>> a pointing finger
“And now folks, we’ve rejoined our intrepid heroine,” Holli mutters under her breath, “to find her creeping cautiously through the middle—better yet, the midst, or no, amidst—what appears to be, at least I suppose to the educated members of our viewing audience, a mangrove swamp. One which furthermore qualifies both as shadowy and, in my estimation, mysterious. Thus perfectly suitable for the purposes of our ongoing drama. Yup yup yuperino. How ‘bout dat. How ‘bout dis.”
Come on, you’d babble a bit too, wouldn’t you? With no one else to trade impressions with … She’s decided it’s crucial to maintain her sense of humor. You have to put the effort in. You hang on to your shit by never fucking letting go of it.
Everything is strange here. Every detail is new and weird. Every single stupid thing, big or small. The smell of the very air, just that in and of itself. And not the scent of it alone, and the flavor it leaves in her mouth. There is the feel of it against her skin. That too! It’s not the same as the air of Earth. It seems heavier or denser or fluffier. Like there’s more to it, whatever all it’s constituted of. Bigger chunks. She can breathe it fine—doesn’t seem to be killing her, or not so far. But this is definitely different stuff. A whole other atmosphere for a whole other world. A whole different kind of atmosphere. There is a sense of … of what? Of keenness. She doesn’t know what the fuck that means—it’s just the first word that occurs to her. A sort of hum or a buzz to it. Not a sound, though. An electric charge infusing her body from the air. Like a glow—yet not a glow you can see. You only feel it, in your flesh.
There is power here. There is magic. Already she is becoming part of it. Absorbing it. Unless instead what it’s doing is absorbing her.
Or unless she’s imagining the sensation, tricking herself. Holli doesn’t think that’s right, yet all the same it’s a possibility that has to be considered. ‘Cause she’s trying to be rational about this whole experience, as much as she can. She’s trying to keep her head together. And obviously in a situation like this one, that ain’t easy.
She doesn’t feel freaked out. She feels surprisingly calm and collected and, well, all around chill, in spite of the rather thrilling, tingling energized sensation her skin is picking up from the alien air. Now of course she realizes that doesn’t make a great deal of sense—not a lick, in point of fact. It’s a complete contradiction. You can’t feel a thrill and chill at the same time (chill in the colloquial zen sense, that is, as opposed to the shivers which are a kind of thrill, if not enjoyable). The physical surge she’s experiencing should have triggered a matching emotional one, positive or negative. She should be getting really excited by the stimulation, or else upset and scared. Instead her emotions are staying almost completely locked down. That alone should freak her out—the fact she’s not freaking out is a freaky realization in itself. Still doesn’t happen, though. Best she can manage is a little twinge of wry amusement.
It puts a slight, crooked smirk on her face. She feels her mouth shift and stiffen into that position. It creates a smug and entitled expression she’s painfully familiar with, from photos and reflections. Though she can’t feel it happening the same way, she knows her eyelids will have started drooping a tiny bit, giving her gaze that sleepy, saucy, cat-like “hooded” look. Her goddamn eyelids almost always do that when her mouth fixes itself into the Smirk. Her countenance (if you’ll forgive the indulgence of the old ten dollar word) frequently and habitually settles into this cast. A “too cool for school” face you wanna slap the hell out of when you see it. And the irony is—if it’s ironic and maybe it isn’t, she goes back and forth—that fucking look, that slanted smirk, never has nothing to do with her internal state of mind, whenever it pops up. It’s an expression that never expresses the actual truth of what she’s thinking or feeling. It’s a lie, a mask. But it’s not a mask she puts on consciously—somehow it does that shit on its own, regardless what she wants.
Right now, though—this is an exception. Well, these circs are exceptional, so there you go. For once the detached deadpan look on her face fits her feelings. More accurately, her lack of them. Her emotional machinery is jammed inside of her or entirely closed down, or nearly so. Like ninety percent. Gunk in the works. Too much to process.
Maybe that’s for the best. Yeah. Probably it’s the safest way to be, walking into a weird new world with nothing but the clothes she’s wearing. Especially in light of the fact those clothes she’s got are only a bikini. Barely fucking qualifying.
