Maddie straddles the branch of the lilac tree, her skirt bunched up to her waist, but there’s no one to see her knickers and in any case the lime-green leaves hide everything except her scuffed school shoes. Tree bark chafes her thighs. It’s a price she’s willing to pay for riding bareback on a flying horse above the jungles of Africa. The air is heavy with floral scent, a potion created by an Archimage to befuddle and bewitch. Bees buzz in the center of the purple flowers, doing all they can to save Maddie from enchantment.
“Maddie,” Mam calls from the distant castle at the end of the garden. It’s tempting not to go. There’s a Prince who needs rescuing, and a frog to kiss.
“Maddie, dinner. Now.”
Nothing for it, then. Maddie dismounts and pats her faithful steed. The straight line left by the mower is a tightrope over the Amazon River leading to the open back door. Inside, the rattle of plates and a waft of hot stove. Mam looks up from the saucepans and smiles.
“There you are,” she says. “Come inside. Your father’s home. Time to eat.”
Da says grace at the table. He’s a bear of a man: hair as black as coal, eyes as blue as the Irish ocean—-or so he tells her. His eyes are closed now, his shovel hands clasped in prayer.
“Holy father, bless this food …”
Mam’s hands are in her lap, her eyes shadow-bruised. She sags over her plate.
“Thank you God, Amen … you need to eat, Sarah.”
“I’m not hungry, Billy. I’ll save it for tomorrow.”
“I brought you a box of toffees.”
“That’s kind, Billy. Maybe later.” Until this year Mam loved toffee, especially the ones with the soft caramel center, wrapped in royal purple.
“Blame my sweet tooth,” she’d say, as she dipped into the box for one last go.
“You have to eat.” Da says now.
“Maybe later.”
“I’m off to bed,” Maddie says. Da grunts goodnight. Mam feels as fragile as a mouse when Maddie kisses her cheek.
Once upon a time, brave Lord Billy of Tobin set forth from Dublin and traveled on a quest to London town to slay a dragon and win the heart of Lady Sarah and whisk her away to the lands of the frozen north.
“Was it love at first sight?” Maddie asks. Mam laughs and says maybe it was, maybe it was. “But, Mam, was there really a dragon?”
“Of course not, Maddie. That’s called poetic license. Though Granny was quite fierce at first.”
Maddie doesn’t like to say, but she knows Mam’s wrong. There’s always a dragon.
“Maddie, you must sit quiet, your mother needs to rest.”
“Maddie, be a good girl. Your mother’s very tired.”
“Maddie, go to your room. Out the way now.”
An egg grew deep inside the fair Lady Sarah’s chest. One day, the egg hatched into an ugly chick. Its beak jabbed at Lady Sarah’s heart and its claws flayed her stomach and her liver.
Maddie straddles the branch of the lilac tree. The leaves are khaki-green, the flowers beige. Today she’s in a deep, dark cave, searching for Ali Baba with his diamonds and rubies and amethysts. She needs to speak to the Genie. Only one wish: the one she made yesterday and the week before and the month before that. Whisper it: “Make her better.” It might work this time.
Then again, it might not.
“Maddie, your mother needs a little operation.”
“Maddie, I’m off to the hospital, will you be all right on your own?”
The brave Sir Billy took his fair lady to a high mountain. He held her high above his head and yelled to the heavens,
“Save her. Save the Lady Sarah from this agony.”
And the heavens looked down on Sir Billy and whispered: “Are you sure?”
“Anything,” yelled Sir Billy. “Just make it stop.”
A soft breeze passed over the couple. Lady Sarah drew a final, shuddering breath and was silent.
“Maddie, love, I’ve got some news.”
“Maddie?”
Rain. Everything falls under the weight of it. Maddie presses her face against the trunk of the bare lilac tree. Her new black dress itches the back of her neck. No one thought to cut the label. She hears her name. Time to go.
