Glitter & Mayhem Read online

  “You don’t want to do this,” I said. “Think of all the trouble it’ll cause. You’re throwing your life away on a crazy story someone’s spun you.”

  Her face was untroubled. “The selkies will protect me. They can’t come in the bar, but I can act for them.”

  “They lie,” Diana said. “They twist and mislead, the fae.” She was staring at Clementine.

  Clementine said, “I will be freed.”

  “Without your skin?” Diana said softly. “Life with me is less preferable than wandering the Earth looking for it?”

  “Yes.”

  I edged closer and closer to Anna. I was shaking, my heart pounding. There’s something about a gun, even one without bullets, that raises the tension level in a room.

  She noticed me even as I reached for her.

  We grappled desperately for a moment while everyone screamed. I don’t know which of us pulled the trigger, but the spear didn’t hit Diana when it launched. It went wild, the sound bright and brittle in the room, and then the enormous mirror ball exploded as the spear shattered it.

  Everyone screamed. Shards bounced with a ting off the silver guitar and chipped a dimple in the Virgin Mary’s cheek. A luchador mask was torn from the wall, landing in a heap atop a pile of shards.

  Something previously contained in the mirror ball’s heart fell, a dark armload of folds that made Clementine’s face light as she ran to it.

  Diana said, hoarsely, “Clemmie, no.”

  Clementine didn’t even look back as she slung it around her shoulders and went to the door.

  Anna walked toward me, shards of mirror crunching beneath her feet. She didn’t seem to notice that she still had the gun in her hand, she was looking at me so intently. Watching my face for some sign that was lacking, apparently.

  She said, “They promised me something if I did this thing for them.”

  I asked, “What did they promise you?”

  “They promised me you. But that’s not going to happen, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “And it’s not because you like some other girl, some other woman better.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I shook my head anyway.

  She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders. She said, “Because you don’t like women.”

  “I like women,” I said. “But not like that.”

  We’d been coming to this moment for so long.

  Somehow I had always thought we could avoid it. I’d skirted around its edges, hiding in half–lies and omissions.

  She looked back over her shoulder, at Diana, who was standing in front of Clementine’s booth, looking at it. The bar owner looked old. And tired. Anna turned and walked away from me, went to Diana. She said something to her I didn’t hear, and Diana said something in reply.

  Sometimes you love someone and they don’t love you back. Or they don’t love you the way you want them to, even though every cell in your body knows they’re the right one for you. Maybe you do what Anna did for so long, waiting even though you know, deep down, it’ll never come. Or maybe you do what Diana did, taking love by what might be trickery, might be force.

  You’d think it would have drawn Diana and Anna together, that frustration. That sorrow.

  And those of us who are loved? We know. Sometimes we care.

  Sometimes we don’t.

  Sometimes we ride away on a motorcycle, rumbling down a moonlit road, headed back up to Lake Michigan. Hair whipping back in the wind. Never looking back at all.

  Sooner Than Gold

  Cory Skerry

  I TUG ON CLEAN UNDERWEAR IN case I get arrested, paint my makeup perfectly because there’s nothing sadder than a grown man in badly applied eyeliner, and climb out my apartment window, onto the fire escape.

  I can’t be late to this assignment, and if I go through the lobby, there’s a strong chance the night doorman will have a thing or two to say about the video footage of our card game last night. I forgot there was a camera pointed at the lobby desk.

  The asphalt below reeks of garbage and piss; about half of the latter is probably mine. Don’t judge. If I’m drunk enough, there’s not even any point in aiming for the toilet.

  My boots land softly as I hit the ground, but the ladder clangs as my weight slides off. I look back up at the enchantment, where it strings out between my leg and the trunk in my apartment.

  It’s a violet chain so thin it looks like I could break it with my fingers, glossy and iridescent like niobium. It burns where it enters my skin, a pain so bright and cruel it took me a week to learn to sleep again.

  Sometimes I think about finding some woo–woo psychic to tell me what it is or try to remove it, but I’m afraid the person at the other end of the chain will find out I tried.

