Saskia's Skeleton Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One. Bastilly’s

  Chapter Two. The Woods

  Chapter Three. Saskia’s Fairy Tale

  Chapter Four. The Castle

  Chapter Five. The Proper Invasion

  Chapter Six. The Prison

  Chapter Seven. Charlie

  Chapter Eight. A Visitor

  Chapter Nine. Good-bye

  Chapter Ten. Ever After

  P.S.

  If it so happens that you are a child, it would be my pleasure to tell you this story about a one-eyed girl, her skeleton, and its bird; a kooky princess; a boy who could run very fast; and a cat, who turned human. But be brave! And beware:

  This is not a fairy tale.

  If you’d rather be ranked among adults, particularly proper ones, I assure you that, despite the conclusions you may have already jumped to, this story is not too silly and is in fact, ahem, a metaphor (which I trust you are well able to decipher without condescending explanations from someone like me). Oh, you’re also going to need some sort of guarantee or insurance, of course, so here you go:

  This story has a happy ending*.

  Now, if you’re uncertain of which party to join (children or grown-ups?); if you don’t see why that is supposed to matter at all; if you can’t help but be somewhat indignant at my suggesting you’re proper; and if it’s beyond you why a story about a cat and a skeleton can’t be serious without having to be a metaphor—then, first, let us exchange hugs, or handshakes, or at least knowing smiles, and second, allow me to dedicate to you this story

  with a fairly sad ending.

  Chapter One. Bastilly’s

  It’s not unjust to expect a glorious story to kick off in a glorious way—say, with a large, fluffy, propeller-tailed dog drooling all over a laughing face. Or with a cake so big and sweet as to fill five stomachs and uplift five moods. Or, at the very least, with someone waving wistfully at an old friend.

  This, however, is a humble little story that doesn’t sit around claiming gloriousness. As such, it is spared the trouble of living up to any glorious expectations—like the necessity to start with something beautiful, bright, kind, or even funny. This little story is thus free to begin with a gloomy, spine-chilling, sinister-looking (as well as long-winged and, when viewed from above, V-shaped—just so you won’t mis-imagine it) fortress.

  If instead of viewing it from above, you looked up at it, though, from a child’s height, you could easily mistake the fortress for the stern dark bow of a giant icebreaker ship—except rather than plowing polar seas, cleaving glaciers, and stupefying penguins, it was towering formidably (albeit quite incongruously) amidst the otherwise flat, half-heartedly green scenery. The plainness of its surroundings only made the building appear eerier for the contrast.

  The main entrance at the sharp front of the gloomy, spine-chilling, sinister-looking, long-winged, and V-shaped fortress was opening. It was doing so slowly, slowly, sloooowly, and the terrible creaking noise the massive door was making echoed like a raven’s cry in the stillness of the gray sky. From behind the door, peeped out: first, the toe of a little shoe; then, a bit higher, four cautious little fingers; then, a bit higher still, a little nose—and only then, the nose was followed by the rest of the little girl’s face. Accompanying her face was shaggy black hair, the longest of its chaotic strands barely covering her ears. The girl’s right eye was plastered with a violet pirate patch, while the left one, dark and intent, glistened among the long eyelashes like a glossy, many-legged spider. Still only half outside, the door concealing her other half like an oversize cast-iron shield, Saskia assessed just how much trouble she was in. “This time,” added the girl, to herself.

  What she saw ahead was to Saskia more sinister, more spine-chilling than all the eerie fortresses of the world put together: her classmates. Just as she had feared, every one of them was still here, waiting for her to come out. The children stood before the building in two rows facing each other, forming a sort of corridor—a corridor of humiliation, terror, and shame, which Saskia was going to have to wade through. As swiftly and synchronously as though someone behind Saskia had tugged on a bunch of unseen strings, the children’s heads all turned in her direction. The girl swallowed audibly, and her fingers clenched more tightly around the door’s edge.

  Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!