Lilies, incense, beeswax. Earth on wood. Thud. Thud. Thud.
After the church, a hotel on the main road into town. Maddie used to wonder what it was like inside. A vast cathedral space, with a glittering chandelier? Or dark and dank, with dungeons full of stolen treasure? In real life, it smells of drains.
“Eat up, Maddie.” Granny, hair set in battalion grey curls, face set in hard lines. “You might feel better.” She passes Maddie a paper plate. It is so full Maddie carries it in two hands in case it collapses in on itself. Slippery sausage rolls with shiny pink meat. Plain crisps. Shop-bought fairy cakes.
Da sits with men in dark suits. They drink pints with whisky chasers. Ties loose, jackets discarded on backs of chairs.
“Could be a party, for all he cares,” mutters Granny, rigid-backed. Her oldest daughter, her best beloved. Gone. This isn’t how fairy stories are supposed to end. Maddie’s chair has a wound in the red fabric. She picks at it–pick, pick, pick–until white stuffing bleeds out. Granny doesn’t notice.
“You’re going to have to get your head out of the clouds, Maddie. Grow up.”
Pick, pick, pick at the sausage rolls. Pick, pick, pick at the crisps. Pick, pick, pick at the fairy cakes. Granny was half right: Maddie doesn’t feel better, but the more she eats the less she feels, and that will do for now.
Paper chains hang from the living room light fixture: green, silver, purple. Da in his armchair with a medicine-pink paper hat on his head, a glass tumbler in his hand. The TV belches belly laughs. Da’s eyes are shut, his mouth open, his whisky tilted.
Maddie’s upstairs, eating a box of mince pies. One, two, three, four, five, six tinfoil cases on the floor. Her mouth tingles with sugar and E numbers.
One dark, rainy night, as Lord Billy bravely fought the hounds of hell, a dragon swooped down on his only child, Princess Madeline, and locked her in a tall tower with no door. No one visited except for the dragon, who came with delicacies for the Princess to eat.
The Princess asked the dragon for two of everything:
“One for me, one to build a mountain to climb down,” she decided and threw the extra food out of the window, onto the ground below.
Granny visits. “My, how you’ve grown.” She takes Maddie to the big shops in town, their windows full of half-dressed mannequins. Before the bus home, she treats Maddie to a visit to the department store cafe on the third floor. Black Forest Gateaux, dirty thick, oozing through the fork tines.
“Your mother had a sweet tooth,” Granny says. “Tuck in.” She watches Maddie, hungry for evidence of her daughter.
“Can I come and live with you, Gran?” Maddie asks, through chocolate and cherries. Gran looks over her head, at the advert that says Buy One Get One Free.
“It’s not so bad with your Dad, is it?” She looks very, very old.
“No,” Maddie says, quickly. “Not so bad.” She takes another dark mouthful and wonders if Granny will let her lick the plate.
The Princess was ready to climb down the food mountain she had made. But when she tried to escape out of the window, she found she was too fat to squeeze through the bars.
“Fatty Maddie, Fatty Maddie.” Breaktime. Maddie took two digestive biscuits and her classmates don’t like it. They circle like seagulls squawking round a fishing boat. One two, three, bites and the biscuit’s safe in her mouth. They can shout all they want now. Crying won’t help, so she doesn’t. She concentrates on the taste of the biscuit, how it sweetens the more she chews. “Fatty Maddie, Fatty Maddie,” round and round and round and round. She knows what they want to happen next.
“Fatty Maddie is coming to get you,” she roars. She spreads her arms and uses her coat for wings. The children shriek and run away, safe in the knowledge she is too slow and, if she did catch them, so what? They are fully armored and they know her weak spot.
The woman behind the shop counter doesn’t look up from her magazine. On the display, bag upon bag of foil-wrapped toffees. Mam’s favorites.
Maddie checks the woman; her head is still bent. Maddie stuffs the sweets under her jumper; clangs the door open; walks fast, as if she was in a hurry, not because she stole something.