And speaking of barely qualifying, this swamp is not very swampy. Ain’t no Dagobah. Which should probably count as a check for the win column, for sheer practical considerations. It ain’t half as mucky as you might guess, this close to an ocean and with all that heavy rain that had been going on less than half an hour ago.
There’s no sign of that storm now. Not a hint of it, really, besides the humidity, and a place like this semi-tropical shoreline forest is almost always gonna feel like that. But no mist to contend with, no mud, no drippings from the leaves. Sky’s cloudless and real bright up there, above the treetops. Holli noticed it happens to be a pinkish creamy white color, rather than any shade of blue. The particular lurid purple that the storm had is gone without a trace. The rain had stopped and the clouds had vanished or at least moved beyond the horizon by the time her swim was finished and she clambered out of the ocean on to the beach. Except there wasn’t much of one. The mangroves grew all the way to the edge of the land. That was what mangroves did. They stuck themselves out as far as they could manage before the water got too deep for them.
Holli knew a forest of this type was called a mangrove swamp because of something she’d watched on television. Admittedly that might not be perfectly accurate. She wondered how general a term “mangrove” was—were there tons of different types or just one? And how many other mangrove-looking type trees were there in different places that worked the same way but weren’t actually mangroves? At least to folks that knew what they were talking about. Only other tree she knew about that stood up above ground level like them with their roots as legs was the big fuckers in India with the name that started with a b. Fuck was the name? Bunyuns or bunjuns, something like that. Those were super big, though, and these guys weren’t. They were hunched and twisted and wouldn’t have stood much taller than Holli except for their roots boosting them up. The root legs weren’t all even, either. Ranged from Holli’s knees to her chin. There seemed to be more of the taller chin-level ones than the shorter sort.
So she could have walked under most of the trees if she stooped, except usually they had too many roots in the way and it wasn’t worthwhile—quicker to go around. The trees were pretty well spaced apart from each other and there wasn’t much undergrowth. Basically none, except occasional collections of nubs or pointed spikes of wood sticking up from the ground, sometimes stretching as high as her waist. She assumed these were the ends of roots that had grown the wrong direction, or maybe they were brand new trees getting started, or trying to. Some of them had to be. Except none of those spikes she saw had branches on them and that didn’t seem right. How big did a baby tree—a sapling, was the correct term—have to get itself before it put out its own branches and leaves and got serious, essentially?
Other thing you couldn’t help contemplating when you looked at tiptoe trees like this was how deep did the roots go under the dirt? Probably far as other trees, that would be her guess—or could they not dig down as much because of the elevated, exposed parts? Or did those legs not count as proper roots anymore, since they weren’t really rooted? What was the point of the silly things sticking up out of the ground like that anyhow? What was the survival advantage?
She imagined it was to let deep water flow by them easier, without knocking all the fuckers over, pushing too much against their main trunks. At the moment there was no water at all. The tide must be out, or maybe this was the dry season. The ocean might never get this far in. Lots of times in wetlands, if she understood the cycle right, when they flooded the flood usually came the opposite direction, or from sideways—the overspill from gorged rivers.
Their leaves are weird. Yellow and curved, they remind her of flattened bananas. Except the inside edges of the curves are also scalloped. Little curves within the curve. And the leaves all grow in round bunches off a single stem, to form clusters of pinwheels or propellers along the tree branches, except they can’t actually rotate when a breeze whispers through. They just flap and rustle around instead. Same as green Earth leaves, yet somehow not the same at all, the patterns they make, and the noise of them. She couldn’t articulate how it’s different more specifically than that—but it’s unmistakable. They have a music and a dance distinctly their own.
Holli wonders (and not for the first time) what the name of this world is. Maybe she’ll get to come up with one. Probably not, realistically. There are people here already. If people is the right description. People of some sort … The angel that wasn’t an angel, and all those schmucks in the big boat that kept shooting at her and totally missing. This world will already have a name. Maybe lots of names.
Then she hears music for a second, or thinks she does. Faint and far off. A flute or something similar. Three or four low notes, hooting. Could have been a bird or an animal. It doesn’t repeat.
She heads that direction. It was more or less the way she was trudging already.
