They called my stepmother. I didn’t have bruises anymore. Not bad enough. But she didn’t come to get me. No one ever came for me. She thanked them and hung up the phone and the next morning they sent me on my way. I guess I wasn’t their one good soul.
But the night before my expulsion from particle-board paradise, this girl Maria talked to me, bunk to bunk, through the 1 am shadows:
“It’s like this place between us and the place where fairies come from,” she said dreamily, looking up at me from her thin bottom bunk. She had black curly hair all over the place, like wild thorny raspberry vines. “And there’s like rock bands with elves in them and no one gives you any shit just for being, and there’s real magic. Ok, supposedly it’s kind of broken and doesn’t work right, but still, if it’s not working right, that still means it works, right?” She sighed like a little kid, even though I figured her for my age, and emphasized her words like she was underlining them in a diary. How did this kid last five minutes out of a pink bedroom? Whatever happened to her must have been really bad—I don’t even know what kind of bad, to make some girl still drawing unicorns in her spiral notebooks take off. She sighed dramatically, enjoying the luxury of being the source of information. “But it disappeared or something, years ago. No one’s been there in ages. Sometimes I think the city ran away, just like me. Something happened to it and it couldn’t bear anything anymore, and so one night it just took off without leaving a note. But I’ll get there, somehow. I will. And I’ll dance, you’ll see. I’ll dance with the fairies.”
One of the other kids hissed at her from the second bunk in our four-loser room. “They don’t like to be called that.”
“What do you know about it, Esteban? Fuck off,” Maria spat, all the pink bedrooms gone from her voice.
“More than you,” snarled the boy. “Hey, chica. You know how in school they said we’d never get social security, because by the time we get old, our parents will have used it all up?”
“Sure,” I said. Esteban was seventeen, too late, where I was too early. Too old.
“Well, it’s like that,” he sighed, and I could almost see him frown in the dark. “It’s all used up. Nothing left for us kittens.”
“You don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”
Maria’s face colored darkly and she scowled up at me. After a long, pointed silence, she said:
“Fig is a stupid name.”
I rolled back over on my miserable striped mattress. I didn’t believe even half of it. I remembered when those homeless kids in Florida started talking crazy about the Blue Lady and how she’d come and save them? I thought it was like that. Something pretty to think about when you’re cold and hungry. It’s nice to think someone beautiful is protecting you. It’s nice to think there’s a place you can go if you want it bad enough. A place where everything you ever read about is real.
And of course it went away. Of course it did. I mean, that’s like the job of magical places, to vanish. Atlantis, Avalon. Middle Earth.
And even if it was real for someone, sometime, it wouldn’t be real for me. I ran away when I was fifteen. When Bordertown had already run away itself. I did it all wrong. Maybe other people could go there, but not me. That kind of shit is for Oberon and Titania. Not Fig, shuffling in the background with paper leaves glued to her t-shirt. I don’t live in a world with places like that in it. I live on the train, and in Denny’s, and in the Citrus Heights Public Library, and that’s all.
Spring came, dry and full of olive pollen. No one came looking for me. I kept singing, and reading (Les Fleurs du Mal in May, and my Keats for the millionth time). Any time I managed to eat meat I just went wolf-blind with starving for it. I had become completely nocturnal, sleeping through the whole route from Starfire Station out to the suburbs and back again, my green backpack nicely padded with no-fare fines. Light rail. Rails of light. That’s me, speeding along towards Starfire on a rail of light. I rode longer and longer into the day, chasing the sun, and my roots got longer and I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to go somewhere. I can’t say it was lonely—it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too thin, hollow, bruised eyes, clothes worn into oblivion—and on the inside you just go hard and impenetrable, like skin, like metal. I stopped talking when I didn’t need to—that’s for social animals, and boy, I just wasn’t one anymore. I was something else, not a girl, not a wolf, something blank-eyed, tired, running after meat, running after trains.
One time, just before it happened, the ticket-taker shook me awake.
“Kid,” he said. “Come on. Wake up. You gotta go somewhere else. I see you here every day. You can’t stay. You gotta go somewhere else.”
He had blue eyes. With the 7 am sunlight shining slantwise through them, they looked silvery, like crystals.
“I’m going, I’m going,” I grumbled, and stretched. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about how totally amazing breakfast was, I mean, as an invention. Bacon and bread. I only thought about food abstractly anymore. Anything I got I just tore through so fast, it didn’t really seem to exist in a cosmic sense. Hungry before, hungry after. I frowned at the fine-dispensing man. I didn’t hate the guy—adults just lived in this other world, this forbidden world, and in that world I only looked like a problem. Not his fault. Not mine. You can’t see one world from where you’re standing in the other, that’s all.
