The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Paris, France!”

  “That’s a lie. You’re a liar.”

  “You got me, Badgirl. You’re too good for the likes of me. The truth is, I’m from the continent of Atlantis. My parents had a squat on the banks of the river Styx.”

  “Is that in the Bronx?”

  “Yeah, Badgirl. That’s just where it is. You’re smarter than a sack of owls, you are.”

  “It’s ’cause of my dress,” I said proudly.

  A little while after that, the Deadman started walking me home from school too. He slicked up his hair fancy and told my teacher he was my uncle. Had a signed slip from Daddy and everything. But we never made it all the way home. He’d stand me on a corner and give me a box that had pills inside it, so bright they looked like Skittles. And he said:

  “You’re so good, Badgirl. Nobody’ll mess with you on account of how good you are. You’re just as clean and bright as New Year’s Day.”

  “I wanna go home.”

  “Naw, you can’t yet. This here is medicine. Lots of people need medicine. You know how you hate it when you get sick. You don’t want people to get sick when you could make them better, do you? Just stand here and keep the box in your backpack, and when sick people come asking, take their money and give them a couple of whatever color they ask for. If you do a good job, I’ll buy you a new dress.”

  I sniffled. It was fall and the damp came with fall. I had a wet leaf stuck to my shoe. “I don’t want a new dress,” I whispered.

  “Well, a new doll, then. God knows a girl needs more than that ratty headless thing you got. I’ll come back for you and we’ll get back before your Daddy finishes his work.”

  I didn’t have mittens so my hands got tingly and cold and then I couldn’t feel them anymore. I waited on the corner and all kinds of strangers came up talking to me like we were friends and I did what the Deadman said I had to. My fingers felt like they were made out of silver so I pretended that was the truth, that I had beautiful silver hands with pictures scratched onto them like the fancy dishes on TV. And every time I had to touch somebody strange to me so I could give over their medicine, I pretended my beautiful silver hands turned them into game-show contestants with perfect teeth and fluffy hair and name tags the color of luck.

  At Christmastime the Deadman brought over a tree with one red ball on it and a strand of lights with only three bulbs working. He had on red velvet elf shoes like the kind Santa’s helpers wear at the mall, only his were old and dark and the bells didn’t make any sound. He also brought a bottle of brandy and some cheeseburgers and a cake from the grocery store with HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEXIS written on it in hot pink frosting. I could read it by myself by then, even though I’d had to stop wearing my smart dress because it got holes in it and all the buttons fell off. The Deadman set it all out like he was Santa but he was not Santa, and I bet Santa never came to his house when he was little, if the Deadman ever had been little. He never did bring me a new doll or a new dress. Daddy put on that show where they play part of a song and you have to guess what it’s called.

  Daddy and the Deadman had gotten so used to having me around they didn’t bother hiding anything anymore.

  “ ‘Bennie and the Jets,’ ” the Deadman said. It took the blonde lady on TV forever to get it. She squealed when she did and jumped up and down. Her earrings glittered in the stage lights like fire.

  They ate some cake. It was red velvet on the inside, but I didn’t feel right eating Alexis’s birthday cake. I ate half a cheeseburger but it was cold and the ketchup tasted like glue. The Deadman gave Daddy his Christmas present. Daddy didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say very much anymore. He just took the little small lump wrapped in red tissue paper from the Deadman and shook some out into a spoon. It did look like sugar after all. He flicked a lighter under the spoon and held it there until the sugar got all melted and brown and gluggy. It was sort of oily on top too, like spilled gas.

  Like a mudpuddle.

  Then the Deadman handed him a needle, like the kind at the doctor’s office when you have to get your shots because otherwise you’ll get sick. I pulled the head off my princess and stuck it on the body with the pink ball gown. Daddy tied one of my hair ribbons around his arm and the Deadman stuck the needle in the mudpuddle first, and into Daddy second. Then he did it all over again on himself. Daddy smiled and his face got round and happy. It got to be his own face again. Daddy has a good face. He patted his lap for me to come sit with him and I did and it was Christmas for a minute.

