by Amber Sparks
My trunk, wails the girl. What about my toothbrush? My paints? My underwear?
Not to worry, her godmother tells her. This will help you travel light, live in studio apartments, take trains and buses and things. When you want your things, you just snap your fingers in the air and say, Trunk, show up! And obviously, wait until you’re alone. When you want it to disappear, give it a good whack.
When the girl arrives at the stables, her fairy godmother is standing over a slain donkey, silver knife in hand. Jesus, says the girl.
Had nothing to do with this, says the fairy godmother grimly. Like most fairies, she respects organized religion, but finds it too tame for her purposes. This is old, wild magic, she says, and the girl finds herself wrapped in the donkey’s hide, stinking and bloody and covered with flies and fat globs. The girl is horrified. Clean it with your magic or something, she demands.
But the fairy godmother shakes her head. I can’t hide you from your father without masking the scent trail, she says. He’ll have the bloodhounds out.
They walk to the wood, the girl trying to keep from fainting. She can close her nose to smells, a trick she learned years ago around ladies and gentlemen wearing too much scent, but she can still taste the metallic tang of blood, still feel the flies biting at her face and hands.
This sucks, she says.
The fairy godmother nods, and stops. With her strong arms, she pulls at the front of an enormous black oak tree, pulls and pushes until it swings open cleanly, reveals an inside thick and dark as night air. It’s an abditory, explains the godmother. A place for hiding precious things. Ash is, of course, the traditional choice of shut-away women and spirits, but there isn’t any ash around here.
You’re going to shut me in a tree? I’d rather die! The girl tries to run but the donkey’s head falls over her face, oozing and fly-ridden, and she stumbles over a stump and falls. She didn’t think she could weep anymore, and here she is weeping again. This is rotten magic, she says. Just let me die like I wanted to.
Oh, buck up, Melodrama, says the fairy, and she pulls the girl to her feet. I’m not shutting you in a tree—what kind of shitty godmother would I be? I’m sending you on a journey, that’s all. It’s this first part that’s hardest. Then step into the tree, step into a new life. I’ll warn you, it’s harder for me to cross over into that country. Far less magic there—it’s all gone underground. I’ll do what I can to help.
The girl hesitates. Her fairy godmother wouldn’t trick her, would she? Well, anyway, better than having her father forced on her. She supposes she would rather live in a tree. One could tell oneself stories, make friends with the woodland creatures. One could be alone.
Oh, says the fairy. One thing you should know. The donkey skin—burn it. But not until you find true love. You’ll lose your chance at love forever if you shed your skin too soon.
The girl stares. Though she is hardly a girl now, she corrects herself—the creature stares, glimmers of girl visible in shining dark eye, in small sleek foot. She puts that foot out now, bare and bleeding a little. She steps into the black mouth of the oak tree. She wonders what true love will look like.
WHEN SHE FIRST takes life drawing classes, she thinks, for some reason, about that donkey. She draws the lines over the calves, the human hips, the belly—but she is all the while thinking of the chocolate-colored hide, of her godmother’s golden hair come down with the knife, the blood splashed over the straw like ketchup. The sadness and the new freedom of that hide.
She is still living with him now, and it will be a few years yet before she leaves him. He is making them chicken salad sandwiches during a break between classes. She is wearing the bone-colored dress, his favorite, with big black boots, thick-soled and tall. She is still in love with him, in this moment, in this part of the story, and so she put her arms around his skinny back and squeezes. They are both laughing in her tiny kitchen, they are making love under the soft heat of the skylight, they are making sandwiches, they are making time, space; they are making room for someone or no one else already.
They are making a bonfire at his parents’ cabin and they are burning the donkey skin. It is something she will never regret, despite her godmother’s warnings.
