Far below, in the Toadstool Ring of Dunsany Gardens, Oleander Hex grins up at the stunned audience. For a long moment, a moment that seems to stretch from the heat-birth of cellular life to the frozen death of the universe, no one moves. Not the thousands in the stands. Not the fairy band on the green. No more than a hare and a wolf move when they have sighted one another across a stream and both know how their evenings will conclude.
A man halfway up the stacks of seats trembles and sweats. His eyes bulge.
“You fucking pixie bitch,” he shouts, and his shout echoes in the fearful quiet like the ringing of a bell.
Manzanilla Monsoon doesn’t need a mic and never has.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PRIMATES AND PRIMITIVES, NEADERNOTHINGS AND CRO-MISERIES, WELCOME TO THE ONE YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR, THE BIG SHOW, THE FIGHT YOU ALWAYS KNEW WAS COMING. THE RUMBLE IN THE FUNGAL, THE BRAWL IN THE FALL, THE BLAST FROM THE VAST BEYOND! THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S TIME TO ROCK THE EQUINOX! STRAP YOURSELVES IN FOR THE MOST EPIC BATTLE ROYAL OF ALL TIME!”
“Run, apes!” bellows the grand-daughter of a river and a god. “Run now and run forever, run as far as you can, though it will never be enough. After all, children, this is a Battle Royal! No holds barred. No submissions accepted. No disqualifications. And a fall counts anywhere.”
The Long Goodnight
of Violet Wild
1: VIOLET
I don’t know what stories are anymore so I don’t know how to tell you about the adventures of Woe-Be-Gone Nowgirl Violet Wild. In the Red Country, a story is a lot of words, one after the other, with conflict and resolution and a beginning, middle, and, most of the time, an end. But in the Blue Country, a story is a kind of dinosaur. You see how it gets confusing. I don’t know whether to begin by saying: Once upon a time a girl named Violet Wild rode a purple mammoth bareback through all the seven countries of the world just to find a red dress that fit or by shooting you right in that sweet spot between your reptilian skull-plates. It’s a big decision. One false move and I’m breakfast.
I expect Red Rules are safer. They usually are. Here we go then! Rifle to the shoulder, adjust the crosshairs, stare down the barrel, don’t dare breathe, don’t move a muscle and—
Violet Wild is me. Just a kid with hair the color of raisins and eyes the color of grape jelly, living the life glasstastic in a four-bedroom wine bottle on the east end of Plum Pudding, the only electrified city in the Country of Purple. Bottle architecture was hotter than fried gold back then—and when the sunset slung itself against all those bright glass doors the bluffs just turned into a glitterbomb firework and everyone went staggering home with lavender light stuck to their coats. I got myself born like everybody else in P-Town: Mummery wrote a perfect sentence, so perfect and beautiful and fabulously punctuated that when she finished it, there was a baby floating in the ink pot and that was that. You have to be careful what you write in Plum Pudding. An accidentally glorious grocery list could net you twins. For this reason, the most famous novel in the Country of Purple begins: It is a truth universally acknowledged, umbrella grouchy eggs. I guess the author had too much to worry about already.
That was about the last perfect thing anybody did concerning myself. Oh, it was a fabulously punctuated life I had—Mums was a Clarinaut, Papo was a Nowboy, and you never saw a house more like a toybox than the bottle at 15 Portwine Place, chock full of gadgets and nonsense from parts unknown, art that came down off the walls for breakfast, visits from the Ordinary Emperor, and on some precious nights, gorgeous people in lavender suits and sweet potato ice cream gowns giggling through mouthfuls of mulberry schnapps over how much tastier were Orange Country cocktails and how much more belligerent were Green Country cockatiels. We had piles of carousel horse steaks and mugs of foamy creme de violette on our wide glass table every night. Trouble was, Mums was a Clarinaut and Papa was a Nowboy, so I mostly ate and drank it on my lonesome, or with the Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen and the watercolor unicorns from Still Life with Banana Tree, Unicorns, and Murdered Tuba, who came down off the living room wall some mornings in hopes of coffee and cereal with marshmallows. Mummery brought them back from her expeditions, landing her crystal clarinet, the good ship Eggplant, in the garden in a shower of prismy bubbles, her long arms full of poison darts, portraiture, explosives that look exactly like tea kettles, and lollipops that look exactly like explosives. And then she’d take off again, with a sort of confused-confounded glance down at me, as though every time she came home, it was a shock to remember that I’d ever been born.
“You could ask to go with her, you know,” said the Sacred Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen once, tipping the spiral-swirl of her carved mouth toward a bowl of bruise-black coffee, careful to keep its scruff of bloodgull feathers combed back and out of the way.
“We agree,” piped up the watercolor unicorns, nosing at a pillowcase I’d filled with marshmallow cereal for them. “You could be her First Mate, see the crass and colorful world by clarinet. It’s romantic.”
“You think everything’s romantic,” I sighed. Watercolor unicorns have hearts like soap operas that never end, and when they gallop it looks like crying. “But it wouldn’t be. It would be like traveling with a snowman who keeps looking at you like you’re a lit torch.”
