C.S.E. Cooney - Bone Swans - Stories

“You are very brave. And I thank you for the offer, but—”

Tex barged forward, breaking their link of flesh. “Think you can stop her, Flabby? You? Stop Granny Two-Shoes?” And he laughed a laugh like wet tissue paper tearing. “You can’t keep Granny from her Beatrice, and you can’t keep us from Granny. If she’s a-goin’, I’m a-goin’.”

“I’ll go, too,” Diodiance announced, stepping away from the wall. “We’ll do Queen B’s death rite to her face. We’ll say goodbye.” She didn’t look over her shoulder at that horrible skin.

“My stars!” cried the Flabberghast. “What enterprising children you are! What pioneering spirits! What gumption. You don’t faint at the sight of blood, do you?”

They all glared at him, wearing, between them, more scab than rags, and he grinned, and the marble foyer of the cardboard hut danced with the rainbows cast by his diamond teeth.

“Of course not,” he murmured. “How silly of me.”

The Flabberghast held up his left hand, folding thumb and fingers into palm, all except for his pinkie. This he held erect like a spindle, and the Barka Gang saw that his long nail was sparkling clear as his teeth.

“I’ll just need a drop of your blood,” he explained. “Your canine companion’s, too, if you wish her to accompany us.”

One by one, at the Flabberghast’s direction, they pricked the soft spot at the center of their wrists, and the tip of Sal’s panting tongue, too, and filed over to the stretched skin on the wall. They pressed their blood upon it. Diodiance signed her name. Tex made a big “T.” Granny drew something that could have been a flower or a bone or a bullet. Sheepdog Sal licked the place where Beatrice’s big toe had been.

The Flabberghast himself scored open his own palm. The hut filled with a smell that drowned the copper trickle of mortal blood in citrus-wine-wildflower-campfire-tidewater-leaf, and what leaked out of his skin was black like his eyes, and like his eyes full of tiny, whirling lights.

The blackness spread over Beatrice’s stretched skin, overwhelming the tiny dots of blood like raindrops converging on a windowpane. The drop becomes a stream, the stream a puddle, the puddle a lake. The blackness spread. And Beatrice’s skin became a door.

Granny Two-Shoes was the first one to step through.

Every building in Chuckle City was on fire. The buildings were tenements, and from their high, flaming windows rained a constant bombardment of grotesque little clowns. They smashed on the cobblestones below. Sometimes they jumped right up from the stones and dragged themselves back into the burning buildings to do the thing all over again. More often they just lay there and writhed on the cracked stones, ragged clothes smoking, the white greasepaint on their faces gray with soot, red noses charred. They twitched.

In the middle of Main Street, a skinny girl in a monkey mask, or perhaps a skinny monkey in a girl suit, cranked out “Ode to Joy” on her hurdy-gurdy. Beatrice shivered. The whole city smelled like ash.

“Isn’t it FUNNY?” asked Rosie Rightly. “Isn’t it a RIOT?”

Beatrice looked at her with solemn eyes. “You think that’s funny?”

But Rosie Rightly was undaunted, or seemed to be. “It’s always funny when things fall out a window.”

Another bright upchuck of screaming bodies hit the pavement. A tiny clown near Beatrice’s feet made a burbling sound that might have been laughter. Beatrice really did not think it was.

“Look at them bounce!” screamed Rosie Rightly. “Ga-DOING! Ga-DOING!”

When Beatrice did not respond, Rosie Rightly patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry your warts, Bee-Bee-licious. You can’t kill the dead. They’re fine. They’re all fine.” She pushed a lock of blue hair from her forehead. “So just relax. Have a laugh, would you?” Her lips trembled. “Please?”

Beatrice studied the bodies on the ground. Heaps of little clowns. Smoldering.

Just like this two years ago, she remembered, when the slaprash first came to town. For a while the grown-ups tried to put up some kind of…quartermain? Or, calamine… She forgot what Dad had called it. Roadblocks at all entrances and exits. To keep the slaprash in. To prevent panicked folks from getting out.

At first they tried burying their dead in big pits, then they were just burning them, but soon there weren’t enough grown-ups left to do any of that. Fires got out of control. Whole neighborhoods burned down. That was when the soldiers came. They didn’t last long, either. None of the grown-ups lasted. The slaprash took them all and left the children behind. With a lot of bullet casings and bones.

Beatrice slammed her hands over her ears and shook off the nasty din of jump ropes. Worst thing in a long list of bad that the Rubberbaby Gang ever did, inventing that jump rope rhyme and spreading it ’round. Their leader Aunt Oolalune, nearly Beatrice’s age, remembered all the rhymes from the olden days, Seuss and Silverstein, Gorey and Lear. The kiddy gangs loved her for her rhymes, but especially that one. It was their own, the only gravestone they’d get. Forget “Ring Around the Rosie” and “Susie Has a Steamboat.” “The Slaprash Rhyme,” like its namesake, went viral, went everywhere. What Dad would’ve called ubittinus. No, that wasn’t the word.

Beatrice watched the little clowns scrape themselves off the ground and trudge into the burning buildings. Flames swallowed them. Bodies plummeted from high windows. The gleeful (or not) screaming began again.

Beatrice turned to Rosie Rightly, who grinned her manic grin. “Whaddya think, Bee-Bee?”

“Is this it, Rosie? This all there is?”

“We-ell.” Rosie Rightly squirmed like she had to pee. “I could show you something else, sure! There’s lots of great things here. It’s Chuckle City! It’s a laugh a minute. Like, like, look at these guys! The rustics! I love me some rustics!” She pointed at an approaching ambulance. “These guys are FUNNY. Wait and see!”

The tiny ambulance whizzed past them. Three rustics hung from its windows. They wore straw hats and overalls, glasses without lenses, fake tufts of white hair glued to their chins. Their faces were contorted in identical expressions of constipation. The ambulance itself was locomotioned by no engine but the hustle of their bare feet. When the feet stopped moving, the ambulance dropped, neatly squashing one of the supine victims of the tenement fires.

From beneath the steel frame came a soft moan. A splatter of bodies later and the moan was lost to the tautophony of the scene. The rustics climbed out of their ambulance, cursing one another’s clumsiness.

“If ya’ll’d dropped it over there, Mr. Wick, we could’ve smushed two!”

“Weren’t two bodies lying close enough together for that, Mr. Jones.”

“Could’ve waited, Mr. Gibbs. More come down every second, like bird poop!”

They clustered around the smushed clown like farmers at a town hall meeting, discussing blight.

“Broked, Mr. Wick!” said one.

“Backbone clean severed, Mr. Gibbs!” said another.

“What to do, Mr. Jones?” asked a third.

“I know!” answered the first. “Let’s make balloon aminals!”

“Balloon aminals! Oh, yay!” squealed Rosie Rightly, dancing around Beatrice, who tried not to feel sick. “BULLY! Oh, they’re great, Bee-Bee! You’re going to love them!”

From pockets, hats, folds of cuffs, rolls of socks, the rustics drew out flaccid balloon skins and began inflating them with such gust and vigor that behind fake beards and empty glasses frames, their smooth young faces turned purple, and puce, and orange. Soon the balloons humped up, took on vivid, twisted shapes, the shapes of things best left under beds and in the dark of closets, and they grew large and larger, aerial sculptures that vied for the greatest ghoulishness. Only when they became truly huge and horrible did the rustics at last tie them off, whipping out black Sharpies from their bibs to scribble in teeth, eyes, scales, claws. Soon the balloons were not balloons at all, but buoyant beasts that turned on their makers and began chomping at them. The rustics tried to fight them off, but were snapped up, shaken apart, eaten, spat out again.