Fractured fables, p.18
Fractured Fables, page 18
Charm sits back, cross-legged, ripping disgustedly at the grass. “You’re so busy mucking around in other worlds you don’t even care about the freaky shit happening in your own.”
“Like what kind of freaky shit?” I ask, very mildly. But I think I know.
“Like fairy tale shit. I bought one of those frozen apple pies—shut up, they’re good—and when we cut into it we found a bunch of blackbirds. Prim’s shoes turned to glass one night while she was dancing. Your mom’s roses went nuts in December, blooming while there was still snow on the ground.”
I unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth and say carefully, “That’s not so bad, is it?”
“Well, it’s not great.” Charm is tearing the grass up in great handfuls now, her nail beds stained neon. “The birds were all dead and putrefied. Prim’s shoes shattered under her—nine stitches, she missed weeks of class. And your mom’s roses died down to the roots. She tore them all up.”
“Oh.”
Charm fixes me with a blunt blue eye. “Is it your fault?”
“Maybe.”
“Will it get worse?”
“Uh, maybe. Yeah.” I look away from her. “If I don’t stop.”
“Then…” Charm presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Jesus, why don’t you?”
“I should. I will! But…” But somewhere along the line, Eva became one of the people I’m supposed to take care of, and she needs me, and the physical laws of the multiverse can go straight to hell. “But first I need to borrow your phone.”
Charm stands. She stares down at me with an expression somehow worse than anger, or even disappointment. It’s a sort of bitter, self-directed chagrin, as if she’s annoyed that she allowed herself to be disappointed by me again. She slams her phone down on the plastic card table as she leaves.
It takes me a minute to guess her passcode (8008, because Charm still has a seventh grader’s sense of humor), and another minute to find the faculty contact information on Ohio University’s site.
The phone slips against the clammy sweat of my face. “Hi, this is Zinnia Gray. Is Dr. Bastille available?”
* * *
“SO—AGAIN, HYPOTHETICALLY—HOW COULD the protagonist get back into that Snow White story without the magic mirror?”
Dr. Bastille sighs on the other end of the line. It seems to go on a very long time, as if she’s holding her phone in front of a box fan. “Well, hypothetically, if you were my student and you came into my office and told me … everything you just told me”—over the last six to eight minutes, I’ve given her the SparkNotes version of my life, framing it all somewhat unconvincingly as the plot of a very meta novella I’m working on—“I would be legally and morally obligated to refer you to campus counseling services.”
“Good thing I’m not your student anymore, huh.”
“Zinnia, that’s not better. You see how that’s not better, right? If a random person came into my office to talk about the fairy tale multiverse, I would probably swallow my personal convictions about law enforcement’s role in the violent maintenance of race and class hierarchies”—this is ivory tower speak for fuck the cops—“and call security.”
“Sure, I get that, but what if I was very convincing and desperate-seeming, and you were sort of compelled to advise me despite your better judgment?” I’m trying to bully her into a specific narrative role—the expert consultant/holder of arcane knowledge who offers wise counsel to the protagonist in their hour of need and saves their bacon—but I can feel Dr. Bastille resisting it. She’s never much liked playing prescribed roles.
I hear her pulling the phone away from her face, saying I’ll just be a minute, love to someone else. A woman’s voice says something about dinner reservations in a tone suggesting they have been made and broken before.
Dr. Bastille sighs into the receiver again. “Alright. Given the parameters of the story you just told me, it is my professional opinion that you’ve written yourself into a corner.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re screwed.”
“I—okay.” The grass feels very cold on my bare feet, the sky very high above me.
“You said the only way to cross into other tale types was by way of a particular enchanted object. A useful MacGuffin which is now, according to you, broken. So your protagonist doesn’t have a magic mirror, and neither does the villain-slash-love-interest—a trend in popular fiction which I find beneath you, by the way”—Dr. Bastille elects to ignore my sighed I wish—“and I don’t think the physical laws of this universe allow for the creation of enchanted objects. Do they?”
