by Alyssa Wees
“Girls, I made waffles!” Mom calls as we pass the kitchen. She stands proudly in front of the waffle iron on the island, spatula in hand. A mostly empty bowl of batter rests next to a bottle of maple syrup and a plate stacked with golden waffles. Another platter lies next to it with a much squatter pile of blackened bacon strips. The scents of sugar and char tangle together in the air. “There’s fresh strawberries for you, Rose, in the fridge. Bacon’s crispy too, Ree, the way you like it.”
“By crispy,” adds Dad, who’s seated at the kitchen table with a crossword and a coffee mug in front of him, “she actually means burnt.”
“No,” says Mom. “I mean crispy. Super extra crispy.”
“So, in other words, burnt,” Dad says, and Mom pantomimes whacking the back of his head with the spatula.
“Oh,” I say, stopped in the archway beside Rose, “that sounds gr—”
“We’ll be right back!” Raisa interrupts, waiting for us by the bottom of the stairs, unseen by Mom or Dad from their vantage in the kitchen. “We’re on a very important mission, not to be delayed or deterred.”
“Well, all righty, then,” Mom says, just as Dad twists suddenly in his chair and hits his pen against the spatula. She laughs, shifting and attempting another smack, this time trying to get in a real blow. But Dad blocks her, swiping up a stray spoon from the table and holding it in his other hand, rising to his feet with his knees bent. I want to keep going, but I’m torn, and Renata is too. She claps, bouncing on her toes as she watches them, an eager spectator. Mom talks as they spar, circling around the kitchen. “Just heat the waffles up a little in the microwave when you’ve completed your mission, okay? Your father and I are going to run errands soon.”
“Sure,” Rose murmurs, but I don’t think they hear. She tugs at my wrist, and we leave Mom and Dad to their happy duel.
“What are they doing?” Raisa says, eyebrows arched and one leg lingering on the third step.
“Sword fighting,” I say.
“They’re so weird.”
Renata giggles. “It’s cute.”
We file down the second floor hallway, all of us quiet until Raisa suddenly stops.
“And here we are!” she says in a beatific tour-guide voice, pausing with a foot on the first step. “The Shadowland of Boys Unseen! Now, ladies and gentlewomen, please keep your arms and legs at your sides at all times. These undomesticated boys are vicious and known to devour anything fleshy and female in sight. Ready?” She smiles, and we nod. “Follow me!”
Rose hooks her hands over my shoulders as we begin the short ascent, like children making a train so we won’t lose each other. Her hands are cold, as always. I try to place my hands on Raisa’s shoulders, but she scowls and shakes me off. Renata comes last, and I don’t look back to see if she’s holding on to Rose the way Rose is clinging to me.
I hold my breath. Hold it until it hurts. Until it burns. I don’t let it out until the very last second, a mere moment before I faint dead away.
And then we’re in the attic, only a little light drifting in from the bottom of the stairs. Raisa slides her feet over the creaky wood, fumbling for the lamp.
“Hello?” she calls, then swears as she hits her toe on what must be the bedpost. With not much in here to stub a toe on, she really lucked out. “We come in peace, okay? We want to know why you’re hanging out in our musty old”—the lamp suddenly clicks on, light swarming the small room—“attic.”
We blink, looking around. There is no one here but us.
Renata crouches down to peek under the bed. Finding nothing, she straightens and shrugs. “Well, that’s really the only hiding place here.”
“You have to turn off the light,” I say, and Gabrielle sidles up to my leg, her fur scratching my calf. “It has to be completely dark.”
Raisa tilts her head, closing one eye to peer at me, as if she’ll understand me better from a slightly different angle, a crooked perspective. “Then how will we see him, genius?”
“We won’t,” Rose whispers, her soft breath blooming over my back.
“He doesn’t want to be seen,” I say. “I don’t think—I mean, I don’t think he exists in the light. It sounds crazy, but that’s where he is. What he is,” I correct myself quickly.
