Horror ripples, slow and cold, down Callum’s spine. “So, they fed on you.”
“Yes. But it kept them away from the rest of my people. I’m grateful for that, at least.” Irina’s tone is gauzy, but her eyes lose focus, lost inwards. “I am very grateful for that. I was responsible for my kingdom. As the only heir, I am responsible for the kingdom. It is my privilege to—”
Her voice seizes on the last syllable, lingers there like a woman staring over a ledge, and Callum can see where she falls, where she has fallen, where she is still falling, plummeting eternally into a nightmare of roots, Irina’s eyes are enormous as she regards her now upturned palms. She closes her hands into trembling fists.
“It was my privilege to suffer for them. But I think it is my responsibility to live for them, don’t you agree? Not as another symbol, mind. As someone worthy of their respect. Better yet, someone useful.”
“And what if they don’t want another ruler?” Annora’s smoky alto is even-keeled, but the challenge is unmistakable.
“Then I hope they will still consider letting me serve them. If nothing else, I am an excellent accountant.” She mimes coquetry in the denouement: a hand touched slyly to a cheek, a gauche invitation in long-lashed eyes. It startles a laugh from Annora, then Callum, then finally Irina, who laughs like someone relearning what it is like to be warm, what it could be like to be happy, finally.
Though Callum’s mother turned her back on destiny, fate persisted. A groom to the last, it would not see her flee the marriage it had concocted. So, her thwarted providence came, riding on a chariot of hoarfrost, in wagons of lambent emerald, on stallions black and broad as a warning, on foot, in chains of gold and obligation. They said to her, “Please.”
And Callum’s mother, who had been god-daughter to her kingdom’s best general, who was beloved even by the bad-tempered ministers, who bogged her father’s every decision in questions, always more questions, she closed the door on each time.
“No.”
But kismet would not be dissuaded. Like death, it knew there was only so much a human heart could take and if you waited long enough, if you stood alcoved in the shadows of a sick-bed until that last breath rasps loose, the soul will come with head bent low. The visitations burgeoned in number. What began as a weekly inconvenience became a daily annoyance, an hourly vexation, so precise in its assault that Callum’s mother learned to time her day by its summons.
“You have to come with me. Please. We need you,” said the umpteenth herald, this one a freckled girl, scarcely old enough to be allowed to ride without supervision, let alone travel the roads alone. But she was creviced with scars, as weathered as any old guardsman, her nose thrice-broken. Callum’s mother felt her heart soften, a wincing fear swollen in her breast. “If you don’t—”
“The kingdom will suffer; the kingdom will end. I know.” Callum’s mother let the girl stagger inside. “I have heard this before.”
“There was another rider?” Her voice hitched.
“Not from your country.” She bade the herald to settle at the dining table and turned to browse her cupboards. Callum’s mother found lemon balm leaves in a jar, placed them into a mug with hot water, a tablespoon of honey; she permitted this to steep before she brought the mix to the herald, offered the fragrant drink with a plum-blue plate of shortbread. “But there have been others.”
The herald drank long from her mug before she spoke again. “Did you go with them?”
“No.”
“Why? They needed you. We need you. Why would you just—”
“Because it wouldn’t do anything. Patterns repeat. Every single time. No matter how the story is told, it ends the same—”
“You don’t know that.” The herald thumped a fist on the table, its corners winged with faces, a bridal gift awkward in its ornate nature, out-of-place amid the rest of the furnishings. “You could have changed everything for those people, but you chose—”
“If you look at the history books, it is always the same. A Chosen One comes. They save the day. Then, they grow complacent, certain in the idea that they were chosen by the divine. Some of them die mediocre rulers. Others become worse things, tyrants glutted on their own stories. It never ends well.” Callum’s mother exhales. “And we both know it is worse when you are a woman.”
They sat in silence.
“Now what?” said the herald.
“I think …” Callum’s mother began, and she thought of what it meant to rule, of the parliament of duties and the houses of obligation, of infrastructure and agricultural cycles, zoning laws, municipal legislation, the bureaucracy that directed the structure of a nation’s year, and how little anyone spoke of these components, the cogwork of a country. “… we begin by you telling me where and what went wrong. When we understand the cause, we can begin dreaming a solution.”
