Burly Tales

by Steve Berman

  The mirror once again paused. He knew Forrest Snow was alive and well, already whisked off to another kingdom. Would the king wage war over this? Over who has the most luxuriant beard? The mirror did not remember the king being this cruel before. How did he ever love such a man once upon a time?

  The king glared at the mirror; impatience was written large on his face. “I said—”

  “Yes, yes I heard you. You’re just not going to like it.” And the mirror showed him the handsome face of his stepson, his beard freshly trimmed.

  “How? How can this be?” The king banged his fists against the table. “It’s impossible. I’ve done everything. Everything.”

  He continued his tantrum. The king walked into his bedroom, ripping his dresser away from the wall. Ripping down curtains. Throwing his pillows and blankets onto the floor. Like a petulant child, he raged. Until finally he returned with a globe of glass.

  “That stupid wizard. He told me to make a wish. To make a wish and whatever I wanted could be mine. I could have it all. I wish for a kingdom and I get the attention of the future heir. I wish for the location of the best oils for my beard and I get it. I wish …”

  He turned towards the mirror and yelled, his voice a desperate plea, tears streaming down his face. “ …I wish for my lover to be able to stay with me and I get that too.”

  The mirror stared at the globe. There was something wrong, he thought, with that piece of magic. “Your Majesty?”

  “But it was all for nothing!”

  He threw the globe.

  Like a cannonball, the globe smashed into the mirror. The mirror felt like he was breaking into a million pieces, shattering on the bathroom floor. A heavy pounding ruptured in his head and exploded through his cranium, returning years of memories. He had a life. He was a person. He had a name.

  “Michael?” the king whispered.

  The mirror—Michael—lay on the tiled floor, naked and cold. But what was cold? A sensation he hadn’t felt in years.

  And the king, he was frowning and rubbing his head.

  “How did I forget you?” the king whispered, his face frozen in shock or horror. “What have I done?”

  Michael looked at the shattered globe. Dark smoke leaked up and drifted out the window. “George, I think that was cursed.”

  “I …” The king, of course, had a name, and hearing Michael utter it brought back so many memories. “I didn’t know what I was doing. It was like, like a chunk of me was stolen. Like I only lived for—”

  “I understand.” Michael glanced at his hands. “It happened to me too.”

  “I’m so sorry.” George anxiously tugged at his beard. “I’m so sorry. I don’t … I don’t deserve ...”

  He moved swiftly, lifting the nearby shears to his beard. In one sudden movement, he started hacking away at so many years of great labor and grooming.

  “No, I won’t let you feel sorry for yourself,” Michael said. “Someone cursed you. Someone cursed us.” Michael approached, grasping George’s wrist, stopping his destruction. “But it’s over.”

  “I have to apologize to him,” the king said. “I have to make up for this.”

  George was talking about Forrest, Michael knew. Just like Michael knew how sweet George was before all of this. How he had only indulged the prince’s attentions as a means to avoid the life of a pauper. At the time, George’s merchant had recently burned down. He had no way to pay his debts. But then, unexpectedly, love developed between them despite George’s machinations.

  Luckily, the former mirror thought, the huntsman had also fled the kingdom before the king could enact any unforgivable revenge.

  “Of course,” Michael replied, rubbing George’s arms, enjoying the feel of the king once again. Memorizing the warm, muscular shape of his body. “But first ….”

  Michael lifted the royal straight razor and helped smooth George’s face, removing the only thing that had mattered to the king in years.

  George reached up, his fingers brushing against the jeweled crown. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  “I loved you as a merchant,” Michael said. “I stayed with you as a king. I think we could try again as men.”

  With a sad smile, George’s warm fingers brushed Michael’s head, moving his shaggy hair behind his ear. “Good. I’d like that.”

  It was unprecedented, a living king abdicating to his stepson. But the kingdom accepted the announcement with barely an objection. George had ruled with fear, not loyalty, and so the people celebrated the rise of the royal son.

