Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  I thought of Aubrey in her butter-yellow coat; she would leave her sister’s pair of red shoes at the edge of her front yard as she interlaced her fingers with Graham’s. I thought of Sylvie, in her pewter-gray A-line, setting her pair at the end of her family’s brick-paved driveway. A woman who’d rediscovered her love for bread would leave hers on an outside windowsill. Another who’d started feeding peanut brittle to the raccoons she’d once feared would carefully place hers in the park’s rose beds. A boy would whisper thank you to a cardinal-bright pair before letting them go; on his feet now would be a pair of ballet flats he’d never dared to wear out before this year, those red shoes giving him the nerve.

  We would give up the red shoes, like we gave up everything else, and the glimmer would leave us.

  I looked at Emil, his hands still on my upper arms, his face still wearing the distraction of five centuries ago.

  If I’d had to live in these red shoes, if I’d had to let them almost dance me to death so Emil could see what we’d seen, so he could know, it was enough. It was worth them taking me into their fever.

  Now it was time to let them go.

  But when I reached to take them off, they held to me.

  Mud stains dulled the bittersweet-berry fabric. The lace of dried salt patterned the satin. But they still sealed to me.

  The air around us grew an edge, the sharp lemon-pith smell of magic overstaying its welcome. It sounded less like the wings of a hummingbird and more like electricity through overhead lines.

  I tried again to rip them away.

  This time, my own touch felt like the point of a hundred knives.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  The priest holds her a second longer, to show he does not fear her, and then releases her.

  She cries out with relief, holding her hand as though it might wither before her.

  A few who were part of the act make a show of returning to their senses, as though they do not know how they came to stand where they are. They stumble, dazed, returning from a trance. Their families, either in true fear or in their own performances, weep to have them return. They take their faces in their hands and thank God the demons have left them.

  The priest nods to the sergeants, his holy work done.

  A single glance is all Lala can risk to offer him her last gratitude.

  The sergeants take hold of her and Alifair, driving them toward the city gate.

  With each step, a crowd gathers behind them, shouting at their backs, rushing them toward the edge of the city. They shout that they will drive the demons out, on pain of the angels. They rush and overtake even the sergeants, who vanish into their numbers as though swallowed.

  Lala hisses and shrieks back at them, as though resisting their justice. They will find it all the sweeter for being harder won.

  Lala and Alifair keep their speed to stop from being pushed or thrown to the ground. Alifair follows her as if in a dream, a boy taken by an enchantment.

  The crowd shoves them to the city gate, the sergeants nodding permission to the guards. They send Lala and Alifair stumbling through.

  The crowd stops at the gate, shouting their insults that would drive them into the countryside.

  Demon.

  Whore

  Devil’s wife.

  Witch.

  Zigeuner.

  What would have wounded her days before now breathes fortitude into her, like wind spinning rain into a storm.

  She has set lies before them, and they have taken up every one.

  So much that the crowd does not dare pass the gate.

  Lala and Alifair leave behind them the cathedral spire, with its rose window and blush-stone.

  They leave behind the Pfalz, and the mint with its gold coins.

  They turn their backs on the cannon foundries, and the barrels of grain loaded onto boats and taken from a city that needs them but cannot pay for them.

  With each step, they place greater distance between themselves and the magistrate, and the councils, and all others who can see nothing for the glint of the sun off their own gold.

  They leave this city of such weight, built on such weak ground that wood and iron had to be driven into the earth just to hold it up.

  Then Lala hears the grinding of footsteps, a smaller crowd, behind them. They follow to the gasps and whispers of the greater crowd, a few of their names called, a scattered chorus of horrified cries. Dear God, no, or, Come back, please, or a crumbling sob.

  Still, these few stream away from the greater crowd. They do not rush or storm. They follow in purposeful strides, a rhythm Lala can hear without turning.

  Lala draws close enough to Alifair to reach his wrists. She pulls at the rope binding him, staying near enough for her body to shield her hands. A witch, powerful enough to curse with no more than a look, should be able to bid the rope unwind with less than a breath or a word. Those following her, those who have let her go, cannot see her working at the knot.

  They will both need their hands free to fight, though she has little idea what they will fight with. Especially when she must pretend she needs no further weapon than the demons she commands.

  She works the knot loose. Alifair knows well enough to keep his hands before him, so the crowd at their backs will not catch what she has done.

  She keeps her hands back from clasping his and tending to the raw, reddened skin encircling each wrist.

  There will be time for pressing witch hazel and lavender to his skin only if they live to this evening.

  Lala holds her throat tight, understanding that any crowd that follows could mean to kill them the moment they are too far for the priest to witness.

  She holds the rope in her hands. She keeps it. It will be the one weapon they have.

  Emil

  It was in the second of Rosella almost crumpling to her knees that he understood. He registered what he should have considered days ago.

  The red shoes weren’t just a sign of a fever trying to take her.

  That fever lived in the red shoes themselves.

