Merry Sisters of Fate @merryfates - Tumblr Blog

I adore your stories. Thank you for brightening my day.

Today is the release date of The Anatomy of Curiosity.

I’m going to tell you a story about this book and how it nearly didn’t exist. It involves magic, blood, and friendship and is completely true.

Once upon a time, there were three friends, Brenna Yovanoff, Maggie Stiefvater, and Tessa Gratton, and they were witches.

No, I began that wrong.

Once upon a time, there were three friends, Brenna Yovanoff, Maggie Stiefvater, and Tessa Gratton, and they were writers.

They had been writers for as long as they could remember and friends for only a little less. The idea for the Anatomy of Curiosity — a show-and-tell writer’s guide for teen writers — was spurred years ago, when Tessa and Maggie were in the middle of an epic fight. The fight spanned states and months and involved battles with dragons in the Kansas sky, and it was mostly Maggie’s fault. I can say that, because I am Maggie.

Finally, when all parties were spent and bleeding out, the two witches reached over and clasped argument-bloodied hands.

“Let’s make a book together,” Maggie said. “That will fix all our problems.”

“You’re a problem,” Tessa replied, which meant yes.

And Brenna was tired of the bad weather, so she patted Maggie and Tessa’s heads and the book was born in the blood of friends. The problem with ideas made under duress, however, is that they are often incomplete, and the project fumbled and faltered even as the battle that spawned it was mostly forgotten. The thing that made the book the most interesting to us — that we were three different writers with three very different approaches to writing — was also what made developing a useful format impossible. How to balance teaching and entertainment? How to show three entirely different ways to get to a story?

By summer of 2014, we were on the verge of calling our agents and canceling it. It was a fraught summer anyway. The three of us were on a road trip — this was Maggie’s fault, and I can say that, because I am Maggie — in a sky blue ‘73 Camaro that was too small for three adults and too broken for a 7,000 mile road trip. Maggie didn’t believe in the concept of impossibility, though, and Brenna and Tessa believed in Maggie, so they were doing it anyway.

We were soaring across the Nevada desert when a raven flew over the top of the car. The Camaro’s engine bucked once. No, thought Maggie. We proceeded for several dozen more miles without incident, and then a second raven flew over the top of the car. The Camaro’s engine bucked again, and then it shuddered in a death rattle.

We coasted into Winnemucca, Nevada.

The car made it to the shade beneath the only tree growing in Winnemucca. We climbed into the bristling hot day and I threw open the hood. As I discovered that a single bolt had fallen from the alternator and stopped us, we heard a laugh. A third raven was sitting in the only tree growing in Winnemucca, Nevada, and it was laughing at us.

The bolt was gone, of course. It had probably fallen out on the highway back when the first raven had flipped us the bird.

We began to walk. It was over one hundred degrees. There was no one else in Winnemucca. They had probably all died. It was just us and the raven. We walked a mile to the closest auto parts store, where we bought a bolt and some lock nuts. On the way back, a Jack in the Box rippled into view. We recognized a mystical oasis when we saw one, so we entered and ordered drinks. As we melted, we talked Anatomy. This, we felt, was the moment of truth. We were stranded in Winnemucca, which might have not even been a real place, and it seemed like we might never escape if we didn’t solve the riddle. Did we choose to hurl ourselves against it one more time or did we choose to give up?

This is the release date of the book, so, spoiler.

We walked back to the Camaro, certain in our new plan. I put in the brand-new bolt and the Camaro started at once. The shade had moved from the only tree in Winnemucca and the raven was gone.

Fast forward to this fall. Tessa, Brenna, and Maggie are still friends, and still writers. The book is about to come out. I am in Virginia, states away from both of them, but I’m thinking about them. I have just come back from Colorado, where Brenna lives, and I have my eyes on my next trip to Kansas, where Tessa lives. I am rummaging in one of my backpacks for a hair band and my fingers touch something cold in the bottom. It’s heavy, and it’s cold, and it is not a hair band. I can’t imagine what it would be — this is just my tiny backpack that I carry clothing in for my overnight trips, and I had just emptied it the weekend before.

I take the object out.

It still had a little bit of rust on it. There was no raven around to laugh this time, so I did instead.

So we hope you enjoy the Anatomy of Curiosity. It’s got magic, blood, and friendship in it, and also some stories and advice.

