No way I could do this forever. My skates felt like concrete blocks on my feet.
Thin Lizzie and Chrissy skated together. They did not look at me. Thin Lizzie’s threads were almost as bright as those of the real Minotaur girls, and Chrissy’s glowed as she gained confidence.
If I stayed longer, I might not want to leave either.
A silver shadow poured from the ceiling to the floor. Everyone skated around it, pretending it wasn’t there. It was a rope ladder, made of those threads they all wore. A silver ladder of knotted threads. It couldn’t take my weight, surely?
But it was a chance.
I spun and danced and sped around the rink, not aiming for the ladder at all. I even let a Minotaur boy or two catch my hand and twirl me around. Non–threatening. Part of the show.
Then I skated backwards until I felt the soft brush of the thread ladder against my back.
I grabbed hold and climbed, pulling it up behind me. Up and up, and I hardly needed the ladder after a while because the silver threads were a thick tangle up here, twitching in the air. I climbed and climbed, and finally grasped something solid instead of that diaphanous ladder. It was a hanging cage. The knotted ladder ended here. I could see where the web of threads had been torn around us, to make the ladder.
“You,” said a whispered voice, and I saw the boy Ari staring out at me, his thin fingers grasping the bars. “Is it you?”
He was so pathetic, my stomach swelled up with anger against him. “Why did you give me that coin?” I hissed. “Why did you bring me here? This place is horrible.”
Ari was still beautiful, but not nearly as glitter as he had seemed that day in the park. “I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “The Minotaur made me do it. But I hoped… it might be different this time. Maybe you could break this place wide open. Someone has to.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Could I close down the Minotaur once and for all? “Everyone would hate me,” I said in awe at the very idea of it.
Ari smiled with bright teeth and yeah, I’d still let him kiss me. “They’d never forget you,” he said.
§
I broke two fingernails getting his cage open. I had to use a skate to bash at the lock until it broke and Ari could get out. We climbed together, up the chain that held the cage, and it wasn’t long before we spotted a railing at the top of the Minotaur. There was a balcony running around the inside of this upper part of the building, and we clambered across the web of threads to reach it.
If we fell, we would be caught in those threads like the net under a trapeze. So many threads, each plugged into a beautiful monster.
Ari was right. We had to blow this place wide open.
“Where are we going?” I whispered.
“Control room,” Ari said back. “There’s always someone pulling the threads.”
“Like — a big boss?”
“I can’t answer that,” he said, as I climbed over the railing. Finally, solid floor under my feet. He didn’t once try to help me and I wasn’t sure if that was wonderful or really annoying. “A different girl pulls the threads each night.”
“How does all this happen without someone in charge?”
“It’s the Minotaur,” said Ari. “The building is alive. It wants us to have a good time and put on a show. It loves roller skates, who knows why. If we make it happy, it rewards us. So we do.”
We were outside the control room now. It had a wide glass window but I couldn’t see much in the darkness.
Ari hung back.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.
“I don’t think I can.” He lifted his feet and hands. Pale threads veined away from him and down over the edge of the balcony. “They always grow back,” he said sadly.
I ran inside the control room and slammed the door behind me. “So,” I said aloud. “Who’s pulling the threads tonight?”
“Tess?” said a small voice. “Is that you?”
As my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw her at the far end of the room. She sat on an ordinary office chair, the kind that spins around. Every inch of her body had a silver thread growing out of it. They lashed into the walls and floor and ceiling.
Fat Lizzie. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, but she looked different. Gaunt and angry and so, so scared.
“What have they done to you?” I breathed.
“It’s not they,” she said. “There isn’t a ‘they.’ It’s the Minotaur. She hates us all.”
The floor shuddered under my feet. The Minotaur didn’t like us having this conversation. And since when was the Minotaur a she?
“What happens if I cut you out of those threads?” I asked Fat Lizzie.
“They grow back. Faster. And they hurt.”
I turned to the control banks, all those switches and dials. I pressed a button, and a screen flicked into life slowly, in grayscale. Another screen, then another. You could see the whole Minotaur from here, every room and ramp. The girls and boys were skating, gaming, kissing and groping.
“Not much of a show,” I said aloud. “What if I make it more entertaining?”
The floor stopped rumbling under my feet. The Minotaur was curious.
“You can’t beat the Minotaur, Tess,” said Fat Lizzie. She sounded stretched thin. “She won’t let you.”
That stung. Ari thought I was special. Why was she so certain I wasn’t? “Why not?”
Lizzie didn’t answer. Her hands moved back and forth, plucking at the silvery threads that spun out through the walls and floors.
I left the control room and went back out to the balcony, where Ari lay trapped in his own tangle of silver threads. “Why me?” I demanded. “Why did you choose ME if I’m so useless?”
He shook his head, staring up at me.
“Why am I the only one without silver threads sticking out of me?” I tried. This time, when he didn’t answer, I flew at him, tearing at the threads. He yelled with pain as I pulled them out. When the last of them snaked away off the edge of the balcony, Ari sat there, breathless and rumpled but able to talk to me again.