  And afterwards, as George stepped away from the crowd, the advisors and royal council departing to spread the news far and wide that Forrest Snow could once again return, return and rule, Michael leaned in, meeting George’s lips with his own. Stealing what had always belonged with him. Every sunrise and sunset they’d been together, but still apart.

  Now, they could finally be whole.

  The Man Who Drew Cats

  Alysha MacDonald

  THEY TRIED TO MAKE A farmer out of Shiro. They raised him in the hot sun with mud caked up to his knees, grinning to themselves as he stooped and planted row after row of rice in the flooded paddies with his cousins. They told them stories at night of how, though it was true that emperors were the direct descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, that it was the peasants who were her actual favorites. After all, the emperors stayed away from the sun by hiding in their large homes and traveling solely by covered wagon. They were tucked away safe like pretty gems, while Shiro’s family was raised beneath Amaterasu’s glory. They grew tan from her presence. They broke out in sweats and sometimes collapsed in the water, then waved up at Amaterasu to go rest behind the clouds, so that they could have a moment of peace in the shade.

  Shiro was to his family what nobility was to Amaterasu. He hid in the long grass and jumped out as his cousins passed. They cursed and hit him with their hats, hissing that he’d scared them half to death by thinking he was a kappa. When his sisters got angry after finding him stitching small birds into their clothes, they pinned him down and shaved the top of his head so that he better resembled the monster. After that, everyone started calling him the little Kappa. He leaned into it. He wrestled his cousins and ate cucumbers with sharp, quick snaps. He hardly worked. He saved up red clay in a jar and painted swirling patterns on their ox, himself, their floor, and once his mother’s lips when she was laid out for funeral.

  He was an amusement to them. While his family took turns hitting him over the back of the head to get him to focus, they never hit too hard and they never hit a second time. They saved his drawings and etchings, but years passed and Shiro grew into an idle teenager, which was not as endearing as an idle child.

  His father came to him one day, watching as Shiro played with a spider by keeping it imprisoned in the circle of his hands. He sat down next to him and Shiro scrambled to his knees, the spider running free as Shiro realized that his scythe had been discarded outside. There was no feigning work.

  “Sometimes,” his father said. “People grow straight and upright like the bamboo. They bask in the sun, keep true and tall, and then are felled when it is their time.”

  His father placed a hand on his head.

  “And sometimes,” his father said, “a person grows like a vine. A vine needs to grow in shaded places or up sturdy walls. It can grow nearly anywhere and it can grow well, but it cannot grow up among the bamboo. It’ll die in the ground if it tries.”

  Shiro watched him.

  “There’s a place for you, somewhere, and you’ll be happier there,” his father said. “You’ve an idle body, but an overworking mind.”

  Shiro gave his father a small smile, but he caught the spider again after and sat with it for a long time, watching as it fled from palm to palm, but was given no escape. His uncles brought him to town a month later and Shiro followed a band of monks to a monastery far up some old mountain.

  If farming had made him strong, then the monastery
padded him out. He ate as much rice as he could after prayers and, sometimes, by sneaking in bites during them. Each taste brought him back home and, if he chewed long enough, he could imagine the ox’s plowing, his family laughing and gossiping as they worked, and the slush of bare feet through knee-high water. He traded the rest of his allotted food for others’ rice cups and sometimes took out a small clump at night, placed it on his tongue, and let it turn to starch in his spit. With every pound he gained, it felt as though he was adding a new layer of his home to him. He loved the soft give of his body. He would press his hand to his stomach, feel the hair, and pretend it was the paddy grass. He would press harder and wish that his softness could extend outward and into his life. Where he could have an existence different from the restrained lives that monks were supposed to lead.

  He was resentful at his father for sending him away, then resigned and, after a handful of long-winding years, grateful. He learned to read, how to use critical thinking, and about his nation’s history. There were endless young men and visiting scholars. Sometimes, a brush with one of them left him with his robes askew and Shiro grinning to himself later during prayers.

