Velveteen vs. the Seasons by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: ISFiC Press
Published: 2016-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

Once again, Velveteen woke to find herself staring at the rotting rafters of a decaying house. There was a bat sleeping there, suspended upside-down like a little velvet sachet. As she watched, it woke, yawned, stretched out its bony wings, and launched itself into the air, flying silently out the open window. Velveteen sat up, and looked down at herself, more out of habit than anything else. Her skin was still a patchwork landscape of brown velvet and patterned swaths of whatever fabric had been handy when she needed to be repaired; looking at the patches carefully, she could see that they corresponded to every serious injury she’d ever sustained in the course of her heroic duties. The body had remembered, even when there had been no scars, and those old battle wounds had translated themselves onto the thing she was now. She still wasn’t wearing any clothes. As a living doll, she supposed she didn’t really need them. That didn’t stop her from feeling naked.

No sooner had the thought formed than the closet door swung open, revealing a lacy, tattered black dress hanging on the inside. Like her skin, it was patched in places, with bat-patterned orange cotton, green-and-purple muslin, and even a few swaths of brown velvet, rescued from the rag bag that had never really existed after her injuries had seen it trimmed away. Like Spring, Autumn was spinning a whole past for her, making it like she’d always been here.

“Hailey said I would get to choose for myself what I wanted to be, assuming I decided to stay here,” she said. Scream Queen wasn’t in the room—not unless the matriarch of Halloween could turn herself invisible, which was a thought Velveteen didn’t exactly feel like dwelling on—but the odds were good that she knew everything that happened in her season. Persephone and Aurora both had. So Velveteen glared at the ceiling for a moment, hoping it would get her point across. Then she got off the bed, and walked to the closet, and took the dress.

It fit like it had been made for her, which made sense: it had been made for her, called out of the substance of the season as soon as she realized that she wanted clothes. It was more childish than anything she would have worn at home, but that made sense too, because it was a dress for the body she currently inhabited, and the body she currently inhabited was human only in the vaguest of senses. What would have seemed awkward and wrong on her normal figure was…well, still wrong, but more creepy than awkward.

“I never wanted to be a terrifying murder doll, you know,” she said. The room did nothing to indicate, one way or another, whether it did, in fact, know. Velveteen sighed. “And by the time I get out of here, I’m going to be talking to myself constantly. This just gets better and better.”

With the bat gone, she was alone in the room. Velveteen glared one last time at the mirror on the wall, and turned to head for the door.

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