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

come from,” she said dreamily, looking up at me from her thin bottom bunk. She had black curly hair all over the place, like wild thorny raspberry vines. “And there’s like rock bands with elves in them and no one gives you any shit just for being , and there’s real magic . Ok, supposedly it’s kind of broken and doesn’t work right, but still, if it’s not working right, that still means it works , right?” She sighed like a little kid, even though I figured her for my age, and emphasized her words like she was underlining them in a diary. How did this kid last five minutes out of a pink bedroom? Whatever happened to her must have been really bad—I don’t even know what kind of bad, to make some girl still drawing unicorns in her spiral notebooks take off. She sighed dramatically, enjoying the luxury of being the source of information. “But it disappeared or something, years ago. No one’s been there in ages. Sometimes I think the city ran away, just like me. Something happened to it and it couldn’t bear anything anymore, and so one night it just took off without leaving a note. But I’ll get there, somehow. I will. And I’ll dance , you’ll see. I’ll dance with the fairies.”
    One of the other kids hissed at her from the second bunk in our four-loser room. “They don’t like to be called that.”
    “What do you know about it, Esteban? Fuck off,” Maria spat, all the pink bedrooms gone from her voice.
    “More than you,” snarled the boy. “Hey, chica. You know how in school they said we’d never get social security, because by the time we get old, our parents will have used it all up?”
    “Sure,” I said. Esteban was seventeen, too late, where I was too early. Too old.
    “Well, it’s like that,” he sighed, and I could almost see him frown in the dark. “It’s all used up. Nothing left for us kittens.”
    “You don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”
    Maria’s face colored darkly and she scowled up at me. After a long, pointed silence, she said:
    “Fig is a stupid name.”
    I rolled back over on my miserable striped mattress. I didn’t believe even half of it. I remembered when those homeless kids in Florida started talking crazy about the Blue Lady and how she’d come and save them? I thought it was like that. Something pretty to think about when you’re cold and hungry. It’s nice to think someone beautiful is protecting you. It’s nice to think there’s a place you can go if you want it bad enough. A place where everything you ever read about is real.
    And of course it went away. Of course it did. I mean, that’s like the job of magical places, to vanish. Atlantis, Avalon. Middle Earth.
    And even if it was real for someone, sometime, it wouldn’t be real for me. I ran away when I was fifteen. When Bordertown had already run away itself. I did it all wrong. Maybe other people could go there, but not me. That kind of shit is for Oberon and Titania. Not Fig, shuffling in the background with paper leaves glued to her t-shirt. I don’t live in a world with places like that in it. I live on the train, and in Denny’s, and in the Citrus Heights Public Library, and that’s all.
     

     
    Spring came, dry and full of olive pollen. No one came looking for me. I kept singing, and reading ( Les Fleurs du Mal in May, and my Keats for the millionth time). Any time I managed to eat meat I just went wolf-blind with starving for it. I had become completely nocturnal, sleeping through the whole route from Starfire Station out to the suburbs and back again, my green backpack nicely padded with no-fare fines. Light rail. Rails of light. That’s me, speeding along towards Starfire on a rail of light . I rode longer and longer into the day, chasing the sun, and my roots got longer and I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to go somewhere. I can’t say it was lonely—it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too thin, hollow,