I
You tell yourself the story.
You tell it over and over.
You tell it until it changes from the lies you like to the truth you don’t.
But the tale’s in the telling, after all, and the truth will out whether you wish it or no.
II
It starts with a tea party.
Or an invitation to one.
A note in the post from Grandmother—a great one, the grandmother, not the note.
Come to tea, it says. There’ll be cake.
And while you’re not fussed on tea, you can’t resist cake. So, today you won’t play with the doll your father gave you, or your friends who live in houses less grand than yours. Masha and Vladimir, Tatiana and Grigori, Polina and Nikolai must amuse themselves without you this one time.
You dress up nicely, sweetly, because that’s what your mother taught you. A pretty dress, with the frills around the bottom and the blue bow tied at the back. White’s impractical but that’s never stopped anyone, and women have ever been trained to avoid stains on their clothing—though their reputations are another thing entirely. Brush the hair until it shines even more, then curl it around your fingers just-so, put the butterfly clip in to hold it back. The swan-white socks with the lace at the top, the shiny black shoes that tap when you’re on the cobbles but attract the dust once you get to the forest paths outside the village. And they rub, too, just at the heel; you remember why you don’t wear these much. You wonder why you didn’t ask to borrow a horse or Old Katya’s donkey (even though you’d end up smelling like one of them—horse or donkey, not Katya).
But you walk and the sun is hot; it pinks your skin and if you touch your nose you feel the heat before fingers meet flesh. You should have worn a hat, but Grandmother is not overly fond of them—Don’t cover your face. What’s the point if no one can see how lovely you are?
You wonder why she’s so obsessed with beauty when she’s so old herself. But maybe that’s why. She’s said before that she too was once beautiful. That everyone watched her and, in being so lovely, no one suspected a thing.
You haven’t told anyone you’re going, or where. Not everyone gets such invitations. Some people don’t approve. But your mother—your true mother—is gone; your father is away and has left you to the good graces of your stepmother. She calls you “little one” because her own daughters (two) are much older than you—almost marriageable. You find them strange, with their concerns about boys and frocks, embroidery and shoes, knitting and collecting useless things into a trousseau.
At last you reach the clearing, which is cool and green when you’re quite tired and sticky-hot, grumpy and a little dizzy. The white fence so neat and bright, and the little cottage with its thatched roof, the garden’s filled with flowers even though they should be dying by now (you know this). You take the stone path (shiny black shoes tap-tap-tap, warning anyone inside). You knock on the door and wait politely, just like you’ve been taught.
Grandmother’s voice sounds, melodic as the birdsong that accompanied you on your journey. You turn the handle and push: there is Grandmother (white-haired, rosy-cheeked, bespectacled and smiling) sitting at a small round cloth-covered table. There’s a fine porcelain teapot painted with flowers just like those outside, and cups and saucers to match. There’s a plate of biscuits, but those are lesser treats, be honest. And there is the cake, iced and decorated with strawberries. Magnificent.
“Hello, Grandmother,” you say, waiting for the permission that comes with a greeting.
“Hello, my darling girl,” she replies, then says your name and you know it’s okay to cross the threshold. To walk in, across the floor rug, to give a little jump so you can reach the chair and sit on its smooth hard woodenness. Smile back at this grandmother and have the tea party you were promised.
III
No.
Flip the pages
Not forwards.
Backwards.
The words look different now. Are different.
And there are no pages, no words.
It’s just your mind, your memories.
And the story reshaped.
There is no letter, no note. The postman does not visit. He has not come for some while. Once he brought letters from your father, for you and for your stepmother. You would read them together in the parlour of his house, where there’s a large fireplace with a mirror hung above it; paintings and icons and statues and tapestries on the walls, and leather-bound books. Before you were told the kitchen was your place. Before the woman who supplanted your mother decided she did not like that Father’s missives to you sounded fonder than his to her; that he did not mention or ask after the stepdaughters that had been provided. Now, your stepmother goes alone to the small post office and collects her letters. You do not know why your father stopped writing to you. Or if he did. If Stepmother perhaps simply does not bring yours home. There is a small woodstove where the postmistress burns logs. You wonder, sometimes, if your father’s letters help keep her warm.
No, there are no letters for you, and the doll that was yours now belongs to a stepsister. But there are dreams and they become plentiful. More than that. They begin as fragments in the middle of other dreams, they are a note of a song that doesn’t belong in the aria being sung. But they are not jarring; they only draw enough attention to let you know they are there. So quiet that no one else might detect them—if anyone else were to be in your dreams, watching. No. Just enough, like a flash of the sun against a mirror on the other side of a valley. Hello. We’re here. Hello.
