Desires and Dreams and Powers Read online

  Rosamund Hodge

  Desires and Dreams and Powers

  The Collected Stories

  Copyright © 2019 by Rosamund Hodge

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  Cover design by Claire Wenzel.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  For Brendan,

  who was there at the beginning

  Contents

  Desires and Dreams and Powers

  Don’t Look

  Textual Variants

  And Her Eyes Sewn Shut With Unicorn Hair

  Ways of Being a Mermaid’s Daughter

  More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand

  The Lamps Thereof Are Fire and Flames

  Perfect World

  Three Girls Who Met a Forestborn

  I. The Sister

  II. The Princess

  III. The Woodwife

  Hunter, Warrior, Seamstress

  Apotheosis

  Of the Death of Kings

  Situation Normal

  Rules for Riding the Storm

  Cut Her Out in Little Stars

  Titanomachy

  Good Night, Sweet Prince

  A Guide for Young Ladies Entering the Service of the Fairies

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Desires and Dreams and Powers

  Mother kills you on the third of July, when the sky is a giant, shimmering blue bowl and the air is shimmering hot soup.

  * * *

  Your name is Cora. You have always lived in Dallas, and it has always been summer. At least, summer is all you remember: sizzling afternoons spent swimming at the pool while Mother sits under the umbrella and watches you through her sunglasses. Cool early morning runs with Mother jogging beside you and watching. Whole days spent indoors, watering the potted plants while the air conditioner roars cold air down your neck, and Mother is still watching.

  Summer is all you remember, summer and Mother’s worried green eyes. But you know there are other seasons: you’ve read about them in books. You’ve seen pictures on the internet, and clicked away the moment Mother looks in your direction. And then you feel guilty for making such a perfect mother sad.

  You do ask her, once, why you remember so little. Every day melts into another; you know things happened, but it’s all a vague mess in the back of your mind.

  Mother just hugs you extra tight and whispers that you’re special, honey, you’re my summer child, and your memory isn’t the best but I love you just the same.

  That’s how it starts: her arms clenched around you, and your heart beating a rapid, secret signal: There’s something she doesn’t want me to know.

  For the first time (you think it’s the first time) you realize you aren’t part of her. You want to be more. And that’s when you start reading books and looking at pictures and coiling questions behind your teeth. That’s when you start sneaking out of your bed at night and climbing up onto the roof, where you stare at the stars and your hands feel empty.

  You stare at the stars.

  Your hands feel empty.

  The darkness seems to listen as you cry.

  You cry and you wipe your eyes and you crawl back inside, and the next day you smile for your mother. On and on and on, every day and every night, until it feels like you’re splitting into two different people, a day girl who puts flowers in her hair and dances because it makes Mother laugh, and a night girl whose ribs ache with longing.

  But you don’t say anything and you don’t do anything because you’re a good girl and you love your mother.

  Until the day—hot and grim as the plains of Troy—when you start your morning run with Mother too late, and halfway through you’re both sweaty and desperate for relief. So you stop at the supermarket to get cold drinks, and you see the bottle of pomegranate juice.

  You’ve seen it before a thousand times. You always get orange juice, because that’s what Mother likes and you want to be like Mother. But this time—this time you stare at the little bottle. The juice is deep, dark red, but the plastic glitters in the harsh florescent light, and there’s a faint glimmer in the depths of the juice as well.

  And you want it. You want the bottle of blood-red pomegranate juice, the way seedlings want the sun.

  “Darling,” says your mother, her eyebrows drawing together, “don’t you want your orange juice?”

  Any other day, that voice and those eyebrows would make you wilt.

  “I’ll drink what I want, Mother,” you snap, the nighttime grief suddenly scrabbling at your ribs. You stalk towards the cashier, and on the way you realize that it isn’t just grief coiled up inside you: it’s rage.

  It makes no sense.

  It doesn’t make sense, either, the way Mother keeps looking at you, as you walk out of the store. She’s always watching, always worried, but now it’s like she thinks you’ll drop dead any second.

  “It’s just a bottle of juice,” you say, and twist the cap off.

  The first mouthful hits your tongue, and you feel like you’ve been kissed.

  “Oh, my darling,” your mother sighs, and then the bottle is falling from your hand as pain sears through your chest, pain and all your memories, all at once, so hard and fast you choke.

  You look down. Mother has buried a sword of bright bronze between your ribs.

  She made me forget him, you think, as a dark fog of death closes over your eyes.

  * * *

  Just kidding. You’re a goddess. You can’t ever die.

  But you do forget. Again.

  * * *

  Your name is Peri and you have always lived in Los Angeles, in a big white stucco-walled mansion with cottage cheese ceilings. Mostly, you and your mom get along, but sometimes you fight. Mom likes to pinch your cheeks and pat your head and say you’re such good little girl, but you’re pretty sure you’re seventeen. Sixteen, at least.

