Late the next afternoon, just before twilight, we left the house and walked to the town square. It was a beautiful evening—pink, orange, and purple in the west where the sun was half below the horizon. The sky above was dark blue and already the stars were beginning to show themselves. A slight breeze blew, enough to keep the gnats and mosquitoes at home. We held hands and walked in silence. As we passed along, we saw our neighbors leaving their houses and heading in the direction of the festival.
The town square had been transformed. Streamers of gold paper draped upon the picket fences and snaked around the light posts. In the southern corner, rows of folding chairs had been set up facing a slightly raised, makeshift stage that was formed from the wooden pallets where the town's brickmakers stacked their wares. Two tall poles on either side supported a patchwork curtain comprised of a number of old comforters safety-pinned together. Six lit torches had been set up around the performance area, casting a soft glow that became increasingly magical as the sky darkened. Constable Garrett, big cigar in the corner of his mouth, dressed in a colorful muumuu and wearing a bow in his hair, played the usher, making us form a line a short distance from the seating. We complimented him on his outfit, telling him how lovely he looked, and he nodded wearily as usual and answered, "What did you expect?"
All around the festival area, Lipara's children moved busily, with purpose, and in the middle of this bustle of activity stood Miss Toth, her skin blue, her hair a wig of rubber snakes, whispering directions and leaning down to put her ear closer to the ideas and questions of her students. Suddenly all was quiet and still but for the flickering of the torch flames. "Please have your tickets ready," said Garrett, and he held his hand up and waved us on. Before taking our seats, we were directed to three long tables upon which lay painted papier-mâché masks of animal heads, household items, seashells, and anything else you could possibly imagine. They had, attached to either side, long strands of thick wire with half-loops at the ends so that you could put on the disguise like a pair of glasses. Mixed in amidst the masks were newspaper hats, and at the end of each table was a stack of fans made of sticks with a round piece of cardboard attached.
I settled on a mask that made my head a can of beans, and my wife took on the visage of a barnyard chick. Mildred Johnson's face became a bear paw; her husband's a bright yellow sun. Beck Harbuth chose a dog mask, and Mayor James Meersch III turned away from the table a green monkey. Once everyone was something else, we took our fans and went to sit before the stage. The show started promptly. Miss Toth appeared from behind the curtain, carrying a hat rack, which she set down next to her. She welcomed us all and thanked us for coming, introduced Colonel Pudding—creator and founder of the Festival of the Dreaming Wind—and walked off the stage. A moment later, from over our heads, there came the sound of flapping wings, and Colonel Pudding landed on the top of the hat rack. He screeched three times, lifted his wings, bobbed his head twice, and said, "Mama, the tale of the dreaming wind. Once upon a time . . ." before flying away. Jessica Johnson ran out from behind the curtain, whisked the perch off the stage, and the play began.
The play was about a great wizard who lived, with his wife and daughter, in a castle way up north in the mountains. He was a good wizard, practicing only white magic, and for anyone who made the arduous journey to see him, he would grant a wish as long as it was meant for someone else. The only two wishes he would not grant were those of riches or power. A chorus of younger children sang songs that filled us in on the details of life upon the mountain. White confetti blew across the stage, becoming snow, to mark the passage of time.
Then the wizard's wife, whom he loved very much, caught a chill that progressed into pneumonia. It soon became clear that she was dying, and no matter what spells of enchantment he tried to work, nothing could cure her. When finally she died, he was deeply saddened, as was his daughter. He began to realize that there were things in the world his magic couldn't control, and he became very protective of his daughter, fearing she would succumb to the same fate as her mother. He had promised his wife that he would always love the girl and keep her safe. This responsibility grew in his mind to overshadow everything, and the least little cut to her finger or scraped knee caused him great anguish.
