Rags & Bones Read online

  The girl smiled at her with eyes the color of the morning sky.

  The queen did not smile. She reached out her hand. “Here,” she said. “This is not mine.”

  She passed the spindle to the old woman beside her. The old woman hefted it, thoughtfully. She began to unwrap the yarn from the spindle with arthritic fingers. “This was my blooming, bollocking life,” she said. “This thread was my life … ”

  “It was your life. You gave it to me,” said the sleeper, irritably. “And it has gone on much too long.”

  The tip of the spindle was still sharp after so many decades.

  The old woman, who had once, long, long ago, been a princess, held the yarn tightly in her left hand, and she thrust the point of the spindle at the golden-haired girl’s breast.

  The girl looked down as a trickle of red blood ran down her breast and stained her white dress crimson.

  “No weapon can harm me,” she said, and her girlish voice was petulant. “Not anymore. Look. It’s only a scratch.”

  “It’s not a weapon,” said the queen, who understood what had happened. “It’s your own magic. And a scratch is all that was needed.”

  The girl’s blood soaked into the thread that had once been wrapped about the spindle, the thread that ran from the spindle to the raw wool in the old woman’s left hand.

  The girl looked down at the blood staining her dress, and at the blood on the thread, and she said only, “It was just a prick of the skin, nothing more.” She seemed confused.

  The noise on the stairs was getting louder. A slow, irregular shuffling, as if a hundred sleepwalkers were coming up a stone spiral staircase with their eyes closed.

  The room was small, and there was nowhere to hide, and the room’s windows were two narrow slits in the stones.

  The old woman, who had not slept in so many decades, she who had once been a princess, said, “You took my blinking dreams. You took my sleep. Now, that’s enough of all that.” She was a very old woman: her fingers were gnarled, like the roots of a hawthorn bush. Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young.

  The old woman swayed, and then she staggered, and she would have fallen to the floor if the queen had not caught her first.

  The queen carried the old woman to the bed, marveling at how little she weighed, and placed her on the crimson counterpane. The old woman’s chest rose and fell.

  The noise on the stairs was louder now. Then a silence, followed, suddenly, by a hubbub, as if a hundred people were talking at once, all surprised and angry and confused.

  The beautiful girl said, “But—” and now there was nothing girlish or beautiful about her. Her face fell and became less shapely. She reached down to the smallest dwarf, pulled his hand ax from his belt. She fumbled with the ax, held it up threateningly, with hands all wrinkled and worn.

  The queen drew her sword (the blade’s edge was notched and damaged from the thorns) but instead of striking, she took a step backward.

  “Listen! They are waking up,” she said. “They are all waking up. Tell me again about the youth you stole from them. Tell me again about your beauty and your power. Tell me again how clever you were, your darkness.”

  When the people reached the tower room, they saw an old woman asleep on a bed, and they saw the queen, standing tall, and beside her, the dwarfs, who were shaking their heads, or scratching them.

  They saw something else on the floor also: a tumble of bones, a hank of hair as fine and as white as fresh-spun cobwebs, a tracery of gray rags across it, and over all of it, an oily dust.

  “Take care of her,” said the queen, pointing with the dark wooden spindle at the old woman on the bed. “She saved your lives.”

  She left, then, with the dwarfs. None of the people in that room or on the steps dared to stop them or would ever understand what had happened.

  A mile or so from the castle, in a clearing in the Forest of Acaire, the queen and the dwarfs lit a fire of dry twigs, and in it they burned the thread and the fiber. The smallest dwarf chopped the spindle into fragments of black wood with his ax, and they burned them too. The wood chips gave off a noxious smoke as they burned, which made the queen cough, and the smell of old magic was heavy in the air.

  Afterward, they buried the charred wooden fragments beneath a rowan tree.

  By evening they were on the outskirts of the forest, and had reached a cleared track. They could see a village across the hill, and smoke rising from the village chimneys.

