Slice of Cherry

by Dia Reeves

  Datura swiped a fresh water bottle from the tea tray and drained half of it in one gulp. She wiped her mouth so hard she tore the skin of her lip. “You’re right,” she said, a bright bead of blood trembling on her pastel mouth. “I have to face the fact that she’s more fungus than flower. Follow me.”

  The sisters followed Datura to the back of the house, where the smell of earth and plant life grew ever more pervasive. She ushered the sisters into a low-lit room with a dirt-covered floor, a room with plants growing weird and pale in the gloom—up from the earth, down from the ceiling, and along the walls. One of the plants wasn’t a plant at all, but a little girl, maybe six or seven, sitting in a corner in a white nightie, dirt covering her feet to the ankles.

  She was albino pale, her white hair creeping over her shoulders like spiderwebs, but her eyes were violet and surprised to see the sisters. Surprised and hopeful.

  Kit’s bubbliness fled as she took in the girl’s condition. “You’re Selenicera?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Doesn’t she look horrible?” Datura waded through the soil to the girl and poured the dregs of her water bottle over Selenicera’s head. “So pale and sickly?” Selenicera flinched from the touch of the water, wiping it from her eyes like tears.

  “She’s the horrible one? How can you treat your own sister like a . . . a toadstool? Crazy bitch.” Kit whipped out her switchblade and darted forward, as out of control as the lichen growing over the window.

  “Kit,” said Fancy, sharp enough to stop her sister in her tracks. “There’s no need for that, remember?” She held up the kinetoscope.

  So Kit held up her knife, her rage replaced with frustration. “But you said next time you’d let me—”

  “I don’t feel like scrubbing that woman’s blood out of my clothes, like I had to do with those transies and the old man. It took forever. And think of all the evidence you’d leave behind if—”

  “Fine. Do what you want.” Kit put the knife away with an ungracious amount of swearing as Fancy cranked the kinetoscope and sent them all into the happy place.

  Datura and Selenicera stared around the garden from the platform with the statues, disoriented and wide-eyed— Selenicera kept patting the cobbled platform, feeling for the dirt she’d been buried in. The confusion soon gave way to admiration; Datura and Selenicera knew a thing or three about gardens, after all, and the headless garden was in fine form today.

  “The kinetoscope’s gone!” Kit exclaimed.

  “It doesn’t come over, Kit.” Fancy said. “It never has.”

  “Why not?”

  “I dunno. It’s not like Cherry gave me a manual.”

  While the Woodsons were busy gaping, Fancy’s minions entered the garden and made a beeline for Datura, and to her displeasure, dressed her in a straitjacket.

  “What’s going on?” Datura demanded, her jittery eyes flitting toward the sisters and then away. “What are you doing? Why’re they manhandling me?”

  Fancy spoke up as Kit helped Selenicera off the ground, helping her stand on her spindly legs. “Just a precaution. I aim to test what you said. See if the kid can thrive in the light. If she can’t, then we’ll kill her. And if we do kill her, I wouldn’t want you to suddenly turn on us and try to take revenge.”

  “What do you mean?” Datura turned to Kit. “What does she mean?”

  But Fancy was too busy watching the sky to answer. Under her gaze the clouds parted and sunlight fell on them, as gently as a warm shower.

  Selenicera began to grow taller and sturdier. Her thin, lank hair thickened and flourished, and roses bloomed in her milky cheeks. She laughed to see the changes in herself, running her hands through her hair and twirling on her suddenly strong legs. Fancy realized as she watched Selenicera becoming healthier that she must be closer to nine or ten; life with Datura had stunted her growth.

  Unlike her sister, Datura began to weaken in the sun. Her skin shriveled and dried; her hair began to fall out like leaves from a dead tree; she squirmed in her straitjacket, gasping for water.

  Fancy told her, “It’s not the kid who can’t handle the light; it’s you. Imagine that.”

  “Please.” The minions had to hold her upright. “Water.”

  “So by your own reasoning,” Fancy continued, ignoring her pleas, “you’re the one who needs to be killed. Right?”

