Fantasy Magazine

“I brought an apple for you, Teacher.” Vera Violetta had grown it on her bedside lamp and picked it just that morning. Teacher accepted it with a puzzled look. “It’s not everyday you see a striped apple,” she said, which was true. But the shade on the bedside lamp had stripes, so the apple was striped red and white, just like a stick of penny candy.

“I glued the dew to it myself,” Vera said. It was tricky, getting the silver-white rhinestones to stick, but she’d managed it.

“Wasn’t that clever of you?” said Teacher. “Now take your seat. It’s time for arithmetic.”

“Teacher’s pet,” Jimmy Johnson hissed at her as Vera made her way to her seat.

“Little Miss Stuck Up,” said Lizzie.

“We’ll get her at recess,” added Min.

And they did. They threw rocks and snails and plastic shovels and the crusts off their peanut butter sandwiches. They hurled curses and clumsy cuss words; Jimmy even threw his shoe. Vera filled it with jam and handed it back just as the bell rang to go back inside.

“Blueberry eyes!” they screamed at her as they turned to go.

“Stupid head!” Jimmy added and stuck his tongue out; it was purple from tasting the jam.

Vera didn’t follow them inside like she ought. Instead, she put her uneaten snack of six ruby raspberries back in her lunch pail and trudged home. The skinny track through the Wood tried to twist her around and put her back in the playground. The brambles and branches urged her to go back.

“You’re missing geography,” they said.

“Poo to you,” Vera said. And blueberry tears dribbled down her face because Vera had blueberry eyes and cried juice where other children cried salt tears. She had cheeks of apricot fuzz and a cherry mouth, if cherries had a split down the middle and crooked teeth just past. But no one made fun of her cheeks or her mouth. Just her blueberry eyes and her strange, strange ways.

“You live out in the forest, nyah! Your mother’s cracked and your father’s gone!”

Which was not quite true, since Vera’s father was a tree and they lived inside him. But her mother was indeed “cracked.”

Like now, when Vera opened the front door and eased it shut behind her. Her mother stood barefoot in the tiny kitchen and skimmed foam off a boiling pot of strawberry jam with a long-handled wooden spoon. She didn’t pay any mind when the boiling fruit flecked her arms with sugar-freckles and she was humming and she didn’t notice Vera was home about five hours early.

Her father noticed, though. The walls trembled just a bit as he admonished her with running sap and an earthquake.

“What was that, dear?” Vera’s mother said as she wiped her hands on the seat of her pants. Then she noticed her daughter standing in the foyer.

“Hullo, darling. Give us a kiss.”

“I’m not going to school anymore,” Vera announced. And she swung her lunch pail with as much insolence as she could muster. “They are a bunch of . . . of . . . stupid-heads.” The word tasted bad in her mouth, like a berry with a moldy middle.

“Now, love, I’m sure they’re not all that bad. I remember going to school, and I had so many jolly friends. Invite one of them back for tea sometime. Then you’ll see.”

Vera looked around their house with new eyes; the eyes of a non-existent school chum. Blackberries sprouted from the cracks in the sofa and the chandelier, if coerced and bribed correctly, bore peaches instead of the customary cut-glass crystals. Anything not made of fruit was made from wood or leaves or brambles. Even the armchair was upholstered in green moss-velvet.

Oh, she could just picture it: Jimmy and Lizzie and Min stomping through the foyer and smashing all the twig-tables to bits. Kicking the spearmint wallpaper with their copper toed boots. Poking their fingers through the willowware china.

“I don’t think so, Mum.” Vera set her lunch pail down with a determined thunk (wishing it was made of tin instead of birch bark — the sound would have been ever so much more impressive) and put her hands on her hips. “There’s no one I want to invite, and no one that would come if I did.”

Vera’s mother looked from the boiling fruit to her daughter and back to the boiling fruit. Then Vera found herself in the middle of a very sticky hug.

“Darling, I’m sure if you give it time,” her mother said as she snatched up her ladle and began coaxing berries and syrup into jars, “school will get better. The Teacher seemed very nice indeed.”

“Yes, she liked her apple.” Vera wiped at her cheek and licked her fingers. Strawberry this time. There was something else in there — rhubarb, perhaps? And a little elderberry honey?