#maggie stiefvater #brenna yovanoff #tessa gratton #the anatomy of curiosity #merry sisters of fate

Jack’s Field of Bargains - story by Tessa Gratton

There was a farm off highway 32, just north of the road, that the Linwood High School cross-country team drove past every Tuesday and Thursday during the fall semester on their way to the six-mile course near Lake Archer.

The farm was just a two-story cabin with peeling white paint and a collapsing barn out back. The silo’d been stripped of its tiles and looked like nothing more than a fat concrete smoke stack, and a massive old cottonwood shaded a pond covered in lily-pads. Between the silo and the tree was a fallow field a half-acre square, full of junk. It was organized in haphazard rows, and varied from tin can sculpture and tire flower beds, to trunks of porcelain baby dolls and old rotary telephones.

A hand-painted plywood sign declared JACK’S FIELD OF BARGAINS.

Tom Vanderpoel sat in the backseat of his teammate Evan’s rusty Chevy, forehead pressed to the cool window, as they sped at least ten over the highway limit. He’d only been running cross country for a couple of weeks, having moved to Linwood with his mom after she and his dad divorced over the summer. Up front was Evan’s girlfriend and star of the women’s team, Mary Jo. Her feet were up on the dash as she hummed along with some emo singer-songwriter and Evan performed a monologue on the injustice of Mr. Summers, the U.S. history teacher’s, epically long final exams. Tom didn’t mind, since it kept him from having to talk back, and he was struggling with himself for thinking Evan in no way deserved Mary Jo.

When he saw the sign, he interrupted. “What kind of bargains?”

Mary Jo set her feet down into the well and twisted around. “Oh, Jack’s. My mom says her dad used to be friends with Jack Dalling, and he used to say you could find your destiny in his field.”

“Seriously?”

Evan snorted. “It’s junk.”

She narrowed her eyes dangerously at her boyfriend, and Tom said, “Pull over.”

#junk yards #prairie #boys kissing

The Brimstone Dog - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

You get to know the people who come in. If you spend long enough behind a counter, you get an idea of what they like, not just in their coffee, but of what makes them happy. You can look at someone once, and see all the commonplace joys and the tiny miseries that make up their lives. You learn to see these things, even when you don’t want to. I was nineteen, working at Thatchman’s in the Village. Vietnam had ended, the horror was over, and there was still a giddy sense that we’d won—not Nixon, or the US Army, but we, the people. We had called for peace and they had heard us. I’d done nothing. Oh, I’d marched—I’d shouted and dyed my clothes and grown my hair like everyone else. But I hadn’t prevailed in any real sense. I was at Columbia that year, studying comparative literature and 18th Century French poetry. If I’d done something remarkable, actually done something, I was certain that my life would have been fundamentally altered. The difference would be there on my skin, trembling in my voice, writ large on my face. My sense of justice would shine out my eyes. People would see my immutable strength of will, righteous and pure, like Joan of Arc. Instead, I was just a girl in a cafe, pouring coffee and serving sandwiches, while out on Bleeker Street, the world went on and on in one long, greasy smear.

The man was older and always wore the same suit. Or maybe it was a different suit and he just had a lot of them. Either way, his clothing was conspicuous. No one else was wearing suits at all. He kept his hair shorter than the men who worked the docks and the warehouses, and much shorter than the men in the Village. At first, I had a notion that he only came into Thatchman’s at all because of the dogs. There were two of them, black and gold, like Rottweilers. They were bigger than Rottweilers, though—massive through the shoulders and as high as my hip. Side by side, they padded after him. When he snapped his fingers, they sat. When he nodded, they got up and followed him. On the first day he ever came in, it was raining. He walked in under the jangling bell, shook himself in a giant, glittering spray, and took off his hat. He was the kind of person wore a hat. I was perched on the wooden bar stool behind the register, making notes in a history of the French Revolution. At the counter he took a seat, winking in the most indecent way and leaning on his elbows. “Can I trouble you for a cup of coffee?” His voice was low and rough, with a certain kind of accent. English, but not the bright, sophisticated kind from the movies. His coat was expensive, but the way he said his vowels was working-class. “You’re not supposed to have dogs in here,” I said. “It’s against health code.”

