karen > Books: 2016-short-story-advent-calendar‎ (32)

The guy and his wife built their house to be strong, fortifying it with wood, sticks, mud, stones, whatever they could find. They lived carefully, quietly, didn’t even look at each other most days. They’d had enough of living in a half-assed fairy tale. Enough bloodshed, enough potions and elixirs, enough of that for a lifetime. They figured if they didn’t talk, didn’t try to understand it all, then the story would just go away. Would stop trying to mean something, would stop trying to break their broken hearts.

With a supreme effort of will, and using the broomstick as support, I was able to lift myself onto the boots and stagger about, sending the children who had unwittingly animated me running in terror. They fled a short distance and peered at me from the protection of the surrounding trees. I had no wish to alarm them, and so attempted some reassuring words. The effort proved most difficult, as I seemed to have no mouth, only a corncob pipe thrust into the uppermost sphere of snow, below whatever objects served as my eyes.

“Did he . . . say something?” one of the children asked. He spoke in English, a language I do not know well.

“I mean you no harm,” I managed to respond.

Slowly they emerged and began to approach me. “What’s your name?” one of them asked.

“Friedrich,” I tried to say, though the sounds that emerged were much distorted.

“Frosty!” cried one of the children happily. “His name is Frosty!”

“Nietzsche!” I corrected him firmly, but the children all laughed.

“Gesundheit!” one of them said.

“You are but one of a thousand retainers to the Beldame. But each of you is a finger, or a toe. Your movements are her movements. Do not make her a disgrace.”

From the greatest distance possible, Harding reaches out and prods the largest shoggoth with the flat top of his hammer. It does nothing, in response. Not even a quiver.

He calls out to the fisherman. "Do they ever do anything when they're like that?"

"What kind of a fool would come poke one to find out?" the fisherman calls back, and Harding has to grant him that one. A Negro professor from a Negro college. That kind of a fool.

Sylvain sang the song now to the little fish, gently at first, just breathing the tune, and then stronger, letting the sound swell between them. He sang of care, and comfort, and loss, and a longing to make everything better. And if tears seemed to rain down his cheeks as he sang, it was nothing but an illusion—just water dribbling from his hair.

I suppose if one is not acquainted with an actual vampire, love disguised as cruelty sounds better than the world outside. All these monsters, waiting for the right girl. All these girls, hoping for monsters. Once a beauty finds her beast, she blossoms. Her junky old jewels turn out to be talismans, her dead mother’s cheap locket a portal to another plane. All she needs to learn magic is for someone to call her pretty.

The vampire is suspicious of vampires with arcane tattoos, bare pectorals, magical powers, secrets; vampires who eat deer instead of girls. Vampires who are looking for love.

—Where on earth does she get her ideas, do you think? the vampire asks, paging through Rosamunde’s adventures.

—They hate that question, I tell him. —They write essays online about how much they hate it. The vampire looks up at me, an eyebrow raised.

—Where do you get your ideas?

—I don’t have ideas, I say. Since the vampire started helping me, my editorial letters have gone more cutting and less enthusiastic. The literary agent says I am showing promise.

It was the middle of the night when the elves came out of the mirrors. Everyone in the house was asleep. Outside, the city slumbered. Silent as shadows, the warriors went from room to room. Their knives were so sharp they could slit a throat without awakening their victim.

They killed all the adults.

The children they spared.

'Why don't we try for a baby?'

This was mid-March. My memory of that moment is of hearing birds outside. I always loved that time of year, that sense of nature becoming stronger all around. But I always owned the decisions I made, I didn't blame them on what was around me, or on my hormones. I am what's around me, I am my hormones, that's what I always said to myself. I don't know if Ben ever felt the same way. That's how I think of him now: always excusing himself. I don't know how that squares with how the world is now. Perhaps it suits him down to the ground. I'm sure I spent years looking out for him excusing himself. I'm sure me doing that was why, in the end, he did.

I listened to the birds. 'Yes,' I said.

We got lucky almost immediately. I called my mother and told her the news.

'Oh no,' she said.

I closed my eyes again, feeling the land sliding again into the place I wanted to go least in the world. There is no reasoning with it, no forcing it. Mapmakers don’t make the land; we only hold fast to whichever shape it gives us. I walked forward.