Free The Bread We Eat in Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente Page A

the bottomless coffee cup, sitting there like a ceramic grail night after night on my formica diner table— drink of me and never sleep, never die . At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck. I didn’t want to do it—but sometimes a girl doesn’t have any nice choices. Remember—I said I wasn’t talent-free.
    I could always sing.
    Not for a teacher, not in front of parents at talent night, not for Oberon and Titania. For a mirror, maybe. For an empty baseball diamond after school. For a forest. And when I say I could sing, I don’t mean I could sing like a Disney girl, or a church choir. I mean I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell. It’s not a perfect voice, maybe not even a pretty one. A voice like a hole. People just toppled in. I stood outside the Denny’s and god, the first time it was so hard, it hurt so much, like a ripping and a tearing inside of me, like the hole would take me, too, my face so hot and ashamed, so afraid, still Fig the non-speaking fairy, can’t even say hail! , can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a blow coming down.
    And I opened my mouth, and I turned my face up to the sunset, and I sang. I don’t even know what I sang about. I just made it up, brain to mouth to song. Seemed better than singing some love song belonging to somebody else. I don’t know anything about music in a technical sense, and I hated the jolt of it, hearing my own voice break the air, to stand up there and sing down the streetlights like I was better than them, like it mattered, like I deserved to be heard at all. So I just kind of went somewhere else when I sang. Somewhere dark and safe and quiet, and when I came back the song was over and my feet were covered in coins. Usually. Sometimes I got a dollar or two.
    That was my life. Sleep, read, sing, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Ride the train, all the way around the circuit and back to Starfire Station. I’m not even kidding, that’s what it was called, the station nearest my Denny’s and my library. I’d get on the train with the morning sun all molten and orange on a beaten-up blue sign: Starfire Station . The rails glowed white. I thought: maybe something wonderful will happen here, and I could tell people about it later, but no one would believe me, because who names a train station that ?
    I didn’t talk to other runaways much. It was always awkward, dancing around how bad you had it in some kind of gross Olympic event. And even if I made a friend, we’re sort of a transitory race by nature. It got repetitive:
    Fig. That’s a stupid name.
    Thank you.
    Where’d you come from?
    Over the causeway.
    Where’re you going?
    I don’t know.
    I didn’t see the point. I had my routine. But I heard about it. Of course I heard about it. There used to be a place for kids like us. Some kind of magical city half-full of runaways, where anything could happen. Elves lived there. Wizards. Impossible stuff: unicorns and rock singers with hearts of gold. A girl told me about it at this shelter once—and let me tell you shelters are fucking mousetraps. A warm bed and a meal and a cage overhead. All they want is to send you back to your parents on the quick, so they rate your crisis level and if you’re below their threshold they up and call the cops on you. I went to one called Diogenes. I liked the name. I knew it from books—I’d moved on to Greeks by then. Diogenes searched the world for one good soul.
    They called my stepmother. I didn’t have bruises anymore. Not bad enough. But she didn’t come to get me. No one ever came for me. She thanked them and hung up the phone and the next morning they sent me on my way. I guess I wasn’t their one good soul.
    But the night before my expulsion from particle-board paradise, this girl Maria talked to me, bunk to bunk, through the 1 am shadows:
    “It’s like this place between us and the place where fairies