A History of Glitter and Blood (5 page)

(Throw away all of that. Start the book here.)

The day the tightropers
came, Beckan and Josha, who was avoiding his lonely high-rise apartment in center city and drinking Beckan's coffee, watched from the window of her father's apartment as the tightropers spit their ropes out and slung them across the tops of their buildings, creating lines and knots and nets up in the sky. They talked about how rude it was for a new race to come by without any notice.

“I wonder how they taste,” Beckan said, which was a little cruel of her. But all she could do when a new race came by was watch the fairy men sleep with them and the gnomes lick their teeth, and make a friend who would, one way or another, be gone in a few months. The last ones were the pixies, years ago, and they left Ferrum three fairy babies. By now, one of those babies was destroyed and lost (dead) and the other two were missing three limbs between them.

She took her father off the counter and held his jar to the window so he could see the threads rapidly expanding across the sky.
Had he lips and a tongue left, she knew he would have clucked the predictable notes about foreigners and peculiar habits and that this had never happened back when he had a body.

“I know about these guys,” she said. “They spit up ropes. Scrap writes about them. They were here a few hundred years ago. They die young.”

“When have you been talking to Scrap?”

“Just sometimes.”

Josha didn't know Scrap well, but he resented him for knowing Beckan first and judged him for having a short name that sounded suspiciously gnome-like (but there was never anything else to call a little dark bit of a thing, with rumpled hair and a lopsided smile). Josha was a boy full of prejudices. It was something Beckan loved. She needed someone to weigh her down, and she needed tall, dashing Josha to have a very obvious flaw.

“So who are they?” Josha said.

“They're tightropers,” Beckan said. “They . . .” She let her voice die out while she watched the tightropers haul armfuls of explosives over their ropes, from one rooftop to another. To hers. “They build tightropes,” she said, quietly.

“So,” Josha said, later that same morning, his feet up on the railing of Beckan's balcony, his ass on the porch swing. They were watching the tightropers continue to string their lines and the fairies on the streets rushing around with their heads covered, like they were expecting rain. “So. Scrap?”

“He's teaching me to read.” She could read, a little, but her letters were always jumbled and backward and she gave up at a young age. Her father complained about it sometimes, but fairies were lax about school. Beckan could learn whenever.

She had plenty of time.

“How charitable,” Josha said.

“Not really. He wants someone to read his stupid stories. So boring. All of them true. He's desperate for a reader.”

“Cricket won't read them?”

“You know Cricket?”

“I know of him,” Josha said. “Don't they live together?”

“Yeah. I barely see him, though.” He was usually walking from room to room, most of the time humming. Scrap ordered him around.

Josha said, “So you're really not crazy about him.”

“Scrap?”

“Either.”

“I told you.”

“Since you don't know his family or anything. Don't know anything about him.” He played with her welding torch and gave her a sloppy grin. “I mean, not like how you know me.”

She watched the tightropers instead of responding. Josha said “Cricket” quietly to himself a few times. “Cricket must be a genius if he avoids Scrap's stories,” he mused.

“A coldhearted genius.”

“A genius is a genius. I don't need another heart, anyway. My own is a bitch and a half.”

Then the first bombs went off, and they sprang toward each other as if they had previously been stretched apart. Beckan felt some heat on her cheek, like the city was breathing on her, but she couldn't see where the bomb fell, and she couldn't help but think that she expected them to be a little louder. That she had expected to feel a little more.

The day after that first bomb blast (of which there ended up being not so many; it was a quiet war, a starved war), Beckan took her father grocery shopping and found all the stores had been closed down in
honor of a bomb that killed no one (no fairies, at least), nor was it meant to. The fairy women and their ancient missing limbs fretted and judged Beckan for her clothes, and Beckan was quickly bored and moved on.

The truth is that fairies are not very attached to the idea of possessions.

In what feels like an unkind bit of irony, given the lack of wings, fairies have a reputation for
flightiness
, for hastiness, for lack of compassion. It's the explanation given for the large number of fairy cities with relatively low populations and no great amount of space in between. Fairies grow old, they grow bored, they leave and settle somewhere new and unnecessary. There is no real reason not to. They have plenty of time.

Ferrum is the oldest and the darkest and it serves as a token, a totem; here is proof that we are not heartless, here is proof that we are not without history, here is our iron city with its cobblestone streets and crackly electricity and a few more crumpled pages of literature than the other cities.

The fairies far away, they likely never think of Ferrum as anything other than a symbol.

They likely never think of it as someone's home.