Now, out of nowhere, another sudden and somewhat startling realization: no bugs. Not that she minded; it was just you’d think she should have noticed that before. Place like this, a cloud of evil little fuckers should be swarming all over her, sucking her blood, buzzing up her nose. Yet it wasn’t happening. She didn’t see a single insect anywhere. Maybe this world didn’t have any. That might be cool. Hard to imagine how that would work, though. Something else she’d seen on television. You needed bugs to get rid of all the organic garbage, gobble up all the dead shit. Leaf litter alone would pile up damn quick in a forest like this one and bury everything else. Of course it wasn’t only bugs that broke stuff down, there were other kinds of things contributing. Fungus, for one, and bacteria. But bugs were major hitters.
And it would be a mistake to read too much into the lack of bugs here. That didn’t necessarily imply there weren’t plenty of bugs elsewhere on this world, in different type environments, nor that they didn’t or wouldn’t show up right here at different times. Like at night. Maybe there were tons of the crawling kinds under the dirt and tunneling inside the trees where she couldn’t see them, ants and beetles and so forth. All she could say for sure was missing at the present moment were gnats and mosquitos, or equivalent aerial pests. Or perhaps they were all keeping away from her because she wasn’t native and they could tell, not liking the smell of her. Maybe her blood and sweat would be poisonous to them.
A problem like that would go both ways. She hoped food wasn’t gonna be a serious issue for her. It might, now she was thinking it through. It would really suck if it turned she couldn’t eat anything ’til she went home. All depended just exactly how alien this world was, and the things it was made out of, the chemicals and minerals. It didn’t seem too strange, so far. Strange as it was, it wasn’t, you know, Mars or Jupiter. They had trees here and they looked like relatively normal, recognizable trees, rather than being made out of glowing crystals or having hairy tentacles all over them or shit like that. The fact the air was breathable was another substantial confidence booster in this regard; also she was sure she’d swallowed a little of the ocean water during her swim — inevitably one always gulped or snorted down a tiny bit at some point, without meaning to, like when a big wave smacks you in the face. It hadn’t been any worse than regular sea water. Salty tasting, obviously. Not refreshing. And much like the air, it had seemed to have a subtly different flavor and consistency than the Earth ocean (provided she wasn’t crazy and kidding herself about that) as well as having a strikingly different temperature. She’d noticed all those things when she was swimming in it; they’d been key factors in clueing her in to what the hell had been happening, the purple storm being a rift or a portal between realities, however you felt comfortable classifying it … Her tummy felt okay, for the moment. No queasiness or cramps.
So far birds were missing, too. Then as she was looking around overhead for them, or for critters like squirrels or monkeys or any damn living thing at all, she spotted some spiderwebs strung between tree branches. Pretty big ones, tough to see unless your eyes caught them at the right angle in the daylight. There were a lot of them up there, actually. They weren’t everywhere, but there was more than just a few. And not all were up that high. She found a couple lower down between tree trunks and root legs. She found them by walking straight through them while she was still gawking around upward. Got a strand stuck in her mouth. You couldn’t spit it out. You had to get it with your fingers.
The way the webs were woven — they weren’t the standard spirals. These were made in crazy jumbled zigzags. Like when scientists gave spiders drugs and filmed them. Caffeine fucked them up, she recalled, while acid, amusingly, made the webs better. These webs were the caffeinated kind. Still perfectly capable of catching things, though all the ones she saw had caught so far were loose leaves and shiny droplets of moisture.
Until she saw a light on one, blinking. It was on a web at the bottom of a tree, in shadow between the arched roots. Holli thought it was a firefly. The dot of light of was emerald green instead of yellow. Minor variation.
She went over for a closer look, crouching down. Damn thing wasn’t a bug. Made her gasp when she saw it clear. It was actually a tiny man with wings, caught in the web upside down, struggling for all his worth and not doing any good for himself at all.
A fairy or a pixie. Real and alive, right the fuck in front of her.
The angel-that-wasn’t-an-angel … Your first thought was “angel” when you saw her, and then if you were sensible you immediately rejected the term. At least that was what Holli had done. The important, jarring differences outweighed the similarities. With this winged guy, your judgment had to go the other direction. It was definitely a fairy or a pixie of some sort. There were still differences from the standard illustrations, but not enough to change your mind.