Time passed and the girl grew older and developed a mind of her own. She wanted to go down the mountain and visit with other people. The wizard knew that there were all manner of dangers waiting for her out there in the world. Before she got to the age where he knew he could no longer stop her from leaving, he cast a spell on her that put her into a profound sleep. To protect her, he encased her in a large seed pod with a window so that he could see her face when he needed to. There she slept, her age unchanging, and he finally felt some relief.
He noticed at the end of the first year of her protective sleep that she must be dreaming, because he could see through the window the figures and forms of her dreams swirling around her. It became clear to him that if he didn't find some way to siphon out the dreams, they would eventually fill the seed to bursting; so, using his magic, he cast a spell that added a spigot to the top of the structure. Once a year, when summer led into fall, he'd climb a stepladder and release her pent-up dreams. They sprayed forth from within like a geyser, gathering themselves up into a kind of cloud that, when fully formed, rushed out of the castle window. The mountain winds caught her dreams and drove them south, where their vitality affected everything they touched.
As the story unfolded on the stage before me, I was amazed at the quality of the production and how ingenious the props were. The seed pod that contained the wizard's daughter was a large luggage bag covered with glitter, and a window cut to reveal the girl's face. To show her dreams swirling within, they must have cut from colored paper small figures of different animals and people and things and attached them to thin sticks that the daughter, played wonderfully by the beautiful Peggy Frushe, controlled with her hands, hidden from sight, and made sail gracefully before her closed eyes. When the dreams were released by the turning of the spigot, they took the form of younger children, donned in costumes, who whirled madly around the stage and then gathered together before blowing south. And what was even more amazing was that the errant Alfred Lessert, with his freckles and shock of red hair, played the troubled wizard with a pathos that transcended drama and stepped neatly into reality.
While I sat there, noting the remainder of the play, wherein a youth comes to the far north to beg for a wish to be granted, discovers the girl and frees her, does battle with her father, who just before killing the lad with a deadly spell succumbs to his daughter's pleas and spares him, letting the young couple flee down the mountain toward freedom, I was preoccupied, seeing my own years in Lipara unfold on a wooden-palette stage in my mind. Before I knew it the action transpiring in front of me had rushed on, and the wizard was delivering his final soliloquy, a blessing for the couple, amid a blizzard of falling snow. "Out there in the world, my dear," he said, calling after his daughter, and scanning the crowd to look into each set of our eyes, "the wind will blow both beautiful and bitter, and there's no telling which it will be each time the boughs bend and the leaves rustle. There is no certainty but that there is no certainty. Hold tight to each other and don't be afraid, for sometimes, in the darkest night, that wind may even bring you dreams."
At the end of the production, the players bowed to thundering applause. We were then instructed to hold high our fans and to wave them as hard as we could. Everyone in the audience and on stage paddled the air with all they had, creating two hundred small gusts of wind that joined together to form a great gale that gave comfort and left no one unchanged. Afterward, some danced the Combarue to the sound of Constable Garrett's harmonica while the children played hide and seek in the dark. We all drank punch and talked and laughed late into the night until the torches burned out.
On our walk home by the light of the stars, Lyda turned to me and divulged how when she and some of the other neighbors were clearing out
Grandmother Young's house so that it could be sold to a new couple moving into town, she'd discovered, beneath the bed, a set of loose papers that held the plans for the festival and the outline of the play. "By then the Colonel was putting the scheme she'd taught him into action, and so I kept it a secret from everyone so as not to ruin the surprise," she said. I told her I was glad she did, just as we passed the bench in the shadow of the strange old oak that gave birth to blue bats, and we caught sight of Alfred Lessert and Peggy Frushe sharing a kiss. "Some things never change," I whispered.
Wearily, we crawled into bed that night, and I lay for a long time with my eyes closed, listening to Lyda's steady breathing and the sound of a breeze sifting through the screen of our open window. My thoughts, at first, were filled with the sights and sounds of the festival—the glow of the torches, the masks, the laughter—but these eventually gave way to the sole image of that old wizard, alone on his mountain in the far north. Through the falling snow, I noticed his beard and recognized his wrinkled face. Murmuring some incantation, he lifted his wand. Then he nodded once, granting me my wish, and I realized I must be dreaming.
