by CK Dawn
Dragon made it to Trash Bin just as her stoic façade ran out of gas. At the base of a young dogwood, she eased to her bottom, fitting her clavicle and shoulder against its smooth trunk. Curling her legs under her borrowed skirt, Dragon bowed her head and sobbed, totally unmoved when the piskies pushed a chipped clay bowl under her leaking face.
Rarely seen, piskies were no bigger than a sugar spoon and possessed bodies like long thorns: pointed, almost-willowy heads and torsos graduating to legs and feet that were disproportionately wide. They sweated a clear fertilizing slime as they walked, like slugs.
Ingeniously dressed in daisy petals for the males and breathless pink tulip petals for the females, they argued among themselves as Dragon wept. Their bark-colored bodies vibrated like tuning forks as angry words that sounded like the abbreviated whistles of a base-clef wood chime passed between the group of three gripping the right side of the bowl and the couple on the other.
The delicate crunch of grass startled the piskies into silence and the two glowing orange dots in their thin, peaked heads watched as Phyllis, barefoot, placed her gorgeous shoes on the ground as if it were carpeted with eggs and lowered herself behind Dragon’s body.
Dragon felt Phyllis’s diaphragm contract at the sight of the piskies as she breathed, “Holy shit,” returning the piskies wary gaze before resting her head on Dragon’s shoulder. “Let it out, little girl.”
“Don’t touch me,” Dragon replied, making no move to get away from her grandmother.
“I won’t, baby,” Phyllis said, hugging her closer as Dragon continued to weep into the piskie’s bowl. “Promise.”
Phyllis held her as she cried, whispering nonsense words to her as grief jerked and shuddered an inelegant path out of her body.
Finally Dragon’s sobs eased to the endless trickle of tears. The piskies had exchanged the full clay bowl for a small dented saucepot and her tears pinged into it, reminding Dragon of the Salon’s living room littered with pots and buckets whenever it rained too hard.
The memory threatened to overwhelm her, but Phyllis’s one-sided conversation caught her attention.
“You always were emotional. Even as a toddler. I remember this one time a horsefly as big as a marble had gotten into that piece-of-shit fourth-floor walk-up I had on 129th Street. The thing pitched on the bathroom mirror and I had my slipper raised ready to squash the hell out of it, but you wouldn’t have it. Screamed so much I thought for sure the neighbors would complain to the landlord, the police and God knows who else. Wouldn’t quit until I promised to let the thing fly out the window. I must have looked like a born-again fool flapping my arms, trying to get that fly to go outside. Lord!” she exclaimed, chuckling.
“Was that before or after Katie walked out on me?” Dragon asked, her stopped up nose taking all the bite out of her question.
“I don’t remember,” Phyllis said, her voice tinged with sincerity. She shrugged. “She might’ve been gone or she might’ve been ‘in love’ and shacking up with some bum.”
The rhythmic ping stopped and Dragon looked at the saucepan, a bit surprised to see that her tears had coated the bottom and now splashed soundlessly in the pool they’d formed.
“Why are you even here?” Dragon said tiredly.
“Where else would I be?”
“Do you seriously want me to answer that?”
“Okay, fine. How about I love you? How do you answer that?”
“Uh, I don’t give a shit? Too little too late? Fuck you? Take your pick,” Dragon muttered, doing nothing to extricate herself from her grandmother’s comfort.
Phyllis sighed as if she alone carried the burdens of the hopeless and said, “I love you anyway. How’s that for growth?” She laid a smacking kiss on Dragon’s nape and fitted herself even more closely to Dragon’s curled form.
“Impressive actually.” Dragon watched the piskies empty a thimble-sized bucket of herbs into her pot of tears. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Twenty years ago I would’ve agreed with you, but living in Branch’s household has taught me a few things.”
“Like what?” Dragon couldn’t help the vulnerability that laced the question.
“Well, quiet, for one thing. Never underestimate the value of being still. People forget you exist, walk by you to get to the flickering noisemaker at the end of the hall. Also, agreement, which is more complicated than you might think. ‘Yes’ is hardly a conclusive statement,” she said. “Neither is ‘no’. Both answers are simply a place to start. Remember that,” she said, squeezing Dragon for emphasis.