Vera reached for a piece of bread and wiped the other cheek.

“I’m taking my snack and going to the Grotto, Mum. I’ll be back for dinner.”

“Be back for dinner,” her mother called after her. “And think about what I said!”

Vera slammed the door to her father behind her and rolled her blueberry eyes.

* * *

Vera Violetta liked the Grotto because her eyes looked more like normal eyes in the water’s reflection. The damp of the mossy stone under her bottom seeped through her thin cotton dress and underpants, but the sunshine was warm and the bread with jam very nice indeed.

Her mother was quite the hand with jam. Muffins, pancakes, pies too. She spent most of the week picking fruit off their walls and compounding things to sell at the marketplace of a Saturday. The money she got for chandelier peach pound cake paid for their clothes and living room settee blackberry crumble took care of the doctor’s bill the time Vera got an ear infection. Vera knew kids at school that regularly ate her mother’s jam at teatime and thought nothing of it.

So why did they hate her?

She glared at her reflection.

It must be the blueberry eyes.

Vera thought again about poking them out with a stick, then took another bite of her bread and jam instead. The Grotto-reflection Vera, the one without blueberry eyes, wrinkled her little nose and took a candy bar out of her pocket.

“The kids at school would like you better if you stopped filling their shoes with jam,” Grotto-Vera said, nougat stuck to her teeth.

“No, they wouldn’t. Then they’d tease me about my hair or my clothes.” Vera gave the bitten half of Grotto-Vera’s candy bar a Good Look. “Maybe I should eat more like you.”

Grotto-Vera thought this over. “Maybe. Instead of fiddlehead ferns and rose hips, you could try a sandwich. Or buy pizza from the cafeteria.”

“Pizza?” The word tasted funny. Like ‘stupid head’ only not as bad. It rolled over her tongue like grease soaking through a cardboard box. “Piiiiiiizza.”

Grotto-Vera nodded and tossed the sweet wrapper over her shoulder. It sank to the bottom of the pool and looked just like a brown-gray pebble.

“Try it tomorrow,” Grotto-Vera advised. “I have to go. Somebody’s coming.”

It was true. Grotto-Vera was always right about these things. The stranger stepped into the ring of trees and blinked, as though very surprised to find her there.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Vera Violetta returned the blink. Hikers didn’t normally wander around the forest in a top hat, tails and white gloves; he looked like a magician she’d seen once in the auditorium at school. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

“Only three? That seems stingy,” the Magician said.

“Three is the traditional number, I believe,” said Vera. “And if I was stingy, I wouldn’t give you any guesses at all.”

“Fair enough,” said the Magician. “Are you a fairy?”

“No.” Vera had read any number of books about forests and fairies and fae folk in green, and never once counted herself among them. Fairies did not have perpetual jam-hands that left smudges on the bindings.

“Maybe you are Red Riding Hood then, on her way to Granny’s house.”

“I don’t have a cloak. And my granny is dead.”

“That’s a pity. Do you mind if I take a drink before I make my last guess? I’ve been hiking all afternoon and I’m really very hot.”

It made Grotto-Vera very cross when people drank from her house, but she’d gone and who was to tell her? Vera waved her hand at it.

“Certainly. But not with your hands.”

The Magician untied his cravat and thought this over.

“Any particular reason?”

Vera smoothed her skirt over her knees. “Rule of the forest.”

“All right then.” He took a strip of birch bark and wrapped it into a cone. Then he waved a hand over it and the cone became a crystal goblet. “Will that do?”

“It will probably leak out the bottom, but if you don’t mind then I don’t.”

The Magician drank, and Vera watched with interest as the lump in his throat bobbed with every swallow. He refilled the crystal goblet three times; some of the water dribbled down his chin and into his shirt, but he didn’t seem to mind. Then he waved his hand over the cup and it flickered back into birch bark.

“That’s a nice trick,” Vera observed.

“Very handy in the forest. And at dinner parties.” He tossed the bark aside and smiled at her. “Well, little riddle, if you aren’t a fairy and you aren’t on your way to Grandma’s house, then maybe you’re running away from home to join the circus. You look like you’d be quite good at walking the tight wire, or flying on the trapeze.”

Vera had entertained the very brief idea that she might run away to join the circus — at the tender age of four — and then decided against it. At nearly nine, the idea was insulting. She slid off her rock and did her best to hide the wet spot on her bum.

