Heiresses of Russ 2013 Page 14

  Silver Shoes:

  The one thing she’d kept as long as Hansel was a pair of silver shoes left to her by the true mother. They were chased filigree, and they never looked quite the same from one wear to the next. When she wore them, the road ahead was a thin gold line, pulling her where she needed to go. They never tarnished.

  The true mother had been an oracle, too. Perhaps that was why she had left. Their father said she had died, and she may have died, or she may have gone over to wandering. If there was one thing Gretel understood, it was that oracles didn’t stay in one place comfortably. Not for long.

  In the forest, Gretel had carried the shoes in her kerchief, carefully bundled to look careless and messy so the stepmother wouldn’t remark upon it. She didn’t put them on until the bread was gone, half eaten by Hansel, and half by the birds. When it was cold, and dark, and they had no shelter, when Hansel’s whining had passed over annoyance and into fear, then Gretel slipped them onto her small, dirty feet. They fit perfectly. They always fit perfectly. They never pinched or gave a blister, and they never fell off, either.

  Gretel’s stomach complained from the lack of food, and her head swam with dizziness, but the shoes pulled her forward, tripping through the darkness along that golden line. She held fast to Hansel’s hand, refusing to lose him in the night. When the witch’s house appeared, it was nearly dawn, and Gretel was too near the point of death to question such a miracle. She ate and ate from the shingled sides, until her tongue and gums bled from the roughness of sugary bread. When she retched, it smelled like Christmas.

  She was too weak to protest when the witch came out and tucked them into the cage, but not too weak to notice that the witch couldn’t loose the shoes from her feet.

  Computer Games:

  At work, Ms. L. Thorne gave her assignments over social networking games.

  First it was Sim Farm. “Ms. L. Thorne has offered you a dozen eggs in exchange for a day of plowing,” the notification said. “Personal message: I don’t like eggs. Run the Cranville reports and settle the discrepancies with accounting.”

  Gretel did as she was told, efficiently, quickly, determined to show that she was also cool and smooth, and worthy of being loved. When her farm threatened to become more productive than Ms. L. Thorne’s, the game changed.

  Gemsplosion came next. “Ms. L. Thorne challenges you to beat her high score: three ruby explosions in one minute. Personal message: Arrange the quarterly meeting. No fattening food. Buy a better suit.”

  Gretel ordered sushi for the meeting’s lunch, and personally oversaw the cleaning and setup of the conference space. At home she tore through her wardrobe, trying on every skirt and blazer and pair of slacks before she settled on going shopping after all.

  Hansel watched this from the bed, wary of the giddy desperation that left pink spots in Gretel’s cheeks. It reminded him of other times, of distraction and neglect, of being forced to sustain himself on dry food.

  When Gretel achieved a diamond explosion, the game switched to Word Cross. “Ms. L. Thorne has played ‘thistle’ for 100 points.” Gretel’s available letters left her with only one viable option: “norns” for twenty-eight points. Missiles, thorns, thistles, norns. She did not wish to consider what this could mean. She was losing quite badly, but that was probably for the best. Ms. L. Thorne did not like to be beaten.

  Once Gretel had had an Italian lover who was also no good at being beaten. In cards, in fights, in anything. He would roar like a bear, and send thugs to kill his opponents. Gretel always let him win. When the whole affair fell apart, when Gretel fled in the night in the silver shoes, with Hansel in her kerchief, she swore she would never do that again.

  But, she told herself, Ms. L. Thorne was different. Of course she would be sensitive about winning. She was a woman in a world which was still tough on women, no matter how much times had changed.

  The meeting went smoothly, though Ms. L. Thorne did not notice the new suit, which Gretel had spent a full paycheck to buy. Gretel resolved to try harder.

  Eggs:

  In the witch time, after Gretel had been let out of the cage, but before she had worked out how to escape, Gretel had learned about eggs. The witch showed her how to reach under a brooding hen without disturbing her, and how to tell what the day would bring based on the number inside each nest. One for sorrow, two for work, three for a decent breakfast.

