All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  “You know who I am,” she says. “I’m the same person.”

  “You’re not the same person.” I knot a lock of her hair around my finger. “You knew he was leaving and you didn’t tell me. You have all these secrets now. You’re sprung on a total monster and I hate him and I hate everyone at that stupid party and I hate—”

  She puts her hand over my mouth, gentle, and I take a shuddering breath through her fingers.

  “There are things that don’t change,” she says. “The thing that will never change is how much I love you. Do you know that?”

  I shake my head. Yes. No. Yes.

  “Don’t break my heart,” she says. “You know that. Tell me you know that. I will love you until the moon falls out of the sky and we are old women in sensible shoes and our main joy in life is spying on our underage neighbor as he mows the lawn with his shirt off.”

  I can’t help it. I start to laugh. “I can never stay mad at you.”

  “Because you have nothing to be mad about and because you love me, too. Can you be happy, for me, tonight? For my party? For Jack? Can we wait until tomorrow to be sad?”

  That is the story of you, Aurora: You are always waiting until tomorrow to be sad. You’re a fairy princess beaming at me, remaking the world in your image. Wiping away everything that hurts. But someday everything that hurts will come back and kill you. Your face, your wide dark eyes, your white hair, the skin I know as well as I know my own. “Okay,” I say. “For you, tonight, I will be happy.”

  “See? It’s easier than you thought.”

  “Aurora?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you stop hanging out with Minos?”

  She goes still. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “He told me he can take me to see my dad.”

  “Aurora. Your dad is dead. Your dad’s been dead for fifteen years.”

  “I know that,” she says. “But you know Minos isn’t like other people.”

  “I know he’s a lot fucking creepier than other people.”

  “You promised me you’d stop. You promised me now we wouldn’t talk about this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not sorry.”

  “No. Seriously, Aurora, come on. Your dad—”

  “It’s easy for you,” she interrupts. “You live in a world that’s black and white. You’re so sure of everything all the time. What’s good. What’s bad. I’ve always envied you that, but sometimes it drives me nuts. I’m not like that. Nothing about my life is like that. Not even the color of my skin.” I’m crying again, and I don’t even know why. She splashes bathwater at me. “Look what you did. Knock it off. We’re happy.”

  “We’re happy,” I agree. She tosses me the washcloth and I scrub the tears from my face.

  “Listen,” she says. “There’s something else.”

  “What.”

  “I might go to LA for a while, too.”

  “With Jack?”

  “With Minos. I mean, yeah, Jack will be there. But I probably won’t even see him. Or not very much. I’ve never been, can you believe that? Minos thought it would be fun.”

  “You and Jack. You’re both—”

  “Babycakes. Come on. It’s not like that. This is me, okay?”

  I know better now than to ask if I can come. “We’re happy,” I say. It takes all the will I have to keep my voice from shaking. Her smile lights up her whole face.

  “I knew you wouldn’t care.” She flings her arms around me again. I bury my face in her shoulder so this time she can’t see me cry.

  I start to put my clothes back on after we are done with our bath but Aurora takes them out of my hands. “No,” she says. Still naked, she disappears into her walk-in closet. I wait, listening to her mutter and crash around. “Here!” she shouts at last, triumphant, emerging with a handful of glitter and fabric that she thrusts at me. I hold it up, letting its full length hang, and shake my head. It’s like something made out of cobwebs—pale, nearly transparent silk, whisper-thin straps and plunging back, strung with glass beads that catch the lamplight and send it flying.

  “No way,” I say. “This is not even enough fabric to qualify as a garment.”

  “I wear it,” she says, indignant.

  “An hour ago you were walking around in your underwear. Pick something else. Anyway, there’s no way this will fit me.”

  “No,” she says. “It’s my birthday. My present is you in this dress. It’s big on me, it’ll fit you fine. Take your bra off, you can’t wear one with this thing.”