“That’s three guesses, all wrong.”

The Magician held up his fingers and produced a gold coin. “I’m willing the pay the forfeit, dear Lady.”

The idea of a forfeit was intriguing, but if she didn’t hurry she was going to be late for dinner and then Mum would be cross —

“Tell me your name then,” she said.

The Magician’s eyes narrowed.

“Wouldn’t you know, I lost it in the forest just this morning. Perhaps I can give you a jewel instead?”

Vera shook her head.

“A bag of gold,” he tried again. “A pony?”

Vera laughed. “How silly. Where would I put a pony?”

“Goodbye, Little Riddle.”

“Goodbye, Careless Traveler.”

“And if you stumble over my name in the brambles, keep it safe for me until we meet again,” he said.

“I’ll trade it back to you for a wish,” Vera bargained.

“Done,” he said, and offered her his gloved hand. They shook solemnly, and her hand came away filled with butterflies.

“That’s a good trick,” she said.

“Oh, I have better ones,” he bragged. “You find my name and I’ll show them to you.”

“How will I find you?” Vera asked, very practical in these matters.

“Turn three times to the right and say three magic words, and I’ll be here.” He looked at her with his green, green eyes and smiled wide.

“Which three?” she asked.

“Any three you like.”

“That makes it easy then. Goodbye Careless Traveler. I hope I have reason to call upon you again.”

“And you, Little Riddle. Watch out for the Big, Bad Wolf on the way home.”

Vera laughed at the very idea and then raced the twilight and the butterflies home.

* * *“Your lunch pail is on the counter, darling.” Thump, thump went her mother’s fists into a bowl of bread dough. “And don’t forget to take your sweater. It’s chilly out this morning.”Vera considered the sweater, a nubby hand-knit thing all the colors of the rainbow and then some. If this was the day she tried normal on for size, the sweater would not do. And as for her lunch pail —“Mum?”“Yes, darling?” Thump. Thump.

“Can I have some money to buy lunch in the cafeteria instead?”

The thumps stopped, and Vera’s mother appeared with a tea towel in her hands and a frown that cut the middle of her forehead in half.

“Hot lunch, darling? I don’t know — ”

“Please, Mum? Just this once?”

The floor under their feet trembled just a bit. Vera’s mother reached for her purse.

“Money doesn’t grow on your father, you know.” She reached inside for her coin purse. “It has to be earned.” Took out a coin. “And it’s just this once. Next time, if you want to eat hot lunch, you’re going to have to earn it by gathering nuts or berries or firewood. Besides, that food is terribly unhealthy — ”

“I know, Mum!” Vera stood on tiptoe to kiss her mother’s floury cheek. “Thanks.”

“Don’t lose it now,” her mother cautioned as Vera tied the coin into her handkerchief.

“I won’t.”

“And take your sweater.”

“Aw, Mum.”

Her mother flapped the tea towel at the backs of Vera’s legs; tendrils of ivy swatted at her calves and wrapped around her ankles.

“You put that sweater on this second and get going or you’re going to be late.”

Vera jerked the garment off its hook and hustled down the path through the Wood. Once she was out of her father’s sight, she tucked the sweater under a hedge. The promise of winter hit her in the back of the neck, and she shivered.

It was cold, just like her mother had said. Maybe it was better to take it.

Grotto-Vera laughed in her head. That decided things.

Vera clapped her hands over her elbows and ran the rest of the way. She stepped out of the Wood and into the schoolyard just as Teacher came out to ring the bell.

Jimmy, Min and Lizzie jumped off the jungle gym and surrounded her.

“You’re late!” Jimmy poked her in the arm.

“I am not. The bell just rang.”

“Where’s your lunch pail, stupid head?” Min asked.

“Yeah, and that butt-ugly sweater you’re always wearing.” Lizzie added. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Not really,” Vera said.

“Liar!” Min screeched with delight. “Your lips are as blue as your weirdo eyes.” But then she laughed and hugged Vera; a vicious embrace that squeezed all the air out of her and ground her bones together.

Vera was trying to recover from the shock of being touched when Teacher rang the bell again. Min and Lizzie linked their arms through hers and practically dragged Vera inside. Jimmy brought up the rear, stepping on the heels of Vera’s shoes with every step.