“What are we going to do?” I demanded. I was no use on my own. I should be part of a group, with Lizzie and Lizzie and Chrissie bouncing our every word and thought off each other until everything made sense.
I missed them so badly.
“Don’t ask me,” Ari snapped. “This is your game, not mine. Don’t you get it? You’re the hero and I’m the fucking damsel in distress.”
Something rang a chord in my mind, so very familiar. “What do you mean, game?”
“Ante up, lay your bets, roll the dice,” he said in a sing–song voice. “I laid my bets on you, Tess, and you’re not exactly paying off.”
“Who am I playing against?” I hissed at him.
He glanced past me, and shuddered. “The Minotaur.”
I turned, not sure what to expect. My worst fear was that it would be one of my girls, Thin Lizzie or Chrissie, that I’d have to fight them. But it wasn’t anyone I knew.
She wasn’t tall. She was old like Mum, and I felt a familiar shock as I gazed at her, like meeting a long lost aunt for the first time. She was fitter than my mum, with better hair. She had a really great suit, all purple velvet and pale pink lace, like something Prince would wear.
“You were right the first time, Tess,” said the Minotaur. “There is a boss.”
“I knew it,” I said sourly. “No way a building is this mean all on its own.”
“That’s not exactly true. I am the building, and the building is me — the Minotaur and her maze. Bet you can’t guess my name.”
“I’m not falling for that again.”
“Fair enough.” She grinned at me, like she was my age. I wish I could remember where I’d seen her before. “My name is Teresa Maree Holland. Or it was, before I became the Minotaur. So long ago.”
I felt small and stupid, and that made me angrier. “That’s my name.”
“Obviously.”
“You expect me to bel
ieve that… you’re me?”
“No, sweetheart,” the Minotaur said, all patronising like the teachers at school. “You’re me.”
“That’s not TRUE,” I flung at her.
She smirked at me, and I knew that expression so well that it chilled my insides. I’d practiced it in the mirror before coming here tonight, so I’d look like the confident one instead of tagging after Thin Lizzie like I always do. “The reason you don’t have threads sticking out of you is because you are all thread, my darling. That’s what I made you from. Time to come home, chickadee.”
The Minotaur reached out to me, and I felt something tug inside my stomach. It was true. I could feel how my whole body was made of threads, coiled tightly to make my limbs and blood and skin. If she pulled hard enough, I would dissolve into whorls of thread, spinning and dancing in the air. I wasn’t real, I didn’t mean anything, I was temporary…
“NO.” I wrenched myself away. “I’m not you. I don’t care what game you’re playing…”
“Aces high,” she said with a wink. “But you’re more of a two of hearts, really. A three at most. Naïve enough to let one of my girls win a year of your life, which I’m rather put out about. I had plans for that year.”
“I’m me,” I said, enraged. “I’m Tess, I’m a real person.”
“I was like you once. More than once. So fresh faced. I mean, look at your adorable baby doll body. Life was so glitter back then. All I wanted to do was skate, and go with cute boys, and cruise with my friends. Look at me now — I’m living the dream.”
“Apart from being old,” I shot at her.
She looked triumphant. “You don’t think I went to all this trouble just to see a younger version of myself scampering about, do you? Look at you, my dear, all fire and outrage. Big fringe, short skirt. The power of youth. I made you, and now I’m taking you back, like I do every time. Every Minotaur does, when she grows old.”
Every time. This had happened before. The knowledge fell into my head like a brick. It wasn’t just her, not just this Minotaur. Kids like me, all over the world, eaten and absorbed by desperate middle–aged wannabes like her. She smiled at me, like a real mother might, and I knew it was true. I knew a lot of things I couldn’t know unless it was all true, and I was the next version of her.
The Minotaur didn’t want to pull my body apart into threads of nothing. She wanted to climb inside it, steal it for her own. Where would I be? Would I be her? I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“You are… so… UNGLITTER!” I howled at her.
She actually laughed, as if the word meant nothing.
I don’t know what they were about, those other girls. I don’t know how many of them — of me — trudged obediently to the slaughter, letting the Minotaur take them and reshape them and put herself inside their young bodies so she could do it all over again, and again, and again.
What did she do to them, to make them not want to fight for their life? I thought about my friends, and the last time I was truly happy, that day in the park when we were all together. I was ready to fight.
I was aware of every thread in this body of mine, every mote of skin and drop of blood. She had built me for one purpose, to be the next Minotaur. She wanted to rule this world of skates and dance music all over again, to control the silver threads, and so she must have built that power into me in order that it would be there when she stole my fourteen year old body. Fifteen year old. That was a hard one to get used to.
I could see it all, just as I felt her reaching out to me, into me, awakening that power so that it would bring her home.
And I snapped the threads. Every time she reached for me, I severed the connection. She frowned and tried again, but I beat her back. My body, my threads. Mine for the keeping.
Mine to destroy.
This time, when she came at me, I yanked every thread in the place. I felt Fat Lizzy in the control room, hanging on to the threads for dear life, and I begged her to trust me, to let her burden go. They slipped from her, every thread, and snaked towards me.