But he didn’t shove me off at the next station. Nobody else was in the car, and the sun gleamed on everything, glittering on the chrome like little supernovas. I settled back into my seat, hunching down so anyone who did come in would know to leave me alone. A greyish lump of girl got on, hauling a stiff rider of morning wind. She dropped into a heap in a seat on the far side of the car and I was pretty sure she didn’t have a ticket either. Her clothes were thrift-mish-mash, green skirt, dingy tank top under a ragged coat with a furry, matted hood. As the train pulled up to speed, her head dipped back and she started to snore. The hood slid off.
It was Maria.
I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized her. But I have a memory for faces. Everyone, all the time. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you forever. And it was Maria, but she was messed up, a hundred years older. Her cheekbones were cutting shards, one eye swollen up like she’d been hit. Her skin was half-sunburned, half-clammy, and she had hacked all her hair off, shaved her head. It had grown back a fuzzy, uneven half inch, a thin black cloud. She had sores on her arms, her lips cracked and bled.
“Hey,” I whispered. She stirred sleepily. I felt awake all of the sudden, sharp. “Maria?”
I went to the girl and slid into the plastic seat beside her. Her eyes slitted up at me.
“Lemmelone, I gotta ticket,” she mumbled.
“Maria, it’s me. Fig. Diogenes, remember?”
Her eyes rolled, unfocused. I cold see the bones in her sternum, like a bone ladder. “Fig’s a stupid name,” she slurred.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
I didn’t ask her what happened to her, why she didn’t just go home if she was so busted. It’s not polite. Her breathing got shallow and she fell asleep again. Maria smelled—kind of sweet, and kind of rotten, and kind of sour. She slumped against me and started coughing, spattering my arm with gooey strands streaked with pink. Not coughing blood like some movie girl with one big number left in her, but just about as bad.
“Hey, hey,” I tried to push her upright. “Wake up, Maria. Come on. Don’t put this on me. I can’t take it. Wake up.”
But she didn’t. Her heart was racing, but her skin was cold. She just fell into my arms like a baby. Oh god, oh god, have a seizure, whatever, just don’t die on me here, this is a safe place, bad things don’t happen on the train. What did you take, what did you do, what was so bad you couldn’t dream about magic anymore? “Maria, sweetie,” I said, and held her. I kissed her forehead. “Baby girl, just open your eyes. Like in the story. Just open your eyes and wake up.” She moaned a
little, and put out her hand to find my face. Housing developments with red roofs whispered by outside the windows—she coughed again, greenish, and specks of dark, ugly blood in it this time.
“Ok, Maria, ok,” I shifted to hold her better, and started rocking. Shit, just stay awake til the next stop. Just don’t die. Come on kid, you gotta go somewhere else. “Just listen to me. Remember that place you wanted to go? Think about that place, think about the elves and the magic and you dancing with the fairies. You can’t go there like this, you gotta wake up. Listen, listen.”
And I sang to her. The words just came and I sang them into her ear, her shorn head, her phelgm and her sternum and her unicorns and her wizards and my voice came rough and quiet, but it came, and I hoped I wasn’t singing her death, I hoped I was singing something better, for both of us, my broken voice and her broken body. I sang because if she could get that far gone I could, if she wasn’t a good enough soul for Diogenes I never would be, if she could die I would never get to be old. The panic in me was like a spider, a crawling, hungry thing. I rocked her, and went to that other place I go to when I sing, and the song poured out of me into her. Think about that place, that place, that place. Let’s run away. That other place. Nothing bad ever happened to you. Nothing bad ever happened to me. We’re just two girls taking the train to school. We’ll go to class and talk about Grecian urns. You can copy off my homework. We’ll have lunch in the grass. I sang and sang, and my voice got big in me, big enough to hurt, big enough to echo. Big enough for her. A voice like a hole. I pressed my forehead to hers and the world went away.
The sky shuddered from full daylight to stars and black and no moon at all with a hard lurch and a snap, like blinds zipping down.
Come on, kid. You gotta go somewhere else.
Nothing left for us kittens.
The train-car was gone, and I was sitting on a long bench with a red cushion, with Maria in my lap. We rattled along on some half-stagecoach, half-city bus beast, something out of an old movie, like we’d jumped frames. Jangling silver and bone bells hung from the several posts of some kind of twisted black horn—nodding black flowers drooped from their crowns. Several long benches stretched behind me, with some folk asleep, some awake. A woman was knitting quietly in the starlight. I sat up front, Maria’s legs curled on the seat, her head in my arms. The driver, with a tophat on his head covered in living moss with tiny clovers and thistles growing in it. The coach heaved and jerked as though horses were pulling it, and I could hear the clop-clop of hooves, but even in the dim light I could see that no animal pulled us along.
I started shaking—I didn’t mean to, but my body rejected what it saw, what it felt, and I couldn’t think of anything to do or say, with this girl in my lap and this utterly wrong thing happening, except that there was no horse pulling the carriage-trolley, no horse but I could hear the hoofbeats, and like a kid I seized on that, that one thing wrong out of everything, everything wrong.
I cleared my throat. I felt unused to talking to adults. “Sir,” I said to the driver. “There’s no horse.”
“This is Bordertown’s own Olde Unicorn Trolley. Famous, like. I’m Master Wallscrew, at yours.”
I laughed a little, nervous. “Where’s the unicorn?”
The driver turned to grin at me under his fuzzy green hat.
“You’re it, kid. It only works with a virgin on board. Sure and it’s not me.”
I blushed deeply and it hit me hard as a broken bone: he said Bordertown.
I shook, and felt cold, and felt hot, and my hands were clamped so tight in Maria’s coat my fingers got fuzzy with lost circulation. I had been wrong: there was a moon out, low in the sky, almost spent, a slim rind left, hanging there like a smile. I laughed. Then I put my face in Maria’s neck and cried.
“What is it, girl? I can’t abide girls crying, I’ll warn you. Shows a fragile disposition, and brings the amorous sort to wipe them away, which would pretty much sort the whole conveyance issue. Sniffle up, before some silver-haired Byron gets your scent.”
“It’s a mistake,” I said quietly.
“What’s it now?”
“A mistake. I’m…I’m nobody. I’m nobody. I’m not supposed to be here.”
I had made it and didn’t even audition. Maria auditioned, with her whole heart. I was supposed to mess around in the back and say nothing. I wasn’t supposed to suddenly have to function in Athens. This was Maria’s place and she couldn’t even see it.
“Wake up, Maria, wake up,” I sobbed. “Wake up. There’s unicorns, like you said, and magic, and…”
And she didn’t stir. But her breathing was better, deep and even, and she had locked her arms around my waist.
“Well, Nobody,” the driver said softly, “where to?”
I rubbed my nose, flowing with snot and tears. “What about these people? Don’t they need to get…places? Go where they want to go. We don’t care.”
“Tourists,” he shrugged. “They wait for the…ah…fuel stop, and go where the Trolley goes. It’s exciting—they never know what they might see. Besides, the old monster’s not too reliable as a method of mass transit. The kids come on sometimes, to haze each other—if it goes, they aren’t as tough as they say. But mostly we just glide, child. It’s part magic and part machine and neither of the parts work quite right, so sometimes you’ll say: dinner at Cafe Cubana, hoss and it’ll take you pert as a duck to Elfhaeme Gate and you’ll be dining on fines and forms. Sometimes it’s nice as you please, right up to the door at Cubana and no fuss. Not its fault, you understand. The magic wants to go Realmward and the machine wants to go Worldward, and in a mess like that you can’t ask for any straight lines.”
“Then why ask where we’re going?”
The driver looked down at me, his blue eyes dark in the starlight, like crystals.
“It don’t run without desire, kid. Nothing does.”
Well, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? What you’ve been doing. I wanted somewhere for Maria to get well, to get fed, to get happy again. Something like a Denny’s, something I could sing in front of, somewhere with coffee all night for $1.10 in a cup like a grail and just a little more room on the blank pages in the backs of my books. Just a little more room.
I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. But the Unicorn Trolley veered off sharply into the shadows and light of the city, into the sound of it like a wall.
And I looked over my shoulder, back toward the moon and the gnarled, thorny weeds of the road. Something banged there, hanging from an iron pole, banged in the wind and the night. On a scrap of tin that might have once been painted blue, I read: Starfire Station.
And just then, just then, Maria opened her eyes, bright and deep as a fairy’s.
And that’s my story, Mr. Din. If you don’t mind I’ll take that beer now—I’m still not brave. It’s Titania’s world but I’ll never be Hermia, and not Helena neither. Just Fig, in the background, with the rest of the fairies.
Now. I see a microphone up there, Mr. Din, and my girl and I are hungry. May I?
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland— For a Little While
In which a young girl named Mallow leaves the country for the city, meets a number of Winds, Cats, and handsome folk, sees something dreadful, and engages, much against her will, in Politicks of the most muddled kind.
History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or wheth
er it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.
History is like that.
Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.
No matter where one begins telling a story, a very long road stretches out before and behind, full of wild and lovely creatures performing feats and acts of daring. No matter how much a narrator might want to, she cannot pack all of them into one tale. That’s the trouble—history goes on all around the story at hand, it is what made it happen and what will happen after, all of those extraordinary events and folk and dangers and near-misses, choices that had to be made so that everything after could happen as it did. A single story is but one square of blueberries growing in one plot, on one farm, on the fertile face of the whole world. A heroine steps in, and sees a wickedness in need of solving—but she is never the first, or the last. She plays her part, blessedly and necessarily innocent of that fat old cat sneaking around the borders of her tale, licking its paws while she bleeds and fights, whipping its tail at her trials and yawning at her triumphs. The cat does not care. It has seen all this before and will see it again.