Truly Elemental: And Other Retro Faerie Tales

Changeling

"She was the marvel with the bruised eye. The silver screen queen that could never die."

LIFE Magazine, 1952

The straps bit into her arms as the orderly drew the buckle another notch. He had red shoelaces and wore his seams inside out. Her fingers crackled in protest, bending like frozen twigs. But the circle of sun-dried tears paralyzed her.

Even without it, she couldn't do a thing. Not anymore.

The orderly squeezed another belt around her throat, binding her fully to the chair. She tensed under his heavy hand; he pushed back, draping a fourth strand of bitter leather over her forehead like a damp cloth for a fever. Lights flared, blinding. Shadows played; sliding down her nose and hiding the divot where the metal rested.

Would rest.

Had rested.

Her chest rose and fell with the innumerable pitter-patter of her heartbeat. Her flesh crawled, raising her thorns beneath the armor of her long sleeved jacket.

They had a cure for that. They had a cure for everything laid out on the paper lined tray. All the shiny things, resting in a nice, even row, same as before:

A razor for her unseemly legs.

A file for her fingers

Shears for cutting, cutting, cutting.

And the ice pick.

A normal life. The shiniest kind.

Her hands curled until the knuckles popped and her skin paled yellow-white.

Her mother had wanted this from the beginning, ever since the cradle. Her un-daughter had many adjectives attached to her, but none of them were spelled N-O-R-M-A-L. Because Penny wasn't normal. She wasn't even real—Not in the way the other babies were. Her mother knew that. The morning she found her in the crib, wailing on the pink flannel blanket, N-O-R-M-A-L became L-I-E. Because baby Penny wasn't baby Penny anymore. And her mother was suddenly a single parent to a sack of thin bones barely disguised as human. But she took what she could get like she always did, and kept her mouth shut to spite the neighbors.

Penny kept her name.

"Ready?" A voice said beyond the industrial lights.

She tried to see around them—to see through them—but the glare tricked her eyes. Light darted left and right, stretching anything that caught in her vision into ill-focused celluloid. She couldn't move her head—she could only breathe, nostrils flaring. Heart tripping. Everyone wore white. Even the walls! So bright and clean. Frightening.

And then there was The Voice—she knew that voice. Smelted like roasted coffee beans into a moneyed brew. If she squinted she could imagine him standing, just out of frame. One dark smudge commanding the rest. The man behind the curtain in a monogrammed sweater and caramel slacks.

She'd been chipping ice in Santa Cruz when she'd met him—the director. The beach was a busy place in summer. And snowball treats were close to free. Kismet. That's what her mother called it. Out of all the advertised snack shacks stretching from the wharf to the river, he'd walked into hers.

Mid July was a nasty time to be working the boardwalk. Everything melted and stuck like gum on cement. Half doused inside the freezer, the electric kick of the motor drowned her ears, blocking the sound of his approach. She basked in the cold, oblivious to anything but the welcome sting on her flushed cheeks. If she'd looked up, she might have seen the man in the drawstring shorts watching her shave the ice block with her bare palm. Thorns, like a rosebush, sprouted from her skin when her glamour dropped. Her mother had kept her locked in her room until she'd learned the illusion to hide them. If she'd looked up, she might have noticed why.