#fiction #Brenna Yovanoff #merry fates #hell hounds

The Deadlier of the Species — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

Jamie hated Andrew Murray. She didn’t feel that he had any redeeming qualities, unless you numbered an ability to wear extremely pointy man-shoes and an annoying chesty laugh as positive features. She hated the way his nostrils flared before he made a joke. She hated the way he talked about women. She also hated the way he talked about men, midgets, babies, and nuns.

To be fair, Andrew Murray also hated her. He found her politics appalling — well, he had, politics were not quite what they used to be. He thought her voice was too loud. He had once, memorably, called her a fat, ugly bitch, which was slightly unfair as only one of those things was true.

The only thing they had in common was Annette Quinton. Jamie’s best friend. Andrew’s fiance. What she saw in the other was a puzzle that mystified each of them.

“Well, this place is a dive,” Andrew said. He laughed. Chestily. It was not a promising beginning to the evening. Jamie didn’t answer. The place was not really a dive. Only eight months earlier, this had been one of the snobbiest areas in the city. She’d applied for an apartment only a few minutes away and had been turned down for bad credit, the only thing her last boyfriend had ever got her for her birthday. Now, of course, it was less than it had been: weeds overgrowing the medians and windows broken out on some of the shops. There was nothing left in Gap except the racks. Andrew slammed the door of Jamie’s old Escort and Jamie said, “Are you trying to break the door off?” “Yes,” he said. “Right off.” He stepped around the back of the car in those ridiculous, long shoes of his — he had an identical pair in some exotic skin like rattlesnake or hamster, Jamie couldn’t decide which pair was worse — and retrieved the rifle from the trunk. He offered it to her but Jamie shook her head.

#maggie stiefvater #fiction #apocalypse #merry sisters of fate

The Vampire Box - story by Tessa Gratton

We have a vampire living in our basement.

It’s my job to feed him while Dad is in Palo Alto at a convention. At six a.m. I pad into the kitchen in my bare feet and jersey nightgown with my robe hanging off my shoulders. I yawn, wishing I could crawl back in bed after the chore. It’s the last week before finals, and I’m already in at Northwest State, so I don’t really have to focus much. The motivation to show up at school is as low as it gets.

Half the freezer is piled with Tupperware blood-packs, and I dig out one from the bottom, grumbling to myself that Mom still isn’t packing them with the oldest on top for easy access. I should just take over the butcher store runs. Then she could just forget about it – which was all she wanted.

While the blood heats in the microwave, I heave myself onto the counter and stare at the basement door. It’s painted soft yellow, but most of the color peeled away a while ago. I went through a phase when I was in Junior High where I stripped a thin line of the paint off the door every time I passed it. The lines were like prison bars holding me back.

The microwave beeps and I hop down. I grab the lancet from its hook over the sink and pull the Tupperware out onto the counter. I yawn again just as I’m pulling off the plastic top, and get a lungful of coppery pig’s blood smell. I gag like a cat and dance back, making a show of myself because there’s no one around to see. When I calm down, I put my hand on the counter, palm up. I take the lancet, which is a thin triangle of steel about as long as my thumb, and put the tip to my pinky. This is my least favorite part. I grit my teeth and ready myself with a massive grimace, then jab the lancet into my finger.

Blood wells instantly, and I let a couple of drops fall into the Tupperware.

I’m supposed to be using Dad’s blood. He drained a quarter-pint of it before leaving and it’s hanging in the pantry with whatever his favorite anti-coagulant is keeping it sort-of fresh. But it’s bad enough our vampire is trapped in a cage in the basement. To not even give him the two drops of fresh blood he’s promised seems un-Constitutional.

With the Tupperware balanced carefully in my hands, I face the basement.

#vampires

Cut - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

My mother cut my heart out and put it in a box.

If this was a story, that’s how it would end.

It would begin with snow and the tragic, impersonal death of a young trophy wife, and fade into a montage of the replacement-bride, how she drenched her hair with honey and washed her face with milk.

That part’s true.

When my father remarried, the woman was unapologetically vain. She spent hours in front of the mirror, looking all alabaster and perfect. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, she went downtown to the day spa, where they shaped her fingernails and peeled the top layer of her skin off with various kinds of acid.

