Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(57)

“Only press the latch,” it says. “I am so weak, I can’t get out of bed.”

“Fine. Grandmother, I’ve come such a very long way to visit you.”

Nix imagines herself reading aloud to Maia, imagines Maia’s rapt attention and Shiloh in the doorway.

“Shut the door well, my little lamb. Put your basket on the table, and then take off your frock and come and lie down by me. You shall rest a little.”

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? The Road of Needles ?

Shut the door. Shut the door and rest a little . . .

Partial head crash, foreign-reaction safe mode. Voluntary coma.

Nix nods and opens one of the memory trays, then pulls a yellow bus card, replacing it with a spare from the console’s supply rack.

Somewhere deep inside Oma’s brain, there’s the very faintest of hums.

“It’s a code,” Nix says to herself.

And if I can get the order of questions right, if I can keep the bzou from getting suspicious and rogueing up . . .

A drop of sweat drips from her brow, stinging her right eye, but she ignores it. “Now, Grandmother, now please listen.”

“I’m all ears, child.”

“And what big ears you have.”

“All the better to hear you with.”

“Right . . . of course,” and Nix opens a second tray, slicing into Oma’s comms, yanking two fried transmit-receive bus cards. She hasn’t been able to talk to Phobos. She’s been deaf all this f*cking time.

The CPU hums more loudly, and a hexagonal arrangement of startup OLEDs flash to life.

One down.

“Grandmother, what big eyes you have.”

“All the better to see you with, Rotk?ppchen. ”

Right. Fuck you, wolf. Fuck you and your goddamn road of stones and needles. Nix runs reset on all of Oma’s optic servos and outboards.

She’s rewarded with the dull thud and subsequent discordant chime of a reboot.

“What big teeth I have,” Nix says, and now she does turn towards the bzou, and as Oma wakes up, the virus begins to sketch out, fading in incremental bursts of distorts and static. “All the better to eat you with.”

“Have I found you now, old rascal?” the virus manages between bursts of white noise. “Long have I been looking for you.”

The bzou had been meant as a distress call from Oma, sent out in the last nanoseconds before the crash. “I’m sorry, Oma,” Nix says, turning back to the computer. “The forest, the terra . . . I should ? 178 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

have figured it out sooner.” She leans forward and kisses the console.

And when she looks back at the spot where the bzou had been crouched, there’s no sign of it whatsoever, but there’s Maia, holding the storybook . . .

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The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr.

Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Red Delicious.

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“Lupine” grew from grafts to the fairy tale rootstock most of us received as children. Here’s one addition: the blue-petaled wildflower for which the heroine is named was once thought to deplete the soil, ravaging it like a wolf (there’s an etymological connection); a nitrogen-fixer, lupine actually enhances it. Here’s another addition: when in the company of a desperate crush we often act idiotically, in direct opposition to our own best interests.

Here’s a third: a character in Peter S. Beagle’s awe-worthy novel The Last Unicorn curses another by saying: “I’ll make you a bad poet with dreams!” This caused Nisi Shawl to think about what makes a curse truly terrible to its victims and to devise her own—strictly for literary uses.

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Lupine


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Nisi Shawl