Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(103)

I turned to face her, and said, “Yes,” and said, “If you but tasted their fruit, you would understand me as you once did.”

“Then why do you wait?” Lizzie said. “Go to them. They are there,

after all, calling for us to join them. Come buy, come buy! It is an ugly sort of commerce, Laura. I don’t know what you are thinking.”

“Wait?” I said. “I wait to hear those voices. You hear them?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said, and lifted her chin to gesture toward the glen across the flowing water. “They are there already, waiting for you to return to them.”

I nearly spun on my feet like a top to look where Lizzie gestured, but when I faced the glen, I saw nothing but the empty pasture where I had danced and eaten the night before. I heard nothing but the sound of the brook flowing by me. “Where, Lizzie?” I asked. “I see nothing, I hear nothing.”

“Good, then!” Lizzie said with a glee that angered me. “Come home

with me. The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, each glowworm

winks her spark. Let us get home before the night grows dark, for

clouds may gather though this is summer weather, put out the lights and drench us.”

I stood still as stone, and felt cold as stone through and through.

“Really, sister?” I said, my eyes wide with fear. “Do you hear them truly, or are you trying to hurt me?”

“Come buy, come buy! ” Lizzie said again, mocking their voices, making them sound like terrible creatures. “It is good that you cannot hear them,” she said. “It means your heart is still your own.”

She held her hand out then, and curled her fingers inward. “Come,

Laura,” she said. “Let us be home again.”

I did not want to take her hand—I wanted to take the hand of the

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? Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me ?

goblins whose voices I could no longer hear, whose masked faces I

could no longer see—but in the end it was the hand offered me, and it was the hand I took.

We went to bed that night and curled around each other as

we used to, and for a while I thought that I was better off for not hearing the voices of goblins. But before our twistings and turnings could reach a satisfactory moment, I felt all passion leave me, like a cork released from its bottle, and lay in the dark, wondering about the strange people who had shown me a glimpse of a life I would

now never know. Lizzie patted her kisses upon my cheek, upon my

shoulders, and stroked my side and waist with her nimble fingers,

but the fingers I had longed for in the past few weeks when she had kept them from me, those fingers and their touch no longer held me in the spell they once cast over me.

When Lizzie finally fell asleep, I sat up and looked out the window at the moon hanging low, caught up in the branches of a tree. I cried, silently, and gnashed my teeth like a starved animal, and held the howls of yearning inside my body so Lizzie would not wake and ask

me what was the matter.

She should have known. She’d been the matter. Now it was

something else taken from me.

For days, weeks, months afterward, I waited in the sullen silence

that accompanies exceeding pain, hungering for another glimpse,

wanting the sound of their music to find me, eager for the taste of their fruit upon my lips, desiring only to dance within their circle once more. But I never spied the goblin merchants again. Instead, I began to wither, the way Lizzie had warned me poor Jeannie had

after returning from the woods without her young man. And as I

withered, Lizzie seemed to grow brighter, as if she held a warm fire within her.

In all the months that passed, I had only one brief period of hope, which came when spring returned to us and I recalled the peach

stone I had brought home from the goblin revels. I had placed it in ? 314 ?

? Christopher Barzak ?

a drawer and, upon remembering it, I quickly took it out to set it on a wall that faced south, and soaked it with my tears, hoping it would take root, or grow a green shoot after I planted it in the garden.

No shoot ever came, though I dreamed of melons and trees full of

ripe apples; and sometimes, as I came to see if the peach kernel was growing, I would be deluded by visions of ripe berry bushes, the way a thirsty traveler in the desert will see water where no water flows.

No more did I sweep the house, no more did I tend to the fowl or