I stayed home and dyed my hair. I caked my face with powder and drew black lines around my eyes to show everyone the difference between us, that I wasn’t like her, that she wasn’t really my mother. She kept buying me dresses in pink and turquoise, and acting like we could be best friends.

Let me start again. My father’s wife had my heart cut out. She put it in a box.

#merry fates #Brenna Yovanoff #fiction #snow white #fairy tale retellings

The Wind Takes Our Cries — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

My Eoin was sixteen years when they rode through. Eoin, I loved him, he was my seventh, and the others nearly killed me coming out, but not him. He slid out like a fish through a fisherman’s hands, and like a fish, he never did cry, just twisted in the goodwife’s arms. Later, when he was older, my husband and master did his part to beat a tear from Eoin’s blue eyes, but he wouldn’t cry for him either. I did the weeping for him, while I listened from the other room, and the wind took my cries away. My husband beat the others as well, but when he beat them, it was steady, methodical, rhythmic sound, like weaving, or intercourse, or raking up hay. When he beat Eoin, it was the unpredictable scrabbling of a foal standing for the first time, or the chaotic crashing of the ocean on cliffs. The beating would stop whenever Eoin stopped getting up, but Eoin never seemed to learn to stay down, any more than he learned to cry.

#maggie stiefvater #king arthur #fiction #merry sisters of fate

Skinned - story by Tessa Gratton

I can’t drown, but it is not for lack of trying.

***

I return to the coast where I was born, for college. I am eighteen and Dad can’t stop me. He tries.

“Meris, all that waits for you there is long sorrow,” he says.

I kiss his cheek. “That’s all I have now.”

It isn’t true, but it’s close enough.

***

Our house is gone. Torn down and replaced with a row of identical villas, purposefully weathered to appear decades old.

I stand with the sand spilling away under my bare feet, ocean wind at my back, and stare at the low fence between two condos where our house used to squat. It is exactly the same place I stood thirteen years ago and saw a patch of color shining on the roof. It hugged the chimney, glistening silver and gray. “Mama,” I asked, when she joined me for tuna sandwiches, “What’s that?”

***

When I return to my hotel I call Dad. “Did you know they turned our house into cheap tourist holes?”

“I sold it to that contractor on purpose. It’s better this way.”

I am quiet until he asks me about the airplane, and when I’m driving down to college to get settled into my dorm. I tell him, and we have a conversation filled with facts but lacking in any real purpose.

***

At dawn the next morning, I go for a run on the beach. Dad used to, every day before work. It’s hard. The sand does not want to propel me forward, but rather suck me down. I splash my sneakers through the edge of the surf, hopping over strings of seaweed. The rhythm of the waves seeps into my bones and I want to cry with relief. I’ve missed it more than anything, trapped in the center of the country. Pink and lavender and mauve spread over the horizon like lipstick, and the thin silver moon dangles before it. The moon is the same color as her skin.

I search for seals, a hand shading my eyes.

Rest for the Wicked - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

For the stone-cold sum of five hundred dollars a week, Richard Casey hired me to watch him sleep.

I know what you’re thinking, but not every help-wanted ad ends in depravity. It wasn’t like that. When I called, the voice on the line sounded hoarse and exhausted. The listing wasn’t even in the kink section.

I was looking for placement as a personal assistant—making calls or taking dictation, arranging dentist appointments for old, rich men who can’t be bothered to buy their own socks or pick up their dry-cleaning. What I got was Richard.

He was tall and sullen, with three days of stubble and forty years worth of shadows under his eyes.

The first night, I brought a thermos of coffee and two sandwiches and a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five.

“What is that?” he said, staring at the book.

I gave him a long look. “An American classic.”

“Put it out on the steps and don’t bring it again.”

I did what he said because it was his show, and because I needed the money. I’d read it twice already, and anyway, there are all kinds of eccentricities you’ll put up with if you really need to get paid.

#merry fates #fiction #demons #Brenna Yovanoff #insomnia

The Absence of Light — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

MACY DELL. Yesterday, Mr. Colquitt knocked on our door and told my parents they were blowing up the moon. He and my dad stood on the front porch and my mom came out afterward and gave Mr. Colquitt a sweating glass of iced tea that matched hers. They watched minivans drive down the street and talked about the piece of moon that had hit the bus in California. Then they were mumbling and boring and Brendan texted me and said to come onto chat so I did.

