VELVETEEN vs. Spring Cleaning #2
It would have been smart to back off and leave it alone.
Irritating a Spirit of the Season on home ground was never a good idea.
Velveteen wasn’t sure she was allowed to call herself “smart” after willingly slaving herself to the seasons for her audition period, and after the last…
however long it had been…she was no longer inclined to play nicely with social conventions.
“You said there were three things wrong with my question. What was the third?”
“Ah. The third thing…thirdly, I suppose, for the sake of symmetry, so: thirdly, you’re assuming that I’ve always been Lady Moon.
I’m as much mask as maiden.” Lady Moon reached up and tapped her own mask, as if for emphasis.
“Some of us, we got to keep our names and our histories, and all the things we’d been in the Calendar Country.
Others have roles to fill. Everyone’s Cinderella at the ball, little rabbit, and no one’s an ugly stepsister, no matter what face they wear beneath their pancake makeup and painted lips. ”
“Wow,” said Velveteen, after a horrified pause. “That is the most pretentious depressing thing anyone has ever said in my presence. You should get some sort of award for being able to spread that much shit with a straight face.”
Lady Moon laughed. “I am going to miss you, little rabbit. One way or another, I’m going to miss you.
Yes, I’m a bit pretentious. I’m allowed to be.
It fits within the purpose I serve, and every little freedom is precious when you’ve given up so many of them.
I come from a time when women were expected to be seen and not heard, and when they had names for girls like me, who liked to dance until dawn and didn’t fancy any of their suitors.
But I had a secret, you see. I could scatter light through the air like a prism; I could make the stars dance. ”
“You were like Yelena,” said Velveteen.
“Exactly so, in some respects, and not at all, in others. I had no secret love to hide; everyone knew that the only thing I loved was the dance.” Lady Moon shrugged.
“When Spring came calling, I was happy to follow. What I gave up was well worth what I gained. I talk a good game, but never let me make you think that I feel differently. I lost a name and was granted a party that’s going to last forever. It was a fair trade.”
There was something oddly wistful in Lady Moon’s tone, like she was trying desperately to convince her audience that she was telling the truth. Velveteen nodded slowly. “Okay. But you still didn’t answer the question.”
“I’m as old as the human desire for celebration and release, and as young as Cecile Warden, late of New Orleans, who vanished from the Calendar Country on her sixteenth birthday, back in 1882,” said Lady Moon. “I don’t really celebrate my birthday anymore.”
“Um,” said Velveteen. “No, I, uh, guess you probably wouldn’t. That’s like, a quantum number of candles on your cake.”
“Not enough paraffin in the world,” agreed Lady Moon.
They were approaching a grove of willow trees, their long, fronded branches dangling down like a curtain.
The foliage was thick enough to completely block whatever was on the other side.
Lady Moon stopped, looking seriously at Velveteen—or at least, Velveteen thought it was a serious expression.
The mask made it so hard to tell. That was generally the idea, with masks.
“None of this is personal,” said Lady Moon.
“There are certain steps that must be taken, if you want to call your dance a waltz; there are certain forms that must be observed, if you want your poem to be a sonnet, and not a sestina, or a crude, arrhythmic insult to the lady you’re attempting to woo.
The poet does not hate the terminal rhyme, nor the drinker detest the twist of lime. ”
“Just so you know, if you don’t stop talking like Dr. Seuss, I’m leaving,” said Velveteen.
“Yes, you are,” said Lady Moon, and pulled the veil of willow branches aside with a sweep of her arm, revealing the clearing beyond.
The rest of the denizens of Spring were gathered there, save for Geb, who was represented as always by a smattering of snake-necked, beady-eyed geese. “We’ll miss you.”
Velveteen stood where she was, rooted to the spot, as Lady Moon walked past her and took her seat in the circle.
The rock she sat on looked like all the rocks around it, but the moment she sat down, it seemed more thronelike than the others, suited for placement atop a parade float.
The rocks the others perched upon had undergone similar transformations.
Jack’s rock looked like a shipwreck, wracked with moss and clinging vines.
The Easter Bunny’s rock was softer, rounded, like a balloon structure masquerading as a boulder for some reason.
