The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  30th September

  Thirty-two days . . .

  6:33 p.m.—Bea

  The first time Bea took off in a glider, she was terrified, though she’d have sooner crashed than admit it. Indeed, it’d irked to admit it to herself. It wasn’t the flying—once airborne she felt joy she’d never known—but the taking off that took some getting used to. The plunge of the roller coaster in reverse: the slow stretch and pull of the ground catapult, the tightening, the almighty snap and fling.

  The lift—oh, the lift!—was sublime. After the abrupt snap came the radiant soar. Rising into the air as if entirely weightless, the catapult forgotten, the plane forgotten, everything forgotten—all past experience erased by this single, spectacular moment of absolute presence. A moment that stretched until the glider began to quake and tilt, prompting the pilot to seize the joystick and seek an updraught.

  It took half a dozen flights before Bea began to savour the catapult as much as the lift, the climax as much as the release. Now, as the giant elastic band pulls taut, Bea feels a coil of anticipation tighten inside her. She sits in a state of both absolute stillness and ceaseless quivering, as if her entire body were on the brink of laughter. She has no understanding of the physical dynamics or meteorological phenomena that keep the glider in flight without an engine, nor does she wish to. To define terms, to understand concepts, would weigh it down, would make concrete that which must remain celestial.

  Bea glances out the window at the diminishing figure of Dr. Finch below, waving. She doesn’t wave back. That their affair gives her unfettered access to the Cambridge University Royal Aeronautical Society’s gliders is its main purpose. The sex is all right, but she feels nothing for him otherwise, excepting occasional disgust.

  As she rises, Bea’s breathing deepens and slows. A wisp of hair escapes her bun, intruding on the view. She pushes it back. When flying, Bea is sometimes seized by the urge to shave her head, to leave the scenery unsullied. It’s an action that’d enrage her elegant mamá—reason enough to do it—and free herself. But, though she’d not admit this either, Bea’s too vain. Looking in the mirror, she compares herself to what she loves. Sometimes her skin and hair are the nut-brown colour of the female blackbird, her eyes the midnight black of the male. Though perhaps her hair is closer in colour to a crow’s wing and certainly as fine—secretly she wishes it were a little fuller. Sometimes . . .

  Be careful! Dr. Finch’s whine invades the sacred silence of the cockpit. Bea shuts him out of her mind. Forget shaving her head, now she’d like a lobotomy, if only to get a little peace.

  Don’t be so reckless.

  Cállate. Bea presses finger and thumb to her temple. Fuck off.

  Bea snatches at the joystick, dips the glider’s nose, then pulls sharply back. The plane arcs up and, for one long elysian moment, all she can see is sky—around, above, within. She is free.

  Bea screams an ecstatic scream. “Wooooohoooooo!”

  In the field below, her tutor will be cursing and shaking his fist at the heavens. Shutting him out, she gazes up at the clouds, made pink-bottomed by the setting sun, holding the suspension a second longer than she should, before allowing the plane to fall backwards, nose plummeting towards the ground in a full turn of the Catherine wheel, so all she sees is landscape—harvested fields and autumn trees. Until, at last, the inverted earth is scooped up and the plane righted and level again.

  Bea gives another gleeful howl. “Woooooooo!”

  That’s right, niña, you show him you’re not some silly girl, you’re a sister—

  “¡Vete a la mierda, Mamá!” Bea hisses, as annoyed by the invasion of her mother’s approval as she is by her teacher’s rebuke. For nearly eighteen years her mother has encouraged her to act audaciously and, although Bea relishes nothing more than reckless behaviour, she’s damned if she’ll give her mother the satisfaction of knowing it.

  Bea banks a sharp left, tipping the plane so suddenly and sharply that she slips across her seat, nearly cracking her forehead against the glare shield. She holds the joystick steady, pushing it as far as it’ll go, so the glider tips and the sky slides. The ground rises to her right, then, all at once, the plane rolls sideways, tumbling, flipping, inverting the world so that earth is sky and sky is earth, suspending Bea like a bat in the cockpit, about to plummet headfirst 2,378 feet to the fields below, in a mashup of body and bone and fuselage. But then she’s rolling, following the circular arc of the left wing as it high-fives and low-fives and high-fives the air again.

