Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 Read online

  My cuts and bruises healed and my scars stayed small as I grew into adulthood. I stopped telling or even acknowledging the story. Even the concept of a sole survivor offends some. I told myself that it had been a freak meteorological condition. I developed a powerful interest in such things and watched Storm Center on The Weather Channel without telling anyone why. I liked to think that the others had stumbled down the other side of the mountain. That they'd grown up in towns other than Salisbury, with names other than Connor and Bart, Gerry and Geoff.

  I know what you're thinking, but I am not so different from other people. I am driven by discontent. I move forward so that I can forget what I've left behind. I am hardly alone in that. I am a professional. The fat in my body can be measured in percentage points. I know how to box and can recommend a good Riesling. It is just that my past contains a malignancy, one which refuses to be shunted aside. I am not alone in that, either, but mine is more extreme. It can not play nicely with others.

  I am lying sideways now, looking at Ritu. She is conducting an inventory of our food with Oliver, who is gay and losing his tan.

  "Two loaves of bread,” she is saying, “and they're Wonder, so they'll keep forever."

  She is speaking brightly, trying to make things bearable. She is wearing a green Dartmouth sweatshirt and faded gray shorts and has folded herself up on the heavy-framed chair, hugging her brown legs to her chest and pointing her toes toward the floor. She looks like a leaf and takes up no more space than a kite.

  I half imagine and half remember the backs of Ritu's ankles notched against my shoulders, how her breasts ripple and her chestnut eyes round as I thrust into her. Sex with her had been impactful and hard, as many forbidden acts are. We had not had a condom that first time and I'd had to pull out and splash myself on her stomach. The semen had seemed impossibly white against her skin then. It did not seem so now.

  She is here with me, in this furiously lit room, but this can not persist much longer. All of the stranded, the trapped, and the missing, they'd simply gotten in the way of something that was never about them. They'd found themselves knee deep in someone else's unfinished business, knowing only that they were knee deep. You'd think I'd feel guilty, and on some level, I do. I swear I do, but there's something else kicking around down there. I feel important. How could I not? That's probably why this note is so overtly philosophical. I guess these sorts of notes often are, but it's something I rarely indulge in. “Impactful and hard, as many forbidden acts are...” Please.

  But how could I not feel that this was somehow all about me? In summer share terms, I'm the one who tracked the sand in. And I'm just a quarter share, the lowest form of rental life, that's the real kicker. This was just my third time out here. Why here, why now, why—but it makes no sense to quibble with the timing. I can see now that this has been rolling up behind me my whole life, that I have merely been looking in the wrong direction.

  Ritu, Oliver, Tina, and Anne are frozen in place as I touch the cold metal of the doorknob. Oliver stands, bless him. “Paul, don't,” he says, but I am moving quickly now. My head is swimming from standing up suddenly after lying down for so long. I close the door behind me and take three steps forward. This time, there is no river. Breathing in is like swallowing paint. I survey the milky oblivion. I feel it press its thousand fingers into me and welcome me back. I shut my mouth and wait for what there is in silence.

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  Crown Prince

  Ellen Rhudy

  She says to me, she says, I know what you want but I can't give it to you. I won't.

  Yes, I say. You won't. (But you can.)

  * * * *

  Her nipples are like worry beads. I press them between my fingers and roll them around, and they feel just like little glass beads, like little glass beads that are warm and cold all at once.

  Maybe I worry.

  * * * *

  She lives on the ground floor of a stone tower. Past her I can see the stairs, looping up, gripping the walls for balance. I went up those stairs once, before she knew. I saw her and that was all it took, that one glance—a second, not even—and she took me back downstairs and pulled me inside her and made me forget.

  I visit her tower every day. I do not always go inside; sometimes it's better to just stand outside and look up up up at the top story, where the stairs gasp free of the wall and spill into a loft. That's where she is, sleeping, always sleeping. If she came to the window I think I would remember better. If she came to the window I think I could climb the stairs again.

