“Deal,” said Zib. “Do you want some berries now?”
Avery’s stomach growled, and he found that indeed, he did.
When the Crow Girl returned, on foot—becoming a murder of crows was a useful thing in many situations, but not when she needed to carry a picnic hamper big enough to use both hands—she found the children with sticky pink mouths and sticky pink fingers, sitting contentedly in the shadow of a large berry bush. She cocked her head to the side, considering them.
This is not the Crow Girl’s story: if ever that story were to be told, it would not begin in an ordinary town, or on an ordinary street. But she is important enough to this story that certain things must be said. First, that she meant well in all ways; second, that she was not well beloved of the Queen of Swords before she chose to rescue two children from a muddy grave; and third, that because she was both child and corvid, her heart was ever divided against itself, like a house with too many locked doors. She looked at Avery and Zib and felt a great longing wash over her. She wanted to be loved as carelessly as they were growing to love each other. She wanted to be comfortable enough to sit silently, berry juice on her fingers and the improbable road under her behind. Most of all, she wanted to spare them from the road ahead.
She was still standing there, trying to decide, when Avery saw her and waved a greeting. She blinked. Of the two of them, she had assumed that Zib would be happiest to see her, but Zib was watching a beetle crawl across a rock and hadn’t noticed her at all. The Crow Girl smiled like the sun coming out and skipped toward the pair, holding up her picnic hamper.
“Fish!” she proclaimed. “Fish and bread and I promised you something better than a napple, didn’t I? Well, here it is!” She set the hamper down with a thump and flipped its lid open, reaching in and pulling out what could have been a very small, pale, fleshy octopus, if it had possessed eyes, or suckers, or any of the other attributes that distinguish “octopus” from “a thing which has many tentacles.”
Zib blinked. “What is it?”
“This is a flavor fruit!” said the Crow Girl triumphantly. She thrust it at Zib. “Here! Try!”
Zib looked dubiously at the flavor fruit, and had the distinct, unsettling impression that it was looking back at her. But the Crow Girl looked so proud, and somehow the thought of disappointing her was even more unsettling than the impression of being stared at by a bundle of tentacles. Cautiously, Zib reached out and took the fruit. It was soft and warm, with a surface that felt like the skin of a peach, lightly fuzzy in an almost animal way.
“How do I eat it?” asked Zib. “Is it like—” She stopped. The Crow Girl didn’t know what an apple was. Why would she understand words like “banana” or “orange” or any of the other fruits Zib could ask about? This wasn’t home. This wasn’t anything like home. The longer they walked, the less like home the Up-and-Under seemed.
“You break off the arms, silly,” said the Crow Girl. She grasped one of the flavor fruit’s twisty tentacles and twisted, snapping it neatly off. The flesh of the fruit was white as bone or custard, pale and scentless. The Crow Girl sat back on her heels, beginning to gnaw the tentacle. She didn’t remove the skin or check for seeds.
Cautiously, Zib grasped a tentacle and mimicked the Crow Girl’s motion. It came off easily, as easily as plucking a ripe tomato from the plants in the backyard. The Crow Girl nodded encouragement, and Zib raised the tentacle to her mouth. Then she gasped, eyes going wide.
“It tastes like my grandmother’s gingerbread!” she said. “It’s warm, and sweet, and— How is this possible?”
“Try another one,” said the Crow Girl.
Zib greedily stuffed the rest of the tentacle into her mouth, reveling in the taste of every Christmas she had shared with her grandmother, molasses and spice and sugar. The flavor still clung to her teeth as she broke off another tentacle and took her first bite, only to gasp again.
“Ice cream at the beach in summer! Strawberry ice cream!”
“I don’t know what a strawberry is, but I know ice cream,” said the Crow Girl. She broke another tentacle off her flavor fruit, offering it to Avery. “Here. Try it and see!”
Avery frowned at the tentacle. He didn’t like the look of it. But he liked being rude even less, and so he reached out took the tentacle, sticking the very tip of it into his mouth. Like Zib, his eyes went wide.
“It tastes like my mother’s spaghetti,” he said, wondering. “I can taste the garlic, and the tomato sauce, and the mushrooms. But … spaghetti doesn’t taste like gingerbread or ice cream, not even a little. This can’t be real.”
“Flavor fruit was a gift from the Queen of Wands, when she had to step aside from being summer and take her place in the Impossible City,” said the Crow Girl. “She wanted to be sure that everyone would always be able to eat the things they like best in the world, because everybody needs a treat sometimes. You can’t eat only flavor fruit—you still need fish and bread and other good things in your belly, or you’ll get a stomachache—and that’s why it’s hard to grow. People would eat only it, if they had a choice.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Avery, hungrily eyeing the fruit in the Crow Girl’s hands. Zib was munching on hers, body slightly curved away, so that there was no chance she’d have to share.
The Crow Girl handed him the fruit. “All yours,” she said magnanimously, before producing a third from the hamper. “We have to eat some fish and bread when we’re done, though, or it’ll be like eating all dessert and no dinner: hungry again an hour later, and ready for bed half an hour after that. How do children sleep, where you come from?”
“Um,” said Avery. “We mostly just close our eyes and … do.”
“Sometimes my parents let me take a sleeping bag into the backyard and I sleep where all the stars can see me,” said Zib. “Once I woke up with a spider in my nose.”
“That must have been very surprising for the spider,” said the Crow Girl. “You stay all in one piece when you sleep? How queer. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to be all one piece and try to rest at the same time. I think I’d shake myself apart even trying.”
“We’re always in one piece,” said Avery.
“No one is always in one piece,” said the Crow Girl. “Your heart wants one thing and your head wants something else and your lungs are pig-in-the-middle trying to argue with the both of them. Your spine wants to sit and your feet want to go and your hands want to grab, and they can’t all have their way. No wonder you look so confused and cranky! When all the parts of me start arguing, I pull them apart until they calm down. You, though, you keep holding them together.”
“We don’t mind,” said Zib. “I would think it very strange, if my hands and my feet went off in different directions at the same time.”
“You get used to it,” said the Crow Girl, and took a hearty bite of her own flavor fruit, smiling blissfully. “Carrion pie. Just like home.”
Neither Zib nor Avery knew what that tasted like, and they didn’t want to: they were happy to eat their own flavor fruit and then, once it was gone, to eat the fish and bread the Crow Girl had promised. The fish was juicy and sweet, roasted with unfamiliar greens and more of the little pink berries, which had burst as they cooked, spreading seeds across the fish’s skin. They popped between the teeth, adding a delightful sensation to their supper. The bread was soft and fresh, and there was cheese and butter and oh! Such a lovely meal it was that both children quite forgot how much they wanted another flavor fruit, and simply ate what had been set in front of them.