  “ ‘How Deep Is Your Love,’ ” the Deadman said. Another blonde lady frowned on the TV. She couldn’t think of the song. Poor lady. I didn’t know that song either. But I knew the next one because it was Michael Jackson and I knew all his songs.

  “ ‘Billie Jean,’ ” I whispered. Daddy was asleep.

  “C’mere, Badgirl,” said the Deadman.

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Why you afraid of me?”

  “I’m not afraid. Little black cats aren’t afraid of anything.”

  “Come on, Badgirl. I’m not gonna hurt you. I got you a present. Make you grow up quick and sharp.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  The Deadman lit himself a cigarette. He had the same don’t-get-sick shot Daddy had, so how come he didn’t just go to sleep and leave me alone? I’d have cleaned up the dishes and made sure the TV got turned off. I did it all the time.

  “Your dad promised me whatever was in the armoire. You were in there. So you have to do what I say. I own you. I’ve been nice about it, because you’re such a little thing, but it’s hard for a man like me to keep being nice.” The Deadman started doing his trick with the mudpuddle and the spoon again. “I gotta carry that nice all day, and Badgirl, I tell you what, it is heavy. I wanna put it down. My shoulders are aching. So you better come when I call or else I’m liable to just drop my nice right on the ground and break it into a hundred pieces.”

  “Don’t be rude, Badgirl,” Daddy murmured in his sleep. I looked up at his scruffy chin and something popped and spat inside me like grease and it made a stain on my insides that spelled out I hate my Daddy and I felt ashamed. He wasn’t even awake. He didn’t know anything. But I still hated him because little black cats don’t know how to forgive anybody.

  I think it’s against the law for a person to own another person, but maybe he did own me because in a flash minute I was sitting down next to the Deadman even though I didn’t want to be. But not on his lap. On TV, a man with red hair was listening to the first few notes of a song I almost knew but couldn’t quite remember. The Deadman reached for my arm and Daddy woke up then, coughing like his breath got stolen.

  “What the fuck, man! Don’t do that,” Daddy said. “She’s my kid.”

  “Lighten up, Muddy! It’s just a little Christmas fun. She’s such a sour little thing. Always scowling at us like she’s our mother. You gotta nip that in the bud when they’re young. A lady should always be smiling.” The Deadman looked my Daddy in the eye. “You ever hear the one about the cat who broke his promise?” And he stuck the needle in my arm.

  After that I didn’t have hands anymore.

  I felt like I was all filled up with yellow, the yellow that looks like all the lights turned on at once. I could hardly see with all that yellow swimming around in me. The TV changed to another show, the one where the beautiful lady in a glittery dress turns giant glowing letters around and everyone tries to guess the sentence. She was wearing my smart dress with the butterflies on it. She reached up and turned over a B, but I don’t like B because B is for Badgirl, so I reached up to turn it back around and that’s when I knew I didn’t have hands anymore.

  My arms just ended all smooth and neat, no thumbs, no pinkie, no ring finger, like the plastic bottoms on the ball-gown bodies. The stumps dripped yellow and blue butterflies onto the carpet. They flapped their wings there, grazing the rug with their antennae to see if it was flowers. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t anything. I loo
ked around but I couldn’t see my hands lying anywhere, not even under the sofa. I couldn’t feel anything when I touched the letter B on TV with my stump, or the beautiful lady’s hair, or the wall of the living room. When I gave up and dropped my arm back down I must have knocked over a bottle or something because there was glass everywhere, but I didn’t feel that, either. The Deadman grabbed me to keep me from falling in the mess but I couldn’t make my fingers close around anything, not his sleeve or the corner of the table or anything. My fingers wouldn’t listen. They weren’t fingers anymore.

  I had so much yellow in me it was coming out, coming out all over, washing over everything and making it clean like the dancing lemons on the shaker of powdered soap. I twisted out of the Deadman’s grip and crawled away from him back into Daddy’s lap.

