by Alyssa Wees
Leaning my head back, I close my eyes, willing myself to disappear too. And then to reappear, in the place where they have gone. But all I see behind my lids is darkness. And I don’t want to be stuck in darkness. If my family is there, I must find a way to pull them back into the light.
“Rhea? Are you home? Are you here?”
I open my eyes.
“Ree?” Rose calls again from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you—”
I don’t move as she ascends, her canvas ballet bag hooked over her shoulder.
“Hi,” she says, stopping with one foot in the hallway and the other on the last step. She blinks at me, shifting her bag. “Uh, what’re you up to?”
“What am I up to?” What an ordinary thing to say, when nothing at all is ordinary or okay. “Do you remember Dad?”
She clamps a hand around her bun considering, holding onto it like a doorknob, like she could open her skull and lift a memory out. “Dad?”
“Yes, Rose. Dad. Our father. Rafael Ravenna. Six two and a tattoo of a made-up constellation on his back.” My chest itches. “He was here this morning, wasn’t he? You remember seeing him before you left for ballet. Right? Please? You remember, don’t you?”
She says nothing.
She stares, and then she says, “I remember.”
“You—do?” My throat tightens, and I think I might cry. She remembers, and I am not so alone as I’d thought. “And Raisa? And Mom, who’s not really dead? And Renata—you remember her too?”
“Yes,” she whispers, and even Gabrielle’s little fox body relaxes in relief. I feel her contented sigh in my own lungs, like a phantom breath that does not quite belong to me. “Yes.”
Rose lets her bag fall to the floor as she strides toward me. She presses the back of her hand to my forehead. As always, her fingers are cool, soothing.
But she won’t look me in the eyes, even though her face is mere inches from mine.
“You knew this whole time,” I say, and though I meant only to whisper, the statement comes out as a hiss. “You knew, and you said nothing. They disappeared, and you just—went along with it?”
The way she avoided me after I asked about Renata while my family ate ice cream; her silence after we scoured the attic for the voice; bouncing on her toes and staring over Dad’s shoulder at me in the garden as I lamented Mom’s implausible passing. Pretending to be asleep when I asked her last night if she believed me. The whole time she knew and kept quiet—but why?
She scrunches her mouth from side to side, and it is a moment before she speaks. “Is it really so bad, though, if we’re here together, just the two of us?”
I wrench away from her, slap her wrist when she reaches for me again.
“I didn’t mean—” she says, but I hold up a palm to stop her. After a moment she says, “I miss them too. But I want—”
“No. No. You are wrong, Rose. You are wrong, wrong, wrong. It will never be just the two of us. There is one more here. We are three, not two.” I grab her elbow and tug her down the hallway. “Come on. I want you to meet him. I want you to meet the darkness that lives in our attic.”
She presses her heels into the floor and won’t budge. “Wait! Please—no—”
“Come on.”
She drops to the floor, dead weight, and I can’t drag her. She crosses her arms like a child. “I don’t want to.”
“Fine,” I say, and Gabrielle flattens against the wall, trying to make herself small. “If you won’t go, then I’ll make him come to us.” I tip my head back and shout, even more loudly and more urgently than when I was searching for Dad. “Darkness! Boy? Are you there? Will you come out?”
My pulse ticks off the seconds. He has to obey, doesn’t he? For some reason I cannot yet understand, he is mine, mine to command. He is a part of me, he said. But only this test will tell: Is he like my lungs, breathing either with or without conscious thought, or like my heart, which beats on and on in whichever rhythm it wants?
The silence changes, like a shifting of weight from foot to foot, like something being decided. There are no telltale creaks of the floorboards, no squeaks of the stairs, as if he glides instead of stepping, as if he weighs nothing. One moment there is perfect quiet, and the next the knob on the attic door starts to turn, slowly, twisting like a broken kneecap, grinding bone.