  The witch would let her eat as much as she wanted, but Gretel was careful not to overdo. One egg a day left her strong enough to work, but skinny enough not to get eaten. Hansel stayed in the cage, eating six or seven in a sitting, ignoring his sister’s entreaties to abstain. Gretel had seen her escape in the clouds, and she knew when it came, there would be no boy at her side, but she tried to reason with him all the same.

  There were a number of ways to prepare eggs, and each had its own divination method. “With hard-boiled eggs, it matters how they peel,” said the witch. “You can learn everything in the world from cracked shells.” She said the same thing about the color of raw yolks, and the curves of scrambles.

  Gretel was beating whites for meringue one afternoon, content in the way that complacency can make one be. She had food, measurable tasks, and as much security as she had ever enjoyed, so she had not tried too hard to fight her circumstances. In fact, she had turned to dreaming of other things entirely.

  “Will I find true love?” she asked the whites. If they stiffened before she counted to ten, she would. If they didn’t, she wouldn’t. She had reached five when the witch came in and placed her gnarled hand over Gretel’s, stilling the whisk.

  “You should never fall in love,” the witch said. “Loving people never does anyone any good. You should do better to ask if you will always have food enough to eat.”

  Gretel thought that was stupid. In her short life to date, she had already seen that food was unreliable. Even having it didn’t mean safety. Hansel was destined for the soup pot, after all.

  Songs:

  One thing Gretel had always loved was music: folk ballads and operas, waltzes and rock. So long as it had a melody, it made Gretel’s heart swell. These days she didn’t have to wait for concerts and dances, or carry the tunes in her head. Music was portable now. There were benefits to living in this modern age.

  The problem with being an oracle, though, was that she couldn’t escape the knowing. All Gretel wanted was a good thumping dance beat to propel her from her apartment to the bus stop, and on to her office. Unfortunately, her MP3 player refused to play anything but “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

  The year was winding down. Word Cross had been the game of choice for three full weeks, because Gretel never won. She didn’t even have to try to throw the games. The letters distributed themselves in the right patterns to make Gretel unlucky and Ms. L. Thorne very lucky indeed. On the morning of the holiday party, Gretel played “wife” for fourteen points, and Ms. L. Thorne played “never” for fifty-six.

  That night Gretel wore a new dress, one that would sparkle under the lights on the dance floor. Hansel yawned when Gretel asked how she looked. “It won’t work,” he said. “She doesn’t love you. Don’t forget to feed me before you go.”

  Gretel gave him the shrimp flavored can of food because she knew he liked it least.

  At the party, everyone got drunk. The company was paying for taxis to take them home. Gretel found herself leaning hazily against. Ms. L. Thorne’s bony shoulder. It was sharp enough almost to cut if her skin hadn’t been in the way, but Gretel didn’t mind. She thought it was sexy.

  “Dear little Gretel. It’s cute that you want me,” said Ms. L. Thorne, “but I’m never going to be into you. I have all the power in this relationship. People fall for others with more perceived power, not less.”

  It was the most Ms. L. Thorne had ever said to Gretel at one time, and it rang horribly of truth. The song changed from “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to “Closing Time.”

  The party was over.

  Ouija:


  A century earlier, Gretel had made her living as a medium. Sometimes when people knocked on wood for luck, she would remember the nights of table tapping, and producing lengths of silk “ectoplasm” from her mouth. It was a profitable trend, but she’d hated it. Her tongue had always been dry, and the only spirits who would talk to her were ones she’d rather have avoided.

  “Is my dear Billy in Heaven?” a wartime mother asked one night. The planchette whooshed over the board.

  H-V-N. S. L-V-N-G. Y.

  “It says, ‘Heaven is living, yes,’ ” said Gretel. But her voice trembled, because she knew it really meant Heaven is loving you, which was what her last admirer had said to win her affections. His abject adoration had rankled, and Gretel had been relieved when he’d succumbed to the Spanish influenza, though it made her a tiny bit guilty to admit it.

