(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.
“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.)
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Scrap told the gnome.
His grin stretched across his face. “Yeah, have fun off with your chubby little empty.”
She stared at him.
“Whoa,” Scrap said. “Whoa, hey.” He took Beckan’s arm and tugged her back. Away. The gnome couldn’t grab her and eat her and she couldn’t grab him and strangle him.
The first one to ever call Beckan an empty was a fairy boy on the playground by the mall, the one with the two-story slide and the drained swimming pool filled with foam blocks. She didn’t know what the word meant, but the tone of his voice made her hit him with her jump rope. Josha finally told her what it meant, after her father refused. He’d learned the slur from his sister, before she left to go live somewhere without gnome girls and traveling girls and lost girls and wandering girls and nymph girls, all of them drifting through the city with their full, kicking bellies.
Beckan wanted to kick the gnome in his horrible teeth.
But she’d been trained out of that harder than she’d been trained to hate the name.
She’d seen this gnome a hundred times. They’d never talked. He’d never called her that.
The war was in their words.
“Get out of here,” Scrap said to Leak.
Leak gave him a long look and stepped back into the elevator, and Beckan heard the echoes of his laugh for a long time.
She walked with her arms crossed over her chest. When they got to 7th and Fremont, she crossed the street over the tram tracks and hurried down the sidewalk. A pretty fairy lady she didn’t know bumped shoulders with her and didn’t pause to apologize.
Beckan breathed out. She dragged her hand over the plate-glass window of a jewelry store she passed and felt a little calmer.
Gradually, she heard Scrap’s long strides catch up with her. She knew he would eventually.
“Becks. You okay?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know why you let them bother you.”
“Yeah, because the problem is that I’m letting them insult me. This is my fault. You’re so smart.”
He lowered his voice. “Are you crying?”
“Screw you.”
“Beckan.”
“No. It’s fine.” She wiped her cheeks off, hard. “Don’t let it bother you or anything.”
“I would have beaten him up, but I like my work. And my limbs.”
“I don’t need you to beat up anyone for me. I can beat up my own assholes.”
She felt him smile more than she saw it. “That too,” he said.
They crossed the bridge over the bay, trams swerving past them on their tracks, and hiked up the hill until the apartment buildings and the offices faded out and they reached the rim of houses at the top of the hills. The stone walls stretched behind Scrap’s house like they were trying to hug the cottages in, make them really a part of the city.
“No tightropes up here yet,” Beckan said. She wasn’t crying anymore.
“Yeah,” Scrap said. “Everyone always forgets we’re here.”
Beckan eventually pauses in her painting long enough to send Scrap home. She blames it all on the half arm, and that makes him agree, but truly it shakes her seeing him out of the house when he’s still weak. Most days he seems, physically, almost like his old self, and she can accept him as a little frailer than he should be when they were only at home, but here, out in the open, whenever he’s tired it’s so clear that if for whatever reason he needed to fight, he could only make one fist.
She’s worried about him. Scrap, with all his darkness and messed-up hair, sometimes calls their little family his pack. Beckan has learned a lot about wolves now from Scrap’s books—he loves wolves—and she knows that Scrap is the smallest and the quietest but easily their alpha wolf, with his paws in everything: the dirty dishes in the sink, Josha’s hair after a nightmare, the clogged drain in the bathroom, the switchblades, the books. Beckan feels warm and comfortable in her place in the pack, but that doesn’t stop her from looking at her wounded alpha and worrying about him now that he’s missing a paw.
He’s also looking a little sick.
She keeps painting, and the streets flood and fill with more bodies and paintbrushes and voices as tightroper after tightroper drops to the ground. It’s still mostly tightroper soldiers in the city with their husbands or wives and small kids. Maybe now their civilians are going to come. She tries to figure out whether or not that would be okay with her and comes up with nothing.
She wonders what it’s like up in the tightropes.
She tilts her head back and squints to see the threads more clearly, and at that moment a body drops from a rope and hangs right in front of her, his face suspended inches away. She smells tightroper bread on his breath and cannot look away from his purple, flat, unsparkly eyes.
The tightroper boy smiles like he knows a secret, a nice secret, that she doesn’t, and that he might tell her if she smiles back in just the right way, and he says, “Curious?”
Beckan tries a few smiles but doesn’t feel like she finds the right one.
“Is it nice?” she says eventually. “Being so high up?”
“You’d like it,” he says, and he zooms back up his rope and into the netting, so fast that he’s halfway back to their web before she realizes that that didn’t really answer her question.
And that she doesn’t really know what just happened.
But her mind clicks, once, and she decides that she’s going to find out his name and get him to take her up. Just to do something.
It is so, so exhausting, her whole life being the pack.
No wonder Scrap has screwed up so often. (What kind of alpha loses one of his dogs?)
