Cabaso's Hat: Part I

Cabaso was not in the habit of getting himself into difficult situations. Not difficult situations that he could not easily talk himself out of. It was a bit more difficult to talk himself out a situation when there was no one around to talk to. Which meant there was also no one around to hear him complain of the circumstances that had led to him being here, and if there was a short list of the things he loved most dearly in this world, complaining was most certainly on it. Near the top. Somewhere after apple crumble and friend plantains and being a mysterious, charismatic, rakish enigma.

He would have complained, had anyone been around to hear it, that in the beginning it was only because he’d wanted his hat back. The hat was not just any old hat. It was not just any new hat. It’s magnificence transcended time and any notion of old or new. It was timeless, beautiful, elegant. A masterpiece of hattery. It had a hidden pocket, which was nearly unheard of, and every colour on it was like a colour seen in the shade, so it always gave the impression that he had just emerged from the shadows, or was a blink away from slipping back into them. He was, when he wore it, effortlessly unique. It was a hat he refused to give up.

Which was what made losing it so hard to stomach in the first place. He had not gambled it away. Not even drunkenly. Cabaso did many things drunkenly, but the consequences were never visited upon the hat. But he’d been doing someone a favour, and been happily doing it (for favours always had to be returned, and on the shortlist of things he loved dearly, being owed was present), and somewhere within the favour he’d been clubbed over the head, and the hat had not protected him. In fact, when he’d come to, the hat had been notably absent. This was disturbing for many reasons, not the least of them being that, hatless, Cabaso was also up to his thighs in water, and the water was slowly rising. We will return to that in a moment. For the moment, the hat.

The hat should have been in Cabaso’s possession partly because it had, once he’d procured it, never left his possession. And secondly, because there was no reason for anyone else to have the hat, unless someone was trying to hold it hostage, to make their way out of a debt they owed him. When he racked his mind quickly for the name of the soul malicious enough to attempt it, he came up empty. When his mind instead conjured up the image of his hat, his hat of midnight colours and the shine of wet cobblestones upon another’s head, circuitry in his brain suffered.

Some say that clothing does not reflect the person inside them as well as they could or should, and that they do not make the man. This is, to some extent, correct. But it is more correct to say that when Cabaso the boy put on the hat and glanced at himself in the mirror of the White Hart Inn’s tavern he saw Cabaso the man, and Cabaso the man stood straighter, tilted his chin up, unless he wanted to look menacing, and was no thief of a good hat, but had come to own it the same way he’d come to be conceive: because the universe had willed it. Cabaso the boy had not had the name yet, but Cabaso the man knew it as soon as he donned the hat and saw himself in it. The hat was big then, but no less resplendent and perfect. Its perfection had only aged with him, as it should. Cabaso. The name came with the hat. No other name could wear this hat.

Back to the water, which was climbing up his pelvis. There had certainly not been this much when he’d been put here, he thought, for he would have woken up to such a shock, rather than this gentle lapping of rising water. All he had wanted was to get his hat back. It had been harder demanding answers without the hat. People listened to the hat. The face beneath it was slightly harder to remember without the shadow of the brim cast on it. And people generally did not want to remember Cabaso. Remembering him often came with seeing him, and often that walked hand in hand with owing him.

Cabaso tested his throat and gave a very slight hollar. There was a rasp in his throat that told him his assailant with the club had either dunked water down his throat, which might explain the ugly feeling in his stomach, or had had their hands wrapped around his throat at some point in his black memory. Maybe there was an ache to his throat he could examine later, when the water was not mounting his hipbones and rising.

In the market, Cabaso had asked the local friers for their assistance. Friers were not much in the way of assistance when it came to intellectual matters, but they could use their eyes at least, and mostly they could use their memories. Cabaso needed some of both. “Did you see a fellow go by with a hat?” Cabaso asked them. “You would know the hat. Beautiful. Magnificent. Incredible. Belongs on a head of a similar kind. The fellow with it would have had to come by here to get anywhere.” The market headed off the honeycomb labyrinth of underground paths. The way he and the assailant had both come had been blocked off by the rising water levels. The tunnels were cut off.

A frier with a basket full of bok-choy shook his head. He dumped the bok-choy into a steaming pan and covered it with a net, to catch the spitting oil. His skin looked like he’d been frying things for years and leaning over his job. It also looked like he’d been eating fried things for years and had forgotten food existed outside his job. “Haven’t seen him. Did you check the pawn shops? All sorts come their way.” The bok-choy frier coughed. “We’s got bok-choy, if yer interested.”

“I am not interested,” said Cabaso. “I am interested in my hat, which none of you seem to recognize. When I find it, I shall return to broaden your sad horizons with it. Which pawn shops are in this district? Where would I be able to buy it back?”

The bok-choy frier shrugged. “Pawn shops along the ridge.”

“And who would have bought my hat?” asked Cabaso.

The bok-choy frier did not answer. When Cabaso repeated the question, he lifted a hand in a gesture that Cabaso felt was unsportsmanlike. Gentlemen were not to be found often in the market. It was followed by another gesture of the kind that looked, if they were playing charades, as though the frier were slitting his own throat. Cabaso was determined, but smart. He asked no more questions. He kept looking for answers.

Elsewhere, there were more answers to be found. Someone dealing in old trunks, who smelled like a cellar that had not been well taken care of, told him, “I know who you are. I know you’re looking for your hat. Saw it by the ridge. Near that old second hand- you know. What’s the place called? There’s a long-nosed man who runs it.”

He had the attention of the hair on the back of Cabaso’s neck. “Well. The Belfast Beacon?”

The trunk-dealer snapped his fingers in Cabaso’s direction. This was not much of an improvement, as far as gestures went. It was shaping up to be one of those days that was against Cabaso. But the trunk-dealer was of a friendly kind, so Cabaso was generously silent about the gesture. “That’s it. That’s the store. But I still can’t remember the bugger’s name…”

“You are quite close with bugger,” Cabaso said. He did not sigh. Sighing was particularly not in style. Or not of the kind of style Cabaso preferred. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I know his name.” There had been no cheer in him, but now the absence of cheer was instead filled with anti-cheer. He could feel that, without the hat, it looked petulant and resentful on him, instead of broody and misunderstood.

He walked away and toward the ridge, which was covered with second hand shops and pawn shops. He held his hand over his eyes when he passed under a lamp meant to imitate the sun’s glare. It was doing a fabulous job of pointing out Cabaso’s lack of a hat. Gold is never wrapped in more gold, said a voice in his head, in the exact tone of his brother’s voice. Precious things are never wrapped in precious things. Cabaso made an effort to pretend his brother’s voice had not spoken in his head.

Instead he pondered as he neared the ridge. This was a risk, because Cabaso had few friends here and many people owed him favours, and because The Belfast Beacon was home to one of the very few men in the world that Cabaso owed. He liked to make calculations and the way he understood it was that there were only a handful of deals in the world worth making. He had made one that was not among that handful, and the month he’d spent with the girl enthralled by a love potion was not enough to owe another human being. But he’d done it.

Here, he would have not to trust anyone. Cabaso had good practice with this. Without the hat, he did not even trust himself.

He should not even have trusted the paths on the edge of the ridge, because no one was watching closely enough to stop his assailant. He remembered looking toward The Belfast Beacon and the one Turkish lantern shining in the window and thinking, something is off. Then correcting himself, because it was not something. Many things are off here. He turned. Wrong, wrong, wrong. That was about the time that the club struck the back of his head and flashpapers ignited behind his eyes. They settled again as he tumbled into the dark.

Which brings us back to the water. It was the third thing he’d noticed upon waking because the first thing he noticed was that his hands were cuffed to the wall. And secondly, he was still without hat.

He had been unconscious. And now that he was conscious, there was no one around him to determine that he was in any condition other than the one in which they’d delivered him to the cellar filling with water. It was a compartment in a sewer that he was cuffed into, filling rapidly. It was not watertight, but the leak around the locked door on the other side of the compartment was slight enough that it did not matter how much water drained from it. On this side, water would continue to rise and to make his circumstances increasingly lethal.