  “Daddy, my hands are gone. Fix it, please? I don’t know how to be a girl without hands. All girls have hands. No one will play with me at school.”

  But Daddy was asleep in his mudpuddle world again and when I tried to pat his face to wake him up I just clobbered him because stumps are so heavy, so much heavier than fingers. But he didn’t wake up. Someone on TV in Giant Letter World spun a big wheel and it came up gold. The beautiful lady in my smart dress clapped her hands. See? All girls have hands. Except me. Another blue butterfly flew out of my stump and landed on the window. It was night outside. The butterfly glowed so blue it turned into the moon.

  The Deadman pulled a deck of cards out of his back pocket and started dealing himself a hand of solitaire at our kitchen table. He was real good at shuffling. I took my eyes back from the butterfly moon and put them on the Deadman. He put his cigarette in his mouth and dragged on it good and ragged.

  He was shuffling cards with my hands.

  I knew my own hands and those were it. My pinkie still had green fingernail polish on it from my friend’s mom’s house and a scratch where I fell playing hopscotch last week. My wrist had my lucky yarn bracelet on it. He’d popped them off me like a princess’s head and stuck them on his body. My hands should have been way too small for the Deadman to wear but somehow they weren’t, either he got little to match them or they got big to match him. I decided he got little, because my hands should be loyal to me and not him. My hand put down an ace of hearts and waved at me. Then words started coming out of me like blue butterflies and I couldn’t stop them and they came out without permission, without me even thinking them before they turned into words.

  “Are you a person?”

  The Deadman chewed on one of my fingernails, which he had no right to do.

  “Used to be.”

  “In Paris, France? With the river?”

  The Deadman snorted. “Yeah.”

  “How do you stop being a person?”

  “Lots of ways. It’s far harder to keep on being a person than to stop. I do think about starting up again sometimes, though. I do think about that. But once you been to that river, it fills you up forever. You need something real good to turn your heart back to red.”

  “Why do you keep coming back here? Do you even like my Daddy? Are you really his friend?”

  “I think he’s a worthless piece of shit, Badgirl. But he has cable. And he has you.”

  The blue butterfly moon got bigger and bigger in the window. It was gonna take up our whole apartment. “Did he know I was in the . . . the . . . arrr mwah?”

  The Deadman sighed. He put down a quick two-three-four on his ace. “It wouldn’t have gone different if he did or didn’t, kid. The thing about having the whole world in your back pocket is that every day is nothing but wall-to-wall bargains. I don’t have to dicker. They keep upping the price. Everyone wants the world. I just want everyone.”

  “I want my hands back.”

  The beautiful lady turned around six or seven letters quick, one after the other. She was still wearing my smart dress, which I guess is why she always knows the answer to the puzzle. But now my dress had gotten long like a wedding dress. It glittered all over. The green bow and green buttons were all emeralds falling down her back and all over the stage. Her chest looked like the sun and she had stars all up and down her arms and the blue butterfly moon was rising in the studio, too, right behind her head like a crown. Everyone had stolen my things. I wanted her to come out of the TV and save me and turn me around like the letter B. But she wasn’t going to. She had my dress. She had what she wanted.

  I’m a little black cat, I thought. Little black cats run away. Little black cats don’t need hands. The blue butterfly moon had gotten so big it bulged up against my tree house and the front door at the same time. Little black cats can climb up on the moon and ride it far, far away. To Paris, France, and the Bronx and the continent of Atlantis.

  The Deadman glanced at the game show. For once, he didn’t solve it before the contestants did. He just touched his lips with my fingers and said quietly:

  “I need them.”

  Little black cats don’t need anyone. Little black cats have magic no one can steal. Little black cats run faster than dead men.

  “Why?”

  All the letters lit up at once and the lady in my dress touched them all, smiling, buttons and bows and butterflies sparkling everywhere, until they spelled out: HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE.

  “With clean hands, Badgirl, you can start all over.”

