by Ivana Skye
My anger was, in its own way, an ocean, the ocean, any ocean, my ocean.
“Gyaaaah!” I shouted as I threw another rock, smiling at the splash, smiling and smiling. I was real, I was myself, I was Cijaya, and she never, not even once, had the right to hurt me.
11
Sedge
the doormat prince
I had, as a general statement, not been having the easiest of times traveling with Nena. She was interesting to say the least, and yet I still wasn’t sure how she could possibly like me. I wasn’t providing too much to our little traveling group of two, after all.
I’d also already chosen to remain guarded, in a sense. I wore a mask of smiles and supposed grittiness and harshness that Nena had been right to guess I’d stolen from a few favorite book characters. She’d asked me to open up, and maybe that would have been fine, but I didn’t know how to do so without showing her something that wasn’t my mask at all—something pitiful. Something I hated.
Even though we were traveling under the harsh light of the desert, I remembered winter cloudy skies, how even after I was fully grown I’d quietly say “okay” to suggestions from my parents. It’s time to do planting—so I planted. The house needs cleaning—so I cleaned.
I worried, really I did, that I wasn’t providing enough when traveling, but in fact I was providing in some ways much more than I had before—I was providing myself, or at least a self. I was providing conversations and snark, and I’d never done that before.
No, no, when I was Maràh I was quiet, obedient. And I never wanted to be that again.
So there I was, biting my lip as we crossed one of the almost gentle hills this part of the desert seemed to have. The ground was hard, mostly rock. There were small brushes in the cracks, and a few trees that seemed as if they were very hard-pressed to grow. It was almost dismal, and yet I liked it. After all I did like hard and harsh things, things of the aesthetic that I was trying to create in myself, things that did not have it easy trying to live and yet kept on going.
The sun was bright, the air was cold, and I didn’t mind either. Nena was ahead of me, and I tried to not let it get to me that she really was better than me at every aspect of traveling.
And, fuck her, she still wanted to know about me. But the fact was, my entire life up until a mere week before I met her was boring at best, and pitiful at worst. I clenched my fist just thinking about it, although I made sure to continue looking down at the rock, because there were pebbles on the ground too, and I needed to avoid slipping.
And then it hit me.
I could open up. I could give her what she wanted, and entertain us both. Because the funny thing about a mask that I myself had constructed because it was meaningful to me, because I wanted it, was that—it was me. Maybe it wasn’t all of me, but it was at least part of me.
I didn’t need to be the version of me I hated in order to be ‘open’. I could be any version of me, so long as I chose it, because my own choices were more indicative of me as a person than just about anything else.
I smiled, and took in the incline of the hill that my thighs were already starting to hate. I could do this. And maybe in the doing, I could have a real friend.
We camped near a small strand of trees with just enough branches to allow us to make a fire. The sun crossed below the horizon just after we ate dinner: Nena’s cooking, as always better than mine. I almost grimaced to think of that, but whatever. It was time to do what I’d decided, especially since I’d already determined that one of the personality traits I wanted to have at least a little bit of was spontaneity. Not too much, of course, but I figured that many of my favorite characters in stories growing up had at least some, and so I should too.
“Nena,” I said, and she turned and looked at me; of course. This was her truename that I had spoken, and it probably would make sense to be more careful with when I used it—but then, that kind of caution was one of the things I had tried my best to leave behind. “I have a story for you.”
Her eyes fluttered and she tilted her head—signs of interest, I was pretty sure. “Oh?”
“It’s about me,” I said. “At least kind of.”
“Ooooh,” Nena said.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, I thought you’d like it. So now,” I said, attempting to use a dramatic storytelling intonation, “imagine if you will someone born with a knife in their hand. Yes, I know, that would hurt the mother, but let’s imagine the baby knew well enough to coil their hand around the knife in the process. Imagine this child, born with a knife and cursed to never be able to let it go, to always be and hold a weapon.”
“Is that a metaphor for you?” Nena asked with a slight smile, one that I suspected bordered on a smirk.
“Hardly,” I said. “It would be a good start to a myth though, don’t you think? Or perhaps a fairytale. I, on the other hand, was if anything born with the opposite curse.”
“Born with a shield in your hand?”
I shook my head. “No, far more opposite than that. My curse was to touch nothing sharp, nothing heavy, nothing hard. A single touch would kill me, see.”
“You’re reaching,” Nena said with a head-shake of your own. “There is no such curse.”
“Of course there isn’t,” I said with a smile. “This is all a metaphor, but you know that. Now come on, let me tell my story. I promise it will actually tell you something about me.”
“That you have a flair for the dramatic?”
I laughed. “Well, that too. Though I’m in good company when it comes to that trait, aren’t I?” I gave Nena a knowing glance.
She just rolled her eyes.
“Anyway,” I said, “if we go back to my metaphor, which really is a terrible one. Well, at least it’s a better metaphor than just calling myself a doormat. The greatest doormat in all the land!” I laughed again, though Nena only looked confused; she did not know me as I once was. “Actually, I wasn’t even the greatest. I was not the fairest of all the doormats in the land, nor was I the most capable of wiping mud off one’s shoes in the land. I wasn’t really the most of anything, and that’s why we’re going to pretend instead that I was cursed.”
“Right, yes, because that makes the absolute most sense I’ve ever heard,” Nena said.
“Of course it does,” I said with another smile.
“Vitalities, you’re a mess,” Nena said, rolling her eyes a little again.
“Oh, shush,” I said. “We could go with this opening to my story instead: the heir of the great land of this story, which apparently you had never heard of before you met me, whatever—the heir of this land was called a prince, but was not a prince.”
“Oh no,” Nena said, almost groaning. “Is this about gender?”
“Not really,” I said. “But I guess that almost applies too. My parents never did ask me mine, you know—they just figured I’d tell them if they got it wrong.”
“And did you?”
“Eventually. When I was 21. I’d known since I was nine, though—doormat, remember?”
“That’s not great,” Nena said. “Maybe your parents should have asked.”
“Did yours?” I asked, honestly curious.
“Yup.”
“See, then, you don’t know what it was like, being me, the doormat prince of Immasa. Not that I was a prince in any sense of the word, that just makes a better story. I was just a farmer’s child, once considered a son.
“Vitalities, I wish there had been more direct questions, Nena—ideally, thought-out ones, slow ones, ones I could take minutes or hours or days to respond to. The whipfire-quick type never did me any good. I could never come up with answers fast enough when I was asked what do you wanna do with your life where do you wanna live do you wanna get a synonym all at once—and some people would ask like that, they really would.
“But we can try to act the way we want the world to be, can’t we, any of us? So I might as well demonstrate by asking you a question, direct but slow, and you can
take as much time as you’d like to answer—how old were you, when they did ask?”
Nena’s smile turned wistful, she shook her head a little. “They brought it up more than once,” she said with a shrug. “I’m not quite sure when they started. Maybe I was five, or six? I don’t know, but they asked a few times, and then pretty quickly I told them I was a girl, and then a few years later they asked if that was still true and if I wanted blockers, you know, for puberty, and I did, so—well, that happened.”
I just let out a tsk. “Sounds nice,” I said, because it did, it really did. “Now, see, my folks weren’t like that, although they never did mean harm: but see, they and more than a few others would take silence as consent. They’d take a nodding head and a shrug and a sure as enthusiasm when I was asked if I wanted to work on the farm for a bit. And another bit. And another. Again, and again, and again.” I couldn’t help it; bitterness was seeping into my voice. I was bitter.
“But that’s not consent,” Nena said, confusion in her voice. “That’s not enthusiasm.”
I smiled, and there was sourness in my smile—she did understand, after all. “So, this heir named prince,” I continued, “the one born unable to touch anything sharp or harsh or hard. He was called the doormat prince, as I’ve already suggested, although he wasn’t really a he, as you already know. And when one day ‘he’ started wearing sashes with the word welcome on them—it was irony, you see—it was simply taken as an unmistakable sign that his deepest want, secretly, was to be the town greeter. Never mind that the town had never had greeters before.” I glanced to Nena, seeing the incredulousness in her face, and smiled again. “Oh, I’m stretching here too, going too far with my metaphor, that’s for sure. And no, this did not happen, not really. But listen.
“For ‘he,’ the doormat prince, unable to touch so many of the items of the world, spent a great deal of time reading. He read and he read and he read and that’s how he came across that other tale I told you, the tale of the other curse, of the child born with a knife in their hands. Do you want to hear more about that tale? The doormat prince liked it very much, after all.”
Nena was rolling her eyes yet again, although this time only slightly, but she said, “Sure.”
“So once upon a time, in a far and away land—”
“Of course,” Nena said.
“Indeed,” I said. “In that far and away land, far smaller than ours and with only one kingdom in which a prince may be born, this one was. Oh, the kingdom had no name, and nor did the land—names, after all, are only given to provide contrast between one thing and another, and this land was oddly Vitality-bare, left entirely unaware of any others living in any part of the world. It was but a single, small outpost in an endless sea, and the people of the land knew no else. And so it was to this land that the child was born, a prince they were called though their gender was never presumed, though their ferocity was. See now, how else could one interpret the coming of a child with a knife always in their hand? Clearly they were meant to be a great warrior.”
“I see,” Nena said dryly.
“And so, too, did their parents see that no amount of prying could remove the knife from this child. The child could move its position, switch it between hands, but never ever could it be set down. Even were the child to downturn their hand, like so—” I demonstrated, holding my hand up, palm faced down—“the knife simply would not fall. Not ever.”
“Sounds like a cool party trick,” Nena said.
“Oh, certainly,” I said, “but far more pressing was that, at first, it was an infant who was attached to a knife, and that is not a combination generally regarded as ideal. So the parents devised an obvious solution: they fashioned a sheath, placed it on the knife, and taped it to the hilt. They decided that was good enough. It was inconvenient and strange, sure, but the child was fine.
“But then, well, the child grew, as children typically do—but not so typically, the knife grew as the child did, always remaining in good proportion to them. And eventually this child like so many others determined they wanted to make friends, and so they tried their very hardest. But—well. You can guess the issue here.”
“No one wanted to be friends with the creepy knife child?”
“Exactly,” I said, and maybe my smile was a little sad—but then, maybe Nena didn’t notice that. “It was a truly terrible reputation that that kid had. Some rumors even had it that they cut the heart out of their own grandparent and ate it. There was no truth to that whatsoever, of course, but the truth doesn’t matter when you have a knife attached to your hand.”
“You are truly the master of subtlety when it comes to your metaphors,” Nena said.
“Oh, shush,” I said. “Cut me some slack, I wrote this thing when I was seven—”
“Oh, you wrote this?” Nena said. “This pile of obvious metaphors is your own childhood story? That’s … actually really cute.” She smiled, genuinely.
“You were the one who asked me to open up,” I said. “Anyway, now that that cat’s out of the bag, let’s continue.”
“So what happened to the knife kid?” Nena went ahead and asked.
“Well,” I said. “In some versions of the tale, uh, I guess including the original one, it’s written on paper somewhere, in truly terrible handwriting—in some versions, the child born with the knife eventually went on adventures with a talking cat and proved their true kindness to the world. Because see, that was always the point—that this person born with a knife in their hand was in actuality truly gentle-hearted, and never once used their knife to fight, only to whittle wood and cut craft paper, things like that.
“But later versions of the tale debunk this—well, the talking cat part—saying that was only a legend, but that the truth of this child was still that they were kind. Those versions of the story are a little less fun—in truth, they were written by an eleven-year-old trying to escape the shame of having written such a silly story with a talking cat in their youth—and mostly centered on this friendless child doing many good deeds despite their loneliness. However, not all their attempts to help were successful: one time, they tried to help an old lady who’d fallen get to her feet, but she just screamed when she saw that they were, you know, that creepy knife kid. It turned out that she’d rather be on the floor with a broken hip.”
“Wow, that sounds like a caricature of old ladies anyway.”
“You are not amiss to notice that, nor would you be amiss to notice that this story of the knife kid is not actually going anywhere. They did have many adventures, certainly, but all went like this: gesture after gesture of compassion and kindness being met only with fear.
“No,” I said, shaking my head dramatically, “what truly matters in all this is what the doormat prince thought about it, upon reading it.”
“We still care about h- them?” Nena asked.
“Oh, of course,” I said. “After all, they are by far the more salient metaphor here. Anyway, they read all these stories of the likely-fictional knife child—”
“Um, you literally just admitted to having written those yourself,” Nena complained.
“Stories are complicated, Nena,” I said as sagely as I could. “Please keep up.”
“Uh, okay…”
“Anyway,” I said, “the prince got an idea from reading these stories, noting that the knife child had the near-opposite curse to them. So they made the only decision they could have, Nena. They decided to try to emulate this other kid, and touch a knife, if just to pretend.”
“But that would kill them!”
“Yes, so went the wording they’d always been told of their own curse. But they were already beginning to doubt the veracity of that, and more importantly—far more importantly, they realized that they did not care that much if they died.”
“If this is just a thinly veiled way of telling me that you attempted suicide once, I am very concerned about you, Sedge.”
“It’s just a story,” I said with a mysterious smile.
“It’s always just a story.”
“Always?” Nena asked with a tilt of her head.
“Sure,” I said, “why not? Anyway, they went and snuck through their house—very sneakily, I must make clear, their parents would have freaked out greatly if they found them and saw their purpose—and upon finding the nearest knife, hidden away in a drawer inside a drawer, they touched it.”
“And what happened?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, smiling and leaning back dramatically. “Nothing happened, Nena. Except for one thing, one very important thing: they knew that they never had been the doormat prince, not really. The curse was not as it had been said, and all that was sharp or hard or harsh was not, in fact, instant death to them. Except, of course, isn’t that a death in its own right—a death of identity, a death of assumptions?”
“Ah,” Nena said, smiling slightly. “That might be the most contrived story I’ve ever heard, but I think I get it.”
I nodded. “I think you do.”
The fire we’d built continued to crackle; the night was truly night now, the twilight having passed in the long minutes when I’d told my story. I glanced at the stars and back down at the fire, and next to the fire was Nena, who herself could make fire.
“So,” Nena said. “What’s the doormat prince gonna do next?”
I couldn’t help myself; I laughed. My laugh was harsh, just as I’d practiced—I was so glad to hear it naturally come out this way. And yes, it was natural, it was genuine, and that’s how I knew that despite Nena’s complaints I really had done as I’d intended, and indeed opened up. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” I said.
Nena rolled her eyes. Again.
And if I was being honest—if I was being open—part of me did want to ask her the question that I’d been wondering, which was if she really did hate me, if I really did annoy her. But that question, I could not ask without dropping my mask, and as my mask was what I wanted to be, I did not dare do so.