The Coat of Stars
Holly Black
Holly Black (www.blackholly.com) is the author of the bestselling "The Spiderwick Chronicles." Her first story appeared in 1997, but she first got attention with her debut novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. She has written six "Spiderwick" novels and two novels in her "Modern Faerie Tale" sequence, including Andre Norton Award winner Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie. Black's most recent book is the first in a second series of Spiderwick novels, The Nixie's Song.
Science fiction and fantasy are about changing our perceptions, about making us question the world around us. In the moving story that follows, Black re-imagines the quest beyond the hill to recover a lost love from the distant lands of faerie in thoroughly modern terms.
Rafael Santiago hated going home. Home meant his parents making a big fuss and a special dinner and him having to smile and hide all his secret vices, like the cigarettes he had smoked for almost sixteen years now. He hated that they always had the radio blaring salsa and the windows open and that his cousins would come by and try to drag him out to bars. He hated that his mother would tell him how Father Joe had asked after him at Mass. He especially hated the familiarity of it, the memories that each visit stirred up.
For nearly an hour that morning he had stood in front of his dressing table and regarded the wigs and hats and masks—early versions or copies of costumes he'd designed—each item displayed on green glass heads that stood in front of a large, broken mirror. They drooped feathers, paper roses, and crystal dangles, or curved up into coiled, leather horns. He had settled on wearing a white tank top tucked into bland gray Dockers but when he stood next to all his treasures, he felt unfinished. Clipping on black suspenders, he looked at himself again. That was better, almost a compromise. A fedora, a cane, and a swirl of eyeliner would have finished off the look, but he left it alone.
"What do you think?" he asked the mirror, but it did not answer. He turned to the unpainted plaster face casts resting on a nearby shelf; their hollow eyes told him nothing either.
Rafe tucked his little phone into his front left pocket with his wallet and keys. He would call his father from the train. Glancing at the wall, his gaze rested on one of the sketches of costumes he'd done for a postmodern ballet production of Hamlet. An award hung beside it. This sketch was of a faceless woman in a white gown appliquéd with leaves and berries. He remembered how dancers had held the girl up while others pulled on the red ribbons he had had hidden in her sleeves. Yards and yards of red ribbon could come from her wrists. The stage had been swathed in red. The dancers had been covered in red. The whole world had become one dripping gash of ribbon.
The train ride was dull. He felt guilty that the green landscapes that blurred outside the window did not stir him. He only loved leaves if they were crafted from velvet.
Rafael's father waited at the station in the same old blue truck he'd had since before Rafe had left Jersey for good. Each trip his father would ask him careful questions about his job, the city, Rafe's apartment. Certain unsaid assumptions were made. His father would tell him about some cousin getting into trouble or, lately, his sister Mary's problems with Marco.
Rafe leaned back in the passenger seat, feeling the heat of the sun wash away the last of the goose bumps on his arms. He had forgotten how cold the air conditioning was on the train. His father's skin, sun-darkened to deep mahogany, made his own seem sickly pale. A string-tied box of crystallized ginger pastries sat at his feet. He always brought something for his parents: a bottle of wine, a tarte tatin, a jar of truffle oil from Balducci's. The gifts served as a reminder of the city and that his ticket was round-trip, bought and paid for.
"Mary's getting a divorce," Rafe's father said once he'd pulled out of the parking lot. "She's been staying in your old room. I had to move your sewing stuff."
"How's Marco taking it?" Rafe had already heard about the divorce; his sister had called him a week ago at three in the morning from Cherry Hill, asking for money so she and her son Victor could take a bus home. She had talked in heaving breaths and he'd guessed she'd been crying. He had wired the money to her from the corner store where he often went for green tea ice cream.