Dragon closed her eyes, resignation draining what little energy she had left. The last few weeks had sensitized her to the weird shit swirling around her and Fel, making all casually given advice read like precise instructions on how to stay unharmed and alive. After each episode of violence or implied violence, Dragon had prayed that this time was the last—that this perfect example of her inability to be badass was the very last time she’d been expected to audition for the gig. Then someone would say something like “remember consent is negotiable” and engines would be started and a gun barrel pointed to the sky, the squeeze of a calloused finger standing between it and the beginning of barely controlled chaos.
“Why would I need to remember that?” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“I didn’t show up at Jasper’s to throw a monkey wrench into your picket-fence dreams.”
“That a fact?” Dragon said dully, wishing she were anywhere but here.
Phyllis squeezed her ribs so hard Dragon saw stars.
“All right, Phyl, Jesus.” Dragon pulled at the arm banding her waist. “I guess extended youth wasn’t the only thing you stayed on your knees for. Way to hold out for the extra-strength retirement option.”
“This is serious, Wilhelmina.”
“Fine.”
“We don’t have a lot of time. Branch let me go, but do you really think that’s the end of the Sun’s involvement in your love life?”
“No,” Dragon said, drawing a huge breath as Phyllis’s arm eased. “I’m not that lucky.”
“You’re unluckier than you know, hon.”
“Tell me.”
“Popular rumor says Mahb offered your boy’s ma a chance at the royal house. All Barita had to do was fuck her husband, a man she hadn’t seen since their own wedding twenty thousand years ago.” Phyllis held an index finger out to one of the piskies who gripped it and flicked a tiny tongue against it curiously.
“Really?”
“Close enough. Anyway, money and promises changed hands and Barita trotted off to seduce her husband, who had to be pointed out to her.” Phyllis chuckled. “Her own husband. You believe that?
“When Flannacán was born, Mahb took him while Barita labored to birth the placenta. Groomed him for what the whole of the Sun could only guess.”
Echoes of Frankie’s story at Molasses Blood, Dragon thought, but played it cool with her grandmother. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that you know what Mahb was really about.”
“She hollowed him out is what she did. All the tiny spaces between muscle and bone and the bigger ones his guts marinated in. Every available inch, even if it was only as big as a molecule, she stretched and widened like Fel was a pair of tight-fitting shoes.”
“Why?”
“Had something to hide.”
“Could you just tell me the rest without all the dramatic bullshit?”
“You’ve gotten bitchy in your old age, Wilhelmina. If I were you I’d get me a colonic or something.”
Dragon smiled at that. “Okay. What did she have to hide?”
“Well, at the time nothing, but Mahb has her a reputation of being prepared. That heifer is a plan B type a girl if there ever was one. Also she’s Queen of the Sun.”
At Dragon’s shrug she clarified.
“Hello! Sun, illumination, sight.”
“Oh, I get you! She figured she’d get her luggage ready on the off chance she’d eventual
ly find something to put in it.”
Phyllis patted Dragon’s stomach, making her feel like a puppy who sat when she was told to. “Flash forward two thousand or so years to K'Davrah.”
“It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?”
“Always, baby girl. And don’t you forget it.”
“What exactly are you saying?”
She moved her lips closer to Dragon’s ear, causing the avidly watching piskies to race for a rope ladder made of onion grass.
Whispering, she elaborated, “I’m saying that every miscellus who lost their magic during the war eventually ended up in Elias Military Hospital and Rehabilitation Center, operated by agents of the Sun. I’m saying that Mahb figured out a way to drain miscellus of their power and mandated the training of ‘necessary’ medical techniques so that her people could unknowingly do the same. Hell, she attended most of the wounded herself. Nurse ‘Mary’ was a big hit with the fifty-first.
“What I’m saying is that Mahb stole power from cripples, POWs and every soldier under the pretext of giving them a routine booster shot to deflect minor charms and spells. What I’m saying is that she constructed and shaped the events that led to war so that she could pull off the biggest heist history has ever known.”
