Fae

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  “I could paint that,” she whispered. Fury uncoiled in her gut. She used to be able to paint scenes like that.

  Vivian wanted to paint again. She wanted steadiness to return to her fingers. Instead of that constant emptiness within, she yearned for the overflow of her soul onto canvas or paper. Hot rage compounded her headache.

  Six months ago, she was broken. Tonight she could confront Andrew. She was alive, not him. He had no power over her, not now. She refused to be herded to the scene of her attack. No, she’d go there willingly and face the bastard down.

  She turned south again, her rear wheels peeling on gravel as she roared back onto the road.

  Vivian took a side street darkened by tall trees. At a right turn, the map sizzled on her chest, and she knew to turn left instead. She wound her way deeper into the hills until she reached a broken wooden fence all too familiar to her nightmares. In the field beyond stood the tree.

  She wanted to hate it, but instead, she stared in awe.

  The gnarled branches of the oak scraped the sky. The nearest trees cowered as saplings in comparison. Vivian absorbed the eloquence of the tree’s composition. Like a bonsai tree on massive scale, it looked utterly natural yet unreal in its asymmetrically balanced perfection—Wabi-sabi, as her college Arts Aesthetics professor would have said.

  She hadn’t been able to take in all of that before. She had been talking to Andrew, her shoulders braced, her hands shoved in her pockets. By the time they were within the tree’s shadow, he had grabbed her arm, and the images of the tree became a mixture of utter clarity and terrified blurs.

  Vivian stepped over the broken fence and approached the tree along an intermittent muddy path. She remembered the mud. She had crawled back to the car, to her purse and phone, even as her skin zinged in continued electric agony.

  Andrew had landed some twenty feet from the big oak. She looked for him there now, her arms clutched close, her throat dry with fear. Acorns and dry leaves crunched beneath her feet and she shivered within the deep shade of the tree’s canopy. No stereotypical ghost stood in wait. She frowned. Things glittered in the grass, as though a bottle had been broken and scattered.

  “Don’t you recognize yourself?” asked a woman’s voice, creaking with age.

  Vivian whirled on her heel, gasping as the scars across her torso flickered with cold. Not pain, just—strangeness.

  The trunk of the large tree stood five feet wide, and from it leaned the body of woman. The branches of her arms flexed and bowed in greeting. Vine hair trailed over her shoulders to the adolescent curves of her chest and down to where her waist melded with the tree itself.

  Vivian stared. “What… what are you?”

  “What are you?” The woman cocked her head to one side.

  “I’m… I’m Vivian. A woman. Human.”

  “You are more and you are less,” the tree said, her ebony eyes narrowing. “I expected more growth. You’re little more than a stump.”

  “What? A stump?” Vivian licked her dry lips and looked around. “I thought… I expected a ghost here.”

  “A ghost?” The tree sounded incredulous. “You wear part of me within your flesh, its magic lighting your path here on this night of power, and you expect a ghost?” The bark-skinned woman shook her head in clear disgust.

  Vivian pressed her hand against her shirt, her mind rapidly trying to take in everything. This being in the tree was something straight out of a fairy tale or Greek myth.

  “You’re a dryad,” Vivian whispered. “Why—why do I see you? I didn’t when I was here… before.”

  “You see me because of what you carry. I have stood here for three hundred circuits of the sun. I have hosted picnics upon my roots, blanketed lovers with my leaves, and shared in such joy. And then,” the dryad said, her eyes blazing like coals, “one fool human sought to use my trunk, my roots, to shatter you. I will not be used in such a way.”

  “Andrew,” Vivian whispered.

  “I thought to spare you, but the damage was done. You beings are so brief and fragile. Part of your soul fragmented like an autumn leaf.” The dryad nodded towards the sparkles in the grass. “The pieces are over there, visible on this night and Beltane.”

  Vivian closed her eyes. She remembered her hands clawing into the roots. Andrew’s heavy weight, heavy breaths, heavy presence crushing her. “Someone help me! Help!” she had cried.

  Then the lightning came.

