“Well,” said the churel-turned-apsara, “I stand corrected. Your script was serviceable until now, even appealing in its way. But how will you end this story?”
The other explorers—Shalini’s friends—stared at one another, clearly mystified.
“Tell me what you would do, child.” The apsara’s luscious face was ripe with malice. “Would you trade your friends for your deepest heart’s desire?”
“I don’t care about your pearl.” Shalini glared. Now she did hurl the bracelet at the creature, who plucked it out of the air and pulled it over her wrist.
“It is not the pearl I mean, but the security you yearn for.” The pearl appeared in Shalini’s hand. “That, at least, you’ve earned.”
Shalini eyed it warily. In its subtle glint, she saw the conclusion, what the audience would see: the apsara challenging her to choose between her friends and a glittering future. Shalini, of course, chose her friends. The end.
No, not the end. Her throat tightened. It felt pat. Too easy. Something was missing.
The apsara shaped her tapered fingers into lotus mudras, as if she truly were the celestial dancer she played. “Surely you must have noticed you scarcely gave yourself a role in your own play? How little you trust your friends or yourself, always certain they will cast you aside.”
It was true. Madhu had subdued the dragon, Sabrina had led the way into the village, Bianca had devised their way out of the prison cell, and Gabrielle had been the one to offer hope. What had Shalini done but just tag along?
“That you wanted to be in the flow of creation is no bad thing. That you do not trust others to understand your personal battles—that is another story, if you would pardon my wordplay.” The apsara chuckled, apparently amused by her own attempt at wit.
Shalini clutched the pearl in her fist and prayed for an ending that would erase this entire night. Her friends would never understand. They all deserved their places in the coven.
“You know, churel,” said Gabrielle, coming up to stand beside Shalini, “I liked you. I mean, you showed up wearing foxgloves!” She gestured to her own foxglove flower crown. “But now you’re tormenting our friend.”
“I’m waiting for you to turn into a bat and fly out of here,” Sabrina informed the apsara. Her dress of ink-and-ebony satin rustled as she advanced. “Anyone can be beautiful and put on makeup, but there’s no concealer good enough to cover up an ugly heart.”
“You think your friend so pure?” the apsara asked, her head tossed back in mirth. “Has she told you how she could not finish writing this script without my help? How she lacked the courage to tell you the truth?”
Bianca frowned, a distraught sylph in her dawn-rose silks and ivory lace. “She did tell us, actually. A little later than she should’ve, but she did.”
“You could erase all this, child,” the apsara purred at Shalini. “All you need to do is trade me these friends for the spell to grant your desire. They will not be harmed. You simply will not see them again. They need never know your shame.”
Shalini made herself lift her head high and face her friends. The audience didn’t matter. The churel didn’t matter. Even the play didn’t matter. Only they did. “I promised you I could finish the play in time. And you trusted me, and I blew it, and I’m so sorry.” She swallowed hard, then added, “I failed you.”
Bianca bit her lip, while Sabrina raised her brows, making the ring of crystals around her eye twinkle. Madhu toyed with one of the lavender-and-indigo roses growing out of her raspberry salwar kameez. Gabrielle turned away, so all Shalini could see of her was her fox-colored hair and the bell sleeves of her mauve velvet gown.
They were waiting for her to do something, but what?
“Yes,” said the apsara. “There is the blood, the sacrifice, the pathos.” She waggled her head, her long tresses spilling around her in a waterfall, her silky sari glistening, and her jewelry sparkling from ankle to earlobe.
Shalini looked at her coven sisters, who were murmuring together. But it was Madhu who addressed her. “You can still fix it, you know. It’s not too late.”
She fought to hide her grief. How? How was she supposed to fix this?
The apsara preened. “Are you ready to learn the spell to remove self-doubt and erase this unfortunate incident? After all, you do not belong here, per your own belief.”
