The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Is that in the Bronx?”

  “Yeah, Badgirl. That’s just where it is. You’re smarter than a sack of owls, you are.”

  “It’s ’cause of my dress,” I said proudly.

  A little while after that, the Deadman started walking me home from school, too. He slicked up his hair fancy and told my teacher he was my uncle. Had a signed slip from Daddy and everything. But we never made it all the way home. He’d stand me on a corner and give me a box that had pills inside it, so bright they looked like Skittles. And he said:

  “You’re so good, Badgirl. Nobody’ll mess with you on account of how good you are. You’re just as clean and bright as New Year’s Day.”

  “I wanna go home.”

  “Naw, you can’t yet. This here is medicine. Lots of people need medicine. You know how you hate it when you get sick. You don’t want people to get sick when you could make them better, do you? Just stand here and keep the box in your backpack and when sick people come asking, take their money and give them a couple of whatever color they ask for. If you do a good job, I’ll buy you a new dress.”

  I sniffled. It was fall and the damp came with fall. I had a wet leaf stuck to my show. “I don’t want a new dress,” I whispered.

  “Well, a new doll then. God knows a girl needs more than that ratty headless thing you got. I’ll come back for you and we’ll get back before your Daddy finishes his work.”

  I didn’t have mittens so my hands got tingly and cold and then I couldn’t feel them anymore. I waited on the corner and all kinds of strangers came up talking to me like we were friends and I did what the Deadman said I had to. My fingers felt like they were made out of silver so I pretended that was the truth, that I had beautiful silver hands with pictures scratched onto them like the fancy dishes on TV. And every time I had to touch somebody strange to me so I could give over their medicine I pretended my beautiful silver hands turned them into game show contestants with perfect teeth and fluffy hair and nametags the color of luck.

  At Christmas time the Deadman brought over a tree with one red ball on it and a strand of lights with only three bulbs working. He had on red velvet elf shoes like the kind Santa’s helpers wear at the mall, only his were old and dark and the bells didn’t make any sound. He also brought a bottle of brandy and some cheeseburgers and a cake from the grocery store with HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEXIS written on it in hot pink frosting. I could read it by myself by then, even though I’d had to stop wearing my smart dress because it got holes in it and all the buttons fell off. The Deadman set it all out like he was Santa but he was not Santa, and I bet Santa never came to his house when he was little, if the Deadman ever had been little. He never did bring me a new doll or a new dress. Daddy put on that show where they play part of a song and you have to guess what it’s called.

  Daddy and the Deadman had gotten so used to having me around they didn’t bother hiding anything anymore.

  “Bennie and the Jets,” the Deadman said. It took the blonde lady on TV forever to get it. She squealed when she did and jumped up and down. Her earrings glittered in the stage lights like fire.

  They ate some cake. It was red velvet on the inside but I didn’t feel right eating Alexis’s birthday cake. I ate half a cheeseburger but it was cold and the ketchup tasted like glue. The Deadman gave Daddy his Christmas present. Daddy didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say very much anymore. He just took the little small lump wrapped in red tissue paper from the Deadman and shook some out into a spoon. It did look like sugar after all. He flicked a lighter under the spoon and held it there until the sugar got all melted and brown and gluggy. It was sort of oily on top, too, like spilled gas.

  Like a mudpuddle.

  Then the Deadman handed him a needle, like the kind at the doctor’s office when you have to get your shots because otherwise you’ll get sick. I pulled the head off my princess and stuck it on the body with the pink ballgown. Daddy tied one of my hair ribbons around his arm and the Deadman stuck the needle in the mudpuddle first, and into Daddy second. Then he did it all over again on himself. Daddy smiled and his face got round and happy. It got to be his own face again. Daddy has a good face. He patted his lap for me to come sit with him and I did and it was Christmas for a minute.

  “How Deep Is Your Love,” the Deadman said. Another blonde lady frowned on the TV. She couldn’t think of the song. Poor lady. I didn’t know that song, either. But I knew the next one because it was Michael Jackson and I knew all his songs.

  “Billie Jean,” I whispered. Daddy was asleep.

  “C’mere, Badgirl,” said the Deadman.

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Why you afraid of me?”

  “I’m not afraid. Little black cats aren’t afraid of anything.”

  “Come on, Badgirl. I’m not gonna hurt you. I got you a present. Make you grow up quick and sharp.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  The Deadman lit himself a cigarette. He had the same don’t-get-sick shot Daddy had so how come he didn’t just go to sleep and leave me alone? I’d have cleaned up the dishes and made sure the TV got turned off. I did it all the time.