  W-H-Y. D-N-T. Y. L-V. M.

  “What does that mean?” asked the client.

  Why don’t you love me? Gretel thought, and it made her angry. She wasn’t talking to him. He was gone, he should move on. This Billy obviously had. Why couldn’t her ex-not-boyfriend do the same?

  The client was staring expectantly. The room smelled too closely of incense and fevered hope. Gretel trained her eyes on the candle flame and willed herself to think fast.

  “He says, ‘Why don’t you leave me?’ He’s moved on to better places. He wants you to be happy for him, and to move on also.”

  The client left happy, but the next night was more of the same, and the night after as well. Gretel grew ever more exasperated until one night, in the middle of a séance, she shouted, “Go beyond the veil, already!”

  After that she stuck to secretarial work.

  Sweets:

  Gretel had learned to bake at the witch’s house. She had learned how to make cakes come out just right to entice a young child. She had learned the secret to making gingerbread strong as wood, how to use sugar paste as glue, how to bind up a wish in the crust of a pie. She had learned all these things from the witch, and some other things too, from the stack of dusty books in the witch’s pantry. The witch, it turned out, was not very good at aspects of witching that didn’t revolve around food. As long as she was well fed, she didn’t care, either.

  Gretel studied the books whenever the witch was out. She paid special attention to the sections on transmogrification, learning how to change her brother into a cat so he could slip through the bars of his cage. The books didn’t tell how to reverse the effect, but that turned out to be all right.

  “What use is a cat to me?” the witch cried, upon finding Hansel sniffing about the kitchen. She didn’t try anything violent, though, or even tell Hansel to leave. Rather, she seemed to like it when he curled up on her lap of an evening, for all she called him useless and lazy.

  In the end, Gretel left with her blessing, which was nice of her to give, even if it wasn’t worth as much as a fairy blessing would have been. “One day you’ll make a fine witch,” she told Gretel as she waved her goodbye. “If you ever stop worrying about this love nonsense, that is.”

  “I am no witch,” Gretel said.

  Lately, though, she tired of the roller coaster ups and downs of love affairs. She wearied of always losing at Word Cross, and of showing up to work with a horrible hope that would rise only to be dashed again. Ms. L. Thorne began flirting with Amanda in accounting. She was in line to become a senior VP, while Gretel was still an admin ass. As Gretel’s hope faded, her bitterness grew, and she found herself craving sweets.

  “This job isn’t good for you,” Hansel said. He was huffy because Gretel had been to the store for cookies, and forgotten to pick up canned food. “I thought you didn’t like sweets.” He glared at her as she chewed.

  “I didn’t before. I do now. A woman can change her mind.”

  “Any decent woman would remember to buy her poor brother a meal while she was at it,” said Hansel. “It’s not like I have thumbs, you know. You always forget me when you fall out of love.”

  Gretel stopped mid-bite. “You’re right,” she said. She left the half-eaten cookie for Hansel, and started emptying the kitchen cupboards.

  “Cats aren’t supposed to eat chocolate,” called Hansel. “I could die.”

  “Then don’t eat it,” Gretel said.

  But he did, and he didn’t die, just sicked up on the bedroom floor. Gretel was too busy baking to notice.

  The next morning she packed everything into suitcases, Hansel included, and donned the silver shoes. She followed the golden line to Ms. L. Thorne’s desk, and left a cake atop it, beautifully iced in calligraphy letters that spelled, “I QUIT!”

  Ms. L. Thorne would not eat the cake, Gretel knew. It would annoy her, though, which was somewhat satisfying.

  The shoes pulled her into another city, and stopped at an abandoned tearoom with a flat above it.

  “What are we doing here?” Hansel asked.

  “I am opening a bake shop,” said Gretel. “You will stay out of the way.”

  It was a life of hard toil, but Gretel enjoyed it. She grew slightly plump, and her hair began to grey. She stopped worrying that anyone would try to eat her, or what they thought of her at all. She allowed the fishmonger (a boisterous woman whose laugh was as open as her heart) to court her with scraps for Hansel, surprising herself by developing a sincere and comfortable attachment. She was, for the first time in her very long life, happy.