Dragon pulled away from her grandmother’s arms and turned to face Phyllis.
“Which she put in my boyfriend?”
“Sewed it into him like he was a fertilized bed of soil, which let’s face it, was exactly what she molded him to be.”
“Jesus wept.”
“You don’t even know the half. You can imagine the stink Fel caused by siding with Doque and enlisting in CRA. Mahb was fit to be tied. Heated up the Bright Court until folk literally melted.
“So, Fel’s going through some sort of rebellious phase and the Sun Court is burning. It’s enough for any girl to make herself a cocktail and swallow her entire medicine cabinet. Queen or no, Mahb ain't no different. Turns out, she forgot or didn’t realize that power in its purest form is fluid, morphing from metaphysical to gas, solid or liquid and back again until it’s totally unrecognizable from its former self.”
“So?”
“So,” Phyllis tugged on Dragon’s ear to help focus her. “The power she put in Fel grew—poked out of him like stinkweed, and one of Doque’s operatives saw it while administering CRA’s version of a spell-deflection vaccination. He ran squealing to Doque and before you knew it, Fel was diagnosed with some kind of resistant infection.” Phyllis’s curling fingers surrounded the words with quotes. “He had to stop at every CRA infirmary on three continents for treatment,” she finished with a sneer.
“What was that? The second biggest heist in history?”
Phyllis grabbed Dragon’s chin, her green eyes scowling into Dragon’s. “Mahb was onto him almost from the start. Had to get rid of it quick or risk losing his advantage. He saw you and Katie in that clinic and used Mahb’s enlarging techniques to hide it in you, figuring you would grow and expand as the power did.” She released Dragon’s chin after she delivered that grenade and took a deep breath as if to throw another.
“I lied when I told you I didn’t have a sample of your hair to give Branch.”
Dragon nodded. “No surprise there.”
“He presented it to Mahb, who presented him with property and unrestricted access to Court when the DNA test came back positive.”
“Positive,” Dragon repeated, feeling suddenly lightheaded.
“That thing you do, see folks’ potential…that’s not really you.”
Swallowing to keep from retching, Dragon said, “I’ve been using stolen power to find my boyfriends.” Living power, she corrected to herself, thinking of the compulsion that urged her toward one lowlife or another, and more recently, the fervent whispers that encouraged her to rend flesh and spill blood.
“It’s been growing inside me. That’s why I feel like I’m being sliced open when I try to use my ability.”
“Listen to me,” Phyllis said. “In Flannacán’s body the power grew like a plant. All it needed to behave was a little pruning. Relatively painless for a being to whom magic is inherent. In you, the power’s more like eggs and the hatchlings like larvae who feed on their host.”
“Oh my God!” Dragon stood, gave in to her roiling stomach and vomited on a patch of hosta.
“You’re human. You weren’t built to handle this much magic.”
Wiping her mouth and tearing eyes with the hem of Saras’s skirt, Dragon tried not to claw at her suddenly itchy skin.
“You have to stop using your ability, hon.”
“Ya think?” Dragon said then started to laugh hysterically. “I’ll just bet that the only way to get it out of me is painful.”
Phyllis lowered her eyes and nodded.
“Bloody?”
“Probably.”
“Terminal?” At Phyllis’s silence Dragon continued. “Is this why I need him so much?” she said her voice a hoarse whisper. “This thing between us happened so friggin’ fast. God.” She ran a shaking hand over her hair. “Two days hadn’t passed before I promised him everything I had. Right in this stupid garden.”
“Sounds romantic,” Phyllis said, dipping a corner of Dragon’s skirt in an ice bucket fountain and cleaning her face.
“That’s why I love him, right? Because I was engineered to like you said?”
“Maybe.” Phyllis squinted at Dragon. “Doque stole as much as he could from Mahb, leaving only dregs in Fel,” she admitted. “Still, I suppose like would call to like. Who can say for sure?”