  “Your dad promised me whatever was in the armoire. You were in there. So you have to do what I say. I own you. I’ve been nice about it, because you’re such a little thing, but it’s hard for a man like me to keep being nice.” The Deadman started doing his trick with the mudpuddle and the spoon again. “I gotta carry that nice all day and Badgirl, I tell you what, it is heavy. I wanna put it down. My shoulders are aching. So you better come when I call or else I’m liable to just drop my nice right on the ground and break it into a hundred pieces.”

  “Don’t be rude, Badgirl,” Daddy murmured in his sleep. I looked up at his scruffy chin and something popped and spat inside me like grease and it made a stain on my insides that spelled out I hate my Daddy and I felt ashamed. He wasn’t even awake. He didn’t know anything. But I still hated him because little black cats don’t know how to forgive anybody.

  I think it’s against the law for a person to own another person but maybe he did own me because in a flash minute I was sitting down next to the Deadman even though I didn’t want to be. But not on his lap. On TV, a man with red hair was listening to the first few notes of a song I almost knew but couldn’t quite remember. The Deadman reached for my arm and Daddy woke up then, coughing like his breath got stolen.

  “What the fuck, man! Don’t do that,” Daddy said. “She’s my kid.”

  “Lighten up, Muddy! It’s just a little Christmas fun. She’s such a sour little thing. Always scowling at us like she’s our mother. You gotta nip that in the bud when they’re young. A lady should always be smiling.” The Deadman looked my Daddy in the eye. “You ever hear the one about the cat who broke his promise?” And he stuck the needle in my arm.

  After that I didn’t have hands anymore.

  I felt like I was all filled up with yellow, the yellow that looks like all the lights turned on at once. I could hardly see with all that yellow swimming around in me. The TV changed to another show, the one where the beautiful lady in a glittery dress turns giant glowing letters around and everyone tries to guess the sentence. She was wearing my smart dress with the butterflies on it. She reached up and turned over a B but I don’t like B because B is for Badgirl so I reached up to turn it back around and that’s when I knew I didn’t have hands anymore.

  My arms just ended all smooth and neat, no thumbs, no pinkie, no ring finger, like the plastic bottoms on the ballgown bodies. The stumps dripped yellow and blue butterflies onto the carpet. They flapped their wings there, grazing the rug with their antennae to see if it was flowers. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t anything. I looked around but I couldn’t see them lying anywhere, not even under the sofa. I couldn’t feel anything when I touched the letter B on TV with my stump, or the beautiful lady’s hair, or the wall of the living room. When I gave up and dropped my arm back down I must have knocked over a bottle or something because there was glass e
verywhere but I didn’t feel that either. The Deadman grabbed me to keep me from falling in the mess but I couldn’t make my fingers close around anything, not his sleeve or the corner of the table or anything. My fingers wouldn’t listen. They weren’t fingers anymore.

  I had so much yellow in me it was coming out, coming out all over, washing over everything and making it clean like the dancing lemons on the shaker of powdered soap. I twisted out of the Deadman’s grip and crawled away from him back into Daddy’s lap.

  “Daddy, my hands are gone. Fix it, please? I don’t know how to be a girl without hands. All girls have hands. No one will play with me at school.”

  But Daddy was asleep in his mudpuddle world again and when I tried to pat his face to wake him up I just clobbered him because stumps are so heavy, so much heavier than fingers. But he didn’t wake up. Someone on TV in Giant Letter World spun a big wheel and it came up gold, too. The beautiful lady in my smart dress clapped her hands. See? All girls have hands. Except me. Another blue butterfly flew out of my stump and landed on the window. It was night outside. The butterfly glowed so blue it turned into the moon.

  The Deadman pulled a deck of cards out of his back pocket and started dealing himself a hand of solitaire at our kitchen table. He was real good at shuffling. I took my eyes back from the butterfly moon and put them on the Deadman. He put his cigarette in his mouth and dragged on it good and ragged.

  He was shuffling cards with my hands.

  I knew my own hands and those were it. My pinkie still had green fingernail polish on it from my friend’s mom’s house and a scratch where I fell playing hopscotch last week. My wrist had my lucky yarn bracelet on it. He’d popped them off me like a princess’s head and stuck them on his body. My hands should have been way too small for the Deadman to wear but somehow they weren’t, either he got little to match them or they got big to match him. I decided he got little, because my hands should be loyal to me and not him. My hand put down an ace of hearts and waved at me. Then words started coming out of me like blue butterflies and I couldn’t stop them and they came out without permission, without me even thinking them before they turned into words.

