The Carnival of Fallen Stars

Everly's Walk: Part Six

Everly made inquiries as her carriage drove them bumpily over the so-called plains between Carrigan and Blythe. Elsbeth complained noisily, muttering unlady-like things in French which she was sure Everly did not understand (Everly did). But between the cursings, she managed to spill a secret or two. It seemed that Everly’s traveling companion simply loved to talk about herself and her dear Caspian. Everly was assured the Caspian was probably waiting at the port in Blythe to greet her. Probably distraught, he was. And oh, but she’d had to leave a dozen trunks behind for the journey, and wasn’t that dreadful? But hopefully her darling Caspian would replenish what she had lost. You’d think he would, you know, considering they were to be wed--

Cold. Everly resolved to be cold. It was all she thought on that long journey to see the man-she-loved-who-was-promised-to-another. If Elsbeth noticed Everly’s sudden silence--No, she hadn’t noticed or she would have taken advantage of what it implied.

Cold. When Elsbeth stepped from the carriage, Caspian’s expression changed from curious, even happy, to confusion, to shock, to--there it was--the flinch of fear. Everly removed herself from the carriage as well. Cold, she reminded herself. Pleasant. Polite. It was fire that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

Caspian Blythe-Cameron tried valiantly to meet her gaze, but she went home without any explanation from him. It wasn’t as if he had a good one anyway. He did try though, a missive or two dashed off desperately after now-finished-house calls went unanswered. 

It wasn’t as if he didn’t try, with his fancy suits out in the rain that poured for three days and nights after Elsbeth came into town. That was probably the only reason he didn’t pack her off on a boat out of Blythe on the spot under Everly’s aching gaze. Then, after the rain, he’d simply forgotten about Elsbeth Deverauz entirely. He’d never liked her all that much anyway (though his mother had insisted), not in the way he’d hated (loved) Everly Carrigan.

Everly's Walk: Part Four

Caspian Blythe-Cameron had a penchant for paintings of fat mermaids and mermen. There was a whole room in Blythe-Castle-on-the-Sea--Caspian had made a castle to one-up his neighbor’s manor, but it was proving a rather expensive and impractical endeavor, one Everly observed with endless satisfaction.--dedicated to his collection of such art.

It was in this room that Caspian Blythe-Cameron kissed Everly Carrigan. And she hated it. Except, well, she didn’t. Rather, she kissed him back. And this was very hard to explain to herself and to him and to the watery eyes of fat merpeople surrounding them.

Caspian had run out of things to hate about Everly when he got to her near-purple eyes and now was forced to admit that he loved her rather foolishly. Everly refused to admit the same until she was back on Carrigan soil.

With one boot toe on the walk to Carrigan House, she kissed him again. Fluttering her lashes in that way that makes words, she told him how idiotic her heart was. He agreed, naturally, that her heart was indeed idiotic.

They danced on the walk to Carrigan House, though there was no music, only moonlight. Little white birds with tails like swallows flew around them, eating at the bread trail that led from Caspian’s carriage to his jacket pocket. This was a habitual thing for him to do, his bread trail. It has been noted that he was a strangely quirky man.

Everly's Walk: Part Three

Everly Carrigan built Carrigan House from the ground. Each stone set was there because she’d pointed, drawn, demanded, or placed it herself. Back then, she was known around and about for her wild hair. It was perhaps the only red thing on the entire coast. Until Caspian Blythe-Cameron showed up down the shore and ordered his townspeople to paint their cottages in lively colors (that would later fade to blinding white beneath the sun that somehow only shone on Blythe’s part of the coast) and to whitewash the stones and streets. 

Everly Carrigan hated that smug Caspian Blythe-Cameron with all of her red, beating heart. She would never order her townspeople to do something so foolish as paint, not when she’d already hauled most of them out by their ears and wallets and forced them to live the seaside life. Apart from the tug boat captains and crew (some of whom preferred to live elsewhere, though certainly not in Blythe-by-the-Sea), Everly’s townspeople tended to be business types, accountants and money-making people that Everly didn’t really think she needed in the first place.