  And you are not good. You resent your mom, with a dull, implacable fury that bubbles inside you all day long. She cooks for you, sings to you, plays dolls with you—which is embarrassing, but it means so much to her—and every moment you’re awake, she’s watching you and guessing what you want. When you want a can of Coke, she gets it before you finish looking around the room.

  She worships you. She is perfect. And yet the feeling of her eyes on you—sometimes just the sound of her breathing in the room—makes your skin itch until you’re ready to scream.

  But you hide it smile and hide, and it’s not too bad because everything has always been this way. Until one day you’re at the library, and the corkscrew irritation winds so tight that you have to duck into an aisle away from your mother’s eyes and breathe.

  At the other end of the aisle, just pulling a book off the shelf, is a man. Not a boy: you’ve seen boys, been told not to look at boys, and it’s no trial to obey because who wants those sagging jeans and awkward, bony arms?

  This is a man, tall and trim but solid, wrapped in a tweed jacket and a blue waistcoat that fit him just right. He has smooth brown skin and dark black curls cropped close to his skull.

  His eyes meet yours. They’re dark and endless.

  Your pulse is beating tap-tap-tap in your neck, like there are doors that need to open.

  Then you hear your mother breathe from the other side of the shelves, and you whirl away before y
ou can think.

  * * *

  You are counting days now. The time that was always an inchoate confusion of moments is suddenly numbers, tick-tick-tock. One day since you saw him. Two days. Three.

  Your pulse keeps tapping, your mind keeps asking, and you want to see him again. He makes you understand why your mom is scared you’ll talk to boys, and he makes you feel like you almost remember something more than the endless L.A. summer, smog and cement and palm trees.

  You get your mother to let you take walks alone. She argues, but you promise to be careful, and you wander quiet asphalt streets. Once upon a time, you think, you could have peeled apart the shadows of the palms and found him. (You don’t know why you think this.) Once upon a time, you had power.

  And one day (it’s day fifteen, you’re still counting) you try a new street and there’s a bakery with nothing in the window but skull-shaped cookies, painted with frosting and crusted in glittering rock sugar, and you lean your face against the glass and wonder why they look like home.

  “You like them?” asks a voice, low and soft and sweet.

  You turn, and there he’s standing behind you. The street is hot and dry and very still, except for one tiny breeze blowing a plastic bag.

  “I love them,” you say.

  He buys you the cookies. (They’re just as delicious as you thought.) He buys them for you the next day and the next, and you walk the quiet, sun-drenched streets together. He never talks about himself, so you ramble endlessly about your life and how you want to see somewhere else someday.

  You don’t touch him. You want to—the space between you is always scraping at your skin, demanding to be closed—but you know that things will change if you do.

  Until the day (it’s day twenty-nine) that you turn to him and say, “What about you? Where do you come from?”

  He goes very still, and then he asks, “Do you want to know?”

  “Yes,” you say.

  “It’s very far away,” he says, and it sounds like a ritual, and it feels like you’re taking a vow when you say, “I want to see.”

  He takes your hand. You’re standing next to a wide freeway overpass; he starts to lead you under, past the tall cement pillars tagged in graffiti, past a dead pigeon and a broken television. The cars roar overhead.

  You realize you can’t see light on the other side. The colonnaded road seems to go on forever, slanting down into the darkness, and you feel like there are doors flying open in your head.

  Almost, you remember.

  But you’re afraid. You can feel the cement rippling and shifting under your feet, like a cat stretching after a long nap, and you can feel yourself shifting and changing and waking as well. You’re not sure if you’re ready to stop being your mother’s good little girl.

  So you rip your hand out of his and you run straight home.

  Your mother opens the door and spits you on a sword.

  “It’s for the best, dear,” she says, and you die choking on blood and curses.

  * * *

  It’s not dying, okay, but it’s almost the same thing, because you lose yourself, you lose him. And you forget what you’ve lost.

  Mostly.

  * * *

  Your name is Hecate von Death because screw you, Mom, I’ll call myself what I want. You have always lived in Boston and you have always fought with your mother. You have never seen the leaves turn crimson and copper. But you want to. You want to see those blood-red colors as glorious as when swift-footed Achilles rained death on the Trojans.

  Sometimes you think your whole life is made of disconnected, nonsense similes.

  Until the day you’re stomping through the park after another fight with your mother. She hates that you dye your hair black, paint your eyelids black, put on black pants and jet-black nail polish.

  “You look like a corpse, dear,” she said this morning, and you snarled, “Maybe I want to be a corpse.”

  Now you’re in the park and you’re close to Newspaper Guy. That’s what you call him in your head, because he’s always sitting on a bench and reading a newspaper; you can’t see any of him except the tip of his black fedora, his dark blue pants and shiny brown shoes.

  Today the newspaper seems like an insult, like one more of the walls your mom puts up around you. So you rip it out of his hands.

  It’s him.

