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He had blue eyes. With the 7 am sunlight shining slantwise through them, they looked silvery, like crystals.
“I’m going, I’m going,” I grumbled, and stretched. I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about how totally amazing breakfast was, I mean, as an invention. Bacon and bread. I only thought about food abstractly anymore. Anything I got I just tore through so fast, it didn’t really seem to exist in a cosmic sense. Hungry before, hungry after. I frowned at the fine-dispensing man. I didn’t hate the guy—adults just lived in this other world, this forbidden world, and in that world I only looked like a problem. Not his fault. Not mine. You can’t see one world from where you’re standing in the other, that’s all.
But he didn’t shove me off at the next station. Nobody else was in the car, and the sun gleamed on everything, glittering on the chrome like little supernovas. I settled back into my seat, hunching down so anyone who did come in would know to leave me alone. A greyish lump of girl got on, hauling a stiff rider of morning wind. She dropped into a heap in a seat on the far side of the car and I was pretty sure she didn’t have a ticket either. Her clothes were thrift-mish-mash, green skirt, dingy tank top under a ragged coat with a furry, matted hood. As the train pulled up to speed, her head dipped back and she started to snore. The hood slid off.
It was Maria.
I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized her. But I have a memory for faces. Everyone, all the time. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you forever. And it was Maria, but she was messed up, a hundred years older. Her cheekbones were cutting shards, one eye swollen up like she’d been hit. Her skin was half-sunburned, half-clammy, and she had hacked all her hair off, shaved her head. It had grown back a fuzzy, uneven half inch, a thin black cloud. She had sores on her arms, her lips cracked and bled.
“Hey,” I whispered. She stirred sleepily. I felt awake all of the sudden, sharp. “Maria?”
I went to the girl and slid into the plastic seat beside her. Her eyes slitted up at me.
“Lemmelone, I gotta ticket,” she mumbled.
“Maria, it’s me. Fig. Diogenes, remember?”
Her eyes rolled, unfocused. I cold see the bones in her sternum, like a bone ladder. “Fig’s a stupid name,” she slurred.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
I didn’t ask her what happened to her, why she didn’t just go home if she was so busted. It’s not polite. Her breathing got shallow and she fell asleep again. Maria smelled—kind of sweet, and kind of rotten, and kind of sour. She slumped against me and started coughing, spattering my arm with gooey strands streaked with pink. Not coughing blood like some movie girl with one big number left in her, but just about as bad.
“Hey, hey,” I tried to push her upright. “Wake up, Maria. Come on. Don’t put this on me. I can’t take it. Wake up.”
But she didn’t. Her heart was racing, but her skin was cold. She just fell into my arms like a baby. Oh god, oh god, have a seizure, whatever, just don’t die on me here, this is a safe place, bad things don’t happen on the train. What did you take, what did you do, what was so bad you couldn’t dream about magic anymore? “Maria, sweetie,” I said, and held her. I kissed her forehead. “Baby girl, just open your eyes. Like in the story. Just open your eyes and wake up.” She moaned a
little, and put out her hand to find my face. Housing developments with red roofs whispered by outside the windows—she coughed again, greenish, and specks of dark, ugly blood in it this time.
“Ok, Maria, ok,” I shifted to hold her better, and started rocking. Shit, just stay awake til the next stop. Just don’t die. Come on kid, you gotta go somewhere else. “Just listen to me. Remember that place you wanted to go? Think about that place, think about the elves and the magic and you dancing with the fairies. You can’t go there like this, you gotta wake up. Listen, listen.”
And I sang to her. The words just came and I sang them into her ear, her shorn head, her phelgm and her sternum and her unicorns and her wizards and my voice came rough and quiet, but it came, and I hoped I wasn’t singing her death, I hoped I was singing something better, for both of us, my broken voice and her broken body. I sang because if she could get that far gone I could, if she wasn’t a good enough soul for Diogenes I never would be, if she could die I would never get to be old. The panic in me was like a spider, a crawling, hungry thing. I rocked her, and went to that other place I go to when I sing, and the song poured out of me into her. Think about that place, that place, that place. Let’s run away. That other place. Nothing bad ever happened to you. Nothing bad ever happened to me. We’re just two girls taking the train to school. We’ll go to class and talk about Grecian urns. You can copy off my homework. We’ll have lunch in the grass. I sang and sang, and my voice got big in me, big enough to hurt, big enough to echo. Big enough for her. A voice like a hole. I pressed my forehead to hers and the world went away.
The sky shuddered from full daylight to stars and black and no moon at all with a hard lurch and a snap, like blinds zipping down.
Come on, kid. You gotta go somewhere else.
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.”