  “So,” said the dwarf with the beard. “If we head due west, we can be at the mountains by the end of the week, and we’ll have you back in your palace in Kanselaire within ten days.”

  “Yes,” said the queen.

  “And your wedding will be late, but it will happen soon after your return, and the people will celebrate, and there will be joy unbounded through the kingdom.”

  “Yes,” said the queen. She said nothing, but sat on the moss beneath an oak tree and tasted the stillness, heartbeat by heartbeat.

  There are choices, she thought, when she had sat long enough. There are always choices.

  She made her choice.

  The queen began to walk, and the dwarfs followed her.

  “You do know we’re heading east, don’t you?” said one of the dwarfs.

  “Oh yes,” said the queen.

  “Well, that’s all right then,” said the dwarf.

  They walked to the east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE …………………………………

  The first book I remember owning was a picture book about a mermaid. The first book I loved was an illustrated “Snow White.” The illustrations were, to my three-year-old self, beautiful, and the story was gripping, terrifying, and it ended perfectly. Years later I retold it as something very dark, and that version of the story seems to be making its own way in the world.

  As a young journalist, I was assigned to read a small pile of “sex and shopping” blockbusters and write about them. I noticed, with a small amount of surprise, that the plots were all fairy-tale plots. I remember constructing, as an exercise, a high-tech, contemporary version of “Sleeping Beauty.” I did not write it—I was not that cynical—but Sleeping Beauty has hovered at the edges of my mind ever since.

  When Melissa and Tim asked me to visit a story I had loved, I thought of so many authors I have loved, so many stories. And then I asked if I could go back to the Sleeping Beauty In The Wood, and felt very lucky when they said yes.

  Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1922). English author Ernest Bramah wrote several collections of stories that feature his droll storyteller, Kai Lung, beginning with The Wallet of Kai Lung and followed by Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, and then by Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat and Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree. They are all set in a China created entirely from Bramah’s own imagination (since he never once even visited the country), a misty landscape rife with sly dragons, ferocious bandits, wily mandarins, and beguiling maidens continually placed into dramatic circumstances that always offer his titular hero yet another chance to spin a tale studded with small delights and exquisite language.

  On first reading, I simply fell head over heels into Bramah’s world, and my imagination still patiently treads its subtle paths.

  —Charles Vess.

  The Cold Corner

  TIM PRATT

  I left home five years ago, and haven’t been back since—so why do I still think of it as home at all?

  After almost a week spent driving across the country on I-40 East, I cut north on Highway 202, and within an hour reached the outskirts of my hometown, Cold Corners. The only corners are in the endless rectangular fields of soybeans and tobacco, and with triple-digit heat and 90 percent humidity in summer, it’s hardly “cold,” so I don’t know where it got the name. (Local wisdom contends the name is a corruption of some Cherokee word meaning “fertile
land,” but I’m willing to bet that’s pure Carolina invention.)

  I thought about pulling off to the gravel shoulder and calling David to let him know I’d arrived safely, but decided against it. When he threw all my clothes, my best saucepan, and my knife bag out the window of our—technically his—condo in Oakland, that was probably his way of saying “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” His flair for the dramatic was one of the things I’d loved about him, when he wasn’t being dramatic at me. David was my first real boyfriend after culinary school, and I’d been dumb enough to think it was forever. Dumb enough to think I could go more than a couple of years without screwing it up, anyway.

  The closer I got to Cold Corners, the less eager I was to finish the trip. I decided not to go up to the “big house”—once owned by my grandparents, now home to my older brother, Jimmy, his wife, and nephews and nieces I hadn’t seen in years—right away. I wonder, if I had gone to their house first, taken my place as the younger child, slipped into those old patterns, put up with the teasing and sympathy for my televised failure for a few days, then slunk back to California … would I have ever truly found my way home again?