  Desert heat radiates from the ground, warming the soles of my boots, and I worry about pit–stains and failing hair gel. I shouldn’t have worn my jacket, but I cut a better figure with something to embellish my shoulders. And I need to look sharp. I can’t use my charm at a drag queen convention if I look like a microwaved cat turd.

  I give in and hail a cab, where I endure five minutes of crackly radio commercials and a Celine Dion song. My reward is AC while I sip from my flask and neurotically check the book for new directives.

  The book is old, like grandpa–times–three old. The worn leather cover is flexible and shiny from years of use, but the gilt edges of the pages haven’t rubbed away. Sometimes I flip through all the paragraphs of nonsense, written in languages I don’t recognize, but I usually just open to the page with the ribbon bookmark, the one page that’s in English.

  The book says the same thing it said when I woke up this afternoon:

  GlitzCon Ball. Saturday night, 8:00 p.m. Pluck the thorns of the black lily. Do not touch her with your bare flesh.

  This cryptic bullshit is sometimes worse, sometimes better, but it nearly always works out in the end. I tuck the book back in my pocket as the cab rolls up to the convention. The side mirror shows me still–flawless makeup before the cab pulls away.

  Inside the hotel, I follow signs to the ballroom entrance, where the bass from the party is rattling the doors. An employee holds up a warning hand. She has enough cakey makeup and sparkly rings to be a GlitzCon attendee, and she’s old enough to be my mother.

  This isn’t the only entrance for me, but I want to see if I look as good as I think I do, so I’ll try it.

  “Where’s your con badge?” the Sparkly Cougar asks.

  “I don’t have one,” I say.

  “Then —”

  I step back, cock a hip, and hold out my hands in the universal gesture for “I’m unarmed.” It works even when you’re not talking to cops. “But that room is full of horny, middle–aged queens, and you know what they like even more than bitching about how painful their shoes are?”

  I use both thumbs to peel back the fitted black cloth of my coat, exposing my all–black rockstar outfit: lace shirt, pierced nipples, edges of a mystery tattoo creeping up above the low–slung waistline of my skinny jeans. I’m going for “slutty Japanese pop star” tonight.

  “This.”

  Sparkly Cougar reluctantly chuckles.

  I grin. “I know, right? Come on, honey, you know no one is going to complain.”

  She rolls her eyes, but she laughs and opens the door for the best thief she’ll ever meet.

  I stroll into pandemonium. The stench of perfume, sweat, fuzzy teeth, and wine is almost too heavy to breathe; the requisite flock of disco balls spin stars across the crowd and the electronic music booms and whirs beside the cacophony of hundreds of gaudy floral costumes. One queen is wearing a ball gown that looks like a giant upside–down rose; another has a bouffant wig with real miniature pansies planted in it. Daffodils, lupines, orchids… None of the elaborate, garish costumes are a black lily.

  I don’t see any black anything — I stand out like a goth skidmark.

  I had this coat tailored just for me, a slim–waisted
frock style with buttons made of real antique coins: pieces–of–eight from a treasure chest I never should have stolen and definitely never should have opened. Still, without the chest I wouldn’t have had the cash to pay the seamstress, and now I have over thirty hidden pockets to stuff with jewelry. Even though I’m here for the thorns of the black lily, nothing says I can’t nab some extra rock candy to pay bills like rent and booze.

  I wend my way through the garden of glitter, searching for others in male clothing. Dudes or not, their jewelry is more likely to be real.

  I pretend that I’ve tripped on a drag queen’s train, stumble into a fat fellow whose tie tack looks like it might be real diamonds, and walk off wishing I dared snatch the matching cuff links. But even though I did put on clean underwear, I don’t want to risk getting caught.

  The author of the book is not pleased when I’m delayed by jail.