Later down the line, when the tug boat industry wobbled, many of those business types left, but a whole crowd of artists and writers and historians and scientists had been drawn out by Everly’s lovely library and legendary wit, intermingling silently with the crowd so that no one saw them come and no one expected them to go. 

(These people even brought with them the famous Carrigan Coastal Circus, a magnificent tent in brilliant colors that sat on the water. Beneath it one could find all manner of wares, entertainment, and even a rather rare and delicate carousel. This was in the prime days of Everly’s Walk, of course, after Everly had died but far before Alice and Araby were born.)

Everly herself, though she never missed a detail, was far too preoccupied with building her home and thwarting that dastardly Caspian Blythe-Cameron to care overmuch that some new people had snuck into their midst. Besides, these people tended to be the only ones of actual interest for Everly to talk to. Apart from Caspian. He was irritatingly quirky.

So irritatingly quirky, in fact, that Everly fell in love with him. Not before he fell in love with her though, she was quick to point out. 

It started out quietly enough, a not-quite-built-house call to judge with his twinkling eyes, an unfortunate run in at the home of some mutually-hired contractor types, perhaps a verbal sparring match over dinner on the edge of Carrigan Cliff--it would have been rude not to invite him to dinner after she’d yelled at him all day. 

Then there were the letters. Nothing more than insults wrapped in romanticisms, they told themselves. But it was true when Caspian said he loved her hair and her hands. Everly had wonderful hands, simply made for pointing and gesticulating.

And it was true when she said she didn’t hate his suits. That it had actually been a lie when she’d shouted that after him down her drive. She also said that she liked his sarcasm, his smirk, his wandering hands. But those were, of course, lies designed to outwit the enemy.

Everly spent a beautiful day with that enemy in the place where the circus tent would be built. He’d forced--literally forced, she would never go quietly--Everly to take a day from building and planning and business-ing. She’d never have admitted that it felt nice to have his steadying hands on her waste as she rode the carousel horse. (Caspian had brought one of his prized carousels from France where he kept them at his mother’s house. It was pink and gold and mint and horrible. Only that was wrong because it was beautiful.) Except she did admit it, in a whisper, with a look from beneath heavy lashes. She didn’t need steadying, naturally; she was an accomplished rider. Caspian knew this because he’d watched her gallop across the scrubby plains on the cliff tops. He’d hated the way the wind sought to unclothe her, flung her curls to the sky, of course. He’d been annoyed by the way she was so sure and confident, so gentle and kind to the beast.

So no, she didn’t need steadying. Except when she did, when she was tipsy on star champagne drunk at dinner in a town where no one knew that she and Caspian hated each other and so they’d probably thought them a couple, and she teetered down the way to her house. The walkway was a narrow, stone bridge that held Carrigan Cliff--which was really more a tower of rock--to the mainland, barely wide enough for a carriage to cross. 

When Caspian Blythe-Cameron told her that he’d hate to see her fall from that death trap, it was true. But only in as much as it was a slight to her poor planning of where to live. Nothing more. Because she annoyed him.

And she swore that she would fall, if only to bother him then. Because he was too quirky and sweet and smart for her to like.

Comment and critiques are welcome.

Polaris

Polaris laughed. Caught up in a filmy web, racing through the inky black, the sound burst from her for the first time in centuries. The chime of star laughter is a sound not often heard by human ears; stars are old creatures, their laughter taken ill by decades of monotonous mortal disease. But now Polaris was shaking, rolling over and over in the abyss of space, chuckling and screaming, a shooting flame through the sky.

The thing that held her was a Space Net 1130™, the favorite choice of space pirate poachers, spider threads of silver splayed wide across the night to capture unsuspecting star-things in its wake, a splash of milky dust trailing behind the space pirate’s ship as it went.