  The children had wonderful porcelain skin. With that wonderful skin of theirs, and lining the grassless path running across the lawn, they looked like some flawless, cream-colored Greek columns dressed in identical well-ironed blue suits. Saskia, meanwhile, was wearing a baggy, yellowed shirt that had a few jagged holes in the sleeves, a pair of weathered brown pants, and an equally weathered (and equally brown) vest—all wrinkled and stained, of course.

  The other kids weren’t much taller than Saskia—in fact, some of them weren’t taller than Saskia at all—but at that instant, the girl felt almost microscopic next to them, and it was as though with each second that she hesitated to step forward, she were getting shorter and grimier, while the others grew only taller and more immaculate. This sort of thing happens when you are a child faced with the prospect of walking some fifteen yards under the intense, disapproving, mocking gazes of other children. Proper children.

  Saskia un-clung from the door at last, and it swung slowly closed, resounding throughout the muted midday with another long crrrrawk, and then a gunshot-like bang! The girl gave a jump, and in a moment, her back was magnetized to the door once more. If all eyes had been goggling at her before, now they seemed to have doubled in size and quantity. Saskia shut her own eye and shook her head. For some reason, that eyeful vision was not helping her brace up.

  The air was fresh and greenish-blue, and smelled sweetly of a recent rain. Drawing in a lungful of it, Saskia took heart and transferred her foot from the stone front step down onto the loose, damp ground. As loose as it was, and despite Saskia’s faint dark hopes, the ground refused to help the girl out by swallowing her up, so she had little choice but to take another step, and another one after that. The closer she was to the children, the wilder it became: the incessant rustling noise that had been hovering around since she’d opened the door—as if countless wings of shadow-like, flash-like birds swished through the air.

  Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!

  Saskia faltered and froze, her gaze fixed on the tarnished silver buckle of her tired brown boot. As she had known it would, a great and blurry drop of red came, flashing, into view. Proceeding to fall away, the drop grew smaller and more well-defined until finally it hit the buckle and exploded all over it. Saskia licked her upper lip. There was a familiar rusty saltiness in her mouth now, as if she had a silver buckle under her tongue, too. “Here it comes,” Saskia thought. How mortifying! You pretend as best you can that you are perfectly at ease and having the loveliest day, but your nosebleed gives you away. (Most people’s bodies betray them by trembling or stumbling or sweating, but Saskia’s had perhaps one of the most embarrassing ways of telegraphing uneasiness.)

  And she did have her reasons to be feeling uneasy. Even on a normal day, the proper children gave Saskia enough grief, but half an hour ago, the girl had had the impudence to break today’s normality—with something as innocent as presenting her homework. From where Saskia stood, she’d performed rather great, so she didn’t understand what had happened and why. Certainly, knowing her audience, she hadn’t expected a delighted ovation; a good grade and a few impressed whistles would have done. She had bowed jokingly and smiled around at the class but had been met with nothing more than a lot of mute gaping. Once the teacher had left off clutching his heart and abandoned weird gulping noises in favor of something more intelligible, he’d excused all his pupils for the rest of the day. Al
l the pupils except Saskia, that is, who had had to hang back and answer a quarter-hour’s worth of odd questions regarding her homework. “What are some effects of the carry-on potion?” “How many mice are there in the tower?”

  But—of course!—instead of scampering home and liking Saskia a bit more for their early release, her classmates remained here to gloat.

  “Imagine that you are a little wolf,” Saskia told herself. “I am a little wolf.” That was what the Princess would do. The Princess often said that if you found yourself stuck in a situation you didn’t enjoy being stuck in, you would do well to imagine you were someone who could shuffle out of such a situation with dignity.

  More than anything now, Saskia wanted to unlearn the word “dignity” in practicing “skedaddling,” but that would be unbecoming to a little wolf. A little wolf would never skedaddle like some cowardly hare. (Saskia honestly tried to picture that, but all she came up with was an image of her own brain pouting, folding its arms, and shaking its own tiny head inside her head.) No, no—a little wolf, surrounded by big scary hunters smelling of gunpowder and avidness, would growl and snarl and glower at them with all the dangerousness it could muster, while creeping steadily toward the woods. It was fortunate for Saskia, then, that the woods were exactly where she was headed, too. Beyond them, the warmth of her splendid, safe castle awaited, where she would be hugged by her beautiful Princess and glanced at impassively by her sullen cat, Franz.

  Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!

  Another drop of blood slipped from Saskia’s nostril, slid down her lips and chin, and gravitated on to her shoe. Repressing a howl rising in her chest, Saskia hooked her thumbs under the shoulder straps of her backpack and, head still lowered, she looked up—challengingly, the way she supposed a little wolf would. As it often happens in such dramatic moments, a gust of wind blasted out of nowhere, and the girl’s tangled locks flew up and swirled around her face. Saskia could only hope this made her look slightly more menacing, not a lot more ridiculous.

  She stepped into the corridor of shame and thread-needled on, her defiant glare darting from face to face, daring the children to attack. (Saskia kept her head down as well as turned slightly to the right so she could dare those in the right row effectively, too.) Oh, what wonderful porcelain skin they all had! When your own face is strewn with dozens of crisscrossing thin scars, everyone around you seems to have porcelain skin.

  Saskia felt many eyes drilling into her, but each time she tried to catch any of the children staring, they looked away before she could. It was almost as if they weren’t even chanting—nobody’s lips appeared to be moving, not when Saskia’s gaze fell upon them, anyway. But the whooshing “Freak! Freak! Freak! Freak!” hadn’t subsided in her ears. Could they be chanting mentally, could Saskia hear their thoughts because they were directed against her, so loud and so unanimous?

  And the ceaseless whispering! “Hear the nonsense she spoke today? Everyone knows the poor thing’s not all there. Her whole family’s like that. Even the cat, I tell you. It’s got rats in the attic, mind. Threw a stick at it once, for fun, like, and I swear the dumb beast threw it back at me. Think I might’ve heard it cuss, too!”

  But who was it, who was whispering? Saskia peered into the children’s faces, but no one was so much as mouthing; all they did was avert their eyes and tug at one another’s sleeves as she passed. “It must be their eyes that are whispering,” decided Saskia. It was strange, but strange things rarely disturbed her as deeply as proper ones did.

  Was the corridor ever going to end? Saskia’s chin felt already all sticky, lips taut and itchy with blood. She raised her hand to her nose mechanically, and stared at her now-red fingers, which were flecked with scars like her face. Saskia always carried tissues for such an occasion but had already used today’s box when the teacher had asked her to stay after class. The only thing unnerving Saskia more than nasty whispers from proper children were compassionate questions from proper adults, so it had taken her a lot of tissues to get through that friendly interrogation.

  Not knowing what else to do with the blood, Saskia wiped the hand on her pants. That was something she’d never dare do were she dressed properly, as she was supposed to be, in the blue uniform, but today was a special day for Saskia—or so it should have been—and hence, she was wearing a pirate costume, with which blood went quite naturally.

  Sewn on the previous night by the Princess herself, this costume was for Saskia’s presentation; she could have just as well performed in the uniform, yes, but it was so much more fun this way (or so it should have been). Besides, you didn’t have a good excuse to dress up as a pirate every day. It was a shame, the Princess had said, that the other kids couldn’t pretend to be pirates and such whenever they liked. It would be no trouble for her to make them all costumes so that nobody’d have to feel envious, only she was afraid the proper adults wouldn’t allow it. Oh, the Princess knew their ways too well; sometimes, she tried her hardest to be like them, but she could never figure out how to be proper and happy at the same time.

  Saskia felt as though she had been walking down the corridor for hours already. She was just approaching the exit and had to remind herself not to break into a run, when she noticed a girl in the left row (the one with a pair of thick white braids and the bluest eyes Saskia’d seen in her life), whose lips were moving, after all. Saskia had never spoken to this girl, but she did know that her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth wasn’t chanting insults, however; it looked as though she wanted to say something—say something to her, Saskia.