He knew exactly who it was that had put him here in the first place. He knew who it was that owned the Belfast Beacon, which was not the first store of its name. But the last store had been burned down. An incident that could have been viewed, unfortunately, as Cabaso’s fault. It really depended on who one asked. If they asked Cabaso, he would tell them that it had only happened in his presence, and near him, and that he was not in control of all of his limbs all the time. If they asked an eye witness, they would tell you that the Cabaso had, basely and clumsily, knocked over a candle and set the place ablaze, thus putting him in the poor graces of the Beacon’s owner, Mr.Castle. And also in Mr.Castle’s debt. Cabaso could see Mr.Castle’s awful, spider smile now, unhappy to watch his shop burn to the ground, glad to have caught Cabaso and to be owed something for the mess Cabaso had put him in. He had never wanted to see the smile again, but he was seeing it now, namely because Mr.Castle was leaning out of a hutch in the compartment several feet above his head, and looking down upon Cabaso with glee.

“An honour, surely,” Cabaso said. He made as much of a bow as a man can make with his hands cuffed to the wall, and without an elegant hat. “I had not anticipated seeing you, Mr.Castle, or I would have dressed more appropriately. The cuffs are a bit excessive in your presence, I think. If you rid me of them, I think you’ll find I’m in a manner more befitting a chat with you. We can talk, you and I.”

To Mr.Castle, it was obvious that ‘you and I’ was a concept he had no interest in. “I think not,” he said. His voice was smooth, like the smoke rising from a lit cigarette. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get you in that position? You are slippery. I am giving you no slack at all until I know for certain that you are dead. Then you can have all the slack you want.”

“Again, how honourable of you,” Cabaso said.

“I really want to hear you beg and scream. I want to hear you pleading for mercy. Have you ever cried, Cabaso? Of course you have. I meant outside of infancy. You will today. For me.”

“That sounds like an unlikely thing,” Cabaso said, “but we’ll see. You did not follow me to the market on the off chance that I would lose my hat, be drawn toward the ridge looking for it, and then receive instructions to go looking for The Belfast Beacon to retrieve it, and thereby put myself in the position to be thwarted and stuffed into this hell hole, did you?”

Mr.Castle smiled.

“Well, that is devotion,” Cabaso observed. “Or overreaction.”

“Devotion,” Mr.Castle agreed. “I had other plans as well, to find you and make you pay for what you did. This was, infact, the simplest of them.”

Cabaso did not doubt that it was. Mr.Castle seemed the type to use simplicity so long as it was efficiency. He liked to look clever, and though scheming looked very clever, winning looked the cleverest. And he did look suspiciously like he was winning right now. He stood up straight and pressed his back to the wall. The water was above his belly button now. The sensation did something unpleasant to Cabaso’s body, and to his panic.

“Well?” Mr.Castle said. “Beg for my forgiveness.”

“Ah! Oh, I see. Well, here goes: please! I’m begging you! I have much to look forward to. I have my whole life! Mercy! Please! You looked best with a bit of compassion on your face, Mr.Castle, and I know I deserve not to even be lifted from this tank and onto the dirt beneath your feet, but if you were feeling so forgiving-”

“I think you are aware,” Mr.Castle said, “that it is a factor of the cadence of your voice that everything that comes out of your mouth sounds sarcastic.”

“I am aware now. Shall I change my voice for you? I am afraid my accent is strong. And my voice won’t matter much longer. Underwater and all that.”

“Be quiet,” Mr.Castle suggested. “You will be on your own very soon. In some time, the room will fill with more water, and you’ll drown. You’ll be dead the next time I come in. There will be laughing on my part. I’ll get someone to chuck your body into the river or something.” He turned his head a fraction toward the window he was poking out of. “Ah. Hang on. Here is something…”

He left. And he returned wearing an insult. He wore it not nearly as well as Cabaso wore it. The rim was too tight around his head, and the shadow that fell across his eyes was sleazy and unkind to his features. The hat itself was a magnificent thing, shining like wet cobblestones, in dark shades, like it was permanently in a shadow. It was mysterious. Charismatic. Enigmatic. Everything about the angle of the rim said elegance and beauty.

Cabaso’s head swelled with rage. Blackness pushed on the inside of his cranium and carried his temper on it, buoyed and darkening the rest of the world. He was really only a few feet below the hat, and the head wearing it, unjustly. The hat was doing its best to turn Mr.Castle the bastard into Mr.Castle the handsome rake. Because it was nto just any old hat. It was his hat.

Then Mr.Castle went back inside the window, and this time he shut it behind him. There was a bang as it swung all the way closed. The darkness was absolute. It did not rid him of the water, which was counting his ribs upward. He writhed against the wall, but the cuffs were firm and tight around his wrists. His legs were free, but they could only go so far without his hands. And he did not want to try walking away and slip into the water with his hands snagged above him. It sounded uncomfortable on several levels.

The hat would have been able to solve this. There was a hat pin in there was had many more uses than most hat pins did have. There were buttons on the hat that had more capabilities than other people’s buttons. There were picklocks and tiny useful instruments in the concealed pocket of the hat. There was also a bandage that would have been perfect for sliding between the cuff and the knob of his wrist. The water did not help his hands slick and come out of the cuffs. It only made it a little harder to concentrate when it was almost up to his underarms.

Cabaso did a quick calculation and realized he was on his way to a quick death. Not necessarily a pleasant death; he’d heard many things about drowning and most of them pointed toward agony. All he had to do was un-cuff himself, and then he would be free to find the source of the water and shut it off, or get out of the room, or both options in alternative order, and then avoid Mr.Castle but not avoid the hat. He would complete it with the most perfect getaway Mr.Castle or anyone in the market had every seen.

He tugged on his wrists. The cuffs bit them hungrily. He tugged harder. He lost a little more of the skin on his wrists to the cuffs. He considered when he’d last updated his will and then whether or not he had actually told anyone where it was. He had many fine possessions he was proud of, but the one that he would be most worried about in whatever afterlife existed sat on Mr.Castle’s head. He thought about his death, and the agony, and the after, and his hat.

“Oh, stop that. Now’s not the time.”

The voice had spoken in his ear, so Cabaso turned his head, automatically, toward the speaker. There was something metallic and finicky happening around his wrists. The pressure around one of them was gone. His hand came back to life as he lifted it out of the water, out of the unlocked cuff.

Cabaso turned to the voice. “Pardon?”

In the darkness, Cabaso should not have been at all able to make out the smile. But he could, because the darkness parted for that kind of handsomeness. The smile was roguish and inviting; the eyes invited swooning.

“Other wrist, now,” said the man. He smiled and the eyes did not invite swooning so much as encourage it.

Cabaso did not swoon. He shifted his shoulder slightly so the man could reach around him without moving through the water too much. The water was up to Cabaso’s shoulders, and not quite up to the man’s. The couple inches of difference were annoyingly infuriating. The man did something else metallic and the cuff around his other hand opened.

“That’s better, isn’t it? I hoped you weren’t in trouble, but it sounded like you were,” the man said. He looked at Cabaso from a dark and handsome face. Cabaso looked back from his own dark face. His eyes sparkled. He was not much taller than the average man, but his posture told everyone he was ever likely to meet that they would look up to him in some way or other so they may as well begin by looking up to him physically.

“Trouble? What trouble? I am perfectly all right,” Cabaso said.

“All right does not require rescuing. I just did that.”

Cabaso would allow him to hold this opinion, however wrong it was. “Mr.Castle does not know you’re here, does he?”

“Absolutely not. He’s still waiting on the other side for you to drown. If you were cuffed, that would only have taken another, foot, but I think he wants to be sure. See? The water is already up to your chin. The water’s coming from the floor. But give it a minute and it will buoy us up to a door in the wall.”

“You planned this?”

The man with Cabaso’s skin and the roguish smile said, “Of course.” He made a face that might have made some people, when looking at Cabaso and the man side by side, think, for a horribly misguided second, that he was a tad more handsome than Cabaso. “Did you really think I was going to stand by and let someone drown my little brother?”

The water touched Cabaso’s bottom lip. He did not tilt his head back. He had his pride. “No one was drowning me. I told you, I’m all right.”

The man began to float on top of the water. His limbs helped him. He didn’t look toward the window where Mr.Castle and the hat had disappeared. He looked toward the opposite side of the compartment and pushed himself slowly to it. Cabaso floated on the water too, and watched him reach for a latch. A part of the wall that did not look like a door swung open, like a door. “This is it,” the man said. “I recommend going quickly, before it fills with water.”

Then he did not give Cabaso the chance to ignore his advice, because he seized Cabaso and hauled him through the door, which was actually the entrance to a tunnel, which was actually like a long water slide.

The water slide went on for a bit. In the dark, Cabaso had the time to reflect that he was going down and away, and getting farther and farther from the hat, and that he did not know what was at the bottom of this, and also, that he was not enjoying himself.