Most of the stars had screamed fearfully as the Net approached, shrill pitches cut short by the sudden notion that they might hide from the approaching fearful beast. It is not in a star’s nature to hide. After all, the thing that they do for so many years on end is to shine forth through obscurity. Polaris knew nothing more than being seen, and so she did not hide quite well enough, did not wink out quickly enough. She thought she saw Betelgeuse cut a lazy side step through the chaotic night which was awhirl with the movements of a hundred stars like fireflies down on earth in the summer. She thought she saw Sirius open up his sunny arms and greet the challenge with a reckless grin.

Time stretching on had rendered her old and tired. Every mortal year that passed drew colder her shell, her colors setting like the sun into chilly red and orange. Inside, her heart burned white hot, a painful reminder of youth since passed, of hope endlessly unrequited. So perhaps she had allowed the space pirate to catch her, or maybe her way had been so set as to allow her no change in luminosity. On either hand there lay a captured star.

“I’m flying,” Polaris murmured, her voice breathy like a child’s. Though her back was pressed hard against the unbreakable pearlescent web, and the strands cut into her tough skin leaving angry welts of blue, she saw only the endless heavens before her.

This is what falling feels like, she thought. Polaris had always wondered. With each of her fellows that fell, her curiosity grew. But she was steady and she was true and she had never wavered from her post in the night sky. She had yearned though. As ancient as she had grown, she yearned to know what freedom felt like. Being stalwart and strong is all well and good, but Polaris had never had the opportunity to fly free, to chase the heavens to their end. In her core, she was the child who reaches her hand threw bars. Though it horrified her to think it, Polaris wanted nothing more than to know the brilliant agony of burning out in an arch of wishing flame.

Glancing quickly at her silver cage, Polaris sighed. She was not truly free. Stretching as wide as she could go, she felt suddenly so small.

“Watch it,” she snapped, a wonderfully childish heat of anger filling her as Sirius slammed one long leg into her side. He’d been flailing wildly with the motion of flight, a sort of chaotic dance through the darkness.

“Sorry.” While his expression read sheepishness, his eyes held only mischief. There had been a time when Polaris had fancied herself in love with Sirius and his constant, barking laugh, but that time had passed with Polaris’ belief in childhood things, stored away in her private center to melt with the rest of her dreams. It is a little known fact that stars dream; they have little else to do up there in the silent sky.

Now she felt all of those dreams, so carefully bottled, rushing through her veins in a sudden current. Sirius watched her colors grow flushed, his barking laughter joining her chiming chuckles. All of the young stars drew away from the two of them, growing bluer and bluer in the sea of night.

“Are you scared, Pol?” Sirius was, for once, without laughter. Humor was never far from his black eyes, as deep as the night itself.

“No,” she answered, and it was true. Polaris was excited, enchanted with the sudden unexpected adventure. If Sirius was surprised, he didn’t show it. With a shrug, he found some younger stars to wheedle. Polaris watched him and knew that he was not any more frightened than she. They had had many years to get to know one another, and she doubted that his comment was anything more than a hopeful attempt to find an excuse to fling his warmth around her chilled shoulders.

But Polaris was not so cold anymore. For a few moments, she amused herself by imagining the human chaos at her disappearance. How much trouble these particular pirates will be in, she mused, a ghostly smile carving her face.

“It’s been a long time since I saw you smile, Pol.”

“It’s been a long time since you payed attention, Sirius.” He frowned, and the delicious warmth grew within Polaris. She felt like a youth again, playing mean, masking games with the boy stars.

“I was always paying attention, Polaris.” Sirius’ eyes were burning into hers. Polaris wondered, not for the first time, how he had maintained such a happy spirit for so long. Now, however, she found herself infected with the same spirit, the champagne-like bubbly place within her burning through her veins in a sudden current.

Throwing back her head, Polaris laughed. Sirius watched her with gleaming eyes. There had been a time when he had called her the most beautiful star in the sky. That was before she had learned not to believe it.