THE BUTCHER IS the first person she meets, upon stepping out of the tree. She finds herself in Central Park, though she doesn’t know it’s Central Park, and the butcher thinks she might be one of the Shakespeare in the Park actors. He’s tattooed from neck to toes, and taking a short break from running his hip-and-featured-on-a-cable-travel-show butcher shop. He’s a sweet, funny man, handsome and a little older than her father, gentle even with the dead flesh of his animals. Perhaps it’s having lived in the donkey skin for a moment, but she feels drawn to him. He likes her to wear the skin when they have sex. (Don’t worry; he cleans and tans it first. And don’t worry; she asks him to. It hurts, yes, but she wants to try everything in this new world.) He tells her important things about the place she’ll call home now.
The stars, he says, are just salt. The grass is fuel for the animals that feed us. The city is our audience, a million hungry bellies and eyes.
And an animal, he says, is always a dragon that will devour you if you don’t respect it. He takes her to the country some weekends, teaches her how to hunt with a bow, to kill with a knife. He teaches her to skin, to flay. He teaches her to preserve a hide.
She uses the butcher’s beast blood to make new paintings; she paints startling, painful creatures with thousands of tongues and no heads. The butcher doesn’t mind—but he lives alone in a room above his shop, and he doesn’t have the room to keep her and her paintings there. So she eventually packs up her things, back into her magical trunk—Trunk, show up!—and she agrees as a last favor to deliver a hog to a roast for a recent art school graduate.
You’ll meet some people like you, the butcher says. Kids who paint, the kind of weird shit you love to paint. Your people.
She doesn’t tell the butcher that her people are busy ruling over sleepy seaports, busy discussing casino taxes and port tariffs. She doesn’t tell him the only art she ever saw there was hung in the hotel lobbies she toured as a princess. It was her job to bless their grand opening with champagne and a serene smile for the photographers. She wore her best watered silk and knew the paintings were no good.
THE ART STUDENT WAS the second person she met. He wore a ridiculous hat and she was, of course, wrapped in the eponymous donkey skin, her protection among strangers. He thought she was a performance artist like him. He made corporate logos out of clay, fired them, then smashed them with a hammer while his friends filmed him. You’re an idiot, she told him. And I’m escaping my father. He wants to marry me.
Just like Oedipus, he said, and she never bothered to correct him. It grated on her, years later, and she felt sure she should have said something at the beginning. Perhaps they could have stayed together then, if he had only known his Greek tragedy. Maybe then he would have understood her better, understood how suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you. Maybe he would have been okay with her melancholy then.
He took her to his tiny place and asked if she needed clothes as well as a place to crash. She said no and yes and snapped her fingers in his tiny bathroom. The trunk came crashing down on the sink. What was that, he said, are you okay in there, I mean, what the fuck?
Yeah, she shouted, throwing on the blood-colored dress. She snapped again to dismiss the trunk and walked out nervously, hoping he would let her stay. His place wasn’t much bigger than the butcher’s. Her fairy godmother was hovering somewhere over the stove, giving her a thumbs-up and looking a bit uncomfortable by the ceiling. She rarely used her wings.
He’s got a trust fund, said the fairy godmother. Good catch!
Okay, said the girl. What is that?
What’s what, said the boy. Holy shit, said the boy. That dress is incredible. It’s exactly the color of blood.
I’m a painter, said the girl. I want to go to art school.
Can I stay here? She almost said, Can I take advantage, but she stopped herself in plenty of time. A life at court had adequately prepared her for every form of falsity, if not much else.
You are so goth, said the boy. He was in awe. He was in love. Yes, you can stay.
She told him his hat made it difficult to tell if he was being serious. Maybe I don’t want to be taken seriously, he said, and grinned, and just like that she was his, they were they, on the floor, on the couch, on the counter, on the balcony in warm weather and much to the neighbors’ annoyance. (Don’t judge her too much. He really was very nice, and very handsome, and an artist at that, and she’d only met older men in her father’s castle. And he really did have that trust fund.)
Happily ever after, yes? True love, yes? Unlike the butcher, he was young, he was exciting, he was flexible. It had been suspiciously easy, she sometimes thought. Her godmother stopped showing up after she burned the skin, and she had to follow the days on her own just like any other young woman (albeit with a magic trunk). Except after the endless grinning and the explosion and the joy and the music and the all-night painting sessions and the great, great sex—after all that comes the okay sex and the bad sex, the fights and fallout and the nights spent alone or wishing they were alone. And finally comes the rain, and the last night, always tinged with such poignancy that it feels, just a little, like the page after the last page of the tale, the grin and the hat and the door closed on his face and then nothing. A tape played forward then backward past the beginning.
