They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars. (the shoes)
It was sound without melody - like dream music, remembered for its effect but not for its harmonic distresses and recoveries.
What they saw, rubbing the caul and blood off the skin - was it just a trick of the light? After all, following the storm the grass did seem to throb with its own color, the roses zinged and hovered with crazy glory on their stems. But even with these effects of light and atmosphere, the midwives couldn't deny what they saw. Beneath the spit of mother's fluids the infant glistened a scandalous shade of pale emerald.
There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own council. "Whine, you fiend," said the crone, "it's your first job." The baby shirked its obligations.
Once toweled, she was observed to be prettily formed, with a long elegant head, forearms nicely turned out, clever pinching little buttocks, cunning fingers with scratchy little nails. And an undeniable green cast to the skin. There was a salmon blush in the cheeks and belly, a beige effect around the clenched eyelids, a tawny stripe on the scalp showing the pattern of eventual hair. But the primary effect was vegetable.
Then the child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, and the child bit the finger off at the knuckle.
"It's green," he finally said. "Nanny, it's green as moss."
"She's green, you mean. It's a she, for heaven's sake."
"It's not for heaven's sake." Frex began to weep. "Heaven is not improved by it, Nanny, and heaven does not approve."
The girl's eyes tracked her back and forth. They were rich and brown, the color of overturned earth, flecked with mica. There was a network of fragile red lines at each soft angle where the eyelids met, as if the girl had been bursting blood threads from the exertion of watching and understanding.
"However in the world did her skin come green?" Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all.
"I remember once whena tinker with a funny accent gave me a draft of some heady brew from a green glass bottle. And I had rare expansive dreams, Nanny, of the Other World - cities of glass and smoke - noise and color..." (Melena)
Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.
She is more grasshopper than girl, with those angular little thighs, those arching eyebrows, those poking fingers. She's about the business of learning like any child, but she takes no delight in the world: She pushes and breaks and nibbles on things without any pleasure. As if she has a mission to taste and measure all the disappointments in life.
Elphaba sagged as if boneless in her arms, neither fussing nor returning the hug, just falling limp from the novelty of being touched.
Turtle Heart was unbearably beautiful. Melena dragon-snaked with him, covered him with her mouth, poured him in her hands, heated and cooled and shaped his luminosity.
She smelled like soap and wood smoke, and the char on toast, a good healthy smell. (Elphaba)
"She is herself pleased at the half things," Turtle Heart said. "I think. The little girl to play with the broken pieces better."
"Horrors," said Elphaba.
It was her first word, and it was greeted with silence. Even the moon, a lambent bowl among the trees, seemed to pause.
"Horrors?" Elphaba said again, looking around. Though her mouth was serious, her eyes glowed; she had realized her own accomplishment. She was nearly two years old. The big sharp teeth in her mouth could not keep her words locked inside her anymore. "Horrors," she tried in a whisper. "Horrors."
Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsigtedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful, she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet.
"The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accesory." (Galinda)
"You strike me as impertinent, Miss Galinda," she said mildly.
"I have not yet struck you, Madame Morrible." Galinda delivered the daring line with her sweetest smile.
She played with her hair while she read, coiling it up and down around fingers so thin and twiglike as to seem almost exoskeletal. Her hair never curled no matter how often Elphaba twined it around her hands. It was beautiful hair, in an odd, awful way, with a shine like the pelt of a healthy giltebeest. Black silk. Coffee spun into threads, night rain. Galinda, not given to metaphor on the whole, found Elphaba's hair entrancing, the more so because the girlw as otherwise so ugly.
The green face above the wheat-gray fabric seemed almost to glow, and the gloriously straight black hair fell right over where breasts should be if she would ever reaveal any evidence that she posessed them. Elphaba looked likesomething between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life. There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it? - like a child who as never remembered a dream being told to have sweet dreams. You'd almost call it unrefined, but not in a social sense - more in a sense of nature not having done its full job with Elphaba, not quite having managed to make her quite enough like herself.
"Evil exists, I know that, and its name is Boredom, and ministers are the guiltiest crew of all." (Galinda)
She seemed like a rare flower, her skin stemlike in its soft pearlescent sheen, the hat a botanical riot. "Oh, Miss Elphaba," said Galinda, "you terrible mean thing, you're pretty."
Madame Morrible, for all her upper=class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad - oh - dangerous. As if her big public smile were composed of the light glancing off knives and lances, as if her deep voice masked the rumbling of distant explosions.
"Something has happened to you," said Avaric. "I'm not dull. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," said Boq.
"Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don't tell me nothing's wrong. For you're not that good a liar, and I'm not that stupid."
"You're fun to look at," decided Galinda.
Boq's face fell. "Fun?" he said.
"I'd give a lot to achieve fun," Elphaba said. "The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-"
"The thing is I have become fond of Galinda myself. Behind her starry-eyed love of herself there is a mind struggling to work. She does think about things." (Elphaba)
"He began to dictate, and he was so excited that he sang his findings; he composed arias out of what he was seeing! Recitatives about structure, about color, about the basic shapes of organic life. He has a horrible sandpapery voice, as you might imagine for a Goat; but how he warbled! Tremolo on the annotations, vibrato on the interpretations, and sostuneto on the implications: long, triumphant open vowels of discovery!" (Elphaba on Doctor Dillamond)
"We have no proof that magic is so strong-"
"We have no proof that god is so strong," interrupted Tibbett.
