Her friend relied upon her to cut glass sheets for their frames, perfect and clear to protect but not obscure the art. After a time the smith had commissioned a large triptych of the nearby seaside to brighten her kitchen. When her friend visited to install the art and thought her walls too bare there began the frequent deliveries of paintings—mostly small or unfinished pieces, practice for their grander works.
“Nothing that we say will make you happier or better,” said her friend. “You have to do that yourself.”
•
A downgrade attempt begets tactile regard.
She missed her apprentice more than she’d guessed she would, but she had grown used to the woman and poor assumptions both. If the apprentice kept her word and if her family kept time she would return before the smith could complete a glass lover.
Yet the smith’s lust would not rest while her apprentice was away so she crafted something less than a lover, thick and curled with carefully charted bumps and ridges.
Hours she poured into its construction. Hours more she spent working over herself, hunched then stretched taut, rhythmic then mindless, expectant then harried. She was too attuned to the apprentice’s touch; stubborn desire could not usurp it. Boredom was the only thing that peaked, wrists the only flesh exhausted. Her screams were of frustration rather than from finishing.
But she was a glass-smith and she had mastered and outsmarted glass many times before. She redesigned, no less carefully than before, as snugly fitting as before. Her yearning was strong but her wrists were weak so she crafted something that was even less of a toy, something crooked and supporting. It went where she aimed it, angled when she twitched. Though still no true rival to a lover, it helped her convulse and conclude.
Afterwards she would lie, exhausted and content, with the glass of her tool slick and cooling against her skin, encircling wrist, holding fingers, resting on her stomach as she recovered. At first she thought it the lack of company, but the simple touch of the glass across and around her flesh was as fulfilling as being filled or felt by her lovers.
•
Rope takes purpose.
She had a friend who made temporary art from flesh and ropes. Whenever in need of a new glass eye, she would invite the smith over to strain against her cord, twist through the air and shudder atop certain knots.
Was this what it was like, the smith wondered, to be one of her glass lovers? To look upon the one who has fashioned such art, to see the care in which she has been shaped, to realise the pleasure in her crafting, to trust her lover and moulder so completely?
“The difference is that you never once feel fear,” said her friend. “I never give you reason to flinch from my touch or mistrust my actions.”
•
Haggled affection hides hungry infatuation.
She watched her apprentice grow in glass-mastery and watched her glee when she writhed under her grasp. The glass-smith found herself content, if not happy, found for herself purpose if not keenness. The nights when the apprentice fell asleep with a smile, the moments when they seemed to connect rather than coincide, the mornings when the glass-smith did not mind waiting for the apprentice to wake up and untie or roll off her: they aroused in her something.
But her skin did not squeak, her touch did not thrill.
Whatever the woman’s attempted taming kindled in the smith, it could not match the fire she felt whenever a glass lover or glass tool embraced her. And though she taught everything she knew of glass and relented to the apprentice’s appetite, she too learned and played with her own hunger. The apprentice’s confidence bloomed and commissions and business boomed; the glass-smith tried to pin down what she pined for.
She created restraints and gags, corsets and stockings, dildos and chastity belts, contoured supports and toys: all from glass, all handed over to her apprentice so she could be fondled and handled. The smith spoke of embracing submission and growing beyond crafted lovers to keep her happy and willing to indulge, but however much she might pretend it was her apprentice’s controlling hands that thrilled, her apprentice’s slow tongue and insistent fingers that slid her shaking and breathless to climax, she knew it was the glass that pressed and caressed between them.
Sometimes, increasingly, when her apprentice was out the smith would stretch out on undulating sheets of glass and feel it against her back, her elbows, her neck, her thighs. She thought of love and regrets, and glass—always she thought about glass—and she more often sent the apprentice for errands and appointments.
•
Leather shares living.
She had a friend who cured and cut leather then tied together the pieces with metal links and corded rope. She made inhuman lovers piece-by-piece with phalli instead of limbs, lovers monstrous with tentacles fully automated, lovers abstract of nothing but breasts and toes, lovers fanciful with wings and harnesses. She didn’t make them for herself, but said she found delight in seeing others finally happy.
The smith made eleven glass goat eyes for one of her contracts and her friend offered to make a lover for her. Leather could do what glass could not, leather would not break against her, leather absorbed instead of reflected. The glass-smith declined.
“Glass is too rigid,” said her friend. “Don’t restrict yourself. Craft exactly who you want to do exactly what you want.”
•
Dreams beyond lust become a passion beyond love.
She kept her secret as long as she could. As contentedness and respect was only so satisfying, her apprentice so alluring would only be so accommodating. Bound by promised exchange she did not begrudge, the glass-smith did not confide that she wished to be confined and crafted. Stifled by attraction stagnated, she told herself that only glass governed by her apprentice’s will could suffice. For a time, it helped. For a while, her belief made it better.
