by Gemma Files
“ Just whisper my name, down below; just whistle it into open doors and across kitchen counters, into the bedrooms where they sleep, so they don’t forget me all the way. Just carry that girl over the ocean to her love. God knows there’s not enough un-thwarted lovers around.”
* * *
XIV. Wind
I took my little blue girl and was gone. I told her she looked like a daemon now, blue as the djinns. I told her she would never be able to go back to her kind, and she said she knew it; she already couldn’t. I almost fell in love with her myself, that strange blue creature who clutched at the bear claw on her neck like it was the only thing in the world worth holding onto, the only thing to believe in. The only reason she wasn’t afraid was because of that bear. It is peaceful, their world. When humans get a good long look into ursine eyes, they never want to come back.
I flew her high up over the clouds, blue in my arms, with her bag of gold things clutched to her chest. We passed through the blue country in a cold whirl.
“What do the other winds call you, Sir?” she asked me.
“I couldn’t say it in your language, my pretty blue djinn. It would fly right past your unrefined ears.”
“Say it anyway.” Demanding creature, how I wanted her.
“Khkhsiyyhlashhiii.” Like a breeze in alder trees, that’s how it sounded to her, like air through the holes of a recorder, along the teeth of grasses.
* * *
XV. Girl
Sometimes I could see down through the clouds. The land looked very small, like something I could rip, something I could step on and break. I had to endure his somewhat consuming embrace. That Wind, I began to realize, thousands of feet in the air with him, was a consummate flirt, worse than any Byron. He warmed all the way up to me once I was blue, talking away, tightening his arms, letting his hands, soft air currents, wander. I didn’t have much of a choice. It wasn’t as if I could twist free.
The air was very cold. It nipped at my blue body but didn’t freeze me. My lungs took in the thin air and didn’t pop. I liked to look down at the riverways. The delta where they met the San Francisco Bay was an unfurling plant, a nest of brown-green snakes. I had never been to San Francisco. I would never go to San Francisco. I was a little afraid of it, then, how fine the women would be, clean and broad, wearing egret feathers and red satin shoes; maybe prostitutes, maybe mistresses, probably not wives. So sure of their own bodies. Now, well, it’s a matter of pride. Of disdain. Of immense solitude.
From above, the city was all straight lines and sand dunes as we passed over.
“Nothing like a good tumble through that soft sand. How it whirls up in waves around you. What do you say, my blue demonette, we make a brief detour down to those dunes and have a frolic ourselves?” His pale hands were on me.
“You forget, sir, that I’m not a Wind. You would certainly blast me to pieces by accident. And I don’t want to be late.”
“So stiff, you people, so very rigid and dull. And we already may be too late as it is. There’s no way to know. What could we be late for, pray?”
When we passed over the Bay, out that opening where the fog comes in, and skimmed the open ocean, the Wind began to croon and sing. Like to a baby in a cradle, and like a dark incantation, at once.
“This is where I was born, you know, off these wavetops, right here, where the sky meets and touches the sea, saucy thing.” His voice was warm and sad. “I can go anywhere, following the map of her skin. See all of those ripples and wave crests and currents? Pathways each. I cruise those streets and comb across half the world with the pelicans and the gray whales under my hands. I like to eat up their shadows on the water, their exhalations.”
“That’s what you eat, shadows and breaths, like I eat bread or plums?” I felt ill.
“Why yes, girl, how do you think I stay immortal? I’ve been having yours this whole time. It’s part of the deal, the exchange. A toll, if you will. Your shadow isn’t nearly as mild mannered as yourself, I must say. Quite a vixen, really.”
“You mean, I have no shadow now? You mean you’ve sucked the air out of my lungs on top of turning me blue?”
“No, no my dear, you aren’t shadowless, what a thought! No, I only take small nibbles and licks, around the edges. The notches grow back in a matter of weeks, like a robust mint plant will, if watered well. Pick off the tips, it grows back healthier. Indeed, you should be honored by attentions, since your corporeal form is so ungiving; you will have a very potent shadow by the end of all this. I’m doing you a favor, as it were. And my little djinn, did you think the air in your lungs was ever yours? No, I give it to you, and then I take it back again when you’re through with it. Honestly, your kind thinks everything belongs to it by some sort of demented birthright..”