He was very, very small. No bigger than a moth, and not one of the big kinds of moth. In fact when she put up her finger next to him, he was shorter than the top segment. Taller than her fingernail (Holli kept hers short and almost never bothered painting them) but only just. Holli had tended to imagine fairies a tad larger, like an action figure. Like the Disney version of Tinkerbell. She imagined them in that sort of outfit too, and with that sort of hair style. Essentially her conception of fairies was completely Disneyfied.
This tiny guy was naked and hairless, with blue and black jagged lines all over his skin in a complicated maze pattern. She couldn’t quite tell if they were stripes or some kind of writing. Tattoos, possibly. His wings looked like the curved banana leaves on all the surrounding trees — real good native camouflage. His body glowed, pulsing feverishly, and when he illuminated she could see the shadows of his bones and some of his organs inside him, which was both pretty neat and pretty horrid. His wings, however, did not illuminate at all.
The fairy was wearing protective goggles, or possibly his eyes just bulged naturally like that, a bit like a frog’s. You would need a magnifying lens to tell which was right. She also couldn’t tell if he was aware of her presence or not. She tried to talk to him: “Hey. Hey there. Can you understand me?” He didn’t answer, and he didn’t stop struggling against the web. Maybe he looked at her and maybe he didn’t.
She could see his teeny-weeny cock. The guy had a hard-on sticking out. It was dumb and childish of her but it made her blush and giggle a little. She couldn’t help herself. Just the absurdity of it. She guessed it was the same kind of thing that supposedly happened to guys when they got lynched. He wasn’t dangling by his neck, though. Was it the pressure on the throat that did it, or just the horror and humiliation of the whole situation? She’d put her money on that second explanation.
Then the spider appeared, emerging from behind the tree root on one side. It scrambled for its prey with dreadful rapidity … only it wasn’t a spider. Instead it was a worm or a grub of some kind, or a caterpillar. It was fuzzy and orange and it had four tiny stubby pink feet on each segment of its body. It was as long as one of Holli’s fingers but slightly thicker around. It might have been cute looking, if it wasn’t doing what it was about to do. That made it seem perfectly ghastly. And the tiny pixie started squealing as it approached. It made Holli’s guts clench and she almost wet herself.
She grabbed a twig off the ground and used it to slash the web. She didn’t kill the caterpillar, only prevented it from reaching the pixie and driving it back out of view behind the root. In fact she felt a little bad for the thing, depriving it of its meal, snaggled fair and square, nature’s way. But all the same she had to side with the tiny man, because it was closer looking to her species and seemed to have some degree of intelligence or at the very least, consciousness. She wasn’t gonna watch it get killed when she could do something to help.
She used the twig to cut him loose. He flew the fuck off fast as he could.
It was disappointing. Sure. She’d had vague but potent hopes he would make friends of her. Sit on her shoulder, lead her to his people … Saving him would turn out to be the first important step in establishing her position in this world, finding her destiny, taking on the mantle of a heroine … All that stuff. Too conventional?
She wanted—no, needed—to believe there was a real reason she’d come to this place. A significance. It could have been a meaningless accident, yes. Fair point. For now, she was still banking on it being deliberate. A summoning. That was her working theory. It was too coincidental that the “magic door” had opened out there right in front of someone like her, who just happened to have the particular background and personality type to recognize the event for what it was, and also be enticed to come through. It wasn’t all that unusual a mentality to have, but it wasn’t mainstream either. Her friends wouldn’t have done either of those thing, and hadn’t, in fact. That was established. They fled the other direction fast as they could. Same was true of the unfortunates on the other stupid boat, while that wretched douchebag on the jetski, equally clueless, just got his ass eaten almost instantly.
There was the other girl to keep in mind, Exhibitionist Blowjob Girl, who the angel-that-wasn’t-an-angel had carried off. That had been done against the girl’s consent, obviously, and it hadn’t looked like she understood what was going on, or why, yet she seemed to have been the creature’s specific target. A compelling case could therefore be made that the portal was all about that girl, not Holli. Or perhaps their destinies were linked. It might turn out to be Holli’s job to find the other poor bitch and rescue her.
The portal hadn’t closed the moment the angel-that-wasn’t-an-angel went back through. Holli had been given plenty of time to come through herself. Again, that might have been accidental. Holli didn’t believe it was. Stories like this never worked that way. Somebody or something had kept the door standing open for her, ’til she figured out the situation, got her shit together, made a conscious choice, and came the fuck through.