  “Wooohooooo!”

  As the glider balances, Bea’s ecstatic shrieks above are seized by Finch’s cursing cries below, both ascending to the heavens in a discordant harmony of exalted rage.

  “Woooo—fucking—hoooo!”

  “What the fucking hell were you playing at?”

  “I knew you were seething,” Bea says, climbing out of the grounded glider. “I could feel it. I could hear you howling obscenities at—”

  “Of course I fucking was.” Dr. Finch is beside Bea before her feet have touched soil. “What the hell were you thinking? In fifteen years of flying I’ve never pulled a stunt like that—a backflip and a barrel roll—without a decent thermal lift. What the fucking hell—”

  “Was I thinking? Yeah, yeah. I know, I know.” Bea strides towards the stretch of lax elastic snaking across the grass. Now that she’s grounded she only wants to be airborne again. “Now, stop whining and give me a hand with the catapult.”

  “What?” Dr. Finch, rooted to the ground, stares at her. “Are you fucking insane? You’re not going back up there. It’s nearly dark.”

  “Nearly”—Bea lifts the elastic, finding the winch—“But not quite.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Oh, come on,” Bea snaps. “Don’t be such a dick.”

  “Society rules,” Dr. Finch retorts. “You’ll get me kicked out. Dammit, you’ll probably get me disciplined.”

  Bea swears to herself. She wants to fly, wants to feel free again. It’s all she’s ever wanted—a legacy left by a peripatetic childhood ruled by strangers who sent her mamá to the dungeon of Saint Dymphna’s while interning Bea in a dozen different foster homes, from which she tried to escape over and over again.

  “You’re such a bloody coward.”

  “And you’re bloody suicidal.”

  So what if I am? Bea wants to say. Surely it’s commendable not to cower from death but to leap into its jaws with a warrior’s cry. Her maniacal, manic mamá at least taught her that. Bea opens her mouth, about to tell him so, then thinks better of it. “Piss off.”

  Dr. Finch glares at her.

  A taut silence stretches between them—the catapult pulled too far, ready to snap. With one last, reluctant glance at the grounded glider, Bea drops the elastic to her feet. She eyes him instead: the thin limp frame, weak-featured face, slightly anaemic pallor of the overeducated, affected scruffy hair and stubble growth to suggest that his mind is on more elevated subjects than personal grooming. What a prick. Bea wishes she had immediate access to a better option. Sadly, right now, she does not.

  “So,” Bea says. “If I can’t fly, then I need the next best thing—is your wife expecting you home?”

  Afterwards, Bea lies across the sofa in Dr. Finch’s office, while he scrambles about for his clothes—acting as if he can’t quite imagine how this happened, as if that means he can later claim that it didn’t actually happen at all. She scans the titles of his textbooks, searching for anything by her favourite philosopher.

  She doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wants to be in the air or, if she can’t, reading a book. An escape. An alternative world. She’d been wrong. The orgasm, especially as it’d been executed by the inattentive Dr. Finch, was a pathetic echo of flight. She should have stayed in the air. She should have stolen the plane. Next time she will. Next time she won’t come down.

  1st October

  Thirty-one days . . .

  5:31 a.m.—Liyana

&
nbsp; The first dive is always the finest. The moment she slices the water and slides under. That is it. Her peak moment. A singular rush of joy floods her veins like a morphine shot as Liyana dives, arms like an arrow, moving so fast and free that she feels no longer solid but liquid.

  “I hate being human,” Liyana often says. “Imagine gliding through water all your life instead of stumbling through air.”

  “You moan like a beached whale,” her aunt Nyasha often replies. “Or that mermaid in that film you—”

  “Madison,” Liyana would always interrupt. “Splash. Yeah, except the blond hair and blue eyes, I wish I was.”

