“Billy Don is in Heaven, waiting for me with open arms,” Darren replies softly. She called his voice “quietly compelling” in her novel and it is, but his smug piety grates on her. “I do not think we will see you there.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she says. She knows what he has done, even if he no longer does. He should be sitting in Abner’s chair. But if he were, she’s well aware, she would be out here, just the same. “Your Heaven exists only in your head, creep, dies when you do. But, meanwhile, Billy Don and I will haunt your fantasy world, so watch out. Our games may be cruel. We will make enemies of your angels. Listen carefully to what they sing. You will know no peace.”
She feels suddenly exhausted. What has she said? She doesn’t know. The parking lot party is in full swing, raucous and obscene, cheering on the executioner. She turns to leave, unsure of what might happen next, her knees wobbly, sees her husband and Simon waiting for her a few yards away. Her husband takes her hand, Simon her arm. The countdown has begun and solemnly they walk away to the drummed beat of it.
The Kingdom has been decimated by the black magic of the Cretin Wizards with their cult of the Living Dead. The King hangs those he can catch, but they are everywhere, ineradicable as cockroaches. Their magic is merely a clumsy sleight-of-hand that can only delude the stupid, but, alas, there is no scarcity of stupidity in the world, nor in his Kingdom nor in his Castle, either. A lesson for the Goose Girl as well, launching forth on adventures of her own. She is no longer a Goose Girl, having bade farewell to her flock, a bittersweet occasion, for she had to choose one of them for her supper before setting out (IT’S THE SADNESS is tattooed across her breasts), and she is no longer Beauty either, if she ever was, even in her own imagination. Inspired by the nightmares unleashed by the Cretin Wizards, she has taken up oneirophagy and will be known henceforth as Dream Eater, the tribal Dreamtime itself her chosen banquet hall. If indeed she is the chooser not the chosen. Is that enough for one life? No, but it beats bedding down in goose shit. Dream Eaters of the past have all been monsters. She will be a monster, too. Is one, born and bred. She flexes her talons, bares her steely teeth, and then, locking the gate and hauling up the drawbridge behind her, she’s out of there. Done’s done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Excerpts from this book have been published in Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, Five Dials, FlashPoint, and Golden Handcuffs. Thanks to Brown University and, in particular, to Vartan Gregorian, Brown president from 1989 to 1997, supporter of endangered dissident writers, innovative digital literary arts, and iconoclastic tenure-rejecting professor-types in need of focused writing time. Bernard Hoepffner, Larry McCaffery, Alexandra Kleeman, Stéphane Vanderhaeghe, Dzanc Senior Editor Guy Intoci, my literary agent Georges Borchardt, and my wife Pilar provided valuable critical readings. Scott Burns, Gordon Pruett, and my son Roderick helped with specific research needs. The book’s long decade of composition was sustained by daily late-afternoon coffees provided by innumerable neighborhood cafés in several cities, most notably by the Stella family and staff of the La Gaffe coffee and wine bar in Hampstead, London, where, in an isolated eyrie overlooking the city, much of the book’s writing was accomplished.