“Oh, I know. I guarded this crossing point from the Otherworld.”

  I tear my eyes from the water. “What?”

  “I stopped the bigger demons like me from coming through.” He traces the shape of the waterlogged cleft with a finger. Its shores are now wide enough to let through a whole family of dragons at once. “Auntie has you taking care of the small ones, I assume.”

  I imagine him in his demon form, his wings flung out in challenge against some equally menacing fiend as they take flight to do battle in the skies. “You were on the other side the entire time?”

  Dimen makes a middling sort of grunt. “If anyone asks. I’m sure you’re more dutiful at this than I was. It’s fine either way; Auntie is scarier than anything in the Otherworld. You never poked your head through the pool?”

  I blink. “Humans need a travel permit, too, if they want to cross, and I don’t have—”

  Head thrown back, he barks a laugh—a real laugh—and it’s the most imperfect I’ve ever seen him, wrinkles all along his face and not just in his handsome dimples. He laughs like Ahma: all in the belly. “Not all rules are for our benefit, you know—most are for someone else’s convenience. An excuse to not think too hard about things. So, what do you say—want to look now?”

  He’s already taken my hand, pulling me splashing through the puddles.

  “Wait!” I shout, and he stops, turning with that slight raise of his brows. My thoughts are buzzing and of no help, and I feel nothing but the cold, clear water at my feet and his hand in mine. “Slow—slow down, that’s all.”

  “Ah.” He relaxes. “My apologies. I forget myself sometimes.”

  We look, just for a minute—a marvelous minute—and in that split second of crossing back when I stand fully in neither realm, I feel lighter than air, like I could land anywhere in the world.

  We visit twice more in the following days, each time for a little longer. The second time, Dimen brings lunch he claims he cooked, and a certain question can’t stay lodged in my throat any longer.

  “Are you courting me?” I ask.

  “Would you like me to?”

  Though I’m not quite looking at him and I don’t think he’s looking at me, I’m certain it’s an earnest question.

  But I never do answer him.

  I don’t believe much in love, at least the kind of love that you fall into. I know it exists. But as a thing I can touch, a thing I’ve seen—I don’t know. I don’t understand how you can make a promise on something so unsolid.

  But sometimes, you spend so much time with the same person—

  This wouldn’t be a problem if Dimen weren’t the prettiest one here.

  He hasn’t found a bride, but one day his few belongings are packed and set aside by the entryway, along with a new coat and a twine-wrapped bundle of food. While I help Ahma cook dinner, Tayin, the youngest of us twenty-two girls, tugs on Ahma’s apron and asks, “Is Fanny going to leave with the prince?”

  “The prince? Sidoi? He is a potato, not a prince, girl. And Fan does not want to leave with him.”

  She shouldn’t have said so with such certainty, even though it was true just a week before. Because immediately, I itch to prove her wrong. I let Tayin fold the rest of the dumplings, her favorite task, and excuse myself from the kitchen.

  Outside, Dimen is sweeping the porch and the furniture is back where it used to be, like he had never moved it around. I remember when I shouted at him to leave, and he’s been nothing but contrary this entire visit; I never imagined he’d leave at all.

  I chew my lip. “Where are you headed next?”

  “I’m not sure.” He leans on the broom as he thinks, fraying the bristles. I make him rest it against the railing. “I always wanted to explore the human world. Hythill has nice shores, I hear. I could bring you along if you’d like.”

  “What—” I gulp to find my words. “What about your bride search?”

  “There are beautiful women all around the world. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Then you’re not—I wouldn’t be—” Swaying on my feet, I would gladly grasp the closest thing to hold me steady, if it weren’t his arm. “That is, you know how that would look . . . if we left together.”

  “You don’t have to be my bride, if that is what you’re asking.”

  Have to be. “I have a choice?”

  Ever so slightly, Dimen’s gaze slides somewhere to the side of me, so he doesn’t have to look me in the eyes. “You always have a choice, Fanny.”

  The wind whistles past and tugs at the secret in my chest; the carved space has always ached, if I knew to recognize its pang. Does he fit there, is he meant to nest there, this feathered demon of smoke? It’s a jewel of a thought, one that my fingers are nearly curled around. All I know is he makes me want to talk back to him and I think he likes it when I do, and he would take me wherever I wished and I would trust the hand holding mine. That isn’t love. It’s not an answer, or anything as neat as a yes or a no. It’s certainly not how stories go.

  So I say the only thing I know I want: “Kiss me.”

  The air hiccups. He glides to the space in front of me, and when I close my eyes for a blink, I hear his movement for the first time—a single beat of a bird’s wing. “It takes two,” he murmurs.

  I lean forward and kiss him. Just a taste, and we part. A peek through the pool can be just a peek and nothing more. I don’t want to be a demon’s bride, not right now.

  But I want this. I reach for his hand, and his talon-sharp fingers wrap around mine.

  “Bring me with you,” I say.

  My world fits in a knapsack. I hug all the girls goodbye, then run downstairs and out the back door and meet Ahma in her garden.

  I’m breathless—maybe even blushing. “Ahma, forgive me,” I say. “I think I may be a fool.”