  I roll my eyes and obey, holding up my arms so that Aurora can put the dress on me. It pours around me like water. It does fit, after all. Silk whispering against my skin. I try not to touch it. Without my jeans, my hoodie, I feel exposed, helpless. Aurora wears these fairy clothes like armor but on me they feel like a trap. She turns me around so that my back is to the mirror and holds up one hand. I wait while she scampers into the bathroom and comes back, wearing a kimono and with her hands full of tubes and compacts. “Sit on the bed,” she says, “so I can do your face.” I close my eyes as she daubs my skin with creams and powders, feeling the cool swoop of liquid liner across my eyelids, the whisk of a brush dusting color on my cheeks. When she stops I open my eyes again. Her face is inches from mine, her huge dark eyes studying me thoughtfully. Impulsively, I lean forward and kiss her. She smiles against my mouth, puts her hands on either side of my face. She tastes like gin and cigarettes and sugar. “I have to do your hair,” she says, her mouth still against mine.

  “I love you. Happy birthday.”

  “I know. Hold still.”

  When she’s done she parades me in front of the mirror. She’s mussed my hair in an artful way. The dress clings and sparkles, and I cross my arms over my breasts. “I can’t wear this,” I say, horrified.

  “You look beautiful.”

  “I look naked.”

  “Naked and beautiful. For me. You promised. Did you remember a mask?”

  “No, but I remembered your present.”

  I pull the banner from my bag and offer it to her. She tears away the paper and the canvas unspools across her floor. When she sees the painting she gasps and covers her mouth with her hands.

  “Oh my god,” she says, “oh my god. This is me. You painted me.”

  “Someday I’ll be able to afford a real present.”

  “You idiot.” Her eyes are bright with tears. “How could I want anything other than this? It’s the best thing anyone’s ever given me.”

  “Do you remember when your dad’s manager got you a pony?”

  “Oh, god. That poor fucking thing. It’s in a pasture somewhere. Who gets a six-year-old a pony?”

  “You did say you wanted one.”

  “Everyone wants a pony when they’re six. That’s what’s wrong with me, you know? I’m the girl who got the pony. Now go downstairs,” she adds. “You’re not supposed to see the dress before the wedding.”

  “Nobody’s getting married, Aurora.”

  “God, you are so literal.”

  I go and find one of the caterers while Aurora gets dressed, and get him to help me hang the banner. I’d thought to put grommets at the corners, and it only takes us a few minutes to secure it in place so that it hangs, waving gently, over the back porch. The sky is purpling. I lean against a pillar, careful not to dirty Aurora’s dress, and watch the caterers light tiki torches and mill about, pretending to look busy until the guests arrive. I want to tell them that no one here cares, that they can sit on the grass and drink cocktails if they want. But maybe that’s weird. I feel soft hands on my shoulders, and I turn around.

  Aurora is wearing a loose, transparent dress made of something cream and gauzy, sewn all over with hundreds of sequins that catch the light and shatter it into a halo around her. Her feet are bare, and her white hair hangs in a sleek curtain down her back. She’s outlined her eyes so that they look even bigger, put on a mask of white feathers. She
looks inhuman, like some half-bird, half-girl creature who’s crossed over to linger, dazzling, in the mortal world.

  Jack is with her, and I wonder when he got here. Dark clothes to her bright, black hair to her white. They are so glorious I can barely look at them. Oh, envy, I think, you belly full of serpents. “You look beautiful,” I say. I don’t know which of them I mean.

  I am already drunk when Minos comes. Here in Aurora’s house, I think, surely we are safe. I can’t erase the image of Jack and Aurora together, Jack’s hand at Aurora’s waist. Jack leaving. Aurora knew. Who told her? Jack, or Minos? Who told her first? What are they keeping from me? I fill my cup until the edges of the world are fuzzy. Not Minos’s eldritch drink; Aurora’s perfectly normal vodka. Instead of erasing the world it makes everything worse. I lean on a wall, alone and maudlin in my magical dress. I know who wore it better. Putting pointe shoes on a hippopotamus won’t make a fucking ballerina. Jack’s avoiding me, and I think if I think about it too much I will crawl under a couch and cry myself into oblivion, so instead I refill my glass. Dance with some boy, masked and courteous, bowing over my hand like we are in a period piece. There are more and more people, people pouring in the front door, clustered around the garden. Some of them I haven’t seen in years: old friends of Maia’s, of Aurora’s dad, their long hair grizzled and their eyes sad behind their masks. None of them recognize me, and I don’t bother to say hello.

