The Bread We Eat in Dreams

by Catherynne M. Valente

“I want to dance on this town til it breaks. I want to burrow in it until it belongs to me.

The moon came out as big as a beer keg; it made Coyote’s face look lean and angelic, so young and victorious and humble enough to make you think the choice was yours all along.

He was looking at Coyote, his hair all blue in the night, and Coyote kissed him as hard as hurting, and Bobby kissed him back like he’d been waiting for it since he was born. Coyote got his hands under his shirt and oh, Coyote is good at that, getting under, getting around, and the boys smiled whenever their lips parted.

I drove off to the afterparty I saw them under the bleachers, foreheads pressed together, each clutching at the other’s skin like they wanted to climb inside, and they were beautiful like that, down there underneath the world, their helmets lying at their feet like old crowns.

I remember we used to say down-by-the-lake like it was a city, like it was an address.

Get any group of high school kids together and you pretty much have the building blocks of civilization. The Eagle Scout boys made an architecturally perfect bonfire. 4-H-ers threw in grub, chips and burgers and dogs and Twix and Starburst. The drama kids came bearing tunes, their tooth-white iPods stuffed into speaker cradles like black mouths. The rich kids brought booze from a dozen walnut cabinets—and Coyote taught them how to spot the good stuff. Meat and fire and music and liquor—that’s all it’s ever been.

I don’t even know what song was playing. The night was so loud in my ears.

And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller’s stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears.

Those were the days she longed for in her awful heart—for a demon has no heart as we do, a little red fist in our chest. A demon’s body is nothing but heart, its whole interior beating and pulsing and thundering in time to the skull-clocks of Pandemonium.

“A witch is just a girl who knows her mind. I am better than a witch.

Demons may pity men every hour of the day, but that pity never moves.

Sometimes I feel like that. A junkyard the Company forgot to put a girl in.

I can’t say it was lonely—it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too thin, hollow, bruised eyes, clothes worn into oblivion—and on the inside you just go hard and impenetrable, like skin, like metal.

see the bones in her sternum, like a bone ladder.