Sometimes she smiles up at that young man, the way she smiled up at her prince. I think perhaps she doesn’t remember the difference anymore.
That’s a happy ending if you like. I see them sometimes, the old woman and the young servant, looking out over the ocean. The tide comes in, the tide goes out.
Anyway. The story got around a bit differently. Stories always do. Turning your back on a story is like turning your back on the ocean. Everybody adding details, everybody adding lines that fall on the ear like music and never mind where the truth falls by the wayside.
Everybody wants a hero so they know who to cheer for.
That’s fine. I don’t expect cheering.
She doesn’t look unhappy when she walks along the shore. But perhaps some day that young man will look the other way—distracted by a pretty girl’s smile, say—and she’ll make her way down to the water.
And if she wants—and if she still remembers–she’ll be welcome back here. You can always reverse engineer a gill slit. Who knows, all those mortal years might have been enough to learn wisdom.
We’ll still be here, under the waves. Nothing much has changed.
The tide comes in, the tide goes out.
All the same in the end.
NEVER
“Pudding,” said Stunky, licking his lips. “Blood pudding, with the greasy crunchy bits around the edges.”
Myrtle groaned. After a minute, she said, “Cheese.”
“Cheese?” asked Stunky. “Just cheese?”
“Just cheese nuthin’,” hissed Myrtle. “All melty over a slice of bread, or on a cracker, or—or—anything. How long has it been since you had cheese?”
Stunky didn’t answer. There was no cheese in Neverland, as there were no cows. There was plenty of blood, but nobody ever thought to make pudding out of it. Possibly no one knew how.
It was all very well to go away in the night with an elfin boy with laughing eyes who taught you how to fly, and promised that you’d never have to grow up, but it turned out that grown-ups had a great deal to do with meals arriving regularly and on time. To get food, you had to beg it off the Indians or steal it from the pirates, and as a result, nearly everyone was hungry all the time, except perhaps Pan.
It almost hadn’t been that way. A farm boy named Albert had come with Pan one night, a stolid presence who’d come along only because his little sister had been intent on going off with the wild boy. He had borrowed seed from the Indians and begun a garden, silently hoeing with a broken sword blade tied to a broomstick and bringing buckets of water up from the spring.
And when the plants were knee high and the tomatoes were throwing out round green balls and every Lost Boy was drooling at the thought of a real meal, something other than fish (oh god, they were so sick of fish) Pan had one of his wild moods and set the whole thing on fire.
“Vegetables!” he cried, hovering over the plants, which didn’t burn well but which stomped and flattened beautifully. “We don’t eat vegetables! Yuck! That’s grown-up stuff!”
Albert, still stolid and wordless, picked up his makeshift hoe and went for Pan’s throat.
Stunky could have told him how it would end. Pan was wicked fast and even if he hadn’t been, he had the fairies. The little brutes had put Albert’s eyes out with their knitting-needle swords before he’d gotten five feet. Pan had stabbed him a few times, mostly as an afterthought, and then thrown the body off a cliff, and that was the end of organized agriculture in Neverland.
They lived mostly on bird’s eggs and nestlings when they could get them. And fish. Always fish. One of the Indians had showed Stunky how to salt a fish with the rough, impure salt that dried on the rocks. You had to scrape it off with a knife and it didn’t work very well, but it was better than nothing. The fish took longer to rot, anyhow.
“I’d kill for a bit of cheese,” said Myrtle, and sighed.
“Sure,” said Stunky, stirring the pot of boiling water than contained the evening’s fish and a couple of hunks of coconut, “but who would you kill?”
Myrtle lifted her head and looked across the room, if you could call the ruined cargo hold of a wrecked ship a “room.”
Pan was lounging on a makeshift throne of old nets and packing crates, regaling some of the younger Lost Boys with tales of wild battles against the pirates. Two fairies squatted on either shoulder, casting their rotting swamp-gas light across his cheekbones, and a third crouched on the back of the throne. It scanned the room ceaselessly, wings twitching like the ears of a sleeping dog.
Stunky elbowed her. “Stop looking!” he hissed, and Myrtle dropped her head obediently. “You want ‘em to think you’re watching ‘em?”
“Doesn’t matter,” muttered Myrtle, poking at the fire. “Can’t imagine it’ll be much longer for me anyway.”
Stunky gulped. It was hard to tell how old anyone was in Neverland. There were no birthdays, since Pan refused to acknowledge that anybody was getting older. Still, Myrtle thought she was about sixteen, and Stunky was only a year or two younger.
If you were a boy, you could sometimes hold out a little longer if you shaved in private. If you were a girl, though, there wasn’t anything anybody could do. Starvation kept most of them alive into their late teens, but sooner or later…well, as soon as Pan smelled blood on a girl, it was over.
You didn’t grow up in Neverland. You didn’t get a chance.