  I tell people the only thing I miss about home is the food, and that much is true. I got to town at lunchtime, more or less, and thought I’d be able to face the prospect of Jimmy, Mom, Dad, and the extended F if I got a bite to eat first. After a week of greased-up fast food and limp pizza delivered to motel rooms, I was hungry for something real—being picky is an occupational hazard of being a chef—and the prospect of Eastern Carolina barbecue sounded like a gateway to heaven.

  You can’t get it on the West Coast. Oh, there are places that serve “Carolina-style” barbecue, but at best it’s an approximation, carob when you want chocolate. In North Carolina alone, there are two distinct styles of barbecue, though both start with slow-cooking a pig in a pit full of burning hickory chips: there’s the One True Barbecue, with vinegar-and-red-pepper sauce, favored in Eastern North Carolina, and the heretical Lexington-style barbecue more common in the western half of the state, with its hideous gloppy tomato-based sauce.

  I pulled up in the weedy gravel parking lot outside Willard’s B-B-Q, a Cold Corners institution renowned far and wide for the lightness and perfection of its hush puppies and the skill of its pitmaster. What a great title for a cook—the best I’ve ever had is “executive chef,” and that doesn’t come close. (Of course, just then, I didn’t have any job title at all, unless you count “recently fired for trying to punch a customer.”)

  There were no cars or pickups in the lot, which was beyond bizarre—it should have been packed, even on a Tuesday. For a heart-stopping moment I looked up at the faded sign (depicting the inevitable smiling pig wearing a chef’s toque) and worried that Willard’s had closed … but then I saw movement inside the greasy windows and climbed out of my car.

  Summer in North Carolina. Stepping out of the air-conditioning was like having a sheet sopping with warm water wrapped around my face. A sudden, brutal pang of homesickness for the East Bay hit me. I remembered the place in the hills where David and I used to sit and watch the cool fog roll in over the bay below, but I couldn’t see a way back there that ended in anything but pity or pain.

  I hit the button on my key chain to lock the car, then felt stupid. When I was a kid, people barely locked their houses here, let alone their cars. Then I remembered some of my brother’s recent e-mails complaining about tweakers and thieves, and left it locked. My friends in Oakland used to joke about how I was a simple country boy too trusting to make it in the big city, but I bet meth heads made up a bigger percentage of the population in my hometown than they did in the East Bay. I’d lost at least two of my innumerable second cousins in home meth-lab accidents.

  I pushed through the front door of Willard’s into a dim space full of empty square tables draped in red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths. A couple of ceiling fans whirred away like the propellers of ancient planes, swirling the hot air around.

  “You driving one of them hybrids?” the brassy blonde leaning on the counter said, and I braced myself for contempt and sneers as I nodded, but she just said, “The way gas prices are going, I oughta get one of those myself. The pitmaster drives a van rigged to run on biodiesel, and he ain’t bought gas in years—just strains out the hush puppy and french fry oil and uses that. What can I getcha?”

  The menu was chalked up on a board behind the counter, and looked like it hadn’t been changed since the last time I’d been there, at least half a decade before. “I’ll take the number two plate and an iced tea.” No need to specify sweet tea; that was the only way they did it at Willard’s.

  “Sit down anywhere. It’ll be right out.” She sauntered back to the kitchen.

  I took a table near the counter, and like all the other tables, it held a glass bottle of hot sauce, a squeeze bottle of sweeter barbecue sauce, a cage of sugar packets in case your tea wasn’t sweet enough (hard to imagine), and a roll of paper towels in lieu of napkins, the latter an innovation I considered suggesting to the owner of my restaurant back home, before I remembered he’d fired me. It seems unfair to get fired for something you did when you were so drunk you barely remember it, but that’s life.

  I pulled out my phone—I’d finally turned off the keyword alert that told me every time my name was mentioned online, but I still occasionally, morbidly, checked the social media sites to see what people were saying about me—but there was no signal. I didn’t have time to be annoyed before the waitress was back with a red plastic oval tray that held a heaping scoop of barbecue (“pulled pork” as the rest of the world calls it), a white bread roll, and a wax-paper-lined basket of hush puppies.

