The Rose and the Beast

by Francesca Lia Block

  He had climbed over the garden fence because he had heard that the woman with the long legs and the cat eyes lived in that shady, fragrant home. She didn’t come out much anymore, people said. The tragedy of her life. They didn’t know about her tiny secret.

  Tiny saw the boy wandering around the garden, as intrigued by the flowers as she was, it seemed. It was true, he’d never seen a garden like this one before. The blossoms were huge and the fragrance was staggering. He felt drunk.

  He was tall and thin with a long face and deep-set eyes with heavy brows. He was not particularly good looking—at least he didn’t think so. He felt ungainly tripping on his big feet as if to escape his body—cumbersome. But to Tiny he was wonderful. Full of wonder. Terrifying. He was everything she wanted. She stopped caring about the garden and the eight spirit babies who visited her, and even about her mother. Suddenly she resented her mother a little, without quite recognizing the emotion since it was so new to her, but felt it because she realized in that instant that she would never be tall and big like that; she was a freak, she knew, and this boy would never love her.

  The boy prowled around the garden, dizzy with the flowers. He was a poet and was already thinking of words to try to describe what he saw (he couldn’t). He peeked into the windows of the house and saw the woman walking around with her hair up in a turban towel. She was about his mother’s age but she had long legs, high cheekbones, and the upward-slanting sun-flecked green eyes of a cat.

  Tiny saw him watching. She needed to scream but she just lay there, oozing and broken like a squashed insect.

  The boy waited while Tiny’s mother loosened the towel from her head so that her long wet hair shook down. He waited while she let her robe slip from her shoulders. Tiny came closer to him. She could hear his breathing, raspy and deep in his throat, and she could smell something that was better than all the flowers in her garden.

  The boy suddenly swung around, sensing, but not seeing anyone. He ran out of the garden.

  Tiny thought about him every day and night. She became sullen and would hardly speak or eat. Her mother asked her again and again what was wrong but she wouldn’t say. Her eyes became like slits and she chewed on her lips until they bled. She felt like the dead butterfly she had seen moldering in the dirt.

  Tiny knew it was time to leave and so she packed up some berries, her bed linens, her thimble, and a silver needle in a knapsack and began her journey away from the garden and from the mother whom she would never be.

  If you were Tiny’s size you would find that a few blocks can take a long long time to traverse. There were many dangers. The bird that swooped down and tried to eat her for lunch. The toad that fell in love with her and tried to carry her away to be its wife. The cat that thought she was a toy to bat around in its claws. With her silver needle and her quick little body, Tiny was able to get away. She was no longer a slow dreamer watching the flowers grow. She was a warrior now. Warriors need something to fight for, though, besides their lives, because otherwise their lives will not be worth it. Tiny thought she was fighting for the boy’s love, but after a while she wondered what that meant and how did she think she could ever achieve it? Small as she was—the size of one of his fingers—nothing like her mother, with nothing to give except a way to watch gardens, some knowledge imparted by eight spirit babies, now gone, and deftness with a silver needle.

  The boy was walking home from school trying to find words to describe the way he was feeling. Alone, awkward, alienated, isolated, crazy. He hated all those words. He wondered why he considered himself a poet. Pretentious as hell. He thought everything he wrote was terrible, actually. He had tried to write about the garden, and the woman in the window, and the strange feeling he had had, as if he were being watched, breathed upon by something that chilled his nape and made him want to cry.

  Tiny found him that day. She was half starved. She had been scratched and bitten. Her dress was in tatters. Not one night had she slept well—there was no safe garden, no walnut cradle, no lullaby mother. She was too old for these things anyway, she told herself. Tinys do not deserve safety. If they are to prove themselves, they must suffer and die or suffer and survive.

  But then she saw the boy, and love seeped into her body as if she had sucked it from a honeysuckle blossom. She knew he was trying to make up poems. She knew so much about him already. She realized that she was nothing without his desire for poetry, just as she was nothing without her mother’s desire for a child. She was their creation; no wonder she had to have them.

  This made her feel strangely brave and she leaped as far as she could, landing precariously on his arm. His jacket smelled of smoke and basketball and libraries and the grass he had rolled in, trying to recall what it was like when he was a little boy and not so…whatever it was that he was all the time. Sad, depressed, angst-ridden. He didn’t even have the right words left for anything.

  Tiny jumped from his scratchy sleeve into his pocket, where it was warm and musty smelling. There was a pack of cigarettes, a gnawed pencil stub, some grains of sand, a piece of spearmint gum in case he ever met who he was waiting for. She explored, discovering new things about him. How he worried about lung cancer but couldn’t stop smoking. How he always lay on the beach in his clothes, wishing the ocean would take him away, he didn’t care where. How he was waiting for his muse, his poetry in the shape of a girl.