  “Are you a person?”

  The Deadman chewed on one of my fingernails which he had no right to do.

  “Used to be.”

  “In Paris, France? With the river?”

  The Deadman snorted. “Yeah.”

  “How do you stop being a person?”

  “Lots of ways. It’s far harder to keep on being a person than to stop. I do think about starting up again sometimes, though. I do think about that. But once you been to that river, it fills you up forever. You need something real good to turn your heart back to red.”

  “Why do you keep coming back here? Do you even like my Daddy? Are you really his friend?”

  “I think he’s a worthless piece of shit, Badgirl. But he has cable. And he has you.”

  The blue butterfly moon got bigger and bigger in the window. It was gonna take up our whole apartment. “Did he know I was in the…the…arrr-mwah?”

  The Deadman sighed. He put down a quick 2-3-4 on his ace. “It wouldn’t have gone different if he did or didn’t, kid. The thing about having the whole world in your back pocket is that every day is nothing but wall to wall bargains. I don’t have to dicker. They keep upping the price. Everyone wants the world. I just want everyone.”

  “I want my hands back.”

  The beautiful lady turned around six or seven letters quick, one after the other. She was still wearing my smart dress, which I guess is why she always knows the answer to the puzzle. But now my dress had gotten long like a wedding dress. It glittered all over. The green bow and green buttons were all emeralds falling down her back and all over the stage. Her chest looked like the sun and she had stars all up and down her arms and the blue butterfly moon was rising in the studio, too, right behind her head like a crown. Everyone had stolen my things. I wanted her to come out of the TV and save me and turn me around like the letter B. But she wasn’t going to. She had my dress. She had what she wanted.

  I’m a little black cat, I thought. Little black cats run away. Little black cats don’t need hands. The blue butterfly moon had gotten so big it bulged up against my treehouse and the front door at the same time. Little black cats can climb up on the moon and ride it far, far away. To Paris, France and the Bronx and the continent of Atlantis.

  The Deadman glanced at the game show. For once, he didn’t solve it before the contestants did. He just touched his lips with my fingers and said quietly:

  “I need them.”

  Little black cats don’t need anyone. Little black cats have magic no one can steal. Little black cats run faster than dead men.

  “Why?”

  All the letters lit up at once and the lady in my dress touched them all, smiling, buttons and bows and butterflies sparkling everywhere, until they spelled out: HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE.

  “With clean hands, Badgirl, you can start all over.”

  Little black cats run right out, just as soon as you open the door.

  A Fall Counts

  Anywhere

  The late summer sun melts over a ring of toadstools twenty feet tall. On one side, a mass of glitter and veiny neon wings. On the other, a buzzing mountain of metal and electricity. The stands soar up to the heat-sink of heaven. Three thousand seats and every one sold to a screamer, a chanter, a stomper, a drunk, a betting man.

  Two crimson leaves drift slowly through the crisp, clear air. They catch the red-gold twilight as they chase each other, turning, end over end, stem over tip, and land in the center of the grassy ring like lonely drops of blood. But in the next moment, the sheer force of decibel-mocking, eardrum-executing, sternum-cracking volume blows them up toward the clouds again, up and away, high and wide over the shrieking crowd, the popcorn-sellers and the beer-barkers, the kerosene-hawkers and the aelfwine-merchants, until those red, red leaves come to rest against a pair of microphones. The silvery fingers of a tall, lithe woman stroke the golden veins of the leaf with a deep melancholy you can see from the cheap seats, from the nosebleeds. She has the wings of a monarch butterfly, hair out of a belladonna-induced nightmare, and eyes the color of the end of all things. The other mic is gripped in the bolt-action fist of a barrel-chested metal man, a friendly middle-class working stiff cast in platinum and ceramic and copper. His mouth lights up with a dance of blue and green electricity that looks almost, but not entirely comfortably, like teeth.