Polaris was drowning in rebirth, fire sweeping her all over and over again. The Net progressed through the sky, unaware of the joyous star it held within. None of the younger stars had ever seen anyone so bright, so beautiful. They wondered where she had come from, for the Polaris who had entered the Net was not the same as the one they now knew.

Sirius laughed with her. It had once been his dearest wish to shine white hot with tendrils of laughter alongside Polaris. The Net bumped through a meteor field, slamming the two manic beings together. Polaris’ breath left her in a woosh. She slammed against Sirius’ cold, hard heat. Their flames mixed, twinkling brightly in the mess of silver light, a golden heart in the chaos.

For a moment, they were still and silent. Polaris felt younger than she had felt when she was born, a collection of universal matter. She felt younger than she had when Sirius had first ignited her night, younger than when she had danced with Andromeda in the inky spring, or flirted with Scorpio from afar.

Her stellar core was glowing. In a thousand years, she had not felt this warm and alive. Perhaps somewhere along the ride, Polaris realized what would happen next. Perhaps it was when Sirius took her hand with the same whoop of laughter that had proceeded all his childhood adventures. Lying side by side on the shining Net, they stared at the free floating things in the heavens, dark matter and suspended celestial beings. Their smiles were near identical, though there had been a time when Polaris had been unable to fathom smiling as brightly as Sirius. In the last second, Polaris tried to wriggle free, but Sirius drew their joined fists tight over his sparking heart.

And then, in a blink, a wink of stardust, after thousands of years of waiting, Polaris went supernova, dragging Sirius with her by the hand into wonderfully agonizing freedom.

The Coffin Maker: Part 2

The Huntsman

They were married in a glade where the trees bloomed a sleepy pink and dropped their blossoms to make a soft carpet of the forest floor. There was no one to bear witness but the trees and the birds and the sky.

And they lay on the soft carpet of petals together, hands clutched tightly.

“What if all of these petals were wishes and the trees were wishing trees?” Juliet said sleepily. The huntsman wrinkled his nose on a laugh, the way he’d picked up from Juliet.

“And what if for every promise we made and kept to one another, here in this place, a wish came true?” he played along.

“Then I would promise to love you always.”

“And I would promise to build you a strong house.”

“I would swear that our home would always be warm.”

“That I will dance with you every night that it snows.”

“That I will teach you to ride a horse.”

“That I will love you always.”

“That I will grow strong roses for our sturdy home.”

And on they went, laughing until their sides ached. It was a tender moment, unlike anything the huntsman had ever known. And he wished that it could be this way always, though such wishes are hard to find granted.

The huntsman loved Juliet with his whole heart and further then, and she loved him just as fully in return. It wasn’t strange in their country for two wandering souls to find each other so fully, but it was a little more scarce in the capitol.

The retired into the warm emerald arms of the forest where they built a house with the riches of his former fame, and he promised that the next coffins he built would be their own, when they were old and gray and tired, ready to trade this life for deep contented sleep.

Juliet was full of laughter and she made everything into a jest, so it was hard for him to draw a serious answer from her. He never fully uncovered her tale, and she was quite convinced that everything before they had come together could be easily forgotten. Perhaps she was right, but either way many years passed in contented solitude.

With a wisdom seemingly endless, she planted roses and taught him to ride horses and all manner of things that he couldn’t fathom how she had learned. They danced slow circles on the fresh fallen snow of winter and retired into their warm home where he had begun to build her a table that would last far longer than they.

Every so often, a seemingly lost soul would come knocking on the door of their small cabin. Juliet would graciously welcome them inside to sit beside the warmth of their ever-burning fire. She seemed to dazzle in those days, glittering with happiness. The traveler would imminently be given over to desire of her, or if the traveler was a woman, they would wander from the house’s warmth to the shed behind the cottage where they were sure to find the huntsman. Just as surely, he would be immersed in work, for nothing else could drag him from his Juliet’s side.