She was a glass-smith, though, and glass had been her first and truest love. After skill differences between the two had dwindled, was judged negligible, and the smith ran out of excuses, could no longer wait patient or fail to forget her longing no matter how pleasant or devoted the woman could be, she tasked her apprentice with helping her obtain a happiness less suppressed. She had asked for so little, given so much.
Surely what she asked now was still so little, what she offered was still so much.
Her skin was ready, her touch was pensive.
They argued and bartered. The smith spoke of oaths and compromises she had tired of, love that she was wearied of deferring. This time it was the apprentice who conceded.
They started with the smith’s legs. The glass was hot but she had worked with fires hotter. The glass was heavy but she had worn protective clothing heavier. The glass was fragile and difficult and stiff but she had conquered practices tougher.
Her skin was agony and bliss, every new inch of it more intoxicating than any lover. Her touch was distracting, torrid and almost delirious as the glass seared and ascended her body.
The smith could no longer craft herself when it came time for her right arm to be clad. She trusted her apprentice. The woman had failed to dissuade her from the glass and now she encased her in it. Soon would come her shoulders, her neck, her head, her face. She could scarcely breathe for impatience; she could scarcely breathe in for glass tight around her chest.
“I think I can hear the sea,” she whispered, as glass trickled into her ears.
•
Maps lead musing.
She had a friend who made maps with paper and ink. He showed the smith the coastlines of a far-off continent, the migration paths of well-tracked birds, the probable rings of sea-dragon nests and the detailed town plans that were his daily work. She brought postcards as they arrived and together they plotted the glass philosopher’s meandering journey.
Her apprentice commissioned a chart of her teacher’s body, having painstakingly plotted every sensitive spot. When they presented it to the smith she mulled over its shadings and symbols until finally she touched an a
rea with dense contour lines and traced the raised ink. The apprentice fondled one of her breasts, keeping time.
For her friend she made a glass globe with raised mountains and dyed terrain. He gently spun it, letting the contours and engraving slide beneath his fingers, and spoke of all the maps he had copied but never created, the towns he could navigate but never visit.
“You will always live with regret,” said her friend.
•
An apprentice’s graduation proves tender.
She broke her only lover out of glass.
There was too much. She wasn’t enough? She had been everything.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she cried, and struck the glass she had helped prepare.
At first her teacher screamed to see skin cracking and flesh exposed. With a bottle’s whistle the lover of glass begged the smith to leave her so. But though she loved her teacher and loved glass, she could not love her so.
This was too far. She had tried so much—but not everything. She had learned more than how to craft and love glass.
“You can’t, you can’t,” she cried, and attacked the woman she had failed to mould.
Her skin was cruel.
The glass lover screamed shrill, vulnerable even while shielding herself. The smith cried still and struck wild and wailed and soon her lover started to shatter and bleed.
But what could break off one could take on the other and just as the smith tried to rid her lover of the extra skin, the lover struck back with shard-ridden arms.
Her touch was ruin.
Soon they lay entangled and exhausted, a single figure of flesh and blood and glass and breath and pain, pinned and embedded into one another. One dragged and slid her arm along the other’s body with cries and screeches, gasps and cuts.
“I love you,” said the glass lover—lover glassed—and stroked her lover’s cheek, grated glass coalescing glazed skin.
“I love you,” said the glass-smith—glass smitten—and kissed her lover, hot lips rough with slivers against cold glass slick with blood.
No one filled them with fish.
•
Hungry
Robert E. Stutts
Even in high summer, paths through these woods are difficult to find, let alone follow, overrun as they are with brambles and briars and bracken. But in summer there is the sun above you to warm your head, and the green of trees to cheer your heart.
The winter is worse, of course, for winter lacks any kindness at all.
Nonetheless it is into the winter woods you go, following your brother, who has failed to protect you as he promised. Your parents have abandoned their children to the mercy of a forest that has no mercy, to keep their hands clean of your blood even as they fill their bellies with your portions, meager as those will be. Days have passed now, and you hope they choke on whatever crumb they sup on. If you had the means, you would have your revenge on them both.
But now you are hungry, and tired, and your eyes begin to water at the thought of a warm bed, or any bed. The night sounds terrify you, and every rustle in the brush is a wolf with meat on his mind. You will not escape a wolf’s hunger; your own cannot match his. Or can it?
A push through a tangle of dead bushes, and the tiny hut appears before you, lit up like a church. But no ordinary house this, no. Around the fence sit wax tapers at regular intervals; their light is brighter than the candles you remember your mother lighting, but of course she had only four. Skulls sit on the fence posts. The gate is open, and the path through the snow leads to the dark brown house. The smell of it floods your nose, and you remember in happier times how your grandmother made bread at Christmas. The roof of the house is made of cake, the windows spun from sugar. An edible house, and certainly not ordinary. As you move closer, you see that the house squats on chicken legs as if hatching an egg. You point at the legs and the skulls and murmur to your brother, who does not care for chickens or eggs or skulls and who rushes forward to feast. You follow after, knowing that danger is but a breath away; you have heard stories, but you, too, are hungry.