  One minute the party is ordinary, noisy and exuberant, and the next Minos is there. I can feel it before I see him; it’s like someone has raised the stage curtains, and now the audience is waiting. The air goes hot and expectant. There are people in masks and people whose masks are not masks, and I am trying again, as always, to tell myself that I am drunk, that I am crazy, but I’m not sure, anymore, that that’s true. I lost sight of Aurora and Jack a while ago. Everywhere I go, Minos is there already, watching me, silent, until I want to scream. I run upstairs and into Aurora’s room, thinking I will lock myself in, climb into her bed and pull the covers over my head, something, anything.

  But he’s there, too. Standing by the window, looking out. Aurora’s sitting cross-legged in her bed, the feathered mask next to her, and I don’t see at first what she is doing. A strip of silk is tied tight around her arm, a syringe in her other hand. “Aurora.” She looks up, her eyes empty.

  “Snakebite,” she says dreamily. If I knew how, I would kill him.

  “Get out of here,” I say, and when he does not move, I say it again. He turns to look at me. His face is somewhere between curious and amused. He lifts one elegant shoulder in a shrug. “Aurora.” I shake her. “You know better. Aurora. You idiot.”

  “Come with me. You promised me we’d be happy.” She takes my hand, rests her forehead on my chest. Oh, Aurora. Aurora calling me in the middle of the night, begging me to come get her. Aurora passed out in the garden in her underwear. Aurora with her hands wrapped in my bloody shirt. Aurora at the party, glittering on the precipice. My whole life has been saving Aurora from herself, and there is nowhere she can go where I will not follow. Nothing I will not do to keep her safe. Even this.

  “You know you want to,” she says. And that’s the trick of it, Aurora with her straight shot to my secret heart. For all my protests, all my designated driving, all the nights I’ve kept on the straight and narrow while she ranged far, I’ve always wondered what it was like. What was so sweet about that oblivion that it could call our own flesh and blood away from us, send Cass running away from this house and putting Maia on the permanent twilight express. Goddamn you, Minos, how did you know, I think, how did you know? How badly I want to save her and how badly I want to be her, beautiful and doomed in a pretty dress. How badly I want someone else to do the saving for once. How the fastest way to unravel us was to lay bare our own wants and let them undo us. “Like sisters,” Aurora says.

  There wouldn’t be so many songs about it if it wasn’t at least a little bit sweet. “Like always,” I say, and kiss her. Minos moves toward me, takes the hand she isn’t holding. His touch is as gentle as a lover’s. Unbending my arm, bony fingers at the crook of my elbow. The needle the faintest pinch. I close my eyes and wait for what comes next.

  I can feel the drug right away, sleek and languid in my veins. Minos’s face is as inscrutable as ever, but there is something in those dead eyes that I think is pity. Or maybe it’s just contempt. Aurora’s room is blurring into darkness, her poster-covered walls fading to black. “Aurora,” I whisper, but there’s no answer. I have fallen out of the world I know and into something else. There’s no sound but the distant murmur of water. I can feel dirt under my bare feet. A chill moves through me. The trees around me are bone-white and bare. I know this place.

  In the distance I hear a hectic cacophony, as if a hundred throats are open wide, loosing terrible cries to the unseen sky. The call of horns and the tramp of feet. The noise is growing closer. There’s only one path, and I’m standing on it. I look around, frantic, look for somewhere to hide, but there’s only the bare trees, the thorns, the blood-colored sap. An unearthly howl rises above the clamor, full of pain and menace, and is joined by another, and another, and then they are upon me.

  They are like some nightmare version of a festival parade: a procession of bone-thin riders on horses so dark I can only see them as empty cutouts of night against the white trees. The riders are maggot-white, the white of fungus and old bone. They’re still in their party masks: fur and feathers, velvet and lace, rotting silk and dirty satin. Their long ragged hair is braided with tattered dark ribbons that flutter madly although there is no wind. They radiate a greenish light that does nothing to push away the impermeable night. They stream past me, slow and stately. I cower against a white trunk, taking care not to catch myself on the huge thorns, but the riders take no notice of me. I am in Aurora’s room. I am on Aurora’s bed. But I can feel the cold smooth trunk under my hands, can smell the faint tang of rust and rot that comes from the riders. My bare feet are cold and goosebumps are rising on my skin. I pinch myself and nothing happens. Pinch harder. Bite down on my lip until my mouth floods with the bitter taste of blood, and still the riders keep coming. That trio of howls again, so close now they make me jump, and in that jerky unguarded movement my shoulder hits one of the thorny vines and I cry out as the spikes pierce my skin. Hissing in pain, I look up and see Minos.

