All Our Pretty Songs

think you are stronger than you look.

“Pay him what?” But Minos won’t answer. “Why are you helping me?”

Minos steps forward and reaches over the gunwale, rests one hand on Aurora’s forehead. He bends down and kisses her at the place where her dark roots meet her brow. It has been a very long time. But once I too knew how to love. He reaches into his black coat and hands me my sketchbook and brushes. These are yours.

“Thank you.”

He shakes his head. You will not thank me. In his dead eyes there’s something like a very human sorrow. He raises one hand, in farewell or in benediction, and then he is gone, nothing where he stood but the empty plain and the dark palace in the distance.

I have to pay the ferryman. Maybe the ferryman wants blood. But when I take Jack’s knife out of my pocket, flip open the blade and press it against the thin pale skin at my wrist, the ferryman shakes his head. He leans forward, the hood still covering his face, and touches Aurora’s hair.

“No way,” I say. “That’s not up to me. That’s hers.” I offer him Cass’s amulet, Raoul’s rosary—not that that’s mine to give either. The knife. My hoodie, my sketchbook, my boots. But he ignores me. “Goddammit,” I mutter. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It grows.” I put Jack’s knife to her hair and start to cut. The knife is sharp but too small for what I’m using it for, and Aurora has a lot of hair. Long moments pass as I saw away, hanks coming off in my hands. I cut my finger and yelp, put it in my mouth for a moment. When I go back to cutting the white of Aurora’s hair is stained with my blood. At last I have a pile of pale strands, a larger mass than I would have thought possible. I offer it to the ferryman. “Rumpelstiltskin,” I say, but if he gets the joke it doesn’t register. These guys don’t have much of a sense of humor.

The ferryman poles us back to the other shore. Maybe it’s imagination or fear, but the crossing seems to take too long. The boat’s sluggish, the current strong. I chew on my fingers and close my eyes. I can feel the palace pulsing behind me, tugging at me with some unsubtle force. You will not thank me.

The boat scrapes against sand at last. “I could use your help,” I say to the ferryman, but he doesn’t move. He has Aurora’s hair in his lap, stroking it as though it’s a pet. It quivers like a living thing under his touch. I watch for a moment, fascinated, and then heave Aurora to her feet, careful not to rock the boat. To get her out I’ll have to more or less throw her. “You have to help me,” I say to her, shaking her. She lifts her head, opens her eyes. Looks right at me.

“I saw my dad.” Her voice is clear and high.

“Aurora, you couldn’t have. Your dad’s dead.”

“Everyone here is dead.”

“Not you. And not me. Can you take a big step? Over the side?” She obeys. The boat tips madly as she steps out, and I think for a second I’ll go flying, but I hop clear before I can lose my footing.

“He’s going to teach me to play the guitar,” she says happily. “Like Jack.”

“Aurora. We have to walk now.” Her eyes roll back in her head and her knees buckle. She tumbles forward into my arms, nearly sending me backward into the river. She’s out cold. It wouldn’t be hell if it was easy. “Piggyback it is,” I tell her.

She’s so light I barely notice her weight at first, as I move through the forest. But by the time I reach the tunnel my shoulders are beginning to hurt. I hitch her body up against my back, get my hands more firmly underneath her thighs, walk into that yawning mouth. Begin to climb.

If I thought the way down was long, it is nothing compared to the way back up. Aurora’s limp body is a dead weight. My shoulders burn, my thighs ache, my calves knot. Sweat runs down my chest, drips from my forehead and into my eyes, but I can’t move my arms to wipe it away without dropping her. I put my head down, think about putting one foot after the other. One step, one step, one more step. My throat is so dry I can’t swallow, my lungs are on fire, my hands are cramping, one step, one step, one step. I have no idea how long I’ve been climbing or how long I have left. Pain travels up my spine and shuts down reason, shuts down everything but one step, the next step, the next step, the next. The walls of the tunnel closing in. Suffocating heat, darkness, silence. One step, one step, one step. My feet are wet, and I wonder dully if I stepped in the river after all, if the taint of that water is enough to keep me in this hallway forever, doomed like Sisyphus to carry my burden until the end of time. The darkness presses against me. I can feel raw fear rising in my chest and threatening to choke me, but if I stop now I will never start again. I close my eyes. It makes no difference. But there’s something about the darkness behind my own lids that’s strangely comforting. Cass’s amulet burns against my chest. One step, one step, one step.