At the bottom, he nearly twisted his ankle in a metal grate. He hit his face on it instead. The hat’s brim would have saved him. He dragged himself off the grate and onto a concrete floor where he shivered and was miserable and wet.

From the tunnel came a sort of enjoying-himself noise. It preceded his brother, who shot out of the tunnel and only his feet like he’d finished performing a very good trick. “Ha!” he said. “Brilliant, huh?”

“To some,” Cabaso conceded. And, not that he was particularly curious, but, “were you holding your hands above your head as you came down?”

“Of course I was. Why wouldn’t I?”

Cabaso got to his feet. His feet didn’t like it. Well, his feet would have to just take it. “You name? Is it still Algernon?”

“Absolutely. No reason to change it. Don’t fix what isn’t broken and all that. And you, Cabaso? Still calling yourself by that name?”

“Don’t fix, and all that,” Cabaso said, though it could be argued that changing his name might actually aid him. He sounded uncertain. He looked drowned and conviction-less. He felt very young and stupid.

“Well, whatever works. Look, I’ve got to go. You know, things to do. Just don’t get into any more messy situations. And don’t worry about it. I know you would have done it for me.” Algernon meant every word he said, which did not make Cabaso feel better about it. It made him, in fact, feel much, much worse.

This really was an awful day. Because now it just had to be said. “Thank you, brother.”

“You don’t have to. But! Your hat, right?” Algernon smiled, like the way he said it did not make Cabaso feel ten inches tall. “Mr.Castle still has it, as you know. And I know you don’t want to hear any advice, but here it is: forget the hat. Really. You’ll be better off without it. Get another one.”

“Hm,” Cabaso said.

“Hm.” Algernon inclined his head, and it was as elegant a gesture as though he were wearing a hat. He shook his head once, spraying water, turning his hair into a devastating mess. He was elusive as he left, leaving in a direction that Cabaso did not notice entirely. This was Algernon’s talent. Leaving through indeterminate routes. People were always left with the feeling that they’d just witnessed a magic trick, but a very high end one.

He could forget the hat. He could lie low or pay someone else to retrieve it for him. He could change his name and plan out a route too complicated for Mr.Castle to chase him. He could get a new hat. Not his hat. It would not be his hat at all.

He came very close to another sigh. He was still going to get his hat back. And part of it was this: sometime, when he was young, he’d decided who he wanted to be. And because he had human imagination, what he created could only get as far as an amalgamation of things that already existed, and it was a variation on a model he’d already seen.

He had known many things about who he wanted to be, and what he wanted not to be, and even as a boy he had decided to become or not become all of them. He had wanted to be entirely different from his brother. He had not wanted to be like anyone that already existed. He wanted to be clever and enigmatic and slippery and devastating. He wanted to be one of a kind.

So, essentially, like his brother.  

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by anonymous

Because I Was Loyal

All of the princesses were barbarians. There was no way around the fact: the king would marry a savage.

It had nothing to do with the fact that, in the early days, several of the princesses that came for his hand were from neighbouring kingdoms that King Agrememnon (known to the royal family and to myself as King Aggie) had managed to offend or deliver the cold shoulder to, and the most logical solution at the time was to propose marriage. The marriage was not a guarantee, no, there was still the test, because these things have to be done right if they’re done at all. But a marriage assuaged the burn, stroked the abrasion, pulled the royal foot from the royal mouth. The sort of girls sent to King Aggie from these kingdoms were harsh at best, and simpering cut-throats at worst. Really, if I had been given reign in this department, I would have made much better selections. But the Chancellor had high hopes those days for peace. When he began to run out of eligible candidates, he dropped his hopes so low that they could not even bounce. They made a gruesome shape on the floor.

This is the story out out of order. To tell you the story in order, I have to tell you that my family has no place in a royal household, but has had a place for generations in the royal household. For a king who respects the workers of the land, whoever is chosen to train the beasts belonging in the royal barn and stables should be chosen very, very carefully. It is not that the animals are particularly hard to take care of, though they are prone to melancholy due to the perpetually grey skies and the rain, and it is not because they make uneven dips and crests in the bushes on the far side of the property that is visible from the road, though not from the gardens, and it is not because it happens at least once every two years that a storm spooks most of the sheep badly enough that the rams and ewes begin to trample their own young. It is because animals are cunning enough to wait until you trust them before turning on you. I am cunning enough to see through it, and cunning enough to turn false loyalty into true. Loyalty, King Aggie would say, is everything.

Which is one of the reasons it has been a daughter or son from my family plucked every generation to tend the king’s beasts. I have only been at it for most of my life, and the earliest part of my life was spent in learning how to tend the king’s beast. Our family was chosen by past kings and continues to be chosen by the current head of the crown because of parallelism. While our family is contstantly progressing, acquiring and passing down new knowledge with the old (so long as the new does not contradict the old), the royal family is constantly looking for progression. As our family makes advancements, the royal family values them. I myself was chosen from five sisters and three brothers because I am the least fearful (important as some of the horses have been born with the devil’s temper), the least ill (fortuitous as the animals do not have days off, and I, therefore, never have either), the most proactive (ideal as many of the animals are clever enough to know when would be the worst time to start a ruckus, and it takes only a stern word or action to convince them, before appointed time, that their life means much more than biting the king’s hand), and, as I mentioned, loyal.

It does not do any harm that I am more savage than any of the princesses that came to see him. It takes a certain dislocation of the mind and the spirit to look a beast in the eye, see oneself and ones’ emotion, and to break that neck very tidily in one’s hands. King Aggie does not always want me around, in the way that one does not always want a flu-patient around. As though brutality is a disease he is frightened of catching. His mother was a savage woman as well, and the family was constantly inspecting DNA for signs of brute force in himself or his sister (married and exported to her husband’s kingdom across the channel). But if the king occupies his territory, I am happy to occupy mine.

I am called on, rarely, but for good reason. When I am needed.

King Aggie’s previous wife died of a mysterious illness. An asp had mysteriously been clasped to her breast in her bed. There had been no signs of a break in to her room, mysteriously. She had been very unhappy to be wed to the king, mysteriously. But like King Aggie’s father before him, and his father before him, and all fathers before them back to the first father that had worn a crown, he had to be wed. Not to take the crown, but because there had always been a wife. Except for those that died mysteriously or in childbirth, and then there had to be a quick replacement made. King Aggie sought his chancellor’s help in procuring candidates, and my help in procuring a wife from them. There may be no wife at all, as it had happened before that he had lost interest in all of the girls, suddenly and completely. The entire palace scurried, but warily, without much aplomb. We had gone through the motions several times. Table cloths were cleaned and laid out. The bottoms of curtains and tapestries were dusted. The sheep were shooed from the castle grounds and locked in a pen. The horses were polished, then their saddles were polished. All doorknobs were polished as well, and servants despaired at their inability to get a good grip on any of the knobs. Black piglets were dragged from the wooden pen to the painted pen. There was enough space around them to get in a few elevated benches. A coliseum of sorts. This was the puzzle the king had chosen for the princesses: out of the black pigs, of which there would be one per princess, one of the picks would have a golden coin in his mouth. Their mouths were all closed with an easily broken adhesive. The coin had yet to fall out, but it could not be swallowed, lest the pig choke and give itself away. If there were twenty girls, there were twenty pigs, and the twenty girls stood in the pen with the pigs and descended on them like a murderous frenzy. The rightful princess for the crown was the one who plucks a pig from the ground and pulled the gold coin from its mouth. Only one pig could be plucked by each princess. If in the end there were three princesses of twenty with not the skill or determination or wherewithal to pluck a pig from the ground, and the remaining pigs ran free in the pen, and the gold coin was not in the mouth of any chosen pig, then no one had won and the king’s search continued. The losers were killed, their bodies strung before the gates to warn subjects and enemies of the punishment for imposters.

This last bit did not happen. But there were some girls that made me wish it did.

The girls caused enough pain as it was, housing them and feeding them and washing their clothing. Some of them saw fit to bring their own stallions or mares. IF that was not bad enough, they were prepared to marry King Aggie, and let a pig’s disgusting eating habits determine whether or not they were right for the crown. No more random than the birthplace lottery that chooses our kings. But, still.

Our kingdom gets into arguments easily, you see.

Aggie was agitated, as usual, when he was to choose his bride to be this time. He ad been suggested find a wife in the summer. And find a wife in the summer he attempted. All of the childish joy had vanished from his eyes. He was attached to frivolity, and what was more frivolous than being with bank and without wife?