It would hurt, knowing the coven would forget her, maybe even replace her, as soon as this spell was done. But Shalini couldn’t leave the play unfinished, and she definitely couldn’t embarrass her friends like this, right?
She studied their huddle, the way they had already shut her out. No. She’d done it to herself. She knew that. Her heart punched at her rib cage.
“You don’t trust yourself to end the play properly, so what holds you back?” the apsara asked. Her voice mesmerized: all Shalini had to do was give up her coven for good, and the churel would fix everything. Truly, what other choice did she have?
The coven turned as one to hear her decision. All she saw in their faces was hurt. The same hurt in her heart.
At last, she realized what she needed to do. What her friends were waiting for her to do. It was high time to revise the story she’d been telling herself.
Shalini reached up and touched the crescent moon above them, the one that had been mosaicked together from unsaid wishes and dreams. “I do need to fix this. But not that way.”
Pearl in hand, she reached into herself—past, present, and future—and cast the storytelling spell.
The audience unfroze, then vanished. Now the band of explorers stood once more in the nocturnal realm of shining stars and dangling moons, of astral palaces and moonlight lotuses, where the apsara rested on her throne. She reached for Shalini. “You will give me the bracelet, and I will take you all into my service. I’ve needed new attendants ever since some of mine burned out. Stars have an annoying tendency to do that.”
Shalini glowered at her. “We came all the way here to bring you your bracelet, and this is how you thank us?”
“On the contrary; you should consider it an honor to serve me.” The apsara extended her hand again. “Now give me my bracelet.”
Shalini refused, and the apsara’s serene expression cracked at the edges. “Give it to me. That’s why you came here, is it not?”
“You can’t control us without it, can you?” It was just a theory, but Shalini grinned when the apsara gasped. Then the apsara pounced, delicate as a panther, at Shalini, who slipped into her serpentine aspect. The bracelet clamped in her powerful jaws, she undulated over the dark ground to safety.
“The stars, I think they’re in the bracelet!” she called around the mouthful.
Her companions also switched to their animal shapes, then crowded around her. Together, using teeth, talons, and claws, they severed the bracelet’s cord. A handful of stars scattered and fell to the earth like smoldering pearls, while others, extinguished, returned to the sky to be rekindled.
The apsara wailed, but there was nothing she could do, and she knew it. “Get out of my sight,” she hissed.
“Gladly,” said Shalini.
And so the explorers, crooning one final song of completion, exited the starlit stage: a strut, a slither, a prowl, a flutter, and a pad down a grassy hill and into a ring of trees laden with apples with skin the rich gold of afternoon sunshine, apples with skin silver as the moon’s brightest face.
* * *
The seawater curtains closed on the stage to ecstatic applause.
“I knew you’d come through.” Bianca beamed. “We all did.”
“But next time,” Madhu said, “maybe trust us enough to tell us what’s going on earlier, so we can help?”
Sabrina nodded. “And so we don’t end up with churels hijacking our play?”
“I promise,” Shalini said, and she hugged them all.
�
��You really thought we would kick you out?” Gabrielle bumped her vulpine nose against Shalini’s scaly cheek. “Silly girl. Have a little trust, would you? In us, and in yourself?”
Shalini nuzzled her back. The pearl couldn’t have helped her if she didn’t already know how to tell the story, and of course she wouldn’t be part of the coven if she didn’t have something to offer. “I will.”
When the curtains opened again, Shalini and her coven, now in human form, took their bows, along with the churel. The audience whistled and clapped. The cast gave a second bow, then exited stage right.
“That definitely wasn’t what they were expecting,” Sabrina said, cackling wildly, “but I think it’s safe to say they loved it!”
“I think you’re right,” said Gabrielle. “Even the yakshini!”
“I’m so glad your mistress came to see this,” Bianca told the churel. “I think she might have liked it.”
“Especially your beautiful sari.” Madhu winked. “Made of the best spell silk.”