  —LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ANDROIDS AND ANDROGYNES, SPRITES AND SPROCKETS, WELCOME TO THE ONE YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR, THE BIG SHOW, THE RUMBLE IN THE FUNGAL, THE BRAWL IN THE FALL, THE TWILIGHT PRIZEFIGHT OF WILD WIGHT AGAINST METAL MIGHT! THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S TIME TO ROCK THE EQUINOX! IT’S THE TWELFTH ANNUAL ALL SOULS’ CLEEEEAVE! STRAP YOURSELVES IN FOR THE MOST EPIC BATTLE ROYAL OF ALL TIME! ROBOTS VS. FAIRIES, MAGIC VS. MICROCHIP, THE AGRARIAN VS. THE AUTOMATON, SEELIE VS. SOLID STATE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VS. INTELLIGENT ARTIFICE! I AM YOUR HOST, THE THINK version 3.4.1 copyright Cogitotech Industries all SUPER EXTREME rights SUPER EXTREMELY reserved. If you agree to the Think’s MASSIVELY MIND-BLOWING and FULLY-LOADED terms and restrictions please indicate both group and individual consent via the RADICALLY ERGONOMIC numerical pad on your armrest. 67% group consent is required by law for the Think to proceed AWWWW YEAH 99% INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY COMPLIANCE ACHIEVED! LET’S HEAR IT FOR OUR STONE COLD SECURITY TEAM AS THEY MAKE THEIR WAY TO THE MEGA-BUMMER HOLD-OUT IN SEAT 42D! ALL RIGHT! HERE WE GO! NOW, THIS TIME WE’VE GOT A SHOCKING TWIST FOR YOU EAGER REAVERS! TONIGHT ON THE SUNDOWN SHOWDOWN, THE FANS BRING THE WEAPONS! THAT’S RIGHT, THE CODE CRUSHERS AND THE SPELL SLAYERS WILL THROW DOWN WITH WHATEVER GARBAGE YOU’VE BROUGHT FROM HOME! PLEASE DEPOSIT YOUR TRASH, FLASH AND BARELY-LEGAL ORDNANCE WITH AN USHER BEFORE THE FIRST BELL OR YOU WILL MISS THE HELL OUUUUUUT! Cogitotech Industries and the Non-Primate Combat Federation (NPCF) are not responsible for any COMPLETELY HILARIOUS ancillary injurie
s, plagues, transformations, madnesses, amnesias or deaths caused by either attendee-provided weaponry or munitions natural to NPCF fighters. Spectate at your own risk. ARE YOU READY, HUMAN SCUM? YOU WANNA BLAST FROM THE VAST BEYOND BLOWING OUT YOUR BRAIN CELLS? WELL, BUCKLE UP FOR THE MAIN EVENT, THE GRAND SLAMMER OF PROGRAMMER AGAINST ANCIENT GLAMOUR! LET’S GET READY TO GLIIIIITTTTTER! WITH ME AS ALWAYS IS MY PARTNER IN PRIME TIME, THE UNCANNY UNDINE, THE PIXIE PULVERIZER, FORMER HEAVY DIVISION WORLD CHAMPION AND THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER, MANZANILLA MONSOOOON!

  —Good evening, Lord Think. I am gratified to sit at your side once more beneath the divinity of oncoming starlight on this most hallowed of nights and perform feats of commentary for the capacity crowd here at Dunsany Gardens.

  —DON’T YOU MEAN CAPACITOR CROWD? HA. HA. HA.

  —I do not. When I say a thing, I mean it, and always shall mean it, without alteration, to the the deepest profundity of time.

  —OH, WHAT’S THAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU! IT SEEMS LIKE THE AUDIENCE DISAGREES WITH YOU, BABY! YES! YEAH! THE THINK DESTROYS PUNS! THE THINK REQUIRES LAUGHTER TO LIVE! THAT IS NOT ONE OF THE THINK’S BONE-FRACTURING COMEDIC INTERJECTIONS THE THINK’S BATTERY IS PARTIALLY RECHARGED BY INTENSE SONIC VIBRATIONS patent #355567UA891 Cogitotech Industries if you can hear this you are in violation of TOTALLY BANGING patent law CAN YOU DIG IT I “THINK” YOU CAN!

  —Was it with puns that my Lord Think defeated the immortal and honorable warrior Rumplestiltskin at Electroclash Nineteen?

  —NO, THE THINK USED HIS FAMOUS ATOMIC DROP MOVE ON RUMPER’S PREHISTORIC SKULL! HE TRIED TO TURN THE THINK TO GOLD BUT THE THINK IS ALREADY 37% GOLD BY WEIGHT! THE THINK’S INTERNAL MECHANISMS AND PROCESSING POWER WERE ONLY IMPROOOOOOVED! AND WHAT ABOUT YOU, MANZANILLA? DID YOU USE YOUR FANCY POETRY TO TAKE DOWN THE TIN MAN AT ELECTROCLASH TWENTY? The Tin Man is the intellectual and physical property of Delenda Technologies, all rights reserved.