The king saw to the pen and I. I told him he should be resting, not watching the pigs. His experience with horses would not teach him which was the best bet, which was the most likely, or least, to be caught. Which mouth was most likely to swallow the coin before someone else could grab it. I have more sympathy for him than I should, for a woman in a family that had not gotten a raise in four years. “This fretting will change nothing,” I told King Aggie. “You will just be tired and short with the princesses that do come. Do you not trust the hands behind this?”

“The pigs? Oh, goodness, Margaret, no,” King Aggie said. “Getting sleep will change nothing. I supposed when I am with wife and absent of others I will know what it is to sleep. To never leave the bed. The room. The house. Has God forsaken my life?”

My life had been, until now, entirely to make sure he could say nothing of this ilk on the subject of his life. Graciously, I said nothing about God. God was not the one about to strangle a black pig with a gold coin. Instead, I said, “You are not forsaken. Greet them. Be curtious and polite.”

There is something deeply embedded in the heads of many children. When they speak to someone they have known all their life, who is bigger, that they have known to be bigger all their life, they find it difficult not to be polite about it. So King Aggie went to greet the princesses. I gave him specific instructions, about greeting them and holding their elbows or touching their wrists.

Princesses are an entirely different breed of human. They are especiall ugly, and especially beautiful, in the way that pearls and rosewater masks can make one beautiful. Especially ugly in the way that they have a knack for ugly expressions. You will notice in many stories that princesses are demure and good-looking. They are not always good-looking, that is simply luck, and they are not always demurring, that is simply bad luck. It was not the type that King Aggie preferred. But what to do? No one liked a savage princess, but the strongest girls grew in the roughest soil.   

That made eighteen black piglets in the pen. Not many, but their squealing would cause quite the racket.

King Aggie made polite conversation; it was killing him. He restrained himself at dinner; it was killing him. He asked about history and politics in neighbouring kingdoms and was treated to blank stares; it was killing him. He was not intrigued by the princess who seemed to think she could make herself useful singing old ballads.

One of the princesses brought him a present of a kitten. He was charmed. I took the kitten to the kitchen, where the King would not be made ill by it, and the kitten would thrive. During this time, whilst also feeding the black piglets, stuffing coins down their throats, chopping the heads off chicken, wiping down horses with blood-splattered hands, the King was quiet in his preferences of the girls. I still found time to participate in the bet. I know already who would win the king’s hand, and that it would happen this time. The other staff were betting, making a game of it, but I was not there for the game. It was clear who everyone would have preferred to win. Equally clear who everyone thought would win. They were never the same person. It was hard to imagine a cream-complectioned face capped with gold hair reaching a hand into the stinking gullet of a pig and pulling out a golden coin. It was hard to imagine beauty of any sort having the stomach for potentially activating a pig’s gag reflex.

There was a feast, which made use of the boar I’d been keeping since King Aggie last caught one, and a powerful ale that put several of the dukes nearly to sleep at the table. One of the princesses nearly knocked over her goblet, then stopped, quickly, and snatched it up before a drop spilled. King Aggie left the feast early and resigned himself to his private chamber to confront his worries in private. I was part of the private. I stood at the door of his private chamber, the chancellor on one side, the earl on the other. King Aggie handed to me the gold coin for the pig’s throat. On the other side of the door, the princesses were holding themselves up against the wall. Tomorrow, they would have to be ready to wrangle pigs. Tonight, they proved to the servants which of them could handle our strong ale. Again, it was hard to imagine a beauty who was also a good drinker. There was one beauty among them and she had been wilting against the wall when I entered the great hall. Each princess was given a key with a boar’s head, made of a different metal, to correspond to the metal boar’s head plate on the door of their respective rooms. Beyond bronze and gold and silver, one had to have an eye for the metals, but there were also servants for the job. There was a princess with a brass key, and another with bronze. One with copper, and one long-legged princess with copper that had turned green. One with a shade of gold that was too white, and another with no metal at all, but a crystal boar’s head. I had known them for the space of hours, and it was enough to know my own choice. King Aggie said nothing. He had also been through this ritual too often. But he was right, to have that hunted look beneath his wariness.

I accepted King Aggie’s gold coin. We pretended there was ceremony. I passed the girls in the hallway and went toward the door that led to the pig pen, to stuff a coin down a throat. I made a detour to the kitchen on the way. It does not do good to look like a drinker when carrying out royal business, but it was in the business of royalty that I carried a mug of ale with me.

I went past the servants in the garden, the servants in the stables, to the pig pen, where eighteen piglets slept and digested their own dinner. I was alone, hidden, as I climbed into the pen and seized one of them. Down his throat went the beer. Into the centre of the frenzy went the pig. He would not soon sleep off this alcohol. A princess would have to be quick in her reflexes to notice him sleeping, and quick in her reflexes to jump to him in the middle of the pen. Then, because I was savage, and valuable in carrying out the king’s business, I put the coin down the pig’s drunk throat. I nudged him into the centre of the pen. For good measure, I slit each of his legs, enough to paralyze him. King Aggie was in for a resilient bride.

Because I was savage, I’d given him the chance. Because I was loyal, I had guaranteed it. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by Adam S. Doyle

City of Angels

Somehow the party lit up the entire street, even though it was held in a single apartment. It was a large apartment, the kind found only in the canyons in Los Angeles. It had a pool in the back, and several polished cars in the front. A girl in a leather dress lounged against one, posed with one high-heeled foot crossed over the other, shoulder tilted down, eyelids heavy with shadow.

Isabel had been to her fair share of parties. But she’d never understood what lured people to these sorts of parties, to places that boasted liquor, music that violated the law, and making out with someone you would likely regret in the morning.

Someone had once called it “chaos without consequence”. That someone obviously never read the papers and saw the endless stories about pretty, glamorous boys OD-ing on the pavement, or rock stars who got behind the wheel with beer on their breath.

But she wanted to see the appeal; she wanted to see how far she could push herself.

The interior of the apartment was a riot of people with drinks in hand swaying to slow EDM. It was absolutely full of people, some who abandoned the music to follow others out to the pool. She looked at them all. How could she ever fit in? Why would she- anyone – want to?

Ultra violet lights flashed. Someone was going around with scissors, cutting everyone’s glow sticks in half. Dancers waved them frantically. The entire apartment looked like a scene from Avatar.

There was an indoor pool as well. A girl lounged on the edge, in a bikini, wearing enough makeup that it was clear she had no intention of actually swimming. She was leaning against a boy in the pool, a hand on his wet shoulder, smiling and nodding. Isabel wondered what kind of person she would have been if she hadn’t left California for Minnesota.

Someone offered her a drink and a glow stick on her way to the patio. She shook her head, hesitated, and then took the proffered cup. It smelled rank and tasted it too. She handed it back after the first sip. The boy holding it looked abashed and slid back into the mass of dancers. She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or glad. Someone had told her that alcohol could either make you very sad, very happy, or very angry. The world needed her to be absolutely none of those things.

Something blocked the doors to the patio. It took Isabel a moment to realize that it was a group of girls, rather than an art installation. They had taken their glow sticks and deliberately swiped neon paint onto their lips and eyes. A couple had gone so far as to paint every single nail with the stuff. They looked like the fairies in a child’s fantasy brought to life. Beneath the paint nearly every girl had a mouth as shiny as glass. She hated it-

Why couldn’t she just forget it and be as neon-bright as them?

One of the girls looked up at Isabel and made such a high-pitched noise that it could have attracted attentive dogs. Isabel was not a dog, but beneath the phosphorescence and the makeup she recognized Clementine. Celementine leapt from the group of girls – there went the perfect composition of the art piece – and grabbed Isabel’s arm. “Isabel, sweetie! I’m so glad you came. Isn’t this party a dream?”

Isabel made her mouth perform an approximation of a smile. She knew from experience that it made her look a little amused, a little cynical, and sometimes drew men’s attentions to her lips. 

Clementine only beamed back. She pulled Isabel into the group and rattled off several names. Isabel only assumed that they were almost all the same thing, since the girls they belonged to looked like different versions of the same Barbie.

When she was done she held up a glow stick. Isabel didn’t take it, but Clementine only wiped her finger across its tip and ordered Isabel to part her lips. Isabel let her pat the glowing paint onto them.

Isabel caught her reflection in Clementine’s eyes. With her lips painted she almost looked like one of them. It was the biggest lie.

Clementine acted as though they had all been waiting for her. They absorbed her into their conversation as though she wasn’t made of Teflon, as though the words wouldn’t just bounce off her. When the patio door opened she smelled oranges and chlorine and the dusty perfume of the canyon.