“You c’d go to the Indians,” said Stunky, keeping his voice so low that Myrtle had to lean in to hear him. His breath stirred the greasy strings of her hair. (Soap was another grown-up thing that Pan wanted no truck with. The Lost Boys did their best with plain water and sand, those few that worried about it at all.) “If’n you stay out of his sight long enough, he forgets you.”
Myrtle twitched a shoulder. She could feel the fairy’s eyes moving over her, like the touch of insect feet scuttling over her skin. The Indians were decent people, and they’d hide a Lost Boy if they could, but there was only so much they could do against Pan. Albert had said they called him the Young Wendigo, but Albert was dead and none of the remaining Lost Boys were quite sure what that meant.
Besides, there’d been that…incident…with the chief’s daughter. The pirates had tried to get to her in time, but…well…
Now, the pirates would take you if you could get to the ship, but the fairies watched the beaches all the time. And Benji, who wasn’t quite right in the head, swore up and down that Pan had changed in front of him once, into a great lord of crocodiles, a monster twenty feet long with teeth like an ivory bear trap.
“Just tore his skin right off and fell into the water,” Benji had wailed, curled up into a ball under a tree root and worrying at his scalp with his nails. “Just right off! And his mouth was open and those little fairies were walking in and out of his mouth and pickin’ at his teeth, I swear, I swear…”
Well. Everybody knew Benji was crazy. Pan had the fairies poke and pinch at him, sometimes, until he started to scream and threw one of his wobblers and bit his own fingers bloody. You couldn’t trust Benji.
But it was true that there was a crocodile that prowled the waters of the cove, and sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t.
It was also true that Pan himself never looked hungry. But you tried not to think about that.
You tried not to think about a lot of things.
Myrtle knew it wouldn’t be long. Even on the wretched diet they’d scraped together, things had been happening. Her face looked different, when she stared at it in the tidepools, and her ragged clothes gaped open in places where they used to lace shut.
She had to do something, but she didn’t know what to do. Her body kept getting older. But she kept waiting.
She thought perhaps she was hoping that something would happen, in this terrible timeless place where nothing was ever allowed to happen.
She kept hoping she’d find a way home.
Sometimes when she was nearly asleep, she used to pray or dream—maybe a l
ittle of both—that there would be a tap on the hold of the ruined ship, right by her ear, and a boy would come for her, as a boy had once before.
In her prayer, he looked a lot like her dead brother Albert. There was nothing fey or wild about him. His hands were broad and callused and his shoulders were stooped from the weight of responsibility.
He didn’t promise her anything. When she looked into his eyes, the only thing she was sure of was that he knew she existed. And alive or dead, he would remember her.
He didn’t fly. In the dream, he left heavy footprints in the sand. He just reached out and took her hand and pulled her up, out of this nightmare, into adulthood.
BAIT
You walked this far
one step after another
barefoot and stubborn on the earth.
Fur and feather aided you
even the crones who are half-beast themselves
even the robber bridegroom's child
but in the end you walked alone.
You were so brave
so stubborn
so very much in love.
It did not occur to you to question
how the talking crow found you
or why your bare feet did not freeze.
Truth is, I have no use for pretty frozen boys—
it's the brave girls who come after them
that form the bulk of my collection.
NIGHT
"Night" is the longest running show in the universe.
It started off quite a few years ago, and while some of the original cast have retired, cooled off, (and in one embarrassing incident, mostly hushed up, collapsed in on themselves to form a naked singularity, although some of her co-stars were heard to mutter that she'd ALWAYS been a singularity in one form or another) for the most part, it's still going strong.
It was hard going at first. The first billion years was pretty dead. However, to be fair, there hadn't been much in the way of advance advertising, no posters anywhere, so really, you couldn't expect much. The rat stagehands that hang the stars in the firmament were philosophical. Nobody saw them anyway, so the fact that nobody saw the show at all didn't weigh on them much. The rest of the cast, encouraged by this example of rodent stoicism, went on with the show.
After a coupla billion years, however, it started to wear on them. People stopped scanning the seats every night looking for a new face—or indeed, any face. But they didn't quit. It was the theatre. The show had to go on. The temptation to slack off, to just hang the quasars anywhere and not bother lighting the nebulae, had to be intense, but the rats never did. It was craftsmanship, they said, and if they didn't have an audience, at least they had pride in a job done well. Again, the cast took heart, and they put in some of the finest performances of "Night" ever seen, except there was nobody to see it. But they knew they'd done a good job, and that was the important thing.
But oh! The excitement, that first time when there, in the third row, a self-replicating amino acid was spotted, clutching its ticket and peering around with the nearsightedness of something that lacks sense organs, and which can only be called an organism in the loosest sense of the word. It couldn't see the show, and the show couldn't see it without a microscope, but still, the tension in the air was electric.
The cast walked on eggshells the next day. Had it liked the show? Would it return?
When the director peered out between the curtains and saw that it was back, and it had replicated a friend, there was a spontaneous cheer from backstage, and they put on the bounciest "Night" ever performed.