The geese had covered their rock in geese poop, as was only right.
Persephone stood. She held a knife in each hand, one black, one green. She threw the green knife to the ground between them; there was no kindness in her eyes, only a deep, abiding sorrow, as long and ancient as the rites of spring. “Pick it up,” she said.
“Uh, why?” asked Velveteen warily. Years of experience had taught her that when people started throwing knives at her, it was time to dig in her heels and get more information. Preferably before someone got stabbed. Especially her.
“Because never it’ll be said in fair England that she slew an unarmed man,” said Jack, and burst into laughter. Lady Moon hit him with her fan. He stopped laughing and pouted at her, with the petulance of someone much younger than he appeared to be.
Persephone ignored them both. Her eyes remained on Velveteen. “Pick it up,” she said again.
“You have to,” said the Easter Bunny. He sounded apologetic, like this was the last thing he’d been planning to do with his day. “It’s the only way you get to leave.”
“You guys are starting to creep me out, so how about you just stop, okay?” Velveteen looked nervously around the circle. “I don’t want to pick up the knife. Leave the knife alone.”
“Beware the Ides of March,” said Persephone. “I really am sorry, but this is genuinely the only way.”
“What is genuinely the only way? I thought I was here to learn balance and all that tree-hugging, world-saving crap, not to have knife fights in the middle of a weird willow forest,” said Velveteen.
A butterfly fluttered past. She reached out, unthinkingly, and snatched the life away from it, leaving it to fall motionless to the ground.
“Come on. If it’s time for me to leave Spring for Autumn, can’t you just say so?
” Was it time for her to go already? It didn’t feel like she’d been in the Spring that long, especially when compared to the endless, frozen days of Winter—but wasn’t that always the way?
Spring was always too short. Winter was always too long.
Even when they were exactly the same length.
“We are saying so,” said Persephone. “I’ve taught you how to reach into the world for what you need.
Once you leave here, if you leave here, you won’t have to do that anymore, but because you’ll understand it, you’ll be better prepared to resist the temptation.
I’ve made you stronger through adversity.
Now there’s just one more obstacle to overcome. ”
“What’s that?” asked Velveteen, who was direly afraid that she already knew.
“Me,” said Persephone, and lunged.
* * *
It was easy to forget, with the Easter Bunny as the pervading symbol of the season in the Calendar Country—where symbols were more important than reality, most of the time—that Spring was a land as blood-drenched and brutal as any other.
The season brought with it vicious rains and the slaughter of the lambs, floods and mudslides and similar quiet disasters, as the world shook itself alive again after its long hibernation.
Spring was the season of rebirth. It was also the season of mothers eating their own young, of eggs that didn’t hatch and hunters in the wood.
Persephone swung the knife she held in a practiced arc toward Velveteen’s throat. Velveteen yelped and fell backward, dodging as much through luck as through skill.
“What the fucking fuck is fucking wrong with you?!” she demanded. The geese honked and flapped their wings in punctuation.
“Pick up the knife!” shouted Persephone. “Don’t let me do this!” She swung again, this time in a downward swipe that should have impaled Velveteen where she lay.
Velveteen rolled away, barely getting out of the way in time. “If you don’t want to do this, don’t do it!”
“I don’t have a choice!”
The green knife was right next to Velveteen’s hand.
She grabbed it without really thinking the action through, scrambling to her feet and backing away.
“There’s always a choice. You—you have to have a choice, or that whole ‘balance’ thing is bullshit.
Nothing that doesn’t choose can serve the balance. ”
“But you want to leave,” said Lady Moon.
“What?” Velveteen looked over her shoulder at the flawlessly coiffed spirit, who was studying her nails, rather than watching the fight. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Caesar didn’t mean to chart the path out of Spring when he was killed, but he did; beware the Ides of March.” Lady Moon’s eyes flicked upward, away from her nails, to the spot right behind Velveteen. “They’ll cut you dead.”
The warning wasn’t enough. Velveteen dodged; not fast enough. Persephone’s black knife caught her in the shoulder, and she screamed, first with surprise as much as pain, and then with genuine agony as swirls of blackened decay began appearing on her own blade—