Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  But the feeling of wanting rises up in her. It opens in her so wide she can feel it in Alifair’s body, a desire spread through them like the shared life inside his aspen trees.

  When she kisses him, her mouth warm and wet on his, it is this she thinks of. How she cannot quite tell the feeling of his body beneath her hands from her own body under his palms.

  When he kisses her back so hard she stumbles, she thinks of these trees, taking in water together.

  “There is nothing I want more than I want you,” she says, her lips brushing his with each word. They come more fierce than soft, more angry than tender.

  “Then stop thinking of what it will cost me,” he says, keeping the same slight distance, the same tone, hard and set as a stone in the earth.

  When she touches the fabric between his legs, when she finds him beneath the scrap of extra cloth, their breath catches between their mouths, and she thinks of those aspen leaves all breathing at once.

  He takes his hands through her hair, and she thinks of the wind fanning out the leaves.

  She has thought so often of him at night, as her hand drifted down her body and between her legs, her shift a thin veil over the patch of coarse hair. She thought so much of being alongside him in the dark as she pressed her fingers into her body, harder, until the ribbon of longing folded in on itself.

  Now her hands are on him, and he is naked to the waist, in nothing but his breeches. It is the first time she has gotten to both see his body, the muscles forged by work, and feel its warmth for this long.

  They fall onto the shade-cool moss, her legs intertwining with his, and she thinks of the trees’ roots beneath the ground, all sharing the space like clasped hands.

  And when the way he touches her makes her tip her head back, there is nothing but the shared life threading through both their hearts. It is bright as the red jewels of the berries studding the yew branches above them. It is the breath that stays between them as the sky grows dark and fills with the living sapphires of the stars.

  Emil

  When he tried to sleep, she was there.

  Not Rosella.

  His five-centuries-ago relative, with her hair, the same coarse black as his and his cousins’, and her skin a tone of brown that ran through him and his whole family. She was there, in the dust-softened cloth of her dyed skirt, among the stone and canal water of Strasbourg. She was there, in this city that smelled like iron and sweat and summer heat, with its sky that seemed sliced in half by la cathédrale’s pink-tinted spire. She was there, within the chaos and flurry of all those dancing bodies.

  She wasn’t dancing.

  She was screaming.

  The sound broke above the dancing over stone and panicked murmurs and the accusing shouts, like one of his mother’s planted bulbs pushing up through hard ground. It came with the salt smell of blood and death. It carried a weight he could almost feel on his own back.

  Blame.

  This city held her at fault for the dancing plague before them.

  Emil startled awake, breathing hard, a question opening in him.

  The force of that blame, blame this girl had borne, lay thick on his skin.

  He reached for his glasses. Even placing himself in the dark room, with the familiarity of his bed and his desk and his books, it stayed.

  The question twisted into its own answer.

  There was more to what happened in Strasbourg than some passing story in his family’s history.

  And whatever it was, it was reaching across five centuries to grab hold of him.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Lala wakes to realize Alifair is not beside her.

  She sits up, shrugging her shoulders to unknot them.

  Through the raw-beam light, she finds the shape of him, carved against the morning. The sun finds seams in the leaves and gilds the brown of his hair.

  She stands beneath the oak he has climbed.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, a laugh in her half-asleep voice.

  He reaches for a fat oak gall. “Your aunt will like these.”

  “And I would like to see you come down before you break your neck.”

  He smiles.

  As he does, his hand moves, so slightly that Lala would miss it if not for the change in shadow.

  She realizes it is a false move only a moment before the first wasp stings.

  Alifair flinches, and that flinch stirs the others.

  The wasps that have always seemed to treat him as a brother now turn on him. It is as though they are waking up, another stinging, then a third and fourth.

  “Come down,” Lala yells, and once he does, she pulls him away from the tree.

  The wasps’ buzz heats the air.

  It is a thread of noise that feels like a warning.

  She packs up their things and leads him the distance to home, where she and Tante can apply honey and cider vinegar to his stings, then lavender and calendula. Maybe wild thyme, the same as Tante puts on burns from splattering oil.

  And still, the sound of the wasps’ buzz seems to follow them.

  She leads him toward the berry brambles and courgette plots of their rented land.

  Before Tante’s threshold, the smell of blood draws her up short.

  At first, she recoils from the tangled, bloody mess. At first, she thinks it is an animal’s afterbirth, as was left in front of Isentrud’s home. The uncleanness of it seems as though it is already touching her skin, reaching out like fingers.

  As Lala draws closer, she distinguishes reedy leaves and stalks.

  Wood betony, and blood. Someone has taken handfuls of the purple-flowering plant, meant to protect against witches, and soaked them in an animal’s blood. The flowers and stalks have taken it up, turning to pulp. It looks like something that came from a living thing’s body, not just plant but animal, even human. The gadje who put it there may not have known she would reel back from how marime the spilled blood is, how unclean no matter the source. But it is no less awful for their ignorance.

  Thick ropes of horror and disgust braid together with Lala’s rage.

  She gives them only the space of one breath.

