The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

  I watched her go, the tail of her shift flipping up and down like an antelope tail. She’d refused all offer of other clothing; didn’t want anything that made her look human, she told Gemma. There was no danger of that, I thought, but kept my opinion to myself. She was too small and too pale to be human, but running away ... she had that down pat.

  With the train stuck on the tracks, we weren’t going anywhere for a while. Jackson’s hot cursing should have melted the frozen wheels, but they remained wedged against the track, unmoving.

  Gemma, back to her stardust self, shoved me and I stumbled into the brush. “Go after her,” she demanded, and Gemma never demanded. Those hands coaxed and that voice tempted, but now they demanded and I went, following the trail Vara had left in the snow.

  It was a wide trail, clumsy and crooked. Her feet must be frozen, I thought, but told myself they weren’t human feet at all and maybe she didn’t even feel the cold. The cloudy sky above me began to darken, though it couldn’t be much past mid-day. My own feet were cold, legs stiff, and I didn’t want to go much further.

  Vara was sprawled on the ground ahead of me, one hand stretching toward the eastern horizon. I touched my hand to her back and found her like a block of ice. No matter that she wasn’t human, she was cold and I picked her up and cuddled her into my coat. She was passive against me, maybe too cold to react, but when I turned away and headed back toward the train, she whimpered.

  In my mind I saw a picture of what “east” meant to her, and I fell to my knees. They cracked against stone, but I couldn’t feel any pain as I went down. Could only see and feel what Vara showed me then and there.

  The metal was curved, the smooth edge of a ship meant for the stars. Her ship once upon a time, but now it was broken, most of it carried away. She couldn’t get home, couldn’t find her people, but wanted to get back to that one remaining piece of ship. And if she couldn’t get there, she wanted to disappear.

  It would be easy, I found myself thinking. Easy to make her vanish, into that bit of ground, nestled against the metal of her ship. But no, no, God, I just wouldn’t do it. She was living and breathing and I wouldn’t end that.

  She felt my refusal, but was too cold and weak to move away from me. She pushed against my chest, made me feel all that she was missing—the touch of her mother’s hand, the nuzzle of her lover, the familiar dirt of her homeworld—but still I refused.

  Vara reached up and grabbed a handful of my hair. She yanked, tried to make me feel pain, any pain that would equal her own, but she couldn’t and that only made hers more keen. She touched me again, this time deeper, and unlocked my own pain. Made me touch Sherri Lynn and the desolation she had known after I vanished. I had closed that off long ago, but Vara opened it as easy as she might a door.

  Left that morning and didn’t tell Sherri Lynn, couldn’t tell her, and she woke alone in the bed. My things were neat in the closets and drawers, but I was gone. Gone like the fairies came and took me in the night.

  Sherri Lynn was broken, like Vara’s ship. Submerged in cold ground, buried so no one could find her. She was dying there, cold and alone, and here I was, playing in the circus without a care in the world. Accepting Beth’s warm smile, finding comfort in Gemma and Sombra’s bed. Taking time with ladies like Anne who came to visit and wanted something to vanish in exchange for a little roll and tumble. Pretending Sherri Lynn didn’t exist.

  It was easier than going back, but going back we were and if I wouldn’t press Vara into her ground, she would press me into mine.

  When Vara was ready to go, she released the train from its slumber. The wheels slowly turned and steam rolled back over the cars. Merrily we roll along, Jackson whispered and refused to look at Vara.

  “Shouldn’t have ever stopped for her,” he said.

  “She’d be dead then.”

  “Blown to bits like that cow,” Jackson agreed and I knew he meant it.

  The cow had been a spectacular thing, standing there one minute, flying in a thousand pieces the next. The train only slowed briefly. I could have moved it before we hit. But I hadn’t. Why? Sometimes the simplest answers are the truth. I didn’t want to. I wanted to see what happened. That was why any of us did anything. Just wanted to see what happened.

  Making the cow disappear was easy, moving it just off the tracks to the lazy stretch of grass beyond. It would chew grass for a few more years, but it was stupid and would wander onto the tracks again sooner or later.