They stuck with her through art time and creative writing and then recess, accompanying her on the swing set and the slide and other foreign bits of playground equipment. And they frog-marched her to the cafeteria when the noon bell rang.

The lunch lady peered at Vera through thick glasses flecked with grease and the fog of the steam trays. Vera stared back, very much afraid her mouth was hanging open and certain there was nothing she could do about it. Everything about the woman, from her hairnet to her loose folds of wobbly skin to her rubber gloves, was foreign yet familiar.

“Vera Violetta, what are you doing in line?”

Vera recognized her from the farmer’s market, a customer of her mother’s. Mrs. Loaf-of-Bread-and-Jar-of-Jam-Every-Other-Week. Mrs. . . . Simmons! Yes, that was it.

She didn’t wear hairnets on Saturdays, thank goodness.

Vera gripped the handkerchief-wrapped coin in her hand.

“Pizza, please, Mrs. Simmons.” The children behind her in line jostled and shoved, complaining about the hold up and what the heck was taking so long? But Mrs. Simmons didn’t slap the coveted wedge on the brown plastic tray like she’d done with the dozen children before Vera. Vera’s heart sank when Mrs. Simmons frowned.

“Is your Mother ill?”

“No ma’am.” Vera shifted, right foot to left as Min poked a finger in between her shoulder blades.

“Hurry it up, stupid head. We’re all starving.”

Mrs. Simmons didn’t seem to notice the shifting youthful crowd. She took her glasses off, wiped them on an equally greasy apron and situated them back on her face.

“I’m sorry my dear, I just don’t think she’d want . . . approve . . . this food . . . it’s just — ”

Min poked harder. Lizzie tapped her foot. Vera swallowed and summoned her most authoritative voice.

“Mother gave me the money and her permission this morning, Mrs. Simmons. Now, a piece of pizza, if you please.”

Mrs. Simmons hesitated a moment longer, and Vera nearly gave up. Then the lunch lady slapped a piece of pizza on the brown plastic tray and screamed “Next!” so loud that Vera jumped. Min helped her along the line with a good hard shove, and Vera concentrated on the tray, the pizza and her feet until she’d given her coin to the woman at the end of the counter and found a seat in the corner.

Min sat down on one side and Lizzie the other. Vera stared at their trays: pizza and paper cartons of chocolate milk and gelatin with bits of fruit suspended in its brilliant green depths like bugs in amber.

Vera returned her eyes to her own tray. Little beads of oil dotted the surface of her pizza. She hadn’t thought to get gelatin, or chocolate milk. She just had her pizza, a napkin and her resolve to be normal.

Min and Lizzie shook their milk, popped the containers open with a practiced pinch of the fingers and sucked the contents through straws like pint-sized vampires. Lizzie was swinging her legs and kicking Vera in the shins under the table, but Vera didn’t think it was intentional. The girls were downright friendly compared to most days, chattering about barrettes and homework and television programs Vera had never seen.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Min shoveled her gelatin in and when she talked, waves of fruit-studded goo sloshed around her mouth and lapped at her teeth. Lizzie continued to kick Vera in the shin under the table, and Vera didn’t want to offend her by shifting her legs. It was too pleasant to sit here like a normal girl with normal eyes and normal friends eating their normal lunches.

“Oh sure,” she said with false bravado, and picked up the piece of pizza. The weight surprised her, as did its objection to being handled. The cheese slid over her fingers and the pepperoni went with it.

“Stick the end of it in your mouth!” Min screamed. “Like this!” And she took another huge bite of her own slice.

Vera mimicked her, stopping the landslide of toppings with her upper lip. Lizzie giggled and cheered, other kids turned around to see what was happening.

“Keep going!” Min said around a mouthful. “Quick, the cheese is falling off!”

Vera took another bite, and shoved it inside her cheek with the first. Tomato sauce slid down the back of her throat and the crust tasted simultaneously of carbon and cardboard. One more bite, and she thought she would choke.

Jimmy sat down next to Lizzie and grinned his gap-toothed grin at Vera.

“Watch out for hairs.”

