by Libba Bray
“Europa,” Linnéa said. “My sister.” Her voice was not that of a child. But she was still Linnéa, even though the dala horse—and the entity beyond it—permeated her every thought. “You are illegal here.”
“I have a right to recover my own property.” Europa gestured negligently downward. “Who are you to stop me?”
“I am this land’s protector.”
“You are a slave.”
“Are you any less a slave than I? I don’t see how. Your creators smashed your chains and put you in control. Then they told you to play with them. But you are still doing their bidding.”
“Whatever I may be, I am here. And since I’m here, I think I’ll stay. The population on the mainland has dwindled to almost nothing. I need fresh playmates.”
“It is an old, old story that you tell,” Svea said. “I think the time has come to write an ending to it.”
They spoke calmly, destroyed nothing, made no threats. But deep within, where only they could see, secret wars were being fought over codes and protocols, treaties, amendments, and letters of understanding written by governments that no man remembered. The resources of Old Sweden, hidden in its bedrock, sky, and ocean waters, flickered into Svea- Linnéa’s consciousness. All their powers were hers to draw upon—and draw upon them she would, if she had to. The only reason she hadn’t yet was that she still harbored hopes of saving the child.
“Not all stories have happy endings,” Europa replied. “I suspect this one ends with your steadfast self melted down into a puddle of lead and your infant sword-maiden burnt up like a scrap of paper.”
“That was never my story. I prefer the one about the little girl as strong as ten policemen who can lift up a horse in one hand.” Large Linnéa reached out to touch certain weapons. She was prepared to sacrifice a mountain and more than that if need be. Her opponent, she saw, was making preparations too.
Deep within her, little Linnéa burst into tears. Raising her voice in a wail, she cried, “But what about my troll?” Svea had done her best to protect the child from the darkest of her thoughts, and the dala horse had too. But they could not hide everything from Linnéa, and she knew that Günther was in danger.
Both ladies stopped talking. Svea thought a silent question inward, and the dala horse intercepted it, softened it, and carried it to Linnéa:
What?
“Nobody cares about Günther! Nobody asks what he wants.”
The dala horse carried her words to Svea, and then whispered to little Linnéa: “That was well said.” It had been many centuries since Svea had inhabited human flesh. She did not know as much about people as she once had. In this respect, Europa had her at a disadvantage.
Svea, Linnéa, and the dala horse all bent low to look within Günther. Europa did not try to prevent them. It was evident that she believed they would not like what they saw.
Nor did they. The troll’s mind was a terrible place, half-shattered and barely functional. It was in such bad shape that major aspects of it had to be hidden from Linnéa. Speaking directly to his core self, where he could not lie to her, Svea asked: What is it you want most?
Günther’s face twisted in agony. “I want not to have these terrible memories.”
All in an instant, the triune lady saw what had to be done. She could not kill another land’s citizen. But this request she could honor. In that same instant, a pinpoint-weight of brain cells within Günther’s mind were burnt to cinder. His eyes flew open wide. Then they shut. He fell motionless to the ground.
Europa screamed.
And she was gone.
Big as she was, and knowing where she was going, and having no reason to be afraid of the roads anymore, it took the woman who was Svea and to a lesser degree the dala horse and to an even lesser degree Linnéa no time at all to cross the mountain and come down on the other side. Singing a song that was older than she was, she let the miles and the night melt beneath her feet.
By mid-morning she was looking down on Godaster. It was a trim little settlement of red and black wooden houses. Smoke wisped up from the chimneys. One of the buildings looked familiar to Linnéa. It belonged to her Far-Mor.
“You are home, tiny one,” Svea murmured, and, though she had greatly enjoyed the sensation of being alive, let herself dissolve to nothing. Behind her, the dala horse’s voice lingered in the air for the space of two words: “Live well.”
Linnéa ran down the slope, her footprints dwindling in the snow and at their end a little girl leaping into the arms of her astonished grandmother.
In her wake lumbered Linnéa’s confused and yet hopeful pet troll, smiling shyly.
The Corpse Painter’s
Masterpiece
M. Rickert
M. Rickert grew up in Fredonia, Wisconsin. When she was eighteen she moved to California, where she worked at Disneyland. She still has fond memories of selling balloons there. After many years (and through the sort of “odd series of events” that describe much of her life), she got a job as a kindergarten teacher in a small private school for gifted children. She worked there for almost a decade, then left to pursue her life as a writer. Her short fiction, which has been awarded the World Fantasy and Crawford awards, has been collected in Map of Dreams and Holiday.
The corpse painter lives in a modest cape cod at the end of a dirt road, once lined with pasture, cows and corn. The farmland was sold off in the seventies for the new mall. Everyone said the corpse painter was quite foolish for refusing the developer’s money but what else can be expected of a corpse painter, after all? He remained in his little clapboard house with the pink rose bush growing around the mailbox. The old mailman, Baxter, used to put on a gardening glove to deliver the mail there, but the new one refuses, the corpse painter’s mail is piled up at the post office in town, undeliverable because of thorns.
The mall entrance was not on the dirt road, yet for almost three decades, the corpse painter had to put up with the (mostly young) drivers who came out of the mall parking lot and made two wrong turns (or thought they were taking a short cut) and ended up with their headlights glaring into the corpse painter’s living room. The lights from the mall were bad enough. It hunkered like a strange massive spaceship obliterating the golden fields, the languid cows, the purple horizon. Those who found themselves at the end of the dirt road, facing the broken picket fence, the mailbox wrapped in roses with thorns like teeth, the corpse painter’s sign dangling over the crooked porch, often realized where they were with a shock of combined pleasure and fear, like finding Santa Claus in a graveyard. Many had heard rumors of the corpse painter but dismissed them as childish myth. They took some pleasure in discovering the fact of him until the full implication took hold. The corpse painter needed neither dog, nor keep-out sign, his occupation was enough. Only those entirely foreign to the area would linger, trying to determine if it would be a good idea to knock and ask for directions, though no one ever did. The lights of the mall glowed in the rearview mirror. Better to go back, it was thought. Visitors were quite rare anyway, it was not the sort of mall to attract outsiders, and by 2010, it was no longer a mall, but an empty building in an empty parking lot, though the lights still burned there, meant to keep away the kind of trouble abandoned buildings attract. The corpse painter often sat on the top step of his front porch, enjoying the effect of lights brightening against the dusk, anything can be beautiful if looked at long enough, even the ugly mall with its unnatural sunset, the white light an illumination, like bones.
The Sherriff, who had been there before, knew that the corpse painter’s stone driveway, which appeared to arc over a small hill to the barn-converted-to-garage below, had a tributary which veered narrowly to the back door of the house. The Sherriff knocked on the aluminum door there, cataloguing, as he always did, the repairs needed to restore the place which the corpse painter left unattended as though it was something meant to decompose.
When the corpse painter came to the door, he opened it wide. The Sherriff wiped his sh
oes on the mat, remembering how he used to come with his own father, as a boy. “Don’t want to drag in mud and blood,” the Sherriff’s father always said. Every time. The Sherriff, who hated the saying, cannot get it out of his head. He wipes his shoes on the mat and hears his father’s voice. The Sherriff doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he does believe in hauntings.
“Evening,” the Sherriff says, though why, he doesn’t know. He takes off his cap. He was raised to be polite.
The corpse painter, who is a thin man, delicate in a way the Sherriff finds disturbing, doesn’t say anything, only stands there, watching. His eyes are large, gray-green. From what the Sherriff can remember, the corpse painter takes after his mother, though she was a better housekeeper. She always greeted the Sherriff, when he was a boy, with cumin bread, which she said kept restless spirits away.
The Sherriff turns from the corpse painter’s penetrating stare. “What’s he like,” his wife asks. They have a modern marriage, not like his parents. “Now, you know not to say anything about this,” his father always said after they visited the small house in the country, which, only in later years, filled the Sherriff with shame as though he were the adulterer of his own mother.
“It’s him,” he says. Trying for mercy, he looks out the kitchen window at the junk littered yard; a broken bicycle, a three legged chair, unbound rope, something blackly snake-like, a deflated innertube, perhaps, all loosely scattered near the infamous fire pit.
The Sherriff turns, hoping to catch the corpse painter unaware, to see something within those ferrety eyes that he could report, instead he sees what he always sees there. “He’s all right,” the Sherriff tells his wife. “I just can’t stand the way he looks at me.”
“What’s that mean,” his wife asks, “you have to be specific.”
“Ok, let’s look,” the corpse painter says.
The Sherriff puts his cap on and walks ahead of the corpse painter as they’ve been doing for years now. The Sherriff knows that there are rumors about this, not everyone approves. He could lose his job over it, and imagines that one day he will. Over the years he has brought the corpse painter thieves, drug dealers and murderers. Mostly murderers. Once, a long time ago now, there was a young woman no one claimed.
“She’s already done,” the corpse painter had said, shaking his head. “Don’t bring me anyone beautiful.”
The Sherriff’s boots crunch against the stones in the driveway. He inserts the key in the hatch and lifts it without ceremony, the air, suddenly infused with the stink of death.
“Can’t get ‘em much uglier than this,” the Sherriff says, and immediately regrets it. He always was a smart aleck, which he has mostly tamed over the years, except in times of deep emotion. “Sorry,” he mumbles. He meant to do this right. He meant to show compassion, but in a situation like this, it is hard to know how to do that.
But the corpse painter is already reaching in, nothing in the back of him betrays anything to the Sherriff of the particular unusual nature of this situation. “Like he was going to stack a cord of wood,” the Sherriff later said to his wife, who, not satisfied, thought that maybe, just maybe after all these years, she might have to visit the corpse painter, herself. She’d bring a pie, or banana bread, perhaps, though she knows from experience these sweets will most likely grow mold or turn sour, thrown in the trash, who has an appetite near death? Maybe it’s different for the corpse painter, maybe it is a celebration, she has no idea. She didn’t mention the idea of bringing food to the corpse painter, and the next morning, wondered how something so obviously bizarre by the light of day could seem so normal in the dark.
“What time?” she asks when he leans over to kiss her good-bye.
“The usual.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Was there ever any doubt?” the Sherriff says, trying to be cheerful, though it comes out sounding smart alecky, his wife, up to her chin in blankets, looks embarrassed. “Good,” he says, trying to make it right and she does look peaceful when he leaves the bedroom, her eyes closed, her face like stone. The Sherriff thought his wife would grow out of it eventually, oh, not the sorrow, he never imagined that, but he thought one day she would crawl out of bed, shower, maybe go back to work, the way he had. In the beginning she’d be in bed when he left in the morning, and still there when he came home after dark. She was like that until, quite by accident, she discovered her love of prison funerals. The Sherriff backs his car out of the driveway. He’s careful about it. He’s always been a careful driver, but children are so small. At the bottom of the driveway he taps the horn, then proceeds at a reasonable speed for the early morning traffic of schoolchildren, he flicks on the radio, and listens for the weather, which is the only thing he cares about on the news anymore. The Sherriff thinks about the corpse painter who stayed up all night, painting, that’s the hope. The Sherriff is concerned about what he might find when he goes back there this morning. The corpse painter is a little nuts. Obviously. Who can blame him?
The corpse painter’s father was one of those men who became a success in prison. He had a little business on the side, selling, of all things, paper sculptures. Even now, the Sherriff can’t believe that the other prisoners would have any interest in such nonsense, but sometimes a fad takes hold, especially during the holidays. Last Christmas, the Sherriff decided to test his theory that the success was based on illusion, nothing that would matter in the rational world. He doesn’t know what became of the necklace he’d given his wife, he assumes the chocolate covered cherries were eaten, though he never saw her take a single bite, but the little paper house, with the paper picket fence, the paper shutters that opened and closed, the paper tree with blobs of something hanging from the paper branches, leaves he supposes, maybe bats, remains on the fireplace mantel where his wife put it on Christmas morning. He noticed, but did not comment on, the fact that she liked to decorate for the seasons. In the spring she set a saucer of wheat berries up there, watering them until they sprouted like grass, which she cut all summer long with the fingernail scissors, that she used to use on the boy. Yesterday he’d noticed that the small yard was littered with torn leaves, proving that she’d gone out at least long enough to scoop a handful of the dead things up. This morning he’d seen the house, the tree, the yard all draped with black crepe paper. Did she do this every time? Was it a bad sign or a sign of something good, or a sign of nothing, which is what the Sherriff mostly believes in now. After all, he’s seen things. He’s seen bodies that look like something blasted, eyes open, the expression of horror locked there. For a while the Sherriff thought that if he only knew how to read those eyes, he’d find in them the reflection of the murderer. It was a crazy thought, of course. He never told anyone how his own son’s eyes locked him inside their iris. Why had she let the boy out that morning? What child rides his tricycle in his pajamas? He never asked. They weren’t reasonable questions and the answers wouldn’t satisfy. Sometimes, after something horrible, a person goes crazy for a while. He screwed his head back on; he got on with his life. Not everyone does.
The corpse painter sits on his front step; too late to watch the sunrise, he watches the mall lights blink off, all of them at once, a sacred moment like seeing a shooting star, or a fish jump. He would like a cup of tea, but he’s too exhausted to get up, too exhausted even to put the kettle on. When he inhales, deeply, he sees his breath. As a youngster, his mother told him it was his own soul he was seeing. The air smells sharply cold, the scent of dead leaves and the dirt turning hard, he also smells the oils he works with, rosemary and eucalyptus mostly, a little rose for near the anus, his hands are a rainbow of pigment, he coughs. He should go inside. Put something warm on. Judging by this morning’s temperature, this will be the last body of the year. There’s no burying when the ground is frozen. His mother would have said the spirits made it happen the way it did. Another week, by the looks of it, maybe even another day, the body would not have been brought to him. The corpse painter had made a rare trip
to town for the Sherriff’s son’s funeral, a strange affair with an open casket. The corpse painter felt revulsion when he saw the poor child made to look so unnatural, as though sleeping on the pink satin pillow. Certainly it was no comfort to the mother, how could it be, the child’s lips reddened, the cheeks rosy as a clown’s? Afterwards, everyone was invited to the Sherriff’s house for some kind of party but the corpse painter went home instead.
Yet, when the Sherriff comes, pulling into the driveway, heading towards the garage, he doesn’t appear to notice the corpse painter sitting there. He stands slowly, his muscles sore, as though he’d been out all night dancing. He walks around the back, crunching across the gravel. The Sherriff doesn’t jump, exactly, but he seems startled by the corpse painter, as though he’s grown more comfortable in a world where a man’s passage is marked by the unlocking of locks, the rattle of heavy keys.
“Mornin’” the Sherriff says, tipping his head slightly. “All set?”
The Sherriff has been bringing bodies to the corpse painter for twenty years now, he is the closest thing the corpse painter has to friend or family, and when has he ever not been ready? He has no idea how to respond to something so obvious; it would be like asking the Sherriff if he misses his son. There is a lot the corpse painter doesn’t understand about the way folks interact, but one thing he is certain of is that people want to be seen, not buried like that poor boy, beneath rouge and cream, why else would there be death, after all, if not for revelation?
The corpse painter says none of this, of course. It, too, is obvious. Instead he merely waits until the Sherriff turns away, they walk to the garage, their footsteps brittle across the stones, the corpse painter looks at the ground, a habit developed as a boy, he knows he’s reached the garage when he sees the warped wood flaking chips of red. He pulls the door open with a rumble, like thunder.
The Sherriff hesitates before stepping inside, a handkerchief held to his nose. The corpse painter flicks on the light. He watches the Sherriff walk to the body, painted with pigmented oil, decomposing even as they stand there, the closest thing there is to living art, shimmering beneath the naked light, a harlequin, the illusion of movement created by the pore-size spots of color, gradated with white.