  Little black cats run right out, just as soon as you open the door.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Catherynne M. Valente: Some eighteen months ago, an acute attack of carpal tunnel syndrome left me unable to use my hands for a period of about five months. It was an absolutely perception- and life-altering injury—one that immediately brought the variations of the Armless Maiden fairy tale to mind. And while I meant to write more directly about that experience when I first set out to retell the tale, Badgirl leapt to the front of the stage and demanded to be heard—this was her story, and her voice, and she would run it as she saw fit. So in the end, I left my helplessness by the wayside and delved into hers. This is the only story I’ve written where I continually had to stop because I’d upset myself and needed to find some equilibrium again. The Armless Maiden stories are some of the darkest fairy tales around, which is part, I think, of why they persist. They are stories about girls lost between the weak and the strong, and how they find their way to wholeness once more.

  PENNY FOR A MATCH, MISTER?

  Garth Nix

  he moon was high above the canyon, its silver light reaching into even the most shadowed depths. It was too bright to be a good night to lie in ambush at the exit, where what passed for a road finally wound its way out of the narrow, zigzag way between rocky walls and ran straight for the town, some five miles distant.

  But bright moon or not, there were three men lying in wait for the next stagecoach to come out of the canyon. Two were long-term outlaws, the Osgood brothers, of whom nothing good was known. The third man, the much younger Danny, surname variable according to who was asking, had been drinking whiskey with the brothers all day in town and now he wasn’t sure how he had ended up with them, crouched down behind a large rock, his father’s old .52-70 Sharps with the black walnut stock in his hands, and fear in his heart.

  The Osgoods were the leaders of a large outlaw group known in those parts as the Nail in the Head Gang, after a certain episode where Ten Osgood, the older brother, had attempted to torture the combination for a safe out of a bank manager, hammering a nail into his head. Predictably, the manager died, and the safe was not opened. But the name stuck. Eleven Osgood, the younger brother, did not like the name but had not been able to come up with a viable alternative.

  Danny was uncomfortable in his innards, and not just from all the whiskey he’d drunk. It was more anxiety about his present company, the plans they had, and a growing realization he’d made a serious mistake. After trying for some time to quell this nervousness and discomfort, he finally stood up, plucked at the buttons on his breeches, and took the first step toward a walk some w
ays off to take a leak.

  “Piss where you are,” instructed Eleven Osgood. “Don’t want no one catching sight. Moon’s too damned bright.”

  The moon was so very bright. Danny obeyed Eleven, pissing where he stood. He stared up at the shining disk while he did so, slack-jawed, not watching his pale stream of urine, which splattered upon the boulder in front of him and splashed back toward the Osgoods.

  “I said piss where you are!” yelled Eleven, forgetting about the need to be quiet. “Not where I am!”

  Danny didn’t hear him. He kept staring up at the night sky. There was a silver road clearly visible there, a road stretching from the moon down to the ground. He knew from the stories his mother used to tell him that this was a path for things from the other side of the Line. A road of moonsilver was a means for persons and creatures barely imaginable to cross the Line, to come into the human world and there cause mischief, mayhem, misery, or mystery, as was their wont. The stories hardly ever mentioned any of them doing anything helpful or kind.

  All that was needed to connect the silver road with the good earth was a sacrifice, the spilling of blood. Preferably human, but anything red would do the job.

  Danny suddenly decided he didn’t want to be there anymore, just as Eleven Osgood stood up, drew his broad-bladed knife, and plunged it into the still-pissing man’s guts and hauled it up, grunting, toward his heart.

  Death came almost instantly.

  Almost.

  Eleven pushed Danny’s still-coming-to-terms-with-it body away and watched him twitch in the dirt while he wiped his knife across his own left thigh, adding a scum of blood and filth to the many layers already caked there.

  A shadow passed over him, and he looked up, expecting a bird of some kind. A big owl perhaps. Something sizable. But there was nothing in the sky but the bright moon. He blinked, dismissing it as a bit of windborne grit, caught for a moment in his eye.