Happily Never After Read online

  She sighs. “You’re a liability now, you realize. A risk. And I can’t have that.” She snaps her finger.

  Two manservants appear, almost immediately, from around a corner. They appear to be in on her secret. My mother nods her head toward me.

  As they move in and I note the distance between my end of the hall and theirs, I decide I have time to escape. I turn back to the door I came through. It’s closed—I must have closed it behind me—so I reach for the doorknob. All I have to do is get of this room—that’s the first thing—I’ll think about the next steps after—finding Milla, or maybe there won’t be time—running, getting far off the premises, boarding a boat, perhaps to Russia.

  I twist my hand, but the knob doesn’t twist with it. I yank on the handle, but it doesn’t budge.

  I feel the men seizing me. An image comes to mind: the image of a yellow-haired woman with red lips, screaming, pleading, being dragged toward the east stairs. It occurs to me that I may soon see the place they took her.

  But these men are dragging me toward my mother, while she watches, the way she watched that woman, as if with pity. They shove me against a column and tie my wrists behind it. I kick, but they grab my ankles and bind them.

  “Gag her too,” my mother says. “She’ll try to talk, and as her mother I can’t let my emotions get to me. Not when it comes to liabilities.” Her voice is flat now, and I can’t tell if she’s being sincere or sarcastic.

  One of the attendants pulls out a piece of cloth. The butterfly wings beat, throb, thrash. “Stop.” I jerk my face away. “Get off.” One attendant grabs my chin while the other shoves the cloth between my teeth and ties the ends behind my head.

  “You can go now.” My mother dismisses the men with a wave. They nod and disappear into the folds of the hall. She stands several feet away, contemplating me. I look back at her. For the first time, I fear her. I realize this is because I didn’t know her well enough to fear her before.

  Behind her I glimpse the gold frame, but her body blocks the rest from view.

  “It’s not the same one, of course,” she says, admiring, or pretending to admire, her fingernails. “Not the one my stepmother used. But I can’t imagine it’s much different. All mirrors are the same, in the end.” She pulls something out of her skirts and holds it up. An apple, with a bite-size piece missing. “This apple is older than you, though you could never tell. No one knows I kept it. It got caught in my skirts. I found it there when I woke. I saved it to kill my stepmother. But I didn’t need it in the end. As you know.” She smiles at the air. I wonder if she’s talking to me or the apple or the mirror. It isn’t clear.

  “I saw them one more time, you know. The dwarves. After I married your father. After you were born. I never told anyone.”

  She rubs the apple against her skirts, as if to polish it.

  “When you came, you were healthy. Smiling. She’ll be pretty too, everyone said. Like her mother was. I wondered when they started using the past tense. By then, my dresses were too small. People had stopped coming to see the fairest in the land. Even your father visited my room less.”

  I yank at my manacles. Why is she telling me this? Why is she doing this?

  “One day you were crying so much, I couldn’t calm you. The nurses came and took you away, to pacify you. I left—slipped through the cracks in the palace. Headed toward the woods. I’d only done it once, but I still remembered the way. I found their cottage. I realized then that it was the only place I’d felt happy. But even the dwarves didn’t treat me the way they used to. They were still kind, but not like they were before. They asked me to do housework again. In the good days I hadn’t minded; I was pretty then. I’d had that, at least.”

  She turns the apple over in her hand. “So you see? I didn’t make these laws because I was a good person, or a deep person. I wanted to convince myself that was why. But these lives we’re born into, they’re mirrors within mirrors within mirrors. One poisoned apple after another. A vicious cycle.”

  She walks up to me and pulls off the gag, holds the apple to my mouth, presses it to my lips. “That’s why I must do this.”

  At once I realize what’s happening. What she intends to do. I press my lips together, as tight as I can. The apple smells like dust under my nose. Its skin feels cold as she pushes it against my mouth. I twist, trying to scream, trying to free my hands. My wrists burn. Milla! Where are you, Milla? If only you could see your hero now, what she is about to do to her own daughter…

  My eyes water. I won’t swallow the apple. I won’t.

