Dust Angels
That morning, their mother gives them an ultimatum: Clean the playroom or go to Hell.
They don’t believe her at first, but then she takes them to the basement and opens the door she keeps hidden behind a heavy curtain and lets them stare until their faces grow pink. She asks them if they would like to spend the day there, and they ask her where the cleaning supplies are kept.
Their mother had been trying to get them to clean the room for many days before this, and now it has reached such a state of disarray that they wonder, walking in, how bad it would really be to spend a day in Hell. They know a couple of people who live there. Uncle Lucifer eats dinner at their house on the last Friday of every month. Aunt Lilith visits often and even gifted them a beautiful marble collection that now lies scattered about the room. (Their mother said Lilith belonged in the outer rings of Hell for that gift after stepping on one of them barefoot.) It could be a pleasant reunion.
But if their mother sends them to Hell for a punishment, they reason that she won’t send them to the noble, castle parts. No, she’ll likely have Lucifer keep them in the bad parts; the parts spoken of in books of old and stories told to misbehaving children.
They start with the elephant in the room. It has an adventurous spirit and slowly, between the last time they cleaned and now, it has nudged itself from its corner of the room to the window. This wouldn’t be a problem (indeed quite a few of their stuffed animals have a tendency to do this) except this particular elephant measures ten feet from head to foot and is bigger than it is tall. It covers the whole window.
They roll up their sleeves, arrange themselves around the elephant (two on one side, one on the other) and begin to push and pull. The elephant is big, but it’s stuffed with cotton. In no time, it’s back where it belongs, and they’re looking around the playroom for their next task.
The toys. They’re spread out around the room, an assortment of blocks and dolls and self-playing instruments and lamps that used to house genies but are now a part of a peculiar tea set. Stuffed animals crowd the window in a messy heap and board game pieces pepper the playroom. A kite lies broken on the ground, its tangled line snaking across the wood floor like a trail of ivory blood. The middle one picks it up sadly.
“This was my favorite toy,” he says. He gathers the string and tenderly rolls it on his finger while his sisters make a game of tossing the other toys into the claw-footed chest. When the string is all rolled, he nudges the little bundle off his finger and rests it on the kite’s fabric. He sees a flutter of movement from a quiet fold and unbends it, revealing a family of dust angels.
He reaches for them, and they dart out in a gasp of white. They hover for a moment near his outstretched hand, then breathe something in their wispy language. The room exhales and scores of dust angels rise from its fabric. The room is alive with the sound of their wings and the air chokes on their feathery bodies.
Across the room, the elephant is taking advantage of the frenzy to inch closer to the window.
The boy feels a tickle in his nose and huffs out an angel that has found its way up there.
Library
Books to be moved from the nursery to the West tower room:
Age of Dragons
A Comprehensive Collection of Human Heroes
Dawn Dancing and Other Stories
From Eggs to Ash: The Incredible Wisdom of Phoenixes
Schildhauer Atlas of Dream Isles
Schildhauer Atlas of Hell
A Study of Skinwalkers, Vol. 1 and 2
A Tea Party at the Edge of Time and Other Stories
The World Encyclopedia of Preternatural Plants
She signs her name in neat cursive and leaves the list under her pillow for the Domovoi.
Later, they wake from their long slumber to assist the first child of the new generation in her transition out of the nursery.
Unfairness
The angels made him sick.
He lies on a couch in the playroom, wrapped in blankets, and sniffles piteously. His siblings are gone with his parents and he’s been left behind with only his grandmother for company.
He coughs loudly.
“Are you all right, dear?” His grandmother asks.
“No,” he says. “I’m sick. And my whole family is out having fun. It’s not fair.”
His grandmother lowers her book and looks at him. “Kids these days,” she says, “are entirely too entitled. It’s always ‘it’s not fair’ this and ‘it’s not fair’ that. In my day, you just accepted what you got. No complaints. Do you think, when I had my head chopped clean off when I was just a girl because of my father’s folly, that I said, ‘it’s not fair’? No. I kept calm and waited patiently for my head to be returned to my shoulders. And do you think, when my mother died from the shock of it and my father remarried and gave me a stepmother who mistreated me and favored her own daughter, that I said, ‘it’s not fair’? No. I remained pious and good and was blessed for my kindness with the ability to speak precious gems into existence. And when my father discovered my ability and locked me in a room packed with baskets and told me he would let me out only when they were all spilling with gemstones, surely then you might think that I said, ‘it’s not fair’. But no. I got a book off the shelf and read aloud from it until my throat was dusty and my vision was blurry and every one of those baskets was filled with my treasures. I lost my gift after that. And never once did the words ‘it’s not fair’ pass my lips.”
The boy is quiet. He’s thinking about cherries and wicker baskets and how much his throat hurts. How it’s not fair he had to get sick on the one day of the year that they go to the colorless orchard.
His grandmother reaches into the high neck of her blouse and scratches at the pale scar that circles her neck.
“Kids these days.”
Core Memory
A monochromatic backdrop with sketched-in trees. Dark, plump cherries filling the sisters’ basket. Purple-red stains on their fingers and lips and the blank canvas of the orchard.
The Taste of Dragon
He pokes at the dragon with his fork.