The door opens, and the darkness oozes out like oil, sucking up the sunlight coming into the hallway from the windows in the bedrooms. The murk of midnight seizes the space as the boy steps sideways through the slit between the door and the stairwell beyond, snatching my sight away entirely. As always, I feel him there rather than see him.
“Darkness,” I say as Rose scrambles to her feet, backing away, her blue eyes wide, petrified. “Darkness, boy, whoever you are—I want you to meet my sister.”
And he says, “No, Rhea Ravenna.” Then he breathes, “I want you to meet mine.”
Silence, silence like a mirror, reflecting Rose’s anguish, my astonishment, the Darkness’s grim anticipation.
“You’ve met?” I ask, confused. “You—you know each other?”
Has she made a deal with him too? How many players are there in this game?
“I have known Rose Ravenna her entire life,” the Darkness declares, stepping toward us. “In every life, by every name. I know her better than you do.”
“That’s not true,” Rose whispers, backing away. “Don’t listen to him, Rhea. You don’t have to listen to him.”
“I don’t want to listen to either of you,” I say, “unless someone would like to explain what we’re all doing here! How do you know each other?”
I feel the Darkness grin. “Come, Rose, tell her. I’m curious to hear as well, since the last time I saw you, you betrayed me.”
I don’t miss the emphasis he puts on her name. “Rose? Is that not your name? Who are you?”
Rose is just a silhouette in the outer rim of the darkness. I watch her tip her head back, as if she’ll find solace in the ceiling. As if she could just disappear in an instant, like the rest of our family. She opens her mouth—but nothing comes out.
I walk toward the boy in the darkness, raising my hands, thinking that if I can only touch him, I will know him. His name, his face, his heart, his soul—one touch and I’ll know everything.
“No—” Rose grabs my arm, but I jerk out of her grasp, so hard and fast that she whimpers and jumps back. “Please—”
Another step and another, and the Darkness doesn’t move, waiting for me to come. Close, closer, closest—I stop before him, immersed in his shadow, eclipsed. I put my hands to his chest, and he flinches at the sudden touch.
But then, after a long moment, he relaxes, his muscles unclenching as his shoulder blades slump against the wall. I press my hands over the stammer-song of his heart, his pulse still punching out an apology. Slowly, slowly, I move my palms toward his neck, the tendrils of tendons at his throat, his square chin. I crawl my fingertips up the curve of his cheeks, brush the outer edges of his thick eyebrows. I tangle my hands in his soft hair, running my fingers to the back of his neck. He sighs, and I am safe. Nothing and no one can find me here.
Is this, then, how I disappear? Devoured by purest, deepest darkness, curled in the belly of the wolf?
No—not a wolf, I think. A fox.
Always, always a fox.
“Rhea,” he whispers, taking my hands and twining his fingers with mine, his grip sure and indomitable. “How long will you sleep before you tire of your dreams?”
“Let go of her!” Rose yells from outside the darkness, but I don’t want the boy to let go. Because, in a weird way, I want to be crushed, the way he’s crushing my hands now. Like cracked glass, melted and remolded into something else. Someone else.
Who am I, really? I want to, need to, wish to know.
If only I had
magic.
I close my eyes, and what I see is this: A princess. A wood. A castle. A king. A sea and a city and a secret and a curse. Humans with two hearts, one inside the other. Maculae. A strange word, a lovely word, one that feels like a kiss fading from swollen lips. Waltzes and backless dresses and moons like skulls scattered in the forgotten tomb of the sky. A mother who was meant to be queen but died too soon. A father who was staring straight ahead when he should have been looking side to side, at the woman whose hand he held and the daughter who smiled as though nothing were wrong, when all along nothing was right. A faceless grandfather with hot iron in his grip.
And a girl who was chosen but who chose to avoid it.
When I have remembered all of these things, I open my eyes.
The Darkness and Rose—both gone.
I am no longer in my house but instead am sitting on a throne.