  I could take a bite, and then, when she unties my fake-dead body, spit it back in her face and run. But the contact alone might kill me. I don’t know how these things work. I only know I can’t let her win.

  A tear appears in the corner of my mother’s eye—drips down her cheek. “That’s why I must remove myself from the cycle,” she says.

  Before I can blink, she pulls the apple away from me, toward her own mouth, and sinks her teeth into it.

  I watch her fall to the ground.

  The thing behind her is now in full view.

  In it someone blinks at me, pale and open-mouthed and tied to a column. I don’t yet know if this stranger is ugly or beautiful or whatever the olden words are. But it doesn’t matter because my mother was right. The law of mirrors has already won: I can’t look away.

  About Christina Elaine Collins

  Christina Elaine Collins is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and an MFA candidate and teaching fellow at George Mason University. Her fiction can be found in various publications such as Jabberwock Review, Weave Magazine, and Rose Red Review, and she was named a finalist for Heavy Feather Review's 2013 Fiction Chapbook Contest (Issue 3.1). She is the assistant editor for So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and has been a writer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts as well as the Art Commune program in Armenia.

  Rat-a-tat-tat

  by Adam Millard

  Beware the woods, stay well away,

  Nobody is safe, not night or day,

  The world is ruin’d, we saw to that,

  Beware the sound of the Rat-a-tat-tat

  – Childhood Nursery Rhyme Circa 2047

  “But I don’t want to go,” Isme said, her body wracking with sobs. She was, Paul realised as he glanced down at her brown dress, wearing remnants of their supper; soup and breadcrumbs peppered her collar. For a girl of twelve, she showed no signs of maturing.

  “Look, Isme,” he said, offering her a handkerchief. “If we don’t go, I’m going to be the laughing stock. It’s my only chance to be something. Kaleb and Godfrey are going, and they won’t let me hear the end—“

  “Then go alone,” Isme interrupted. The way in which she wiped the tears from the corner of her eyes irritated her brother. Everything that she did irritated him. “I don’t see why I have to go with you.”

  Paul hadn’t expected her to understand. They seldom went anywhere together, and certainly never at night time. If the truth be told, he was too scared to go alone. Not that he believed any of the stupid stories about Top-Half; they were too ridiculous to pay any heed. But he believed in the bandits and the cannibals roaming the forest. Oh, he sure as hell believed in those.

  “You’re coming with me, Isme, or I’m telling Pa about that boy you’ve been kissing. What’s his name?”

  Isme’s countenance changed so much in that second that you might have believed her to be two separate people. “No, please, you mustn’t tell Pa about Adrian. He’ll kill him.”

  Paul grinned, satisfied with himself for giving her no real option. “Then we leave tonight,” he said, running a hand through his jet-black hair. “And don’t think about backing out on me. Not unless you want to see Adrian pinned to that tree over there.” He pointed across to where an old oak stretched up towards the liquid sky. Black lava-clouds drifted slowly along, nonchalantly, as if they had always been there, and for Isme and Paul, they had
.

  Later that night, when Pa was drunk on a barrel of home-brew and sleeping off the results, Paul packed a rucksack with essentials. He doubted anything would go wrong, but it didn’t hurt to carry a few weapons, a box of candles, and some food. In the case of the latter, it wasn’t much, but they would – if Paul had appraised the distance to the centre of the forest correctly – be back in time for breakfast. Pa would wake at some point in the mid-morning; Paul was certain that the potency of his father’s moonshine, and the ridiculous amount he had imbibed, would render him unconscious until then.

  Isme had spent the best part of an hour sobbing out in the barn. Paul wondered if she was ever going to grow up. Since the bandits slew their mother almost three years back, Isme had cried almost perpetually. Paul often speculated that Isme was the reason that their father chose to spend his time soused. By marinating himself in whatever ungodly concoction he could muster, Pa didn’t have to listen to Isme’s incessant whining. If only, Paul thought, there was room at the bottom of that barrel for two…

  “Come on. And pack that crying in. Anyone would think you were six.” Paul led her out of the barn and into the night, where a bitter chill met them.