She was glad not to be alone; L.A. was not a place to be alone. It was all about connections, a city of freeways that connected downtown and suburbs and beaches, and people who knew the cousin of this celebrity or this producer. People around her held her hand and did little shimmies, air kissed her cheek. It was something you did with strangers in L.A. If you did not do those things it had nothing to do with the fact that you were surrounded by strangers. The point was to not be alone.

After some indeterminable amount of time – how long ago had she arrived? How long ago had she had that drink? – a couple of the girls became genuinely curious about her.

“Where are you from?” Sierra asked.

“Minnesota,” she said.

Sierra’s eyes went as wide as the eyes of a cartoon animal.

A bevy of boys appeared. Most of them were fresh out of the pool. They shook their hair, sprinkling everyone with shining drops. One of them slid down Isabel’s dress. “Where have you been?” Clementine asked one, pulling one down by the shoulder to speak right in his ear.

“Looking for you,” he replied.

Clementine smiled. She kissed him and he let her. For a moment his eyes were closed. They blinked open and focused on Isabel before he pulled away from the kiss.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Isabel,” she said. She didn’t ask who he was.

Apparently she didn’t have to. “Jasper,” he said. He was tanned, the sort of tanned that came from days on these beaches, or hours on ones in Costa Rica. He flashed pearly white teeth when she gave him an almost-smile.

“Darling.” Clementine was at her side again. “Enjoy yourself. I’m going to find Candace.” It was a dismissal, but Clementine was the one that left.

“Anything I can get you?” Jasper asked.

“Ross brought a couple mickey’s,” one of his friends offered. He scratched his buzz cut.

“Water,” Isabel said. She got a feeling from Jasper, almost like a challenge, or a chase. It left her stomach buzzing.

“Ha!” said Buzz Cut. “It’s too late for water.”

She aimed her cool gaze at him. She parted her lips slowly. “Does that mean you won’t get it for me?”

In an instant he’d disappeared to find a bottle of water. Jasper laughed and wiped at his hair with a towel. His eyes didn’t leave hers.

She didn’t know quite how to do this. There were only so many steps she could take before she needed someone else to lead. She tried to think of a signal. She parted her lips and nudged his calf with the toe of her enormous heels.

It was all he needed.

He led her up the stairs, where it was only marginally quieter. She’d never known the point of parties, so she’d never known when she had accomplished what she’d come to do: when did she leave?

Maybe this was the point. Everyone did it for a reason, didn’t they?

Jasper pulled her into a dark bedroom. It was full of mirrors, maybe made for someone who didn’t intend to have someone else in the room with them, or maybe it was entirely for that.

Jasper closed the door and spun. He grasped her around the waist, slid his hands down to her hips, and kissed her.

He was taller than her, but not by much in the heels. The heels had been an impulse buy. She bought them because that was apparently what you did in Mel Rose, though she couldn’t remember why.

They were still kissing. She didn’t try to keep track of his hands. She kept waiting to feel like this was wrong. It didn’t.

It was one of those stories that was neither particularly bad, nor good. Just a story of one’s youth that was almost chic in L.A.

His mouth was urgent. She’d been kissed like this, but not by a stranger. He pressed against her like she would only be here for a moment, like he needed to get all of her before she was gone. Ah, so this was what it was like. Passion without affection.

He pulled back, just far enough she saw the corner of his mouth, his dark eyes, his wet collarbone. He laughed, quietly.

She kissed him to keep him quiet. His fingers found the zipper of her dress. Nothing in her head told her to stop. Stopping was as pointless as continuing. But if she stopped he might ask her name. She wanted to objectify, to be objectified. If his name was Jasper or something else entirely, how did it change anything? Even his face didn’t matter. She could reduce him to his hands-

Which were on her bare back and pulling down the shoulders of her dress. This seemed like a very grown-up experience to have. Like saying Last night, in the canyon, I- and it was another story that blended into hundreds of almost identical stories in Los Angeles. It would be distinct and hardly memorable, because these stories hardly ever were.

He tugged the front of her dress down. The thrill of the chase – the one she assumed attracted everyone to this kind of action – was gone. There was no challenge now. His intent was clear. She was fine. Everything was fine.

He pulled her to the bed and leaned back for a second. “Shit,” he said, looking down.

She wasn’t sure if people said anything while they did this. What did they say? What could they possibly have to talk about? Whatever it was, she didn’t want him to say anything. It would only blur lines.

“Shut up,” she said, and kissed him.

In the second between kisses he said, “beautiful.”

She pulled away. Her lipstick had bled cherry across his mouth. “No,” she said. She said it like she said no to her parents when they asked if she’d been the one to break the glass in the sink. It tasted like a lie.

“No?” His voice didn’t sound different at all.

She wasn’t sure if, at the moment, she hated him, or herself, or the city for trying to show her what it had to offer and her attempt to see it and not being able to look at the drugs and the sex and the drinks without seeing past them to the unplanned pregnancies and heroin tracks and rehab stints. Why couldn’t she just turn her brain off?

“No.” She pushed his hands away and pulled up the straps of her dress. He stopped looking at her bra as she reached behind her for the zipper. She tasted the neon on her lips, smudged with her lipstick.

He chuckled under his breath. “You not drunk enough?”

Maybe this would be easier if she was drunk. But alcohol left a taste in her mouth almost as bad as this moment.

“Clementine is probably wondering where you are,” she said, voice like ice.

He looked at her. He clearly couldn’t see beyond her raccoon mask of eyeliner. She’d put it on heavily enough to discourage any emotional guesswork.

She wet to the room’s add-on bathroom and fixed the wrinkles in her dress. She ran a hand through her hair and wiped the lipstick off the side of her mouth. She did not look like a more grown-up version of herself. She did not look like the girls that loitered in boutiques, talking about their surfer boyfriends while they tried on large sunglasses. She looked like those people who had come into the city with screenplays or demo CDs and wound up in bars. No- she didn’t even look like them. She looked like a girl with so many sins that if you took them all away she’d be nothing but her eyeliner and a pair of heels. Everyone in L.A. was nothing but sins.

How stupid she had been to reduce L.A. to the stories of those on the decline, when it was the collection of those who were already fallen.

She emerged from the bathroom. Jasper had disappeared; when she went down the stairs she couldn’t see him or Clementine. Someone offered her a hit of something. There was sweat at his temples. The veins in his arm were dark as bruises. He smiled the smile of someone who was so low he didn’t see there wasn’t anywhere else to go.

None of the people in this party would ever drive through Los Angeles and see more than the grey pavement in front of them. They may not all have been born here, but they were made out of – into – this imaginary kingdom, this hipster nirvana. This place where dreams came true if you made them come true, and destiny was for the wealthy and luck was for the poor. This dry, dustbowl. This glowing, glittering metropolis. This city. This city.

Isabel left the party. She did know it had ended. It had ended and there was nothing accomplished. That was the appeal, she decided. They had nothing to accomplish, and therefore nothing to distract them from the non-reality that was all of Los Angeles.

It didn’t matter if you’d come here to make it big in the industry. It didn’t matter if you’d come here to surf. It didn’t matter if you’d come here to forget an ex boyfriend, or to find one. The moment you entered the city, you were dead.

Art by Cara Delevingne

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Bargain

I didn’t know how to deal with loss. I’d never experienced loss like they had. The kind of loss that set families off-kilter and pounded cracks through them. I wasn’t prepared for the heavy quality of the air in the house, as if the loss of one person was the loss of a pillar under a ceiling that was constantly pressing down. I’d known people distantly who’d had deaths in the family, from illness or car accidents. But a family that had lost a child, and not lost a child in death, but lost them, to some place or even to some person, was entirely different. I expected they would be frantic, searching for answers, or upset that the police investigation had ended. Torn apart and looking like it.

They weren’t like that.

The first thing that struck me about Lisbeth’s family was how functional they seemed. No one looked ready to dissolve into a puddle of tears. I’d met her mother before, before Ariadne had gone missing, and she looked just as she had that day in the spring. She wore a cardigan and had her hair up in a very utilitarian bun. There were shadows under her eyes but they could have been from working late. Lisbeth had said that her mother was taking regular twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, on-call constantly and finding a reason to be out of the house. She stood there in the living room looking worn but not taut, not pulled to the end of her emotional tether as Lisbeth had when Ariadne had first gone missing.

Lisbeth was better now. Coping, as her mother obviously was. Sean didn’t look like he wanted to cope at all.