  To Jackson, Vara was a stupid thing. A thing that would wander onto another track sooner or later.

  She didn’t move when I lay her down on the mattress. Her knees were still drawn to her chest. I covered her with the blanket and watched her, and wondered if I was wrong.

  “You could find a life here,” I finally said. “It could be a good one.”

  She roused at that. Sat up and turned toward me, stretching toes toward the fire I’d made. Vara shook her head. “I don’t want to be something unreal, something people pay money to see. I just want to go home. And can’t.”

  She picked up the thing nearest her hand, a discarded shoe, and threw it at me. I was so startled I didn’t react and the shoe hit me in my chest. It fell to the floor as she yelled at me.

  “And you can. Your home is there and you don’t go.”

  “My home is here.”

  “This is no home.” She pounded the mattress and gestured around her. There was little here that would make this a home; the room itself never existed in one place for more than a few nights. There was no yard, no flowers, no real bed with sheets and pillows. No photographs on the wall and no mail in a mailbox. No Sherri Lynn.

  “I had to come here,” I said as I reached for the shoe Vara had thrown. I picked it up, held it in my hands, used it as a focal point. Anything so I wouldn’t have to look into Vara’s eyes. “I did it to a man once, made him vanish, and it’s too easy to do it again. I can’t do it again, I won’t. Not even for the best of reasons, don’t you see?”

  I think she did see, because she turned away from me. I dropped the shoe and crouched behind her, wrapped my arms around her small shoulders, and pressed a hand over her heart. Or whatever it was that fluttered inside of her like a caught fish.

  “Right here and now you are alive. It don’t matter that you’re different. It don’t matter where you came from. No one is goin’ to care about those things.”

  “But I care.” Her voice was small, so small I could have held it in my palm and had room for a bird, a shoe, and maybe a jar of marmalade. “I am those things. And you, you have this wonderful gift and all you do is make coins roll down women’s dresses. You could help me—I’ve shown you the place.”

  There would be no arguing. I’d known that all along.

  “Then let’s go, you and me. Let’s go now.” She turned in my arms and her eyes brightened. Her watery fingers squeezed my arms. She was ready now. She had nothing to pack.

  And neither did I really, so when the train stopped for the night, we stole into the car of horses and took One Eye, who Jackson was always threatening to shoot. Grabbed some rolls and marmalade, and vanished into the night.

  We weren’t alone right away; Sombra and Gemma followed us, in shadows and bits of starlight, but they didn’t talk so we didn’t acknowledge them.

  We rode that whole long night through and through the next day. We stopped only long enough to eat. Vara was too excited about getting to the place she’d shown me in her mind. Her mind was more clear now, she was showing me more things. Things I didn’t really want to see, but couldn’t help but noticing.

  She had one thing on her world that she missed as much as she missed familiar faces. Smashed berries was all she could think to call it in her head. Like the marmalade, I thought as her pale finger slid into the jar to scrape the final sweet bits from the bottom.

  Next twilight brought us to the place Vara had shown me in her mind. It wasn’t a pretty place, barren and deeply scarred. Vara slipped out of my loo
se hold and ran across the snowy ground, light as a fleck of lint. She went over a small ridge and I rode One Eye down after her.

  Vara kneeled in the dirt, took up handfuls of it and scrubbed it over her skin. This was the place, she’d lived here for a month before she’d found the courage to leave and look for her own kind. But there were none, only tall, dark strangers who didn’t speak her language and so she had to learn.

  “I want to go, will you make me vanish?”

  I got off One Eye, slow because I could feel the ground vibrating with her excitement. Came to her side and kneeled down there, touching the dirt that covered her and then the ground itself.

  That metallic thing was under there, the piece of her ship, and I could feel the small remains of another of her kind. Not much left, maybe a finger or toe. Whatever else had been taken away with shovels. I could still feel the deep grooves they’d made that day in the dirt.

  “Rabi.”

  Her dirty fingers curled into my shirt sleeve and I shook my head. “Can’t put you in this ground,” I whispered. “You’ll die. Do you have death on your world?”