There were bound to be other signs. It was bound to happen soon. Helpers would eventually pop up, telling her where she was supposed to go and what she needed to do and how to do it. Supplies and equipment would be provided. You had to trust the narrative. You had to let its current sweep you along.
Shame about the pixie. She really thought for a second she’d made the next big breakthrough there. Had started feeling pretty proud of herself. Maybe that was what fucked it up. Maybe that was the lesson she was supposed to learn from this. Not to get cocky, not to get ahead of herself. Not to assume too much. Yeah, that must be it. An important lesson, in fact.
So she’d do her best to take it to heart.
That music started up again. Louder, closer now, and it didn’t immediately die off like the first time.
Holli nodded to herself. “Okay. Here we go. Here we fucking go. Okay.”
But she proceeded with increased caution and as quietly as she could manage. She kept huddled low, scurrying from tree to tree, checking around carefully each time before hustling to the next one. Being barefoot was a big advantage for this, and not having any stuff like a backpack or armor to encumber her movements or jostle around. Her practical nakedness felt properly practical, all the sudden.
“Trust the narrative,” she mumbled, “There has to be a narrative at play. The current will carry me. It already is. Yes.”
Soon enough, what the current carried her to was a seated figure playing a wooden flute. Probably a girl, maybe a young boy. Holli was betting on a girl. She was perched on one of the mangrove roots, a thicker one than most of them had. The tree it belonged to was slumped over sideways, and half its roots reared higher than every other tree’s. Not like the tree had got pushed over; it seemed to have grown that way because half its root legs were too fat on one side. It was a bit of a mutant. Made the roots comfortable to sit on while the skinnier majority wouldn’t be.
The girl had a cape on, with a hood. Cloak was a probably a better word. It was a lurid purple color, not at all good for camouflage. For a second Holli thought it was the same shade of purple that the portal-storm had been, but then she changed her mind. She was looking too hard for signs and portents, and if she didn’t cut it out she was gonna trick herself again.
One of her legs was folded under her and the cape/cloak, while she had the other stuck out propped against another root. The leg was wearing bright yellow tights or hose with a stirrup—in Holli’s estimation that color didn’t go any good with the purple cloak at all—and on her foot was a sandal, the sturdy gladiator kind strapped snug around the ankle. Holli also took note of a knife in a sheath along the girl’s calf. But what in fact was most immediately striking about her costume was the bunny ears on top her hood. The left flopped sideways at the top, the other one stuck up straight. They weren’t exactly bunny ears, the shape of them. More like a cat’s except too big. The tufts of extra fur sticking up in points from the tips made the ears look longer than they were. Like a lynx had, if Holli was thinking of the right kind of animal. The hood hid the upper part of the girl’s face. From what Holli could see of her mouth on the top of the flute, it was a regular human mouth, not any kind of furry muzzle. The tip of her nose also appeared normal.
The flute thing was a simple recorder, or something similar. Not that Holli knew shit about instruments. Only it didn’t seem like anything fancier like a clarinet or an oboe or whatever. Why were they called recorders, it made her wonder all the sudden? They didn’t record anything. Kind of mystery you could solve real easy with Google, if she had her phone. And the internet, obviously.
Sounded nice, though, the recorder. The tune she was playing. She wasn’t exactly jamming on it. This was something low and slow and simple, melancholy maybe but appealing, regardless. Catchy. Holli started nodding her head to it.
Best of all, the girl had fairies flying all around her, hundreds of them. They were dancing in the air along to her music. From Holli’s position, they were just spots of light, or rather streaks of colors. The swarm fashioned whirling, interlocking rings and spirals around the musician. Not just green-glowing ones like the dude she’d rescued, there were also bright blue ones and orangey-red ones, and some whites, though not many.
It looked pretty fabulous. Exactly the kind of gorgeous scene you want to find, when you go through a magic portal into another world. This was the real fucking deal.
Holli didn’t want to interrupt. She kept quiet on her knees in a huddle under another tree not too close, screened pretty good by its root legs but with plenty nice size little gaps left for her peer through … She soaked up the spectacle before her, savoring it. It was wonderful. She almost cried.