  There wasn’t much difference between night and day, other than the temperature change. You could sometimes use a thermometer as a timepiece. Ten below meant early evening. Twenty below and you could place the time around midnight. Paul guessed it to be somewhere around ten-thirty, and it would get a helluva lot colder before they reached the forest’s centre. The same oil-slick clouds coasted along overhead; beyond them, the erratic flickering of lightning, no longer accompanied by the rumble of thunder. There hadn’t been as much as a growl from above for over five years, yet the lightning was a constant.

  They were less than a quarter of a mile from the house when Isme began to complain. “It’s too cold,” she said. “Why are we doing this, Paul?”

  “I’ve already told you,” her brother replied. “If I am to be considered brave, and a Wanderer, like Kaleb and Godfrey, I have to make it to the clearing at the centre of the forest in the dead of the night.”

  “Stupid rules,” Isme hissed. “Your little gang are going to get themselves slaughtered. If the bandits don’t get them, Top-Half will.”

  Paul shuddered at the mention of His name. “Stop that nonsense right now,” he said, glancing across his shoulder as gooseflesh began to rise on the nape of his neck. “He’s a myth, Isme. Something overprotective parents tell their children to keep them ferreted away. Ma told you about Top-Half so you would spend the rest of your days living in fear. Yeah, you’d be safer never leaving the house, but what kind of life is that? If the bandits or the cannibals want to get us, they’ll break in and take us. As simple as that.”

  As soon as the words passed his lips he wished he could take them back. Not because he could see the effect they had had on Isme, but because he had put the fear into himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, it’s a nice night. Just you, me, and the trees. We’ll be home when it starts to get warm again, and you can spend the rest of the week kissing Adrian next to the barn, safe in the knowledge that your secret will never reach Pa’s ears.”

  Paul couldn’t be certain – it was so dark now with the trees all around that it was a chore just to see where you were walking – but he thought he perceived a change upon his sister’s face.

  Almost a smile.

  They walked through the woods, a jungle of long-dead trees and desiccated roots, in silence. Somewhere, off in the distance, creatures called to each other; their falsetto screeching should have terrified the young duo, but instead gave them something to focus upon as they traversed the trees.

  “How long do you think we’ve been walking?” Isme asked. “Can we stop to rest for a while?”

  Paul grinned. “Not long enough, and no,” he said. “Honestly, Isme, I don’t know how you’ve survived this long.”

  She thought back to before Ma died, to a time when Pa was always sober, taking care of them, keeping the bandits at bay with his machete, firing rounds – that was when there was still ammunition – at packs of cannibals as they attempted to breach the house. She’d survived because people had helped her, and now she was hopeless for it. With Ma dead and Pa practically pickled, she realised she could only count on Paul to keep her safe, to protect her from the evils of the Aftermath; the cannibals, the bandits, Top-Half…

  “Here you go,” Paul said, pulling her from her reverie. In his hand he held a bottle of cloudy water and a chunk of bread. “Don’t say I never give you anything.” He smiled.

  She took the food and ate, washed it down with the water. The fact that she couldn’t see the bottom of the bottle due to the opaque liquid didn’t stop her from gulping it down, thirstily. She felt better for it after.

  “Are we good to get moving again?” Paul asked. He didn’t know what time it was – nobody did anymore, not exactly – but he knew they would be cutting it mighty close.

  Isme thanked him for the brief respite, and said, “Come on then, Wanderer. Let’s go meet your Pack.”

  The rest of the journey was a lot more pleasant; Isme had ceased asking asinine questions, and Paul’s own trepidation had been replaced with something much more agreeable: the knowledge that, after all these years, he was going to become a Wanderer.