I shook as we gusted over the sea. I craned to see my shadow but couldn’t find it anywhere. The ocean was gray-blue and it rocked and plunged like the skin of an animal. The Wind flew me on routes and paths, marked in those waves, that were invisible to my eyes. I watched the pelicans glide between the troughs, almost touching the water, never faltering. The Wind loved those shadows. He ate pieces of them like I would eat sun-hot blackberries. I could see the Farallon Islands, wrenching up out of the water, rough and lonely. The waves were deep blue around the granite peaks.
He dropped me down on the marine terrace. My bag of gold clattered. He nipped at my shadow, rustled my skirts, kissed me right on the mouth, pointed me toward a large sea-cavern, and left the ground. My lips felt like ice.
“I’m still blue!” I cried out to him, when I looked down at myself.
“You always will be, my little daemon. That was the tax, the other toll. And I can pick you up in my arms anytime I please, now, take you up over the clouds. So don’t relax too much into domestic bliss, once you win back your man and all that. I’m always near. One day you may be glad to know it.” Then he was gone, a flash of blue velvet and a strong breeze.
* * *
So there I was, hands cut on that rough terrace of granite. It smelled like birdshit. The wind howled everywhere in my ears; a farewell. Waves made white troughs as they hit the abrupt rock of the shore. I felt I was at the top of a mountain, flooded to its neck. At the beginning of Creation.
I went toward a sea cave, had to climb over rocks and water to get inside. I found a tunnel, easy as that, open to the daylight. I crawled in. Within a few yards, it widened and widened, and I could stand. Lanterns hung on bone hooks that looked like the vertebrae of seals. The shadows they cast on the rough walls were animals I had never seen before, maybe heard of in storybooks—elephants covered in wool with tusks long as crescent moons, lions with teeth that curved out of their mouths and huge legs full of muscle, big broad wolves with short noses and tails, a creature like the camels of the Far East. It was a medieval bestiary, dancing along the walls, but the animals were new to me, not the unicorns and the dragons, manticores, griffins, harpies, giraffes. Beasts that were big and unglamorous and full of power.
I walked in those tunnels lit with oil, dancing with beasts I couldn’t name, for what felt like days. The gold pieces clanked against my back and made my shoulders ache. My shoes ripped to shreds on the sharp rocks. Sometimes I felt like one shadow animal followed me—a big bear with a short nose, or a creature more slender by far than a deer, with twisting horns. They leapt next to me; they seemed helpful, guiding me through bends and forks and crossroads. The air felt thin and damp below ground.
I came to a place where bones covered the walls in a mosaic, in patterns like you see in Persian rugs. I knew I was near. I heard a fox yap and howl. I heard the desperate alarm-songs of chickadees. As I continued, the tunnels opened out and were lined with fungi and molds that seemed planted, even painted, like garden patches of green, orange, white, purple, red.
“You’re making this way too easy for us, girl.” The voice came from a shadow. “Walking right into the trap, without any complaints? You want to see your man? I’ll throw you ri
ght in with him.” A creature shaped like a big woman walked toward me. In the light, she was not a woman. Her skin was blue mold and the greens of lichen, her nose long and knobbed as a parsnip root. Her breath filled the cave with the smell of fresh dirt. Her shadow was furred. “We’ll just keep you there after the wedding and watch you grow old,” she continued, laughing. “What fun. You’re even more delicious to look at than him, with all that blue skin. Fetching color. Good thing you’re just in time for the festivities.”
* * *
XVI. Bear
It was never her fault that I realized I loved being a bear more than I wanted her. It was the offer of another world, a siren call I couldn’t resist. I don’t know many men who can, at least not in this place, where all men came following the song of gold in the water, unable to hold themselves back from the promise of a new world.