So I guess it’s no surprise I went out to the herds with Papo as soon as I could. I could ride a pony by the time I got a handle on finger painting—great jeweled beasts escaped from some primeval carousel beyond the walls of time. There’s a horn stuck all the way through them, bone or antler or both, and they leap across the Past Perfect Plains on it like a sharp white foot, leaving holes in the earth like ellipses. They’re vicious and wily and they bite like it’s their one passion in life, but they’re the only horses strong and fast enough to ride down the present just as it’s becoming the future and lasso it down. And in the Country of Purple, the minutes and hours of present-future-happening look an awful lot like overgrown pregnant six-legged mauve squirrels. They’re pregnant all the time, but they never give birth, on account of how they’re pregnant with tomorrow and a year from now and alternate universes where everyone is half-bat. When a squirrel comes to term, she just winks out like a squashed cigarette. That’s the Nowboy life. Saddle up with the sun and bring in tomorrow’s herd—or next week’s or next decade’s. If we didn’t, those nasty little rodents would run wild all over the place. Plays would close three years before they open, Wednesdays would go on strike, and a century of Halloweens would happen all at once during one poor bedraggled lunch break. It’s hard, dusty work, but Papo always says if you don’t ride the present like the devil it’ll get right away from you because it’s a feral little creature with a terrible personality and no natural predators.
So that’s who I was before the six-legged squirrels of the present turned around and spat in my face. I was called Violet and I lived in a purple world and I had ardors for my Papo, my magenta pony Stopwatch even though he bit me several times and once semi-fatally, a bone mask, and a watercolor painting. But I only loved a boy named Orchid Harm, who I haven’t mentioned yet because when everything ever is about one thing, sometimes it’s hard to name it. But let’s be plain: I don’t know what love is anymore, either. In the Red Country, when you say you love someone, it means you need them. You desire them. You look after them and yearn achingly for them when they’re away down at the shops. But in the Country of Purple, when you say you love someone, it means you killed them. For a long time, that’s what I thought it meant everywhere.
I only ever had one friend who was a person. His name was Orchid Harm. H
e could read faster than anyone I ever met and he kissed as fast as reading. He had hair the color of beetroot and eyes the color of mangosteen and he was a Sunslinger like his Papo before him. They caught sunshine in buckets all over Plum Pudding, mixed it with sugar and lorikeet eggs and fermented it into something not even a little bit legal. Orchid had nothing to do all day while the sun dripped down into his stills. He used to strap on a wash-basket full of books and shimmy up onto the roof of the opera house, which is actually a giantess’s skull with moss and tourmalines living all over it, scoot down into the curve of the left eye-socket, and read seven books before twilight. No more, no less. He liked anything that came in sevens. I only came in ones, but he liked me anyway.
We met when his parents came to our bottle all covered in glitter and the smell of excitingly dodgy money to drink Mummery’s schnapps and listen to Papo’s Nowboy songs played on a real zanfona box with a squirrel-leg handle. It was a marquee night in Mummery’s career—the Ordinary Emperor had promised to come, he who tells all our lives which way to run. Everyone kept peering at brandy snifters, tea kettles, fire pokers, bracelets, books on our high glass shelves. When—and where—would the Little Man make his entrance? Oh, Mauve, do you remember, when he came to our to-do, he was my wife’s left-hand glove, the one she’d lost in the chaise cushions months ago!
And then a jar of dried pasta grew a face and said: “What a pleasure it is to see so many of my most illustrious subjects gathered all together in this fine home,” but I didn’t care because I was seven.
You see, the Ordinary Emperor can be anything he likes, as long as it’s nothing you’d expect an Emperor to ever want to be. At any moment, anything you own could turn into the Emperor and he’d know everything you’d ever done with it—every mirror you’d ever hung and then cried in because you hated your own face, or candle you ever lit because you were up late doing something dastard, or worse, or better. It’s unsettling and that’s a fact.
Orchid was only little and so was I. While Mums cooed over the Emperor of Dried Pasta, I sat with my knees up by the hearth, feeding escargot to one of the watercolor unicorns. They can’t get enough of escargot, even though it gives them horrible runny creamsicle-shits. This is the first thing Orchid ever said to me:
“I like your unicorn. Pink and green feel good on my eyes. I think I know who painted it but I don’t want you to think I’m a know-it-all so I won’t say even though I really want to say because I read a whole book about her and knowing things is nicer when somebody else knows you know them.”
“I call her Jellyfish even though that’s not her name. You can pet her but you have to let her smell your hand first. You can say who painted it if you want. Mums told me when she brought it home from Yellow Country, but I forgot.” I didn’t forget. I never got the hang of forgetting things the way other people do.
Orchid let Jellyfish snuffle his palm with her runny rosy nose.
“Do you have snails?” the watercolor unicorn asked. “They’re very romantic.”
Orchid didn’t, but he had a glass of blackberry champagne because his parents let him drink what they drank and eat what they ate and read what they read and do what they did, which I thought was the best thing I had ever heard. Jellyfish slurped it up.
“A lady named Ochreous Wince painted me and the tuba and the banana tree and all my brothers and sisters about a hundred years ago, if you want to know. She was a drunk and she had a lot of dogs.” Jellyfish sniffed when she was done, and jumped back up into her frame in a puff of rosewater smoke.