Because of its difficulty to come by, dragon meat is considered a rare delicacy. He thinks it tastes like chicken but packed with more iron than it ought to have.
He stares down at his plate, which holds an untouched slab of dragon drowning in a dark, sticky sauce. Even without bending to it, its tangy metallicity burns in his nose. He makes a face.
“Eat your dinner,” his mother says to him.
He lifts his glass and takes a sip of the pale liquid circling in the cup. When he sets it down, the drink keeps moving, and it looks like he has a miniature whirlpool trapped in his cup. He imagines a tiny Charybdis lurking at the bottom of the glass, sucking up liquid and belching it out to create the swirling motion.
His mother looks at him and tells him to eat the food on his plate.
He looks at the dragon, then rubs off a forkful of its sauce and puts the fork to his tongue.
It’s earthy and sweet. He tastes another rub of it and decides that it’s a good sauce. He takes a pinch of dragon and pulls it through the sauce pooled on his plate, then closes his eyes and puts it in his mouth. He chews once, twice, and then swallows it whole.
Horrid.
Shadows Dancing
Diamonds twinkle overhead. Dying light shines through translucent curtains. A ghost teaches her shadow to dance, as he taught her siblings before.
Two slippered feet and two weightless ones, joined in a long-forgotten waltz.
The Monster under the Bed
On her first night in her new room, she hears something moving under her.
She lies still for a moment, listening to the quiet jumble coming from below, and then she gets off her bed and pulls back the trailing comforter.
It’s dark. She can see only a shadowy heap, adjusting its position under her bed.
“Who are you?” she asks. It pauses, then rolls so the front of its body is facing her. Two circles of light shine through the darkness. “Get out from there, so I can see you in the light.”
The creature obliges and she moves from the bed to give it space.
“What are you?” she asks, once it’s out. Even in the light, it looks to her like a mass of shadows, pressed into the vague shape of a man. Its eyes are radiant and white and sit too low on its face.
“In this language, the closest word to what I am,” it says, “is monster.”
“Do you have a name?” she asks it.
It replies, “Not for your tongue.”
She’s uneasy. She’s been taught the importance of names when dealing with unknown creatures. “What brings you to my room?” she asks the monster.
“I’m here to watch over you,” the monster says. “And to warn those who would want to do you harm.”
“If you are here to watch over me,” she says, “why did you not before? When I lived in the nursery?”
“There are other children in the nursery,” it replies. “And that ancient nursemaid of yours that’s been protecting children since the dawn-times. No, anything that would like to get you while you sleep would not enter a room such as that. But now you are in a room of your own, and now you need me. So here I am.”
She thinks of the songs the nursemaid would sing in the dark of night, when everyone was sleeping (or supposed to be sleeping, in her case). Songs in a language she’d never before heard but sounded to have been born in the ages when dragons outnumbered humans. Strange, lilting melodies.
But now the room is quiet, and if she stills herself and listens carefully, she can hear an ominous absence pulling at the air. It frightens her, the idea of it. The kinds of things that could hide in it.
“And you’re always going to be under my bed?” she asks the monster.
“No,” it says. “Sometimes I will hide in your closet, sometimes I will fold myself into your dresser, and sometimes I will stand watch in the corner of your room. But yes, most nights, I will be under your bed, waiting for something impure to enter your room so I can prove my worth.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, and she mutters a quiet “well, then, thank you” to the monster. The monster nods. It crawls back under her bed and melts into the darkness. She climbs into her bed and stares at the ceiling.
Sometime later, as she’s drifting off to sleep, she hears a low growl from under her bed.
She doesn’t feel scared, but she doesn’t dare open her eyes.
Lakeshore
They see Death for the first time at the lakeshore. She kneels at the edge of the water, cradling a baby bird with a hanging head. Waves lap at Her skirt as She caresses the bird’s featherless neck.
When She leaves, She carries away with her something of the bird’s. She took its soul, they say to each other, watching as She slowly submerges herself in the lake. But they can’t know for certain. Her hands are closed around whatever She took.
They hold a funeral for the bird. They make a tiny coffin from braided grass and scoop out a place for it in the sand. They tell stories of birds and sing songs of birds and when it’s all over close up the hole and carefully pat it even. It was just a baby, the youngest sniffles. That’s all the time it gets, her sister says. The burial site is marked with a sharp, white-to-gray shell.
Dream
She is practicing the waltz on the first floor of the Museum when she sees it.
She is intrigued. By the strange sheet that’s draped over its tall, thin figure. By the sound the sheet makes pulling against the stone floor. The tender swish of a forgotten era.
She calls to it. It turns around, then goes back around and continues its walk. Slowly.
Stately. A crown of candles rests on its shapeless head, their yellow flames shivering in the wind. Tassels of braided grass hang from its fingers.
She follows it. Through the rows of bronzed armor, strapped to the wall with thick chains. Through the glass cases that hold faded writings and discarded artifacts. Across a floor covered in ash and dust that collects on the edges of its sheet and stains the white material gray. Still, it walks. And running, she can’t catch up to it.
Sunset
There’s a cliff at the far end of their property, right at the edge of the world. They sit on its margins and let their legs dangle over a river of time. A chilly wind blows in from the West.
As the sun fades from the sky, they huddle together to share their warmth and listen silently to the rush of seconds below.