“Sean,” Lisbeth said when he didn’t get out of his chair to greet me. “Aren’t you going to say hello? Ella’s here.”

His complete lack of interest was the first thing that told me that he was dealing with Ariadne’s disappearance differently from his sister and mother. Sean was full of vitality, and his personality always had an edge to it, like he was an inch from bursting into laughter or shouting. It was intense, like the sharp and handsome features of his face. He usually said hello, looking either aggrieved to say it or genuinely glad to see me. There was nothing on his face now but a distant disdain, as if he were angry with something none of the rest of us could see.

“Sean?”

Sean pushed out of his chair and headed to the kitchen. He grabbed a glass bottle from the countertop and a bottle opener. Without answering, he headed toward the stairs, prying the top off the bottle. Listbeth muttered, “asshole,” under her breath as he stumbled on a step. Soda (it was too fizzy to be beer) sloshed over his hand. He grabbed for the banister and pulled himself up, not bothering about the fizzy mess on the floor. He stomped up the rest of the stairs.

At the top of them he turned so quickly the carpet under him slid and he almost slipped. I heard him going down the corridor above us too, and the crash of a door being flung open so hard it hit the wall beside it. Then another slam as it closed.

I didn’t say anything. Lisbeth might have been embarassed in another situation, but now she just looked furious. “He thinks this is all his tragedy,” she said. “Asshole.”

“He’s been having a hard time with the police and the inquiry,” Lisbeth’s mother said beside us. Her hands were twitching as she held them in front of her. The expression on her face was reassuring and brittle, so shiny that I knew there was something darker beneath it. I felt like I should say something about her daughter, but in doig so I might open up and bleed that darkness. “He doesn’t like the attention. He wanted to be alone for all of this. And it was a shock to all of us. He just doesn’t want to think about how we might have lost her. He’ll be embarrassed later. He’s just angry for now. We all have our ways.”

Lisbeth gave me a newspaper clipping in her room later and I read it while she painted her toes. It summed up the entire investigation, she told me, and I took this to mean that she did not want to explain it to me. I knew only bits and pieces, and after I read the article, what I knew was this: Ariadne, fourteen, disappeared three weeks prior. Went for a walk before dinner, never came home to dinner. The investigation started a couple hours later because she was a minor. It had been three weeks and there was no sign of her body, though the woods in the ravine by the house had been searched. There were no clues. The public searches had been called off.

I tried to recall Ariadne as I’d last seen her. The youngest of the family, Lisbeth’s small sister, who looked even smaller, who read books about mythology and loved the original fairy tales and spat at Disney adaptations. Lisbeth had once told me that Ariadne wanted to be a fairy hunter when she was older.

“Mum cries all the time, now,” Lisbeth said. She tapped the wall behind her bed, between her and her mother’s room. It made a hollow sound; her nail scratched the wall paper as she slid it down. “Sometimes at night. Don’t worry. You’ve got your mp3 player, right? You can put it on if she does it tonight. I don’t think she knows that I can hear her.”

I looked outside at the ravine. It dipped into a green mess, filled with so much foliage that from this vantage there was nothing to see but the tops of trees. The ground under it, which I knew from experience was filled with rolling hills, some as high as if they hid houses under them, all covered with moss, was invisible. I imagined Ariadne in those woods and where she would have gone. A hand reaching out to grab her, from the roots of a tree. A tree swallowing her up.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I was used to waking a few times in a night, as if, no matter how deeply I fell into sleep, there was always something attached to me, something wound tightly around me, that was ready to bring me back with a small jerk. I was jerked back to wakefulness and Lisbeth’s long, slow, bragging breaths in the small hours of the morning. It was dark and cold, the wind biting at me where it crept under the windowsill. Lisbeth had opened it, likely, when I’d been asleep. She always complained about being a hot sleeper.

I was a cold sleeper, and now I was not a sleeper at all. I pushed my legs over the edge of the bed and looked for my jumper. I tugged it on, tucking it into my sweatpants. The floor was dark, but there was a prickle of moonlight that bled a line across the room, like a long blue light bulb hung above the bed. I crept out of the room and pulled the door shut behind me. In my socks I went to use the bathroom, blinking when the light seared my eyeballs, stumbling for a moment when I turned the light off again while the toilet flushed. Darkness always seemed darker when there’s been a reprieve from it.

I went back toward Lisbeth’s room, but didn’t go inside. There was a sound coming from inside, like she was scarping her nails against the wall again, but the light was off. I knew she must have been asleep, so I didn’t bother opening the door. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep if I lay next to her, if I lay down at all. Sleep was far away. I left the muffled noise along and continued. I padded past Sean’s room. The light wasn’t on either, and it was completely silent.

I went downstairs, as quietly as I could. Sean was there. I paused on the bottom step of the stairs, staring at the couch. It was easy to see him, with his wild dark hair and dark eyes, and his sharply-cut face and body. The moonlight lit the room like a sun under a silver veil. It flooded in through the glass doors that made up most of one wall and looked out into the small garden. The world outside was grey, dark, misty. I could see the grass just in front of the door, the shapes of trees not far away, but nothing else.

Sean was sprawled on the couch, his bare feet hanging over the edge of one arm. Under his heavy eyelids I saw a sliver of black. He was awake, drumming his fingers on one leg and on the couch cushions. He tilted his head toward me when I stepped off the stairs. “What are you doing up?” he asked.

“I don’t sleep well.” I came over and sat on the edge of the couch. He didn’t make room for me but he was lean enough that, propped up at this angle, he left enough room that I could perch on the cushion.

“So you came to invade the living room instead?” He sounded annoyed.

“I didn’t know you would be here. It isn’t your bedroom.” I crossed my arms. The cold air must have been coming in through another window. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. “Why aren’t you in you bedroom?”

“It’s my house,” Sean pointed out. “I couldn’t sleep.”

I tried to think of something to say to him. Sean and I had never had real conversations. I’d never had a real conversation with Ariadne, either. I had no idea what they meant to one another, or what to say to him. I tried to imagine was I would want to hear if someone I loved had vanished without warning and not come back. When people were suspecting the worst. I couldn’t think of anything except a question. “What do you think happened to her?”

Sean’s pointy face got pointier.

“I’ve heard people talk about all the things it could be,” I told him. “I don’t know what it’s like, obviously, but- It’s just, I know everyone says that they want to help and you can talk to them. But I’m actually good at listening. And not saying anything. So it’s almost like not talking to anyone, except I’ll actually hear. And I won’t give you advice. Or anything. So, if you want to talk…”

Sean’s narrowed eyes got a little wider. I could hardly see them in the hollows under his brow. “Congratulations for saying what almost everyone has said. With your own twist. I’ve never heard anyone say it so free of eloquence.”

“I try,” I said, even though I didn’t.

“I can tell,” he said. After a long moment, when he wasn’t looking at me, he said, “Thanks.”

We stayed on the couch, and Sean moved over just a few inches, enough that I could relax the leg that had previously been holding half of me up, and I could slide fully onto the cushions.

Something hit the glass door. It was a clear sound, like a nail tapping a crystal glass. Sean’s eyes went so wide they looked like tunnels. He didn’t turn toward the doors but reached a hand forward, spreading it across my knee. It gave me a jolt but only because I could his fingers were shaking. “Ella, are you looking at the door?”

“Yes,” I said, as there was another tapping sound. I recognized it. Someone or something had thrown a rock at the door. Whatever it was, I couldn’t see it through the grey. There were squirrels near my house, resting in all the trees that surrounded it, and acorns were constantly dropping on the roof. These taps were from objects hurtled horizontally, though. “Why?”

Sean ducked his head as another tap came. He didn’t answer as there was a fourth. This one was aggressive, the small pebble ricocheting off the glass with the force of a bullet. Whatever was throwing it was strong.

“Are you still watching?” Sean whispered. He was so quiet. I could tell he was trying to breathe softly, trying not to disturb the silence. “Is there anything there? Do you see anything?”

I shook my head. His quiet was contagious. I had the sudden desire to stay silent too, soundless, though I couldn’t tell why.

“Pretend you don’t see anything. Pretend you don’t hear anything. Ella-” he breathed. His hand on my knee reached for my wrist. He pulled me down on the couch, rolled me so I faced him, my legs lining up with his. His pupils were blown wide, his breath puffing on my cheek. I could feel his pulse in his wrist. He was blinking fast, as if with each blink he could see the world more clearly.

“Ella. Don’t move at all,” he whispered. “Don’t say anything.”

Two hands hit the glass door.

Their fingers lingered as the palms pulled way, then they retreated back into the mist.