And once you realise they exist, you start to look for them, listen for them. You miss them on the days they are absent—or you cannot find them, which might be a different thing altogether—and they are friends, for a while. You think.
The dreams become bigger, better, greater, more lucid. There is a grandmother and she’s yours. She has a cottage, tidy and smart, its yard filled with blossoms in a riot of colours. In a glade, green and cool, where birds sing—oh that note, remember that note? That single note that caught your attention? That note, over and over, but it makes you so happy, for a while. It makes you yearn. And there is that grandmother who fills the hole left by a family that couldn’t hang on. Couldn’t survive. That left you here with a stepmother and two stepsisters in the house your father built. But the grandmother in the dreams feeds you cake, she pats you and calls you her darling girl. She lets you sleep in the velvet armchair by the fire as if you’re a kitten, her sweetest pet, her dearling child, and you are loved.
And that is wonderful, while it lasts. Perhaps it is weeks, perhaps months, while it’s wonderful.
Then you dream of gardens, only they aren’t quite gardens or not as you’d know them. Not like the manicured grounds around your father’s house where you used to play. Where you can only sneak out at night, now, lest you be seen. These gardens have no blossoms, nothing green, only bodies are planted there, only fingerbones wave in the black air of the cold hours like so many night-blooms, shrinking beneath when the sun rises.
There comes a day when you wake. Are you fleeing the dreams or walking towards them? You leave the house your father built for your mother. You leave, knowing somehow that it’s mostly empty, now. You go past the cottages in the village where Masha and Vladimir, Tatiana and Grigori, Polina and Nikolai lived. Black curtains flutter in the windows, doors closed against weeping.
You don’t dress in a tea gown because you don’t have one anymore, and the shiny black shoes with the buckles no longer fit. You wear a sack-brown dress with its apron pocket on the front; the fabric scratches your skin wherever it touches you, which is most places. Your boots are too big and so you stuff newspaper in the toes to stop them falling off because there are no laces. But this only works a short while, until your feet compact the paper; the space expands as if it’s a living thing reclaiming its territory. You still get blisters, just like in the first story. Eventually, you step out of those boots and continue on, barefoot.
You come to a glade, green and shaded, so cold without the sun. The fence is still white, but some of the palings are crooked; others are gone. There are only a few black blossoms in the garden of the cottage. The path has cracks and weeds grow up through them. Your feet slap on the stones, the coolness of them is refreshing. You lift a hand at the door. You hesitate. From inside you hear a clicking and a clacking, as of someone rattling . . . something.
You knock.
You are bid.
You go in.
Grandmother smiles and tells you you’re safely home.
IV
No.
Not this either.
Not this tale.
Things drop away, gentle lies fall.
Things disintegrate.
The story will out.
Truths poke up like fingerbones from loose dark soil, sharp underfoot, digging into tender blistered soles.
The letters stop. The dreams begin. The day your father leaves is the day Stepmother turns cold and cruel, your stepsisters cease to see you, hear you, speak to you. There is no slow erosion between then and now. No autumn of affection. The frost is immediate. You no longer have your pretty bedroom—one of the stepsisters has that. All your shiny things are redistributed to them. For a while you have the attic, but you make it comfortable and that cannot be allowed. So next it is the kitchen, a place that stubbornly resists comfort. You may not keep the fire going after the meal is cooked (by you now, for all the servants are dismissed). You sleep in the hearth to steal its last warmth. You are filthy despite your best efforts. You breathe ash, you bite coal, you wrap yourself about with cinders to keep from freezing to death—because you’re not ready for that yet. You’re not ready to go, to surrender.
The dreams come quickly. They are not gentle. They do not float like birdsong.
They are daggers in the night. A summons. A demand.
They are slicked red and coated with sweat.
Grandmother calls.
She calls and calls and calls, for two nights and three nights and four.
And one morning you wake knowing where you must go and what you must do beforehand. You wait for Stepmother to leave, to go and visit friends, to take some tea, to collect her letters and to burn yours. Then you choose a big sharp knife from the kitchen and go to your not-sisters.
They come apart quickly, but not easily.
There’s a strength to your arm that might not be yours. Might be borrowed or given or stolen. You don’t know. But you use it and you like it and you could get used to it. This strength.
That mirror over the fireplace, you haven’t gazed in it for the longest time. Not since it got harder and harder to stay clean, to steal a little water and soap, to wash away the soot at the end of each day. Now the sack-brown shift is decorated with black and red and you think that perhaps you look better this way than ever you did in a white dress with a blue ribbon, with shiny black shoes and lacy socks.
You put the knife in your pocket; you find a bag and pack it with bones (smeared crimson, some meat still adhering), and the fingerbones especially, the ones she likes best of all. You must bring a gift to Grandmother.