  Datura bared her teeth. One of them fell out and clattered on the stone. “I should’ve followed my first mind and cremated you.”

  “But then we wouldn’t be here having a swell time,” Fancy exclaimed, as Kit scooped up the tooth and put it in her pocket.

  Fancy snapped her fingers, and a flood of happy place people poured through hedges carrying garden furniture and trays of food. Not muscle, just regular people, who smiled and bobbed their heads when they entered Fancy’s presence. Within moments they had set up a table and chairs and furnished tea and sandwiches and cakes enough for high tea with the queen.

  “Selenicera, do something,” said Datura during the commotion. “Don’t let them treat me like this. Not after all I’ve done for you.”

  Selenicera stopped spinning and looked at her sister, took in the straitjacket, seeing her as though for the first time. “It’s because of what you did to me that we’re even here.” She turned to Fancy to speak, decided against it, and turned to Kit instead. “Where are we?”

  “The happy place.”

  “How’d we get here?”

  “Remember the wooden box with the crank Fancy was carrying? It’s a kind of door.”

  Selenicera got it then. Porterenes understood all about doors that led out of the world. “What you gone do to Datura?”

  Kit laughed humorlessly. “Ask my sister. She’s the one ‘handling’ it.”

  “Don’t be like that,” said Fancy sharply. “Killing her in her house would have left evidence behind; I told you. We’re kinda trying to avoid that, remember?”

  “Well, we’re here now, so why can’t I—?”

  Fancy snapped her fingers again and all the happy-place people came to attention. “You may leave.” After they trooped away—all except Fancy’s personal minions, who were still holding Datura—Fancy extended her hands to Kit and the Woodsons. “Please. Have a seat.”

  They all sat at the table, Kit on Fancy’s right, Selenicera on the left, and Datura several feet away at the opposite end of the long table, the two minions flanking her.

  Fancy smiled, enjoying her role as gracious host. “Now let’s e—”

  “Kit!”

  Franken loped up behind Fancy’s chair and stopped beside Kit. He’d gotten clothes from somewhere: a long-sleeved turtleneck and pants, both black. He was much thinner than when they’d first met, and his hair was in his face, like he was hiding behind it. But his stitches were still prominent, bulky and black. They’d need to be taken out at some point. Fancy could order the minions to do it. Or she could just leave it. Who cared what Franken looked like?

  “Hey, Franken!” Kit pulled him down and kissed his scarred face. Kit obviously didn’t care.

  He gestured at the spread. “Room for one more?”

  “What the hell?” said Kit as Franken crowded next to her at the table. “The more the merrier, right, Fancy?”

  “If you say so. That’s Franken,” Fancy told Selenicera, whose eyes bugged out of her face as she took in Franken’s patchwork visage. “Kit’s old playmate.”

  Selenicera waved shyly.

  “I need a drink!” Datura yelled, startling everyone, straining helplessly toward the teapot, rattling the buckles of her straitjacket.

  “She looks real bad,” Selenicera noted. “And thirsty. She’s always really thirsty.”

  Fancy swished the tea in the teapot around a few times and then poured everyone a cup. The tea was as silver as the teapot and rippled in the pink china cups like a liquid mirror.

  “What kind of tea is this?” asked Franken, taking the proffered cup.

  “My own blend,�
� Fancy answered, handing one of the minions a cup for Datura. “Brewed in Datura’s honor.”

  While Datura gulped her tea with the help of one of the minions, Fancy slid a tray of cakes to Franken.

  “Try one of the cream cakes,” she said, and then watched intently as Franken chose one.

  He bit into it and then filled a saucer with them. “These’re awesome!” He spoke with his mouth full. “Tastes like—” He slumped forward onto the table, his cheek squishing his saucer of cakes.

  Kit tsked at her sister. “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing much.”

  Kit raised Franken’s arm, then let it go. It dropped limply to the table. “Then why is he passed out?”

  “Maybe he’s tired from obsessing over you.”

  “You are cold-blooded,” Kit said admiringly, ignoring Franken as she filled her saucer with finger sandwiches. Fancy was glad to see that whatever fascination Franken had held for Kit in the cellar was now broken. Perhaps she’d been silly to worry.