The traveler would find him sharpening some instrument. He had, under Juliet’s tender spirit, become a good natured and jovial man. She had smoothed away his rough edges, an artistry of her own, and left only the best behind. No female traveler could help but want him. And none could miss their love for each other.

Now often, these lost travelers were not lost at all. The huntsman had a way of becoming the best at everything he did, and along with tales of Juliet’s beauty and kindness, rumors of his talents spread. So it happened that often the lost travelers come to their small, ivy-covered cottage in the woods were really rather determined, travelers on rather specific quests.

Many knew him from his days in the capitol and came to beg for a coffin to be made. There were many sad and tragic stories, but always he refused them.

“I am not a coffin maker any longer,” he would say, gently steering them toward the door, Juliet watching with a frown. As the traveler reached the threshold, he would lean close and murmur the name of the next greatest coffin maker he had ever known, a tall and handsome woman whose father was a blacksmith in the capitol of another land, and then the questing traveler would be gone.

Juliet would sigh, long locks tracking shadows over her porcelain features.

“I wish they could forget.” Smiling, the huntsman would draw her closer. She fit perfectly in his muscular arms now that they were both adults grown, childhood days left firmly behind. And he thought that his love for her that day in his coffin shop had been but a raindrop in the storm that now raged in his heart.

“People do not know how to forget those as strange as me,” he would answer, smoothing one large hand over her long curls, her head tucked beneath his chin.

“I love to hear your heart beat,” she would murmur, running her soft fingers over his sternum, almost absently.

“People cannot forget men who can walk alongside death.They do not see things as I do.”

“As we do. You forget that I too have slept beside death.” Placing a kiss atop her head, he would clutch her hand in his, forming a fist between their chests. The warmth of her body would melt the cold seeping into his fingers from his thoughts.

“I love to feel your heart beat,” he would murmur.

And in those long hours after the past came knocking, the would stand together beside the burning fire, determined to ignore the stain of darkness that death seemed determined to leave on their lives.

One such day it was raining, hard sheets like ice that slit the throat of the sky. Juliet sat reading by the fire that beat furiously against the gray sky. The huntsman sat beside her, sneaking peeks at her book simply because it annoyed her and, when she caught him, she would wrinkle her nose with a smile and turn her book away.

They sat this way, quite content, even as thunder made their home shudder. Their roof, however, did not leak. The huntsman had built it well. Absently, Juliet’s hand stroked her rounded stomach, and the huntsman hummed a lilting lullaby to the sleeping baby within.

A hush came over the storm, the hissing of steam in the fireplace was audible in the sudden silence. And the door to the cottage was flung open. Gaining his feet in an instant, the huntsman cut an imposing figure against the flames.

“Hello.” The voice was deep for a woman’s, velvety and far too sweet, like poison.

“What do you want?” Seeming to have forgotten all pretense of manners, the huntsman’s words were a growl. Juliet rose slowly to stand beside him, but he pulled her slightly behind him out of fear. He was not ready to build her coffin yet.

“You are the huntsman,” the woman purred, shutting the door behind her and dropping the hood of her cape. She was beautiful, but he had known she would be. Hair black but streaked with white and lips of blood red, she stalked forward with the grin of power.

“One of many.”

“The greatest.” Her brow rose with a knowing twist, her lips forming daggers with their words. The huntsman offered only an elegant shrug.

“He is.” Juliet spoke softly. The woman hardly afforded her a glance. It was then that the huntsman knew the woman’s weakness. She was threatened by beauty.

“I suppose I am then, if my wife says it is so. What have you come here to ask of me?” The woman pulled from within her cloak a long box, and from within the box, she pulled a dagger. Every fiber of the huntsman’s body was warning him to banish this woman from his home, to prevent her from saying anything further. There was no doubt that she was royalty (he had made coffins for enough of them to know), just as there was no doubt she was a sorceress (though these were admittedly far more rare). Neither of these suspicions gave him great confidence in her motives.

