James lifts fork to mouth, then chokes and coughs, spluttering all over his plate. He grabs his water and downs the entire glass, then mine. His face twists as he struggles to clear his mouth. Red-rimmed, watery eyes turn my way as he croaks, “Gah! All that salt and Tabasco—you trying to kill me?”
I snag a morsel from his plate, eager to taste something, anything! I bite, and chew.
But no. There is no flavor, no bite of hot or salty. Just chewing.
I force myself to swallow. Disappointment drags at me like a wet, heavy towel, and I shake my head: no, no.
James’s incomprehension turns to disbelief, then shock, and finally a glimmer of fear, all etched like ludicrous caricatures on his face.
“You—you really can’t taste that?”
I am too sad to speak. I shake my head and move my lips in a silent “No.”
We stare at one another for what feels like weeks. Finally, I bow my head, cradling it in my hands, elbows splayed across the tabletop. I cannot stop the slow tears that fall, each piercing me like a knife.
“I think you should call Father McKenzie,” I whisper.
I feel more than see James’s nod, hear the crack of relief—hope?—in his reply. “I think so too.”
* * *
“Mrs. Smead. Melanie,” Father McKenzie rises to greet me. His smile splits a round face barely older than my own, but his eyes have caged a dark worry. He leads me to a chair beside the fireplace.
His office is dim, with heavy curtains drawn over tall windows blocking the blustery light of the day outside. Despite the fire crackling in the hearth, it’s comfortably cool within.
I sit. The dimness of the room disguises its drab lack of vivacity. Without that reminder biting me in the eyeballs, I relax, and feel just how cold my hands have become. Where they rest on my thighs, their cold penetrates my jeans to numb my flesh.
“Your husband says your memories of Fairy are...disturbing you. That the...addiction is settling in.”
I nod, miserably acknowledging the truth of his words. “Addicted to Fairy,” just like any two-bit lowlife, looking for fun and finding—.
I suck in my breath. Finding the glory of the Immortal world, which sucks the life out of this mortal one.
My breath comes out in a long, stuttering sigh.
“Yes, I...think so.”
“And why didn’t you do this,” he waves a hand indicating himself and the procedure we’re discussing, “right away, when I blessed and cleansed your daughter?” The words are gentle, but his question rings with an undertone of keen perception.
I feel myself flush warm as I struggle to speak appropriate words with a mouth gone dry. “I, I didn’t want to lose my memories. If they came for Aurora again, I had to be able to bring her out.” It was the truth.
Partially the truth. Who wants to forget the most glorious thing you’ve ever seen?
I’d thought I could handle it. That my daughter and husband would be enough to hold me.
I was wrong. So, so wrong. Ah, hindsight.
I grimace and turn away. In the hearth, the fire popped and hissed, but still gave no heat.
“And now?” Father McKenzie prompts, rubbing his hands over their opposite forearms.
I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, chew on my lower lip, try to stop my hands from trembling. “I, I think I need help. Staying here. Forgetting there.” I glance at the priest, hoping he can’t see that I only want relief, not forgetting.
He smiles, a grim expression, and holds out his hands.
“May I see your hand?”
I place my palm in his. The heat of his skin nearly scalds me! I flinch, but he holds on firmly.
Slowly, the heat evens out between us, while his expression darkens. “You’ve waited a long while. This may be...difficult.” His eyebrows fly upward and his next words are short and decisive. “We must do this soon. Tomorrow night at moonset.”
I snatch my hand away, trying to calm my panicked gasps. “Not the dark of the moon?”
That would be five days. Five more days to force the memories into the cells of my body, so I couldn’t forget...only—
“No. That would be too late.”
He was right. Just listen to yourself, Melanie. Do you want this, or not?
I nod, my hands clutching into claws at my sides.
Father McKenzie rises to his feet. I stand and follow him out, my heart thumping loudly in my ears, shaking in my chest like a frightened mortal thing.