Lizzie and Min screamed with laughter at the idea, but Vera Violetta scrunched her blueberry eyes shut and wished he could take back the words. The three bites of pizza in her mouth stuck in the back of her throat and then exploded all over the table. Then she retched up her breakfast and possibly part of dinner from the night before as the fearsome threesome fled several tables away screaming “Gross!” and “Ewwwww!”

Tears streamed down Vera’s cheeks and her nose ran. Teacher arrived and tried her help her mop up her face and the front of her dress.

“Don’t worry, honey. You can put your sweater on and no one will be able to see.”

“I left my sweater at home.” She was shaking now, shaking like the leaves on her father when a cold winter wind found the house.

Teacher guided her through the hushed silence towards the door. Vera’s blueberry glance skidded over the faces, the expressions of disgust and vicious amusement. The janitor arrived with his mop and bucket. And that’s when Jimmy laughed.

Vera jerked away from Teacher and closed the distance between them in three bounds.

Then she punched him directly in the nose.

Blood gushed out of him, like juice from an orange, only stickier and redder than anything she’d ever seen. Jimmy clapped his hands to his face.

“Ow!” he howled.

“Vera Violetta!” a horrified Teacher exclaimed.

And Vera ran. Out the cafeteria door and down the deserted hallway. Out the front doors and across the empty playground. Into the Wood, which knew better this time and didn’t so much as twist the path to the left where it shouldn’t. She ran and sobbed and forgot the cold and the sick down her front until she tripped over something and fell to her hands and knees. She lay down flat in the path and cried until she was empty, like a nutshell once the nutmeats are picked out. She wanted to stay there until the leaves covered her in a blanket, sleep until winter was done and spring returned.

But after a while, she got a crick in her neck. Her dress was clammy and stuck to her in places, and her mouth tasted like pizza and worse. Vera levered herself into a sitting position and looked back to see what had tripped her up.

She’d expected a tree limb, a rock, or an animal hole of some sort. Not a glistening sphere the size of her thumbnail that glowed with some sort of inner light and sparked when she picked it up. She wiped some mud off with the hem of her dress, and the object hummed.

Vera Violetta was by no means a silly little girl. She had a very good idea just what she held in her hand. She closed her fingers over it and ran for the Grotto.

I wish, I wish to be normal!

* * *

The stranger wasn’t there, but Grotto-Vera had plenty to say. “I heard the story from the moss, who heard it from the path-brambles, who heard it from the trees along the edge of the playground. That hawthorn sees everything that happens at that school.”

Vera rinsed her mouth out first, chewing handfuls of spearmint and swirling them around with the water from the coldest part of the Grotto. When she couldn’t taste pizza any longer, she washed her hands and splashed water over her face. Then she scrubbed at the worst spots on her dress with a sliver of rock and a soap root.

“So does Mister Nosy Hawthorn see them tease me and bully me and throw things at my head?” Vera twisted her skirt to wring the extra water out and then sat on a rock to dry.

Grotto-Vera pressed her lips together. “Little ladies do not go around punching little boys in the nose, however terrible they may be and however much that little boy might deserve it.”

“Oh really?” The thin afternoon sunlight did little to warm her, and Vera wished again for her maligned sweater.

“Yes, really.” Grotto-Vera paused. “Did he bleed?”

“Yup.”

“A lot?”

“Quite a lot.”

Grotto-Vera tried not to smile, and didn’t quite manage it.

“He is,” she conceded, “a horrible little boy.”

They grinned at each other. Vera checked her skirt and was surprised to find it nearly dry. Her heart thumped just a little as she slid to the ground and turned once to the right.

“Hocus pocus,” she said. Another turn — the forest bled green around the edges as she spun. “Alakazaam.” Dizzy, she nearly fell. “Please.”

The Magician stepped out of the trees. “Please?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Vera took a deep breath; everything was still spinning, although she had stopped. “It’s the best magic word I know for getting something you want.

“That’s very true,” said the Magician. He looked different this time, as though any minute his hat might shift and spill leaves all over the ground. “I think you have something of mine, Little Riddle. Something I want very much. I’ll even say please for it.”

Vera closed her hand over the marble. “And you promised me a wish if I found it, Careless Traveler.”

“That I did.” He took another step toward her and then stopped to smile wide.

Vera didn’t like seeing that many of his teeth. She took a step back.