Brendan is not cute. He is fourteen and has acne. Anyways I am sort of in love with Mr. Colquitt. Sometimes Mr. Colquitt will drape an arm around Mrs. Colquitt’s shoulders and she will lean up against him, and I will think, aww, that would be nice, in the way that you look at clouds and think about running across them barefoot and you think, aww, that would be nice.

I’m not sure what I think about them blowing up the moon.

MR. FRANCIS DELL. Ben Colquitt came over two days ago and said they’d decided that destroying the moon was the best course of action. What the hell do I know about the best course of action? All I know is that the moon is suddenly shitting pieces all over us and now you don’t know if you’re supposed to go out to work with an umbrella or a tank.

Forty-two years and I told Sara that the worst thing that’s ever happened to us as a family is this recession.

And now look, the damn sky is falling.

What the hell are we even paying NASA to do anyway?

#maggie stiefvater #fiction #merry sisters of fate

Stains - story by Tessa Gratton

It’s Varro’s idea to steal the unicorn.

We are too old for pranks now, me just fifteen and him a year past that, nearly ready to take his initial trials. But the way his jaw sets as he suggests it, the way he makes his voice sound off-hand and won’t meet my eyes; instead gazing out over the garden as if he only cares that the rows of crabapple trees are pruned just right and the petunias haven’t overgrown their boxes.

“A last lark while we’re children, Ginny.”

Sitting with my corset pressing my ribs together, I know better than to think I am still a child. They’ve already stained my lips with spell-dye so all will know my words are power.

Varro’s, too, of course. He turns to me. The black on his lips suits his face in a way it never will mine. His hair twists in ropes like black snakes around flat, foreign cheekbones the color of burnished gold, and his up-turned eyes are as black as his hair. As if Nature knew what he would be and said: Let this Varro be born in two tones, gold and black, so that when the mage-artist paints his lips it will be the finishing touch on my own perfect work.

***

His parents had been foreign magicians, here on ambassadorial business with the council. The whole family had come for dinner at our country house, and I remember the vibrant colors embroidered into their robes; orange fish and teal ocean waters; cool mountains and black branches heavy with pink and scarlet blossoms. Mother had said much of their magic was in their clothing; woven into the threads, telling stories if you knew how to read them. None of their lips were dyed, but instead their hair curled with elaborate braids and thick black snakes. The father even had copper and silver wires twisted in his to make it flare out behind him like a rooster’s crest.

I’d been most impressed with Varro, just my size and smiling all the time. He led me on a merry chase through my own house after I’d discovered him hiding under the dining table chalking magic into the wood so that all the food would turn to dust. While I’d been down there, chastising him, Mrs. Antigone had entered and caught us both. We’d fled, my hand in Varro’s, until my heart raced and I could barely breath from running and terrified laughter. I’d flung my arms around him and danced deep into the orchard, only compounding our punishment by making us so very late for supper. When we appeared in the sitting room through one of the several secret passageways, waiting there with our backs straight on Mother’s favorite ruby settee and our hands clasps in our laps, they’d not been able to force the truth from either one of us. “Miss Genevieve introduced me to the house,” Varro said, meeting all their eyes. I was less of a liar, and glanced demurely at the rose-patterned carpet. “Yes, Father, I’m certain we must have passed where you were looking several times. Just missing each other.”

We had, of course, been sent to our rooms hungry, with only ashes to eat for our unkind joke.

***

“Why the unicorn?” I ask him, reaching up to tease at the curl fallen down my neck. I wrap it around my finger so tightly the tip turns pink.

He leaps to his feet, whirls around to face me. “Because nothing in this house is innocent.”

#unicorns #freedom

Marine Layer - story by Brenna Yovanoff

Rose hates the bougainvillea, which grows in wild sprays of red and purple, swarming over the railings and the walls. She hates the oleander, with its sweet-smelling flowers and its toxic sap.

She hates sightseers and tourists, weekend-giddy and winter-white. She even hates the hotel, although there’s nothing really terrible about it—after all, it’s just a hotel.

Mostly, she hates the fog, always forming beyond the breakers, always waiting.

“Marine layer,” her mother says, with her head bent studiously over the books. She tallies up the cost of two hundred cases of wholesale ketchup, scratching out a number and replacing it with something different.