“There is a maiden,” the woman began, hatred adding a harsh madness to her voice, “with hair of raven and lips red as the rose. It has been suggested that she will become the fairest in the land, though I’m sure yourself would disagree.” She cast a dismissive glance at Juliet who drew herself up in a fair show of bravery. “This maiden is a princess with skin white as snow. I’m sure you know who I speak of, for you are an intelligent and well-traveled man.” The huntsman and his wife knew exactly who the woman spoke of, though they were loathe to admit it.

“I would like you to...dispose of her.” As the fervor in her voice had risen, she had begun to pace forward, losing touch with her control. The huntsman held up his hands to ward her off, and it seemed to remind her of herself. Smoothing her gown and robes and hair, she settled back on her heels.

“Carve out her heart and bring it to me.” To their credit, neither Juliet nor the huntsman choked. Their expressions remained entirely neutral, though their own hearts beat far faster with every passing moment.The fire behind them burned brightly, casting their silhouettes in grotesque mockery on the walls.

“Why me?”

“You used to be death’s concierge, and now you are his weapon.”

“Why would I ever be expected to accept such a request?”

“I will pay you handsomely.” A flash of pearly teeth in the dark. “But of course you wouldn’t be interested in that. Hmmm...” She paced a small circle.

Rapidly, like a snake, the woman’s hand was flung forward and, beside the huntsman, Juliet fell to the ground.

“No!” The cry was torn from his throat, guttural and terrifying. He dropped to the ground beside her, gathering her limp form into his arms.

“Did you think she came to you by chance? Perhaps she did. But the life she lives is borrowed...or maybe your love is so great that it has been gifted to you. Either way, I assure you I can take it. I can take from you everything you will ever love.” As he felt the stillness of her pulse, tears cut opalescent lines down his cheeks and clung to the stubble on his jaw. His eyes were full of her quiet face, exactly the same as when he’d first met her, though now his heart held the anguish of love grown and lost, a plant reaped at its ripest.

“If I do this thing, she will live?” Breath entered his Juliet’s body even as he voiced the question.

He had no choice but to make the deal, his hand closing around the daggers hilt with finite cruelty. The woman had cut from him his strength, and it was all too simple to shrug back on the cloak that he had long ago borrowed from death.

Far away, he made the journey, to a field fair flushed with blossoms. He was not shocked to find the land beyond the forest again engaged in war, but the horrors he had witness along the roadside seemed to fall away when he entered the field. The scent of spring tickled his nose as he stalked forward, a shadow in utopia. The huntsman took pause at his first sight of the princess, for she was but a child. Though visions of Juliet’s trusting gaze filled his mind, he knew she had not wished him to do this thing, no matter the cost. She cared far more for the price to his soul, and all the while, the child shrank from him with frightened eyes like a deer.

The tale of the huntsman’s inability to take the fair maiden’s heart has become legend, and even he knew the doe’s heart he had sent instead would not prove a worthy ploy. But years passed by quickly in the woods, and Juliet lived alongside him in the bright sunshine without any sign of the woman’s fatal retribution.

The Coffin Maker: Part 1

The Coffin Maker

He used to be a coffin maker, during the wars. And his home was a land fair riddled by war, though it mattered not to the common people who sat on the throne as it changed so often. In those days, it had made little difference to the coffin maker for whom he crafted the coffins; his skill was plied no better or worse for a title or two.

As the last war ravaged the capitol and the line of grief-stricken lengthened out the front door while the line of corpses lengthened out the back, he met a young and beautiful Juliet. It was she who would become his wife.

The shop had been packed that day, brimming with sweat and tears. The hazy, golden mist of summer swam stickily before his eyes. He much preferred it to the crimson steam of the battlefields.

It was a strange quirk of this country that it’s battles were often fought at home, in the capitol itself. To see the glass and metal buildings glittering mirrored fractions down at the carnage below, to see death run rampant among pristine marble and the glistening treasures of the earth worked so frivolously into the capitol’s famous spiked spires, to see it all in its juxtaposition made it all the more horrendous. Though he had never stepped foot on the fields of war, he had seen enough of it brought home. The coffin maker made it his policy to require the bodies be brought to him as soon as his fame and talent allowed him the quirk, which was admittedly quite soon after he began the job.