"Which strikes me as being as good an argument against god as it is against magic," said Elphaba, "but never mind that."
"Boq, you know despite myself I think you're a little sweet. You're a little sweet anda little charming, and you're a little maddening and you're a little habit-forming."
Boq held his breath.
"But you're little!" she concluded. "You're a Munchkin, for god's sake!"
He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.
Glinda - for out of some belated apology for her initial rudeness to the martyred Goat, she now called herself as he had once called her -
Had he not been warned, Boq wouldn't have taken Nessarose as Elphaba's sister. She was by no means green, or even blue-white like a genteel person with bad circulation. Nessarose stepped from the carriage elegantly, gingerly, strangely, sinking her heel to touch the iron step at the same time as her toe. Walking as oddly as she did, she drew attention to her feet, which kept eyes away from the torso, at least at first.
The feet landed on the ground, driven there with a ferocious intention to balance, and Nessarose stood before him. She was as Elphaba had said: gorgeous, pink, slender as a wheat stalk, and armless.
Glinda concentrated very hard and tried to make Elphaba's leftover sandwich elevate outward over the canal. She succeeded only in exploding the thing in a small combustion of mayonnaise and shredded carrot and chopped olives. Nessarose lost her balance laughing, and Nanny had to prop her up again. Elphaba was covered in bits of food, which she picked off herself and ate, to the disgust and laughter of everyone else.
Where they silver? - or blue? - or now red? - lacquered with a candy shell brilliance of polish? It was hard to tell and didn't matter; the effect was dazzling. Even Madame Morrible gasped at their splendor. The surface of the shoes sheemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.
The bar mother slapped her rag at some noisy older men to shush them, and the dart players dropped their hands to their sides. The room quieted down. Elphaba made up a little song on the spot, a song of longing and otherness, of far aways and future days. Strangers closed their eyes to listen. Boq did, too. Elphaba had an okay voice. He saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn't work together to hold everyone by the neck. No, he wasn't giving her credit; Elphaba had a good voice. It was controlled and feeling and not histrionic. He listened through to the end, and the song faded into the hush of a respectful pub. Later, he thought: the melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.
But a man's tongue between her legs, a spoonful of saffron cream...
Nessarose said "Catch her, I can't, I'm-" and she sagged against Nanny's bosom, and Glinda swooned at the same moment. Elphaba thrust out strong arms and scooped Glinda in mid-collapse. Glinda didn't really lose consciousness, but the uncomfortable physical nearness of hawk-faced Elphaba after that undesired act of desire made her want to shiver with revulsion and to purr at the same time. "Steady on, girl, not here," said Elphaba, "resist, come on!" Resist was just what Glinda didn't want to do. But after all, in the shadow of an apple cart, on the edge of the market where merchants were selling the last fish of the day, cheap, well, this was hardly the place. "Tough, tough skin," said Elphaba, appearing to pull words from the back of her throat. "Come on, Glinda - you've got better brains - come on! I love you too much, snap out of it, you idiot!"
"Well, really," she said as Elphaba dumped her on a heap of moldy packing straw. "No need to be so romantic about it!"
Once Glinda saw a farm woman standing on her doorstep, hands sunk deep in apron pockets, face lined with grief and rage at the useless sky. The woman watched the carriage pass, and her face showed a yearning to be on it, to be dead, to be anywhere else other than on this carcas of a property.
The Emerald City was not amused by itself, nor did it consider amusement a proper attitue for a city.
"Please," said Elphaba, at once hard and soft, proud and pleading. Glinda realized she had never before witnessed Elphaba wanting anything.
"This is just the return leg of a voyage you already know." She put her face against Glinda's and kissed her. "Hold out, if you can," she murmured and kissed her again. "Hold out, my sweet."
She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands - as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. (Elphaba)
The girls were six or seven, small creamy lumps of uncurdled femininity, spooned into furry muffs and tucked into furry scarves and tipped into boots iwth furry edges.
There was a club and it beat down on him, like the kick of a horse, like the falling limb of a tree hit by lightning. There must be pain, but he was too surprised to notice. That must be his blood, squirting a ruby stain on the white cat, making it flinch. He saw its eyes open, twin golden green moons, befitting of the season, and the cat scampered through the open skylight and was lost in the snowy night.
There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.
The plain below, compared to the mountains, seemed level as a lake. The wind made strokes across it, as if spelling things in a language of curls and stripes.
Elphaba thought: Such silly things, children - and so embarassing - because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
The skies throbbed with turquoise, even at midnight. Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die.
The plain itself seemed to bring forth night color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.
She was naked and old and strong; what had seemed like boredom was revealed as patience, memory, control. She shook the very hair off her head and it uncoiled down her back and disappeared. Her feet moved massively, as if seeking the best purchase, like columns, like pillars of stone. She dropped her arms forward and her back was a dome; still her head was up, her eyes the brigher, her nose working mightily; she was an Elephant. (Princess Nastoya)
There was no way to go through the water - that would be death -
But her feet went out anyway -
They hit the water hard, the water hit hard back -
The water turned to ice as she ran - foot by foot of ice under foot by foot of hurry. A silvering plate formed instantly, cantilevering forward, making a cold safe bridge to the island -
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