night, save for a few lone wanderers, and a few too many huddled down to sleep in shop fronts.
Light spills onto the pavements, illuminating the residents within. Leo wonders who they are, these people whose thoughts he can hear but whose names he doesn’t know. Behind one window, he senses a Grimm girl, one with strengths and skills still dormant, with no idea yet of who she is or what’s to come.
Most of all, he thinks of Goldie, wondering what happened to her afterwards at the hands of her boss. He’ll find out tomorrow. He hopes she didn’t take any shit from the jumped-up little toad; he hopes she gave as good as she got, hopes she bit off his tiny dick. He smiles when he thinks of her reading his diary. Fortunately he hadn’t written anything incriminating, or he’d have lost his all-important upper hand: the element of surprise.
Over a decade ago
Everwhere
As you step outside the gates you notice the shift. It’s so subtle that, at first, you hardly perceive it. But, as you begin to leave Everwhere behind, as the scent of bonfires no longer lingers on your skin, as your eyes adjust to the sharper light—feet quickening on concrete instead of moss, ears twitching at the close honk of a car horn and the distant bark of a dog—you notice that you feel a little duller, a little denser, a little sadder. Your head feels heavy, as if you haven’t been sleeping well. Something niggles at you, as if you’d recently received bad news but can’t quite recall what it was.
As you walk deeper into the world you’ve always known, this place where the bricks and mortar are so familiar, the shift feels ever stronger, more acute. The contentment you had felt, the calm, the clarity, is evaporating. The touch of sadness presses on your chest until it seems to pierce your core. Steadily, you feel as if your spirit, every memory of laughter, every capacity for joy, is being sucked out of you, just as clouds leech light from the sky.
You want to turn back, want to run to the place you’ve left, but you know you cannot. There’s no going back, not until the next first-quarter moon, not until the gates open again. And so you walk on. Until you no longer notice the dull ache of disappointment and sorrow, for now it’s as much a part of you as the blood flowing in your veins. And, after a while, you forget how you once felt. And, finally, you forget that you were ever there at all.
Goldie
“You know I only want to keep you safe, don’t you, pet?”
I nodded. I wanted to tell Ma to stop calling me that. I wanted to ask, Safe from what? But I sensed it’d unleash a hysterical flood of fear I didn’t want to deal with. Whenever Ma was in this sort of mood it was easier to agree with everything and wait. So I tuned out, took a deep breath, and dived under the waters, while currents of anxiety swirled above as Ma chattered on.
I wished I could tell Ma I’d be fine, there was nothing to worry about because I could take care of myself. I wanted to tell Ma about my sisters, about what I could do in Everwhere. But I knew she’d dismiss me as a silly girl having fantastical dreams or, worse, subject me to a regurgitated lecture on the infinite perils of life. So I held my breath and kept quiet.
“Why don’t I tell you a story?” Ma asked, reaching out to twine a finger through my hair. She had blond hair like mine but with a fine fuzz of close-cut curls that gave her a halo effect, a saintly look that sometimes belied her behaviour. “A new one.”
I flinched. I didn’t often like her stories, but I never knew how to say so. Ma told stories to scare me into staying safe, into never doing anything audacious. She didn’t want me to have adventures, to fall—or fly—over the edges of expectation. One day I would—not under Ma’s custodial eye, but when I was old enough I knew I’d leave. Leave home and go to London, or even farther. Perhaps I wouldn’t even come back.
Maybe I’d return one day, when I’d been away long enough to miss Ma. But only when I’d seen as much of the world as it was possible to see. Nothing Ma said would change that; no matter how