Nothing left for us kittens.
The train-car was gone, and I was sitting on a long bench with a red cushion, with Maria in my lap. We rattled along on some half-stagecoach, half-city bus beast, something out of an old movie, like we’d jumped frames. Jangling silver and bone bells hung from the several posts of some kind of twisted black horn—nodding black flowers drooped from their crowns. Several long benches stretched behind me, with some folk asleep, some awake. A woman was knitting quietly in the starlight. I sat up front, Maria’s legs curled on the seat, her head in my arms. The driver, with a tophat on his head covered in living moss with tiny clovers and thistles growing in it. The coach heaved and jerked as though horses were pulling it, and I could hear the clop-clop of hooves, but even in the dim light I could see that no animal pulled us along.
I started shaking—I didn’t mean to, but my body rejected what it saw, what it felt, and I couldn’t think of anything to do or say, with this girl in my lap and this utterly wrong thing happening, except that there was no horse pulling the carriage-trolley, no horse but I could hear the hoofbeats, and like a kid I seized on that, that one thing wrong out of everything, everything wrong.
I cleared my throat. I felt unused to talking to adults. “Sir,” I said to the driver. “There’s no horse.”
“This is Bordertown’s own Olde Unicorn Trolley. Famous, like. I’m Master Wallscrew, at yours.”
I laughed a little, nervous. “Where’s the unicorn?”
The driver turned to grin at me under his fuzzy green hat.
“You’re it, kid. It only works with a virgin on board. Sure and it’s not me.”
I blushed deeply and it hit me hard as a broken bone: he said Bordertown.
I shook, and felt cold, and felt hot, and my hands were clamped so tight in Maria’s coat my fingers got fuzzy with lost circulation. I had been wrong: there was a moon out, low in the sky, almost spent, a slim rind left, hanging there like a smile. I laughed. Then I put my face in Maria’s neck and cried.
“What is it, girl? I can’t abide girls crying, I’ll warn you. Shows a fragile disposition, and brings the amorous sort to wipe them away, which would pretty much sort the whole conveyance issue. Sniffle up, before some silver-haired Byron gets your scent.”
“It’s a mistake,” I said quietly.
“What’s it now?”
“A mistake. I’m…I’m nobody. I’m nobody. I’m not supposed to be here.”
I had made it and didn’t even audition. Maria auditioned, with her whole heart. I was supposed to mess around in the back and say nothing. I wasn’t supposed to suddenly have to function in Athens. This was Maria’s place and she couldn’t even see it.
“Wake up, Maria, wake up,” I sobbed. “Wake up. There’s unicorns, like you said, and magic, and…”
And she didn’t stir. But her breathing was better, deep and even, and she had locked her arms around my waist.
“Well, Nobody,” the driver said softly, “where to?”
I rubbed my nose, flowing with snot and tears. “What about these people? Don’t they need to get…places? Go where they want to go. We don’t care.”
“Tourists,” he shrugged. “They wait for the…ah…fuel stop, and go where the Trolley goes. It’s exciting—they never know what they might see. Besides, the old monster’s not too reliable as a method of mass transit. The kids come on sometimes, to haze each other—if it goes, they aren’t as tough as they say. But mostly we just glide, child. It’s part magic and part machine and neither of the parts work quite right, so sometimes you’ll say: dinner at Cafe Cubana, hoss and it’ll take you pert as a duck to Elfhaeme Gate and you’ll be dining on fines and forms. Sometimes it’s nice as you please, right up to the door at Cubana and no fuss. Not its fault, you understand. The magic wants to go Realmward and the machine wants to go Worldward, and in a mess like that you can’t ask for any straight lines.”
“Then why ask where we’re going?”
The driver looked down at me, his blue eyes dark in the starlight, like crystals.
“It don’t run without desire, kid. Nothing does.”
Well, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? What you’ve been doing. I wanted somewhere for Maria to get well, to get fed, to get happy again. Something like a Denny’s, something I could sing in front of, somewhere with coffee all night for $1.10 in a cup like a grail and just a little more room on the blank pages in the backs of my books. Just a little more room.
I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. But the Unicorn Trolley veered off sharply into the shadows and light of the city, into the sound of it like a wall.
And I looked over my shoulder, back toward the moon and the gnarled, thorny weeds of the road. Something banged there, hanging from an iron pole, banged in the wind and the night. On a scrap of tin that might have once been painted blue, I read: Starfire Station.
And just then, just then, Maria opened her eyes, bright and deep as a fairy’s.
And that’s my story, Mr. Din. If you don’t mind I’ll take that beer now—I’m still not brave. It’s Titania’s world but I’ll never be Hermia, and not Helena neither. Just Fig, in the background, with the rest of the fairies.
Now. I see a microphone up there, Mr. Din, and my girl and I are hungry. May I?
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While
In which a young girl named Mallow leaves the country for the city, meets a number of Winds, Cats, and handsome folk, sees something dreadful, and engages, much against her will, in Politicks of the most muddled kind.
History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.
History is like that.
Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.
No matter where one begins telling a story, a very long road stretches out before and behind, full of wild and lovely creatures performing feats and acts of daring. No matter how much a narrator might want to, she cannot pack all of them into one tale. That’s the trouble—history goes on all around the story at hand, it is what made it happen and what will happen after, all of those extraordinary events and folk and dangers and near-misses, choices that had to be made so that everything after could happen as it did. A single story is but one square of blueberries growing in one plot, on one farm, on the fertile face of the whole world. A heroine steps in, and sees a wickedness in need of solving—but she is never the first, or the last. She plays her part, blessedly and necessarily innocent of that fat old cat sneaking around the borders of her tale, licking its paws while she bleeds and fights, whipping its tail at her trials and yawning at her triumphs. The cat does not care. It has seen all this before and will see it again.