Advertisement
True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her.
The story as it is told in the dry valleys north of Averon, where the only roads run down to the Cricket River and the only power is the freehold of Skadar, begins with a merchant envoy from the southern coast who traveled from Averon.
I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm—I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon.
You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass.
On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys.
Recent scholarship has shed considerable light on many previously puzzling or mysterious aspects of the life of the Baba Yaga—or, as some would still have it, the Baba Yagas. But one element has remained largely unstudied, and indeed, almost completely ignored.
The coffin she carried had felt like an imposition at first—a holy imposition! a welcome imposition! but an imposition nonetheless. But by now she had carried it on her shoulders out from the tenth school, carried it across plains, up and down canyons.
My son tells me that there’s a man in the house, someone he hears well after the lights are out, in the narrower halls or maybe at the far side of the den—a gait and creak he’s certain isn’t me or his mom, since he can hear us both breathing heavily and tossing in our sleep.
Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he exerts authority for this one time and says that this is a man,
Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned by the doe’s diaphragm, is so peaceful he might as well have been asleep.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