  * * * *

  She works at the Kitty-a-Go-Go next to her crumbling stone tower. (Something I only noticed today: White gouges on the stone.) She works with little pink stars stuck over her nipples. I sit and watch her and think—there is something, I cannot remember—and afterwards return to the first floor of her tower where she unsticks the stars and sits bare breasted counting her money.

  Yes, I think. There is something, something I came for. But that is as far as I get.

  * * * *

  The sleeping girl has blond hair. Blond hair and blue eyes. I tell you this because it's all I know, other than her walk with legs unmoving beneath wool dresses, how when I first saw her, before she came here, I thought she had no legs (I was young, then) and moved on puffs of air, and maybe she does or maybe she does not, maybe the sleep has been too long and she has forgotten.

  * * * *

  I am as adamant a proponent of beauty sleep as anyone, but a hundred years seems excessive even to me. But perhaps not. Perhaps it is just enough.

  * * * *

  She keeps her money in a row of jelly jars glued with used pink stars scabbing off the dusty glass. She announces her plans to use her Thong money to build an addition, to open a bed and breakfast.

  She cannot cook, she cannot clean. But pink stars cling to her nipples, do not come loose in the middle of an act like some of the other girls', which is a more useful talent than any I can claim.

  You will be my cook, she says. And then, I am leaving to draw blueprints.

  * * * *

  The next morning there is a kitchen, there are bedrooms and bathrooms, whole suites, whole apartments. I make scrambled eggs in the kitchen and then she leads me up the stairs, past new doorways leading to rooms that hang from the tower like stone boils. She leads me past door after door to the loft, and then she winks and says, You know what to do, and leaves.

  * * * *

  I send letters home, sometimes.

  I am evasive. I do not provide a return address. I write: “Things are well here, I hope you are having good weather."

  My mother is too old to beget another son. If he isn't already, my father will soon be doing it with the maid. And then the bells will ring ten times and the people will rejoice and the footmen will store all the birthday presents in the spare rooms. My mother's maid will write thank-yous to the other kings and the foreign dignitaries and higher lords, will pretend to be my mother. And again, they will not know the difference.

  * * * *

  You do not awaken a sleeping princess by kissing her on the lips, as per rumor, but by whispering into her ear the names of precious metals and jewels.

  Little else can sustain the female royalty.

  * * * *

  The bed and breakfast begins to fill up. She adds more rooms, places them randomly, overlapping and unbalanced. She adds an elevator that shoots straight up the center of the stairs. She makes another line of jelly jars, without the stickers. Every night she goes to the Kitty-a-Go-Go and every night I follow.

  * * * *

  I cook and she cleans. At night when I am trying to fall asleep she tells me that she is a princess and will return home once she remembers where that is, exactly. She thinks by the sea.

  I tell her I'm a prince. And if I have had a bad day I tell her that her hands are too worn, too calloused and cracked and bruised and red from scrubbing the flagstones, for her to ever return home.

 
; One day she agrees and we marry, the pink kitten buzzing on and off over her head.

  * * * *

  Some nights I walk to the Kitty-a-Go-Go in disguise and tip her handsomely with money I've stolen from the Thong jelly jars.

  * * * *

  One night the sleeping woman is gone and I am alone in my loft. I sneak downstairs and lick the worry bead nipples.

  And then one day she is back. She says, I think I found it but I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't remember what my father looks like.

  Nor do I, I say, though this isn't true. We lay side by side not touching, and before she falls asleep she says she is going home as soon as she remembers whether it is North or Northwest, that she is engaged to a crown prince and she is sorry but when it comes down to it she will choose a crown prince over a lost one who makes scrambled eggs every morning and washes dishes the rest of the day. I tell her I understand, and keep secret that there is a princess waiting for me at home and that I will choose her over the one next to me. I wish her luck in making it home and say that I won't be too upset if she leaves again, only I don't say that she's too old and has worked, two things that destroy a princess faster than anything.