  “It was you,” Vivian said. “You brought the lightning.”

  The dryad nodded, her leafy hair swaying in the breeze. “It is an easy thing, at my height, to stretch towards the sky.”

  Heat uncoiled in Vivian’s chest, but not the heat of the burns or the map. “Do you realize what it did to me?” she screamed. “Do you know how much it hurt, how it still hurts? And my hands.” She thrust them out towards the tree. “I can’t… do anything.” Draw, paint, live.

  The dryad blinked, unfazed. “I have been struck by lightning dozens of times. I hold no fear of it.”

  “Well, you’re a tree!”

  “And you are a human.”

  Vivian’s shoulders shook as she breathed rapidly. “I haven’t been the same since that night.”

  “You expect to stay the same? This day, my roots have sunken deeper into the ground. I’ve shed a hundred leaves.” Vivian turned away from the tree and swallowed another scream. Her throat burned with the effort. She didn’t want to stare at this pompous being, this thing that caused so much pain even as it meant to save her.

  She stooped to pick up a piece of her soul. It was the size of a fingernail, iridescent, weighing nothing against her palm. Looking around, she spied a dozen more shards.

  She needed to be whole again. She pressed the piece to her lips and swallowed.

  Vivian walked back and forth to find and swallow every shard. Heat curdled in her chest again, and she breathed through the pain. She faced the dryad. The heat instantly subsided.

  The woman in the tree studied her with an impatient frown.

  “Enough of that! Come closer. The night grows older, and your ilk isn’t meant to carry my magic. Let’s do this and be done.”

  Vivian stopped, staring down at her body. Once upon a time, she would have been delighted to carry such magic. A blue glow lit her shirt.

  “Don’t hesitate or I will do this until you come close.” The woman in the tree flicked her spindly fingers. Pain shivered down Vivian’s torso. “I’m content with my roots planted here. I have no desire to graft with a human.”

  The pain was all the motivation Vivian needed. She took a few steps forward and the dryad grasped her with a wooden hand.

  Pinpricks of cold intensified across Vivian’s breasts and ribs. The world glowed vermillion and black as agony rippled across her body, as though the lightning struck again. Vivian blinked and saw tree branches directly above, though she had no memory of falling or closing her eyes. Her hand clutched her shirt and found holes—dozens, hundreds. The map had been ripped from her skin. She held a hand up to the moonlight and didn’t see any blood.

  Vivian pressed a fist to her stomach, which had abruptly turned queasy. “That’s not—that’s not all, the bigger splinters were pulled out at the hospital—”

  “I lose branches to the wind and it is no loss, but my essence isn’t meant to be melded with yours.” The voice was fainter. Even its appearance had withdrawn, more fused with the tree.

  Vivian sat upright. She didn’t feel different, or did she? She lifted her shirt. In the scarce light she could barely see the Lichtenberg figures. Maybe they would heal now. Maybe…

  Her stomach burbled, and she had just enough time to face the ground before she became ill. Shards of her soul sparkled across the dirt. They were as bright as ever, unaffected by the absence of the dryad’s magic.

  Above her, the dryad laughed like a wind whistling far away. Her branches clattered. “As if ingesting your soul will restore it. It’s a soul, not rainwater.” The words were scar
cely audible.

  Vivian picked up a single fleck of her soul. She turned it between her fingertips. The shard glowed in her hand, its edges jagged yet not sharp. None of the pieces were alike. It was an impossible puzzle.

  They could never go back inside. They were never meant to.

  An odd sense of peace fell over her.

  Vivian sat, gazing up at the tree. She could barely see the dryad at all now, those dark eyes as whorls. The burn scar on the trunk began at Vivian’s eye level and extended to the roots. That was where the lightning channeled through, struck her, then passed on through Andrew. Her fingers hovered over the scorched wood.

  The tree had taken the blast and survived, even thrived. It stood, magnificent and old, braving the wind and winters and whatever else came this way. The burns and lost branches did not take away from the dryad’s perfect imperfection. Wabi-sabi.

