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title: Tangledown date: july 15, 2002 Tom slipped out of the house, smiling slightly as a cat wound between his legs and purred. It was a tabby, thin enough to see dark outlines of ribs as the moonlight shone through the skin and fur. He went back inside and poured it a porcelain saucer of cream. He sat under the Riddles’ apple tree and realized he could reach straight up and just grab any apple he wanted and the abundance of everything astounded him. At some point he fell asleep with a core clutched to his chest, one arm wrapped around himself and the cat in his lap, purring and thrumming like a heart. He dreamt about his mother, first. She was walking around the house, touching things, touching velvet lampshades and mahogany staircase banisters as if she had never touched them before (Tom wasn’t sure she’d had, in real life). She was dressed as a French maid, the sort you fuck with their skirts hiked around their waist, their fragile hands clutching the handle of the feather-duster while they scream English obscenities with the adjectives all over the place. Then she saw him, and when he bent low to kiss her hand, she stared at him with frightened eyes and said, “I’m sorry, dear, I think I’m dead. I’m sorry, there wasn’t enough life for the both of us.” Tom would like to imagine a dramatic, bloody death; his mother gasping out his name (“TOM!”) before she dies under the helpless eyes of maids with useless hot water and towels. But it isn’t like that -- she died about an hour later, just melting away, like ice-cream in the sun. He would come back later, he told himself, as he strolled down the street and out of Little Hangleton. To burn the entire house down, with his dead family in it. *** There was a Prince, once upon a time. He would stare at the lapping Prefect’s pool and dip slender, prehensile toes in the frothy water; all around him, startled, giggling prefects would be shoved in and come up sputtering. Nobody dared to push him in; the air around him suggested that the water would run straight off. In time, he grew up to be a Monster and a Lord. Almost all Princes do, if they survive to that age. |
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