A shiny silvery glint separate from the fairy rings caught her eye after a while, down next to the musician’s hip. She had a sort of staff or walking stick leaning there beside her against the root, and mounted on the top of it was a small metal hand. It was formed with all the fingers closed but the first one, the trigger finger. So the little silver hand was pointing straight up in the air. Well, not exactly straight up at the moment, the way the stick was leaning.
It was a bit creepy looking, somehow. Didn’t strike her like that at first … then for some reason it did. Gave off a disturbing vibe.
Then a big animal jumped on the musician from behind. It clobbered her off the root and drove her face forward into the ground, and it was taking a bite out of her shoulder and the side of her neck as it was doing that.
Didn’t roar when it attacked, and the girl didn’t scream. She didn’t have time. It was some kind of huge cat, like a panther or a lion, as big as the girl herself or possibly slightly larger. It was sleek and gray and petrifying. It held the girl down with its front paws and moved its head back and forth in little rapid jerks without letting go with its jaws. Worrying was the word, when an animal does that. Holli watched its ears twitching, mesmerized, and the tip of its tail, curled up high behind it.
The girl wasn’t killed instantly. Her legs were kicking and her hands were scrabbling at the dirt. She still didn’t make any sound. The fairies did, though only for a split second. They all shrieked at once—it was a little like a bunch of wineglasses shattering at the same time, an entire warehouse full of them, except higher-pitched and finished too quick for that. And then they all vanished, zipping off every direction. The entire swarm was gone in the time it takes to blink your eye.
While on the ground with her face in the dirt the girl was still kicking and clawing and it wasn’t gonna do her a lick of good; the huge damn ghastly cat kept worrying at her neck. Only Holli heard it purring now. Sounded like a motorcycle engine.
Holli found herself standing over them both, with no memory of running out there from her hiding spot. She had the girl’s staff or walking stick in her hands, again having it grabbed it without realizing. Now she watched herself swing the thing from over her head with both hands and smack it across the back of the cat. She hadn’t consciously decided to do that either, and in fact as it was happening, she was thinking that it wasn’t a good idea. The stick was too short and shrimpy to do any damage. All she was gonna accomplish was calling the cat’s attention to herself. She wasn’t gonna save the other girl. It was already too late for her. Bound to be.
She walloped the damn cat anyhow. Couldn’t have stopped herself if she wanted to.
There was a white flash and Holli got flung back on her ass.
When she sat up and looked at the cat, it was split in half. It was made entirely of stone—had it always been? And now the stone was shattered in the middle. The body was hollow, greenish steam was pouring from inside. Something else flew out and flickered away, too small and too fast for her to see what it was. Maybe another fairy, but not one that was lit up. And small as it was, she thought it had been a bit bigger than the fairies were. Now it was gone.
The staff in her hands was vibrating and warm, and the silver hand on the top was shimmering slightly. But while she watched, it stopped and went back to normal.
Okay, magic wand. Weapon. Check.
She set it aside carefully, then crawled over to the cloaked girl and pulled her clear of the broken cat statue. Its mouth was still fixed on her neck; Holli had to pry it away. Which might have been a bad decision considering the amount of blood that gushed out from the holes its teeth had made. More likely it wouldn’t have made any difference, unless she sped along the finish. Probably better that she did, if she did.
The girl partly rolled over and looked at her. She didn’t try to say anything. There was almost as much blood coming out her mouth and her nostrils as from her neck. Her hood fell back when she moved her head. Holli had expected the lynx ears to be her real ears, fitted through slits in the hood. That didn’t turn out to be the case. The girl had normal ears. She was a normal girl, except her hair was dyed blue and cut kind of weird and jagged. Cool looking but a style that would have drawn stares back home.
Holli took her hand and held it as the girl finished dying, which didn’t take long. She might not even have felt Holli’s hand. She didn’t close her eyes or make any last sounds. Just went still. Holli didn’t see a light go out of her eyes, as the expression goes. Instead they seemed to fix or freeze. Like she focused intently on something in the distance ahead of her, and then stuck that way while she was concentrating.
