Kindle Notes & Highlights
Snow White, Green Mantle Jude Reid
Turns out there comes a point a girl gets tired of running. “I’ll do it,” I tell him. “Good.” He nods, and some of the tension between us eases. It’s only a little thing he’s asked for, after all, and it’s not as if I’m not used to paying my way in flesh. Rabbits, grouse, the occasional deer. This won’t be much different.
The girl’s standing outside when we leave the hut like she’s been waiting for me. She’s bundled up in layers of oversized clothes, staring off into the woods through the black thicket of her hair. Her skin’s pale, the outline of her lips is lost beneath a chapped red crust. Fifteen or sixteen at most, only a few years younger than me.
“When am I coming back?” A child’s voice, high and thin. “I’ll send her back for you.” The chief looks at his feet. “After it’s done, all right?” “Fionn.” She speaks my name like she’s trying out the shape of the word and fixes me with her dull black eyes. “Are we going then?” “Safe travels,” the chief says as if that’s possible anymore. As if he hadn’t just hired me to take his daughter into the woods and slit her throat.
On a day like this, it would be so easy to let your guard down. People do. There’s always talk about safe paths but living on the trail teaches you that’s just another fairy story people tell each other to pretend they’re still in control of the world.
The girl—Jennet—adjusts the backpack on her shoulders, and I find myself wondering what’s in it. A change of clothes, maybe. Food for the journey. She won’t be needing them. I’ll look inside after and see if it’s worth having.
“He wants to be rid of me, you know that?” There’s no rancour in her voice, but no fear, either. Her father used the same tone with me when we struck our deal, all bland matter-of-factness. “Because of this.” She lets her oversized coat fall open, and I see what she means. Next to her stick-thin limbs and round child’s face, the bulge of her belly looks obscene, an overripe apple ready to split at any moment. “Did he tell you about it?”
“Weren’t you curious about why he wants to be rid of me? Not even a little bit?” I ignore the question. Curiosity doesn’t fill my belly with food or my pockets with iron.
Ruined stonework juts through the ground like the stumps of worn-down teeth, the last remains of whatever building stood here in the time before. There was a city here, once, before the forest and the Othermen claimed back the land for themselves. I
Her life had been a prison, Jennet tells me. The dull-eyed villagers, the tumbledown huts, the meagre allotments of farmland that gave up less sustenance every year. The empty hours of a lifetime had stretched out in front of her, and she had found herself drawn to the woods, again and again, the thrill of stepping from the path returning a little savour to an existence rendered bland by the overwhelming need for safety. And that was where she had met the father of her child. He was an Otherman, of course. Fairer than any human male, mounted and armoured as though he had stepped out of an
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They had names in the old days. Fair folk. Shining ones. Elves, back when they were myths and nothing more. Back before they tore our world down to retake what was once theirs.
the horse and rider emerge from between the trees, so bright it hurts to look at them. The mount is the brilliant white of fresh-fallen snow, the horseman golden-haired and high-cheekboned, his eyes glittering like blue stars as he looks first at the girl, and then at me. Oh, he’s beautiful, even I can see that, but there’s nothing human about that beauty. It’s thin ice over deep water, a cornice over a precipice, a diving hawk with its talons outstretched. He swings one long leg over the back of his saddle, drops gracefully to the ground, and spreads his arms wide. “My love,” Jennet says and
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Except it’s then I think of the look on the knight’s face as he lifted the child free—as if it was the most precious treasure in the world, something found after a lifetime of searching. That same hunger is on the face of every Otherman in the woods, unmistakable in their yearning. I rack my brain, my thoughts muddy with fear. Have I ever seen an Otherwoman? Is there any such thing? I drop the bow, open my jerkin and shrug it off my shoulders. The shirt beneath follows, then my breeches, until I’m naked and shivering in air that’s lost any sense of summer. For one awful moment, I think I’m
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I’m not like Jennet. I’ve taken plenty of men and women to my bed over the years, sometimes for safety, sometimes for pay, and only once—maybe twice—for love. The Otherman fucks every bit as gracefully as he does everything else, and if it hadn’t been for the glowing eyes watching from the forest, I might even have enjoyed it.
Baby Teeth Lina Rather
Laura watched from the window while Mama took the salt packets they’d pocketed from a Speedway and sprinkled a circle around the house to hide them from the monster. She tore the top of each one off with her teeth and spread it as far as she could, then dropped the white paper scraps on the ground. Laura had stuffed her pockets with packets, so she knew Mama had enough to walk around the whole perimeter of the property. Not that it was much—the next mobile home sat just ten yards away.