  Of course she did, it was a stupid question. She knew exactly what she was asking here. There was no hesitation in her eyes or her mind. Her hand tightened in my sleeve and she bent to her knees, as if they’d grown too watery to hold her.

  “Not going home is already like death.”

  The truth in that hit me hard, so hard that I saw it then—a clean green orb hanging in the heavens. The cool of an alien wind brushed over my arms, made my hair stand at attention. An alien sun sank into a topaz sea, and all around me, birds that were not birds whirled and cried. I tried to breathe, but could not. Couldn’t take breath until Vara stopped touching me.

  I breathed, but the image of the place did not leave me. I could see the flowers and the pollen on the flowers, and the small bugs embedded in the stems. I could see a structure, not like any house I knew, but it smelled friendly and tasted like love. I opened my mouth and took it whole, and as I swallowed, Vara’s excitement rippled over me and tasted like smashed berries.

  I focused on that small house and its taste. With Vara’s small hand in mine, I could nearly feel the door, and it seemed to move under my fingers. Swinging inward, it revealed to me a room with a fire and a tall, tall figure, and I knew this was Vara’s family. Felt it as though it was my own.

  When I looked at Vara, her face was smooth, like someone had pulled a sheet of pale plastic from chin to forehead, sticking a finger in to leave a mouth hole. Vara’s hand wasn’t a hand, either; no hand like I knew. Under her vaguely human cloak, she was nothing I understood, nothing I could understand without a hundred lifetimes to do so.

  But I could understand the things in my head. Family and warmth and water and bright skies lit by a shining star. I thought about those things, about those things through Vara. I thought about Vara, about her under that bright sky, pale toes in the golden water. I pictured her there and she giggled as though she already were.

  She began to melt in my hands, pale sugar water running into the red dirt. Her mouth was still open in a dark O, her eyes wide with surprise—was it surprise or fear? Oh, it was fear. It stabbed me hard in the chest and I tried right then, tried so hard, to stop her from vanishing. Was it going wrong? I didn’t know. Couldn’t know.

  “Vara,” I whispered, but that had never been her name and her alien mind did not recognize it.

  Once a thing goes, it goes. She was becoming a lost thing to me and no matter how I tried to hold her together, she still slipped through my fingers. She was going somewhere I could no longer find her, a place I could not even imagine without her guidance. She was cold and wet and then nothing at all. I felt an indistinct, lingering sense of her, a shimmer of warmth wrapped up in smashed berries. Then, nothing at all.

  The cold began to seep through my trousers and I became aware of the light across the horizon. It had stopped snowing and the sun was coming up.

  I guided One Eye out of the small depression and we kept moving east. Would have been easy to ride back to the train, but I couldn’t go back, not now. Not going home is already like death.

  Sherri Lynn was shoveling snow from her walk when I saw her two days later, her nose reddened from the cold, a green hat mashed over her pale hair. She looked up at the sound of horse hooves on the cold ground, stiffened when she saw it was me. I got down, but didn’t come any nearer.

  She extended her hand, slow and shaking, and I placed my own within it. Sherri Lynn’s mind was now dark and cloudy. It was a blessed darkness and I loved the things I could not see.

  “Coleman,” she whispered, disbelieving.

  That voice was familiar, warm with an uneven edge. I squeezed her hand and she whispered once more. I vanished into her voice, into the memories that flooded her, that flooded me. Familiar, haunting places that tasted like love and marmalade.

  Artificial Nocturne

  1936, New Orleans, Lousiana

  Rosemary and mint drip from the impossibly long fingers of Maman Floss as she spreads cooling bat grease across my shoulder. I keep my eyes closed, her voice wrapping around me in a contralto so soothing I forget the constant pain that radiates from shoulder to fingertips.

  She tells me: If I had broken you earlier, chauve-souris, you would not feel such agony. I should not have taken you, but sometimes you see a thing and cannot resist. You can see what it should be and make it such. Her fingers slide down my arm, to the elbow where the bones have been separated. One bone is angled down, to support the silken, umber skin Maman Floss stretched into my wing. She holds me by the hand and stretches my wing until I whimper. Only then does she release me. In the right light—the gauzy light at the edge of the sodden marsh that spills above the steel train track—the edges of my wings flare with gold.