And you leave the house. You leave only a wordless message for her, Stepmother; you leave her with only her breath. You’ve taken the children—and despite her hatred for you, despite the fact her heart could not expand to hold you in it—she did love those daughters, those girls. She loved them so and now they are no more than a stain on the silken rug.
The road is long and your feet are bare, but they toughen—you walk for weeks and months. You might walk for years. You think how much easier it would be if you had Grandmother’s mortar and pestle to navigate the land, over the tall trees, or by the hidden and hollow ways the dead and damned most oft travel.
You grow thin. Sometimes you take a bone from your sack and gnaw on it—you think Grandmother will not begrudge you—and you eat the other scraps you find. The things that wander because their parents are careless. Because in some places there are too many mouths to feed and one less is a blessing. You know it is what Grandmother would do.
Yes, the road is long, but one day, at last, you are there.
The hut is black, small, behind a fence that has skulls atop its posts. Their eyes are aflame, and they open their mouths to scream. You call their names: “Masha and Vladimir, Tatiana and Grigori, Polina and Nikolai—hush.”
And they do.
Why do they?
It is enough, you suppose, that they do.
Grandmother knows you are coming anyway.
You heft your sack of bones (lighter now), your hard feet slap-slap-slap on the path. Beneath the little wooden porch you can see the folds of the chicken legs that hold Grandmother’s cottage up when she wills it. You knock on the door, which is dry and splintered but you’ve no fat left on you, there’s nothing for a sliver to catch in; you turn the handle, push.
“Come in, my girl.” Her eyes catch at you like fingers (like the ones in your sack, all sucked and licked clean, white white white). She says your name, which no one has done in a long time, so it doesn’t seem to fit anymore. “Vasilisa. Little queen.”
You step over the threshold, your feet filthy and traipsing dirt and ash and whatever else you’ve walked through in your days and weeks and months and perhaps years. And there she is, crouched by the hearth, stirring a great cauldron. Her hair is silver, her face a map of lines, a crooked nose, deep-set eyes, a heavy brow. Thin lips that smile. She’s grandmother to a lot of children despite no blood ties. That’s why she can call you. And the others. (Counting you all.)
You come close, so close you can smell her breath and skin, her rot and sweat, her age and the very skeleton of her. She lifts a hand, fingers thin, nails sharp with black moons under them, rests one against your cheek (so high, so defined, so cavernous).
“What a way you’ve travelled, what a path you’ve trod. Such a pity to end here.” The edge of her nail presses—just a little—but you feel it open you up. Feel that gem of blood seep, spill. And you realise that Grandmother doesn’t like dry bones, not if wet ones are available.
But Grandmother doesn’t know you’re not ready to go yet either. She said it herself: What a way you’ve travelled. That you won’t die; you choose, you refuse. You’ve done terrible things to survive, but there’s not so much of you left. Not the old you. The first one. And Grandmother doesn’t know you’ve kept the big knife, brought it with you, its handle still sticky with the blood of the family your father left you to, of the scraps by the roadside whose parents did not watch. While she’s busy with your face, you are busy with her belly.
You are younger.
Faster, and stronger.
You have all that borrowed, given, stolen strength.
When she’s open, things fall out.
A collection of small hearts (golden), skulls (silver) and keys (bronze). There’s a tiny doll that says it will tell you Grandmother’s secrets in return for a little food, a little drink. She’ll tell you how to sing in dreams. How to call children to you. How to feed yourself. She’ll tell you why you must count their fingerbones. She tells you that you can’t go anywhere, because there always needs to be someone in this hut. That you’ve won it fair and square, by blood and bone. She tells you to throw Grandmother into the hearth.
And you say “Yes,” and sit in Grandmother’s chair, then feed her to the flames that suddenly blaze up.
There are no mirrors here, but it doesn’t matter.
There is the fire and it works just as well to reflect your face.
You’ve changed.
You are both more and less. More and less—not the other way around. There is a difference. The less is the thing that counts. Parts of you have fallen away. More will fall away still. But you have years to wait.
V
Most evenings you sing.
Call them to you, the children.
Call in their sleep because you don’t have much of it anymore.
But some nights, just a few, when the moon is blue or red, when it belongs to a wolf or to winter, to snow or to a hunter. Those nights, you dream on your own.
All those fingerbones poking from the soil.
You tell yourself the tale you lived.
You turn it around on your tongue.
Every time it comes out it’s different.
Tastes different.
Truth and lies mixing and mating.
Pieces fall away.
The tale’s in the telling, after all.
Originally published in Disintegration, edited by Darren Speegle.