  “I feel funny,” said Selenicera. Before she had finished speaking, wings tore out of her back and ripped through her nightgown—not Kit’s angel wings, but butterfly wings. Emerald ones with matching antennae wagging atop her head. The sisters laughed at the sight of her.

  Fancy held up an empty silver tray so that Selenicera could see herself. “Look.”

  “I’m a butterfly?” She seemed more astounded than upset.

  “It’s cuter than what you were,” Kit said. “A mushroom growing down in the dark.”

  “Much cuter,” Selenicera agreed, taking the tray from Fancy so she could admire herself at her leisure.

  But Datura didn’t look cute. She swelled and puffed and changed from white to greenish-brown. Her mouth thinned and widened until she looked like a toad. She screamed like one too, croaky and guttural, as she ordered the minions to bring her more tea—that unslakable thirst that the sisters had first noticed in her still evident.

  Kit eyed the Woodsons, amazed, then grabbed another tray and looked at herself. “Why haven’t we changed?” she asked, disappointed.

  “The tea’s meant to show what they’re like on the inside. So Datura can see for herself who’s good and who’s not.”

  “We drank it too.”

  Fancy shrugged. “This is who we are.”

  “So then, we’re good?” Kit paused, as if listening to what she’d just said. “Is that possible?”

  “She’s good.” Fancy nodded her head at Selenicera, who was waggling her antennae and stretching her wings.

  “I think that goodness could be flexible enough to include the two of us,” Kit insisted. “I think it’s possible. We didn’t turn into toads.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re saints.”

  “It’s not about being saints or sinners or good or bad, Fancy. It’s about being both. You know? About being complete.”

  “Can I fly?” asked Selenicera, either asking permission or asking whether it was possible.

  Fancy nibbled one of the tiny sandwiches. “Try it and see,” she said absently, wondering why Kit was so fixated on goodness.

  Selenicera shot into the air with a whoop, but Datura’s tongue whipped forth NASCAR-quick all the way from the end of the table and caught Selenicera in the chest, her gluey tongue holding her sister fast. Kit reached out, casually, and severed the link with her switchblade.

  Once she was free, Selenicera shot into the air, laughing, flapping around the table, fanning the sugar out of the bowl.

  Datura reeled in what was left of her bleeding tongue, knocking over teacups and tracking blood over the finger sandwiches. She cried for more tea, so obsessively thirsty she didn’t seem to care that the drink she was begging for had turned her into a toad.

  The happy-place people returned briefly to clear the spoiled food—and the severed tongue, which was so gross not even Kit wanted it as a trophy—and replace it with more sandwiches and cakes. Selenicera alighted in her chair and dug in, but Datura only wanted tea.

  “Come on,” Kit coaxed around a mouthful of cherry tart. “Even common criminals get a last meal. It’s only right.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Datura’s severed tongue made her words sound strange.

  “What if I gave you a special type of fruit?” said Fancy. “It can only be found here. You like plants. Look at those trees over there.”

  Datura studied the trees growing between the statues. The dancer’s tree had grown tall in the sisters’ absence and sported leaves of fire. But it was the old-man tree with its blood fruit that caught Datura’s eye.

  “What kind of tree is that?” she asked.

  “The horniverous oldmandia,” said Fancy.

  Kit snorted into her teacup.

  “The fruit of that tree stimulates an unholy appetite,” Fancy told her. “Wanna try it? You’d be the first.”

  “I’ll get it!” Selenicera shot up, her emerald wings blowing Fancy’s hair this way and that, and flew to the tree and picked the fruit. She flapped to Datura’s end of the table and giggled as her sister ate as tamely as a dog.

  After consuming the fruit, Datura immediately began eating everything the handlers held before her. They all ate in earnest, but shortly thereafter Datura began to moan and swell. Alarmingly. Her features stretching and rounding like a balloon.

  “Is she gone change into something else?” asked Selenicera, nibbling a scone and watching her sister attentively.