Irina does not go home immediately. Her kingdom, thorn-choked still, lies on the shoulder of its distant mountain, forgotten, save by the few villages that survived the conflict. They grow potatoes there, a trail of tradesmen tells Callum. Sugar beets, parsnips, radishes, nothing impressive, no giant examples of the species. The soil is still starved by the roses, and it has been more years than Irina imagined.
But the princess does not ask how many. Instead, she asks, “Do the roses still grow?”
No, say the tradesmen. They sleep.
So, Irina asks not to stay, but be taken to the town by the belly of the mountain, where a university is being built. She asks for introductions to the abolitionists and philosophers that Callum has come to know, to the leatherworkers and the farriers and the burly, soft-voiced men whom Annora calls colleagues. She asks to work, to learn, to join the caravans on their winding excursions, all to rebuild what her country has lost. It is not much, but it is a start, and soon she is, like the others who have come to Callum’s door, gone.
When Annora and Callum marry, their wedding small but radiant with half-familiar faces, men and women in rich garb and humble expressions, Irina returns, alone, without a retinue, nearly unrecognizable, but happy. She brings them cake, like everyone else: marzipan and lemon drizzle, with summer fruits layered between. A petitioner makes himself known during the ceremony, a boy already slumping from his bone-thin mount, and Irina leads him away.
“Please,” says the new arrival. “He is the only one who can help.”
“Yes,” says Irina. “But not in the way you think, and first, sit down and have some damned cake.”
Salted Bone and Silent Sea
by Shanna Germain
After our son died, I locked my voice in a box. The kind of box doesn’t matter. Neither does the lock. What matters is box and locked. Said together like that. Throw the key away into the surf. Think better of it just before the sea claims it as its own, and grab it from the white foam, hide it somewhere warmer, quieter, more dangerous.
I was trying so hard not to be the monster that I knew I was.
My husband, Evan, wanted to know what I wanted for dinner.
“Do you want—?” he asked from where his top half was submerged inside the fridge. I could hear him moving things around inside, and I knew what was in there: greens gone wet and brown, jars of liquid skimmed in algae, crumbs of bread nibbled from all sides. “Pasta or potatoes?”
I sat at the kitchen table and watched my husband’s scissored legs be cut off at the waist by a steel box and thought how none of those words made sense anymore. All those p sounds like something small and round you’d squish with your fingers, and their insides would pop out and you’d be grossed out and try to wipe them on your shirt, where no one could see. But you’d still feel it and feel it, even in the shower. Even in the moments you’d forgotten about the something small and round, you’d still feel what was left upon your skin.
My husband is a good man. Everyone says that about their husbands, I guess, but sometimes someone says it and it’s true. He’s not perfect, but he holds me up the way water holds up oil.
Evan didn’t wait for me to respond about what I wanted, knew better than to hope for an answer. He spread too-cold butter over too-soft bread and slid it across the counter until it rested near my elbow. Nonchalant. Like nothing. He didn’t look at me. Didn’t move toward me. He’d seen, these days, how I startled, sometimes, like a wild animal, from so much as an implication of kindness. After he backed up so far he was nearly out of the kitchen, like a home movie played in reverse, I stuck a finger through the bread then lifted it and looked at him through the baby-shaped hole.
I couldn’t eat anything. The key was stuck in my throat, a long bone of white ache that hurt when I tried to swallow. Or speak. Or breathe.
Days, or maybe weeks, later, my stepdaughter’s school called. It was too early in the day for them to call. I was in a baby blanket, wrapped like a bathrobe, watching the news. Another school shooting, another burning, another plane crash, train crash, loss of life and limb. Everybody dies, sometime. Who said that? We all did, one time or another. And then we went numb.
I answered the phone without answering.
“I’m calling about Hadie,” the voice said into my silence. Not Hay-dee. Haddie, like Maddie. Hadie hit a kid in her class. Hadie wouldn’t speak to any of the other kids. Hadie stole something from the teacher’s desk. Hadie broke all the red crayons in pieces and left them on the heater to melt into fake blood.