  I try not to think about that, instead searching for a black flower costume. There must be a thousand attendees in this cavernous geode of a ballroom, plus at least fifteen hotel staff, ten live parrots hanging in gilded cages by the garden–themed photo set in the back, and two service dogs for one old lady. After forty–five minutes of charming my way through the crowd, winking when someone slaps my ass and leaning over to kiss fingers while I tease off rings — that shit works, I’m telling you — I’m still the single smudge of goth couture in this florist shop LARP.

  It’s been almost two years since I failed to steal what the book directed.

  I am not going to fail again.

  Even the AC can’t stop me from sweating now, and I pat at my hairline with my handkerchief. My mascara is waterproof, but that only goes so far.

  The fucking book can’t be specific, can it? No, it just gives me riddles. Maybe I’m looking for a small enamel lily pin on someone’s lapel. Maybe the book means black as in African American, wearing a lily costume of any possible goddamned color.

  Around the room again, and again. Checking lapels, checking skin colors against costumes, panicking every time I see people trickle out the doors.

  I head for the nearest door — it’s actually the one I came in — and place my hand on the knob. Options blur through my mind: the elevator, the emergency stairs, a utility closet. I choose the last, and when I open the door, that’s where it leads.

  I shut the door quickly behind me, because I don’t want anyone following. Now if they try to open the same door, it will lead into the hall, where it actually goes. Relieved, I take a deep breath of the closet’s comparatively fresh air. Just a faint odor of pine, bleach, and the musty suggestion of a mop put away while wet.

  Two doors’ distance is all I get. Don’t ask me how it works, or why I can do it, but if I lay my hand on a knob or a handle, I can choose if the door opens into the following room, or any of the rooms that annex that same room. Sometimes it’s a dead end, like this closet, because there’s no other door to open. I’ve chosen the wrong door and gotten arrested before — it’s a bit like trying to solve a maze with a pen instead of a pencil. You just screw up sometimes.

  §

  Like sometime, you might go into a room no other human could have found. Maybe you take a chest that wasn’t meant for a human to have. You smugly carry it back to your apartment, but the moment you open the lid, a chain snakes into your leg. The pain is phenomenal. You dig through the chest, looking for something to cut yourself free, but there’s nothing but gold coins and one crappy old book in a language you can’t read.

  The intangible chain stretches all the way to the hardware store, where they think you’re a psycho case when you start hacking at the linoleum floor by your feet with garden shears, and then an axe, and then a sledgehammer. The cops mace your crazy ass, but you barely even feel it because your leg is getting worse. You say you were angry and drunk, and you agree to pay the damages, and you go home in defeat.

  You can’t even tell the truth to friends or your now–ex–boyfriend, because they can’t see the enchantment.

  There is no sleep. Not for days. You consider amputation, start looking up methods on the Internet. Turns out there are fetishists for everything, and their utter batshitness might be your gain. But before you pack your leg in ice to induce a frostbite so severe the doctors will be forced to surgically remove your curse, you wonder about the book.

  You open it again, hoping there’s something in there, something to explain, even if it’s just a picture. It’s gibberish until one page, the page that says:

  Nautical exhibit at museum at midnight. Brass spyglass from a 1728 wreck. Place it in chest.

  You know which museum has the nautical exhibit. What do you have to lose? It doesn’t hurt any more to walk than it does to stay in place. And you miss stealing, since you’ve been hiding in your apartment biting a pillow and swallowing a plethora of Vicodin tablets that do absolutely nothing.

  The moment you place the spyglass in the chest, it slides through the wooden bottom, like it’s sinking through water.

  The pain in your leg becomes bearable. It doesn’t disappear — it never fucking disappears, never — but you can pass out now. You sleep, and you don’t wake up from a dream about being savaged by a shark or stepping in a bear trap or being allergic to only one of your socks.

  So you steal what the book tells you, and you put it in the chest. Gold coins ooze up from the other side, breaching like whales, until there’s a stack to replace your offering.

  The burning subsides for a time, but the book always makes more demands.

  §

  Now that I have the privacy of the closet, I pull the book out and look again. It says what it said before, plus one more word.

  NOW.