  Vivian scooped up the fragments of her soul and stood.

  Her body was ugly. Scarred. But she was alive.

  In a violent motion, she flung the shards back into the grass. The fragments sparkled like a hundred prisms as they arced through the air and bounced into the carpet of green. They resembled strange glass flowers with rainbow petals, glowing and iridescent.

  She would paint them someday.

  If her fingers could never hold a brush, she would use finger-paints. Somehow, someway, she would capture this scene again. The tree would loom in the background, holding up the moon and a dome of stars with its ancient strength. Vivian was just as strong, just as resilient.

  “I’ll come back someday,” she said to the tree. The lower branches bowed in acknowledgment.

  Vivian did not need a map to find her way.

  ~*~

  Beth Cato’s debut steampunk novel THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER will be released by HarperCollins Voyager in September 2014. She’s originally from Hanford, California, but now resides in Arizona with her husband and son. Her short fiction, poetry, and tasty cookie recipes can be found at http://www.bethcato.com.

  ~*~

  Possession

  Rhonda Eikamp

  Corporal Francis McFarlane was about to drown, and the woman in his pocket couldn’t save him.

  Black water had cascaded in when the submersible’s tip ruptured, the hand-cranked propeller not quick enough to pull them back from the explosive charge they’d rammed into the Union ship, the sea like a steely-cold monster poking its snout in through the twisted hole, and now all eight men were flailing away at the crank up around up around, headed for the shallows of the Chesapeake Bay, but they would never make it. The water was up to McFarlane’s waist. Private Dunsey was screaming beside him. On every face McFarlane saw the knowledge—clear by the light of the single candle clamped to the ceiling—that they would be dead in minutes, clams at the bottom of the bay.

  Moments were tripping in his head like lightning bursts: the old farm, sunlight. Cherish, home in Suffolk with the baby, her eyes red from crying when he left for war. There lay a sadness, worse than the panic closing his throat. They would be alone. His life for the Confederacy, yes, but god help him, his wife and child would be alone.

  McFarlane felt the flutter in his breast pocket and fumbled open the button. He knew the others believed he carried a live mouse there, a lucky charm, and he’d let them think that. No use for secrets now. The tiny winged woman clambered onto his palm. Perfect and perfectly nude, her skin a white gold glowing brighter than the candle. Eyes too large for the thumbnail bit of smooth beast face, lids sweeping back and up to her temples, etching the same parabola as the impossible violet wings rising from her shoulder blades, huge as elephant-ear leaves as they unfolded, colors of bruises and winter sky. The men had stopped cranking, the water to their chests. The nearest stared, death-hallucinating, McFarlane knew they assumed, seeing an angel come to lead them home.

  He brought her close, basking in the glow. Water washed at his chin. So cold. She stroked his nose with hands like gnats, the subtlest of touches, then tried to hug his cheeks, though her arms barely reached past his nostrils, scratching at him then, animal fury fighting to possess its master, wolf-gone-dog gone wolf again.

  “Mine,” she hissed and it was the hiss of wind in forests, ancient bodies buried in humus and rising again.

  “You can’t save me this time, flower,” he told her.

  Above them the candle, sole beacon of light and oxygen, guttered out.

  ~*~

  It was the hottest day the county could recall since 1840 and Frank McFarlane had gotten free of his pa for the afternoon. Thirteen and learning the trade from the rich clayey ground up, expected to take over the farm some day, but the peanuts would do without him for a few hours. The shagbarks behind the slave quarters had drawn him in with their coolness, a green velvet cloak, until he was deeper in the woods than he had ever been before, ready to turn back as the ferns became too thick, when he spied an iron spike that had been driven into one of the trees at shoulder height. An odd sight, with an even odder patch of moss growing around the spike in a butterfly shape, lavender hues that fluctuated with scarlet and which he found hard to look at. Without thinking, Frank grasped the spike and worked it from the bark, and as it came the moss thickened—congealed, he would have said, churned like purple butter out of flat milky nothing—until the spike lay in his hand and a miniature woman hung before him, naked, with her back to the tree-trunk, her outspread wings of gauzy skin caught on the rough bark.