Dragon slapped her grandmother’s hands away as they continued to wipe her face. “You did.” She leveled a scowl at Phyllis that promised a serious beating. “In that cryptic note you left for me at Saras’s.”
“Mahb was only sure Doque put her stash in a human, not which one. She wasn’t even sure Doque had the know-how to actually get it out of Fel in the first place. She was banking on the magic still being housed in your boy and simply wanted to make sure his new pet’s connection to him was nothing of consequence. I was supposed to use you to draw him out, which I hoped would take the heat off of you. But then I remembered the clinic and the way you’d changed after one visit.”
“Unfuckingbelievable!” Dragon threw up her hands and started pacing.
“You don’t know what it’s like in the Sun,” she said her eyes begging Dragon for understanding. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I only planned to use your hair as a last resort, but then Branch… I had no idea I’d been with him long enough for him to use me as a receiver. Thought I had another ten years at least until that happened. I was going to tell you the whole story that day at your friend’s house, but my stomach started to cramp and my mouth went drier than dust and just like that I could feel him plug into me like I was an outlet for his headphones.”
“So you threw me under the bus. Again.” Dragon flopped onto a folding chair covered in clover. “I seriously can’t take much more of this crap.”
“I can do more for you on the outside than I can burning to a goddamn crisp in the Light.”
“You sicced the most powerful creature in the world after me so you could help me?”
Phyllis hauled her out of the verdant chair and shoved a wad of money in Dragon’s cleavage. “Get your man and run.”
“You laced this with some kind of locater charm,” Dragon said, as if Phyllis’s betrayal was a foregone conclusion. With a grimace, she pulled bills from her bosom like a magician working his last trick. “Fel is toast if I go anywhere near him. I won’t put him through that, especially since it would all be for nothing.”
“Jesus Christ, girl! So, the magic in you called to the leftover magic in him. So what? Sounds like true goddamn love to me.” Phyllis retrieved her purse from where she’d dropped it, pulled out another folded handful of vens and handed them to Dragon.
Dragon stared distrustfully at the bills. “I’ll manage, thanks anyway.”
“You have heaven
at your fingertips! Don’t be stupid, take the money!” Phyllis said, raking her fingers through her strawberry hair.
“From you? I do not believe you have my back,” Dragon enunciated slowly and clearly. “Jesus, I hate repeating myself. Do you know how tired I am of having this conversation with you?”
Phyllis’s mouth thinned, her eyes glossy with remorse, but said nothing.
“Now it’s your turn to say something like—oh, I don’t know—this time things will be different. Then I say fuck you and round and round we go. Why don’t you surprise me and explain exactly how I’m supposed to believe you.”
“That’ll take time we don’t have, so I’ll give you the easy answer now and save the rest for another time.” Reaching into her purse, she pulled out yet another roll of bills and held it out to her granddaughter. “Take the money, Dragon,” she said. “Or maybe you’d rather wait for your Da to help you?”
Tears quickly filled Dragon’s eyes at the thought of all she’d lost and she turned away from Phyllis.
Circling around her until they faced each other, Phyllis plucked the money out of her granddaughter’s hands, added it to the other wads and wrapped Dragon’s hands around the whole bundle. “It’s clean.”
“Vicious bitch,” Dragon whispered.
Nodding, Phyllis wiped Dragon’s face and kissed both of her cheeks. She slowly spun Dragon around and pushed her towards the east entrance of the garden. “Get moving.”
Dragon took two halting steps then stopped, the money weighting her hands like both a gift and an obligation.
“Don’t look back, girl.”
Ignoring her, Dragon glanced over her shoulder. A warm wind blew Phyllis’s hair away from her face and a tumbleweed of flowering dogwood rolled past her as if it had places to be. Her red dress hugged every curve and ended abruptly at mid-thigh as if it had intended to go on, but had been unexpectedly torn away. Beautiful legs, Dragon was surprised to note, which apart from the color, were exactly like hers, and bare feet—this was how she would remember her grandmother: passionate, reckless, impulsive, generous and cruel.
“Granmommy,” she said, smiling at Phyllis before hauling the strap of her duffel over her shoulder and jogging out of Trash Bin.