I’m circling the fire pit now, letting the plastic-smelling smoke sear my eyes. “I guess not.”
“Which seems like it might be a good thing, because your protagonist’s hypothetical wanderings were doing substantial damage to the fabric of the space-time continuum, were they not?”
“But like, why?” My voice goes high on the last word, wobbling perilously. “Why is it such a big deal if I—I mean, my character—doesn’t just lie down and wait for the trolley to hit her? Why can’t she run away?”
I can hear a familiar creaking through the line, as if Dr. Bastille is leaning back in her office chair and pinching the bridge of her nose. She did this often in our advisee meetings. “In this novella, you’ve posited narratives as literal worlds. So stories are the organizing principle of the multiverse—which raises some serious world-building questions, by the way, like where these story-verses come from in the first place, since the existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller.” She pauses to address her date: No, you go ahead, I’ll meet you there. “Anyway, you’ve created a universe that runs on plot, and a main character who smashes plots like a human wrecking ball. In refusing to complete her narrative arc, she is compromising the integrity of the universe.”
“Oh.” The smoke scorches my eyes, burns the inside of my nose. “Then this is it. It’s over.”
“It does seem a dissatisfying climax.”
“Yeah. Well.” My nose is running badly now. “Thanks for your time.”
“Sure.” The creak of her chair, the shush of arms sliding into coat sleeves. Dr. Bastille’s voice softens very slightly when she says, “I’d be happy to read it, when it’s done.”
“Read what?”
“The … never mind. Good luck, Zinnia.” She hangs up.
I set Charm’s phone back on the card table and sink slowly to my knees. My eyes are too full of tears to see much beyond fractal green, but I search the grass with my hands, crawling in circles. All I find are beer caps, a few waterlogged roaches, the sharp tops of acorns. There are no shards of magic mirror in Charm’s backyard. Which means Dr. Bastille was right. I’m screwed, and so is Eva.
* * *
I PACE THE yard for a while, inventing and dismissing a dozen unlikely schemes. It occurs to me eventually that I’m doing what my therapist would call bargaining, and that bargaining is a stage of grief.
Charm and Prim are in the kitchen, speaking in tense, low voices. They stop when the screen door shuts behind me. Charm gives me a searching stare, which I return blankly until she turns back to the dishes. Prim looks fretfully between the two of us for a moment, but there’s no real question which side she’ll pick. She unfolds a dish towel and dries a mixing bowl at Charm’s side.
I walk down the hall to the bedroom that is supposedly mine but which actually functions as a walk-in closet. I pick my way through yoga mats and wrapping paper, trash bags of winter clothes, a laundry basket filled with velvet gowns, pewter goblets, all the crap I hadn’t sold at the Ren faire before I disappeared. The futon is buried, so I sit on a box of unassembled furniture with THREE IN ONE! written across the side in bubbly, childish letters.
I stare at the wall and test the words on my tongue: The end. It’s not such a bad ending, I guess. It’s a sort of cosmic compromise with the universe. I don’t get to magically cure my disease and con my way out of my own plot, but at least I didn’t drop dead at twenty-one; Eva doesn’t get to live as a hero, but at least she didn’t die a villain.
It’s not exactly happily ever after, but that’s a pretty bullshit concept anyway. Honestly, I don’t even know why I’m crying.
Later, long after the clink of dishes has faded and the tears have left my cheeks stiff and dry, the door inches open. I assume it’s Charm coming back for round two, but it’s Prim. She steps easily through the detritus and clears a space on the futon. Neither of us say anything for a while. She just sits there with her perfect posture and her perfect hair, and I notice the fine lines at the corners of her mouth, the slight pucker of skin beneath her eyes.
She doesn’t look old or anything, just ordinary. Like any other girl who wakes up every morning and makes coffee a little stronger than she prefers because that’s how her wife likes it, who shops at the farmer’s market every Saturday, who will look in the mirror in ten years and start googling eye creams even though her wife insists she’s always had a thing for crow’s feet. Maybe happily ever after isn’t a totally bullshit concept, after all; maybe, if I can’t have my own, I can at least find the decency not to ruin this one.
