We're Here, page 14
One thing that is different in reality is the negative of a shape in the dried puddle of Wells’s blood. It appears as if something large and rectangular was there when Wells bled out. When she was found, it had been removed. Some claim it was the tome, that leatherbound strangeness, that kept the floor clean where it lay because it drank all the blood that touched it.
Thea Wells’s murder remains unsolved.
Féli has never been seen again, not even at Wells’s funeral. However, if you look closely at all the photographs taken of that event, you will see a figure among the celebrities and pedigreed royals who have come to say farewell to a genius artist who defined a generation. The figure is in only one or two photos, and they seem to be wearing a long, dark robe. While their face is shadow-wrapped, it appears pale, smooth, mask-like. It could just be one of the mourners, seen from an odd angle with unfavorable lighting. Or not.
The question of the dark man, Féli’s alleged lover, also remains. When The Diners first sold—minutes after it was hung in the gallery—people asked Wells about him. Wells refused to say anything about the painting or its subjects, having become eccentric and like a modern-day hermit by that time already.
To this day, Wells’s paintings attract not just art-lovers and historians but also believers in the supernatural. The police are regularly called to Wells’s grave to break up séances held by self-proclaimed mediums and their congregations.
Féli remains a mystery as well. Yet, one art historian has told this author, in confidence and on the condition that their name not appear in this article, that they have seen Féli, her face, her dark hair and green eyes, her uncannily pale skin and distinctive features. The historian found her on another canvas, which cannot be clearly attributed to an artist. Yet, that canvas was confidently dated to more than 300 years ago. It is the portrait of a seated woman who looks exactly like Wells’s Féli. Far in the background, one can just make out the sinking bulges of a circus tent, a harlequin in their chequered dress walking inside through the flap. This painting’s basis in reality, just like its creator, is not clear. How it managed to capture the woman that appears in Wells’s paintings 300 years later, is unknown.
TO REST AND TO CREATE
L.A. Knight
If you don’t disclose, you can’t ask for accommodation...
We understand things are difficult, but these accommodations just aren’t reasonable...
We’re sorry, you’re just not the right fit for this company...
There are so many ways to say the same thing. So many ways to lie so very sweetly and tell me that of course the company doesn’t mind hiring a disabled autistic person, of course they encourage a diverse work environment, of course they’re accessible.
If I close my eyes, the rain slides cool caresses down my neck like streaks of ultramarine chill and kisses my nose with little fizzes of celestine blue. I want to let it cover me in cobalt and forget the list of potential employers on my phone’s Notes app. I want to pretend I’m not stuck in this hell-world of mundane misery and not even a shred of magic.
But I missed the magic window, or rather the magic Door. I’m in my thirties. Chosen Ones are chosen a lot younger than that to go through the Doors, the magical portals that take a good chunk of the population to places unknown. There have been studies. Some speculate that as many as one in three people end up going through a Door, most of them before they’re even twenty. They go on to be saviors of worlds beyond this mundane one, or tyrants, or ordinary citizens but in places so far beyond the scope of our birthplace that it’s just as extraordinary as being the hero or the despot.
Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they’re kicked out. Sometimes they stay.
Sometimes they die.
But I missed the window, so instead of popping off through a portal to go save the magical world of my heart, I flinch from the shriek of car horns slamming down the street, the cacophony of water crashing on fiberglass rooftops.
The scream of the city bus’s brakes chases me away from the bus stop. I hunch and walk. I can’t walk long. My breath hitches, shallow and sharp in my throat. My pulse trips over itself like a clumsy dog, the disease stealing the oxygen right out of my blood.
But I don’t know what else to do but walk until my temples press tight as a patch of sunburn and my toes tingle with the faintest edges of numbness. Not enough air. The warning whimpers through my spasming solar plexus. I have to sit down soon, stop before I kiss pavement and taste blood I can’t afford to lose. Walk away from the advice, the lies, the two-faced backstabbing bullshit because I’m unreasonable.
