Arcane II by Nathan Shumate (Editor) Page A

and hushed mirthful words. The door to Tatyana’s room opened as Grandmother and someone else entered.
    “Tatyana, this is your grandfather, Grigory,” Grandmother said, but Tatyana did not want to believe her. She did not want a grandfather.
    Grandmother’s words sounded wrong, exhaled, croaked out, grated as a saw’s blade on wood, but were sickly sweet and overripe with joy. Could she be a woman dressed like Grandmother? Tatyana wanted to believe that.
    But the woman with the man was her grandmother. She carried her broom, dripping rain from its twigs. She wore her dark skirts, which passed through raindrops and never wrinkled. She walked in her red leather slippers, the ones—Grandmother had told her—that the house and the hurricane listened to.
    Tatyana didn’t like it, but how could it be anything but the truth? That man, Grigory, was her grandfather, which she never knew she had.
    Tatyana knew what a man was. She had seen pictures in the books, which the hut laid every day on her pillows, but the pictures now paled compared to seeing a man in the flesh. The pictures were only outlines of something so complex. He was old, a man made of bark that creaked even when he wasn’t moving.
    “Don’t be shy, my dear,” Grandmother said and laughed and said through thick syrupy laughter, the words mirth themselves.
    Grandmother kissed Grandfather Grigory, and Tatyana did not feel well when Grandmother’s thick lips sank in the quicksand of wrinkles that were Grandfather Grigory’s cheeks.
    At that point Tatyana forgot everything: her belly that ballooned as if stolen from the throat of a frog, the fireplace that was an iron mouth with iron teeth, the tongues of light that licked the pages of her book, the words that spasmed when the light hit around the illustrations of snakes, snakes Tatyana loved to watch and run her fingers on.
    All that seemed covered in dust in her mind, like the times she’d forgotten to wipe down the pantry. Even the hurricane that closed the house in the armpits of its winds, now hissing lightning and spitting rain, was beyond her attention.
    There was only this crickity-crackity wooden doll of a man with sand as skin that moved around, pulled left and then right as if beneath its surface squirrels skittered, not that Tatyana had ever seen squirrels, for she had seen almost nothing outside Grandmother’s hut. He smelled of the sea, his clothes dripped water that was not of the sky.
    His eyes, she could not see. But the smile... She remembered, for it was the twin to that of Grandmother’s, stretched over her cinnamon face.
    “Don’t be rude, child. Stop staring,” Grandmother said through her smile without moving her lips, as if Grandmother were not there, in her body. “Look, your Grandfather has brought us eels for dinner.”
    It was only then that Tatyana could see past Grandfather Grigory’s smile to his left hand, which held a bundle of long animals that looked like snakes, but had no scales. They were dark as if they were ribbons of the night, smelled like the sea, and they were covered in grease. Tatyana wanted to play with them. She loved snakes, even though these were not. Tatyana had only the house, the hurricane and Grandmother to play with, so she felt sad that she had to eat the eels.
    “Silly girl,” Grandmother said and put a frown over her smile, the former never maturing, the latter never melting away. “Get these in the kitchen and get your grandfather a cup of my brew. Can’t you see he’s not well?” All the while she sounded happy.
    Tatyana closed the book. The pages huffed in disappointment, or maybe that was Tatyana who wanted to stay a bit longer.
    “Finish yours first, or else you won’t sleep,” Grandmother said and patted her shoulder the same way she fluffed her favorite pillows.
    The bracelets chirped a metallic song as Grandmother brought the half-empty cup to Tatyana’s lips. Tatyana opened her mouth and gulped it all in one breath. The brew