  Ahma laughs; birds deep in the forest startle at the sound. She dusts the dirt off her palms and kneads my cheeks with a liver-spotted hand. “All the best stories begin with one.”

  She presses a bag into my arms and I know inside are warm buns and boiled eggs. I kiss her cheek and promise to visit.

  “But not too soon,” she adds.

  I run to the clearing in front of the manor, bag and broom in hand, and Dimen is overhead, his great wings unfurled, a shadow blocking the sun. He swoops down, I catch the thick ridge of feathers on his neck, and together, we fly away from Ahma’s island.

  Author’s Note

  As a Chinese American who grew up on mostly British stories, I always wished for more fantasy that mixed the different lores and aesthetics living in my imagination. I didn’t feel like an outsider in these worlds I knew, but neither did any of them feel fully like home. I breathed this wish into particular details: the cadence of the narration, the fairy tales referenced in passing, the language switching—especially the dual names of Fan and Fanny. Fairy tales often center around grand quests, but in this case I wanted to write a small story set in a big world. Sometimes there’s an entire journey in those first few steps.

  Ahma’s island is a place of multiple languages and dialects. Sidoi is a Taishanese Romanization of 薯仔, which means “potato” and is also slang for “fool.” Dimen is a Mandarin Romanization of 睇門, which means “guard the door.” It also happens to sound a lot like demon.

  Imagery in FOOLS

  by Emily X.R. Pan

  FOOLS is full of clever images that make the characters and settings pop. It’s a good example for us to pull the lens in close and talk about the decisions writers make at the prose level.

  What makes an image worthy? As readers, our minds spark when we come across something unexpected that sharpens the picture and makes the world feel real. This is how our main character, Fan, surprises us when she describes the witch taking her heart: “She nipped it out as gently as she would pluck a flower bud . . .”

  Chen uses imagery here to subvert expectations. The original picture in my head was of a witch carving out the heart, leaving our protagonist bloody, at the very least. But the witch is gentle, treating the heart like a flower—there’s no body horror there.

  In the next section we learn more about Ahma:

  They whisper of Ahma’s wisdom being the answer to life itself—but truly? She dispenses more fried pancakes than talk. You just can’t think clearly on an empty stomach.

  Chen could have written, “She dispenses more food than talk.” But specifically saying “fried pancakes” makes the sentence feel more real and inhabited. To follow it with “You just can’t think clearly on an empty stomach” adds humor. These endearing pictures help to build up Ahma as a mother figure.

  In this same paragraph we hear a bit about the other girls:

  . . . Mari, the victim of a king with a gemstone touch, whose opaline throat trilled songs that could beckon statues to life; or Linna, thrown into the sea as a sacrifice, who washed ashore with a sense for pearls as deep as fifty feet underwater.

  These details are delightfully unusual. And because the characters have such different traits, we now better understand the scope of the magic.

  Careful word choice has a huge impact, too. Like this simple sentence:

  We had stayed up through the night, and dew flicked from my hair when I shook my head no.

  Without “dew” I would have imagined beds, but now I’m guessing they slept on grass, which feels idyllic and enchanting. The verb “flicked” is the most active word here—it brings the sentence to life.

  Chen also builds upon her own ideas to make the world richer:

  The upsides of a missing heart are few and practical. Without a heart, I don’t bleed; I feel my wounds less, if at all; and unlike my parents, I am never distracted by a leap of emotion. So Ahma gives me the task that demands the steadiest of the girls—that of guarding the gate between worlds.

  This is an example of imagery doubling as a worldbuilding tool. Fan’s lack of a heart is plenty magical on its own, but now we’re learning there are different consequences in this world for having no heart, which makes this fantasy setting feel more fully realized. Second, it becomes justification for why Fan has the task of guarding the gate, which turns out to be an important piece in the line of plot dominoes.

  As I read this story I could smell the sea. I inhabited the world. What’s more magical than that?

  Monsters

  Adriana Marachlian

  “Marachlian drew me in with her first sentence. I had to know why this character saw monsters, and the more I read, the more I discovered a clever and beautiful metaphor about what it means to travel far from home, where people avert their eyes at your otherness rather than embrace you with open arms. Marachlian’s crisp prose and exquisite dialogue joined together to create a deeply emotional tale of diaspora and nostalgia for home.”

  —Roshani Chokshi, author of The Gilded Wolves

  The day Milagros moved to the US, she saw monsters.

  From the stories her cousin Cecilia had told her about the bustling life in Brooklyn, Milagros had assumed there wouldn’t be any. Cecilia and Tía Yocelin had spent three flights and two uncomfortable layovers going on about other things: the streets, the markets, the shows. They liked to say they were from Brooklyn, not the US.

  But they had never mentioned monsters.

  Milagros realized now, watching the slimy green creature climb onto the suitcase of an oblivious Tía Yocelin, that it was because they couldn’t see. Or, rather, they could see, but not the way Milagros and her mamá could.

  But her mamá had stayed home, so now it was just Milagros.