  Rosella looked at him, her breath held in her throat.

  “This is never going to end,” she said, the words barely audible.

  The guilt landed on him, like that feeling of a palm on his shoulder.

  Maybe, if he and Rosella had never met, none of it would have happened. The bitter ashes of his dreams turning to live embers. A pair of red shoes becoming as deadly as they were beautiful.

  Maybe it had to be both of them, him and Rosella sparking against each other like the iron and flint his five-hundred-years-ago relatives would have held in their hands.

  There was Rosella, the daughter of a family who crafted red shoes famous with the suggestion of magic. Red shoes that came with the hint of something scandalous that only made Briar Meadow love them more, and that the men who ruled sixteenth-century Alsace would have hated.

  There was a scrap of history Rosella didn’t know, and that Emil had just learned—the red shoes meant to cure la fièvre de la danse.

  And there was Emil, descended from a girl who made herself into a witch to save the boy she loved. For just long enough to survive, she had transformed herself into the brazen demon everyone thought her to be.

  Together, these things flared and lit, like raw sodium in water.

  Commended back into the hands of the devil for the blessing and good of the people, who now live free from the demons who once plagued them.

  Since his father had told him those words, Emil had repeated them over and over in his head.

  Of course Strasbourg assumed his five-centuries-ago relative was telling the truth when she confessed, with such venom in her voice. Of course they wouldn’t consider that she might have done it to save a man’s life, and her own.

  She had taken what everyone else had put on her, and she had made it hers. They had held a knife to her back, and she had twisted it from their hands without them even noticing.

  Rosella’s eyes fell to the ground. “I thoug
ht…” She trailed off.

  Emil held on to her. She returned his grip, keeping herself standing.

  He knew what she thought. He saw it in the pain in her face, her fear over how that fever still wasn’t letting her go.

  Probably, she thought she’d been pulled into this for no reason except that this year’s glimmer had touched every pair of red shoes her family made. She probably thought this only went as far as figuring out something about his family, about la fièvre de la danse, about a city held in some frightening plague five hundred years ago.

  But this was just as much about her as it was about the Olivas, the same as how it had been as much about him as about his family.

  It had to be.

  Emil had never quite turned his back on his family’s history. He never could. But he’d stopped looking right at it. It became a set of stars just off the side of his vision. And going that long without looking straight at it had made it little more to him than a cautionary tale. It was a warning of everything people were capable of, all the reasons his grandfather had told him to keep his heart open but his hands ready.

  He’d thought that if he ever looked back, he’d get stuck there. But the past had come for him anyway, because there were things it wanted him to know.

  And there was something it wanted Rosella to know, something he would never be able to get at because it didn’t belong to him.

  She had to, because it was hers.

  Emil said Rosella’s name in a way sure enough that it brought her eyes back to him.

  “Everything that happened to my family, I stayed as far away from it as I possibly could,” he said. “I didn’t want to look at it, at any of it, because I was afraid of it. I never would’ve admitted that to my dad, not in a million years, but that’s what it was. I was afraid of it.”

  He caught her elbows in his palms, keeping her up.

  He held her gaze. “So what are you afraid of?”

  This time, when her expression shifted, it was all the flame colors at once.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  “Do not look back,” Alifair whispers to her, knowing any gaze will provoke them. It will make those who follow see them as prey all the more.

  Lala knows no other way to frighten them off than to give them the spectacle they wish.

  She screams and runs off the road, dancing this way and that, never in a straight line, not even for a few steps.

  Alifair follows deep in his feigned trance.

  Lala treads over rocks and weeds, throwing out her arms as though demons might tear open her flesh. She puts all her soul into the dance, and hopes it will be enough to scare away their pursuers.

  It is not until they are into the trees, out of view of the city gate, that Alifair sets a hand on her arm.

  “Lala,” he says.

  The name alone startles her. He has never called her that within anyone else’s hearing. Tante Dorenia taught him well not to.

  She falls still, quiet enough to feel the watching eyes behind them.

  A small crowd stands, not with the look of wanting to catch and kill. More with a blinking patience.

  Lala recognizes a few faces.

  There are the brother and sister for whom Alifair bought bread.

  And Aldessa, the flax farmer’s spinster of a cousin.

  The two maid friends who have lived together as long as Lala has been alive, neither of them married.

  A few men who hunt together in winter.

  A group of women who share a household, claiming to be sisters, but who look as little alike as black willow and birch.

  Emich and Roland, two apprentices whose masters once beat them for being found lying together, considered a mercy compared to the loss of an arm each as Li livres de jostice et de plet would have called for.

  Two old men and their wives, all of them white- and silver-haired. But neither husband stands with his wife. It is the men who stand near each other, and the women with each other, in a way that makes Lala wonder if the wives have spent more nights in the same bed than with their husbands.

  There is Geruscha, with a tiny, hopeful smile on her face.

  Henne stands alongside her, clasping her hand.