  Kaleb and Godfrey were among the greatest hunters the Aftermath had ever known; to place himself alongside them, battling bandits and providing the surrounding villages with meat and sustenance, was something he’d desired for years. They had three years on him, which would make him the youngest Wanderer in the Pack, no less skilled, and certainly no less feared. If only Ma could see me now, Paul opined.

  As the forest gave way to a clearing, Isme relaxed, sliding down a tree as if she had partaken in some ancient Olympics. Paul began to scour the area for any signs to suggest that the Wanderers had been there. He found nothing, but knew this was the clearing at the centre of the woods, the place they had agreed to meet.

  “Anything?” Isme asked, breathlessly.

  Paul shook his head. “They’ll be here. It’s not cold enough to be midnight just yet. I think we made good time.”

  Through the trees, inkblot clouds were visible. The shrill ca-caws of mutated birds rang out all around, as if in dissension at the young siblings’ presence. The brother and sister duo had known nothing else; since birth, the world had been filled with transmuted creatures; the birds had been possessed of a third wing; the wolves had extra appendages which hindered them more than anything. Sitting in the library, upon a dusty shelf, was a book filled with illustrations of what animals looked like before the Event, and to Paul they looked…well, odd. How could a bird fly with just two wings? What use was a cat with one head?

  Just then, there came a sound that turned Isme’s blood to mercury. A rat-a-tat-tat that she had been afraid of since birth. Ma read her the poem every night before bed, and she’d recited it religiously ever since.

  “Did you hear that?” she said, her mouth open in a wide O. Paul thought she looked comical.

  “Hear what?” he said, making his way towards the tree which she was pushing herself against, as if in hiding. “Isme, what did I tell you? Huh? No silliness.”

  Rat-a-tat-tat…

  Her eyes bulged from their sockets; even in the impossible darkness, Paul could see that she was terrified. “You heard that, right?”

  He had heard it; his own gooseflesh caused him to shudder. “Sounds like a bird pecking a tree,” he said, more to alleviate his own fears.

  “The world is ruin’d, we saw to that…”

  “Isme, don’t start with that stupid rhyme. I swear, if Ma could see you now she’d…”

  Rat-a-tat-tat…

  “Beware the sound of the Rat-a-tat-tat.” As she finished the rhyme, her voice cracked and tears began to flow, streaming down her cheek, glistening with each flash of lightning the heavens provided. Paul was too angry to comfort her, a
nd yet he knew that he should. It was his duty, and no-one else’s.

  He stepped close to her, draped his arms across her tiny, frail shoulders. “Isme, everything’s fine. You’re just frightening yourself. Top-Half doesn’t exist; everybody knows that.”

  “What if he does?” she gasped. “What if the elders were right?”

  “Well, they’re not, and I forbid you to—”

  Something broke to his left; he snapped his head across, his eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness that met his gaze. Enveloped by shadows, a figure stepped forward. As it entered the clearing, Paul pulled his sister into his chest. This was something not meant for her eyes.

  Rat-a-tat-tat…

  “I’m scared,” she sobbed into Paul’s chest. “Is it there? Is it Top-Half?”

  “Shhhh,” Paul said, stroking her lifeless hair with one sweaty palm. “Everything’s okay.”

  The thing came closer. With each step it produced the same deathly rattle. Rat-a-tat-tat…Rat-a-tat-tat, for Top-Half was exactly that. A torso sat mounted on wooden stilts; the face atop the torso in a constant grimace, the melted features something from a terrible nightmare. The horrifying sound produced as it approached was resultant of its legs rubbing together; a grasshopper from the very bowels of Hell.

  They had all heard the stories; they had all heard the rhyme about the man who had lived through the Event, despite being severed and mutilated, his body from the waist down replaced by wood.

  Top-Half; a demon in a world of cannibals and bandits.

  “I don’t want to die,” Isme sobbed. Paul could feel her tears penetrating the material of his shirt.

  He shushed her once again, told her everything would be alright. As he closed his eyes, he saw their Pa, drunk and oblivious. Tomorrow he would wake to an empty house. Would he even care?