  She matched Cecilia’s excited pace through an airport that was surely as big as her entire island back in Venezuela, while her cousin listed the things they would do during Milagros’s first weekend here: sleep (hopefully a lot), unpack, get Froyo, go shopping for new clothes so Milagros “wouldn’t start ninth grade in rags,” sleep some more.

  Milagros nodded when Cecilia paused to breathe, which wasn’t often, waiting until they stopped by the elevator to scoop the small creature from Tía Yocelin’s suitcase and onto her own. The creature blinked two of its three eyes, then curled around the handle.

  “What are you looking at?” Cecilia said. “Is something wrong with your suitcase?” She jiggled the handle, and the sudden movement made the monster flee.

  Milagros watched it walk-hover away on tiny wings that seemed too small to sustain it.

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  They wouldn’t take a cab home because cabs were too expensive, Tía Yocelin announced, loading both Cecilia and Milagros into a train that traveled outside. Milagros understood that was to be her first lesson: Things were more expensive here. But it was a lesson she had already learned.

  The outside train—Cecilia had called it an air train—took them on a loop of the airport, as if to show Milagros the great expanse of what was to be her new home.

  It was too big.

  The old white woman across from her gestured at the train window and let out a long string of English words that made absolutely no sense, all the while staring at Milagros like she expected something.

  Cecilia leaned forward to answer. The woman smiled, said something else, and turned away with the vague expression of someone who wanted to act like nothing had happened.

  “What did she say?” Milagros asked Cecilia.

  “She was telling you that it was a pretty incredible view.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “That you don’t speak English.”

  Milagros glanced at the woman, who was still pretending to not notice her, and felt the heat of shame rise up the back of her neck. She was glad when the ride was over and Tía Yocelin led them into a station that reminded her of the metro she’d used the few times she’d been to Caracas.

  The next train they took was packed full. Tía Yocelin pressed Cecilia and Milagros into the corner between a railing and the sliding doors, the suitcases crowded between them. A man sitting down shot Milagros a look when her elbow accidentally poked him.

  She apologized, which somehow seemed to make him even angrier.

  A voice crackled overhead, so warped that she was sure she wouldn’t have understood it even if she knew English. No one seemed to pay it any mind. Then the train lurched to life.

  A long, mournful sound, like metal against metal, whined over their heads.

  “What’s that?” Milagros asked, hands over her ears.

  “It’s the conductor speaking,” Tía Yocelin said.

  “No, the other sound.”

  Tía seemed to smile and frown at the same time, and patted Milagros on the head instead of answering. One of her rings caught on a strand of hair and pulled.

  Here was another lesson: What Tía Yocelin did not like, she ignored. Like taxes or her stepson Gabriel or Milagros’s questions.

  The journey was a game of stop and go that they seemed to be losing, especially Milagros, as the shifting crowd shoved the suitcases repeatedly against her.

  She turned around in what little room she had. The darkness of the tunnel made the window into a faded mirror, her own brown face reflected back, just tiredness framed by flyaway hair.

  A blue light flashed outside at her eye level, there and then gone, as the train sped on.

  Milagros was used to catching sight of what people at home called “strangeness.” Her island had been full of creatures and oddities: small espíritus that didn’t so much haunt as worry about their house’s tidiness; wisps that attached themselves to plants and animals and went wherever they were taken; the oily black things that carried out the mal de ojo.

  She had lived with that strangeness enough to know how it made her feel—slightly too aware, like she was leaning over a precipice just for the view.

  So she knew, as soon as the flash broke through the reflection of her face, that it wasn’t just a light. She knew that the creature at the airport had not been a one-time thing.

  The train stopped at a station, people rushing to get out and almost taking Milagros and Cecilia with them. Tía Yocelin harrumphed at all of their backs.

  When they started to move again, Milagros kept her eyes on the other side of the glass, hoping to catch sight of that blue flash one more time. For three more stops, the darkness was still.

  Then, there.

  She stood on her tiptoes, watching the streak of blue light sweep down and back up. She imagined it was winding around the train before it came back into her field of vision—thicker, like it was learning to be solid again.

  Milagros tapped on the glass.

  Two things happened at once: The train stopped deep in the tunnel and, whether cause or effect, a pair of eyes blinked open in the darkness.

  Two silver slit-pupil orbs, each the size of one of Milagros’s hands, blurred her reflection into unimportance. The space between the eyes was filled with a dimness that coalesced into fragments, then edges, then nothing again.

  Milagros stared, and the monster in the darkness stared back.

  Back in Venezuela, the waves had moods.

  They were tugged ashore by creatures made of spindly wood pieces, sliding, crashing, lapping. On rainy days, when her mamá closed the stationery shop early, Milagros would climb up to the roof of their building and watch people watch the small monsters.

  Not everyone could see, of course, but the creatures didn’t need to be seen to exist.

  Her older sister Esperanza sat with her sometimes, holding a raincoat over both their heads, dreaming up a future that would never be reality. As she talked, Esperanza watched the waves without seeing much, catching glimpses out of the corners of her eyes, the truth hiding from her around the edges of the world. That was back when tourists still visited their island and Milagros still had a sister.