  Heart fluttering thrice as fast as the second before, Saskia paused and lowered her gaze. She noted a silk scarf wrapped around the bluest-eyed girl’s neck. Although the scarf was blue, too, it wasn’t part of the school uniform. Saskia looked still lower, and there was a starched white handkerchief in Elizabeth’s hand. Saskia cast her gaze to the ground and saw a pretty, lacquered shoe inch toward her battered boot.

  Saskia held her breath, amazed at the ridiculous hope that this wonderful blue-eyed girl with such porcelain skin was about to come forward and offer her—her, Saskia!—that handkerchief. It would then cease to matter whatsoever what the other children were whispering. For a moment, Saskia had even forgotten she was a little wolf, although she did pull herself together promptly and made her stare wary again. There was a brief second when the bluest eyes met Saskia’s, and all the children’s attention began to lumber from Saskia to Elizabeth. The blue-eyed girl dropped her head, crumpled the handkerchief in her fist, and put her foot back in place.

  Saskia felt all eyes aim at her once more. The whispers picked up again. Somebody chuckled. Saskia realized she was still standing foolishly before Elizabeth, gawking at her. What a smart way to disprove you’re a freak! Not that there was much point in trying, what with Saskia’s silly, careless tricks that had got her in this position to begin with. The girl looked around her—the children’s faces seemed now twisted with wicked laughter and sneers only to appear utterly unstirred moments later, with just the echo of their laughter lingering in the air.

  As a thoroughly abashed Saskia turned to leave, the heavy door of the fortress crawked one more time. It must be some of the grown-ups because one of the children shouted, with a hint of relief in his voice, “That girl is bleeding again, sir! She needs to see the doctor, doesn’t she?”

  Saskia gasped. Her eye became perfectly round with horror, and her hair stood on end. She knew one should shun doctors at all costs if one didn’t want to wind up prescribed metal pellets for one’s improperness, and Saskia was positive she wasn’t going to find anything metal tasty. A friendly voice called her name, which boded another sympathetic talk. Just as the front door of the fortress shut with another bang, Saskia devised a clever compromise that would cater to both her little girl’s fear and her little wolf’s dignity: After such a loud gunshot, no one would blame a little wolf for taking to its heels, which was what Saskia did without looking back.

  Her breathing panicked
, her backpack rattling, the girl hurtled down the remainder of the grassless path, through the arched gates in the fence surrounding the fortress grounds, along the bowed cobblestone bridge over a gurgling creek, and plunged into the woods. Perhaps, the Princess would be displeased that Saskia had chosen not to wait until she picked her up today, but the girl was far more afraid of proper talks and metal pills than walking through the woods alone. So she ran, panting loudly, away from this dreadful building that was called, as the plate at the entrance proclaimed,

  Chapter Two. The Woods

  Like the school grounds, the woods were bordered by a high wrought-iron fence. Apparently, proper people had at some point decided that everything ought to be bounded, walled in and off. Properties, countries, even these woods. Were they worried, wondered the girl as she ran, that were it not for the fence, the trees would head for the hills?

  Now Saskia came to think of it, there was something else that bemused her about these woods, namely the golden plaque at their gates that explained what they were. Somebody proper must have also decreed that everything should be tagged and defined, even the most obvious or the most obscure things. Perhaps they felt, speculated Saskia, that had they not concreted the nature of these woods by engraving it on metal, the place might one day grow tired of woodiness and evolve into water or rock. (Proper adults wouldn’t appreciate having to redraw the boundaries then.)

  So, as Saskia’s feet pedaled on, her mind was occupied with pondering all that. Had it worked at least a little more properly, it would rather concern itself with a different side of the matter: What the plaque at the entrance explained was that these were—

  The girl raced for another minute, keeping to the earthy trail that lay quite straight, splitting the wilderness into two neat halves. This was, Saskia guessed, why the sign said “the woodS”: Indeed, they were neither dense, nor vast enough to call themselves “we,” but there was one wood to the left of the trail, and another one to the right, and together, these were two woodS.