Someone speaks, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s me, it’s my mouth that’s moving.
“Now,” I say. “I am the Witch of Wishes. What would you ask of me?”
I can’t see her, this so-called Witch, because I am her. I look through her eyes; I see what she sees. Before her stands a boy no older than herself, with burnt red lips and hair as black as charred wood and skin so paper-pale that she—I, we—can nearly peer right inside, through the temple of his ribs to the gasping garnet of his heart.
Your bones quiver and sigh my name at night, I think, staring down at him. Let me see them, let me see your bones.
For a long moment he says nothing. I notice then the scars on the backs of his long-fingered hands. No, not scars, not exactly—brands.
I do not like to ask twice, and my voice, the second time, is not so nice. Grating, impatient: “What do you wish?”
“I wish—”
He licks his lips, and smiles. Something inside me snags, rips. He opens me, and I bleed. I know I will give him anything, everything. He needs only to ask, and it is his.
And all at once I know what he is going to say before he says it. The Witch, she knows too, though not with the same certainty that I do. His wish is hers too, a wish that has been blooming between them since the very moment they met, and now all he must do is speak it aloud, and she’ll make it come true.
I have seen this scene before. The Witch and I are one, and I know exactly what is to come. Just this.
“Just this,” he says. “A kiss.”
Wake up, wake up, wake up.
He waits, and it is very quiet, not even a breath to splinter the silence. With trembling fingers I reach into the split in my sternum, pluck a petal, and place it in his waiting, open mouth. He swallows, and then he wraps his shaking hand around the nape of my neck and brings our lips together.
This, I think, is what it must feel like to wake up. Never let it end.
I will stay here, suspended, stuck in a kiss, somewhere between a life and a dream.
I am the Witch of Wishes and want for nothing. I have everything.
Behind us, someone shouts, “Varon, leave her alone!”
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
The boy pulls away, his hands still twisted in my hair.
I lift my chin and look around him, beyond him. A tall girl with gold hair scrambles into the room, green leaves swirling around her as the walls begin to shed, slowly at first and then faster, the leaves crisp and brown by the time they hit the ground. The boy still standing so close to me does not seem surprised, neither by the leaves tumbling as the dream dissolves, nor to see the girl standing there. He is only watchful. Wary.
Rose? The Witch’s lips don’t move as I try to say her name. In this memory, the Witch whose body I’m borrowing does not know her. This girl is at once my sister and a stranger.
The Witch startles as she sees her, and so I startle too. “And who—who are you?”
It is only now that I realize what I’ve done, what he has done to me. All at once, there’s a sound like the sizzle-snap of power lines, my veins cracking with electricity. No, not electricity—magic. Hot, hotter, hottest, and soon my skin is sticky with sweat. Violet lightning severs the sky in several directions; the tooth crenellations crowning the castle topple, and thunder as they hit the dry dirt. The branches of the walls unravel and fall to the floor, where they writhe like snakes. Far above, the stars melt like a mint, and plump yellow maggots devour the moon.
Every muscle in me is clenched, resisting. The curse has begun to break. This is how the world ends: in a kiss cut short, a storm of sleeping synapses, in murder mistaken for mercy. My dream is dying, dead.
You have wasted your wish.
I look at the boy before me, his hands still wrapped around my neck. I want him to let go of me, but I can’t summon the words, so I push up on my toes and with my teeth nip the skin over his jugular, sudden enough to get his attention but not hard enough to hurt.
“What—?” He hops back, his arms falling away as he brings his fingers to his neck, rubbing the spot where my teeth just were.
The girl reaches us and leaps onto the dais, sliding her palm into mine, holding tight. I let her. It is comforting to have her here, even though I don’t know her. Not in this memory. She is so beautiful and so bright, and by her touch I know at once that I am safer than I have ever been.
“You cannot keep running,” the boy says, and he has to shout to be heard over the moans of the world breaking apart. “You cannot keep sleeping. Not while we need you. You have to wake up, Princess. It is time to wake up.”