"Not good. He wants to see his son. I told him if he comes around the house again, your cousin's gonna break probation but he's also gonna break that loco sonofabitch's neck."
No one, of course, thought that spindly Rafe could break Marco's neck.
The truck passed people dragging lawn chairs into their front yards for a better view of the coming fireworks. Although it was still many hours until dark, neighbors milled around, drinking lemonade and beer.
In the back of the Santiago house, smoke pillared up from the grill where Cousin Gabriel scorched hamburger patties smothered in hot sauce. Mary lay on the blue couch in front of the TV, an ice mask covering her eyes. Rafael walked by as quietly as he could. The house was dark and the radio was turned way down. For once, his greeting was subdued. Only his nephew, Victor, a sparkler twirling in his hand, seemed oblivious to the somber mood.
They ate watermelon so cold that it was better than drinking water; hot dogs and hamburgers off the grill with more hot sauce and tomatoes; rice and beans; corn salad; and ice cream. They drank beer and instant iced tea and the decent tequila that Gabriel had brought. Mary joined them halfway through the meal and Rafe was only half-surprised to see the blue and yellow bruise darkening her jaw. Mostly, he was surprised how much her face, angry and suspicious of pity, reminded him of Lyle.
When Rafe and Lyle were thirteen, they had been best friends. Lyle had lived across town with his grandparents and three sisters in a house far too small for all of them. Lyle's grandmother told the kids terrible stories to keep them from going near the river that ran through the woods behind their yard. There was the one about the phooka, who appeared like a goat with sulfurous yellow eyes and great curling horns and who shat on the blackberries on the first of November. There was the kelpie that swam in the river and wanted to carry off Lyle and his sisters to drown and devour. And there were the trooping faeries that would steal them all away to their underground hills for a hundred years.
Lyle and Rafe snuck out to the woods anyway. They would stretch out on an old, bug-infested mattress and "practice" sex. Lying on his back, Lyle'd showed Rafe how to thrust his penis between Lyle's pressed-together thighs in "pretend" intercourse.
Lyle had forbidden certain conversations. No talk about the practicing, no talk about the bruises on his back and arms, and no talk about his grandfather, ever, at all. Rafe thought about that, about all the conversations he had learned not to have, all the conversations he still avoided.
As fireworks lit up the black sky, Rafe listened to his sister fight with Marco on the phone. He must have been accusing her about getting the money from a lover because he heard his name said over and over. "Rafael sent
it," she shouted. "My fucking brother sent it." Finally, she screamed that if he didn't stop threatening her she was going to call the police. She said her cousin was a cop. And it was true; Teo Santiago was a cop. But Teo was also in jail.
When she got off the phone, Rafe said nothing. He didn't want her to think he'd overheard.
She came over anyway. "Thanks for everything, you know? The money and all."
He touched the side of her face with the bruise. She looked at the ground but he could see that her eyes had grown wet.
"You're gonna be okay," he said. "You're gonna be happier."
"I know," she said. One of the tears tumbled from her eye and shattered across the toe of his expensive leather shoe, tiny fragments sparkling with reflected light. "I didn't want you to hear all this shit. You're life is always so together."
"Not really," he said, smiling. Mary had seen his apartment only once, when she and Marco had brought Victor up to see The Lion King. Rafe had sent her tickets; they were hard to get so he thought that she might want them. They hadn't stayed long in his apartment; the costumes that hung on the walls had frightened Victor.
She smiled too. "Have you ever had a boyfriend this bad?"
Her words hung in the air a moment. It was the first time any of them had ventured a guess. "Worse," he said, "and girlfriends too. I have terrible taste."
Mary sat down next to him on the bench. "Girlfriends too?"
He nodded and lifted a glass of iced tea to his mouth. "When you don't know what you're searching for," he said, "you have to look absolutely everywhere."
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II Page 18