“Like fairy tale shit. I bought one of those frozen apple pies—shut up, they’re good—and when we cut into it we found a bunch of blackbirds. Prim’s shoes turned to glass one night while she was dancing. Your mom’s roses went nuts in December, blooming while there was still snow on the ground.”
I unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth and say carefully, “That’s not so bad, is it?”
“Well, it’s not great.” Charm is tearing the grass up in great handfuls now, her nail beds stained neon. “The birds were all dead and putrefied. Prim’s shoes shattered under her—ninestitches, she missed weeks of class. And your mom’s roses died down to the roots. She tore them all up.”
“Oh.”
Charm fixes me with a blunt blue eye. “Is it your fault?”
“Maybe.”
“Will it get worse?”
“Uh, maybe. Yeah.” I look away from her. “If I don’t stop.”
“Then…” Charm presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Jesus, why don’t you?”
“I should. I will! But…” But somewhere along the line, Eva became one of the people I’m supposed to take care of, and she needs me, and the physical laws of the multiverse can go straight to hell. “But first I need to borrow your phone.”
Charm stands. She stares down at me with an expression somehow worse than anger, or even disappointment. It’s a sort of bitter, self-directed chagrin, as if she’s annoyed that she allowed herself to bedisappointed by me again. She slams her phone down on the plastic card table as she leaves.
It takes me a minute to guess her passcode (8008, because Charm still has a seventh grader’s sense of humor), and another minute to find the faculty contact information on Ohio University’s site.
The phone slips against the clammy sweat of my face. “Hi, this is Zinnia Gray. Is Dr. Bastille available?”
“SO—AGAIN, HYPOTHETICALLY—HOW COULDthe protagonist get back into that Snow White story without the magic mirror?”
Dr. Bastille sighs on the other end of the line. It seems to go on a very long time, as if she’s holding her phone in front of a box fan. “Well,hypothetically,if you were my student and you came into my office and told me… everything you just told me”—over the last six to eight minutes, I’ve given her the SparkNotes version of my life, framing it all somewhat unconvincingly as the plot of a very meta novella I’m working on—“I would be legally and morally obligated to refer you to campus counseling services.”
“Good thing I’m not your student anymore, huh.”
“Zinnia, that’s not better. You see how that’s not better, right? If a random person came into my office to talk about the fairy tale multiverse, I would probably swallow my personal convictions about law enforcement’s role in the violent maintenance of race and class hierarchies”—this is ivory tower speak forfuck the cops—“and call security.”
“Sure, I get that, but what if I was very convincing and desperate-seeming, and you were sort of compelled to advise me despite your better judgment?” I’m trying to bully her into a specific narrativerole—the expert consultant/holder of arcane knowledge who offers wise counsel to the protagonist in their hour of need and saves their bacon—but I can feel Dr. Bastille resisting it. She’s never much liked playing prescribed roles.
I hear her pulling the phone away from her face, sayingI’ll just be a minute, loveto someone else. A woman’s voice says something about dinner reservations in a tone suggesting they have been made and broken before.
Dr. Bastille sighs into the receiver again. “Alright. Given the parameters of the story you just told me, it is my professional opinion that you’ve written yourself into a corner.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re screwed.”
“I—okay.” The grass feels very cold on my bare feet, the sky very high above me.
“You said the only way to cross into other tale types was by way of a particular enchanted object. A useful MacGuffin which is now, according to you, broken. So your protagonist doesn’t have a magic mirror, and neither does the villain-slash-love-interest—a trend in popular fiction which I find beneath you, by the way”—Dr. Bastille elects to ignore my sighedI wish—“and I don’t think the physical laws of this universe allow for the creation of enchanted objects. Do they?”
I’m circling the fire pit now, letting the plastic-smelling smoke sear my eyes. “I guess not.”
“Which seems like it might be a good thing, because your protagonist’s hypothetical wanderings were doing substantial damage to the fabric of the space-time continuum, were they not?”
“But like, why?” My voice goes high on the last word, wobblingperilously. “Why is it such a big deal if I—I mean, my character—doesn’t just lie down and wait for the trolley to hit her? Why can’t she run away?”
I can hear a familiar creaking through the line, as if Dr. Bastille is leaning back in her office chair and pinching the bridge of her nose. She did this often in our advisee meetings. “In this novella, you’ve posited narratives as literal worlds. So stories are the organizing principle of the multiverse—which raises some serious world-building questions, by the way, like where these story-verses come from in the first place, since the existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller.” She pauses to address her date:No, you go ahead, I’ll meet you there. “Anyway, you’ve created a universe that runs on plot, and a main character who smashes plots like a human wrecking ball. In refusing to complete her narrative arc, she is compromising the integrity of the universe.”
“Oh.” The smoke scorches my eyes, burns the inside of my nose. “Then this is it. It’s over.”
“It does seem a dissatisfying climax.”