  Kit looked to Fancy for an answer, but though Fancy had great fun dreaming up murderous scenarios and setting them in motion, she never knew exactly how things would turn out.

  “She gets any bigger,” Selenicera said, “she gone float away.”

  But Datura didn’t float away.

  She popped.

  The damp explosion knocked the minions off their feet and blew the girls away from the table. They hit the platform hard, and it took several moments before they recovered enough to pick themselves up off the ground. Selenicera had regained her old skin, the blast having stripped away her winged form. The only thing left of Datura was the gore covering her sister.

  Selenicera spoke first, wiping a glob of Datura from her mouth. “I’m officially full now.” She flung the glob away, and when it stuck to the air two feet away, she jerked back, startled.

  “It’s nothing,” Kit told her. “Just means we’re going home.”

  A few seconds later the walls of Selenicera’s strange garden room closed around them.

  Fancy noticed the kinetoscope on the floor and picked it up, petting it like a faithful dog.

  “Did all of that happen?” Selenicera wrapped her arms around herself as though she was cold. “Did my sister really explode?”

  “Yep,” said Kit. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m good. But this?” She looked at the goo coating her. “This ain’t so good.”

  Fancy shrieked with frustration when she saw her clothes, having just realized that Selenicera wasn’t the only one covered in gore. “This is really starting to irk me out.”

  “Let’s go get cleaned up,” said Kit, her lighthearted manner at odds with the wads of skin matting her short hair.

  Selenicera showed the sisters the bathroom, much more subdued than she had been in the happy place.

  “That’s a huge tub.” Kit put her hand on Selenicera’s head. “Since it’s your house and all, we’ll let you shower first, kid.”

  “I don’t like showers. I don’t like . . . being watered.”

  Kit slid her hand to the back of Selenicera’s neck. “You don’t have to bathe if you don’t want to. I could drown you instead.”

  Selenicera shook her head vigorously.

  Kit laughed. “Your head says no, but your eyes say yes. Don’t they?” She turned Selenicera to face Fancy, who was watching her sister with growing concern. “Look at her. Doesn’t she look miserable?”

  “Of course. Her sister just exploded all over her.”

  Fancy went to the sink to scrub he
r hands clean. “What’s the point in helping people, just to kill ’em afterward?”

  “You wanna know what the point is? The point is, I have no fucking idea why you brought me along!”

  Fancy was so stunned by her sister’s outburst she didn’t even chide Kit for swearing.

  “You promised that this time I could stab someone,” Kit continued, “but here I am! Covered in blood and yet completely unsatisfied.” She considered Selenicera, who’d once again wrapped her arms around herself. “But I don’t have to stay unsatisfied. How long do you think this kid’ll survive, all alone with no family? I’d be doing her a favor.”

  “I have a brother,” Selenicera said in a small voice. “He’ll take care of me. He said he would.”

  Kit smiled at Selenicera reassuringly. “I could make it so that it wouldn’t hurt, if that’s what you’re worried about. You wouldn’t explode or—”

  “Please.” She was shaking her head, shaking all over. “He’s got a den. He said I could stay in it.”

  Fancy pulled her sister away from Selenicera. “Kit, I told you, there’s no need for that. We can kill people without stabbing them or getting our hands dirty.”

  Kit held her bloody hands in Fancy’s face.

  Fancy grimaced. “I just gotta work out some kinks.”

  Kit looked at herself in the mirror. Fancy had no idea what her sister saw, but whatever it was seemed to depress the hell out of her.

  “I guess there is no need to stab people anymore.” Kit took Datura’s tooth from her pocket and tossed it in the garbage pail by the toilet, but Fancy hurried forward and fished it out.

  She waggled the tooth in Kit’s face. “There’s also no point in having the happy place if you’re gone leave evidence out like Christmas cookies for anybody to find!”

  Kit sighed all the way from her toes and sat on the edge of the tub. Then she smiled at Selenicera, who was eyeing the two sisters nervously. “No worries, kid. I won’t kill you. I’ve decided to quit while I’m ahead.” She looked down at her own gore-streaked body appreciatively. “Be a shame if all this good stuff turned into a toad.”