I also took a silver–bladed ceremonial knife in a leather sheath he’d given me because it was sharp enough to make me feel safer.
§
The sign outside — reading “ICELAND” in big rectangular retro–looking blue letters — is the best–preserved part of the old skating rink. The ruined Iceland is a big, low building, painted in fading blue and dirty white, shaped sort of like a warehouse, with windows and front doors all boarded up and scrawled with graffiti. The back of the place is built partly into a hill, which does give it kind of a barrow/fairy–hill vibe, though I’d never noticed that before. There are small parking lots on either side, closed off by high chain–link fences intermittently topped with barbed wire, and the fences extend for the full length of the building on both sides. The front steps are scattered with garbage, and homeless people sleep there a lot, in the covered entryway. But there’s a place where the fence has been sliced open, leaving a gap big enough to squeeze through. From there you can just scramble up the hillside to the building itself or onto the roof, where some of the boarded–up windows are only sealed in theory.
I waited until there was no one around, then wriggled through the fence and made my way up the grassy hill. I found one of the loose boards and pulled it away, then peered inside.
It was dark, and after a moment’s debate I decided to risk using a little flashlight. I shone it around inside, and the place was pretty depressing. The bleachers where people used to sit to watch hockey were still there, but the floor of the rink was covered up (of course, I don’t know what I was expecting — a pond?). The walls inside were just as heavily tagged as the ones outside, maybe more so. The place looked pretty much like a high school gymnasium after the apocalypse, and smelled like pee, cat and human both. There were no revels here. But there were no people, either, as far as I could tell, so I wriggled in through the window to the bleachers and sat on the top bench. Coming here was pointless, but it was the last thing I’d planned to do with Crater, so screw it, this could be my memorial. I just wished I’d brought a flask of booze. And that he was here to share it. I’d have shared gladly, even if he did always insult my taste in —
That’s what I was thinking when everything changed. My ears popped painfully, and my eyes watered, and I almost fell off the bleachers, because the world tilted, and I thought, earthquake?
But it wasn’t an earthquake. It was a breach. An overlap. Two worlds inhabiting, briefly, the same space.
The old ice rink became a ballroom, but it was also still an ice rink — complete with a gleaming oval of white ice, and figures dressed in elaborate gowns and peculiar costumes gliding around. The bare metal support struts cluttering up the ceiling were hung now with paper (I guess?) lanterns glowing pale green, in fanciful shapes: dragons, jellyfish, spiders, castles, swords, antlered skulls. Moss and vines and streamers dangled, too. There were long tables heaped with food and bottles and pitchers of various liquids, the tables drifting around on the ice as if they were skating, and somehow there was never a collision. There were box seats high up on the other side of the ice, and musicians in those, playing harps and bagpipes and flutes and drums, some dressed in tuxedoes and some in zoot suits and some wearing nothing but rags, and the music that came out was inexplicably all bells and violins. There was a scented smoke in the air, not quite colorless, sort of a golden mist, and my head swam with the flavor. I came down off the bleachers carefully — they were full of people now, sitting and chatting and drinking and laughing and screaming, except they were only people at first glance. At second glance they were mostly animals, and sometimes objects. On a third glance they were a little of all of the above.
There were lights shining in various levels of brightness from various directions (not always from obvious sources) and no one except for me appeared to cast a shadow. I clutched the sheathed dagger in my pocket, and felt the stones clattering in my other pocket, and stepped down to the ice.
I was glad I’d worn my hiking boots, because the tread kept me from sliding around. The ice wasn’t mirror–smooth, anyway, more beat up, like people had been skating on it for hours, which maybe they had, in the Other Place. I tried to count, or even to estimate, how many people — or “beings” maybe — were there, but I gave up. Scores, anyway. Sometimes three people would seem to merge into one, and sometimes one would break apart into many, like a flock of birds scattering. There were antlers and snouts and earrings and, I swear, a man–sized egg wearing a waistcoat, going past on skates. He did a double axel jump right in front of me.
I moved among the crowd, and no one seemed to pay me any mind, though they moved out of my way. Something like a small mountain wearing crushed red velvet and something like a bear with a fish bowl for a head stepped away from a slowly–drifting table covered in empty crystal goblets… and there was Crater, holding a bottle, filling the glasses. He was dressed in a red–lined opera cape and an old–fashioned tuxedo instead of scruffed–up denim and leather, but when he saw me, his smile was warm and human.
“You made it!” he said, not shouting, but somehow I heard him clearly despite the music and the noise of the revelers.
I almost jumped at him and wrapped him up in a hug, but he was still pouring, so I just shuffled and gaped. “You’re alive.”
“In the Other Place, even the rocks and the water are alive, so I guess it’s no surprise I am, too.” He kept pouring, and I wondered if he was planning to fill all the glasses on the table, and how that small bottle could possibly hold enough liquid to do so. Then I noticed that every time he poured, a different colored fluid came out — amber and red–orange and purple and pink and every color of sunsets and the rainbows you see shimmering on oil slicks.
I touched his arm, and he paused in his work. He reached out with his free hand, brushing my cheek. The back of his hand was so cold it burned. “They took me. I’m sorry. I… never really got away, I guess. They were aware of me all the time, the way you keep an eye on your toddler at the park to make sure she doesn’t wander too far. And the extra time they gave me, the extra life, came with a price. I’m serving. But… at least I’m serving in heaven.” His smile was weak.
“Come with me.” I grabbed his hand, even though it was like clutching a bag of ice cubes.
“You should go,” he said. “You haven’t been here long, maybe it’s only morning back in our world by now, or the next afternoon —”
He stopped talking, and I became aware of a figure standing close behind me. I turned, but the guy — or whatever — sort of half–stepped around, just out of sight, and no matter how quickly I spun, he remained almost behind me, just glimpsed from the corner of my eye. Eventually I stopped twirling, because I was getting even more dizzy, and I felt like an idiot, or a dog chasing its tail. I had the impression the creature standing behind my left shoulder was hairy, beastly, and there was a rank smell like wet dog, but its voice was smooth and cultured when it said, “This one is a poet. We have wines that loosen words and send them spiraling up, up, up. Bid her drink.”
Crater gritted his teeth, but he picked up a glass, filled with something the color and consistency of grapefruit juice, but glowing with an inner light. He started to offer it to me, and I was trying to decide how dangerous it would be to refuse, when Crater grunted and flung the full glass past me, into the face — I presumed — of the monster at my back. A little of the fluid splashed my face as it went by, and though I was careful to keep my mouth shut tightly, I did get a stinging drop in my left eye.
Most of it struck the target, though. There was a terrible roar, which sounded like sheets of paper being ripped, and then Crater was flinging glasses in all directions and shouting at me to run.
I didn’t run, though. I gave him my silver knife — his silver knife — and he looked at me in surprise, then plunged the blade into one of the glasses. When he drew it out again, the blade was shining like the last coals in a campfire.
We ran for the bleachers. Almost no one tried to stop us
— mostly they ignored us, or doubled over laughing — but the few who did move to block our paths fell back when Crater slashed at them with the knife. I sprinted up the steps, mounting them two at a time, and while Crater wasn’t that fast, he was close. The window I’d come through was still there, a little rectangle of freedom, and I scrambled through into darkness.
I was sure, sure, that Crater wouldn’t follow me. Something would stop him first. Or he’d get his upper body through the window, and then something would grab him by the ankles and drag him back in, his face frozen in an expression of longing and terror and regret. Or he’d make it all the way out but all the years he’d put aside by magic would fall on him at once and he’d turn into a skeleton and then into dust, right beforeme.
Instead he collapsed on his back on the hillside, the dagger in his hand just a silver blade again, and stared up at the sky. “You saved me,” he said. “While I was there, it didn’t feel like I needed saving, but now… I know I was a slave. I would have stayed, and done my time, but they wanted you to drink, they wanted to give you something, too, so they could take you later. All that time I thought I stole from them, but they just set a hook in me so they could reel it in later —”
I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He was warm, as warm as ever before. When I pulled away, he blinked at me. “Aerin… I know I said you’re an old soul and age is just a number and all, but, let’s be honest. I’m way too old for you. Or maybe it’s just that you’re way too young for me.”
“No shit. You’re too old for my grandmother. I just wanted to shut you up for a minute. Shouldn’t we get away from here?”
He shook his head. “Climbing out, I think it was like popping a soap bubble. The connection is broken. That’s just empty space in there again. The revel was a trap. It’s easy to get in, but you’re not supposed to get out so quickly. You have those stones in your pocket, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“I’m so glad I gave you the real thing and not some rocks I found in a park or something.” He sat up and groaned.
“What now?” I said.
“You should be safe. I think. You didn’t drink or eat anything — right? — and the stones in your pocket will make it impossible for them to fix on your location. You’re carrying the earth of everywhere.”
“But what about you? Will they come back for you later?”
“It was nearly fifty years before they came this time. With luck, the difference in our timeline and theirs will work in my favor. But all the same… I think I’d better leave town. I haven’t been to Europe in a while.”
I sighed. “I thought you were dead, you asshole. And now you’re leaving for Europe? I guess that’s better than you being in the ground or a butler for demons.”
He touched my cheek again. “Aerin, are you crying? For me? I’m touched, seriously.”
I rubbed my eye. I wasn’t crying. The eye was just watering from being splashed by that drop of strange wine.
§
The little while at the revel had translated to an entire day of time in our world — not that my housemates noticed my absence — so I’d missed an exam, but I claimed terrible gut–twisting viral agony and got permission to do a make–up test. I almost didn’t take it. I thought about dropping out and following Crater to Europe, but I didn’t think I’d become the person I wanted to by being someone else’s shadow, so I just helped him pack up a few things and pillaged the most interesting books and booze from his apartment and gave him a kiss on the cheek before he left for the airport.
After he was gone, I sat on a log in the eucalyptus grove on campus, where we’d first met, and later talked, and later did things other than talking. I closed my left eye, and looked at the trees, and they were just trees, tall white pillars, an invasive species that didn’t belong in California, but were beautiful anyway.
Then I closed my right eye, and looked at the trees with just my left eye, the one splashed by wine from the Other Place.
The trees weren’t full of angels, but they were filled with other things, even stranger and more luminous and breathtaking, with wings of ice and lace and twilight, and though I could see them, I was almost certain they couldn’t see me.
I opened both eyes and took out a little red notebook and a black pen and began to write poems for the rest of my life.
Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl
Sofia Samatar
1. Pink Ice
BESS AND THE GREEN GIRL ARE out for drinks. They’re at a club called Pink Ice, where everybody gets a lollipop at the door. Rumor has it the lollipops are poisoned, or at least drugged. Their white ink messages — JUICY, KISS ME — glow in the dark.
Bess and the Green Girl sit at the bar and twirl lollipops on their tongues. They look fabulous. They’re both wearing high–heeled shoes with pointy toes. Bess’s are yellow. Her image gleams in the mirror behind the bar: round red mouth and high–piled hair. She wears a white blouse with a lot of ruffles over the breast.
The Green Girl is wearing an oversized t–shirt that says LIVELIVELIVE. She has long, flat hair and terrible posture. A jumble of plastic bead necklaces covers her throat. She crunches lustily on the nub of her lollipop, gnawing it off the stick. The Green Girl has surprisingly large, strong teeth, and so does Bess. They’ve talked about whether your teeth keep growing afterward. Bess doesn’t think they keep growing, but maybe you get a new set, the way children do. She dips her lollipop into her vodka and cranberry.
“This place is the best,” the Green Girl yells.
“Love it,” shouts Bess. The music is physical, invasive. She can feel every note in her bones.
“It’s even better than that place with the smoke.”
“Mm,” Bess agrees around her lollipop.
“It’s like, I feel like I’m getting an injection.”
Pink Ice is an injection of noise and movement and beauty and youth. Boys and girls crowd in, waving lollipops in the air. They wear black boots and sparkly hair–bands, black lipstick and sparkly eye shadow, black lace stockings, everything black and everything sparkly.
The Green Girl seizes Bess’s arm. “Look! I want that!”
There’s a girl in a feather stole.
“You want that? That?”
“What?”
“It’s feathers!”
“So?”
“Chicken feathers! It’s horrible!”
The Green Girl rolls her eyes. “Can you open your mind, please? Even a tiny bit? There is an entire world beyond cardigans.”
“Just because I have taste,” says Bess. She does have taste, she gets it from magazines. She gives the Green Girl a playful kick with the tip of her shoe. The shoe leaves a dent in the Green Girl’s spray–tanned leg.
“Ugh,” says the Green Girl, bending down to rub out the dent. “Would you stop?”
“Sorry,” says Bess.
“ ‘Sokay,” says the Green Girl. She shakes back her hair and brightens. “I love this song!” She jumps down off her stool and shimmies into the crowd. Her t–shirt’s so huge her skirt doesn’t show. She looks like the other girls at Pink Ice: fabulous and starving and sparkly and lost.
§
2. T–Shirts
A thin boy in thin jeans asks Bess to dance.
Bess dances.
Bess and the Green Girl love to dance.
Bess and the Green Girl love to dance and drink and take little white pills and little colored pills and they love to go home with boys.
They love shopping and shoplifting and the movies.
Also, the Green Girl loves making her own t–shirts. She gets these big white t–shirts and rips off the sleeves, and then she puts messages on them in Sharpie or in puffy, candy–colored iron–on letters. The t–shirt mania started when Bess and the Green Girl were rummaging in boxes at Goodwill, and the Green Girl found an old shirt that said I WOULD DIE 4 U. “Hey!” said the Green Girl. “That’s us! That is so us!” Her eye
s were huge, silver, ecstatic. She bought the t–shirt and wore it every day for a month. Then she started creating her own t–shirts. The first t–shirt she made said I DIED 4 U. Bess refuses to go out with the Green Girl when the Green Girl is wearing this shirt, because how tacky can you get?
The Green Girl has a shirt that says DEAD BEAT. She has one that says BASTA and one that says CONQUER. She has one that says I WANT YOU GREEN. She has even made a couple of t–shirts for Bess. One of them says CLIPPITY CLOP. Every once in a while Bess wears it to bed.
§
3. Roman Holiday
At first, they didn’t want to be themselves. They started as men, of course. They had a lot of sex. But after a while they began to feel stranded and strange. It was, the Green Girl explained, as if you’d lost something important, like your phone, and soon you’d remember what it was and know that your life was ruined. A looming, anguished feeling. So then they stopped being men, and were women instead. Sometimes they were old women, and sometimes kids. Sometimes they were even men again. They have been clowns and cowboys. But mostly they’re who they were, only smarter, and with better clothes.
They have been all over the world. Last summer they went to Rome with Ophelia. Ophelia is always asking to hang out with them. They’re still not sure how they feel about this. “She’s okay,” says the Green Girl, “but, sort of like, I don’t know — weedy?” Bess thinks “tragic” might be a better word, but “weedy” works too. On the Rome trip, Ophelia went to bed early every night and cried herself to sleep, and Bess and the Green Girl sat up with their feet on the coffee table, little nubs of sponge between their toes. They waited for their toenails to dry and flipped through the shiny magazines they’d stolen from the lobby.
“The thing is,” the Green Girl said, “she hasn’t moved on. She’s sort of like stuck.”
Glitter & Mayhem Page 19