In job interviews, they notice the eye contact first, always. I don’t stim beyond a lick of my tongue over back molars to help me remember the taste and feel of pastel crystal beads on strings of transparent plastic lace sparkling with glitter, the click of them against my teeth. That, allistics don’t pay attention to. They don’t understand the tightness around my mouth when I try not to wince every time a phone shrills. They don’t see the agony behind my gritted smile because the fluorescents sting like saltwater, like lemon juice, like acid.
No, it’s my eyes the interviewers notice as soon as I sit down on the other side of their shiny desk. My refusal to offer them unearned intimacy, the lack of consent for their invasion, my attempt to avoid another blowtorch melting one of my metaphorical spoons to slag. And it’s always downhill from there.
It doesn’t help that everything about me screams threat! to them: the dark curling clouds of my hair, looser than my sister’s but tighter than my brother’s, the way my fake smile shows teeth like bleached ivory against the golden brown of my skin, the broadness of my nose.
They don’t care about the way Mommy used to take hours to pick through my curls every wash day so she didn’t snag because I was so tenderheaded, or the money Dad paid out of railroad retirement and his military pension to give me nice teeth after oral stimming gave me an open bite, or how my friends love the way I scrunch up my nose like Samantha from Bewitched when I’m thinking out nefarious schemes for pizza. The people behind the desks just see nappy hair, dark skin, big nose. They see the blood-red checkmark squatting next to Are you disabled? and the words “autistic” and “chronically ill” carved into the line demanding I explain what the hell is wrong with me, why aren’t I normal.
And no, apparently they can’t let me cashier from a chair to avoid passing out and no, of course they can’t let me record team meetings on my voice-to-text recorder so I can keep accurate notes and what am I, some kind of baby snowflake Millennial? Of course I can’t wear ear protectors; this is a place of business, not a construction zone or a Nightwish concert.
Always no, no, no. No you can’t have this. No you can’t do this. No I won’t explain this to you, you little freak. Use actual words. Stop taking so long, just spit it out. No you can’t write it down, no you can’t use an app, just talk. Why are you getting so angry, anyway? Geez, you people. That explains why you couldn’t hack the Choosing.
Like they can just tell, by looking at me, every second of every day of my life until now and it’s a short, shitty write-up.
It’s a pandemic. I’m immunocompromised. I’m chronically ill. The world is trying to kill us all but it’s trying to kill me extra fast because I’m just special and lucky, I guess. And if I don’t get another fucking job, there won’t be anything in my stomach to hurl when I push my body too far. Going hungry will be the least of my problems. Where will I live? What about my cats?
Sickly green and purple sparkles dance along the edges of my vision and I trip over air and numb feet. Crap. Too far, too hard. Sit down. Have to sit down. I do, but my brain says, No, not enough. Have to lie down. Can’t sit. Not enough to stop pain, weakness, nausea. Find a flat place. Here. Sidewalk. No trash. Bag on the ground, under my shoulders. Chin tipped up, head back. My heart higher than my brain.
My body is made of television static. Can’t feel my hands, my feet, my face. Everything is dove-gray with bursts of aurora borealis. Tingles and gasping. Just breathe and it’ll pass. Huge gulping breaths. Breathe, pass. Breathe, pass.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
Gray. This will be over pretty soon and then I’ll get up and go home and cuddle my cats and see if my landlord hates me enough to refuse a few more days’ extension.
I close my eyes.
The world is white.
It shouldn’t be, though. I was outside, in the rain, on the sidewalk, getting wet, trying not to faint. Everything should be stormy mistral-gray velvet overhead, and rain-slick slate-blue underneath, and the glowy pumpkin orange-gold of streetlights, and the yellow-green of the palo verde trees that line most of the major streets and vomit their gorgeous acid-yellow pollen everywhere.
I sit up on a soft white couch. Do a quick mental check: clothes on, glasses on, no pain, no numbness, and I don’t feel like my stomach wants to claw its way up my throat and spill on the floor. But my feet are cold; no shoes. Where are my shoes? Where’s my stuff?