Round the corner, she starts with a silver one, a slow unwrapping, mouth wet in anticipation.
“Give us one of those.” Nits Brown from Maddie’s class, nasal with cold. He wipes his snot on the sleeve of his jumper.
“Yeah, give us one.” His brother, Bulldog, in the year above, coming up behind. Taller, thickset. Freckles. Hands curled into loose fists, ready for action.
She doesn’t want to. In the last three weeks she’s given them pencils, erasers, crisps, polo mints, loose change. These are Mam’s sweets.
She turns and runs. She runs, she runs, she runs.
“Fat cow,” they yell. “Fat cow. Loser.” Her chest pounds. Thighs chafe. Eyes prick red, black, red.
Home. Ha! She swings round the gatepost, flips them the V. Trips. Toffees scatter onto the pavement: silver, red, purple. Quick. Run. Too late: a thump, a shove.
“Fat cow can’t stand up straight. Come on, blubber girl.”
Knees skinned; hands skinned. Maddie’s stomach growls.
“You going to troff them down there, like a piggy? Piggy, piggy fat girl?”
She gets up, face wet with tears. Inside the house, horse racing on the TV. Da sits in his favorite armchair. He doesn’t work anymore. Couldn’t get up in the mornings. Maddie shows him her palms, flecked with gravel and blood.
“That’s bad,” he says. He doesn’t look away from the screen.
“I’ll put a plaster on it, shall I?” she says. Her chest is tight. The base of her skull prickles. It’s getting hard to breathe.
“You do that, love. You do that. Mind out the way now, I’ve money on this next one.”
From the kitchen window, the lilac tree is a thousand fingers scratching at the dusk. Maddie hasn’t been out there for months. She struggles through the ocean of grasses and brambles to the end of the garden.
She still has the toffee bag. She isn’t expecting much, a red or silver at most, a mangled yellow if she’s lucky, but when she opens it three royal purple toffees nestle inside.
This is a sign. It must be a sign. Of course it’s a sign. The moon smiles down, egging her on. Cram your mouth, Maddie. Make your wish.
Saliva dribbles down her chin. She chews slowly.
Now what?
The moon shrugs. What were you expecting?
She’s sick of it. Sick of the fat at her waist, of the slash and gnaw of her stomach, the never-ending want, want, want. She spits the wad of chewy sweetness on the ground. No one is coming. There’s no Prince in shining armor, or Genie with a wish. It’s just Fat Maddie. Fat, useless Maddie.
Once upon a time there was a sad, lonely Princess in a High Tower, imprisoned by a fierce, scary dragon. The Princess watched the dragon fly around the Kingdom, incinerating its enemies, capturing fair maidens. It wasn’t exactly a heroine, the dragon. But it was free.
Maddie straddles the branch of the lilac tree. Takes a deep breath. Another.
“I’m ready” she whispers to the darkening sky and closes her eyes.
Her skin cracks like water-starved earth; her scabs sharpen into spiny scales: purple; ink-black; violet; midnight blue. Her nails extend, thicken, curve. Her stomach burns red. Vast leather wings sprout from her back. Her teeth will scythe forests, her claws will crush mountains. She lifts her head, sniffs the air and move her wings for the first time. Thud, thud, thud: a breeze becoming a storm. And then she is up and away into the night sky, too large to be contained, and all that is left is a lilac tree, black in the moonlight.
| Jac Morris is a twice Pushcart-nominated writer of short-form fiction. Her flash fiction can be found at Propelling Pencil, Free Flash Fiction, Roi Faineant Press, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and Westword amongst other places. She lives in England and has recently launched an online flash fiction magazine called Neither Fish Nor Foul with her friend Jude and a taxidermied bear called Cap’n Dave. You can find her (too often) on Twitter @JackieMMorris or through her blog thewavingnotdrowningblog.com. |  |