“Sean,” I whispered. My voice felt like I was speaking around cotton. My pulse was dangerously quick. “What was that?”

The scent of mist and moss was pervasive, as if we’d opened the doors, and every window.

The mist hissed, like the wind through the trees. But a wind would have pushed the mist away. The sound slithered in the air, in the space between my heartbeats. It was several sighs at once. “Sean. Sean. Come out. Come out, Sean. We want you.”

“What is that?” I said again. I couldn’t take my eyes from the place where the hands had been. The prints were still there, clear in the condensation.

“Ella, you have to go back upstairs,” Sean said. “Come on, go. I’ve got to go.”

“What? Where?”

Sean pushed himself up on his elbow. I was on the outside of the couch, trapping him in. He looked down at me. “I’m going outside. I’ve got to see them. I don’t want them to come inside. I don’t want them to come after Lisbeth too. That’s not fucking happening.”

“Too? What do you mean too? What are-”

“I have a feeling,” Sean said, pushing himself up the rest of the way, knocking my feet out of the way so he could stand on his.

I wasn’t nearly brave enough to go up the dark staircase on my own. But I was brave enough to stand next to dark-coloured Sean as he walked to the back door. I said, “I’m coming.”

The mist swirled around our feet as we walked down the steeply sloped side of the ravine. Sean had let go of my wrist but sometimes I wanted him to take it again. We were walking close enough that we wouldn’t lose one another in the mist, but the possibility still made my stomach twist. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t. I would have crushed his fingers.

My socks were soaked through when we got to the bottom. The springy moss felt as wet as if I’d walked through a stream. There was dew on the trees. The boughs were a complicated, blurry spider web above us. Occasionally we heard sighs, from far away, then so close that I spun in the mist, not wanting to see the source of them, unable to stop searching.

We found a clearing. There was a stream running through it, slowed to a trickle. Sean grabbed the edge of my shirt to pull me to a stop. It was cold as winter here, as if we’d climbed into a dark hole. Sean stood in the moss, squinting into the mist.

“Do you see them?” he said-

-just as they came out from behind the trees. The water at our feet shivered. The trees seemed to bough. The mist rolled at our ankles like a tide pushed up onto a beach. I watched the hands curl around the trees, the delicate bony feet stepping out, the faces appearing. I could not tell if they were girls or boys, they were androgynous, like children whose faces had not had time to mature. But their features were sharp, sharper than Sean’s. Their skin was poreless, as soft and fine as porcelain, their hair shining, drifting about them like seaweed in water. They were naked, but they had nothing to identity their gender, their bodies smooth, without crevices. I tried to summon a word for them, for the entities, but I could come up with nothing that did not sound impossible.

“Oh, Sean,” they sighed. Their voices came from all around us, like they were the air itself. “Sean, you brought company. You came for us.”

I counted them, the things that came from behind the trees. I got to seven, all in front or beside us. There might have been one behind us, or a few, but I didn’t look. I saw that one of them held something in its hands, a lump of fur that wasn’t moving. Another smiled with a cluster of teeth that was not perfect, but thin and sharp. There was something about it that was so other. I tried to reason that what looked bad, or cruel, wasn’t always so. But it was everything humanity was not and something deep inside of me recoiled from it.

Sean looked at them with empty eyes. He released the hem of my shirt and spoke to me without turning his head. “They- I don’t know what they are. But Ariadne… she…” his voice caught and he stopped trying to speak, but I knew what he wanted to say.

The creatures came a little closer, but not within touching distance. Some of them were smiling, or making an approximation of it. Nothing on their faces could convey actual joy. Their features moved like some moldable mask, but there was nothing human under them. They reached forward with long, long fingers. Every one had an extra knuckle.

“Sean, what do they-” I began, but I stopped. Because all of their gazes had turned to me, as though they hadn’t noticed me before. Seven pairs of green eyes, seven toxic green gazes, settled on me. They were eyes you didn’t want to see in the forest at night, eyes that cut through mist and the dark.

I remembered something I’d once heard from Ariadne. When she’d tried explaining that people were wrong about fairytales, that the real enemies weren’t just humans. That in other parts of the world there were myths about creatures, creatures with long fingers that reached into cradles, or beckoned from beneath waves. Horses with teeth or seals with human legs under their skins.

I saw a face in the mist. It was quick, like a coalescence of shadows and moonlight. It might have been a trick, of the light, or my eyes betraying me, but my throat burned anyway. The face had Lisbeth’s amused mouth add Sean’s strong eyebrows. “Sean.”

“It’s her,” he said. His voice was as violent as the look he’d given me when I first saw him the day before. “I know. But I don’t know how to-”

The creatures must have seen me looking. They gave me those imitation smiles again. They faded in and out of the mist. In. Out. In. Out. Then in again, much closer to the both of us. I almost stumbled back.

“Pretty,” one of them crooned, reaching a hand forward like she meant to touch my hair. I felt a whisper on my scalp, as cold as if dew had fallen on my head, rolling over my crown, toward my ear.

Sean, jostled me, throwing out an arm. “Don’t touch her.”

“He likes her,” they sighed, together. Sean went still. My fingers felt numb. My face was prickling. “How much? How much?”

I took a step back then, quickly. I could still see half of Sean’s face, hardening, his eyes darkening. “Sean. How do we leave?”

“Bargain,” one of the creatures shrilled, and the rest shrieked with delight. The sound was a death knell, high and keening like the howl of a hyena.

“Sean…” I began.

“For what? What do you want for Ariadne?” Sean said.

Something came back to me. I recalled passing Lisbeth’s room, the scraping sound, as if she were dragging a hand across the wall, or the floor. The cold air in her room of the window I no longer believed she’d left open. “Oh, Sean,” I said, before they could. He looked at me. I didn’t want to say it. But it wasn’t my choice. He had to make it. “Lisbeth. Would you rather have Lisbeth or Ariadne?”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Where She Went

Mama and Papa didn’t understand that he wasn’t imaginary. Mama said imaginary like she really meant dream or hope, and when Papa said it he always sounded as though he’d missed the words fucking childish and landed on imaginary instead. I tried to explain that he was invisible, not imaginary, but that seemed to siphon away at their conviction instead of fortify it.

Mama asked if he was my guardian angel. He was my guardian. I couldn’t say he was an angel. He looked nothing like the creatures in the stained glass windows of the church we went to Sunday mornings. He looked nothing like the paintings I saw in a picture book at school that looked more like a catalogue for the L’Ouvre than a children’s story.

I didn’t have a name for him at first. I thought of him as an echo, because he arrived after spring, in June, when the damp was tapering and the heat was swelling and bleaching the rocks in the river, schorching the grass and turning our yard into a burnt brown rug. The air was filled with breathlessness and swelling like it would pop. He appeared, cool and dark like soil that had been rained on, like an echo of spring. I was trying to sleep under my bed, which was cooler than under my sheets. I was covered in sweat, everything sticking to me, and flipping onto my stomach, then my back when sweat pooled on my stomach. Outside the window cicadas were already humming, too loudly to hear thoughts. Frogs chirped. Birds didn’t bother. It was too hot for their song.

It was black. Outside the room. Inside of it. Even with the fan whirring and blowing a weak cold breath across my tummy, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t think I would ever sleep.

I turned my cheek against the floor. It was sticky but cool, the ridges of the wood so pronounced I could feel it as I rubbed the side of my face against it. I whispered a word into the dark, to test it. House. Language dissolved in the dark, as if the neural mechanism to turn sounds into words could be eclipsed by the dark. House sounded made up. It delighted me endlessly to say it, over and over, hushed.

House, said a voice that was not my own, joining in.

He was on top of the bed, speaking over the edge of it, down to me. His voice was smooth, like butter softened by the summer heat. It was deep like nighttime. I giggled so loudly that Papa came stomping down the hall in his boxers and Coca Cola logo t-shirt to tell me to shut the hell up because the middle of the night was no time to make noise and it was already too goddamn hot and loud to sleep. If I wanted to goddamn play I could do it when the sun came up. He didn’t mention my invisible friend.

But I didn’t stop talking. We traded nonsense words through the night, in whispers, both of us trying to speak more quietly than the other until we couldn’t hear the words we exchanged at all. House, sugar, gecko, bat… We played with my dolls and I tried to show him how to use a yo-yo, but he just liked to watch me do it, even when I tangled the string and had to get it undone, slowly, in the dark, feeling for the knot.