Your brother has thrust his face into the front of the house and has begun to chew and chew and chew. He does not stop, and you wonder if he remembers to breathe. Gently, you pull at a bit of the doorframe and bring the bread to your lips. The taste is warm, fresh-baked.
The door swings open. A witch lives here. She is beautiful and sharp-edged, with hair the color of pomegranate seeds and eyes as pale as icicles. You know that her hunger, like yours, is terrible and insatiable. She will gobble you up. Those stories you know to be true. She is blind, but she smells you and wastes no time in snatching into her house the both of you. Your brother she locks in a brass cage, to fatten him up. You, she says, will be my maid and will learn what I have to teach you. The notion makes your stomach drop: someone else to tell you what to do.
All day long your brother eats and weeps, eats and weeps. The witch has a magic cupboard that never empties; she teaches you the words to open and lock it, so you may pull whatever she needs from its depths. And such fine delicacies the witch concocts for your brother: Beluga caviar served on little triangles of toast; large bowls of borscht with heavy dollops of sour cream; large yeasty pirozhki stuffed with sautéed cabbage or mashed potatoes (mixed with carefully diced green onions and dill) or chopped beef (sautéed with onions and eggs); pork kotlety served with sauerkraut and baked turnips. She tops blini with all kinds of fruit preserves: cranberry, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, loganberry, huckleberry, mulberry, boysenberry, youngberry, olallieberry. Fried syrniki comes to him garnished with honey and applesauce. All day long he eats and eats and eats, crying all the while, and you are given nothing to eat but bread crusts and some beets left over from the borscht, which stain your teeth red.
At the end of each day, the sightless witch asks to feel your brother’s finger. She cannot see him to gauge how well he fattens, and she is wise not to reach into the cage. He offers a small bone he has found in the straw beneath him. She runs her own fingers along its smoothness, takes the tip of the bone into her mouth and runs her tongue around it. Not yet, she says, not yet.
Each night you undress the witch, and then yourself, and you crawl beneath the sheets with her. Her breath smells of ginger; her long hair moves across her back like honey; her skin is as white as sugar; and she tastes like wild strawberries, as warm and tart as summer, when you feast below.
The daily routine seems endless to you, although it is not entirely unpleasant. The witch keeps you warm if not full. You begin to wonder if you should tell the blind witch how your brother deceives her because his crying annoys you and he never offers to share any of his food with you. Instead, you stop telling him that all will be well.
At last, and long in coming, the witch decides that as skinny as your brother remains he will still be eaten. She has a large oven, large enough to fit two snugly enough and bake them through and through. You understand what she has planned for you now, and somehow you are not surprised to find yourself shoving her into the oven and locking the door. You saved yourself, and your brother, but it has not made you happy, it has not given you joy. You run outside to escape her screams, which do not last long. The wind is cold and damp and you feel it seep into your bones, eating up the warmth the witch left behind.
You eat the witch in many ways, with sour cream and dill, with apricot compote, with sliced turnips and parsnips sprinkled with rosemary. You feed some of the witch to your brother, whom you’ve left in the cage and who continues to cry every day. He has grown quite fat, and there is nothing, after all, wrong with your eyesight.
•
Liquid Loyalty
Redfern Jon Barrett
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“I don’t need anyone else but you.”
“I don’t need anyone else either.”
“I think about you all day.”
“I think about you too, Arthur.”
Anya flinched, he
r blood shocked cold. She hadn’t said that properly; she wasn’t emphatic enough; she hadn’t got the look right; she’d be discovered. Had he noticed? She examined him through her best gaze of adoration: his face betrayed no signs of suspicion, no betrayal, no anger. He hadn’t noticed. At least not yet.
“I hate going to work and leaving you,” Anya cooed for good measure. She said this every day, but this time she gave the words a little more sorrow, accompanying it with a slight frown—a demonstration of upset which would endear him to her. She knew what came next.
He leant forward and extended a small, soft kiss to her lips.
“Don’t forget,” he instructed, picking up his small bottle of pills from the breakfast table.
“I would never forget,” Anya replied, raising her small vial of liquid in return. As Arthur shook out a pill and swallowed it, Anya added three drops from the vial into her coffee.
He had no reason to suspect that it was just water, that its real contents had been emptied into the toilet—just like last month’s—just like last year’s. She kept her eyes on him as she sipped at her drink. She was glad there was the liquid option, it would be a lot harder to falsify the pills, with their distinctive crimson red colour and diamond shape. She had told him that she never could swallow pills.
“Don’t leave me,” he begged, playing out his day-to-day drama. What was in his head? Nothing but her. That was the point. That was the point of everything these days. No distractions. No need for friends or hobbies or political discussions. Just love—just the one person.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she replied. “I hate leaving you, I want us to be together all day. But when I’ve finished work we can see each other again.”
“We can listen to music together.”
Heiresses of Russ 2014 Page 6