  Lala takes Alifair by the shoulders and points him toward the door. “Go inside. Show my aunt your stings.”

  He blinks at her, more dazed than she has ever seen him.

  She tries to smile. “Show her the oak galls you brought her. She will love them.” She gives him as gentle a push toward the door as she can.

  And then she runs.

  Rosella

  Emil’s house was a language I had almost forgotten, a few words coming back at a time. The French blue of the painted siding. The way his parents insisted I call them by their first names, because when I tried calling either of them Dr. Woodlock, Julien waved a hand and said, “I don’t know which of us you’re talking to, use our names.”

  There was the tree I once helped Emil and Julien pick plums off, so Yvette could show me the perfect way she arranged fruit in a clafoutis. And Yvette’s petit four daffodils in the side yard, the flowers soft and pink as cotton candy; five falls ago, they all burst into out-of-season bloom in the middle of October.

  Then there was the hissing ball of fur Emil insisted on calling a cat.

  “Gerta,” Emil said in his most calming voice when he came to the door. “Don’t hiss at our guests, okay?”

  Gerta scampered off.

  “She’s in one of her moods,” Emil said.

  “Isn’t she always?” I asked.

  “Good memory.”

  Gerta, the cutest, fluffiest, most misogynistic cat in Briar Meadow. She had come out of the woods the year the forest cats appeared, with a ruff of orange-gold fur at her neck and a pissed-off affect that only calmed when Emil, then a little boy, gathered her up and talked to her. Yvette had named her for Maria Margaretha Kirch, who charted the paths of Saturn and Venus in the eighteenth century.

  Of course, a cat named for a feminist astronomer had turned out to hate other
women. All except Yvette Woodlock herself.

  “Do you want to come in?” he asked. “We’ve gotten her out of the habit of biting. Mostly.”

  Gerta batted first at the edge of the sofa and then at the hem of my jeans.

  “Gerta,” Emil said, as though trying to reason with her.

  “She’s not bothering me,” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  As though she understood, the cat arched her back, pricked her ears, and showed her teeth.

  “And this is why I don’t have a girlfriend.” Emil picked her up, and she turned into a purring round. “She does this every time.”

  “Sure, blame the cat,” I said.

  He petted Gerta’s ears.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Water? Tea? Coffee strong enough that you can chew it?”

  My laugh sounded more tired than I meant it to. “I’m okay.”

  He set the cat down, his shirt now flecked with orange fur. “Be nice, liebling.” The sound in his voice brought me back to grade school, how he spoke the same as his parents, any German word tinted with a French accent and the other way around.

  Yvette Woodlock breezed through the living room. I always saw her and Julien in town, alternating who picked up both of their suits at the dry cleaner’s. She was fine boned without seeming birdlike, with black hair that fell in even waves I’d always envied, and thin-framed glasses so much like Emil’s I wondered if they’d bought them together. Even in her own home, she wore neat slacks and collared shirts that would have looked stuffy if she didn’t have that cloud of French refinement always following her.

  At first glance, Yvette and her husband seemed mismatched. Julien, taller and broader than both his wife and his son, had hair a little like old photos of Einstein. Already all white, it grew less neat throughout the day because he put his hands in it whenever he was thinking. He threw papers in fanned messes across his desk, always able to find a particular one despite the chaos. (Emil took after his mother, with her labeled folders and paper clips always fastened straight up and down.)

  Each insisted they were the better cook, Yvette tidily recording her recipe for sauerkraut with onions and butter and flat champagne, while Julien thought instructions deadened the soul of the chef.

  Now Yvette noticed me.

  “Oh,” she said, surveying me in a way that was surprised but not unfriendly. “Ça fait longtemps.”

  I gave Yvette the best smile I had, though I felt it on my own face, weak and watered down.

  Yvette Woodlock’s gaze was as sharp and unyielding as the fairy tales she used to tell our class. Snow White’s queen demanding her heart as proof that she was dead, the hunter cutting out the heart of a deer. The queen made to dance herself to death in iron shoes. Stepsisters cutting off parts of themselves for nothing but a glass slipper and a prince so boring we never learned his name.

  Only Yvette Woodlock could tell us fairy stories and have it seem like she was telling us the truth about how the world worked.

  “If my son takes you outside,” Yvette said to me on her way out of the room, “wear protective equipment.”

  “What?” I asked Emil.

  “Thanks a lot, Maman,” Emil mumbled.

  Yvette paused next to her son. “Ne sois pas un poulet mouillé,” she said, talking to him but glancing at me.

  Emil shut his eyes in the same cringing, forced smile I had given my parents a hundred times.

  “Do I want to know?” I asked Emil when Yvette was out of the room.

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  I started remembering what the Woodlocks’ house smelled like, all the different kinds of tea they kept in their kitchen. Black and chamomile, dried berries and cloves, fennel and rose hip.

  I wondered if Emil had memories of my house that mirrored mine of his. My mother teaching Emil to make a tortilla at the same time she taught me, when we were six, our hands shaping the masa. How making manriklo with Yvette meant Emil was instantly better at it than I was, and how I never heard the end of it from my mother.