“You don’t want me,” I said finally, when the voice on the other end of the phone seemed like it was done reciting its litany of wrongs. “You want Evan. Evan is her father.”
I’d picked Hadie up from school before, but always planned ahead of time, a careful execution between three adults who are desperately trying not to break their children. And never since Ben had died.
“We can’t reach him,” and there was sorrow in the syllables. I recognized the voice as the one belonging to the school principal, a slight and quiet man, who had given a presentation on emergency preparedness and children bringing weapons to school. Dekon. Or Darron. When Ben died, he sent a card both to us and to Hadie’s mother. Hers had a simple pink seashell on it, like a baby’s ear, that said With Sympathy for Your Loss. She’d shown it to me at the calling hours, slightly apologetic and sweet, in the way that she was always slightly apologetic and sweet.
“Try her mother, then,” I said. I was broken and angry, and it was all new and the force of it made even the webbing between my fingers pinch and pull. I rubbed my throat, felt the grooves within the skin. Had I always had so many bones there?
“I did.” Hesitant. More sorrow. I put the phone on the couch and moved far enough away that I couldn’t make out the emotions anymore. Just the words. “You’re next on the list.”
And I remembered signing those papers, I did. I had Ben, our baby, in the cradle of my body—I didn’t know he was already growing slippery, slipping, swimming away—and I was singing. Because I was always singing, then, the one song that almost made him sleep, sometimes, the one song that quieted his wails. My t-shirt was stained, my breasts anchors that tied me to no-time and no-place. I couldn’t remember what it was like to be alone or silent or dry. My half-dreams found me in water, liquid pressing silent to my ears, my feet moored to the shifting sand and silt.
“It’s for Hadie,” Evan had said. “Just for emergencies.”
I couldn’t imagine, then, what difference one more emergency would make. How could I sleep less? Be less whole? Hold one more thing against my aching, slogged skin and smother it with love? And like that, I’d lifted a hand and found a pen already in it. Paper on my knee. Signature scrawled, wet as water, across the page.
I spent the first six months of Ben’s life drowning in mourning for the loss of my self, for the places where my skin ended and another’s did not instantly begin, for the way my body was falling to ruin and disrepair, worn to nothing by salt and sway. I could have talked for hours about mourning, and I didn’t even understand that I didn’t yet know what it was.
“Hello?” from the phone. “Are you there?”
“I’m here.” I wasn’t, but it’s a thing you say.
It took me forever to find my way out of the house. All the actions that humans do to show they’re fine had slid away from me. I couldn’t remember where bras lived, so I layered tank tops and then sweaters over my body until I felt heavy enough to step outside without floating away. Every step was a hook, gutting me toward the past. Keys. Car seats. This route to the school I knew well enough that I could get there without thinking beyond pedal, gas, lights, left.
Doug. I remembered his name as soon as I saw him standing on the sidewalk next to Hadie. I could tell he didn’t want to let her come with me. I didn’t blame him. A lot of people thought I’d go crazy after. They wait, still, holding their breath until the day I stick my head in the oven or knife a guy at the grocery store or start walking around town with a cat in a stroller. I’d tell them to breathe, but most days I can’t really remember how, myself.
I might be going crazy, but it wasn’t that kind of crazy.
“Hi, Dee-dee,” Hadie said. She’s always called me that, does so even now that she can say my name proper. I don’t mind.
Doug started to say something, but Hadie came to me and took my hand, as if she’d known me all her life—which I guess she had, if you consider she wasn’t born yet when her father and I started dating. I used to stand on his porch and talk to Hadie’s soon-to-be-mom, with Hadie swimming inside her belly like a fish, waiting for Evan to come down the stairs. They no longer loved each other, but they lived together still, waiting to see if Hadie would bring them together or break them apart. I was supposed to be just a thing for him to do to kill time, I think. Like a jigsaw puzzle or quickie porn. I didn’t know, then, that Evan can’t touch something without falling in love with it. I guess Hadie’s mom did, and that’s why she laughed a little each time I said, “I’ll bring him home safe. Don’t worry.”
