Free Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente Page A

to eat.
    “Novitiate!” cries a woman with three rings on her right hand and a coiling bracelet of silver and agate on her left that winds around all her fingers and up her arm. Oleg is careful not to look at her. His feet ache from the pilgrimages to the kitchen, and he does not want to talk to her. Her fingernails are wet with pomegranate juice.
    “How long have you lived in Palimpsest, Novitiate?” she asks haughtily.
    “I …”
    “Speak up!”
    “I think this is my second night, if I understand everything.”
    She claps her hands and squeals, a high sound like a broken chime. “I thought so! Your gait is quite gauche. An immigrant ! How charming! Tell us, boy, is it true that you can’t see yellow or blue? That you feast in the rubbish heaps after we’ve all gone to our ?eds and our teawine? That you all get here by …” She leans down to catch his eye, to get him in trouble, but he averts his gaze in time, and sees only her long red hair brushing her wineglass, still streaked with strawberry. “Well, by rutting like filthy old cows? What do you eat? You must tell us all your foul rites!”
    Oleg fixes his eyes on his shoes. His face burns with a shame he did not know, until this moment, he possessed. He has not heard the word immigrant flung like that since he was a boy—of course, he is an immigrant. There and here. The strange woman with her hooting, triumphal laughs and her gingery perfume makes him want to run, and also to stay and grind her glass into her face.
    Slowly, with a deliberateness he savors, and will savor still in the morning, he raises his head and stares at her directly, her clear, spangle-painted eyes, her cheeks with tiny jewels embedded in the skin which is just beginning to show wrinkles, laugh lines, without bitterness or malice. Silence crashes through the hall and explodes at his feet.
    “I’m sure,” Oleg says evenly, “it’s all true. Every word. Want to come to the rubbish heaps with me? We can rut under the moon and see where you end up.”
    The woman’s violet mouth opens slightly, perhaps in shock, perhaps in pleasure at being confronted at last with real live immigrant manners. The giraffe-legged maître d’ surges up behind him and cuffs his ear with one enormous, manicured hand. He seizes Oleg’s arm, and without a word hauls him from the glassy cobalt hall and deposits him unceremoniously onto Zarzaparrilla Street.
    Gabriel strolls out a few minutes later—sweet boy, good boy, loyal compatriot.
    “I told you,” is all he says, as he pulls the gondola’s lead free of the dock and pushes them out into the street of coats again. He is cold, as though Oleg transgressed against him personally, embarrassed him, made him a fool.
    “But it’s a dream,” Oleg insists. “It was fun. We won’t even remember it in the morning.”
    “You don’t know anything, Oleg,” sighs Gabriel, and they do not speak while the wind picks up through the last, late stars and light begins, lemony and cool in the east.
    “Give me the scissors?” Oleg says finally, smiling as brave and bright as he has ever learned to do. But Gabriel has turned away; his gaze is over the sweet, small rooftops, down alleys Oleg does not know. He is gone: softly, subtly, irrevocably. He doesn’t turn to look, or graze fingers as he hands over blades longer than his legs. Oleg stands, nearly toppling them, and holds his architect—not his, not really—and whispers against his neck his best apology:
    “I want to tell you a story. It’s short, I promise. And it’s about love. See, in the land of the dead, a boy who was run over by a black car fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes …”
    But Gabriel is not listening, and his back is stiff beneath his coat. Oleg sadly takes up the bronze scissors and knifes through the flowing street below the boat. Dismayed threads pop free of shoulder seams; buttons fly. Below he sees