To Rose, the phrase sounds soft: marine layer. The kind of thing of thing you drift into just before you fall asleep.

It sounds wrong.

The fog sits on the edge of the world, too far out to matter, but it creeps. Faster than is right or decent, it rolls in over the water and covers everything.

The cliffs, which minutes ago looked out on a wide open sea, are bounded in by nothing. By stark, pale gray. A person could walk right out into the ether. They could disappear.

The hotel is blanketed by fog. And things change.

#merry fates #fiction #Brenna Yovanoff

Beast — Story by Maggie Stiefvater

This is a story.

This is a story about two girls who lived alone with their mother on the end of a road at the edge of a forest. It was not a tame forest. The trees grew too close together for walking and by summer, the ground between the trunks was fast set with violent green thorns, rotted branches, and aborted saplings. It was not a pretty forest. There were too many trees in too small of space, all hedged in by foul-scented locust trees at the edges. The locusts were new. Tall and skinny, with leaves only at the top, like a broom, they grew ten and fifteen feet in a year and quickly hid anything the forest had to recommend it.

But the two girls were lovely: Rose and Lark-Louise were their names. You wouldn’t have thought they were sisters to look at them. I thought they were merely friends when I first met them, or possibly cousins. Twice removed, if cousins. They were that different. People expected Lark-Louise to be the wild one by her name, but she was slow and quiet as ripples in a pond. Dark-haired Rose was the fiend. The thorns in the forest had nothing on her for sharpness. Both of the sisters lived alone with their mother — I said that, didn’t I? — in a rambler at the edge of the trees. The house had four beds in it. Two twin beds in a shared room for the girls, an air mattress in the basement, and a queen bed that used to hold two. I know all this because I’ve slept in two of those beds. There was no father because a beast ate him. The girls don’t know, but he was trying to cut down the locusts behind the house to make the forest less ugly. It was easy for the beast to reach him from the snarl of thorns. When Rose and Lark-Louise’s mother found him, their father had a twelve foot spear run through him long-wise, and one of the beast’s pronged feet buried into his chest. Their father had managed to cut it off, you see, but the foot was still alive and angry and digging.

The beast was the most frightening thing you could imagine.

#fiction #maggie stiefvater #tw:all the triggers

Edge - Story by Tessa Gratton

Flying is like playing an Old Eur harpsichord.

My fingers stretch wide and flutter over keys and touchpads, my silver nails skim as if over smooth ice. I can watch with my own eyes and the thick oxy-smoke buffs against my pupils, keeping them from drying out in the absence of tears.

I watch the universe swirl by as I spin around and around in my forward arc back toward Earth. The spinning isn’t necessary this trip, as I left my mortal cargo on Fortune IX and all that accompanies me now are cubes of stri-rock and coated fossils in the cargo corridor. But I enjoy the spinning, so I never shut off the gravspiral.

When my last pilot began latching my wires into place in the warehouse under Fortune’s main dry dock, she’d said, “Ana, I wish I could go out with you, to see you dance.”

“You would not survive.” I sculpted my lips into a gentle frown. I liked her, and would gladly dance for her.

“I know.” She sighed, and the brown hair teasing her forehead fluttered up. I blew at it, laughing as the hairs tossed about in the low-grav field.

Her name was Jericha and she had flown with me between Fortune IX, Xerxes and Earth three times. Any more space time and her bones would collapse upon themselves.

“I have heard,” she said, “that they are working on a new generation of angels – a group born of human adults.”

I frowned. Early experiments had concluded that the post-adolescent brain could not adapt completely to sharing capacity through the dust.

We are called mech-angels, and we were born in fire.

#that one time tessa wrote scifi #spaceships #angels #meat-brain

Gingerbread - Story by Brenna Yovanoff

I learned the art of deception early and well. If a person is to flout the law, one must behave sensibly. Above all, one must be unremarkable.

The house was charming in an immaculate sort of way, with carved shutters and decorative shingles worked in a fish scale pattern. The trim around the eaves was robin’s egg blue.

I’d been to fifteen addresses by then, and all were distasteful. The kind of people looking to take on a lodger are not generally the kind of people one cares to live with.

The Ross Street house was quite different. There were no unused gardening tools lying to rust in the yard and no indolent, flea-bitten dogs. The lawn was small and tidy, with manicured flower beds and a flagstone walk flanked by rose trees.