  Lala looks to Alifair, but his face shows the same incomprehension she feels.

  “What are you all doing?” Lala asks them. “Why have you come?”

  Their bodies part, and Tante Dorenia emerges, proud as a queen. By the way she holds herself, the slight shape of her belly shows.

  The sight of Tante, among all these who hold a common thread within their hearts, nearly undoes Lala’s own.

  “Did you not hear your own words?” Tante’s smirk is as small and bright as a sickle moon. “We are your legion of demons.”

  Rosella

  With every feeling that the shoes were cutting into me, with every sense that the glass beads were needles piercing my skin, I remembered that night when I was five. I remembered watching outside the workroom door as that man insisted my abuelo hand over his work for nothing. I remembered my abuela defying him with her best pair of scissors.

  I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.

  For years, I had run as far from that night as Briar Meadow would let me. I had decided, in that moment, that I would never land there, that I would never let my family be there again, having to wreck what we loved just so it would not be stolen. And with every time I decorated bake sale tables with Graham, I had taken that vow deeper inside me. With every time I dressed like Sylvie, in dove-gray sweaters and black pants as neat as licorice candy, I repeated it. I would never let men like that make me destroy the work of my hands, because, instead, I would learn to pass alongside their daughters.

  I had been so sure I could learn the rules that made girls like Piper. I had been so caught up in those rules that I never considered I might one day have to take a pair of scissors in my hands and break them.

  And I had worn my fear on my body in shades of red.

  But these shoes, the shoes my grandfather had made with his hands, I had stitched back together with my own. They held the history of where we’d come from, villages with air so bad my grandmother said Santa Muerte had to wear a gas mask to get close enough to claim the dead.

  They held the work of our hands.

  They were as red as our blood.

  Words formed in my mouth, sharp and sweet. They were mine, but had the sheen of being a gift I was accepting onto my tongue.

  And as I did, the memory of something Emil said flared in my brain.

  Something he’d told me in the light of small, petal-colored flames. About being on a bridge with his own grandfather, both of them watching the mirrored triangle of current behind a buoy. How it looked like it was moving even when it was staying still.

  That was the thing about staying still, he’d told me, about holding your ground. When there was a current coming at you, if you managed to stay where you were, you left a wake.

  The power Strasbourg had over his family was not only in the secrets they made them keep, but in making them think they had to keep so many secrets to begin with. It came in making that girl believe she herself was a living secret, something to be kept in the dark.

  Then that girl, that woman in the blue dress, had taken hold of everything a whole city had said about her. She had grasped their whispers and suspicions. She had taken it all in her hands, and used it.

  They had declared her a witch, and she’d stayed still, accepted the word, none of them realizing she was sharpening it between her teeth.

  I looked at Emil, this boy who’d just told me how hiding from his own family’s history had gotten him nowhere.

  I let go of him.

  And I danced.

  I threw myself between trees, spinning and whirling. I threw my arms toward the moon.

  The motion sent pain through my ankles. It made my heart feel hard as a root.

  But I danced.

  Emil had taught me that sometimes the only way to leave a
wake was to stay still. And in these red shoes, staying still meant this. To stand my ground, I had to do the thing I feared.

  I moved fast as the wind through the trees’ amber. I spun toward the light of the nearest road. I put my own fever into the red shoes. I moved fast enough to turn the red shoes to a blur of color, the glass beads a handful of flung pomegranate seeds.

  I danced out of the woods and alongside the road. I danced past houses and mailboxes, past cars slowing to see the odd girl flitting along the soft shoulder.

  With every turn, I brought my body farther into the light of the glimmer and the moon, the streetlamps and the spill of amber from windows. I caught silhouettes in those squares of light, but I didn’t stop.

  So much of our town was out tonight, waiting for the glimmer to fade. Waiting like they had every year, for the spiders to stop weaving webs of silk so fast our town looked draped in lace shawls. Or for the stars to lose the pink tint they’d had for weeks.

  I danced past them all. My family’s priest. The mayor and her wife and their children. Teachers I’d had in grade school.

  My own mother and father, with their always Band-Aided hands.

  I danced past the houses of girls I knew.

  Aubrey and Graham, in their neat rows of similar constructions that always seemed newly painted.

  Sylvie, in her family’s looming, crumbling Victorian.

  Piper, in jeans and a moth-white sweater, the moon bleaching her hair almost as pale as she watched from the end of her tree-shadowed driveway.

  With each twirl, I declared myself an Oliva girl, with my brush-brown body and my fingers made beautiful by the calluses of needlework. I was an Oliva daughter, whose great-grandparents had lost pieces of their fingers to the maquiladoras, and lived to make lives of their own by hand.

  I was an Oliva, our history written in blood and thread and the glint of glass beads.

  I had learned, from my own fearless abuela, to take what I feared, and use it.

  I had learned, from a girl with rage-lit eyes and a blue dress, to grasp the blade the world held to me, and hold it myself.