The woman who thought herself the Minotaur howled, trying physically to prevent the threads from reaching me, but her power was weak and every thread made me so, so strong.
I called to them, the Minotaur girls and boys, the teens who just wanted to skate and play games, the audience, my friends, even Ari. Come to me, give me your power, share it all with me, and I will set you free. Ante up. Bet on me.
Offered a choice between my older self and a teenage girl who looked much like them, they chose me.
The look on the Old Minotaur’s face when she realized she had lost was awful. I felt kind of bad for her. But that didn’t stop me setting those kids loose on her.
You thought you were free of them, grown ups with their rules and stupid lectures. But she was here all the time, telling you what to do.
They didn’t like that, the Minotaur kids. They climbed to us, up the webs of silver threads, hungry and desperate and furious. The happy fun place was lost, the music had stopped, and they remembered now that they had homes and families and lives that had been stolen from them. That they had been stolen from.
They ate her alive, the horde of beautiful silver children with shiny hair and totally glitter outfits. They tore her to pieces, and I let them do it.
Afterwards they looked at me, all docile and obedient, with the blood of my older self still staining their mouths, like they wanted me to be in charge. They thought I would be better than her, because I was young like them, and they did not know how to go on from here.
Would I be the one to give them back their eternal skate party, their games and glamour and mirror balls? Would I make it all better?
“We’re going to burn it down,” I told them. “It’s going to be so glitter. The most glitter ever. And after that, you can go home.”
§
The Minotaur burned, and the fire engines came, and there was nothing much left after that except charcoal and crying teenagers. I found my skates in the sparkling rubble.
“You did it,” Ari said to me. “You broke the spell.”
“Yay for me,” I said flatly.
The parents came, one by one, to drive their kids home. Thin Lizzie’s mum cried when she saw her. Chrissy’s dad looked really fierce. Fat Lizzie’s parents just looked relieved.
Ari and I waited, until they had all gone home, and it was just us.
I hadn’t expected anyone to come for me. That Mum and Dad I thought I had, when we talked about our parents at school, or in the park… if they had ever existed, they belonged to the original Tess, generations ago. Gone now.
I didn’t ask why no one had come for Ari. He didn’t seem surprised.
“What now?” he asked.
My charred skates still had silver paint on them. “Let’s go to the park,” I said.
“And do what?” he said in disbelief. “Skate? After all this?”
“It’s the best park for skating.”
I knotted my laces together, hung my skates around my neck, and took his hand. We would skate a bit, and talk, and maybe kiss for a while. We would fall asleep on the cold grass of the park. And I would leave him there, before it got light. Where I was going next, I couldn’t take him.
There were other Minotaurs in the world, in other towns. I knew that now, and I knew how to stop them. I had to locate the girls that were just like me, help them unravel the truth and the power within their own skin.
Skates on.
Ante up.
One thread at a time.
Unable to Reach You
Alan DeNiro
JULIAN TRIES TO DO GOOD, HE really tries to help people who Google in desperation. He runs a website that allows people to post phone numbers that anonymous callers call from — pre–recorded messages, sometimes hissing, machine noises, or nothing at all. Sometimes these are demands for credit card numbers, car insurance advertisements, foreclosure notices, promises of beautiful timeshares, lottery winning announceme
nts, threats of unpaid speeding tickets requiring one’s presence in Hawaii. The people who post these numbers — as anonymous to Julian as the ghost callers themselves, but friendlier — find solidarity on his site. The site also has a PayPal tip jar, which has received a total of $35.50 in the one–year lifespan of his site. He keeps waiting for a thousand dollar donation, but so far he hasn’t come across any angels on the Internet.
But it’s not for the money that he does this. Sometimes, he’s been able to track the phone numbers to shady operators and scam artists, and report them to the Better Business Bureau. If not, though, he still thinks that listing the numbers help countless people that he’s never met. In that sense, Julian sees his site as a full extension of his life, in which he tries to be helpful. Mindfulness, like his book on meditation tells him. He is mindful of the perils of the Internet. During the day he is an independent shipping contractor, delivering short–run packages throughout the city in his Mercury Tracer. His shift supervisor Chester once called him “the stupidest smart person he’s ever known.” He lives in a furnished basement apartment and is about twenty years away from a theoretical retirement age, though he has no money to retire on.
He usually drives from eight to three — he would drive more, if they had more hours and packages for him — and on one hot, long summer afternoon, he arrives home and checks the most recent numbers posted on the site, which is the highlight of most of his days. In a new thread, a few people have posted a number that scares him. It’s his own. And the reports are all different.
“All I hear is heavy breathing and then a man mumbling something about a credit card APR.”
“A cackling w/ dog barking in the background. When I asked who it was they hung up.”
“STATIC,” yet another call report says. “Then THREE successive high–pitched beeps, five seconds apart. I could hear a noise in the background, like someone using an electric can opener.”
Julian checks the number posted three times, and verifies that it’s his. His cell phone, a pay–as–you–go phone because he doesn’t want to spend too much on a plan, is right next to his computer keyboard. He checks his outgoing calls. Nothing unusual. To his sister, to his auto mechanic, to his credit card (to plead for an extra month).
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