  And so Tiny waited also, and when he came to his apartment building and went inside, and closed the door of his room that was piled with books replacing tables and chairs and had black-and-white posters from Italian movies on the walls (all the women were so big like Tiny’s mother), and had a rumpled bed with sheets like maps—that was when she climbed out of his pocket and stood in front of him. Now she was truly a warrior because he was a million times more dangerous to her than toads, cats, or birds.

  Oh, shit, he said. What the fuck.

  I’m Tiny, she said.

  You can say that again.

  I’m Tiny.

  He laughed. Man! he said. You are awe-inspiring, O Muse.

  I’ve been trying to find you, she said.

  Well, Tiny Muse, I’m certainly glad that you have.

  He got down on his knees before her—she was perched on a stack of books of Beat poetry—and stared at every part of her perfect little body. He felt a bit perverse about it, but he didn’t care because she seemed to be enjoying his gaze. He knew that he would never be without the right words again as long as she was with him, but he thought he should officially ask her anyway.

  Will you help me to find the words, O Muse? he asked.

  She looked him up and down, looked around the room.

  Can I sleep in your bed? she answered.

  He grinned at her and reached for the piece of gum in his pocket.

  Suddenly he was translucent, perfect, the size she was.

  The prince of the flowers.

  GLASS

  She did not mind her days alone, away from the eyes outside. It was better this way, her secret stories hidden so no one could touch them, take them. Her sisters listened, rapt, but did not try to take. They cared more for the eyes and ears; they seemed to want to collect these like charms to wear around their necks, the eyes and ears and the mouths whispering—beautiful, beautiful, why did it matter she wondered. She was free, still, like a child, the way it is before you are seen and then after that you can never remember who you are unless someone else shows it to you. She had the stories she gave to her sisters that made them love her. Or need her, at least.

  And she had the tasks. She loved to plant the beds with lilies and wisteria, camellias and gardenias, until her hands were caked with earth. To arrange the flowers in the vase like dancing sisters. To make the salmon in pomegranate sauce; the salads of spinach, red onion, pine nuts, oranges, and avocados; the golden vanilla cream custards; the breads and piecrusts that powdered her with flour. She loved, even, to dust the things, to feel them in her hands, imagining their history. The gl
ass music box that perhaps a boy had once given to his grandparents—the first present he had ever chosen, making them close their eyes, watching them standing there, before him, suddenly looking so small with their eyelids closed and their hands held out until they heard the tinkle of their first dance. The glass goblet with the roses and grape clusters one could feel with the fingertips like Braille that perhaps a man had given to his wife because she was losing her sight and he was afraid to give her more books of poetry. The candlesticks like crystal balls, many-faceted; though the girl could not read her own future in them perhaps if she looked closely enough she could see the young bride tearing away the tissue and holding them up to the light to see herself being imagined by this girl, now. This girl, now, who did not mind polishing the wooden floors or scrubbing out the pots until her sisters could see their reflections, or cleaning between the tiles and lighting the candles, running the water and scattering the petals and powders in the bath so that her sisters could lie in the tub where she would tell them stories. Always she would tell them stories; they returned at night and sat before their mirrors, let her rub their feet with almond oil, soothe them with her words and in this way she felt loved.

  But the woman came to her then. The woman with hair of red like roses, hair of white like snowfall. She was young and old. She was blind and could see everything. She spoke softly, in whispers, but her voice carried across the mountain ranges like sleeping giants, the cities lit like fairies and the oceans—undulating mermaids. She laughed at her own sorrow and wept pearls at weddings. Her fingers were branches and her eyes were little blue planets. She said, You cannot hide forever, though you may try. I’ve seen you in the kitchen, in the garden. I’ve seen the things you have sewn—curtains of dawn, twilight blankets and dresses for the sisters like a garden of stars. I have heard the stories you tell. You are the one who transforms, who creates. You can go out into the world and show others. They will feel less alone because of you, they will feel understood, unburdened by you, awakened by you, freed of guilt and shame and sorrow. But to share with them you must wear shoes you must go out you must not hide you must dance and it will be harder you must face jealousy and sometimes rage and desire and love which can hurt most of all because of what can then be taken away. So make that astral dress to fit your own body this time. And here are glass shoes made from your words, the stories you have told like a blower with her torch forming the thinnest, most translucent sheets of light out of what was once sand. But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing not for running away.

  So she washed off the dust and ash and flour and mud and went to the dance where sure enough everyone whirled around her, entranced by the stories in which they recognized themselves, but in the stories they were also more than themselves and it always felt at the end fulfilled not meaningless and empty like life can sometimes feel. She knew they all loved her with her stories because they became her and she became them.

  He came to her across the marble floor, past the tall windows glowing like candles, the balconies overlooking the reflecting pools full of swans, the stone statues of goddesses and beds of heady roses—had she made all of this, like a story? He had dense curls and soft full lips and bright eyes like a woodland beast and a body of lithe muscle and mostly she could see he was gentle, he was gentle like a boy though he could lift her in his hands. He held her and she felt his hard chest and stomach and hipbones and she felt his strong heart beating like the sound of all the stories she could ever hope to tell. Maybe she had not created him, maybe she was his creation and all she dreamed, his dream. Or maybe they had made each other. Yes.