  Maman Floss was broken before she can remember, changed from what she had been born as to what she would become. Her fingers were opened, spread, and lengthened when young muscles and bones still allowed such ease of puzzle-making. Her legs were unknotted, pulled like the taffies she sometimes brings home from the city.

  Her great oblong head brushes the ceilings as she moves through her house and she bends through every doorway, honeyed curls catching at cobwebs. Her figure is perfect, retaining the shape of the hourglass that molded her throughout her youth. The fragments of that hourglass fill a jar that sits on the topmost shelf in the room I like least.

  When the body is older, she has told me, it becomes more difficult, less flexible. Flex-e-bull, she says, voice thick with an accent from over the ocean. She wishes every day that she could spare me the pain as she does others in her collection, but she cannot, so we go forward as we are.

  She tucks my winged arm against my side and I open my eyes, quivering after the rubdown. Gliding still exhausts me; my muscles are still developing to their form. Maman Floss twists the lid onto the jar of grease and wipes her pale fingers clean on her skirt as she crosses the room. She studies the casks and jars upon the shelves, the forms inside. Small hands press against the jar walls, palms traced with little lines that will never grow larger, grins warped by the ripple in the knee-high glass. Kage raps on his jar lid and Maman Floss goes to him, unscrews the lid, and lets him pop his head out. She talks to him in a soothing coo and then it’s back into the jar he goes, content, still adapting his size to its glassy walls.

  Of the dwarves, Gordon is my favorite. Maybe it is because I’ve known him the longest. Maybe it is because he holds my hands and dries my face when I am done crying. He doesn’t tell me not to cry but lets me have a proper bawl, understanding the pain that comes from transformation. He’s twenty-nine years old but smaller than even me. I can reach the counters in the kitchen; he has to climb up the stepstool to perch on them, which he has done now, bringing me a pineapple.

  He sits beside me, parting the fruit with a knife well-suited to his smaller hands, offering me a gold crescent when it breaks free with a wet slurp. Sweetness bursts t
hrough the rosemary and mint, obliterating it.

  Maman’s father, Lucien Delaunay, requires the best things, even if it means making them himself. He often smells like paints and solvents from hours in his studio painting and creating. He paints our likenesses on broad sheets of crisp paper. Everyone in the house gives him a wide berth but for Maman Floss. He didn’t have to assemble his car, but we treat it as though he did. When the car isn’t being used, it rests under a cloth that reminds me of Maman’s dresses, dark and soft between my fingers.

  We don’t do many things together as a family, so when Lucien says we are going to the city, there is a small explosion of excitement in every room of the house, even from those who aren’t going. A trip into the city means we will return with unusual things: caramels, pomegranates, fresh coffee. Solomon, whose face has been remade into the likeness of a fish, wants a train; Harriet, who looks like she could fold her ears around her face to hide away, wishes for a yoyo. Maman Floss has Gordon make this list, as she cannot write so well with her long fingers.

  Last winter, Maman Floss made me a new square-shouldered cape and she drops this over me as the list grows, helping me arrange arms and wings beneath the houndstooth fabric. Coconuts, ropes of garlic; Miriam wants a rocking horse but Lucien says no, absolutely no, because she is being made to tumble not ride, her legs and arms already loose, without joints. Gordon doesn’t add it to the list, though he skips a space, as though it is there.

  The grill of the car looks like long chrome teeth in a yawning mouth. Gordon said that once, but Lucien didn’t like it, so Gordon has never said it again. Still, I can’t stop thinking about it as the soft cloth is drawn back. The night-black of the fabric whispers away to reveal the metallic ruby curves and the thing I can never stop looking at, the small naked silver woman who perches at the apex of the hood. She is bent with the wind and a shiver runs through my whole body. I’m still looking at her when I crawl into the backseat. She is a bright speck through the windshield.