  When her breathing slows I take the stairs to the Kitty-a-Go-Go, which is full of businessmen tonight. I recognize some from the bed and breakfast but we pretend not to see each other.

  I leave early and sit on the first floor of the stone tower, between rows of jelly jars. I peel star stickers from the glass and roll them into hard little beads, and pretend they are her.

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  The Half-Sister

  Sarah Monette

  I was cleaning the lamps when the stranger knocked.

  I knew it was a stranger, right off, because whoever it was didn't know about the postern door that's the only thing in the front wall that opens. They'd knocked at the ceremonial gate that hasn't been used since Father reached his majority and won't be again until Gunther comes of age in another twenty years—if Father hasn't quarreled irrevocably with Gertrude before then and disinherited the whole pack of them.

  I stayed where I was, up to my elbows in lamp-oil and dirt, while Nanna creaked her way slowly across the hall. Nanna's terrible arthritis does not change the fact that she is the ranking woman in the household. Gertrude hates that, but she loses the argument every time she starts it. Lane outranked Nanna, but it didn't matter, with Lane lying there like a dead thing in her bedroom, without even the strength to turn her face to the wall.

  Nanna wrestled the door open, and stuck her head out to shout at whoever it was. I could hear a mutter of explanations and apologies, but all of the greeting formulas got carried away by the wind, so I was completely unprepared for the man who stepped into the hall at Nanna's gesture of invitation.

  He screamed Southerner from head to foot, from his braided hair and long mustaches to the expensive but completely inadequate boots on his feet. They were soaked right through. I suppose he was handsome, if you go in for that sort of thing, though there was too much cheekbone for my taste—too much crag. Craggy-faced men always think far better of themselves than they need to.

  He said to Nanna, slowly and distinctly, as if she were some kind of idiot, “May I see Madalane, please?"

  I knew who he was. My hands—big, lumpy-knuckled hands, short-nailed and filthy—clenched so hard that the rag twisted between them tore. Nanna and the stranger both turned to stare at me; from the way his head jerked around, he hadn't even realized I was there.

  I stood up, conscious of my shabby dress, the strands of hair escaping from my hairpins. “You should not be here."

  "You must be Karlin,” he said, as if I'd said something normal and polite. “Madalane told me a great deal about you."

  If he thought that would make me like him, he could have spared his breath. “And you're Gerard. Lane hasn't said a word about you."

  His face darkened in hurt and anger. But I continued before he could find words: “Leave. Please. Leave Lane alone."

  "Lane can make her own choices, Karlin,” Nanna said, her pale eyes sharp for once. “You will not make them for her.” She turned and hobbled slowly out of the hall.

  I stepped out from behind the table where I had been seated and approached Gerard. Prince Gerard of Hylfeneth, he was, and by Southern reckoning, Lane was his wife, although I wasn't sure whether their marriage was binding under Northern laws. It was one of the many things Lane wouldn't tell me.

  "Please,” I said, though the word was dry and bitter in my mouth. “Just go."

  "I can't,” he said, spreading his hands as if he expected me to understand.

  "Haven't you hurt her enough?"

  "Hurt her?"

  "If she dies,” I said, “it will be because you have killed her."

  For a minute, I thought he was going to hit me, and so did he. But he changed his mind, and ran his hand over his face instead. “Karlin,” he said at last, and if I could have liked him, I might have pitied the weariness in his voice, “I don't know why you hate me, but I don't think you have any idea of why Madalane left Hylfeneth."

  "Don't I?"

  "You don't know what we went through."

  "You haven't sat with her every night for a month of nightmares. You weren't here when she came riding up the pass like something that had been dead for a week and was just too brute obstinate to admit it. You haven't argued with her over every single bite of food she eats—and had to give the half of her meals to the pigs anyway. I have. So don't tell me what I don't know."