  The food was … well, I’m a cook, not a food writer, but it was like eating my own childhood memories. The barbecue was cooked to perfection, seasoned just right, spicy and vinegar-astringent sauce combining ideally with the meltingly delicious fat in the pork. The hush puppies were perfect, too: oblongs of deep-fried cornbread, just a little crunchy on the outside, sweet and fluffy inside. The tea was sweet enough to make me want to schedule a cleaning at the dentist, but even that tasted like home.

  I ate with single-minded intensity, then leaned back in my chair and belched quietly to myself. The waitress squinted at me from the cash register. “You look real familiar to me,” she said. “You always had blond hair?”

  “Oh. No, but if you recognize me it’s probably because—I’ve been on TV lately. That reality cooking show, Stand the Heat.”

  She did not seem awed by my fleeting celebrity. She frowned, and I revised my estimate of her age from thirties to forties. “Had to cancel the cable a while back,” she said. “Never seen it. Did you win?”

  I shook my head. “Came in fourth. Got cut right before the finale. That episode just aired last week.” I think I kept all the bitterness out of my voice. There were three finalists. Even the two who didn’t win would get perks: money, bragging rights, invites back for a future all-star show. They were good chefs, and one of them had even been a friend—a summer-camp kind of friend, though, and we hadn’t kept in touch since we stopped living in the same New York town house—but I didn’t believe any of them were better than me. I’d been a front-runner, and I knew it, winning lots of the weekly competitions … but one fish bone in one fillet served to one flamboyantly vicious guest judge had ended my run.

  “Too bad,” she said. “Still, fourth place ain’t bad. I never came in fourth place at anything. Maybe I saw you in a magazine or something, though I swear … Huh. I’ve always wondered about those shows—is it all real, or is it fake, like pro wrestling?”

  I hesitated, unsure how to answer the question, even though I’d been asked its equivalent many times. “It’s … the contests are real, the games and competitions, though they cut out a lot of the boring stuff to make it seem more fast-paced and exciting. But when you watch the shows, the stuff you see people say, a lot of that’s encouraged, if not exactly scripted. And …
” I tried to think of a way to say what I meant. “The me on-screen isn’t the real me. I don’t think I’m that cocky, for one thing, and they really tried to play up the fact that I come from the South—I swear they showed every time I said ‘y’all,’ four or five times at least. The producers turn you into a character.”

  In fact, the bizarre falseness of reality TV had knocked me off balance in my own life, causing me to question all sorts of assumed truths—was I the person my friends thought I was, hotshot chef and grinning joker, or was that just another character I was playing, or a character they needed me to play? Who was the real real me? My anxiety over that question had led me to make some lousy decisions and burn way too many bridges. This road trip was supposed to help me settle the question of who I was and what I wanted, but it wasn’t working so far.

  I could tell I’d lost the waitress—at least, I thought so, until she said, “I reckon we all have to play different parts for different people. Sometimes I think the only time we can really be ourselves is when we’re all alone with nobody to disappoint.”

  I laughed and said that was true. I left a generous tip on the table, then went up to the counter and paid the bill—I was stuffed, and the whole meal cost less than a happy-hour cocktail at a decent restaurant back in Oakland. “Is Junior out back?” I asked, leaning on the counter across from her.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You know Junior?”

  “I used to live around here. Even worked here at the restaurant one summer in high school, just running the fryer. My first real cooking job.” Junior was the owner and pitmaster, and he’d been in his fifties back then, a big man who got up long before dawn to start cooking the day’s pigs, and who always smelled of fragrant smoke.

  “Well, ain’t that something!” she said. “We should hang your picture on the wall, you being on TV and all. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, honey … but Junior passed on last year. Wasn’t a heart attack, either—everybody always thinks it was the food—it was cancer.” She pronounced it almost like “CAIN-sir,” and I wondered if I’d pick up my old accent again while I was in town, the way unwrapped butter will pick up the flavor of onions or garlic sitting next to it on the counter.