I am beyond hope, beyond light, so certain that I have moved into a world where I will be climbing forever that when the tunnel ends I walk smack into hot metal and stand for a moment, reeling, before I let Aurora’s limp body slide down my back. When I try to move my hands the pain is so intense my knees buckle and I crash into the metal again. A long time passes before I can work my hand forward enough to touch the surface. To brush my fingers against something round and smooth, waist-height. Doorknob. I am standing at a door. It takes more than a few tries before I can close my hand around the knob, turn, push.

The flood of sunlight is so bright I turn my head away in pain and behind me, in the tunnel, Aurora cries out. I totter there for a moment, leaning on the door, eyes screwed shut against the glare, until the green flash behind my lids seeps away and I dare to crack one eye open, still squinting. Concrete. Parked cars. A street. I am looking at a street. I am looking at the street in front of Minos’s club. I take a step forward, shaky-legged as a toddler. Across the street, men are filing into Ortiz’s Meats. Going to work. Like it’s some kind of ordinary morning. I try to call out but my voice comes out as a croak. One of them turns, sees me, stares. Says something to another man and both of them walk toward me, cautious.

“Lady, what happened to you?” he says when he gets close enough for me to hear him. He’s staring at my feet in horror. I follow his gaze. My boots are gone and my feet are covered in so much blood I can’t see skin.

“My friend,” I say, pointing behind me, and then a dark haze rises up and swallows me whole.

NOVEMBER

In my dream I am waiting in a white room at the end of a long corridor. For some reason I’m in bed. My feet hurt. The blanket is scratchy and the air smells wrong, like chemicals, and underneath the tang of pee. Aurora is standing over me. Too thin but still beautiful, her face haloed in short black hair tipped with white, her dark eyes huge and sad. I haven’t seen her in a long time, but I can’t remember why. I open my mouth to ask her why she cut her hair, but no sound comes out. She is talking, has been talking for a while maybe, or maybe not. Maybe we just got here. She is wearing a white sleeveless silk shirt that exposes the graceful line of her collarbone, and I am wearing some kind of blue dress, which is clearly not mine because I would never wear a dress if Aurora didn’t make me, and it is made out of thin cheap cotton and I am naked underneath it and I want to know where my underwear is and what is going on, but this is a dream, so maybe that’s why everything is weird. The light is watery and unfamiliar. Too sharp and pale. White around the edges like I am looking at everything through a lens. “I love you,” Aurora is saying, “more than anything. But I miss him so much.” I try to sit up, but there’s a weight on my chest, a pile of stones I can’t see pressing me down. I open my mouth but no sound comes out. She takes my hand and kisses my knuckles. “Don’t be mad at me,” she whispers. And then she’s turning, walking away from me. I watch her back recede down the long, gleaming hall.

“Aurora,” I say at last, but she’s long gone.

When I wake up Raoul is the first thing I see and I am so confused I shut my eyes again, open them. But there he is, sitting in a metal chair upholstered in garish turquoise vinyl, reading Optometry Today. He is wearing tight black jeans and a white Depeche Mode shirt that is falling off him in artful tatters and a red beanie that looks as out of place on him as a collared shirt. The room I am in is exactly like the room in my dream.

“I didn’t know you were interested in vision,” I say. The words come out thickly. My throat is a desert. My mouth tastes like something died in it. He looks up and a slow smile spreads across his face.