  Then, one afternoon, he was given a brush and told to write with it. He dipped it in the ink, watched the black blend with the horsehair, breathed in, and pressed it to the washi paper. It bled out thickly and smelled of forest. The brush raised, droplets of ink dripped onto the paper.

  He’d drawn and stitched throughout his childhood. He made endless little crafts, but he had never made something as beautiful as a single brush stroke.

  He sat crying over the paper, watching as his tears dripped down and blurred in with the ink. An older monk went up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, saying that not everyone could write their name on the first try, so he needn’t weep over it. Shiro smiled up at him and, for the first time in his life, focused. He drew Kanji, swirling flowers, and sold calligraphy prints for the monastery in town. Perhaps, in a different world, he would have done that until his body bent into death. Where he would be a master by then, unbound by want or desire, and would use his last moments to scrawl out a jisei on golden paper.

  Perhaps, had it not been for the cat.

  Shiro had learned of the many seducers of monks. The forests were rife with yokai, ghosts, oni, and spirits. One straying step and one didn’t just lose their way, but their life.

  Shiro’s unraveling was far subtler than any demon’s influence. The cat arrived with the pond, which had been his duty to build. He spent a spring digging, then lining it with rocks, and finally ordering the silver carp to fill it with. When they were safely settled, he practiced calligraphy with his feet dipped in the water.

  It was then that he saw his first cat.

  He knew that cats existed, of course, and had seen them as running blurs or white glowing eyes from hidden spots in town, but never in the open. He sat watching the feline weave out from the woods, tail high and proud, and then pad a lap around the other side of the pond. It sat sunning itself and stretched out limbs that seemed unconstrained by physics. He’d heard of ghosts who could turn their heads around. He’d seen a monk fall from the temple roof and lay crumpled at wrong angles on the ground. But when the tabby stretched out so impossibly, it did not seem to be in any pain.

  It captivated him.

  He wasted all of his paper drawing it before he realized what he had done. When it tried for a carp, but found it too big, he left out a wad of rice for the cat to eat and retreated. He watched from around a tree, while the cat went up to the rice, sniffed, and turned away in disgust.

  The monks who saw him with the creature said it must have been some demon cat, a bakeneko perhaps, because it so thoroughly led Shiro astray. He abandoned his art. He ducked out during prayers or the middle of the night, stealing a carp and breaking its spine on a rock, before slicing off small cuts for the cat. Soon, the cat grew to cats, and they bred. The monastery was slowly overrun by the furred creatures, until monks couldn’t sit in peace without a cat coming up, rubbing against their back, and then pawing at the adornments on their robes.

  Shiro cared for nothing but his cats. They said he drew them into existence. He slept by the fish pond in the summer, wrapped up in a great furred blanket of whites, greys, blacks, and calicos. When he moved, the cats all moved with him. His ink was spent for nothing but drawing each one, his calligraphy only used to scrawl their names in the corners. When they took away his inks, he got an old stick and drew out the cats in the dirt, laughing as they swapped at the end of the stick in fake lunges. He walked with kittens in his pockets, wearing a cat as a scarf around his neck, and even started growing back his hair.

  It wasn’t out of hand until it was. Locals wouldn’t come to the shrine because the cats’ territorial squabbles destroyed any sense of peace. The place started to smell and, when a group of new initiates drowned sacks of cats in the pond, Shiro exercised no detached patience after finding out. It surprised them too, because Shiro was not a violent man. The numerous frustrations that they vented to him over the year was met with Shiro’s friendly response that, as Buddhists, weren’t they supposed to treat all animals as equals? As such, weren’t the cats not pests, but actually their guests?

  Thus, when Shiro saw the bodies of the cats drowned in the water, he felt an anger he had never known. He’d been annoyed plenty of times before, but had never experienced a flashing, fiery sort of hatred. He tackled the initiates into the pond and cursed at them for not respecting the lives of creatures, big or small. When they yelled back that he was the one not respecting the lives of his own fellow man, he shook his head and got off them. His cheeks flushed with shame. His clothes dripped and clung to him. He went to one of the head monks and the man, who had been the one to whisper to the initiates to carry out the killings, met Shiro with a bag packed for travel. Shiro paused at the door, letting in cat after cat in between his legs. He went there to report the monks’ misconduct, but paused upon seeing the bag.