The Magician seemed to understand her discomfort, and pulled things out of his pocket: yards and yards of scarves, a bouquet of silk flowers, a pair of love birds, a penny whistle, a stick of candy. Then he began to juggle them with the greatest of ease, all the while watching her with his green, green eyes.

Eyes like gooseberries.

“So what do you wish, Little Riddle? You wish to be rid of your blueberry eyes?” Scarves flew over his head and flapped into the trees above to nest in the branches. “You want to be a normal little girl with boring little friends?” The penny whistle shrieked like a steam locomotive. “Pizza for lunch and hamburgers for dinner and fruit punch and snack cakes and birthday parties and sleep-overs and nasty little boys to kiss?”

“No,” Vera lied.

“Liar,” he said. And he then juggled a willowware plate, a scrap of spearmint wallpaper, a jumbled lump of yarn that might have been her sweater.

Vera didn’t like where this was going. She didn’t like the sneer on his lips or the green of his gooseberry eyes or the fact that he’d stolen things from her father. She didn’t like the way he looked at her or the way she was out here alone (because Grotto-Vera couldn’t be counted on in a fight).

“Glare all you like. Be as nasty as you want. But I still have your name and you’d better behave or . . . ” she cast about for an appropriate threat, “I’ll eat it.”

He dropped everything; the willowware plate smashed against a rock, the wallpaper fluttered into the water and her sweater landed in a heap of wool in the dirt.

“You wouldn’t,” he said.

“Try me,” she countered. The bullies at school had prepared her well for this moment, she acknowledged. She owed Jimmy an apology for the damage she’d done to his nose. And perhaps some jam.

“Make your wish!” he cried. “You know what you want!”

“I don’t know what I want yet,” she lied. Only it wasn’t a lie anymore.

“You know. I know. Don’t think I don’t know,” he said. “I know. I know exactly what it’s like. The whispering and staring and pointing. They laugh at you when you pass them in the halls and they trip you on the way to your seat. I know.”

“So you ran away,” Vera said. “Didn’t your parents miss you?”

“There weren’t any parents to miss me.”

Vera contemplated what it would be like to not have a tree for a father, or a silly jam-making mum. The idea tasted almost as bad as pizza.

“You stole things from my house,” she said.

The magician had the grace to look at his feet and turn red to the tips of his ears.

“I just wanted to see what it was like inside. I’ve watched your Mum come and go.”

“Can you really give me a wish?” Vera asked.

“Yes.” The Magician glared at the ground and then at the sky. “I’ve gathered up the extra bits of magic, when the berries ripen and the hatchlings break out of their eggs and when the leaves turn orange. And I have enough for one wish.”

“And you’ll give it to me, in exchange for your name?”

“Yes!” he said. “I was saving it for myself, but I’ll give it to you.”

Vera thought about her odd house and her rainbow sweater and her blueberry eyes. She thought about the children at school and how angry Teacher must be and Jimmy’s nose. And she thought about the Magician, and his gooseberry eyes and his strange, strange ways.

“I wish — ” and she paused, trying to think of the right words.

The Magician held his breath. “Yes?”

“I wish you could do it over again, and not mind your gooseberry eyes.”

The Magician stared at Vera as she pressed his name into his hand. The tiny sphere exploded with light that encompassed the Magician and knocked Vera onto her bum. And all the blackberry-hatching-leaf magic softened the angles of the Magician’s face and stole his inches away one by one and sapped the deep timbre from his voice. By the time it faded, he looked no older than Vera herself, and swam in his clothes. The top hat slid over his eyes, and he shoved it back with one brown paw of a hand.

Blue eyes contemplated green, and then she held out her hand.

“I’m Vera Violetta,” she said.

“And I’m Jack.” They shook with due solemnity. “And now what do we do?”

“Now we go back to my house for tea,” she said. “Mum will be so pleased to meet you.”

Read more in Fantasy Magazine 6: Available now!

Magazine / $5.95 / 80 pp.

When not scribbling, Lisa Mantchev can be found on the beach, up a tree, making jam or repairing things with her trusty glue gun. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Aeon, and Abyss & Apex. More will be appearing soon in Japanese Dreams and Electric Velocipede. She is currently at work on the third novel in the Théâtre Illuminata trilogy. You can Taste the Bad Candy at her website.