Hadie climbed into her booster seat, and when I leaned in, I refused to look at the way she touched Ben’s carseat next to her, gripped it with her whole tiny starfish hand. She couldn’t miss him, too. I couldn’t bear that. It wasn’t that I wanted the missing all to myself. I wasn’t a monster. Not that kind, at least.
Once, I’d accidentally pinched Hadie’s skin when I buckled her into her booster seat—she had cried silently, salted sadness that puddled into oceans beneath her eyes—and now we both would forever fear that moment of metal-to-skin. She sucked in her belly and I pulled down her crayon-stained shirt, and my hands didn’t shake even when they touched the carseat, and I thought, “I’ve got this. I’ve got this. I’ve got this.” I didn’t. But it’s a thing you think.
Before we got out of the school drive, Hadie starting singing in the back seat. The song that goes da-da-da-la-la-la-la. She had all the notes wrong and the tune wrong, too, but you’d know it if you heard it. You’d know it if you had a boy with red-gold hair and eyes as blue as the sea and genes that made sleep a never-never-land. You’d know if you sang it like I did, to keep you and your son afloat when you were already starting to drown.
We used to sing that song, the three of us, when we drove home.
“Hadie …” My voice came out high-pitched, thin in the air. She kept singing, wrong tune, wrong notes, and I refused with every single, unplucked nerve in my body to hate her right then. “Hadie, stop.” Sharp as two stones pounding together.
From the back seat, silence like before the storm, waiting to erupt. Then the full-throated wail that nearly shook the windows. I envied her ability to open her throat, those big gulps of air in, that painsong out. Only hers. Only ever hers. I drove and said nothing. She didn’t need another voice in this elegy.
I turned past the hospital and suddenly couldn’t picture Hadie’s face clearly. In the rear-view mirror, she looked squelchy and wavery, a watercolored depiction of a child. Had I picked up the wrong child? Who was this stranger in my back seat, wailing her pain to the windows and wipers? Who was this
stranger in the front seat, shed of her skin, pretending to be human, dried out as sun-bleached bones?
I could not be trusted with myself. Who had entrusted me with another child? I couldn’t wipe the tears fast enough to see clearly. Was that a stop sign or a tree? Huge rocks lined the edges of the street. The lane was too wide, too blurry, rushing like a tide, and that place on my hip where you carry laundry baskets and babies locked up, went dead.
We hit a boulder—jagged and looming—hard enough to silence everything. Hadie. Me. The car. The world.
“Di,” Evan said. He was leaning over me, and I’d never seen his eyes so blank. Never even after he’d found me in the nursery, singing, singing, our child breathing still, barely, gasping, the sun going down all around us.
“Di,” he said again.
My throat was broken. No, the key was broken in my throat. Bone and break and breath, all tangled beneath my skin. I needed water.
“Stop … stop calling me that,” I whispered. “Stop calling me that. Please. Please.”
He looked shocked. Of course he did. The first time we met, I told him, “Call me Di,” and he did. He always did. How could I say that every time I heard that version of my name, now, it was an accusation, a memento in the shape of language?
“Diane,” he said finally, in the voice of a person who’d just figured something important out, but didn’t have the words to explain it yet.
He touched my hand that wasn’t hooked up to a tube and didn’t ask if I knew where I was or what had happened. Once, I would have loved him for that with such ferocity that I would have thought my heart might swim from my chest and launch itself into the air toward him. Beside my hospital bed, the monitor kept its steady rhythm.
When Evan and I met, I was singing in a downtown dive near the shore. Not karaoke. Paid. My voice, the reverberation that tightened nets around men and gilled women and sank relationships. I’d swam away from a life I hadn’t wanted, with no thought of what I was swimming to. All I’d brought with me was song, all I knew was the way people drew to me and drowned in me when I opened my mouth. I’d had to learn words like fridge and paycheck, how to drink without being drunk, how to stand on a stage on two feet, and wear shoes with heels so high, they cut the air like knives.
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