  He looked as if each word was a separate nail being pounded into his flesh, and maybe he would have left then, maybe he would have gone and left Lane alone, except that a voice said, thin and shaky, “Gerard?"

  We both turned. It was her.

  I don't know how she did it. She hadn't been able to leave her room for weeks, even to escape from Father, but there she was, leaning in the doorway—white as a ghost but fully dressed.

  "Lane,” I said. “Lane, you oughtn't—"

  "Gerard?” she said again, and then they were clinging together in the doorway, talking and laughing and crying all together in a horrible tangle, and I knew that she was going back. Going back to Hylfeneth, going back to him, going back to the life I'd thought and hoped and even prayed she'd renounced. I'd thought she'd begun to see me again, the way she'd seen me before some fool traveling peddler had infected her with dreams of Hylfeneth and she'd stopped seeing anything but the blood-red minarets and lace-spun bridges of the stories. I'd thought, when she came back, that the reality had cured her of the mindless dreams, that if we could just wait out the last throes of the fever, Lane would be back, my Lane who'd never laughed at me for being raw-boned and ugly and dark, who'd never called me goblin, who had shared with me things that this handsome hero would never understand. He didn't know the Lane I did. I'd thought Lane had realized that, too, but the radiance on her face told me I was wrong.

  They were deciding to leave as I watched them. I could see it on their faces. They would go riding off into the clouds together, and Lane wouldn't have to face Father or explain herself to Gertrude or confront any of the remnants of a life she didn't want. She didn't even see me when she said goodbye, only her faithful half-sister—every heroine has one.

  I don't know if there was something I could have said, some way I could have reached her. I lie awake nights, wondering. But there was nothing I could have told her that she didn't already know, and if what she knew was not enough to keep her here, then what use would any words of mine be?

  She strode out ahead of Gerard, eager for the next adventure I suppose, and I caught his cloak and said, “When she dies, don't bring her body here."

  I don't think he understood me, not really, but he understood something, because he nodded and said, a little awkwardly, as if he wasn't used to it, “Karlin, I'm sorry."

  I shook my head. “She's made her choice."

  He left then, following her as he would follow her
anywhere, and I stayed behind, as I had stayed behind the first time she left. Stayed behind to keep the lamps clean and lit, to keep the household running, to keep carrying the responsibilities Lane had let fall.

  I'm no heroine. I don't have a story. And Lane's story is not mine to tell, except for this: she made her choice.

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  Dear Miss Wonderment

  Geoffrey H. Goodwin

  Dear Miss Wonderment:

  I hope you're finding yourself okay. I dreamed I received a telegram that said you were coming to visit. Hours later, perhaps still in slumber, perhaps in reality, you showed up—frail, bedraggled and shivering—on my front stoop.

  You're not here now, so I'm writing you this letter.

  In what therefore must've been a dream, I couldn't help but notice the new tattoo on your left forearm. In Day-Glo pink it said, “What time is it right now? Become a new you by 12:22!"

  But you, my darling from a different time and space, were unchanged. Your teeth had become pointier and certain patches of your skin were well worn and parts had become thinner, but you were still you.

  You were the same lump of damaged goods that you've been for quite some time.

  In my dream I sent you a ticket to ride the ferry from Penobscot Bay to Lake Michigan.

  There are three possible ferry captains:

  1) Moss is a one-hundred-year-old woman who pilots her craft extremely carefully. When you give your ticket to Moss, it will be a very slow and gentle ride.

  2) Hotstick seems gruff and resembles a military general, but he has a gift for exchanging pleasantries as long as you begin the conversation by speaking first.

  3) Murray Bamf is a Franciscan monk who steers erratically and goes too fast, but he is often willing to drop passengers off wherever they desire—not just at the pre-assigned stops.

  But I have digressed; everything is prearranged for you. The two men will not be your ferry captains. Moss will be picking you up this morning at 11:12, as long as my dream is correct.