It was a ring in a cake that finally did it.
She was baking a cake for them both, celebrating her first show. They had friends over, crowded into the tiny flat, and she was wearing the dress the color of blood over a pair of black jeans. Everyone was laughing too loudly, and there was music, and she never could get used to the music here, so bold and brutal, and his jacket was in her way on the counter she was clearing. She picked it up and a ring fell out. It was intricate and silver, and inscribed—and not to her. She put her hands down on the cool countertop, felt the warmth of loss flood her fingertips. Something switched off inside her. She calmly put the ring in her mixing bowl. She watched the yellow swirls of batter slowly snare the silver.
She remembers it now, though she can no longer remember his face or even his hat. She remembers the impossible clang of his teeth, biting down on the solid metal. She remembers the yell, the slow recognition, the way he screamed, You could have fucking killed me. She remembers the friend with the green hair and the Ramones tee-shirt, so red-faced she knew it must be her. She remembers the feeling, finally, of that door closing on everyone. The feeling, not bad, of being alone again. She almost wishes for another love affair, sometimes, just to be able to end it. Just to feel that door close once more. Would that be true love? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever?
THE THIRD PERSON SHE MET was herself. Welcome, she said to herself, and she smiled. She put on a little weight, enough to feel comfortable and soft in her own skin. She got a job in a coffee shop and rented a tiny studio in the building next door. She baked a cake for herself every morning, and every night she walked through the nearby park, just her and the ghouls and the owls. She cut off her long dark hair and created paintings that made the art world shudder. She watched movies on Netflix with her friend the butcher, and she told him she’d given up on love. I’m done with that for good.
And you so young, he laughed. It won’t be forever. Someone will snap you up. But they mustn’t, she thought, and she was so alarmed at the thought that she couldn’t shake it, all through her midnight walk.
The next night, she asked to borrow one of his biggest knives. And the next night, she and her dresses (and her underwear and toothbrush and that useless gold) disappeared, though she left behind her unfinished paintings. And though art museums will occasionally run retrospectives, and a publication or blog might speculate on what happened to that promising young painter, no one has seen her again.
But on moonless nights, in deep woods miles outside the city, some souls say they’ve glimpsed—just briefly—someone draped in what looked like an animal skin, huge head and furry ears fallen back over an elegant neck and throat. The shape always flees before it can be clearly seen.
Other people just possess you, she’d told her friend, the butcher.
Is that so bad? he’d asked. To be possessed?
It’s the worst fate of all, she’d say. The donkey skin, she thought, was everything else in the world; it was solitude: anonymous, bloody, and happy ever after.
Everyone’s a Winner in Meadow Park
I’LL BET YOU THINK GHOSTS ARE SO FUCKING ROMANTIC. I’LL bet you think they only haunt rich people, or like, Europeans: pale lords and ladies in castles or governesses in old family mansions. I’ll bet you’d laugh your head off at the idea of a trailer park ghost.
Don’t.
I WASN’T REALLY RUNNING AWAY when I ran away—I was just hiding. The first time I was seven or so, just after Mum died and I came to live with Maggie. I was probably hiding from Cal, who used to come after me with his shoe, which laugh all you want but it was a big black boot and it hurt like a motherfucker. I was convinced that I could make myself invisible, and nobody could see me hiding on the top of the slide in the park playground.
But the ghost saw me. What are you doing, she said, or really sort of thought at me. She was a little like a TV on low, hard to hear unless you leaned in and blocked everything else out. I told her about Cal, it just poured out of me, and she sighed hard like she’d known a Cal or two when she was alive.
I got used to the ghost eventually, but she definitely scared the unholy shit out of me when she first showed up. I couldn’t see her, but I could sense her, like a shadow over the sun, you know? Or a cold bit of air under the warmer breeze.