  A slash of pain crossed my anklebone. I took a slow breath to keep myself from reacting. The air I drew in brought the smell of everything else I remembered from the Woodlocks’ downstairs. Wood and paper. Yvette’s favorite rosemary candles. And another smell I’d come to think of as the ink in their books.

  “Are you okay?” Emil asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I just stopped by because I wanted to say thank you.”

  Stopped by. As though Emil’s house was on the way from my house to anything in Briar Meadow.

  “And I’m sorry for taking off like I did,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Can I ask what you were doing out there?”

  “It’s stupid,” I said, feeling the pinprick of anticipating my own lie. “I was looking at the glimmer and I just lost my balance.”

  He gave the kind of half-raised-eyebrow, slow nod I remembered from years ago.

  I remembered it meaning he didn’t believe me at all. Like when I said the bruise on my knee was from the stairs when really it was from trying to imitate Sylvie’s ballet-class pirouettes. Or when I told him I’d missed school because I had a cold when it had been because my cousins got me to eat something that contained the nuts I was allergic to (like hell I was telling Emil about the hives, so many of them that my painkiller-fuzzed brain couldn’t count them).

  Now Emil moved in a way that made me notice a streak of color, a brushstroke of teal against the brown of his forearm.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He looked down. “Oh,” he said. “Just flame tests. I’m comparing different kinds of cobalt glass to see which is best at filtering out orange light from sodium ions”—his tone shifted mid-sentence without him pausing—“and I’m gonna stop talking because I’m probably boring you to death.”

  “No,” I said. “I was just gonna ask, what’s a flame test again?”

  He half closed his eyes. “You’re serious? It’s one of the few labs even non–pocket protectors remember.”

  I felt my eyes widening.

  “Yeah,” he said, stretching out the word. “Graham’s not quiet about calling us that.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Graham meant it as a term of endearment. Mostly. But I still couldn’t help apologizing for her.

  “Do you want to see it?” he asked.

  “Your pocket protector?”

  “Sorry,” he said, leading me toward the back door. “Just brought it in for dry cleaning.”

  I went out to the old garden shed with him, wondering if he’d been this cute in middle school, last year, last week, and I hadn’t noticed. He had always just been Emil, the boy who used to tell me about geode formation while I snored, pointedly and loudly, pretending to be far more bored than I was.

  He had a lab bench now. Garden tools leaned in the corners on either side, like they were standing guard.

  “You’ve come a long way from growing crystals in sugar water,” I said.

  He laughed. “Thanks.”

  He set up a row of glass vials, each holding a labeled powder. Some white, some blue green or dark red. I watched his hands, his brown fingers that always had a few paper cuts from library reference books.

  Emil handed me a pair of goggles. “Insert preamble about not trying this at home.”

  I put them on. “Got it.”

  He put on his own and started the burner. With a few clicks of the striker, the petal of hot blue appeared.

  He tapped a wooden stick into one of the vials and held it into the flame. It turned green as light through honey locust leaves.

  I looked at him. “How’d you do that?”

  “Barium,” he said. “The ions burn different colors.”

  The next one turned the flame fall-leaf orange (“calcium,” he said). The one after purpled it to the winter-dusk color that always made me think of December.

  Except now, it made me think of the purple tint to the sky aroun
d the glimmer.

  “Emil,” I said.

  “Cesium chloride,” he said.

  “No,” I said, the words hot in my throat. “I was just gonna say, if…”

  He was looking at me now.

  Out by the reservoir, the way I’d grabbed him and kissed him had seemed almost inevitable, like the glimmer had set some charge between us. Static electricity that would stay on our skin unless we touched and sent it into the air. It was logic that had followed from the light in the sky.

  But now, with daylight outside and the dark inside the shed, the contrast left me with a kind of delayed embarrassment so intense I was sure he could see it through my skin.

  “If what I did the other night,” I said, still stumbling, “if I did something you didn’t want me to…” No matter how many ways I went at it, I could not catch the end of my own sentence.

  He looked back at the flame. “I didn’t mind.”

  That should have let me breathe out. Instead, his words just fluttered inside me instead of my own.

  I didn’t mind, meaning what? I didn’t mind, meaning he wouldn’t mind doing it again? I didn’t mind, meaning he’d already forgotten about it?

  He handed me a stick and a vial of turquoise powder. Our fingers brushed in a way that seemed like it could have been on purpose.

  “You’ll like this one,” he said.

  I dipped the wood into the powder and held it into the flame. It turned to a gradient between green and blue, chlorine-pool green at the tip darkening to iris blue at the base.

  My breath caught in my throat.

  “Copper sulfate,” he said.

  I looked from the teal flame to Emil, his face behind the safety plastic and his glasses. I used to know what Emil looked like without glasses, but not anymore. Now the fact of him, this close, seemed more fever dream than the red shoes themselves.

  “Emil?” I asked.

  He glanced at me. “Yeah?”

  “Why did we stop being friends?”

  He held a powder to the flame that burned the color of early lilacs. “Because there’s always a point when girls stop being friends with boys.”