  Liyana allows herself this joy once a month. She “borrows” her aunt’s membership, walking the half mile to the Serpentine Spa on Upper Street, and swims for an hour. No more, no less. Then she leaves and doesn’t return, no matter how much she wants to, until the next month and the next permitted trip. The enforced limitation is a regretful but necessary discipline to keep the inevitable aftermath of sorrow at bay.

  “So why do you go, vinye?” Nya asks. “If it makes you sad?”

  “The same reason you chase men who make you miserable,” Liyana replies. “Because if you didn’t, you might as well be dead.”

  Almost five years ago Liyana spent six hours a day in a swimming pool. Then, swimming had anointed her only with joy, much like her aunt’s new (and fifth) husband had Nya. At ten she’d won enough trophies to fill an oak cabinet; at thirteen she was set for Olympic stardom. Then came the accident that beached Liyana for a year, casting her forever back into amateur waters. Now swimming brings joy and sorrow in equal measure. The first dive is still the finest, the final always the saddest. And then Liyana leaves, before the longing to stay becomes too overwhelming. It’s already difficult enough to let go after only an hour. And in the following days the scent of chlorine clings to her skin no matter how she scrubs, twisting her guts and stinging her black eyes, bright as stones on the seabed. When at last it leaves, her skin—dark as the depths of the ocean—is parched again until the next month.

  Underwater, as her torpedoed self slows, Liyana opens her eyes to the lengths of shimmering blue ceramic tiles, shaped into a sea serpent of two curling mosaic S’s. She is poised to flip, to kick off from the tiles and push to the surface, when she sees a glimmering in the corner: a stone, bright white as a skull. It’s as big as her fist and, as she glides towards it, Liyana thinks of Kumiko’s face. Kumiko, her skin pale as bone within curtains of black hair like a waning moon in a midnight sky.

  “If I’m the moon,” Kumiko had said, “then you’re the night sky, curling round me.”

  Liyana laughed. “All right then.”

  “No, I’m not the moon.” Kumiko leaned forward. “I’m the teeth in your dark, wet mouth.”

  Kumiko touched her lips to Liyana’s. Slowly, Liyana kissed her. “You’re trying to distract me.”

  Kumiko smiled. “Is it working?”

  “I’m trying—I want to draw you.”

  “I want to fuck you.”

  Liyana laughed again. “You’re not very ladylike, are you?”

  Kumiko pulled back. “By whose definition?”

  “Well . . .” Liyana tapped her pen to her teeth. “You’d certainly better not talk to my aunt like that.”

  “That depends”—Kumiko’s smile deepened—“Does she look like you?”

  “Right,” Liyana said, setting down her pen. “You’re definitely not meeting her now.”

  Kumiko rolled her eyes. “Like I ever was.”

  “You will,” Liyana said. “I’m just . . .”

  “Waiting for the right time,” Kumiko said. “I know, I’ve heard your spiel enough times I could recite it back to you.”

  “Please,” Liyana said. “You’ve got to—”

  “Give you time,” Kumiko finished. “Yeah, yeah. Yada yada . . . You know what? You need to stop being so ladylike and grow some balls—or boobs, or whatever the fem equivalent is—and stop being such a fucking coward.”

  Liyana surfaces clutching the stone. Shaking the water from her hair, she looks up into the face of a man. She frowns and folds her arms over the poolside edge. He gazes down at her.

  “I thought I’d have to call the lifeguard,” he says.

  Liyana’s frown deepens into a scowl.

  “You can hold your breath for a really long time,” he clarifies. “It looked like you might not come up.”

  “Fifteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” Liyana says. She doesn’t want to be talking with this man and has no idea why he is talking to her, but the desire to speak about swimming is ever-present, the words escaping before she can stop them. “I used to be able to hold it for tw—longer.”

  “Used to?”