  I jam it back into my pocket, take a deep breath, and step back into the bouquet of B.O. and carcinogenic perfumes. I arrange a smile on my face with all the care that a florist takes with a wreath for a state funeral.

  Maybe I’m not looking for a person. Maybe the “her” was a statue, or a painting. I close my eyes almost all the way, so I just see a blur of light and color through my lashes, and scan the room. When a dark patch appears, it’s just one of the service dogs I spotted earlier, a saggy–bellied lab standing guard by her owner’s feet. Before I can dismiss her entirely, however, I spot a glint of silver on her service coat.

  Hundred bucks says I know that dog’s name.

  They’re leaving right now. The door shuts behind them.

  I duck around huge hats and ponyfalls, poofy skirts and trailing scarves. When I exit the ballroom, they’re nearly to the elevator.

  No, no, no. I break my practiced saunter and jog down the hall toward the woman and her dogs. I hate drawing attention, but I don’t have a choice.

  I slow as I approach, creeping up behind Lily’s wagging tail. The pin comes off of her embroidered “Service Animal” coat easily, though the sharp edges puncture the pads of my fingers.

  Lily’s tail brushes across my cheek as I get to my feet.

  She spins and snarls. Her elderly owner hauls at the leash, her face calm as her four–legged companion tries to get close enough to chew my nuts. I don’t have to pretend to be terrified.

  I clench the pin in my hand, trying to pretend it’s not cold as a polar bear’s butthole. It’s not the first object I’ve been told to steal that has strange properties, but it’s the first that numbs my fingers until I can’t even tell if they’re still gripping it.

  “Holy shit, your dog is psycho!” I yell, backing away.

  “You probably deserve it,” the woman snaps. Her other dog growls low in its throat, but it doesn’t struggle to reach me the way Lily does.

  I flee, my heart beating faster than the electronic music in the next room.

  Good. Now I’ll go home and throw this pin in the chest and waste Glenlivet by drinking it fast until I pass out. I open the book — still the same message — and tuck the bloody pin under the cover. When I get frisked, they never seem to be able to find the book, so it’ll be safest t
here.

  I no sooner finish tucking it into my breast pocket than someone with a beautiful Spanish accent says, “You’re not supposed to pet service dogs.”

  I glance over my shoulder, just to be sure it isn’t security.

  It’s a queen, maybe. I can’t tell; she’s lanky, with a Roman nose and overpainted lips. She could be female with strong features, or male with delicate ones. She has blood–red extensions, high–quality toyokalon bound into a messy ponytail to show off her impossibly thin hoop earrings and her black leather choker.

  She’s the only other person wearing black, a simple velvet dress powdered with glitter. I didn’t see her in the ball room, when I was looking for black costumes.

  I realize I’m staring, and shrug. “Service dogs don’t bite. Pretty sure that lady bought the coat on eBay so she could smuggle her fleabag into tea parties,” I say. “It’s like a fad with old bitches. Give it a few centuries; we’ll be doing it, too.”

  She narrows her eyes but doesn’t speak, as if she can’t decide if she’s offended or not.

  “Nice being lectured by you,” I say, and head for the stairwell.

  I hate elevators, because I can’t open the doors with my hands, so if I’m trapped in an elevator, there’s nothing I can do. Luckily, I’m my own elevator. I haul back the stairwell’s heavy fire door and it opens straight to the parking garage.

  My footsteps echo alone for long seconds before I hear the elevator door open behind me. Heels click on the pavement, and I glance back to find the goody–two–shoes with red plastic hair.

  “You’re leaving already? Not enjoying the convention, then?” she asks. She trots closer, inviting herself to walk along with me.

  “Drag isn’t my scene. I’m way too pretty to pretend to be a woman,” I reply. The chain is hurting more. I’m taking too long, and the book’s author is angry. I look for doors to get outside faster, but most of them are on cars, which won’t do the trick.

  For a moment, I imagine going back into the convention with her and having a drink. She has style, and it’s been a long time since I hung out with anyone I wasn’t stealing from. But the book doesn’t leave room for socializing in the schedule.