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
My bag slumps on the floor in front of the couch by my black Vans. Instant relief. I know Vans are shit for arch support but I’ve had this pair for seven years, and I’ll wear them until they’re shreds. I’m glad to see them sitting scuffed and shedding threads where the canvas has scraped open. I don’t even try to stand before I snatch my shoes up and stuff them on my feet, double-knot my laces. The cold, cramping my toes through my socks, starts to fade as reassuring pressure squeezes around my feet. Some of the sensory panic eases. Now I can look around without needing to yank my hair or rock until I fall off the edge of the velvety couch.
The main carpet is voidling-black but the rug by the couch is bright, childlike blue. My wobbly legs drop me onto it when I try to stand up, and I just lie there for a long time, rubbing my cheek against it.
Fur? Velvet? Cookie Monster pelt? Who the hell cares? I can’t get up yet; still too weak from almost fainting. For now my choices are blacking out or the rug.
Everything quiets as the blue smooths over my cheek and I fall into it. My eyes flutter shut and I’m in a world of towering trees as thick as skyscrapers, bark the color of ocean on a night with only stars and St. Elmo’s fire, broad leaves as bright as lapis lazuli and furred with silver. Dried golden leaves underfoot shush so softly it doesn’t even hurt to hear it when I take a step. The light is cool and dusky violet and the air is sweet as winter melon and this place is beautiful, nothing hurts here, I want it, I want it—
My eyes snap open as a voice murmurs with impossible gentleness, “Very good. You found the second world without even having to search. You’re exactly what we’ve been looking for.”
Xe stands there, watching me without trying to catch my eye. Locs down xyr back like ropes of burnished copper sway gently when xe turns, making sure I know xe isn’t trying to get me to make eye contact. It’s a relief strong enough to gut-punch. I look at xyr mouth, wide and full as mine but dark as plum wine. Xe smiles, and it’s as gentle as xyr voice. Somehow, just by looking at the dangling silver chains tipped in crystallized stars glittering from xyr ears and the opal-and-void-shard labret through xyr lower lip, just by admiring the long swish of xyr silver gauchos and the generous curves of xyr belly and breasts and shoulders and arms, hugged by a shimmering midnight rainbow of silk from a world I’ve never seen, I know what xe is. Who xe is.
“Holy shit, this is a House of Choosing.”
A House of Choosing. The places between worlds where Chosen Ones go to find the Doors that lead them to the worlds where they belong. I’m supposed to be too old, too worn out, too tired for this. I am tired. Always tired. I was tired back when I was still young enough to be Chosen, too tired to cry or scream or do anything but curl up like a snail in my blanket-tent at home, and try not to shake apart after all my teachers refused to write me recommendation letters so I could take the first set of Choosing Tests. Before my blood got sick and before my brain learned words like depression and PTSD. Even before all that, I hadn’t been allowed to even try to get here and go through the full set of Tests.
But I’m here now.
Xe grins, a flash of teeth just a little too sharp and suddenly I can’t breathe. It’s not my oxygen-starved blood trying to choke me out again, not the screaming agony of a meltdown barreling down on my brain like a homicidal freight train.
It’s hope.
A pure, impossible pearl of it hanging in front of me like the pomegranate in front of a desperate Persephone, trying to escape every mundane crap thing about her old life. I’ve wanted to escape my birth world most of my life. The shrieking noise and agonizing smears of color and everything too bright and loud and painful. The repetition of not enough, loser, freak. I’ve wanted to just get away as long as I can remember and now I can, I can escape.
But...
But wanting to get away from somewhere is not the same as wanting to go somewhere else. When I was a kid, I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to get away, somewhere I could be accepted and happy. Now, though...
“I don’t want to Choose a world,” I blurt out.
Because I don’t. I don’t know what would happen, if I can be enough for another world. If my story would be tragic and terrible or deadly and delicious or happy and humble. There are too many variables and I’m not a computer, dammit. I hate not knowing what will happen and I don’t want to have to worry about things. I’m so tired of having to worry all the damn time about all the things that I don’t know, an entire world of things.