I held her, strange and blue as a fruit, when she showed up in the granite tunnels to save me. It made my heart split. Once, it was all I wanted, to have this body back, to have the love of a sweet woman. But when she dripped the tallow on me and sent me back here, and they took the bear out of me, I began to grieve. I began to long, not for her any more but for that other body. You always want what you don’t have.
I want the balance of four legs, all rooted; the mercy of claws; the colors, burnished and sanguine, through bear eyes. And the smells. The world is full of them, layered like muscles against the skin of the air. I could walk the world on pathways of smell.
This is all I can think about anymore. It has become a worship, a trance, my only love. So when she came, I held her, I smoothed her hair, I kissed her cheeks, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it: you should not have come. I’m nothing to you. It was all a mistake and I’m sorry.
Instead of crying in my arms, like she might have done once, she did something extraordinary. She opened up a beaten bag on her back and pulled out a spindle and carding comb made entirely of gold. She wouldn’t tell me where they’d come from; only smiled around a secret and went to the corner, where my bearskin was. It had rotted off me, all the extra muscle and fat, but the skin was still intact, shed like a snake’s. She began to pull and brush it with the golden comb. I tried to stop her—it was all I had left—but she wouldn’t let me.
* * *
XVII. Long-Nose
I didn’t pay much attention to all that carding and combing. I didn’t either when she took out the spindle and starting spinning it all. I figured these were the domestic neuroses of a recent prisoner, trying to find something to do with her hands. We’re not always the cleverest lot, not by your reckoning, your measure of wits. Our intelligence lies more in the way of stones and roots. It’s earthen, slower, dense as clay. So, I didn’t think much of it. My wedding dress was almost done. I was growing a blue mold along the edges, like a fur trim. They have to be waited upon, these molds, given their proper time. I was distracted, thinking the trim would be pretty with my eyes. A vain thought, very human. They were rubbing off on me.
I suppose most curses don’t go exactly as planned. This is what makes life unexpected, you might say. I wasn’t expecting that blue waif of a girl to have the power to transform. It was the Lady of Gold, I’m sure, meddling as always with her pretty hands, seeing a curse laid, wanting to muddy the waters, to stamp down her own claw-prints. Beautiful females are like that, expecting everyone to look at them, craving the reflections. If I’d known the spindle, the comb, the apple, were hers, I’d have snatched them away in seconds. But I was distracted. And while I grew blue furs of mold, while I made a speckled bodice of orange spores, she’d spun and woven a huge cape with the bones of a grey fox that had died next door, whose rot we had been enjoying after dinner. Piece by damned piece she wove it, sewed the pieces together with sinew and bone sliver.
* * *
XVIII. Girl
On the morning of the wedding, I tucked the cape around him and gave him the apple. I took his hand, which was cold in mine. I threw the carding comb down, and it became a wet river of gold that shattered our glass cage and seeped down the stone tunnels. I held tight to the spindle and it clicked like the needle of a compass. We ran through that river of gold, and it stuck to our feet and the cape. The granite walls flickered around us. Chips of mineral glowed as we passed, giving us light, making my blue skin flash strange shades.
“This way,” the walls seemed to whisper. “That way,” wanting to keep us. The spindle felt like it was wound up with a long string attached far away, above ground, a string that pulled and pulled so I knew where to turn.
* * *
XIX. Long-Nose
I tore after them in my delicate dress. It rippled against the walls as I went. But the river of gold caught my feet like quicksand; not hardening, just a deep sludge. I called after them with the old songs of trolls, the ones that charm stones and tree burls into submission. None of them worked.
Nothing of ours does, in this new world.
* * *
XX. Girl
I knew when the tunnels passed under the ocean floor. The pressure in my ears felt like being far up in the sky. The weight of the water above us; the weight of air.
* * *
XXI. Bear
When the tunnels pushed up through the earth, out the entrance of an old badger den and into the air, I couldn’t resist the apple any longer.
“Wait for me love,” she said. “Let me under the cape, I’ll be your bear wife. We can share it.” She held out her blue hands.