  Liyana shrugs droplets from her shoulders. “Out of practice.” She glances back at the pool. She’s wasting valuable water time. “I should—”

  “How often do you come here?”

  Liyana’s frown returns. “Did you just ask me if I come here often?”

  He laughs. “Yeah, I guess I did—sorry, I didn’t mean to.” He pulls his hand over his hair. Liyana notices that he’s quite attractive—tall, muscular, skin the colour of wet earth—exceedingly attractive, one might say, if one were that way inclined. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was only asking . . . this isn’t my local gym. I wondered if it’s worth the membership fee.”

  Liyana rubs her thumb over the wet stone. It wants to return to the water. “I suppose so, I don’t know. I only come to swim.”

  “How often?”

  “Once a month.”

  His eyebrows rise. “Really? You don’t—you look much fitter than that.”

  Liyana shifts in the water, pulling her arms closer, covering the view to her breasts. “I don’t think—”

  “Shit,” he says. “I’m so sorry. That sentence should’ve stayed in my head. I didn’t—”

  “Mean it like that?” Liyana raises a single eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I, um, I only meant to say that you—you look like an athlete.”

  Liyana regards him. In addition to being handsome, he has a voice that, even when he’s self-conscious and stumbling, sounds like a river smoothing rocks. Perhaps that’s why she has let this conversation go on so long.

  I was an athlete once. The words wait in Liyana’s throat. But to let them out would incite questions she has no intention of answering.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says instead. “I’ve only got forty-seven minutes left.”

  “That’s—you’re very . . . precise.”

  He smiles again and Liyana is caught by it, reminded of something long ago. A moon breaking through clouds. A river catching its light.

  2nd October

  Thirty days . . .

  10:36 a.m.—Scarlet

  Scarlet didn’t want to go but her grandmother had insisted. Why she’d thought a day’s apprenticeship with a Hatfield blacksmith was an appropriate eighteenth birthday present, Scarlet can’t imagine. But it’s another pitiful example of how far and fast her grandmother’s mind is declining—her birthday isn’t till the end of the month. Even so, what could she do but go along with it?

  The blacksmith, Owen Baker, is the sturdiest man Scarlet has ever seen, with a head as bald as her belly, a neck as thick as her thigh, and hands almost as broad as hers are long. He could throw her over his shoulder and disappear into the forest in a flash. Not that she can see the forest. The forge is located in a courtyard, adjacent to a pig farm. Yet when Scarlet thinks of blacksmiths, if she ever has since the age of eight, she thinks of fairy tales involving forests and vulnerable girls—or perhaps that’s huntsmen?

  “All right then, what is it you’ll be wanting to make now, Miss Thorne?”

  Scarlet looks up, momentarily blank. She’d been tuning out the blacksmith’s introduction, with its potted history of the noble art of crafting rivets, but hadn’t expected it to be over so soon.

  “Sorry?” Scarlet starts
twisting her hair into a bun. The thick dark-red curls spring like flames from her head, framing her eyes, brown as the wood that feeds the fire. “I didn’t think I’d be . . .”

  “Well, as I say”—the blacksmith rests both broad hands on his anvil and leans forward—“You’ll be making whatever you want. A rivet, a nail, a sword . . .”

  Scarlet stares at him, releasing her grip on her hair. “A sword?”

  “Oh, yes.” The blacksmith grins, eyes suddenly bright as a three-year-old boy’s. “You want to be making a sword, Miss Thorne?”

  Scarlet considers this curious proposal. “No, not really.”

  “Fair enough.” He straightens himself, the light in his eyes dimming. “So, then what’ll it be?”

  Scarlet reaches for her hair again. “But I thought you’d tell me what to do.”

  Owen Baker shakes his head. “What’s the fun in that now? No. It’s up to you.”

  Scarlet’s thrown. She fingers her hair, chews her lip. Then, all at once, it comes to her. “Okay, I know.” She grins, delighted by her inspiration. “I want to make a gate.”

  “A gate?”