Maybe this is why people aren’t usually Chosen past twenty or so. We’re all too exhausted and anxiety-riddled? Too afraid of the other shoe readying to drop? Too terrified of everything going to absolute shit right when we start to feel secure?
But I need a job. If I can’t get work, I can’t pay rent. If I Choose another world, maybe I won’t have to pay rent.
Maybe I will have to pay rent because the world I go to is basically just as shit as this one. Or maybe I don’t have to pay rent, but in exchange I’m sacrificed to a Dark Lord and die a painful bloody death and then my cats starve.
Oh crap, my cats.
“My cats—”
“Don’t worry about your cats,” xe says. “They’re here. This is a House of Choosing, after all. They’ve been placed in your rooms, which await your approval. But we’re not looking for another world-walker. We’re looking for a world-maker.
Um.
“A who-da-what, now?”
Xe sinks gracefully to the floor in a smooth tangle of pillowy brown limbs and billowing sleeves and pant-legs. Then xe does something nobody has ever done with me before—xe lies down on xyr back so that we’re on the same level. Xe folds xyr long-fingered hands together and rests them on the cushion of xyr stomach.
“We need someone who can make the Doors. Who can find the seeds of different worlds and bring them blooming to life, then carve the Door that leads there. You can do it. You felt a world just now, when you touched the rug.”
I study xem; xe isn’t looking at me, thank everything holy, but the arched ivory ceiling overhead. Xyr eyes have impossibly long fringes of black lashes like onyx lace that curl lightly against xyr brown cheek, and swirls of color like fire and twilight glow across xyr eyelids. I can almost see a place there, with a huge dusty-indigo sun perpetually tethered just at the horizon, and a colossal ringed planet the vivid orange-purple of nectarines hanging in a sky that gradates between the color of red clay and the soft gold of pollen, and strange obsidian butterflies the size of hawks and their wings —glinting with flecks of amethyst, and lilies sparking with celadon light against golden earth—
“That’s Hesperide,” xe says without looking at me. I blink and lose the ghost-images of the butterflies. “The world you just saw in my makeup. That’s my medium—makeup, thread, fabric. Fashion and everything it entails. Yours is something else, though, I think.”
“I don’t...” I have to say this carefully, but wording is hard. “I don’t know what you mean. My medium. Seeing worlds.” I don’t want to screw this up, but what would be worse is saying I know what I’m doing and then dying in a fiery explosion when I fuck up and bomb.
“You know about Doors, of course.”
I shrug. Everyone knows about Doors, so why ask me? Is this a trick? Another test? I study xem, all shadow and silk and twilight embers.
“I tried to take the initial Choosing tests in elementary school.” I don’t like saying it. The words crunch in my teeth like broken glass.
Only the initial tests cost money—a lot of money. Anyone can take them at any liminal location: libraries, gas stations, schools, military recruitment centers, beaches, art studios, cemetery gates, but payment is required if a kid doesn’t feel like waiting for a House of Choosing to just snatch them off the street and wants to try testing instead. The government will jam its sticky fingers in anything and everything just to make a buck and screw with people.
Passing the tests is a different matter. Only the Chosen can pass the tests that bring someone to a House of Choosing, and nobody but people who dwell in the Houses knows how all that works.
“And?”
I narrow my eyes. “My teachers wouldn’t write me the recommendation letters, and we couldn’t afford the fees without them.”
That was before the very recent reforms of the last few years, which are trying to make being Chosen easier on anyone who isn’t upper-middle class, white, and abled. Not because Congress actually gives a shit about the marginalized, but because conservatives realized they don’t actually want their little darlings gallivanting off to play hero in other dimensions. If Junior’s busy slaying dragons and winning princexes and learning who they really are without Mother and Father glaring over their shoulder and stuffing them into tiny boxes, who’ll take over the family megacorp? Think of the stock market.