“Okay, sure,” Raisa says, and though she scrunches her lips, dubious, she obliges and switches off the light. Rose releases my shoulders, and I bend my elbows to clasp her hands behind my back. Our fingers entwine, and I feel the pulse on the side of her knuckle. It’s a sloppy pulse, surging fast at first and then a little more slowly, shallow and strong and shallow and strong again. And almost perfectly in sync with my own.
We wait.
Four girls and a fox, standing in the dark.
I think I feel a prickle on the side of my scalp as if a hair has been plucked, but gradually the feeling blossoms into a more tender tug. The sensation reminds me of if someone were to twist a lock of my hair around their finger, spooling it like thread on a bobbin, around and around and around.
Slowly.
Gently.
In the dark.
“Rose?” I whisper. “Are—you—”
But her hands are still linked with mine, and as far as I know, Raisa and Renata are still on the other side of the room near the lamp, the bed between us.
“I—have to—go.” I spin around, smashing into Rose, who stumbles backward but does not fall. Somehow, despite our sightlessness in the dark, she reaches out and grabs my wrist, pulls me down the stairs after her. Gabrielle’s toenails scrabble on the wood floor as she chases after us. Renata is next and Raisa last, stomping down the steps, panting. When we are all in the hallway, we stare at each other with wide, wide eyes.
“Yeah, okay,” Raisa says, hunched over with her hands on her knees, her pigtails falling forward. “What exactly were you so freaked out about? There was nothing there!”
“You—you freaked out too!” I say. Rose’s clammy hand is still clamped around my wrist.
“Only because you freaked out first! You scared me more than anything.” She straightens. “What do you think, Rosie?”
Rose says nothing, stares at nothing but at a point just over my left shoulder. Back toward the attic. My scalp tingles. Exactly there, above my right ear, and nowhere else.
“Rose?” I prompt, and her eyes swivel between the two of us. Finally she shrugs, before turning and walking quickly into our room.
“I didn’t freak out,” Renata murmurs, her eyes glazed over. “But there was definitely something there.”
I don’t quite know what to make of this; I look at Raisa, and she smirks. Torn between asking Renata to elaborate and finding out why Rose walked away, I eventually shrug and follow Rose into our room. I find her perched on the edge of my bed, her head bowed. For a long moment she doesn’t move at all, and I’m just about to make sure she’s still breathing, when she looks up. She smiles, and it is like she has never been afraid of anything, ever, in her whole life, and certainly wasn’t terrified of anything in the blotting blackness of the attic only seconds ago.
“Rhea,” she says with purpose. “Don’t worry.”
And then her crisp golden exterior starts to undulate, her immaculate facade a mere mirage, and I see her as something else, something spectral and soft, terrible and tear-able: her skin melts to molten silver and sloughs from her skeleton like drops of starlight.
It’s over in a blink, the most elegant entropy I have ever seen.
Unaware of my vision, she walks over to me. Hugs me, her arms sliding under mine, wrapping around my ribs. Her hands join in a fist and squeeze my spine.
“Beauty is poison to monsters,” she says, still holding on to me. I lay my head on her shoulder. “They love beauty, covet it, but they can’t have it. So you see, you’re safe from any danger. You’re safe, Rhea. You are.”
> She releases me and steps back. I try to smile, but it sits on my face all wrong, slanted and stiff. My scalp begins to burn, like a thousand tiny teeth gnawing through to my skull.
But despite my unease, I decide she’s right. The Darkness had to be a dream. No, more than that—a nightmare. Because I can think of nothing more terrifying than a dream like this, which is only in your heart and cannot hurt you, until it suddenly reaches out and touches you.
The Witch approached the black-furred fox, holding a freshly plucked petal from her heart in her glittering palms. No fox had ever eaten of her heart before, and even the Witch did not know what would happen when this one did.