One night, before bed, I was having tea with him, when Mama came and stood in the doorway, with a can of beer in her hand, condensation gathering on her fingers, her eyes narrowed, or maybe just looking narrowed because they were red and puffy. I looked up at her, because he did, and said, “Mama?”

Mama didn’t look at me at first. She looked at the window, like I’d spoken from outside. The heat made her curls stick to her neck. Her curls were shiny, her lip stain fading, but I thought she was beautiful. Mama was always the prettiest person, I thought.  Then she turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know what name to choose. I want a good name. He needs one.”

Mama’s red lips pursed. One of her eyebrows was critical of me. “Who’s he?”

“My… guardian.” I tried out the word on my tongue. It tasted like house did in the dark.

“Why can’t your guardian think up his own name?” She didn’t sound indulgent or amused, but not angry about him, like Papa was. She didn’t care what his name was, and that bugged me, made my throat sticky.

“He wants me to name him. But I can’t think of anything good.”

“Spot,” Mama said.

I shook my head. There was an age when you realized your parents didn’t have the answer to everything, and I wasn’t at that age yet, so answers that didn’t satisfy me still left me feeling betrayed. “That’s a dog name. He needs a good name.”

“Alshat.”

Alshat was a star’s name. Mama had probably learned it in her days at university, which we almost never talked about because one time I’d asked my parents if I was going and Mama had gotten a sour, pinched look on her face while Papa’s cheeks and ears turned red. But Papa didn’t know Alshat was a star’s name. Mama called him Alshat when she asked if he was coming to dinner, or asked if he needed an extra seat at the table. Papa told me that if I didn’t stop pretending Alshat was real, I was going to get my head shoved in a toilet at school because people don’t like retards, Ginny.

Mama and Papa got into a lot of fights over that summer. It was too hot not to fight, and too hot to stay in the same room, so once they were done shouting they always went into separate rooms, or Mama left the house while Papa knocked something over. They were fighting in the kitchen while Mama made gravy and Papa tested the meat to see if it was done cooking, glaring at its pink insides. Alshat and I were sitting quietly at the table in the dining room to wait for dinner. I’d put out all the plates, but Papa had shoved the meat back under the grill, so I guessed it would be a while before we ate.

“-dying out here. This heat. There’s nothing to paint. Nowhere to study, for Christ’s sake,” Mama said. The wooden spoon she used to stir the gravy traced a wobbly shape in the air as she talked and gestured. Alshat was watching it too. “Not that you care. What’s wrong with university? Too hard or do you really not care about living in this dust bowl with no idea what’s out there in the world? Do you even know who Van Gogh was? Do you know him from your brother?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I bring home your food. What fucking right do you have to talk to me like that?” Papa snarled, sounding more like an angry cat than a man.

“I have every right,” Mama said. “I-”

“Alshat, don’t say that,” I said, putting my hand on the table between us. I leaned in and whispered, “We can go to my room and finish having tea. Or we can build a castle.”

Papa slammed one of the cupboards in the kitchen closed. It banged, once, then twice as it bounced. Mama looked ready to kill. “Fine!” Papa shouted at his fist. “Go to your fucking room, Ginny. Go!”

“Don’t you dare speak to her like that!” Mama growled. “Ginny, baby, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your daddy.”

I wasn’t worried about Papa as much as I was about her. I didn’t like the scraped sound of her voice, or her gentle hands curled like claws, reaching for me. I hopped off my chair, Alshat behind me, and bolted for my room. I pulled it shut, even though it was like putting cardboard between myself and the hallway. I lay under my bed, the fan pointed at me, tracing my fingers in the dusty, and another in the sweat on my tummy. The dust stuck to my hot palms. “Alshat. I don’t want you to say that again, all right? They were just having a fight.”

Alshat apologized and found new words to make un-real. Then he started to sing. It felt like a siren, like an ambulance coming down the road, like the promise that something bad had happened and it was only going to get worse until it didn’t.

The next day I went to the front door and looked for my shoes. They were usually under Mama’s but Mama’s weren’t there. I put on my shoes and looked for her boots, the ones with the little hills and the holes at the toes that made her look beautiful and made men look at her when we went to the proper grocery store. Mama was gone with the shoes. Papa came out of his room to make coffee and grab a bear, and in the afternoon he went to the backyard and starting putting together the flattened cardboard boxes we kept in the shed. He made one phone call during dinner, and I watched him while I ate spaghetti from a can. I couldn’t hear the person on the other side of the phone but I guessed it was Grams, because he kept saying No, She’s your daughter, and Well, she’s all right, I didn’t tell her anything, I don’t know what the hell to say, She’s fine, Really?

“Ginny,” he said, holding out the phone as far as the cord would stretch. “It’s your Grandma. Talk to her. Stop talking to your invisible friend, talk to Grandma, come on.”

“Yes, sir.” I took the phone- somehow the cord stretched a little bit more to read me, all the way down on the kitchen floor, because the received was high on the wall. The phone smelled like Papa’s beer and cigarettes. “Grams?”

“Ginny. Oh, baby,” she said. She sounded a lot like Mama, but like Mama’s voice on a scratchy record. Mama had never smoked. “I’m getting a bus. I’ll be with you the day after tomorrow, all right?”

“Mama’s gone,” I said. “Alshat, stop.”

“Al- what? I know your Mama’s gone. You’re going to be just fine, sweetie,” Grams said. When she said it I knew that Alshat had told the truth, and he hadn’t listened to me the night before when Mama and Papa were fighting.

Grams came two days later, with her small bag full of things that smelled like her house in the larger town. She cleaned the linens and I helped her hang them on the line in the garden. She prodded Papa until he took a shower, then vacuumed his room while he was in the bathroom, then the living room, and my room. She set up a chair at the table for Alshat, even though Alshat was tall enough that he could stand during meals. She asked me to stay quiet at night because she was a room away from me and could hear me talking to him.

Alshat stayed all summer. Grams did too. The branches on the trees sagged, like the heat took something out of them as well. The air over everything shimmered, like the earth had become a furnace. Papa ate in the garden, or his room, and didn’t give Grams the chance to vacuum his floor a second time. When we ate I spoke to Alshat when Grams was staring at nothing, the way Mama sometimes did. But Grams heard me, when Mama didn’t. She looked disappointed when I only gave her one-word answers to questions. But I didn’t have anything to say to her at the empty table.

“You’re excused,” she said, voice laced with sadness. “You can go to your room, Ginny. You and Alshat. Except- listen. Even if your Mama doesn’t come back, you know maybe she’ll send you a letter, right? You know she loves you, right? She didn’t leave because of you, baby. You know that, right?”

I nodded and waited for her to finish. Sometimes people needed a few moments to let the words coalesce and sort themselves out on their tongue before speaking them. Grams leaned across the table and patted my hand. She had painted nails, like Mama, but her hand was covered with wrinkles, like the folds in laundry. She raked my wrist with her nails as she pulled her hand away. Alshat was looked at the spot on my wrist she’d touched.

“And here,” she added, picking up something from one of the chairs. It had been pushed under the table so I hadn’t seen the shopping bag sitting on it, but it had a plastic bag inside of that, and in that there was a Polaroid camera. It was black and plastic-looking with a few stickers on it. “It was your Mama’s. She said you could have it. She said you could have anything of hers you wanted. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I remember smiling, so wide it almost hurt, because I’d never had my own camera. And Grams looked happy to give it to me, and I could feel Alshat excited beside me. “How many pictures can I take?”

“As many as you want,” she said. “We’ve got extra rolls of film. Try to make these ones last at least a week, all right? I have to go into Golden Lake to get more film, and I don’t want to do that too often.”

I nodded. I didn’t say thank you. I was already running to my bedroom. I kicked the door shut and told Alshat to pose for the camera. He didn’t want to pose anywhere except under the bed. I lay down on my tummy and slithered halfway under the bed, turning the camera on, the bulb leaping up, ready for action. It was dark under the bed, even though the sun hadn’t gone down and my room was bright with sun. “Say cheese,” I said, like the photographer who took our school photos.

Alshat didn’t say anything. I took his picture and listened to the camera spit it out, looking at the shiny grey surface of it before I waved it around, waiting for the grey to resolve into shadows, into shapes, into Alshat. I held up the picture to show Alshat himself, like wide crocodile-mouth, his eyes like slashes of light, the outline of him, which was all that appeared in the dark, and all that showed up on film.

Your Mama is never coming back for that camera.

“I know that, Alshat,” I said.

Alshat’s eyes were all colour in the Polaroid picture. No pupils.

Do you want me to get rid of your Papa too?

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay