Eastlick and Other Stories Page 3

  “Little cunt!” he says, reaching a hand to his mouth. The blood pools at the corner of his lips, and it’s on his fingers, and it’s dripping down on me. “You bit me!” he says.

  The blood scares me, and energizes me. And still there’s Dana, Dana in front of me, on top of me, bleeding on me, swearing at me.

  I have to get out of here.

  I want so much for this all to stop. I want it worse than anything I’ve ever wanted in my whole life: more than the Frye boots, more than Dad coming back, more than anything. I want him to stop hurting me. I want him to—

  Dana suddenly screams and peels off of me, falling to the floor, holding his head. I scramble to my feet, pulling my dress down, trying to cover up. Dana is screaming, and looks up at me. His eyes are all bloodshot, red. What happened? Something’s wrong.

  Dana starts sobbing and lying on the floor, curled up like a baby, holding his head. What’s wrong? Is he having a heart attack or a stroke or something?

  Then I know I did it. I did something to him, I hurt him. I did magic on him, I wished for it and it happened, like with the Ouija board. I wanted him to hurt, like he’d hurt me. And it happened.

  All this flashes through my mind in a second, and then I turn and run from the room.

  ~o0o~

  I don’t stop until I get to the street, and then I still don’t stop. I’m halfway down the block before I realize I can’t go home like this. I have blood on my face, and I lost Dru’s hat, and my clothes are all messed up. And I don’t have any candy. I make myself stop in between street lamps. I’m panting, breathing so hard, but I can’t get enough air.

  It doesn’t matter. I’m safe now. Nobody has come out of Dana’s house. I can see from here, nothing’s going on. Well, the party is still going on. Maybe nobody knows what happened in his bedroom. I didn’t even look at anyone when I pushed my way out of there. They’re probably all too drunk to notice.

  I’m still standing on the sidewalk remembering how to breathe when Dru’s car turns the corner. She pulls over, rolling down the passenger window.

  “Get in,” she says, even though we’re a half a block from the carport. I do, and she bites her lip, looking at my face, at my dress. Then she shakes her head. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  In her apartment, she doesn’t speak for a while as she sits me down at her kitchen table and wets a soft cloth. Finally, she says, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

  I wonder what she means, but then I kind of know, and I wish I didn’t.

  “He was supposed to be gentle, but he blew it,” she goes on. “I’m so sorry. He shouldn’t have been drinking.”

  I stare at Dru, then shake my head. “No,” I say. “I don’t want this. I wish everything was like it was before.” I don’t want to have any magic, I don’t want any powers. I want to be normal. I wish this as hard as I can, harder than I’ve ever wished for anything in my whole life.

  “Even though it saved your life?” Dru asks, although I didn’t say that last part out loud. Then I stop wishing.

  “You know it, you know it all,” I whisper. “You made that all happen.”

  She gives me a sad look. She’s washing my face, washing away Dana’s blood, the smell of him. “No, Laura, you did. You’re much more powerful than I am.”

  Now I’m terrified. I open my mouth to start screaming for my mom next door.

  Dru stops me with a small smile and a raised finger. “You don’t want to do that. What are you going to tell her?”

  And I cannot speak—I clamp my mouth shut, without actually deciding to. No, she did it. I feel my throat closing, and I panic. Then she puts her finger down, releasing me. “Just sit here a while. Just listen to me. Let me tell you how it is. Let me tell you about wishing, and hoping.”

  “I want it to stop,” I say, in a tiny voice.

  “You can’t wish it away. But I can help you.”

  I stare back at her. I am more powerful than her, and I know it. Before she can do anything, I push away, push her down, throw her to the floor, hard. I fling the door open and run out into the night, away, away.

  She can’t teach me anything. I already know too much.

  From far behind me, I feel Dru trying to pull me back. But she can’t do it.

  I run, out the end of Eastlick, into the dark. And as I run, I start to understand that nobody can hurt me. No creatures of the night. No boys with yellow cars. No Ouija boards.

  I run, and I laugh. And when I realize how alone I am, I laugh even harder, so that I won’t weep.

  Bane

  Editor Jennifer Brozek wrote me one fine afternoon basically saying, “Help! I’ve got an anthology that’s short a story, can you write one in a few days?” “Of course!” I said, delighted to be asked to pinch-hit, even though I was leaving for Australia the following week. She told me what she wanted: a fairy tale turned on its head, told from the monster’s point of view. Human Tales came out in August of 2011.

  _______________

  The fiery orange padparadscha sapphire lay glowing at the cave’s entrance.

  A torment. A reproof.

  A caution.

  ~o0o~

  Once upon a time there was a dragon. She was fierce and brave and wild. Her sinewy coils stretched longer than the fat man’s house in the village where the sheep-keepers dwelled, longer than the span of river that ran through the valley at the foot of her mountain, longer than the hottest day of summer and the coldest night of winter.

  The dragon called herself Granletten, when she thought of names at all. She had not seen another of her kind in many, many turnings of the world, since her sister Persille had taken flight, seeking her own path far beyond the mountain, in the way of dragons. Solitary creatures, dragons are, despite their penchant for deep thoughts, and for clever repartee with like-minded (or, even better, contrary-minded) souls.

  ~o0o~

  This morning had started like any other. Granletten had shifted her great bulk toward the front of the cave, shielding its contents from the rising sun. She thought about the clouds on the horizon, the turning of the seasons, and the time when she was a half-grown dragonlet and had first flown through a waterfall, just to see what would happen. She was just preparing to think about moving her right front claw a few inches, to cover the pile of gold coins that lay there, when her great eye was caught by a movement on the path.

  Oh, is it time for another human already? Surely it hadn’t been all that long since the last one. His bones were around here somewhere… She cast an eye back to the far reaches of the cave, but did not see them in the gloom.

  By the time she looked forward again, the man-child was nearly at the cave’s mouth.

  ~o0o~

  Granletten kept down the numbers of brave fools who came waving their tiny swords in her scaly face by the simple expedient of distance, living as she did in a large cave on the wild side of her mountain.

  The humans satisfied various purposes of their own by sending her their most dispensable fools: younger sons of large families, troublemakers, petty criminals—anyone who needed weeding out. Then they would wait a decent interval before sending another, leaving her to go about her dragonly business unmolested. Every once in a great while they would send a clever rogue. At those times Granletten enjoyed some smart banter before killing him. It was really a favor she did for the humans, relieving them of these unwanted burdens upon their fickle society.

  ~o0o~

  “Good morning, fierce and terrible dragon,” the man-child sang out, his voice only trembling a little. In his small and pale hands, he rather inexpertly held a sword. A large satchel was slung across his back.

  Granletten rolled her enormous eyes. Somehow the humans had gotten the idea that she needed to be told who she was, as though she might perhaps have forgotten; now every fool who came by recited the same tired lines.

  She sent him a puff of smoke from her nostrils, because that’s what he would be expecting her to do.

&n
bsp; The man-child held his ground. She could almost taste how badly he wanted to turn and run.

  What would be his story? A quest, a dare, a princess’s hand in marriage? Ah, humans and their petty concerns.

  The man-child suddenly set the bulky sword on the ground, then dug into his satchel and brought out a small bundle.

  “I have come bearing a gift.”

  Granletten perked up her ears. This was different. Usually they came to steal from her.

  ~o0o~

  When not fending off stray humans, Granletten spent her time amassing, sorting, cleaning, and organizing her treasure. Dragons are the keepers of the world’s brightest, loveliest artifacts, holding them safe and secure. She was pleased to honor the fiery spirit of the earth by collecting and safeguarding its elements, resting the cool length of her body across as much of the bounty as possible, like a hen atop her eggs.

  As the weak and tender jewels such as opals and pearls stay supple when given regular contact with the thin, watery oils of human skin, so do the bolder gems—rubies, sapphires, diamonds—crave the touch of a dragon. Gold and platinum come to life in the fire of a dragon’s breath, singing out the reflected glory of the earth’s fires below in an answering song, thrilling to the heat and wildness. Treasure stolen by humans, to be worn by their interchangeable kings and queens and princes and sultans and rich men’s daughters, or hoarded in their counting-houses gathering dust and slowly dying inside—this was treasure that wanted rescue. That wanted tending by the world’s dragons.

  The rest of her time was for deep, solitary thoughts.

  When you live a double dozen centuries or more, you have plenty of time to ponder. And dragons lived longer than any other of the earth’s creatures. It was all part of the ancient bargain, the balance that held the world together.

  A balance that seemed to be shifting.

  It began with the humans. Granletten could not recall exactly when the first flickering spark of animal essence coalesced into something greater, something finer, prouder. Animals were clever enough; the mountain goats had long since learned to avoid her smoky cave entrance, lest their young vanish into her great maw.

  But she could not place precisely when the clever animals became really clever; when they developed the ability to think.

  The ability to speak.

  It had happened so subtly. Fits and starts. Long stretches of no progress at all. Then one day, she realized she could talk to them.

  They would talk back. Sometimes they would even make sense.

  ~o0o~

  “A gift?” Granletten tried to form the words, to speak back to the man-child, but her voice was long-unused, and it came out more like “Grr-grft!”

  This frightened him, clearly; he took a step back, stumbled over his own sword, and almost fell.

  Granletten blinked at him, waiting for him to recover. Then she tried again, after clearing her throat (and sending another gust of smoke and ash in his direction). “A gift? For me?”

  “Y-yes, your highness, oh mighty dragon…” He flushed and looked down at what he held, as if reminding himself of it. Of his resolve. Why had the humans sent this one? He wasn’t like the others—neither brave or foolhardy enough to be on a dangerous adventure, nor calm enough to be one of the clever ones.

  Granletten leaned forward, resting her jagged chin on her scaly front limbs and peering at him for a closer look. “Tell me your story,” she rumbled.

  ~o0o~

  What joy it was when the first humans began to talk to her! It wasn’t as though the dragon had been lonely—no, not that. “Lonely” was a pale, small, human emotion, a concept it had taken her some time to grasp. “Of course not,” she had laughed, when the first clever man-child had gotten it through to her powerful, long-thinking mind. “My sister Persille is just beyond those mountains, over there.” She’d waved a sharp-clawed forelimb in a generally sunward direction.

  No, loneliness was not the problem. But to have someone to listen to one’s ideas, to argue back? Ah, sweet treasure.

  The problem came clear when that first man-child had brought his clever mind to her, had gone away again (for she did not kill this one, out of amusement and a desire to speak with him once more), and then, by the time she had thought about what he had said and looked for a continuation of their conversation … well, he was gone.

  Granletten had roused herself, secured her cave and treasure, and ventured down to the village, searching for the small, fair-haired youth that had so delighted her just a short while ago.

  After all the screaming and panic and general hubbub had subsided, and she’d had to dispense with a few particularly foolish-brave warriors with little pointy metal weapons to wave at her, a trembling elder had approached her.

  “What … what do you want, noble dragon?”

  Granletten had sighed, sending a gust of fire breath to singe the man’s hairy ears, without exactly meaning to. “The boy, who came to me: Emmon, his name was? I would speak with him once more.”

  “Emmon?” Confusion, consultation with other elders. Finally, from another, even more ancient one: “That was my great-grandfather, dead these hundred years or more.”

  No. One couldn’t have a satisfactory discourse with humans, when they came and went like so many mayflies.

  So Granletten the mighty dragon kept her own council. She enjoyed the greater and lesser fools who came her way, thought her deep thoughts, and tended the earth’s treasures.

  ~o0o~

  “M-my … my story?” The man-child had a smear of dirt on his face, dust mixed with sweat. Granletten resisted the urge to wipe it away—even if she could wield a claw so tenderly across his fragile flesh, he would surely not take the gesture in a friendly manner.

  “Yes. Your story.” Her voice was warming up now, the words coming more easily. “Why do you bear me a gift? Nobody brings gifts to dragons. If you’re trying to play a trick on me, please remember that no one has ever actually succeeded at that.”

  “Oh … n-no trick, I promise. No trick. Um … your th-things are so beautiful…”

  She raised a scaly eyebrow. “How do you know what my treasure looks like?”

  “Everyone knows. I found something beautiful, too beautiful for anyone in the village, or the city, or across the whole country. They said I should bring it to you.” All this without stammering.

  ~o0o~

  Two things the humans did: they made the jewels lovely, and they made them portable. By digging and cutting and faceting and polishing the raw, bulky stones that made up the essence of the earth’s magic, they made the gems far easier for the dragons to collect.

  It was perhaps ironic that humans did this with no actual understanding of what it was they were working with. Of the value of their finds, the true treasure of their play-pretties. Oh, there were various self-styled witchkind and sorcerers and the like among the humans, who claimed to find powers and echoes and spirits and other such nonsense in precious stones. Granletten had quickly discerned that this was all smoke and ash; that these holy folk were just as greedy as any other clever monkey or bright-eyed magpie who spies a shiny bauble and seeks to make it his own, to hold it close.

  No, the humans had no clue that the blood-red rubies with which they adorned their fairest maidens or worthiest kings were the literal blood of the earth; that the deep green emeralds that graced the plump fingers of a rich man’s wife held the spirit of the forests and marshlands within every sparkle; that the rare golden-orange sapphires of the tropics were the manifestation of the very passion that kept the earth vital, and propagating, and alive.

  They just thought the stones were pretty.

  Granletten didn’t mind. Portable suited her; the fact that the humans had gathered so many jewels actually made her work easier, saved her the trouble of hunting them down in the depths of the earth herself. And beauty pleased her. Even a dragon has a sense of style.

  ~o0o~

  Granletten narrowed her eyes at the man-child. He
no longer looked afraid, now that he’d gotten around the tangle of his words. “Did your king send you?”

  He shook his head. “No, not the king; not even the mayor of the village. They’re fools.” He paused, seeming to consider the import of his words, but then pressed on. “The holy man sent me, because you are more powerful than the mayor or the king. You’re the one who should have this.” He opened the bundle.

  The dragon, like all of her kind, was a cold-blooded creature. Despite this fact, the ichor in her veins ran hot and excited when she looked at what the man-child brought forth.

  It was a single perfect enormous padparadscha sapphire, bright orange, flaming like the center of the sun. Some human hand had cut it, shaped it into a faceted oval, as if to be set in jewelry—but it would be a bauble for a giantess, for the thing would weigh down any woman’s finger, would leave a bruise on even a strong man’s chest.

  Yet it had never been set to metal; Granletten could see that at a glance. The fiery essence of the stone sang out to her, even as it reached for its brethren in the hoard behind and beneath her. Yearned to be returned to its companion-stones.

  Granletten looked at the man-child’s face, assessing it. He appeared both proud and certain of himself, without doubt, and without any of the fear he’d shown earlier. What was his game here? What did he want in return?

  “Where did you find this, youngling?” she asked instead.

  He shrugged, then set the heavy stone down on the ground before the cave’s mouth. “Our holy man is wise, and would not tell me where it came from. He said you would want to know, and that you could not be told.”

  “All the treasures of the earth are mine to guard and tend; you humans merely take custody of them from time to time, without leave.” She said all this without threat in her voice. The words were clear enough.

  He gazed back at her, still unafraid. “And so I give it to you.”

  This had gone on long enough. “And what do you expect in return?”

  The man-child smiled. “He told me you would ask this too.”

  ~o0o~

  Sometimes, the humans would come to her, not seeking an adventure or the solution to a quest, but offering a bargain. They would have noted her great size and power, the terrible fire of her breath, her powerful wings and sharp teeth and claws, and would ask her to destroy some neighboring village, or burn down a particularly stubborn stand of trees, or haul some great structure from one place to another. In return, they would offer her a grubby handful of stones—paste, usually—or shiny metal-things of no value whatsoever.