The ageless, endless queen of the tooth-and-tree castle had grown tired of the mysterious fox repeatedly refusing to dance, night after night disregarding the Witch’s orders and commands. No manner of slyly threaded threat or spun-silk words of coercion could convince him to obey. Now the disobedient fox sat in the center of the clearing, and the Witch dropped the petal in front of him. It fluttered to the ground, sparkling in the sunlight.
“Eat,” she said. “Eat.”
For a moment, just a second, the fox hesitated and did not move. Then he bowed his head and scooped up the petal with his tongue. The Witch waited while he chewed, a dribble of blood leaking between his lips as he swallowed.
“Now dance,” she said. “Dance.”
The fox blinked once, twice, three times. Then he danced, prancing on his thorn-pricked paws. He twisted and writhed, lurched and sighed as his fox form fell away in clotted clumps of dark fur and wilted whiskers and muddy claws—all of it dropping to the rough ground of the glade.
Where once there had been a fox, there now lay a boy in tattered clothes.
And not just any boy, but a familiar one, with powder-pale skin and hair so thick and dark it shamed the space between stars, lips to rival the reddest apple, and scrapes on the backs of his hands.
“You are no fox,” she hissed. “And you have already been here once. What evil magic have you used to trick me?”
The boy lying on his back—breathing too fast, blinking too much—looked up at the Witch. Her cheeks flushed when she noticed his chin and his jaw, shimmering wet with the ichor of the petal from her heart, now in his burbling human belly. So terribly intimate, the vestiges of a hallowed meal smeared across his skin and teeth. He had deceived her, stolen from her. She crouched over him, one hand clenched in the dirt at her feet.
“No magic,” he gasped. “I simply transformed, and I was allowed through your gates.”
The Witch glared at him, tightening her fist in the dirt, aggravated further by her own oversight. “You are no fox,” she repeated, “and you are not a child. You have no purpose here. Leave.”
“You are right,” he gasped. “I am neither of those things. But I do have a purpose. You are the Witch of Wishes, we both know. Yet who will grant your wish? Who else but I, I who have managed to enter the Woods over and over and over again, as none but the foxes have done?”
“I need no wishes.” The Witch shook her head and straightened her long legs, the wind ruffling her skirts, her hair. She stood over the Fox Who Is No Fox and said, “I have everything, and you—you are nothing. A trickster, a lie, a dry kiss on closed lips. You are not welcome here.”
“You dismiss me so easily?” he said, and winced. The Witch knew he was in pain—it hurt to be born, and to be born again, even if the rebirth was simply a regeneration of one’s own, true skin. “I can help you leave this place, this dream, this long-suffering sleep. I can wake you up.”
The Witch licked her lips and glanced at the foxes gathered at the edge of the glade, hardly moving, barely breathing.
“There is a way,” he added. “And I know it.”
“You lie,” said the Witch. “And I do not care, for you are wrong. I wish for nothing.”
“At least let me tell you a story. A story of the outside. Wouldn’t you like to hear of the country beyond your Woods, the lives of the children when they are not asleep? Haven’t you ever wondered what the world is like?”
The Witch raised her eyes to the sky, and the stars lifted their light as a human might lift her chin, and pretended that they were not listening in, not waiting to hear what the Witch of Wishes would say to this Fox Who Is No Fox. The real foxes blinked, and the trees shrugged their wooden shoulders as the wind scarpered across the clearing, sifting through the Witch’s long hair, setting her scalp to tingling. For one second precisely our Witch’s heart skidded to a stop, one lost pulsation in a procession of a thousand, thousand contractions of muscle and blood. She rested a hand on her chest, her fingers tracing the scarred skin where she had stitched herself back together, again and again and again.
“All right,” she said at last, and led him into the castle. “You may tell me about the outside. But—” She held up a hand as he started to smile in triumph. “If I decide I do not want to hear any more—do you promise you will stop?”
At once he nodded.
“I promise,” he said, pressing both of his hands to his heart. “Now let’s begin.”
The Fox Who Is No Fox sat before the dais while the Witch of Wishes on her throne listened to his descriptions of the World Beyond the Wood. Though there were many worlds, he explained, he knew of only one, the world where he was from, a world powered by magic. He was from the country with the crystal kingdom, and it was of this tiny piece of that tiny world out of a thousand, thousand, thousand tiny worlds that he told her, beginning with the small but important things: seasons and city lights and steaming cups of cinnamon tea, pine nuts roasted in phoenix flames and sour blackberries plucked from the thorniest bushes. A popular game called Crone, in which all the players either won or lost together. A night sky that, in the northernmost places, was so saturated with silken stars that even at midnight the world would appear as bright as at noon. There were academies of higher learning, and anyone who wished to could study at these schools—except the maculae.
“Who are the maculae?” the Witch asked in a whisper, the strange word squirming up her throat and searing her lips. The Fox Who Is No Fox leaned forward, eager to explain, but then the Witch’s throat burned, and she did not dare say the word again. Did not even think it. “Never mind. Speak of something else.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and she could not quite meet his gaze. Finally he nodded, and described instead the phenomena of sparkling tornadoes and glitter-rain hurricanes, winds ripping roots and tearing trees out of the ground like hair from a scalp. He warned her of Star Fire, flames so potent, they could burn through steel, it being magic in its purest and most solid form.
“That comes from a star? How?” the Witch asked. “Even with magic, it seems very hard.”
“It is. First you command the star to fall,” the Fox Who Is No Fox said. “Then you catch it in your hands, and kill it.”
“You would have to be very powerful even to touch a star,” the Witch said, glancing up at her own. “To touch it and not burn.”
“Yes,” he said, and then moved on to disaster, to dread. He told her of war. People in chains. Hard balls of magic fired like gunshots, punching through bone, through brains, the impact like being jolted awake from a dream but in reverse. Ghosts, with empty eye sockets and sore throats.
And just before the blue-violet glaze of dusk, before the Witch cupped her hands to catch the spun-shadow sun as it fell, deflated, from the sky, the Fox Who Is No Fox leaned forward and said, “Do you wish me to stay?”
“No,” said the Witch of Wishes.
“Do you wish for me to come back?”
After the briefest of pauses, the Witch said, “Yes.”
“Until tomorrow, then.”
With full, syrupy stomachs we sit at the round table on the back patio by the garden. Thanks to the sugar, my nerves haven’t calmed down a bit since our
visit upstairs, and I’m glad that, even though it’s summer, Mom likes to keep teaching us, keep our minds pliant. Sadly, though, today none of us is fully concentrating. I’m between Mom and Renata, with Rose and Raisa across from me, and Gabrielle curled in my lap, asleep. I deliberately picked this seat, the one that faces the yard, so that my back is to the house.
To the attic.
“It’s too hot out here,” Raisa says, letting her body go limp in her chair, sliding down as if she’s going to slip right under the table and disappear. She tosses her arm over her eyes, shielding them even though the umbrella in the center of the table adequately casts us all in shade. “I can’t think properly in these conditions.”
“We could go inside,” Renata suggests, sipping her glass of lemonade.
“It’s hot in there too! It’s inescapable.”
“It’s really not that hot,” I say, and it isn’t: seventy-five degrees at most, clouds like skulls rolling across the sky, wispy ghost-bones to block the sunlight. The scent of lilacs is sticky in the air, and the sea gently hits the sand like hands clasping in prayer.
“Listen, girls. We’re learning about something fun today,” Mom says, flipping through a thick textbook.
“What subject?” Rose asks, idly fiddling with her hairpins, pulling them out of her bun and sliding them back in. She doesn’t even have ballet today, but still she likes to wear her hair up.
“History,” Mom says.
“It better be the history of torture methods or I don’t care,” Raisa declares. “Starting with this, being forced to do schoolwork in the summer.”
“Do you really have something better to do?” I say. A flash of orange through the rosebushes just beyond the cement of the patio catches my attention, but it’s gone before I can even blink twice. “What else would you be doing today?”