Before the war, it was the city's secret: that it was loved, that it was beautiful, that it was their entire world and they were never unhappy with that. They liked that they knew who would eat them. They liked that no one outside the city would understand the balance they kept with the gnomes. There was grumbling, there was every once in a while a death of a baby on either side, but most of all there was this odd, buzzing type of harmony that no one who was flighty would ever understand.

It made sense.

Until, well.

Beckan goes to help with the renaissance project, of course, and she's been painting for ten minutes when an arm, blue and pink and sparkly and scrawny, appears in her field of vision and dabs a spot of paint onto her nose. She turns around, and Scrap smiles at her.

She can't believe he's here, but more so she can't believe how happy she is to see him. “You came.”

“Couldn't miss this!”

“Oh, yeah. Painting. It's really riveting stuff, lemme tell ya.”

“We should
actually
rivet something. Would be a lot more interesting.” He makes stripes under his eyes and reaches out and drags the back of his hand across the damp surface of the hot-air balloon in the mural she's been working on. Paint gets in his glitter and his glitter gets in the paint.

“That's a fairy balloon,” he tells the tightroper women, who are watching in disgust. Even if they came for the fairies, they did not come for the glitter.

They work together for a while, laughing and pouring paint in each other's hair. Beckan considers apologizing for their little fight last night but doesn't, because she doesn't think it will help, and because right now, getting along isn't fake. They aren't ignoring anything. This is just one of their sides. Beckan and Scrap are a lot of things, but they are never not Beckan and Scrap.

Scrap stabilizes himself on the wall with his half arm to reach a spot above his head, but very quickly it starts to shake.

“Does it hurt?” Beckan says. Quietly.

If he were a romantic hero, he would look at her immediately with a dashing smile and say, “No, of course not,” in a way that subtly reveals that it does hurt, very much, in fact, but he is strong and brave and rugged.

“Yeah,” he says. Straightforward. Calm. He takes the arm off the wall and tugs it back inside his sleeve. “It's ugly, too.”

“It's honestly really hideous.”

She probably shouldn't have said that. (Did she say that?)

They smile at each other.

Their conversations are all wrong.

What the fuck is going on? The paper's crumpling up and I can keep it straight and more later. Okay. I shouldn't even be out of bed. I need to remember to take this part out. This is ridiculous. Fuck fuck fuck what's wrong with me. I should be doing this in order. This is bad. I think. I think this is bad. Okay, I'm putting this down. More later. (Did that last bit really happen? Did she really smile?) More later.

Sorry about that.

After she saw the bomb site, that second day of the war, she went to Scrap's manhole to meet him. His head slowly came into view as he hauled himself up in the gnomes' elevator. He nodded to the gnome helping him pull (Leak, but she didn't know his name then) and gave his usual tired smile to Beckan before he climbed up into the sunlight. Beckan offered her hand, which he took without pausing.

“No groceries today,” she said.

“Lazy?”

“Bomb.”

“Oh. Right.”

Leak was still there, his orange skin already starting to sweat in the sun. “Good to see you,” he said to Beckan. His voice was slimy against the top of his mouth. She didn't know much about gnomes, then, but she knew that they didn't have to talk that way.

She looked at the gnome's teeth, as big and sharp as cleavers, and at Scrap's leg easily within his reach. But she was the one who took a step back.

Scrap chose to go down there, after all. And she didn't ask why. The truth, she realized later, wasn't that she was afraid of what she would find out, but just that she hadn't really cared, and that was a realization that would make it hard for her to sleep sometimes.

They had been friends, once. They played together as children, but never as enthusiastically as she and Josha did a few years later. He went on for more school and she didn't, and neither of them judged the other or thought much of each other or wondered or worried. Scrap kissed a few of the fairy girls with missing feet and Beckan practiced her welding. They had plenty of time.

But now Beckan wanted to read and her neighbor who agreed to help threw up her hands after a few lessons and told her that she should probably ask Scrap, and she remembered the tiny fairy boy in the tiny house all of its hundreds and hundreds of steps away, and she rang his doorbell one day and that was that.

“Ready to go?” she said. She tried not to look at the gnome. The gnome was looking at her.

Scrap rubbed his nose and sneezed at his glitter. Beckan tried not to laugh, but Scrap didn't. His smile was the same as when he was a child. “I'm exhausted,” he said. “Clearly.”

“Really clearly.”

Another smile from him, this one a little sad, and a word, not for the first time, flashed in Beckan's head: disarmed. She once told Josha that when she was around Scrap, she felt disarmed, both in the sense of being overwhelmed and of surrendering shields and weapons.

This, not the bomb site, was where the war first affected Beckan. She was a little fairy who could barely read and the war wormed its way into her words. (This is what history is, Becks.)