Ellen Datlow: Black Heart, Ivory Bones

“What did you say?” Mama demanded.

“Other girls.” Ruby still mumbled, but she got the words out loud enough to be heard this time.

“I thought so.” Mama sat back stiff and tall against the driver’s seat, making the old plastic covers creak and groan. There weren’t any lights on this stretch of road except what the car carried with it, and those were out, but there were little licks of lightning playing through the cracks in the sky. One of them dashed across heaven to outline Mama’s face with silver, knife bright, her chin like a shovel blade, her nose like a sailing ship’s prow.

“Now you listen to me, little girl,” Mama said out of the pitch-black that always followed mountain lightning. “Anything those other girls tell you is a lie. Don’t matter if it’s got two bushel baskets full of facts behind it, don’t matter if they say the sun rises up in the east or that air’s the only thing fit to breathe, it’s still a lie, lie, lie . And why? Because it came out of their mouths, God damn ’em to hell. Which is the place I’ll toss your raw and bloody bones if I ever again hear you mouth one word those ‘other girls’ say. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“‘Yes, Mama.’” Mama mocked the soft, mechanical way that Ruby spoke. “Don’t you even want to know the proof behind what I’m telling you?”

“No, Mama. You told me. That’s good enough.”

Mama reached over and jabbed her finger into Ruby’s hip, a place where the bruise wouldn’t show even in the bathing suit part of the competition, not even if the suit was one of those near-indecent high-cut styles. That place was already pretty mushed over with blues and greens and yellows, generations of hard, deep finger-pokes done by an expert hand. Mama knew her merchandise.

“You lie,” she said. “You want a reason. You always do, these days, whether you come right out and say so, like an honest soul, or whether you follow your blood and lie. Ever since you grew titties, you’ve changed. Used to be you’d take my word and all, no questions, no doubts, but not now. You’re getting to be more like your mother every day, so I know what’s coming, if I let it come.”

Ruby didn’t say anything. Ruby didn’t know quite what to say. Whenever Mama talked about Ruby’s mother, it was like she was daring Ruby to find the breath to speak. Ruby couldn’t, though. It was like cold wax was clogging up her throat, coating the roof of her mouth with its crackling shell. Sometimes the silence was enough to make Mama let go and give Ruby back her breath.

Sometimes it was enough, but not now.

“Your mother.” Mama said the words like a curse woven out of dead things and dark places. “All her pretty promises about how we’d be more of a family with a child to raise, and the hell with what folks’d say. No more sneaking, no more lies about two old maids keeping house together to save on costs like we’d been saying. Even said how she’d be the willing one, glad to make the sacrifice of lying under as many men as it took to stick you in her belly. And when you rooted and grew, what didn’t I do for her when she was carrying you? Anything she asked for, any whim that tickled that bubble she called a brain, I broke my back to fetch it. I gave up all the sweetness of the woods and the brightness of the stars for a set of overpriced rooms in a city I hated, just so she could stay in walking distance of fancy restaurants, movies, stores. The night her pains came on, who was it drove her to the hospital? I held her hand, made her breathe, caught your slime-streaked body, cut the birth cord. When she looked at you that first time, all wrinkly red, and turned her head away because you weren’t pretty enough to suit her, I held you close and felt you nuzzle into my chest looking for what she wouldn’t give you, and I wept because I would’ve given it to you if I could.”

In the dark, Ruby heard Mama’s voice catch on a dry, half-swallowed sob. Tears were smearing her own face, but she never made a sound. This was the longest Mama’d ever gone on about Ruby’s mother. Usually all she harped on was the night that woman had run off, never to return, leaving the two of them behind. Mama was saying some things Ruby knew, but there was fresh knowledge jutting itself up out of the dark like a sprouting hedge of thorns. Each new revelation drew a drop of blood from somewhere that would never show, not even during the part of the contest where the judges asked you things. Ruby let the tears flow down. It wasn’t like they’d hurt her makeup; she never wore any between pageants. Mama said not to. Ruby sat tight and bruised and bleeding, waiting in silence for Mama to be done.

“There is one decent road out of these mountains, and I’ve put your feet on it,” Mama said. She wasn’t talking over tears anymore. She was in charge of everything and heaven. “One road that won’t lead you into treachery or shame, like the one she chose, the whore. All the things you want, all you hope to own, all waiting for you to call them in just like magic, once you’ve won your proper place in this world. Beauty’s place, with no limits to it. People pay attention to looks. People give up the earth for beauty.”

“Yes, Mama,” said Ruby, small. Mama didn’t even hear. Mama was too taken up treading the word-web of her own weaving.

“God knows you could get by with less, but I’d be lying if I told you I believed that’d content you,” Mama said. “I know you too well. I’ve known you from the womb. You’re a hungry one, greedy like she was, only difference being now I know how deep the greed runs in your guts. I’m not losing you too, girl. She took too much from me. You’re mine, now till it’s over and beyond. I’m too old and homely to find someone new, and I’m damned if I’m dying alone. I’ll feed your hungers until you haven’t a one left, and then you’ll stay. You’ll have to. What’d there be left to lure you off if you got everything?”

“I ain’t going anywhere, Mama,” Ruby said, soft and pleading, the way she’d learned the judges liked to hear a girl speak.

The key turned in the ignition, the car stuttered to life. “So you say.” Mama’s face flashed grim in a shot of lightning, but then it vanished as the dark clapped down.

They drove out of the mountains and into the city, right up to the door of the big hotel where all the contestants were supposed to stay. Mama made Ruby sit in the car in the garage under the hotel until after she got them registered and had the key to the room in her hand. Then she went down to the car and had Ruby ride up in the service elevator so no one’d get to see her.

That’s how she always did it. That’s how it’d always worked before.

This time he was watching, and Mama, who always seemed to know everything, never even knew.

He’d heard about Ruby, seen the tapes of all the other pageants. At first he told himself he was just doing it for the story—“Secrets of Mystery Glamour Queen Revealed!”—but the splinter of his soul that still believed he was a real writer told him another story.

He’d seen the tapes: the judges, almost evenly divided between the ones who looked ready to let their next yawn send them all the way off to dreamland and the ones who devoured the girls with their eyes; the audience, papered over with politic-perfect neutral smiles, playing no favorites, putting their own faces on the runway bodies or else imagining those bodies in their own beds; the girls themselves, shining, bouncing, gleaming for their lives. And her.

No hope, once she took the stage, no hope for anyone at all to take it back again. She’d always come in wearing whatever it was the contest demanded — bathing suit or business suit, evening gown or kitschy cowgirl outfit, furs, sequins, fringes, fluff, leather, lotion, vinyl, sweat — it didn’t matter. She wore them all, always with that one accessory that didn’t belong but that she could no more forget to wear than her bright bloodred lipstick.