  He’s astride the biggest horse I’ve ever seen. He is wearing a dark robe of some kind of fur and a crown of twisted metal set with cracked and dirty red stones. Aurora is behind him, arms tight around him, head resting on his back, eyes closed, her hair a beacon in all that dark. At the horse’s feet trots a huge black dog with three heads. One of the heads turns toward me, and the dog stops, its three muzzles thrust into the air and sniffing, like some horrible parody of a house pet searching out treats. Three sets of teeth, ridged fangs each as long as my thumb; three red tongues dripping with slaver; three growls rising in three hot throats. Minos halts the massive horse. The riders split around him as seamlessly as water, flow back together once they’ve passed him and stream away down the path. I see Jack, sitting tall on a horse of his own, surrounded by ghouls. His head is held high and his back rigid. His guitar is slung across his chest. His face is a mask, his mouth a straight line. “Jack!” I shriek. “Jack!” But he doesn’t turn, doesn’t look toward me. The horse moves relentlessly away until he’s lost in a sea of black.

  The dog howls, the same trio of howls I heard in the distance. Minos holds out a bony hand and the dog stops, looks up at him with a tripled gaze that is equal parts adoration and fear. It wags its whip-thin tail and moves away from me. Minos is as still as stone, watching me, the endless riders moving around him, the dog sitting now, expectant, waiting for a command. “You can’t have her,” I say. “You can’t have either of them.” Aurora opens her eyes, sees me, her face aglow.

  “You came,” she says. “I knew you’d come. We’re going to see my dad now.” The pain in my shoulder i
s spreading. I take a shaky step toward Minos, but my body is burning up. He bares his teeth as if he’s going to take a bite out of me, and I realize he is smiling. Aurora’s gaze goes unfocused, her mouth slack. “Oh,” she whispers. “It’s so beautiful down here.” Her lids flutter closed.

  “You fucker,” I snarl. “Give her back.” The world around me is dimming, a red haze moving across my vision. I take another step forward and fall to my knees. Minos puts his heels to the horse and beckons to the dog. I stagger to my feet. The last of the riders thunder past me. I can hear the echo of hooves far ahead. There’s no way out but forward. Each step is more painful than the last.

  When I get to the river I sink to my knees again, touch my forehead to the colorless earth in despair. There is no sign of them. I hear the dog’s howl, muffled as though it comes now from somewhere deep in the earth. Faint but unmistakable, the first chords as Jack begins to play. Go home, child, someone says, and darkness comes down around me like a curtain.

  I open my eyes to green. The smell of wet earth fills my nose. I’m freezing and my body is one giant ache. Somewhere above me a bird scolds me with a vigorous, descending trill. I push myself up on my elbows, wincing at the stab of pain in my shoulder. I’m in the trampled, empty wreckage of Aurora’s yard, sopping wet, tangled in the shredded ruins of her dress and covered in fresh-cut grass. The sky is the white-gold of dawn. I climb shakily to my feet and check for damage. Ten fingers, ten toes, bum shoulder, wobbly legs. Otherwise in full working order.

  The inside of the house is a disaster. Streamers hang crazily from the huge chandelier, and the front hall is caked with mud and feathers, bits of fur, the broken pieces of a jeweled necklace with its gems cracked and smeared with filth. Paintings hang at odd angles, the glass in their frames splintered into jagged starbursts. My heart catches when I see the banner I painted for Aurora, torn down and trampled. I pick it up out of the dirt, brush off the worst of the grime, but it’s ruined. I leave it on the back porch and go inside again. “Maia?” I call, climbing the sweeping staircase to the second floor, but there’s no answer.