  Frank reckoned he was dreaming. He’d had some of those dreams already, but the women had been his size and his inexperienced imagination had been unequal to the detail spread before him now. She opened eyes that seemed to take up half her face, black pupils swirling in night irises, and a cosmos of sparks lit up in their recesses at the sight of him. As Frank watched with his mouth hanging open, she rocked back and forth until her wings were free, half tumbling, half fluttering to the ground, and when he picked her up and held her on his palm, his hand shaking, she looked him up and down.

  “He,” she hissed, almost startling him into dropping her.

  A strapping boy, his ma called him. Tall for his age. “I’m male, if that’s your meaning.”

  She fluttered to his shoulder then, caressed his ear and cheek, and a shudder galloped through him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. A sense of a thunderstorm approaching. I’m awake, he thought. No. I’m waking up.

  She leaned forward to look at him. “Mine,” she pronounced.

  Mine, Frank’s thoughts echoed and the shudder throbbed through him again.

  He took her home with him. She became his pocket secret, crawling back and forth between the pinewood box he found for her and his coat whenever no one was looking. All winter and spring, while she nuzzled his fingertips unseen by others, he felt a lethargy that was at the same time a joy, a sense that he had at last come to be weighted down by deep adult truths he’d never hoped to understand. Frank’s parents looked at him strangely. Great-grandma Louisa, who left her room at the back of the plantation house only for dinner, would watch him across the table with loving troubled eyes. A year passed, two. His flower, he named his moss woman in his thoughts, telling her secrets she only ever answered in monosyllables, her replies never seeming to match his ramblings, as though she had no real idea what he said.

  She protected him.

  From work: a voice in Frank’s head telling him how to get out of the hardest tasks, his father snapping at him more often, calling him lazy. From the elements: storms, the fire in the barn one winter—some force like iron chains on his legs that kept him from running in to save the horses, though he knew he could have made it.

  Teaching him to favor himself.

  In the summer of his sixteenth year he was hunting squirrels in the woods west of home when an angry black bear rose before him out of nowhere. Furred death, towering above him on its hind legs. He tried to shoot and his rifle jammed. Of a sudden he saw the blur of violet streak from his pocket to land on the back of the
bear’s neck. The moss-woman burrowed her face in the fur and the roaring stopped. The bear dropped onto all fours, turned and ambled away. When she flew back to him, he saw her teeth were red with blood. It was the first time he understood what she could do, his little goddess bossing nature around, and wondered whether he should be frightened.

  He was nature too.

  When Frank was eighteen his great-grandma Louisa died. She called him to her bedside once the doctor said her heart wouldn’t see another day and she waited until they were alone.

  “You were always a good boy, Francis,” she mumbled. He hadn’t expected that kind of platitude. They hadn’t spoken much in his flower years, but he and his granam had been close once, his child spirit drawn to a like vision in her that saw beyond the farm and the peanuts. She reached out a hand and stroked his pocket, and he understood. Reluctantly he undid the loop.

  “How?” Louisa whispered as his flower clambered down his sleeve to gawk at the old woman’s wrinkles. Frank told her about the tree behind the slave quarters and the iron spike.

  “The Negroes know,” she muttered. “This is an old, forgotten thing. Older than me even.” She tried to chuckle and had a coughing fit. “They take you, you know. Used to say they’d take you into a mountain for a hundred years.” Urgency crept into her face. “But that’s not it, Francis. They take you over on the inside. Something in you goes to sleep. This little thing, its morals aren’t ours. It’ll protect you from danger, but it’ll want and want and you’ll become beholden to it. If you let yourself start to think like it does, you won’t be human anymore.” The long speech tired her and she lay back. The moss-woman crawled onto his granam’s face, investigating her lips, and Frank removed her and put her back in his pocket.

  “Promise me you’ll stay yourself,” came the dying woman’s weak whisper.

  He wasn’t sure he understood what she meant. “I promise,” he said.