* * *
I go home, tell James the news. He looks...relieved, but his eyes are too round, the whites too obvious.
I pretend not to notice, and he pretends to accept everything as normal. I pretend not to have a racing pulse, not to see flashing lights at the corners of my eyes, not to have a galloping darkness inside me trying to swallow me up whole.
When James sleeps, I rise and slip from the house, more silent than any human should be. Instinctively, I follow the magnet of my Fae-attuned soul and run.
My bare feet race across the fields and lanes. I leap fences and small, clear brooks as moonlight streams above the horizon, shining clear and cold, and nearly as brilliant as the light of Fairy.
When my senses return, I stand, revitalized, at a gate to Fairy, the one at the bottom of Miller’s cow pasture. I shake my head, wondering why this one. It’s further than the one at Sugar Creek, where I’d gone in after Aurora. But it’s also more isolated. Subconsciously, I must want to do this alone.
Leaning against the fence line, I stare at the softly glimmering woods. Their shimmering will intensify as the moon rises, and die away as it sinks below the horizon, closing the gateway. I’m nearly ten kilometers from James, sleeping soundly in his home.
Our home.
No. His home. I don’t belong to this world, don’t want to be a part of it anymore. I am crossing over, going where I belong. For good.
I cling to a fence post, the roughly weathered wood gnarled yet sturdy. It supports me as I pant, as I hold tight to my wild panic, stuffing it down, down.
“I knew you’d be here.”
I spin and find Lenora, in a sleeveless knee-length shift, at my elbow. She leans casually on the fence, as if she’s been there all along. The muted glow of cottage lights behind her outlines her form, and the soft chiming of glass against glass echoes like a lullaby. Her bottle trees.
“How—?” I open and shut my mouth several times, before I press my lips tight.
“Father McKenzie told me, of course.” She isn’t looking at me, but at the woods, at the gateway between the worlds slowly opening as the moonlight brushes it silver. I shiver as a wave of perfection washes out from Fairy, caressing as it radiates past.
As the woods open, Lenora’s skin begins its coruscating dance. Her flesh spangles softly as moonlight limns her, correcting her frumpy appearance to Fae beauty.
“Did he talk you out of leaving? Into excising your memories?” I blush at my mistake. Father McKenzie would’ve been a babe like Aurora forty years ago. “Or the priest before him?”
Lenora’s smile could curdle milk. “Pastor Miller tried, but didn’t get through. I was too tough, too sure.”
Shock rockets through me, then triumph. And a greedy need to know.
“So you went back? And, and came out a second time?” I gape, unable to grasp how anyone could force themselves out a second time.
She turns from the woods to stare at me. I stare back, our eyes holding, until Lenore opens her soul to me.
Beyond her contempt, beneath her reserve, is a cap of steel—no, of iron, its thick, rusting bands proof against all things Fae. And beneath that—.
I gasp.
Beneath that lies such longing, such intense, seering pain that I flinch, a hand lifting instinctively to my mouth to stop an outcry.
Behind that
locked door, Lenora is a seething mass of need and rancid desire, and that same diamond-clear pain that’s been growing within me. And she’s been tortured this way for forty years.
I look away, ashamed at my weakness.
“How do you stand it?” My whispered words plume in the apparently-cold night air.
The doorway to her soul snaps shut, locking tight as she shifts her weight. When she meets my gaze again, her expression is etched with empathy.
“If you go back, it won’t be like the first time. You won’t be a challenge, a novelty—an underdog crusader against the Immortal—but just another tiring, irksome mortal playing at being ‘one of them.’”
Lenora’s lips curl as her eyes glaze, watching memories replay. “You’ll never possess their grace or beauty. You’ll be forever an outsider, a despicable traitor to your own kind.”
Lenora keeps speaking, but I no longer hear. My lips mouth “No, no, no.” But I can’t deny the truth she speaks. It’s implacable, hard—like the beautiful diamond of hurt within me.
Within us both.
