A History of Glitter and Blood

A History of Glitter and Blood by Hannah Moskowitz

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Authors: Hannah Moskowitz
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says, “Shit, you’re brave. Do you know that?”
    She hadn’t stopped shaking her head, but she does, now, very slowly.
    He gives his ankle a few tugs and clatters to the ground with a noise like a xylophone. When he straightens up, he is half as wide as Beckan but several inches taller, and she can’t stop looking at his hair, black and thin and free, like something spilled on him.
    â€œHi, Beckan. I’m Piccolo.”
    â€œHow do you know my name?” she says, which is stupid, because there are three fairies and they are celebrities. He doesn’t answer, which she takes as a compliment.
    She tilts her head up and tries to find where he was hanging, but she’s so quickly disoriented by the hundreds of threads, all nearly translucent and thinner than her fingers.
    Piccolo looks up with her.
    â€œYou’ve never been up there?” he says.
    â€œI don’t know how. How do you balance?”
    He picks a foot up and shows it to her. Where she has five toes, he has two, dividing his foot in half with a narrow slit. “We slide,” he says.
    â€œBut me.”
    â€œYou hold on. And you can slide, with practice.”
    She takes a step back. “Thank you. I’m all right.” She does not want to hold on to anyone.
    â€œI’m not going to hurt you.”
    â€œYes. I know, maybe you won’t.” She shakes her head. “But my friends are waiting for me.”
    â€œScrap’s still underground.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œYou really want to walk home alone?”
    â€œIs that an offer?”
    He shakes his head. “I can’t. I can’t wander off, I’m ridiculously controlled, it’s this whole thing.” He chews on the inside of his cheek. “It’s bullshit. Anyway. But I’ll wait here with you if you want.”
    And all of a sudden, she trusts him. There’s something about a boy who isn’t allowed to wander off. There’s something about a boy in a sky who has limits.
    â€œYou can wait with me,” she says.
    He nods. She shifts so she is next to him, and they stand together in the darkness. His way of breathing is louder than hers. She can’t believe how tall he is.
    â€œYou know,” she says, and he jumps. “You know,” she says again, “We could see better from up there, maybe?”
    â€œWe could.”
    â€œSo.” It’s Josha’s speech pattern, the unaccompanied
so
, but it seems in place here. She feels like Josha would be better at this than she is. It’s hard to be herself around new creatures. She always forgets how she is.
    His face breaks into a smile, and then hers, and she looks up at the stars and at Piccolo spitting a new thread into his hand, and something inside her pounds like a drum.
    He yanks a length of thread out of his throat, bites it off, and whips one end up to the sky. It sticks.
    He offers his hand. She takes it so quickly that it isn’t until her fingers are in his that she realizes she cannot remember the last time she did anything with this little thought.
    She thinks about Tier, probably holding hands with Rig. The different secret handshakes Cricket had with Scrap and Josha. About how Scrap will sometimes grab her knuckles when they’re walking home at night and something moves and they are afraid.
    â€œJust hold on to me,” Piccolo says. He moves Beckan’s hands to his shoulders, slips the thread between his fingers, and zips up the line with Beckan on his back. The thread glides through his hands. Air whistles down Beckan’s throat—this is so fast. Has she ever gone this fast?
    She watches the building beside her, the ruined mess of a skyscraper, as row after row of windows pass and disappear beneath them. It is so much higher than when she used to go up to the roof of her apartment building, before everything, to get a good view of the sunset while she melted scrap metal into sculptures. She’d

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