I told Maggie about the ghost one time when she asked where I’d been all bloody day, and she said I was nutters and that unless I wanted to get taken away from her, I’d better not talk any more nonsense like that. Maggie’s from England, which is why she uses words like “nutters” and “bloody.” (Mum cursed a bloody streak, too, but she learned to swear like an American.) She and Mum were best friends in Liverpool, and they both moved to America shortly after I was born. Without my father, obviously. Nobody knows who he is, except my dead mum. She and Maggie meant to end up in L.A., working in the movies. But somehow they ended up here in Meadow Park, after hitchhiking halfway across the country and running out of money. Maggie met Cal, though, and that put paid to that, as Maggie said. Mum told me we were all going to leave—her, me, and Maggie—and we’d make our way to California. But then the semi collided with Mum’s car, and that put paid to that.
MY BEST FRIEND JASMINE is a horse girl. Even when we were really little, she used to hang around outside the stables in Eastbrook and just watch the riders train or whatever the hell they do. Her parents bought her a horse when she turned seven, which explains why it’s named Fluffy Marshmallow, or Fluffers for short.
I’ve ridden a few horses before, and it fucking sucks IMHO. They smell. I mean, I love most animals, especially cats, dogs, but horses . . . I don’t know. I have no idea what Jasmine sees in them. But she really loves horses—like, obsesses over them. She feeds Fluffers sugar cubes and strokes her mane and draws pictures of her during class when we’re supposed to be doing geometry proofs.
But it’s not as if you choose your friends, any more than you choose your family. With friends, it’s all coincidence and timing and who lives nearby. And we live in the boondocks so options are limited. Thus, my best friend is Jasmine McMahon, who has lived within biking distance of my home-sweet-mobile-home in scenic Meadow Park since we met in Mrs. Cooper’s kindergarten class. Her family’s not what you’d call trailer park trash, like Maggie and Christmas and me; they live in one of those big houses near Lakeville, the ones with all the tall windows. It’s a ten-minute bike ride if you go around the north side of the park.
The ghost t
hinks she’s my best friend, and I have to keep explaining about Jasmine. Jasmine most definitely believes in the ghost, but she also believes in astrology so idk how meaningful that really is. Jasmine keeps trying to get me to do the Ouija board so my ghost will speak to her, but I’m like, Look, bitch, this ghost is boring as shit like some weird pioneer girl so I hardly want to spend my Saturday night conversing with her and Jasmine about crop harvests and oxen. It’s the twenty-first century and this ghost needs to move on, you know? She’s nice but omg she doesn’t even remember her own name anymore, she’s been dead so long.
I wish you could choose your family. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen this one. Christmas, maybe, but definitely not Maggie. And I’m pretty damn sure she wouldn’t have chosen me, either. Which is not to say that we don’t tolerate each other. Maggie’s okay, but she and Aunt Mina (who is actually her mother-in-law, but everybody, including Maggie, calls her “Aunt,” idk why, these people have issues, okay) are not the world’s brainiest. Maggie never finished high school, even, before she and my mum came to the States. She married Cal right away, and they started a motorcycle repair business, which mostly consisted of Cal fixing his friends’ bikes for free. He left a couple of years ago, thank fucking god. All he ever did was get drunk and yell and hit things, mostly Maggie but sometimes me. He sucked so much that even now, thinking about him makes my eyes water and shut like I’m going to get punched in the face any second. I always figured if you had a ghost, they’d protect you, and revenge themselves on anyone who did you wrong. But all my ghost girl ever did was hide from Cal. He seemed to upset her, and she’d dematerialize or whatever when he came after me. Like I said, some ghost, huh? Not much good for spooking people.
Maggie used to try to protect me, though, and sometimes I’d lie to Cal for her and say she was out when she was really hiding out back of the trailer. The night he left for good, we threw a big party and got beer and chips and salsa and rented movies from Redbox. We even got some fireworks and the Johnson kids came over to help set them off. We sat there until like four in the morning, watching the black snakes burn and flake off and fly away over the blacktop. Cal called just once after, and Maggie let me talk to him in pig Latin so he was convinced he had the wrong number.