I ate it whole, without thinking, without waiting, like the first time I saw the rivers here and the miners bending over them. Like the bear I killed long ago, in a perfect instant, without a thought. Pulled the trigger. I ate it all, because I couldn’t wait, because I couldn’t control my sudden desire, the soft luster of the apple like a star in my hand.
* * *
XXII. Girl
He became a bear again without me, so fast, a tempest of fur. I reached out for him, like I used to, when he let me climb on his back or curl against his chest. This time, he just looked at me. Blank, no recognition. Something different in his eyes, something I didn’t know. He growled. Then he lunged and his teeth ripped my arm open as easily as a pair of scissors in cloth.
I screamed, it hurt so much. Everything hurt.
I ran. He followed for a few paces. When I turned my head to look back, he was walking away from me into the night, satisfied. The place where the cape had trailed in gold made the fur around his tail and his back legs blonde as dry grass. I wanted to lie down and bleed out my whole life onto that ground, to have lost him.
I never saw him again.
* * *
XXIII. Lady of Gold
I had the last say in this story. That’s how I wanted it. I was tired of being used, and I liked the boy too, in the end. I gave him what he wanted. I couldn’t do the same for her. And who would be left, among her kind, to tell that story, to keep us all in the air, if she were a bear too, cavorting through the acorn groves, nursing clumsy cubs?
No, you need one left behind, to grieve and to scream that sad story against the clouds, against the sky-wet stars. To shape her sadness, big as a bear, into a memory that stays rooted in the human world and keeps us in your dreams.
No one wanted her, with that blue skin. She had sacrificed everything for the dream of a bear who only loved her because he was also a man. Bears love, oh they do, don’t get me wrong. But they don’t love the way humans do. Their love is like the long dark patience of winters, unflinching and slow. They don’t need it, desperately, to be whole; they already are. A human’s love and a bear’s, well, they just don’t fit. One needs to be transformed to match the other.
For a while I watched her dig and pan in the water. Not to get rich, but to find me. She demanded I come out. She whined and she cried and she yelled for me. I didn’t feel like obliging. My finger had been in the pie long enough. And I only have so much patience to grant wishes and such things. I let her dig and call, and dig, unt
il she gave up and went back to the mountains.
* * *
XXIV. Girl
I stopped outside the door of my father’s house one night. I stood by the window next to my sisters’ bed. The room looked warm, the covers thick goose-down and silk. The luxuries my going had bought. One of them turned in her sleep toward me and opened her eyes. I started to smile, and wave, but she screamed and screamed. She woke up my other sister and they ran to the door with a cast iron pan. I fled into the woods, crying blue tears down my blue cheeks, drying them with blue hands.
I went straight east, then. Up the streams, along the river, to our den once covered in gold. I didn’t go in. I barely looked at it. I had to be disciplined, to keep from crying. I kept walking, up and up, until I reached the highest blue lakes of the Sierra Nevadas, the lakes surrounded by jagged snow peaks. The air was very thin but at least my lungs were good for this. My blue skin was happy and tough in cold places, dyed to withstand the regions above clouds.
There, I found myself a cavern. I taught my body to hibernate, blue and slow. There, I stayed. One summer, I saw a mother grizzly and two cubs dancing through the columbines around the lake. Both cubs looked like their back ends had been dipped in gold.
* * *
XXV. Wind
In the end, she took me as a lover, though it was only now and then. No one else would have her, and after years she became lonely. It’s suitable, really. I doused her in sky. She was bound to me by a strange blue vein that bled. I taught her some of my songs, and we sang together in the cold crags of the mountain, while she drew bear after bear in the snow. They always melted in summer, ran down the rocks into the streams, down to the places where people lived.
They had stories about her, after a couple decades. The blue woman in the peaks of the Sierras. Once every few years, some foolish boy would climb near the top, wheezing on the thin air, fingers purple. He would leave a pile of apricots. Or a long blue velvet ribbon, or a candle. Offerings, I think, for general good fortune or strength, for a girl’s love. Something like that. He’d sit up there in the snow and talk for a little while to the air, thinking she cared.