  When the girl showed up, she was skinny and sad, with large, imploring eyes. She came to the shop every afternoon in her school uniform to stare longingly at the cakes.

  Gretel let it go on for a couple of weeks before she gave in. One afternoon she placed two jagged halves of a heart cookie on the counter. “Here. This one’s broken anyway,” she said.

  The girl ate it hungrily, but Gretel could see remorse in the splay of her maidenly eyelashes. She feared eating a broken heart would doom her to having one.

  “You should never worry about love,” Gretel said, thinking of herself, and of Ms. L. Thorne, whose sharpness she still glimpsed from time to time in mirrors and razors. “That never does anyone any good.”

  The girl’s eyes widened, impossibly becoming more round.

  “Oh for pity’s sake, you look like a cartoon,” Gretel said. “Stay here a minute and watch the shop. I have to go get something.”

  When she came back, the girl was fidgeting, and shifting her slight weight from one foot to the other. Had Gretel ever looked so pathetic? She held out the silver shoes.

  “Take these. They’ll fit you. I don’t need them anymore. They’ll show you where to go.”

  “Oh, but I couldn’t,” the girl said. “They must be very expensive.”

  “I paid nothing for them,” said Gretel.

  The girl clasped her hands behind her back. “Aunt says never to take gifts from strangers.”

  Gretel sighed. “You took the cookie.”

  “That was different,” said the girl, but the splay of her eyelashes said she was lying, and that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she felt her debt was repaid.

  “Fine,” said Gretel. “You can work for them if you must. Come here after school tomorrow, and I’ll have something for you to do.”

  That evening, upstairs, Hansel purred by the hearth, his belly full of fish.

  “She thinks you might eat her,” he said, smug as house cats and siblings are wont to be.

  “She’s a fool,” said Gretel. “I don’t eat children.”

  “She doesn’t know that,” said Hansel. “She only knows you’re a witch.”

  Gretel pressed her lips together, but said nothing, for she knew he was right.

  •

  Otherwise

  Nisi Shawl

  “Let’s cross it while it’s still floating.” Aim was always in a hurry these days. Nineteen, and she didn’t figure she had a whole lot of time left before she’d go Otherwise.

  “Hold up,” I told her, and she listened. I listened, too, and I heard
that weird noise again above the soft wind: an engine running. That was what cars sounded like; they used to fill the roads, back when I was only thirteen. Some of the older models still worked—the ones built without no chips.

  A steady purr, like a big, fat cat—and there, I saw a glint moving far out on the bridge: sun on a hood or windshield. I raised my binoculars and confirmed it: a pickup truck, headed our way, east, coming towards us out of Seattle.

  “What, Lo?” Aim asked.

  If I could see them, maybe they could see us. “Come on. Bring the rolly; I’ll help.” We lifted our rolling suitcase together and I led us into the bushes crowding over the road’s edge. Leaves and thorns slashed at our pant legs and sleeves and faces—I beat them away and found a kind of clear area in their middle. Maybe there used to be something, a concrete pad for trash cans or something there. Moss, black and dry from the summer, crunched as we walked over it. We lowered the suitcase, heavy with Aim’s tools, and I was about to explain to her why we were hiding but by now that truck was loud and I could tell she heard it, too. All she said was, “What are they gonna think if they see our tracks disappear?”

  I had a knife, and I kept it sharp. I pulled it out of the leather sheath I’d made. That was answer enough for Aim. She smiled—a nasty smile, but I loved it the way I loved everything about her: her smell; her long braids; her grimy, stubby nails.

  I thought we’d lucked out when the truck barreled by fast—must have been going thirty miles an hour—but then it screeched to a stop. Two doors creaked open. Boot heels clopped on the asphalt. Getting louder. Pausing about even with where I’d ducked us off into the brush.

  “Hey!” A dude. “You can come out—we ain’t gonna do ya no harm.”