  You don’t know who he is, but you know you’ve met him before.

  He smiles, small and polite. “Good afternoon,” he says, pulling the newspaper back from your suddenly weak hands. He folds it in four and gets up to leave.

  Your skull feels like a ringing bell. “Who are you?”

  “Nobody you know,” he says, and starts to walk away.

  “Just—wait a second, mister—”

  You grab his shoulder, and around you the world turns and reverses and awakens. Like a circuit’s been connected, suddenly you know, and you pull him around into a desperate, hungry kiss.

  Your name is Persephone. You have never loved anyone else but him.

  “You remember,” he whispers when your lips finally part.

  “Yes,” you say, and kiss him one more time. “Hold that thought. I need to have a talk with my mother.”

  * * *

  When you open the front door, she’s waiting. But you’re ready, and you catch the blade in your hands.

  “Hi, Demeter,” you say, and she wails through her nose as you fight over the sword. Then she stumbles and you’re on top of her, ramming the sword through her arm into the ground.

  “It was for you,” she gasps. “I did it all for you.”

  You’re gasping too, bent nearly double. Even now, the tears trickling out of her perfect eyes make you want to kiss her feet and beg her forgiveness.

  “I gave you half my life,” you say. “And then you stole the rest of it.”

  “He infected you,” Demeter whispers. “You were miserable in that cavern, so he made you forget the sunlight, forget me. He stole you.”

  It’s true, maybe. Or it isn’t. You’re just a little girl who can’t remember, so how can you tell?

  “You stole me,” you say, because that’s the one thing you know for sure. “I want to be free now.”

  And then you get up and leave.

  * * *

  Hades is waiting for you on the park bench.

  “What happened?” you ask.

  He sighs. “Your mother persuaded me you would be happier.”

  “That was dumb.”

  “So I discovered.” He looks you up and down. “You’re different now.”

  “Are you?”

  “Maybe.” He’s still not moving from where he sits.

  “Did you really make me forget the sunlight?” you ask him.

  “That’s how your mother saw it,” he says. “I thought you loved me.”

  “Well—” You sit down and take his hand. “I think so too.”

  He smiles, and it’s real now, not like when he was trying to leave you. But he still says, “You don’t have to come with me. You can go home if you want.”

  “Too late,” you say. “I kind of stabbed my mom a little. Besides, you have something that belongs to me, mister.”

  You pluck the fedora off his head and set it on yours. It feels like a crown as you nestle into his shoulder, back into the place where you feel at home.

  “You have a lot of missing winters to make up to me,” you say, and he chuckles—a deep, warm chuckle that rumbles the air in your lungs.

  You don’t remember him. Even before Demeter started screwing with your head, you suspect you didn’t always remember him. You’re a goddess of spring and new beginnings and probably your memory will never work quite like anyone else’s.

  But it feels familiar, the warmth of his shoulder against yours, and you think this is what it was like, all those ages ago when you first kissed him and tasted pomegranates.

  The moment when you thought, Yeah. I could get used to this.

  Don’t Look
br />   There’s one thing I don’t tell the reporters, or the police, or my parents: I knew there was somebody in the room.

  There’s always someone in the dark. And I’ve always known.

  * * *

  Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?

  * * *

  I don’t have to finish taking finals. By the time the paramedics say I’m not in any more danger of shock and the police have gotten done talking to me, Mom and Dad have already arrived. They drive me home that afternoon. I huddle in the backseat, dry-eyed and shivering, while Mom and Dad trade worried looks.

  They don’t say anything, but I can imagine their hushed voices floating up the stairwell tonight. Dad: Our poor baby girl. What are we going to do? Mom: She’s always been so fragile. She’ll never recover. I could have told you she wasn’t—

  But Mom thought I was ready, three months ago. She was the one who bought me the car, who told me I was driving to Hunterly College by myself. It’s time to gain some independence, honey. Aren’t you excited?

  There was no way I could tell her, Mom, when I’m alone in the car, there’s someone in the backseat.

  I hooked in my iPod and played it really loud the whole way. Sometimes music helps, but that time it didn’t. The whole way there, I knew, I knew that somebody was sitting in the backseat, watching me with inhuman, malevolent eyes.

  In 125 miles, I managed to only look in the rear-view mirror twice.

  Don’t look. That’s always been the rule.

  * * *

  Then I got to college. I felt stiff and numb and carbonated all at the same time, and the peppy smiles at the Campus Life office didn’t make me feel any better. There were going to be yawning hallways in the evening; narrow sidewalks between the dorms at night; empty public restrooms with undead florescent lighting. I’d have to learn which places I could stand to run through, which ones I had to avoid, and then I’d have to hide what I was doing.

  Mom had been talking for weeks about all the friends I’d make, but I knew that wouldn’t happen. Once you learn to be afraid—really afraid, down to your bones—you’re afraid of everything. Even your classmates.