I’ve raised my hands to my ears, and I’m standing with my shoulders hitched high and my back hunched protectively. But Lenora is no longer talking, just looking out at the woods, her skin scintillating constellations like a clear night’s sky.
I drop my hands and straighten, slowly.
“You think I should let Father McKenzie remove the memories.” It’s not a question.
“I didn’t say that,” Lenora says, still not looking at me. “And I didn’t say you shouldn’t go. But if you go, you won’t find any ‘beautiful sympathy.’”
I think of the octogenarian sisters, the rest of the villagers, even of James—all of them overflowing with sympathy, pathetic and useless as it is.
I nod sharply. “I can live with that.”
“Can you?” She turns toward me. Her expression implores me to think, to feel.
Although I want to disdain her, when she glows with that lambent Fae glitter, I just can’t.
I sigh and grip the fence post, watching the opening to Fairy. “Why not?”
“Because you’re human, not Fae. Because humans crave connection, and without it, we wither. We become lesser, not more.” Lenore touches my arm, drawing my gaze to hers once more. “We don’t become Immortal by losing the stuff of our humanity, Melanie. We only become...inhumane.”
And it hits me, as if she’s clanged a bell against the side of my head. My inner ears ring with the insight.
I stare. Lenora’s eyes swell with compassion and pride and—everything human. In that silence, I see my own soul laid bare. It’s nearly an empty husk. Inhumane—that’s what I’m becoming.
I cling to that fence post, holding tight to the one pure emotion left me: love.
I love Aurora. It’s why I went after her. And, and I love James. It’s why I fought our way back, to be with him. And if I wish to love myself, to love the best me I can become—then I have to stay. I have to dig in and do the hard thing, not run for the easy.
I feel Lenora beside me, feel her human craving for connection and understanding mirroring my own. I turn swiftly, and before I can stop myself, bend to hug her tightly.
She stiffens, then relaxes into the contact.
Lenora’s lips brush my hair. “It’s what the Fae would respect, after all. Only the difficult, beautiful voyage is set to song.” Her words are muffled, but the vibration helps them penetrate all the better.
We pull apart, and watch together as the moon arcs overhead, then down, and the woods slowly fade to black. The gateway is closed.
“We should go,” Lenora says.
I nod and follow as we make our slow, human way back to James, to our human lives.
Ahead of me, Lenore’s skin shimmers faintly. And I understand that it’s not the remnants of Fairy clinging to her that glitter, but the beauty of her own mortal soul, forged by a challenging life into a grace only those likewise blessed can see.
One day, perhaps my skin will shine similarly. But for now, I have work to do. Perhaps my “great story” is over, as far as the villagers are concerned. But now the forging of my song begins.
Copyright © 2018 by M. E. Garber
David VonAllmen’s work has appeared in Marvel Comics, the Writers of the Future anthology, and most recently in the novella series The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide, each volume of which was written by a former Writers of the Future or Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award winner. This is his first appearance in Galaxy’s Edge.
AN UNFAMILIAR FACE
by David VonAllmen
He has a hammer. Hammer. Won’t do him any good. Not when I’ve been searching so long for someone to reproduce with. Not when all my senses have zeroed in on him.
“Oh no,” he whimpers. Backs himself against the wall. “Oh no, you’re one of them.”
Every time, I cry for them in my heart and beg their forgiveness in my mind. Every time, I fight against my muscles and my compulsions. But when I see an unfamiliar face, I cannot resist. I cannot.
Can I? I did resist once. I did. Once. How? If I could remember, maybe I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone ever again.
He smells original. Overwhelms me with the ripe scent of uniqueness. I’m fascinated by his blond hair—so unlike mine. Strands catch on the building’s brick exterior and gleam from the alley’s faint incandescent lights. Blond. He slinks down and cries out. Hopes a passer-by will run in and save him. Knows that won’t happen. This time of night there’s no one around for miles other than me. And me. And me.