So the day that he met Juliet, his name was quite famous to the dead and dying, the grieving and the grieved, the lost and the losers left behind. His Juliet came in the back door, as all the corpses did, a beautiful and pristine ghost on a cart. He felt himself fall for her, the young coffin maker did. His heart tipped from his breast to lie in the grave beside her, with one simple wish: to never be parted from her still and beautiful face. Wishes had a way of often being granted in that blood-stained land.

He knew instantly that she was not a casualty of battle, and he was glad that war’s ugly hands had never touched her pale, smooth skin. But death had certain kissed her pink, upturned lips. He envied it the chance.

Everything in the shop had gone still and cool when they brought her in, the constant revolution of chaos stopping to watch the coffin maker’s face crumple into a thousand emotions at once. Lines of feeling etched themselves deep and simultaneously in his countenance, so that for a moment he became the old man he might have been in another life, dying in his sleep with this woman in his arms. That old man had never known the horror of a city at war, the putrescence and disease that infiltrated the bodies, minds, and hearts of the city’s people. He would never have known what it was to look on someone’s face and see only the size and shape of their coffin, building itself in his mind.

And as he looked at her face, the abandoned place in his chest despaired, for how could he build a coffin worthy of this woman? How could a man be expected to bury his own heart?

“What is her name?” His voice was raspy from disuse, for he spoke rarely in those days. Head turning and craning, he found that no one had stepped forth to claim the woman as she arrived. “Is there anyone here for her?” he called. The room slowed in surprise, but there was no response, no family stepping forth from the throng.

“She is alone?” He addressed the man who had brought the cart, a tall fellow with wrinkled eyes, face worn and leathered by brutal images.

“Her name is Juliet, and I brought her from her father’s house. He loved her so greatly that her death took with it his own self.” A jerky nod indicated the second corpse behind the cart man. “Here is the sum their distant relatives sent for their burial.” Blinking quickly, the coffin maker’s hand stretched toward the pretty corpse, shaking. No part of him believed that he would be able to touch such beauty. But flesh met flesh. And, in that moment, she was his.

“I will take care of her,” he swore. The cart man cared not, so long as he was paid.

The coffin maker worked feverishly. Where haste would have been suspected to lend his craft imperfection, the beautiful maiden had inspired him so fully that even those plain coffins prebuilt for unnamed soldiers and poor widows‘ husbands were unmatched in their artistry. Never before had so many coffins made by his hands in so short a space, and never had they been so masterful.

In the space of a day, he cleared the shop. In the space of a night, he built a king’s coffin for Juliet’s father (and, just after, in the dawn’s light, built another quickly for the recently martyred king, though many would claim it was not half as splendorous). The father’s coffin alone was far beyond the small payment the cart man had brought him, but the coffin maker cared little for the money, having amassed a small fortune with his fame. Death is a high-paying business. And all the while, he sketched.

A design for Juliet’s coffin had begun to form in his brain, wrapped in tendrils of some strong emotion from his heart. He sketched always except for when he was called aside by some poor living fool with a lucky bastard on a cart who had taken leave of this mess. And as he drew up plans for one stranger after another’s grave-bed, they would take it upon themselves to observe his feverish sketches.

Always they were left open mouthed.

“Can you actually build such a thing?” they asked, skepticism written in their brows.

“Of course,” he’d reply. “Though I’ve never tried before.” They believed him because of the zealous emotion in his sage-colored eyes, burning with sad obsession.

“And who could afford such a thing?” they whispered amongst themselves, though all were too afraid to ask the craftsman himself. Instead, a brave soul or two inquired, “Who is this creation for?”

The coffin maker would smile, a grin lighting his face aglow. He was really a quite handsome fellow, though his occupation had labeled him rather darkly. It is often that those who work with death are determined to be somehow off, as if the shadow of fatality has somehow changed them, as if they are not the same as the other humans who shrink from finality’s sight.