Shalini laughed. “Thanks so much for being part of this. It wasn’t the plan, but I couldn’t have done it without you.” She offered the churel the restrung bracelet of stars. “What will you do now?”
The churel fastened the bracelet around her bony wrist and smirked down into the audience at the terrified man the yakshini held captive. “I believe I have a long-overdue date with my...husband, shall we say. What about you?”
Shalini opened her journal and pointed to the moon. “Next summer’s just a year away. I’ve got another play to write.”
* * * * *
THE LEGEND OF STONE MARY
by Robin Talley
EVERYBODY FOR MILES around used to remember the story of Mary Keegan’s curse, but you wouldn’t know it now.
Mama says folks here in Boyle’s Run forgot about Mary on purpose. Grandma says they all got too busy looking after their own behinds to worry about stories from the olden days. Fools, Grandma always says, this town ain’t made up of nothing but fools.
To be honest, I didn’t used to think that what happened to Mary had much to do with me, either. I knew our family came from Mary Keegan’s line—you couldn’t grow up in the same house as Mama and Grandma and not know that—but even so, some story from another century never seemed to matter as much as the stuff that was happening right now.
Like school, and why everybody there always looked at me funny. Or Karen, and why looking at her made me feel funny.
That all changed on Halloween night, 1975, though. The first time I got to see Mary Keegan up close.
Even though she wasn’t far from where we lived, I’d only ever caught one tiny glimpse of Mary before that. Practically as soon as I could talk, Grandma made me swear never to go anywhere near the old statue of Mary in the woods. But one night in fifth grade—it was Halloween that time too, actually, now that I think about it—I got in a big fight with Mama and climbed up on top of our greenhouse to sulk, and I saw the faint outline of Mary’s statue over the treetops to the south.
Mama and I had fought that night ’cause I’d tried to sneak out. I wanted to go trick-or-treating like everybody else, but Mama told me to stay in and weed the flowers.
Well, if I wasn’t going out, the last thing I wanted to do was work in our stupid greenhouse. Instead I climbed up on the roof right as it was starting to get dark. When I looked off to the south, the tip of Mary’s statue was just barely poking out above the pines.
A weird feeling thrummed under my skin like an itch. Like it was pulling me to her, even though the trees were so thick all I could really see was a dark, blurry shape rising up from a small clearing. Even so, the crowd of people snaking through the woods toward Mary was clear as day.
I asked Mama about that later, and when she tried to explain, that was when I finally understood just how much the folks around here really had forgotten Mary Keegan. If they’d remembered, they never would’ve let the kids go out there.
See, most folks around here—the ones younger than our grandparents, anyway—don’t know who the statue is even supposed to be. All anybody sees when they go out there is a creepy statue of some lady. To them, Mary’s grave is nothing but a place where you probably won’t get caught getting up to whatever you might want to get up to.
Stone Mary, they call her. Or Stoned Mary, if they’re trying to be funny.
But I’ve never been allowed to go out there with everybody else on Halloween. It’d be disrespectful to our ancestor for me to trample over her grave like that. Besides, Mama says, why should I want to go out with dumb kids who think our family is a bunch of weirdos?
I never answer when Mama asks me stuff like that. She always thinks I don’t want anything to do with the folks in town, just like she doesn’t. She figures I want to spend my days with her and Grandma, weeding the plants and making change for the out-of-towners who come from all over to buy our rare orchids and chrysanthemums. She can’t imagine any reason I’d rather be hanging out on the smoking block with Karen Rogers and Suze Payne and the rest of the junior girls, waiting for football practice to end and driving up to the water tower to get high.
I think Mama figured out some of it, though. ’Cause when I told her Karen got me a job working at the Hardee’s out on Route 22, Mama didn’t even seem all that surprised. I thought she’d tell me to quit, but she just rolled her eyes and said I’d best be careful dealing with townsfolk.
Well, as far as I could tell she was making a whole lot out of nothing. So when we were finishing up our shift that Halloween night, Steve Boyle and Becky Callahan started talking about going out to see Stone Mary, and I got that weird thrummy feeling again and said I wanted to go, too.