The woman who answered the bell was easily in her seventies, but sturdy, pleasantly pink in the cheeks. She told me that her name was Mrs. Kersh and she had advertised the room because her house was just so big and she did like to have some company every so often. She currently let rooms to two boarders, a man and a woman, although they generally kept to themselves, and did I mind that she didn’t allow cats? She kept finches, you see, and didn’t want them agitated.

When she inquired as to my line of work, I told her that I was a chemist, which was not a lie. I was very good with chemicals of all kinds. In the basement of a vacant warehouse near the loading docks, I manufactured the cleanest methamphetamine in four states.

#merry fates #fiction #Brenna Yovanoff

One Glass - story by Tessa Gratton

First sip: ambrosia.

Second sip: hints of black cherry and he leaned close to whisper into my ear, “How does it taste?”

“Like -” I didn’t want to say cherries or chocolate or any of those things that would make me sound like a wannabe connoisseur. “Like -”

Third sip: “Like a waterfall, or like whirling in circles til your head spins and you can’t find your feet.”

He stroked my cheek with one long, pale finger. “And?”

Fourth sip: “And cherries.” I turned my face and found his lips waiting. His mouth was cool velvet. I sat back, blinking down at my hands. They curled around the stem of the glass and I could see my rings through the amber wine, distorted into arrows of silver. “You make this?”

“My family does.”

I saw flecks in his irises the same color as the wine and I wondered if he drew it from his veins. But I laughed at the notion, drowning the giggle in a quick drink.

Fifth sip: flying. My heart fluttered, buoyant in a sea of honey-wine. My thighs could not feel the soft leather of the sofa beneath me, and I pressed my knees together.

I’d met him at a party in Heatherfield. His smile erased the memory of the shape of his jaw or the cut of his hair. The lights sparkled and the music was just loud enough that I heard what I chose to. I thought I was inviting him to dinner and following him home because I wanted him.

He raised his own glass and held his eyes on me while he drank. Half the cup in one swallow.

Sixth sip: I wanted to dance. I stood, swaying as vertigo swept up from my stomach. He caught me, pulled me to his chest. He smelled like the wine. Sweet, clean, promising.

Hands together, we turned in a miniature waltz, confined by the ocher walls and polished furniture of his slick apartment. I shut my eyes and wind brushed my face, tugged at my curls. He put a hand flat on my hip and stepped closer. He pressed the glass to my lips.

Seventh sip: We spun and I heard music; whistle and pipe and tinny drums. The hum of bumblebees surrounded us, and feathers tickled my bare arms. I opened my eyes and saw only his face, white and shadowed like a half-moon, with that Cheshire smile and honey-wine flecks in his eyes. Behind him a blur of dark forest, of black, narrow trunks and summer-time maple leaves. All around us the flitting giggles of sparrows and toads and fireflies.

My shoes sank into wet earth but in his arms I flew, around and around and my head fell back and my hair trailed, catching in twigs and tiny goblin fingers. They jerked and tugged and I cried out, but he swallowed my fear with a kiss, the way I’d hidden my joy in the wine. Hot lilac and wisps of rose-scent slunk up my nose and clung to my throat like a sticky aftertaste.

Around and around, his fingers cold and hot, his breath sweet. I released him and flung out my hands and they were caught in the whirl of the dancing. Fire licked at my fingers and the music was louder than the ocean in my ear. He held me and spun me. I heard his laugh lace through the melody and my heart was the metronome – they kept time with me. Their drums, their pipes, their tiny footsteps and

My hand slammed into cold glass. I stumbled. The tinkle of glass accompanied me down and my knees hit hard wood.

Silence.

I blinked. Beneath my hands was the worn floor of the apartment. Shards of glass glittered between my fingers as dim street light melted in through open windows. I pushed to sit back on my heels. Paint peeled off the walls and a ceiling fan dangled from electrical wires. The sofa was slashed and the decrepit coffee table was the only other piece of furniture in the room. I was alone.

I lifted the broken stem of my wineglass. It was solid and refracted red and blue and pale green light back at me. I bent and skimmed a finger through the gritty liquid staining the hardwood floor. Lifting it to my nose, I smelled mud and dank leaves.

_____________

originally posted June 25, 2008

#tessa gratton #fairy magic #flash fiction

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