Princess.
Panic, like a thousand tiny paper cuts in my brain.
“What have you done?” I whisper. “What have you done?”
“Please—” The Fox Who Is No Fox reaches for my wrist, pleading, but as soon as his hand touches my skin, he retracts it, his fingertips blistering as though he’s been scorched.
I propose that we play a game, you and I. A guessing game.
“Do not touch me,” I say, and stumble back. I let go of the girl’s hand, but she stays close to my side. “You cannot keep me here. If I must wake, I wake to another world, another life. I will not go back to the place that would not have me.”
“All worlds live beneath the same sky,” he says, clutching his burned hand to his chest. “And I will always find you. I will always know you.”
I will take your curse away.
“But I won’t know you.” I pause, knowing I need to design a new dream, fast. But first—a new curse. “And if you tell me, I won’t listen. I see now that you are doom. You are death.” I stop again, looking down at my hands, at the brands now seared on the back, so red that they are almost black. “You wish to take me back to the crystal castle between the forest and the sea, to a world that cannot hold me.” I lean close to him and whisper a new spell. “I curse you now to darkness. And only I can release you by uttering your name.”
As soon as I’ve said it, I wish I could take it back. All of it. This spell, it leaves the taste of tar on my tongue. All wrong. He did not kill this world, this dream. I did that. There is no one to blame but myself.
But it’s too late. What’s done is done.
And all you have to do, my sky, is say my name, my name, my name.
“Take me with you, please!” cries the girl, squeezing my hand, hard. Her eyes are wet. “I don’t want to wake up, just like you. I want to dream with you forever.”
I turn to her, and I know her now—not as Rose, my sister, who shared a bedroom with me. But the Witch knows her, remembers the girl who came not so very long ago to the Woods—my Woods—and wished to stay with me here, always.
I reach for her arm and sink my nails into her skin, but Rose does not cry out, and she does not flinch as I look deep into her heart, a rushing reel of images, of memories: Rose hidden away in an attic in the Hollow with her slowly shriveling parents. Using her oneiromanc
y to reach out to her brother sleeping in the crystal castle; waking up after meeting the Witch, the wish she was given sitting like an insoluble stone in her belly. Let me stay with you. I am nothing but a dream too.
My nails bite down harder, and I see how the girl suffered the chill of panic and paranoia each time she cast a spell, how she despised the poison inside her, this magic that was the reason why her parents were dying and why her brother served a spiteful king and why she had been locked away so that she would be safe. I see how Rose rushed to the mirror in her tiny room, stood before the glass with frozen lungs and tremulous hands, asking her reflection, I’m still beautiful, aren’t I? How she tried in vain to reach the Witch again, this time alone; how her brother grew secretive and strange, telling her to rest, telling her that there was a war coming and she had to be strong and ready when it came. How he told her not to worry, that they were going to win.
How can you be sure? she asked, and I feel how his reply clamped like crystal teeth around her brain: I think I know how to wake the princess up.
What are you thinking? she cried. If you kiss her, you will die! I will die! You—you love me, don’t you?
You can’t die in dreams, he said with a confident smile. Everyone knows that.
But she didn’t obey; she didn’t rest. Instead she followed him through his dream, skulking close behind as he transformed himself into a fox and entered the Witch’s castle. And there she saw him, asking for his wish.
Asking for a kiss.
And Rose gasped, for suddenly she knew who the Witch of Wishes was.
Who I was.
And with all her little quivering heart, she did not want her brother to wake me up—to end the dream, and her wish with it.
When I have seen all this, I release her arm, and she exhales. We are alike, she and I. Dreamers both.
“I wish to go with you,” she begs, and the Fox Who Is No Fox reaches for her. But her flesh is flushed now, smoldering like mine, and just as untouchable. We are safe—from him, but not from ourselves. In this moment we don’t know who the monsters are.