  “It’s become clear to me that this might not be the life for you,” the monk said.

  “You would turn me out? For this? Because I was kind to small creatures and sheltered them?”

  The monk walked up to him and gave a small, encouraging smile. “Once you leave, the cats will disperse. We’re doing them no good by locking them away here and letting them breed. They’ve killed all the fish and they’ll starve without you here to feed them. You shouldn’t stay here either or you’ll starve, too. Mentally starve; spiritually starve. There’s no shame in leaving. You don’t have a monk’s soul. You’re too attached to life and so … this is not your path, but we’ll care for your cats until they leave.”

  “No,” Shiro said. “After the cruelty I’ve seen today, they will leave with me.”

  “Then you’ll learn loss, finally,” the man said. “And I wish you the better for it.”

  Shiro tried to keep the cats with him. Before he left, he bought a bucket of eggs and cracked one open every hour of walking. The cats scrambled and fought over the yolk, but he could not keep them all. They dropped off, one by one, and he couldn’t follow them into town, up trees, or into the mouths of foxes. He held to what he could, but every day brought fewer cats and pieces of his heart slipped away each time one ran off to a new territory. There was no holding such fluid creatures. They squirmed, hid, and climbed. Some went to farmers or the arms of smiling, happy children. Others were trampled by a horse or taken by a bird. He buried every one that he found dead. The leaves fell. He awoke to snow on his face. He sat up shivering and saw that the last of his flock had left him.

  He was alone in the forest.

  He bowed and contemplated their tracks in the snow. Already, the snow was blanketing them. Three cat trails in different directions—what was the point in choosing one to follow?

  Shiro breathed out. Was this what his father had meant, years ago, when he called him vine-like? As an adult, Shiro knew that vines were weeds that destroyed whatever they clung
to. Perhaps that was his father’s message and never one of love. That he clung to pointless things and crushed them with his desperate, clawing grasp until everything around him suffocated.

  How could he return home as a failure? He’d been away for years. By staying in exile, he could keep his childhood locked neatly away in memory. He didn’t have to face any news of deaths or suffering. He couldn’t bare the thought of traveling back, only to see the house gone entirely and his family moved on or murdered.

  But where was he supposed to go? He’d spent his life listening to what other people wanted him to be, but what did he want?

  He took out his art tools, sat with his back to a tree, and drew out his home in long, loving brush strokes. He drew cats in place of his family. They slept atop the roof and jumped up in fright from the water. He placed the paper down, drew a fire and some food with a stick in the snow. Then he slept, feeling strangely warm and nourished, with the echoing of meowing in his ears and the crackling of imagined flames.

  WHEN HE AWOKE, SHIRO FIGURED he had made such a poor drawing that he was cursed into a landscape painting. He was atop a snowy mountain peak, pressed into the top branch of a pine tree, and clung to it with a start after seeing how high up he was. The beard he was growing was not yet long enough to shield him from the biting cold.

  A coo of laughter came from the next tree over. A tengu peered down at him from the topmost cedar. His black wings flicked about in the wind while he gripped to the bark with sharp, black-nailed talons. The rest of the body was squat, but undoubtedly human. The tengu watched him from behind a long-nosed gigaku mask with its hair a mismatch of black and feathers.

  “Welcome, monk,” the tengu said.

  Shiro knew of tengu, but their origins changed depending on who he asked. Some called them the protectors of Buddhism, others the reanimated forms of people killed in jealous blood. They were creatures who loved nothing more than to mock, torture, and sometimes murder, depending on the tale. A monk at the shrine had fallen prey to one such being. He disappeared and returned, vacant-eyed, foaming at the mouth, weeping of nonsense and clawing at his own face. Whatever the tengu did to him drove the monk mad.