After that, it snowballed—amino acids, proto-viruses, mitochondria, and one day a huge hulking brute, cell walls and everything, stimulus response. It was astonishing. The snack bar could hardly keep up. Only the rats stayed calm, hanging the stars up every night in the theatre firmament with the same meticulous craftsmanship, unmoved by prima donnas and vapors and missed lines. But that's rats for you. Solid creatures, rats.
The seats had to be expanded (and in some cases, completely redesigned) when such peculiarities as Hallucinogenia were ushered down the aisles, and the eventual rise of the vertebrates required a complete overhaul, but it was all worth it. You can still catch the shows today, regular as clockwork, the longest running show in the universe. Sometimes it's a bit late, sometimes a bit early, but the show always goes on.
BOAR & APPLES
A long time ago—though perhaps not as long as you are thinking—in a kingdom at the edge of a dark and dripping forest, there lived a king and a queen, and all was not well between them.
The king wanted an heir, as kings do, and the queen seemed to have neither the ability to bear one nor the decency to die in the attempt. The first child she carried near to term. None of the others lasted past their sixth month in the womb, and some of them even less.
The king, who had little enough kindness to begin with, grew more joyless with every announcement that the queen was with child, and more silent whenever the steward brought word that it had come to nothing. He drank in the hall with his eyes hooded, and his men walked quietly around him and took their own drinking to the stables and the guardhouse.
The queen herself had no kindness in her at all. If she had married differently, perhaps she might have learned some, but she had married a man who desired her for the beauty of her face and the child-bearing implied by the width of her hips, and cared very little for the other parts in between.
If you wish to feel sorry for her, I will not try to dissuade you, but there’s little enough sympathy in the world, and it would be a shame to waste it.
“Barely more than a jumped-up squire,” she hissed to herself, dragging the brush through her hair until her scalp smarted. “And with this face, I could have had a duke who ruled twice this much land, but no, I wanted to be a queen…”
And—“Upward!” she said to the servant who knelt before her, holding the mirror. “How am I to fix my hair when all I can see is my knees?”
The servant tilted the mirror upward silently. She wore a piece of cloth tied around her eyes, because the queen had suspected her of stealing and had put out her eyes with the back of a brooch some months earlier. She was not good at angling the mirror as a result, but she could no longer dress hair or embroider sleeves, and the queen did not believe in letting servants go to waste.
It was a great source of fury in the queen’s life that one of her half-sisters had married a minor lord, who had then turned around and inherited half a kingdom. “Legs like tree trunks!” hissed the queen, combing her hair until sparks crackled from it. “And built like a ball of dough on top! Can you imagine her in a grand procession?”
“No, my lady,” said the blind servant girl, who was instead imagining what it would be like to serve such a lady.
“It should have been me,” said the queen. “I would have been the most beautiful woman in the land. It should have been me.”
That she would never have looked twice at such a minor lord, and that the lord and her sister spent their evenings reading aloud to one another and searching out interesting cheeses together did not cross her mind. The queen was not given to self-reflection, and she was not particularly fond of cheese.
A year passed, then two, then a procession of them, one after another. A gray strand appeared in the queen’s dark hair, and was ruthlessly plucked out. The blind serving girl hanged herself in the scullery one night. No one was quite sure how she had managed to do it, for the rafters were very high.
The mirror went on the wall, as it had become increasingly difficult to find ladies-in-waiting to serve the queen, and there were none to spare to hold the mirror.
The king spoke less and less to his men, and not at all to the queen. Still, apparently something happened between them for which words were not required. The queen became pregnant, and this time she carried twins for eight months before coming at last to childbed.
One was a boy. He drew breath and died, as if one breath had been enough to assure him
that this was not a world he wished to live in.
The other was a girl. She was larger than her brother, a sturdy and healthy child from the first.
The queen waved her away when the midwife brought her, still slick and red from birthing. “Send her to the wet-nurse, fool. What are you thinking?”
The infant shrieked. The remains of a caul clung to her head, and she was purple and wretched and furious.
The queen stood up.
Her ladies-in-waiting gasped, and the midwife said, “My lady!” and put a hand on her shoulder to push her back to the bed. It was unthinkable that a queen should bear twins and immediately stand up.
The queen backhanded the midwife. There was little enough strength left in her hands, but the signet ring on her finger tore a line down the woman’s face. The midwife stepped back and did not touch her again.
The queen tottered across the room to where her mirror hung on the wall. There was a narrow table before it, and the queen braced herself against the edge, her arms trembling with exhaustion.
“Who?” she said to the mirror. “Who?”
The mirror chuckled.
The ladies-in-waiting crossed themselves. The midwife bowed her head over the bloody, weeping infant and walked from the room with a measured step. She had learned long ago never to run from a dangerous animal.
“Who, damn you?” cried the queen.
“Than you?” asked the demon of the mirror, throwing back her own reflection. The queen’s face was shiny red and haggard and her hair hung down in sweaty rags across her face. Her lower lip had split and she had bitten and worried it with her teeth. The circles under her eyes looked like gouges.
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