I inhale. “I know I’ve been a shitty friend. And a lackwit, and all those other things Charm called me.”
“Well, actually.” Prim gives a small, embarrassed cough. “I sent that text.”
I don’t say anything, relishing the rare feeling of having the moral high ground. Prim squirms for a minute before adding, in a rush, “I was upset because Charm was hurt—again—and she was just going to keep giving you chances to hurt her, and I didn’t want to watch.”
Okay, maybe I’m not on the high ground after all. “I know. It’s just … I guess I wasn’t ready to talk about appointments and treatment plans and all that stuff. I didn’t want to be worried over, you know? I wanted to make my own choices, choose my own consequences, live my own—”
“Zinnia,” Prim interrupts, softly and gravely. Her gaze is very sober. “We want to adopt.”
“Um, that’s good? Does this place allow pets?”
She blinks at me, and an expression of great pity crosses her face. “No. It doesn’t.” Her eyes move to the box of furniture I’m sitting on. I look down and notice for the first time that there is a picture of a blissful-looking baby on the front. The small print explains that the contents of the box can be used as a bassinet, crib, and toddler bed as your “little one” grows.
I feel suddenly very, very young and very, very stupid. “Oh,” I say weakly.
“That start-up offered Charm a full-time position last year, and she took it. So the timing feels right, and it turns out I want children very much, once I realized they could be obtained outside of heteronormative and patriarchal conceptions of marriage.” I remember Charm telling me last year that Prim signed up to audit some classes at UW; apparently she liked them.
“Wow, I’m so…” Happy? Terrified? Abruptly conscious of the passage of time and fearful of my changing position in what was, until recently, a trio of friends? My voice shrinks. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, you wouldn’t.” Prim doesn’t sound especially sympathetic. “You left when Charm tried to tell you. She wanted to ask about using this bedroom, once the paperwork was filed.”
“Oh,” I say again, even more weakly. I dampen my lips. “So … how’s it going? I heard it can take a while.”
Prim’s cool composure slips. She looks away and swallows twice. “We never filed the paperwork, actually. Charm hasn’t signed it.”
A chill settles in the pit of my stomach, a premonition of guilt. “Why not?”
Prim’s posture is imperfect now, her shoulders bent. “She says it’s because she’s not ready to give up beer, but I think she’s scared.”
“Of what?”
Prim rarely snaps—you can take the princess out of the royal court, but you can’t take the royal court out of the princess, or something—but now she snaps, “Of doing it without her best friend, maybe.”
The guilt arrives, cold and heavy as a swallowed stone. “Look, I’m really, really—”
She interrupts. “Or maybe she’s just scared of messing it up, the way her parents did. Adoption … wasn’t easy for her.” This is a massive understatement; I once overheard her mom lamenting Charm’s (unremarkable, classically teenaged) behavior to my mom. You’d just think she’d be more grateful, wouldn’t you? Mom had looked at her like she was a new kind of fungus on one of her rose bushes. I’d never told Charm, but it’s not like she didn’t know the score.
“Yeah, I can see that.”
Prim picks at invisible lint on the futon. “I’m scared, too, to tell the truth. My childhood was not particularly easy either, but…” She shrugs, as if the next thing she says isn’t that important. “I wish I could talk to my mother.”
I move over to the futon, sitting so close our shoulders touch. “Hey, at least there’s no wicked fairies in this world.” It’s an effortful joke.
Prim laughs, equally effortfully. “Well, not yet. But I saw those glass slippers, and the dead birds. This world is not so safe as I had hoped.”
The guilt doubles, or maybe quadruples. It’s a wonder I have any room left for ordinary human organs. I fumble for something comforting to say and emerge with “No world is very safe, in my experience.”
