Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(101)

mistress.”

She leaned down and placed her lips upon mine, and sucked at my

? 308 ?

? Christopher Barzak ?

flesh as I had sucked at the flesh of the fruits. I nearly fell into her arms as she took me into her mouth—I felt myself collapsing a little more with each kiss—but I managed to pull away before she stole my last breath from me.

“I must be going,” I said, wiping my lips clean of her, blinking, in shock a little. Beneath the white moonlight, the smear of juice I had wiped away glistened on the back of my hand.

“So early?” the female goblin said, raising one sharply angled

eyebrow. “But the moon has just now risen.”

“My sister Lizzie,” I said. And as soon as her name left my mouth, I began to remember myself, to recollect the argument Lizzie and I had had that afternoon, to remember my love for her, the love she

said no one would call love should they ever discover it.

“You may find other sisters here, if you join us,” the goblin woman said, trailing a fingertip down my cheek.

“But that is not love,” I said, as if I knew what love was wholly

from my feelings for Lizzie, as if that were the only love that could ever be.

“Love,” the female goblin whispered. She smiled with what might

have been sympathy, had I been able to see her entire face behind

the mask and know what the rest of her features might tell me. A

mask, I thought, was perhaps what I had needed when facing the cat-whiskered man. A mask would have hidden my weakness. “Love,” the female goblin said, “comes in many different shapes, my dear. Why

approve of only one? Particularly when no one else would approve

of the shape of your love anyway?”

I stood, trembling, wishing for an answer, but her question pierced my reasoning through and through.

I turned quickly, and began to run, taken over by a fear that grew in me like a dark tide. I had come to the brink of something. A great chasm of darkness lay before me in the glen, an uncertainty that invited one to throw oneself into it, to lose my self, if I so wanted. But I ran from the sight of it, ran to rejoin the world I knew, regardless of its limitations.

? 309 ?

? Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me ?

Behind me, the goblin woman shouted, “Do not forget us!” But I

did not look over my shoulder or give her a word in return, and only once did I stop to pick up the hard pit of a peach I had dropped earlier that evening, the first fruit I had tasted, which in the momentary madness of my fleeing I thought I might plant and grow into a tree of my own, to have that fruit available to me forever.

Lizzie. Oh how Lizzie will hate me for what I’ve done, I thought as I crossed the brook and took the path home. And I was right. As I approached the gate, she was already there, waiting for me with her arms folded beneath her breasts, her form a daunting silhouette in the silver moonlight, a guardian spirit to her father’s cottage.

“Laura,” she said, shaking her head, her voice filled with what

seemed like loathing for me. “Do you know what time it is? Do you

know how worried you’ve made my father and mother? Do you not

care what others might think? Don’t you remember Jeannie, after all, and what happened to her? The fate she suffered for going into the night?”

I put my head down, shamed, and began to tear up a little. Jeannie.

Of course. Jeannie. I had forgotten about Jeannie, young Jeannie, who had gone off one night with a dark-skinned young man who they said lived in the woods, and had returned home some days later, a

broken woman. The lovely, poor, ruined Jeannie, who withered like a plucked flower until she died from either heartbreak or, as I secretly believed, from the coldness she was forced to endure from others after returning from the woods. This was what concerned Lizzie,

then. What others thought of her.

“It was not as you think,” I murmured, preparing to explain myself.

But Lizzie’s sharp voice rose up again, barring me from speaking.

“I will not hear any of it, thank you very much,” she whispered,

shrill, in the late summer night air. “Do not speak a word. And do not return to the glen again, Laura, ever, or you will not be able to live here thereafter.”

I nodded, and wiped my face with the back of my hand, wishing

Lizzie might take my tears upon her finger as the cat-whiskered

? 310 ?

? Christopher Barzak ?