Steve whooped and said he’d always known I was a far-out chick, and Becky went into the bathroom to fix her makeup.
“You sure?” Karen whispered to me, when Steve went over to the ice-cream machine to make himself a cone. Halloween wasn’t a night when too many folks wanted a burger, so we’d had the Hardee’s to ourselves for most of the dinner shift. It would’ve been a shame if nobody got to have something tasty. “I thought we could go to the railroad tracks. It’s quiet out that way at night.”
Now, Mary or no Mary, a trip out to the railroad tracks with Karen sounded pretty nice to me. I was getting along better with folks at school by then, but after what happened with Joey Leary, I was still being careful not to get too close to any one person.
But if there was anyone I wanted to bend the rules for, it was Karen. She and her parents had only moved down here from up north the year before, so she had no idea my family was any different from anybody else’s.
That wasn’t the reason I liked her, though. There was just something about Karen. Something I couldn’t put a name to.
One night a few weeks before Halloween, the two of us had driven out to the railroad tracks and sat on the edge of the bridge, talking and smoking. Mostly, she was smoking and I was talking. Complaining, as usual, about my mother, and how she was never going to let me out of her sight long enough to live my own life.
“It’s as if she thinks she can keep me in that greenhouse forever,” I said, while Karen puffed her cigarette and drummed her nails on her knee. All night, she’d been acting antsy. “I told her I just want to be normal, like everybody else, but she acts like it would be the end of the world.”
“Look, Wendy, there’s something I should tell you.” Karen stubbed out her cigarette and started twisting her mood ring around her finger. Then she turned to look at me, her wavy brown hair spilling out across the shoulders of her peasant blouse.
I sucked in my breath. It was kind of startling, having the full force of those dark brown eyes on me. “Okay.”
“I didn’t come here to—” Karen stopped, even though I hadn’t said anything. I realized too late I was staring at her lips, thinking about how they looked in the faint bit of moonl
ight shining off the creek below the railroad trestle, and I forced myself to meet her eyes again. “I, um. I really like you. And the truth is I haven’t been—”
I’m still not sure exactly how it happened—and believe me, I’ve replayed it in my head a million times since then—but before she could say anything more, we were kissing.
Which was a bad idea. I knew it was a bad idea. I didn’t know all that much about how normal folks were supposed to act, but I did know normal folks didn’t do stuff like that. Besides, I liked Karen, and I didn’t want things to get complicated between her and me. For Keegan women, when things started getting complicated, bad stuff wasn’t far behind.
So I was going to pull away from the kiss. Really, I was. But then Karen pulled away first.
I tried to act like I wasn’t crushed. Like none of this was a big deal at all. I laughed and mumbled something about my breath probably smelling like cheese, and Karen laughed too, and then she started trying to get me to sing along with Elton John on the radio, and soon we were both laughing harder than ever.
But it wasn’t really funny, because I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I liked Karen. Or about the last time there was someone I really liked. It was different that time, but...maybe it wasn’t quite as different as I wanted it to be.
We couldn’t have been more than eight. Joey Leary was my best friend—or at least, he said he was—until the day he tripped me on the playground out back of the church.
I fell and landed in a mud puddle, messing up the new dress Mama made me. I cried and cried while Joey and his friends laughed about how he’d tricked that weird little Wendy Keegan girl into thinking he liked her, then shown her what for.
I’d cried all that night on Grandma’s lap. Three days later Joey got stung by a bee, and his face swelled up like a sponge dipped in water. He was dead before they could even get him to the hospital down in Hopewell.
After that, the minister said I wasn’t allowed on the playground anymore, and people started calling me a freak. It’s not as if folks in town had ever exactly been nice to me, since everybody knew I was a Keegan, but after Joey they didn’t bother hiding what they thought anymore.
Toil & Trouble Page 14