“I’ll hit you!” he yells. Lifts the hammer to strike. The fury is genuine, but buried under too much fear. Fury. Fear. With his back up against the wall, knees half-bent, the tool can’t do much damage. I can’t stop myself, anyway.
Can I stop myself? I did resist once, to save the one I loved. If I could remember how, maybe I could stop myself again. Maybe.
I move closer, reach out. He flails out with the hammer, slams it down on my wrist. I pull back in shock and pain. Dart in before he can raise it again. Pain. Terror overriding his motor skills, he thrashes, but only manages to drop the hammer.
“Why do you keep doing this? What do you want?”
Want. I don’t want to keep hurting people. What do I want? Sometimes, while I’m searching for someone I can reproduce with, I forget. I wander the streets for days without rest, trying to find an unfamiliar face. The longer I go, the more it possesses me until I see nothing but the faces of those I pass. Is that a different face? No, move on. That one—the body might be different, the posture. Run to check. No, that’s the same face. Move on.
I press my weight down on him and he collapses, going fetal and screaming. Hands over his eyes and nose and mouth. Hands. I wrestle to pry them away, he clinches to keep them covered. He is stronger than he looks and a fiercer fighter than I expected, but it makes no difference. I cannot stop.
A jarring impact against my ribs knocks me sideways. Jump back at the man without pause, fearful he’ll get away. Pain penetrates my brain just enough for me to realize the blow did not come from him. Someone else is attacking me. Trying to steal my mate.
I roll over just in time to avoid a second kick. Look up. Not the same face. Different face. Not trying to take what is mine, trying to help the man. A woman. A woman with an unfamiliar face. Another potential mate.
But her eyes. Eyes. They glint with yellow alleyway light and for a moment they are the eyes of someone I loved once. Was it a child or an adult I loved? Was it a man or a woman I loved? My love loved me back and we laughed in the sunshine.
I fight the urges. Clinch every muscle to restrain my body. It helps me remember. If I can remember I can stop myself. I can stop hurting people. How did I do it before?
I remember my love’s eyes and they were full of love for me. Then they were full of fear. I was fea
rful, too. What did I fear? I feared that I would hurt my love. That I would make my love another familiar face.
I clawed at my cheeks and stabbed myself in the leg with a kitchen knife and screamed and screamed at my love to run. And my love did run, thank God. My love is far away now. My love is forever safe from harm now.
That is how I did it. That is how I beat the compulsions. I can do it again, to save these unfamiliar faces.
I grab a fistful of hair in each hand and pull. I remember. Each moment I resist the compulsions they are weaker and I am more in control. Each moment I remember more. I remember the apartment where we lived. I remember the soft hugs we shared. I remember my love’s beautiful face.
I remember my love’s face changing.
No. My love…. My love did not run away fast enough. My love became another familiar face.
I stumble and slam my shoulder against the rough alleyway bricks. I wail, the guttural moan of a banshee echoing off the walls.
I start to lose control again. I fight to get it back, but my love’s face appears, sharp in the center of my mind. I recoil from the memory. It hurts too much.
I let go of my hair. I let go of my muscles. Memories fade.
What was I remembering?
It left a sad, horrible buzzing in my chest. I know I don’t want to remember it ever again. From now on I will stay away from the memories. I will stay here, where all that exists is the simple, blissful compulsion to reproduce.
The woman runs. I dive for her and wrap my arms around her legs. Drag her to the ground. She punches at my head, striking my nose twice, clouding my vision with tears. Punch punch.
I run all four fingers of my right hand quickly across my tongue, pulling up as much saliva as I can. Thrust my fingers into her eyes.
“No!” she wails. Spins onto her stomach, hands over her eyes. Too late. She knows it’s too late.
So does the man. Looks at her with horror pulling down the corners of his mouth. Frantically kicks at the ground, scooting himself up the wall. He runs and I reach out, swiping at his leg. Only grasp his shin for a moment before he tears away and disappears down the alley. Disappears.
Galaxy's Edge Magazine Page 8
