Toad Words(19)

“Doesn’t matter,” muttered Myrtle, poking at the fire. “Can’t imagine it’ll be much longer for me anyway.”

Stunky gulped. It was hard to tell how old anyone was in Neverland. There were no birthdays, since Pan refused to acknowledge that anybody was getting older. Still, Myrtle thought she was about sixteen, and Stunky was only a year or two younger.

If you were a boy, you could sometimes hold out a little longer if you shaved in private. If you were a girl, though, there wasn’t anything anybody could do. Starvation kept most of them alive into their late teens, but sooner or later…well, as soon as Pan smelled blood on a girl, it was over.

You didn’t grow up in Neverland. You didn’t get a chance.

“You c’d go to the Indians,” said Stunky, keeping his voice so low that Myrtle had to lean in to hear him. His breath stirred the greasy strings of her hair. (Soap was another grown-up thing that Pan wanted no truck with. The Lost Boys did their best with plain water and sand, those few that worried about it at all.) “If’n you stay out of his sight long enough, he forgets you.”

Myrtle twitched a shoulder. She could feel the fairy’s eyes moving over her, like the touch of insect feet scuttling over her skin. The Indians were decent people, and they’d hide a Lost Boy if they could, but there was only so much they could do against Pan. Albert had said they called him the Young Wendigo, but Albert was dead and none of the remaining Lost Boys were quite sure what that meant.

Besides, there’d been that…incident…with the chief’s daughter. The pirates had tried to get to her in time, but…well…

Now, the pirates would take you if you could get to the ship, but the fairies watched the beaches all the time. And Benji, who wasn’t quite right in the head, swore up and down that Pan had changed in front of him once, into a great lord of crocodiles, a monster twenty feet long with teeth like an ivory bear trap.

“Just tore his skin right off and fell into the water,” Benji had wailed, curled up into a ball under a tree root and worrying at his scalp with his nails. “Just right off! And his mouth was open and those little fairies were walking in and out of his mouth and pickin’ at his teeth, I swear, I swear…”

Well. Everybody knew Benji was crazy. Pan had the fairies poke and pinch at him, sometimes, until he started to scream and threw one of his wobblers and bit his own fingers bloody. You couldn’t trust Benji.

But it was true that there was a crocodile that prowled the waters of the cove, and sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t.

It was also true that Pan himself never looked hungry. But you tried not to think about that.

You tried not to think about a lot of things.

Myrtle knew it wouldn’t be long. Even on the wretched diet they’d scraped together, things had been happening. Her face looked different, when she stared at it in the tidepools, and her ragged clothes gaped open in places where they used to lace shut.

She had to do something, but she didn’t know what to do. Her body kept getting older. But she kept waiting.

She thought perhaps she was hoping that something would happen, in this terrible timeless place where nothing was ever allowed to happen.

She kept hoping she’d find a way home.

Sometimes when she was nearly asleep, she used to pray or dream—maybe a little of both—that there would be a tap on the hold of the ruined ship, right by her ear, and a boy would come for her, as a boy had once before.

In her prayer, he looked a lot like her dead brother Albert. There was nothing fey or wild about him. His hands were broad and callused and his shoulders were stooped from the weight of responsibility.

He didn’t promise her anything. When she looked into his eyes, the only thing she was sure of was that he knew she existed. And alive or dead, he would remember her.

He didn’t fly. In the dream, he left heavy footprints in the sand. He just reached out and took her hand and pulled her up, out of this nightmare, into adulthood.





BAIT





You walked this far

one step after another

barefoot and stubborn on the earth.





Fur and feather aided you

even the crones who are half-beast themselves

even the robber bridegroom's child

but in the end you walked alone.





You were so brave

so stubborn

so very much in love.

It did not occur to you to question

how the talking crow found you

or why your bare feet did not freeze.





Truth is, I have no use for pretty frozen boys—

it's the brave girls who come after them

that form the bulk of my collection.





NIGHT





"Night" is the longest running show in the universe.