  Beloved. One. He planted in her a seed of a white flower with a dizzy scent; in the night garden the oranges hung like fat moonstruck jewels and the jasmine bloomed as she spun and spun. Now she had everything and the sisters eyed her jealously, secretly, in their mirrors until the glass cracked, clutched the little bags she had made for them until the crystal beads scattered and broke—they had stories, too, they’d like to tell. They’d like to make someone cry and swoon and spin with love for what they made. Who was she to take this away from them? How dare she wear the glass shoes? They could see what was wrong with her. She wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t so beautiful. Her skin was blemished and her body was too thin, or not thin enough, and she wasn’t perfectly symmetrical and her hair was thin and brittle and why was he looking at her like that? It was just that she knew how to make things. Or not even that—just rearrange, imitate.

  She felt their envy and this broke her. The story ended, she couldn’t tell the rest, they’d hate her, she had to stop it, she wasn’t any good shut up you bad bad girl ugly and you don’t deserve any of this and so the spell was broken and she ran home through a tangle of words where the letters jumbled and made no sense and meant nothing, and the words were ugly and she was not to be heard or seen, she was blemished and too fat, too thin, not smart, too smart, not good, not a storyteller, not a creator, not beautiful, not a woman not not not. All the things that girls feel they are not when they fear that if they become, if they are, they will no longer be loved by the sisters whose hearts they have not meant to break. And besides, if the sisters are gone and only the beloved remains with his dense curls and his lips, how safe are you then? You have to have him or you will die if the sisters are gone with their listening ears and their feet to rub and their bodies to dress and their shared loneliness.

  She lost one of the glass slippers—shine, fire, bright of her making like a dropped word lost, like a word, the missing word to make the story right again, to make it complete.

  It doesn’t matter, she tells herself, shredding up the dress she made. It doesn’t matter, I am safe. Alone and safe. The sisters don’t hate me. I am small and safe, no one will hate me, hear me, no one can break me by leaving, by taking away his seed, the promise of the jasmine blossom in the garden.

  Still he came to find her even without her enchantments, her stories, her dress, her shoe. He had the shoe, he’d found it when he followed her. It was so fragile he didn’t breathe.

  She made him want to cry when he walked up the path through the ferns and doves and lilies and saw her covered with earth and dust and ash. Only her eyes shone out. Revealing, not reflecting. Windows. Her feet were bare. He wanted her to tell him the rest of the story. He felt bereft without it, without her. There were only these women with mirror eyes strutting across marble floors, tossing their manes, revealing their breasts, untouchable, only these tantalizing empty glass boxes full of dancing lights he could not hold, only these icy cubicles, parched yards, hard loneliness.

  When the sisters saw him kneeling before her holding the one shoe, not breathing, trying not to crush anything, saw how he looked at her, how he needed her, they knew that if they tried to take this from her they would never know, have nothing left, they would starve, they would break, they would never wake up.

  The fairy who was not old, not young, who was red roses, white snowfall, who was blind and saw everything, who sent stories resounding through the universe said, You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young, laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

  CHARM

  She felt like the girl in the fairy tale. Maybe there had been some kind of curse. Inevitable that she would prick her arm (not her finger) with the needle. Did the girl feel this ecstasy of pure honeyed light in her veins, like being infused with the soul she had lost? For Rev, that was all there was.

  The flood was like an ogre’s tears. Mud and trees and even small children were carried away in it. Rev’s vintage Thunderbird was swept down the canyon, landing crashed at the bottom, full of water and leaves.

  Fires like dragon’s breath consumed the poppies and lupine, the jacaranda trees that once flowered purple in sudden overnight bursts of exuberance as if startled at their own capacity for gorgeousness.

  When the
earth quaked, the walls of Rev’s house cracked; all the glasses and teacups in her cabinet careened out, covering the floor in a sharp carpet that cut her feet as she ran outside. Chimneys and windows wailed. Rev was amazed at how, with the power all out, she could see the stars above her, clearly, for the first time since she was a child on a camping trip in the desert. They were like the glass fragments on the floor. The air smelled of leaking gas. Her feet were bleeding into the damp lawn.

  This is my city, Rev thought. Cursed, like I am cursed. Sleeping, like I sleep. Tear-flooded and fever-scorched, quaking and bloodied with nightmares.

  She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD’d on the pavement. When the sun began to come up Rev went back to her canyon house where vines had begun to grow through the cracks in the walls. The air smelled acrid and stale—eucalyptus and cigarettes. Her television was always on.

  Pop came by in his dark glasses, leather pants, and long blond dreadlocks. He gave her what she needed in a needle in exchange for the photos he took of her. And sometimes she slept with him.

  Sleeping Beauty, he said. I like you this way.