asked, still scooping handfuls of water on my side of the nest–boat. I wasn’t giving up so easily.
“The fairies will be waiting for us,” Peter said gravely. “And they haven’t seen me in a long while. They may not recognize me. I’m not a child any longer. They may want to kill us.”
“Kill us?”
“Well, you more so than me. I should be okay if they do recognize me. They’re very adamant about keeping humans out of the gardens after Lock–out Time,” said Peter. “The only thing that saved me from them the first time I rowed up to their shore was that I was still a baby and all the women–fairies wanted to take care of me once they saw that. Even fairy women love human babies.”
I wanted to tell him love for babies is far too easy. My mum proved that. I wanted to tell him about how my mum didn’t give a shit about me after I wasn’t a baby and took off when she didn’t like who I was becoming. I wanted to say, “You know what? While my mum was telling off my dad in the next room, right before she left us, she told him it was probably because my dad was such a weakling wanker that his son had become a poof.” A poof. A bleeding poof is what she’d called me that day.
Thanks, Mum. Thanks a lot.
Being abandoned as a baby like Peter might have been easier than growing up with a mum who didn’t like who her baby boy grew up to be, like I did. But I didn’t put that thought to Peter. We didn’t need to compete about who’d had it worse, I figured. We could both feel like our early lives sucked and maybe we’d both gotten stuck in those places precisely because of how sucky they were.
Despite the fact that we’d stopped paddling, the boat continued to drift toward the riverbank, and as we grew closer, I began to see them. Little people with pointed ears and fanciful clothes of so many different colors came out of the shadows. Seeing that, I realized why my mum used to say they hid themselves away dressed as flowers. I smiled at that thought, then frowned in the next instant. I was thinking of her again, and thinking of her made me mad all over.
When the boat landed, bumping up against the bank and jolting me out of my thoughts, it turned out that the fairies didn’t try to kill us after all. Instead they sent up a great cheer as Peter leapt from the boat into their waiting arms, surrounding him like fireflies, their many wings all aflutter, covering him with kisses like a hero returned home from war.
After all the pomp and circumstance, though, it was mostly a disappointment, to be honest. Peter seemed to forget about me, and the fairies were so caught up in his return that they didn’t notice me in the slightest. They all moved off from the banks of the Serpentine together, back into the gardens, where they began to play music and pass tiny cups of wine down the lines of their tiny tables and dance and sing like it were a holiday party. One of them—their queen, I figured from all of the lining up and bowing that went on around her—gave Peter a set of pipes, which he started to play at her request, and then they all twirled along the garden paths together, drunk and laughing like idiots.
I kept my distance. To be honest, I was relieved they had no interest in me, and I was also starting to get tired of dealing with Peter. There was something off about him. I mean, he was exactly as described in the books about him—always stoked for endless adventure—but I wasn’t so charmed as I’d been when I was little and his storybook life seemed like a thing I would have given anything to have. Now, being so close to him, I felt more like, I don’t know, like he had something wrong with him. He unnerved me.
I sat down at the base of the Peter statue instead of following after. Rested my back against the bronze stump, gathered my knees into my arms, checked my phone again. When it still showed nothing but a grey screen, dead as dead can be, I tilted my head back to look up at the stars wheeling above.
There it was, the first star on the right, winking at me, as if it were giving me an invitation to move there. I looked down though, stared at my untied shoelaces and thought about other things. Mum, mostly, even though I didn’t want to. She would have a good laugh if I ever told her about this evening.
Time passed. The color of the sky changed, lightening ever so slightly as morning made its way back. I didn’t sleep. I just sat there and tried to think about what I’d say to my dad when I was able to go home again. He’d murder me, for sure. I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Curfew would be reinstated. I’d be living in my own personal dystopia. He’d probably even threaten to send me off to live with Mum and Marcus if I didn’t settle down.
A shadow fell over me at some point, and I looked up to find Peter standing above me, blocking out the stars, which were beginning to fade as the sky lightened. “You’ve made it,” he said. “You’ve spent a whole night in the gardens. Not many can say that. How do you feel?”
“How do I feel?” I said, and looked away. “I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” said Peter. He knelt on his haunches then, so he could look at me straight on.
“I’m so fucked up,” I said, shaking my head.
“No,” said Peter, “you’re not.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
“How do you figure?”
“I think too much. Mum always said so. Her and my aunt Donna. My aunt Donna once said that my personality would ruin me. It was at some kind of family thing, I forget which one, and my mum was still around, so I wasn’t able to say anything in return without getting a clout on the head by my dad for talking back. When we got home though, I asked my mum what aunt Donna had meant, and she said Donna didn’t have a way with words, that was for certain, but that she thought she meant I thought too much. And that it would do me no good in life to give things that kind of attention.”
“What do you think about that now?” Peter asked.
“I dunno,” I said, shaking my head. “I guess she was right. My aunt Donna, I mean. I think about things too much. I think about my mum more than I should. I think about her more than she deserves. I wonder sometimes, is she thinking about me as much as I’m thinking about her? And then I think, To hell with her. Stop caring, like she stopped caring about you.”
Peter stood again, put his hands on his hips and said, “I tried to go back to my mother once, but she’d already had another child and she’d forgotten about me mostly. I know how you feel.” He held his hand out then, and I looked at it for a moment, not sure what he wanted. It was far past the time to be looking for a rub. “You can come with me,” he said, and I blinked a little before asking where.
“Back to where I’ll be going,” was his answer.
I looked up into his eyes and knew where he was talking about. I knew from the books my mum had read where he’d be going, where I could go if I just took his hand and let him fly me away from all my problems. Mermaids and pirates and eternal childhood. All of that and some fairy dust lingering in the air like snowflakes after.
“No, thanks,” I said and sighed. I couldn’t leave my dad, no matter how hard we were fighting, and for better or for worse, I couldn’t leave my mum, even though what she’d said had flayed me and kept flaying me for these past two years. “I’ve got…I’ve got to get things right here, somehow,” I said, thinking I would probably go over to my mum’s place after the gates opened in a while, and I’d act really strange most likely, showing up out of the blue like that. But hopefully she’d make breakfast and maybe we could try to figure out how to talk to each other a little. “Maybe some other time though?” I offered.
Peter stared at me with those blank
eyes of his—those eyes that could never get what human eyes understand as ours grow older and see more of the world, the good and the bad of it—and I shivered. No words passed between us after that, though we kept staring at each other like we were mirror images, or one of us a shadow come undone from the other, and we couldn’t or at least didn’t want to let go.
I almost reached out to him, but before I could, Peter turned away and transformed into a little white bird, which all of us are before we become human beings. And then he flew away, up into the pale morning sky studded with fading diamonds.
(Editors’ Note: In this issue, Deborah Stanish also interviews Christopher Barzak.)
© 2014 Christopher Barzak
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the major motion picture, Jamie Marks Is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and James Tiptree Jr. Awards. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, and Before and Afterlives, which won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. Christopher grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, will be published by Knopf in 2015. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University. Learn more about Chris at christopherbarzak.com
Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors
by Jay Lake
Mother never has been patient. Old as she is—and there are hills Above of which she can remember the birth—time has never blessed her with the sort of wisdom lore informs us is inevitable with the assumption of the grace of age.
This does not bother me. I am not one of the mabkin. They toil at her leisure, they sweat to her pleasures, they suffer to her pains. Sooner be a worker ant in a burrow than one of those pretty, pretty, doomed butterflies. Mother always pulls the wings off her children and eats them in the end.
Uncanny Magazine Issue One Page 8