It had a profound beauty to it, believe it or not. It wasn’t as ugly or sad or horrifying as Holli had been trying to prepare herself for. Though afterward she still felt guilty about not feeling any of those ways. Kept wondering if she had missed something.
She left the body there. Couldn’t think what else to do with it. She ought to bury it but without good tools she wouldn’t manage to do it right. She wouldn’t be able to dig deep enough and the body would get dug right up again by other animals. It was gonna end up getting torn to bits and eaten either way. That was the cold truth. She wasn’t strong enough to carry it along with her—the only other decent option—especially not knowing which direction to take it.
Holli took the girl’s magic stick and she took the hooded cloak. It had been torn a little on one side over the shoulder, and it had some blood on it, but not very much. Not like the rest of the girl’s clothes, a knee-length sort of tunic or jerkin, totally ruined with gore. Her leggings just as bad. Sopping. Holli took the knife off the girl’s leg, strapping the sheath to her left forearm instead. She also could have used the sandals. Looked like they would have fit her just fine. She dithered over the question a long while. Couldn’t bring herself to do it. Felt too gross, too creepy. Maybe if the girl had complete stockings on, but she hadn’t. Yes, it wasn’t the fact the girl had died in them that bothered her. It was knowing her bare feet had sweated in them, soaked into the leather. Made her squeamish. Wasn’t something she would have expected to get under her skin as bad as it did. But then, this wasn’t the kind of question that had come up in her life before. More she thought it over, she decided if one of her friends back home had offered her a used pair of flipflops for some reason—not that she could realistically imagine Rae or Melissa or any other girls she knew thinking that was an acceptable idea—she would have refused. She would have been disgusted by the offer for the same reason. Could have borrowed boots or fancier shoes without a qualm, but not anything you wore without socks or hose. Would other girls feel the same hangup, or think she was crazy? Holli couldn’t figure.
If the forest floor had been harsher, gravel or even deep nasty mud, she might have made herself get over this. There was no great need. The ground in here was easygoing for a barefoot explorer, much drier than she would have predicted, just sand and smooth fallen leaves. It was a little squishy but not slimy or slippery, and grit didn’t cling to her either. When she glanced at the bottoms of her feet, they’d stayed almost perfectly clean.
How shitty was it of her to be claiming this dead girl’s things? It was videogame thinking, wasn’t it? Reduced the death to a narrative contrivance, providing Holli shit she needed. Yet it also would have felt disrespectful to leave everything untouched. Like it had cooties. Pointlessly wasteful, too. Coldblooded as you could call it, salvaging the things did give a tangible purpose to what would otherwise have been a meaningless tragedy. Not a purpose, not really. A transformative benefit.
Shit, she was only managing to make herself feel crappier.
Holli didn’t take the recorder. In fact she couldn’t find the thing. It must have rolled or bounced off under one of the trees. If she had located it she would have left it with the body. Put it in the girl’s hand. Holli couldn’t have made use of it in any case. She’d played the flute back in junior high but only a couple years before she decided to quit. Never any good at it. Plus a recorder worked completely different. Hadn’t touched an instrument since, except now she thought of it the guitar of a guy she dated very briefly and she hadn’t shown any knack for that thing either. Completely forgot all about that guy until just then. Great kisser but much too clingy. Fuck was his name?
Five minutes after walking away from the corpse she changed her mind and went back. Practical considerations be damned, she’d feel like way too much a shitheel for the rest of her days if she left it lying there. She’d have to grit her teeth and make a grave. Maybe the magic wand could help, if she concentrated hard enough. Maybe it could blast a big hole for her. Worth a shot, at least.
She had a hard time finding the right spot again. Then when she did, the body had fairies all over it. For a second she almost flipped out thinking they were devouring the girl. Then she saw they were covering her with leaves they’d gathered, but doing something to them, spraying some sort of glassy coating on them out of their tiny mouths that made the leaves glow and harden and stick together. So the swarm was rapidly forming a mound over the body.
Little guys had found the recorder too, and they had it sticking up out of the top of the mound.
Fine then, they had this taken care of. That was a load off. She wouldn’t disturb them.
Holli got out of there. Unlike before, she walked fast. No more of the stealthy scampering, she decided. Not now that she had this wand thing and the cape covering her. She left its hood down. The lynx ears were too dorky looking.
the celestial cellar 