Dark and Deepest Red(62)

The sergeants stop hard. Though they are behind her, and she cannot see their faces, she can hear the choked pulling in of their next horrified breaths.

They watch the scene, more stricken in one moment than this city has ever seen. Each newly afflicted begins dancing, as though a mere look from Lala has made them do it.

Please, they all breathe, low as the drone of bees but clear enough to be heard.

Help us.

Keep our souls from her wickedness.

Their voices rise from small pleas to desperate shouts, each calling out their beseechings as they play the part of the dance claiming them.

The executioner gives Lala a hard shove.

But a sergeant calls out.

“Bring the friar,” he shouts. “Now.”

She hears his worry, how if he does not pass this obligation on to a holy man, he will be blamed for the failure. It has already happened once, the council and the physicians facing the embarrassment of having excluded the Church, and only making things worse.

Lala is what the sergeant expects of a Romani woman, what all the rulers decided she was when they forbade her and her aunt from their borders. To such men, she is nothing but sin and danger. And for all the times she has hated this, for all the times she has wished they would see the faith in her heart, in this one moment, she is thankful for their ignorance.





Rosella


Pain and life sparked through the shoes. It lit up all those little tears in my muscle and made my ankles feel brittle as glass.

The red shoes bucked under me.

My body’s instinct was to run, to hide in the dark cast by the trees’ overlapping shadows. My parents were already so terrified of how these shoes held to my body, terrified of me. What would they do if they saw how the red shoes made me dance?

As the last gold in the sky cooled, the swirling heat of the red shoes rose up through my ankles. The delicate pain in each muscle brightened.

Once when I was little, my father told me that the moon was spiraling very slowly, an inch or so a year, away from the earth. When he found me crying in my room about it, crying millions of years in advance for our lost moon, he told me it was better that way. He told me that if, instead, the moon was spiraling toward the earth, it wasn’t as though one day we’d be able to stand on our tallest ladders and touch it. Instead, our gravity would break it apart like a sugar cookie, all the glowing pieces strewn out across the sky.

Now I had a pained sympathy for that almost-moon. I was breaking apart under the force of the red shoes. They were my gravity, my earth, the part of me that made me move. They possessed my body so completely there was no fight left in me. I would scatter in pieces across the night.

The moment before the red shoes spun me deeper into the trees, he was there, as suddenly as a boy the dusk had made. He took hold of my waist and my shoulder and he held on to me.

This time, when the shoes took me, he went with me.

I held on to him, hard enough that we stayed with each other. The force of the shoes seemed like something he was drawing into him, something he was trying to take on.

I could have blamed it on the glimmer, how I pulled him deeper into the trees, a sliver-of-moon early evening that thickened the wood and ash smell of autumn. I could have pretended it was the same swirling magic that brought us the coywolves and light-bulb fireflies.

But the truth was that, in that moment, every memory I had of us lived in the heat between my body and his.

Setting ladybugs loose in his yard, little guards against the mites and whiteflies eating his mother’s geraniums.

Hanging a glass hummingbird feeder outside his great-aunt’s window in the weeks before she died, so she would see the bright flashes of their wings in the early hours before anyone was up and with her in her room.

Holding on our tongues the bright lilac candies his father swore by to prevent colds, how they looked like plums but tasted like lavender.

Fennel and caraway and plumajillo, the handfuls of scents that were his house meeting mine.

Fire in every color.

How, in his house, fairy tales were neither just the sparkle of fairy lights nor blood on glass slippers. They were beautiful and dangerous all at once, the glossed candy red of a poison apple.

We set our lips and hands against each other, and we were our age now, more careful than we were as children but also more reckless, with more of our lives at our backs. He paused his hand at the hem of my shirt until I nodded, my forehead against his. I kept my hand on his belt but didn’t go further until he gave me the same yes.

When the red shoes tried to take me again, I drew him down into the leaves with me. I held him so close that even the fierce and relentless magic folded into their stitching could not find its way between us. They could not drag me out from under him.

I kept him on top of me, asking him with my whispers and my hands to hold me down as the red shoes tried to take me. I gave him my hands, and he held them against the ground, his palms to mine, fingers interlaced.

Shared between Emil and me, the red shoes’ spell and power became something we could almost hold. Kept between our bodies, we owned it, and it shifted, becoming so small and dim compared to the light between our hands.

The shoes pulled at me, and the force buckled through my body. He kept on top of me, my arms locked across his back. For this moment, the frightening magic in the red shoes was ours. With our lips and our fingers, we spun it from curse to enchantment. Even this spell of velvet and beads could not rip us apart.