The coffin maker would smile and say, “Her name is Juliet,” as if that settled all questions. It was clear then to any who had dared ask, that the coffin maker was in love with Juliet and she must have been his wife, and so they left off questioning.

As dusk came the second day, the shop cleared to a quiet, peaceful emptiness. Even the bodies had been taken away, except for Juliet. The coffin maker rubbed his brow with one tired palm, studying the girl. Her skin seemed to vibrate with a hidden life.

He had been unable to fathom putting such a vivacious creature into the earth, to let her be trampled by wars and given over to darkness. And so he had drawn for her a glass coffin, so that she would forever see the sun, so that she would remain forever safe from the sullying fingers of the world, a glittering, impeccable treasure.

Nestles in vines of masterfully wrought wood, the glass would lie, a gem in twirling wooden arms, a diamond showcasing far greater beauty. The light would glitter off its surface and no nature would ever seek to destroy such a brilliant creation.

Slowly, because he could not help himself, he placed a soft kiss on her still pink lips.

ANd her coffin would remain forever a drawing, whispered about by awed gossips through city squares, a legend of sorts in the land of death, because in the moment when the sun set that day, Juliet awakened.

Wide, green eyes flew open with a great fluttering of lashes that seemed to displace all the air in the room. The coffin maker could almost see the pulse of her heart inside her breast. She sat up slowly, long, golden hair spilling down her back, studying him. Had he expected anything, he would have expected her to ask him questions, to cry for help in confusion. He would have thought to comfort her, maybe to hold her as she cried. Juliet took great pleasure in dispelling expectations.

“My father’s dead,” she stated in a clear, calm voice. It rang like a bell in the empty space, and the coffin maker’s ears burned pleasantly at its sound.

“Yes,” he nodded, letting his deep voice mix with her chime.

“And you are the coffin maker.” It was another statement. She sat so that their faces where inches apart. In that moment, he realized she was slightly older than he had thought and not half as fragile. In that moment, she realized that she could love him.

“I am,” he answered again. It was the first time in his life that he thought to be ashamed of it. Slowly, her small hand came up to touch the bones of his face.

“I’m not sure I can marry a coffin maker.” Eyes glittering with laughter, she smiled at him. He had never seen anyone so alive in his shop before. Covering her hand with his own and pressing its coolness to the warmth of his jaw, he smiled at her. He felt his own eyes twinkle for the first time since he had come to the capitol.

“I don’t think I’ll make coffins anymore then.”

“What will you do?” she asked. Her voice held the tiniest twang, sweet and mischievous like summer rain.

“Whatever you like.” He caught his tongue between his grinning teeth, years of strife falling away to reveal the youth burdened beneath them.

“I’ve always loved the forest.”

“So have I.”

And so the coffin maker became a huntsman. And so the huntsman took a wife.

Ink

these wings are words that whisper wonderingly through me

wander thoughts of thoughtless beginnings and fabling fibs to tell a lie

rip right out my back in breaking painful price of giving up oneself to the sky

my bloodless body is a candy-colored corpse hanging thin and fumbling from textual lines left behind

swing me from the simple stars this celestial print projection and leaving me waning under the moon’s face

sending lacy ink like water to reach round my back and through to the heart

like blackened wilting webs they hold me as a marionette wobbling in the wind of marginal space

gossamer feathers spiky and soft with warmth

they slash the open page with loving feather fingers wash with cruel wanderings

cut the cords that carry me, these lines that want to string my things

and when the wished-for punctuation crashes to closing it works its wonder on my will

i drop, the warm longing of painful loving leaves me

without the want of need like water in the veins

i fall, alone without the agonized torment of driving destruction

without the wretched wrong of giving half and more to the hateful heavens

i collapse, without the strings of alphabet soup that flow from my fingers into those that pull me

without the rivers of ink that itch beneath skin until they are born free

i die