The day after the first bomb, when Scrap still had two arms and Beckan’s reading was still mostly sounding-out, he gave her a lesson at his kitchen table. She was learning quite quickly; a few weeks before she’d fluently read her first sentence, one Scrap had once jotted down at the bottom of an old soup recipe: A long time ago, maybe fairies did have wings.
Since then she had worked her way through a few of Scrap’s stories, but that day after the bomb was the first time she’d read one of Scrap’s stories and actually liked it. That had less to do with her taste and more with the fact that most of Scrap’s stories were not very good. Dry histories.
“This one is romantic,” she’d said, when it was over, and she rested her head on her arm and stretched her fingers out on the kitchen table.
Scrap was lingering by the refrigerator. “That wasn’t exactly what I was going for. It’s supposed to be . . . realistic.” Every few words, he slid his eyes over to the wobbling pile of dishes in the sink.
“I don’t like realistic. Just do the dishes if they’re bothering you so much.”
“It’s a waste.”
“How?”
“You thought it was romantic?”
“They’re in love, aren’t they? It’s a story and all these terrible things are happening and they’re in love the whole time. Why don’t you do your dishes?”
“Waste of time.”
“They’re gross.”
“I’ll do them later.”
Scrap’s cousin, rooting through the fridge, said, “He does them in his sleep.”
“What?”
Scrap said, “Cricket, bite me a little, why don’t you.”
Even though Beckan was only a tooth, an eye, and an ear away from living alone, Scrap and Cricket’s parentless house felt lawless to her in a way hers never did. Maybe that one eye was enough to make her feel watched—though she had to admit that more and more often, she was leaving her father tucked away in corners or stuffed, as he was now, at the bottom of her tote bag—or maybe it was that her father’s apartment could somehow never feel small and bright and reckless in the way of this cottage, where every corner felt filled with something easy and significant, like family.
She could never fill her sink with dishes the way Scrap and Cricket could. There weren’t enough dishes in the house. There wasn’t enough food in her fridge.
“There’s no food at my house,” she realized. “I couldn’t get groceries.”
“Stay here,” Cricket said. “I made pasta.”
Scrap said, “We cook together. But he does dinner usually. Cricket makes a very good sidekick.”
Cricket said, “Too bad you’re a shitty superhero. Beckan. Want to be my superhero?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
Scrap ran his hand over his head. “Like in a book.”
“Yes,” she said, and she wrote her name and over and over again in the top margin of Scrap’s notebook. “Yes.”
Scrap took the book away and disappeared to hide it, and Beckan perched on the counter while Cricket warmed up pasta. He sang, to himself, but not as if he cared if she heard. His voice was deep and thick.
“A gnome called me an empty today,” she said. She didn’t know why.
Cricket set the bowl down.
He said, “How do you feel?”
She watched her feet where they swung back and forth and scraped an itchy bit of glitter off her thigh. “I feel like I shouldn’t give a shit.”
“I can’t have a baby either, you know?” Cricket said, with a smile that Beckan appreciated but didn’t quite respect. At least Cricket could give someone else a baby. At least Cricket could make pasta. And sing. All she could do was melt things and dream about flying.
She knew that having a baby was no way to measure success. She knew that it wouldn’t make her a more fulfilled person and that lying awake wanting one makes her a useless, stupid cliché.
She also knew that she just wanted a fucking baby, okay?
She lived with that.
She said, “I feel like I don’t know what a good goal is. What I should be doing with my life.”
“Write a book like Scrap.”
“I don’t even know what a real book is like.”
He grinned. “Then write something stupid and romantic like he does.”
“Screw you!” Scrap called from the living room, and Cricket laughed and laughed.
“He’s trying to write a serious book,” Cricket said. “But he keeps writing love stories. Bad ones. I won’t read them. I don’t even think he’d let me. He writes them creepily in secret. But they’re bad. I can just tell.”
“Bad?”
“Substanceless.”
“He’s never been in love,” she guessed.
“Probably not. Have you?”
She nodded. She still was, because Josha was her world then.
“Scrap thinks it must be horrible,” he said. “You can tell from the stories.”
“It is.”
“I think it sounds nice.”
“No.” A thought edged its way out of her mouth. “You’re substanceless, a little, I think.”
And he was, but he smiled, and she decided she forgave him. That afternoon, the three of them ate pasta and the gnomes officially declared war.
And now Beckan has fixed the city enough for one day, she still smells like paint, her thoughts are still on the tightroper boy, but she’s riding the mines down to work and she remembers that day and that story and that sink full of dishes and that Scrap with his arms and that story.
That fucking day after the bomb, it was a love story.
And now he’s back to writing lists of dates. When before all of this, before he’d ever felt anything in his whole little life, he’d once written a love story.
She would grab Scrap and shake him, if touching in the elevator weren’t silently but very strictly forbidden nowadays. (More on that later.)
It was a love story.
Just a little one.