It seems, inexplicably, to help. Prim straightens again and nods at no one in particular. “No. Which means all that matters really is who you have standing at your side. Charm and I have each other, and if that has to be enough, it will.” She pauses, perhaps having run out of grand proclamations. “But where I come from, fairy godmothers are traditional. Twelve seems excessive, but if I had a daughter I should hope for at least one.”
She meets my eyes as she says the word one, her expression simultaneously arch and a little anxious. Like she’s just asked me to carry something large but fragile, infinitely precious, and isn’t sure I’m up to the task. Like she wants to trust me, but isn’t sure she should.
I have the absurd urge to kneel. Fresh tears prickle in the corners of my eyes. “That would be—I would be—” I swallow. “Like, I know I haven’t been that reliable lately, and I can’t promise that my GRM will stay in remission or whatever—but it would be my honor.”
Prim nods without breaking eye contact. Her gaze feels like a sword touching each of my shoulders, not especially gently. “Good.” She inhales sharply and draws something from her pocket. “We’ll talk more when you come back, then.”
I know I’m not at my sharpest—having been zapped into a dozen different universes, lightly tortured, imprisoned, kissed, nearly executed, rescued, and chastised by pretty much everyone I’ve ever met—but this feels like a real left turn in the conversation. “Come back from where?”
Prim hands me the thing she took out of her pocket. It’s long and silver, and in its surface I catch the blue flash of her eyes, the glare of the cheap light fixture above us.
It’s a long, broken shard of mirror. “I pulled it from your hair when you first arrived.”
I could kiss her. I could ask her what the hell took her so long. I could weep, because hope is so much more terrifying than despair.
I draw a breath that shakes only slightly. “Tell Charm I’m coming back, okay? For good, this time. Cross my heart.” I don’t wait for Prim to agree, or tell me to be careful. I hold the shard so that it reflects a jagged piece of my own face, and whisper to it: Mirror, mirror.
10
IN AN OBJECTIVE and literal sense, there’s no way Eva is the fairest of them all—her face is too square and her mouth is too wide, and she’s maybe a smidge too old—but that’s the face the mirror shows me when I ask, and the mirror never lies. Maybe beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and if the beholder is willing to ditch her friends and damage the fabric of space and time for someone, the mirror logically assumes they’re past the point of objective beauty standards.
Which I guess I am, because Eva’s face makes it suddenly difficult to breathe. I fall toward her, diving through nowhere, feeling like a smear of toothpaste being squeezed out of some cosmic tube. I’m braced to land in hellish chaos—a burning castle filled with murderous huntsmen, perhaps, or a public execution—but I find myself standing in a small, whitewashed room with lots of windows and no blood at all.
It doesn’t look like the sort of room that could conceivably exist anywhere in Evil Snow White’s castle, or even in the same world. The light slanting through the windows is an ordinary dusky gold rather than the malevolent violet of endless twilight; the fire in the hearth is cheery and warm and probably was not made to heat iron shoes or boil human soup. The whole place reminds me strongly of Zellandine’s hut, except a little emptier and newer.
I would assume I’d made a wrong turn in nowheresville if it weren’t for Eva. The queen—my queen—is sitting at a small table, fiddling with something shiny.
I make a small, embarrassing sound in the back of my throat, nearly a whimper; she looks up.
And she’s—fine. A little tired, maybe, but not tormented or terrified. There’s a crust of red around one nostril, but no mortal wounds. She’s still wearing her sheer white shift, grimed with prison filth, but there’s a plain cloak draped over her shoulders now. Her feet are bare on the floor, the skin smooth and unhurt.
One side of her mouth tilts. There’s a light in her eyes that doesn’t quite manage to be a wicked gleam. “Why, Lady Zinnia,” she drawls. “Have you come to rescue me?”
“I…” I glance around the room, which persists in being almost aggressively nonthreatening. “This was a whole lot cooler in my head. How come you don’t need rescuing?” I remember, very distantly, wishing more of the princesses would rescue themselves. “The last thing I saw was the huntsmen coming for you, on account of how you assassinated their immortal monarch.”
“Yes, well, you left before it got interesting.”
