Trigger Warning

The stepmother took the girl’s tender arm between her finger and her thumb and pinched as hard as she could, squeezed until the tears glistened in the girl’s eyes, but she said nothing. So her stepmother locked the girl in her windowless bedroom, so she could not get away.

The woman took the diamonds and the ruby to Al’s Pawn and Gun, on the corner, where Al gave her five hundred dollars no questions asked.

Then she sent her other daughter off to buy drugs for her.

The girl was selfish. She saw the dog panting in the sun, and, once she was certain that it was chained up and could not follow, she kicked at it. She pushed past the hooker on the stair. She reached the dealer’s apartment and knocked on the door. He looked at her, and she handed him the twenty without speaking. On her way back down, the hooker on the stair said, ‘Please . . .?’ but the girl did not even slow.

‘Bitch!’ called the hooker.

‘Snake,’ said the dog, when she passed it on the sidewalk.

Back home, the girl took out the drugs, then opened her mouth to say, ‘Here,’ to her mother. A small frog, brightly coloured, slipped from her lips. It leapt from her arm to the wall, where it hung and stared at them unblinking.

‘Oh my god,’ said the girl. ‘That’s just disgusting.’ Five more coloured tree frogs, and one small red, black and yellow–banded snake.

‘Black against red,’ said the girl. ‘Is that poisonous?’ (Three more tree frogs, a cane toad, a small, blind white snake, and a baby iguana.) She backed away from them.

Her mother, who was not afraid of snakes or of anything, kicked at the banded snake, which bit her leg. The woman screamed and flailed, and her daughter also began to scream, a long loud scream which fell from her lips as a healthy adult python.

The girl, the first girl, whose name was Amanda, heard the screams and then the silence but she could do nothing to find out what was happening.

She knocked on the door. No one opened it. No one said anything. The only sounds she could hear were rustlings, as if of something huge and legless slipping across the carpet.

When Amanda got hungry, too hungry for words, she began to speak.

‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,’ she began. ‘Thou foster child of Silence and slow Time . . .’

She spoke, although the words were choking her.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know . . .’ A final sapphire clicked across the wooden floor of Amanda’s closet room.

The silence was absolute.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

He was the monarch of all he surveyed, even when he stood out on the palace balcony at night listening to reports and he glanced up into the sky at the bitter twinkling clusters and whorls of stars. He ruled the worlds. He had tried for so long to rule wisely, and well, and to be a good monarch, but it is hard to rule, and wisdom can be painful. And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world.

Bit by bit, moment by moment, death by little death, he ceased to care.

He would not die, for only inferior people died, and he was the inferior of no one.

Time passed. One day, in the deep dungeons, a man with blood on his face looked at the Duke and told him he had become a monster. The next moment, the man was no more; a footnote in a history book.

The Duke gave this conversation much thought over the next several days, and eventually he nodded his head. ‘The traitor was right,’ he said. ‘I have become a monster. Ah well. I wonder if any of us set out to be monsters?’

Once, long ago, there had been lovers, but that had been in the dawn days of the Dukedom. Now, in the dusk of the world, with all pleasures available freely (but what we attain with no effort we cannot value), and with no need to deal with any issues of succession (for even the notion that another would one day succeed the Duke bordered upon blasphemy), there were no more lovers, just as there were no challenges. He felt as if he were asleep while his eyes were open and his lips spoke, but there was nothing to wake him.

The day after it had occurred to the Duke that he was now a monster was the Day of Strange Blossoms, celebrated by the wearing of flowers brought to the Ducal Palace from every world and every plane. It was a day that all in the Ducal Palace, which covered a continent, were traditionally merry, and in which they cast off their cares and darknesses, but the Duke was not happy.

‘How can you be made happy?’ asked the information beetle on his shoulder, there to relay his master’s whims and desires to a hundred hundred worlds. ‘Give the word, Your Grace, and empires will rise and fall to make you smile. Stars will flame novae for your entertainment.’

‘Perhaps I need a heart,’ said the Duke.