The Secret Life of Fairies

Published in The Quarter(ly), Vol. VII: Weirder Still, 2023.

Each fairy shall put supper on the table. This was a code decided long before fairies themselves existed, but when their eventual appearance was exceedingly predictable, when all “sky” was white, and not with a single blemish, and this white only ended because from the ground rose weeds, each single blade of this peasant’s grass differentiable like in a medieval catalogue, except increasingly pixelated toward the top.

The weeds were the rough border of the world, unreachable. But before them were bluebells, an infinite stretch of them, from the feet of the viewer until forever, sometimes and only broken by elegant gray trees; what swans are to the kingdom Animalia, these trees were to the kingdom Plantae.

The air sharp like winter; the fairies live in long-sleeved gowns of the Imperial Court. Not as rich or as stuffy as those fit for a queen, but better because of this, and one is led to wonder and led astray, staggering to answer why, why do the young ladies in waiting, already glowing from normal childhoods, also get the lighter, ethereal dresses, so they can sway and leap and lead and flee easily in the romances we read, but their owners stuck deep into potato mash, unable to move or to speak but glare and order.

The fairies do not dress in recognizable patterns. Their fabrics are all monochromatic, and whatever pattern they want to show is created through light and shadows, certain lines or dots or flowers made thicker than their surroundings, still with the same material, and depending on where you stand, the time of day or something else, you will see different things, if the sun or the moon wills.

Four little page boys accompany them on their forestial travels to carry the tails of their dresses. Though that is not entirely true, three carry the tail, and even that is not really thorough, one carries the tail at the very back and two help a few steps ahead on the sides, but what weight is there to carry on the sides?, and one carries a staff a step ahead of the fairy.

Knights in murder search parties scour the same woods, day in, day out. Every single knight is clad in iron wire for the limbs and white sheet for the torso, signed with a Red Cross by two strokes of brush and wall paint, and mount steeds of the color #af9f84.

Knights regularly kill the pages. For a few seconds the regular crush of drying weed under horseshoe will cease and the sound of an arrow tip slicing the aether in half will sound, until it becomes lodged in the cranium of the boy, almost always entering through the lower right corner and embossing a trianglish shape on the upper left. An identical page (the truth is, all of them are identical, but this I shall explain later) spawns on the same spot to take on the duty. Indeed, the pages are all the same height and wear a muted dark orange uniform, their faces are the same pale, and though this one’s lip is thinner and pinker, and this one looks more sadly, look again and you will see different differences. Ergo, they are all the same and what you notice only your mind’s tricks, for it is not used to seeing multiples of the same human. The pages never turn in the direction of the newly dead, and it is as if they are blind, deaf and mute, for they never acknowledge anything. They sometimes repetitively turn their heads left and right, maybe ten, maybe twenty times, eyes unblinking like glass. By no account are they human like us or fairy like them or knight like them, this insentience is possibly why they are shot so easily, but they do bleed like us, red liquid thinly seeping from whatever little crack the arrow was not able to seal, while they fall and lie for an instant like children. But they need to be shot, or for whom will the parties search in the white of morning and in the white of night?

Finally the fairy arrives at a temporary lodging, a divan of evening blue in the middle of a small clearing. When she sits, as if on cue, lambs arrive to chew on the hem of her dress. This is a short respite for the caterpillars who live inside the bluebells, which the lambs normally chew on if there are no dresses present at their assigned post, and these caterpillars will one day become politicians and then shall the lambs see…

Outside, a mill turns. Sails of Pangean weight whirl in planetary speeds and guillotine any fairy in air. With such a difference in size, it seems to the intruder at first that the blades sweat blood. The extinction started between gyrating rocks, carved by tooth and nail, grinding white flesh into dust, when all this was a social activity for cavemen around fires.

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The Feverish Fast of Albert Drach

from The Chamber Magazine, 3/6/22. no longer online.

It was the third day of Albert Drach’s fast. He had been eating null, inputing nought, defecating null, outputting nought. He was awaiting fever dreams to descend on him. He was awaiting descensions of the kind no one had known before, the way the sun’s sunset sets on the Polish Poppy Proletariat, intoxicated from hours with the black seed, who on their way home would imagine their wives had all slept with a purple fabric seller from Kiralyhida and poisoned their dinners. Albert Drach was awaiting such descensions.

And they did come unto him. (In parts.)

He threw his head back getting out of an ocean, his hair coalesced in one single strand splattering its salt water into a white sky, and plopping on his back like a whip. He was groping pebbles in blue, black and gray, crawling ahead in fast devolution from human form; this here rectangular rock larger than his palm and this here short shard of slippery volcanic vomit. He gasped for air as if his pastel pink lungs were fit for a muddy, pre-Cambrian ocean. Standing on a shore of pure stone, he looked ahead, and without a gaze could feel his nakedness, in waves emanating from his hips, not from shame or negation, but a viscous cold filling in his creaks.

Two and a half girls waited, leaning on layers of white rock squashed into each other for centuries. The half girl had one hand, only hand, in a gap in the wall - but no, it was more of a cliff looked from below, but no, it sharpened as it rose and stood alone, but no - and had her body asymmetrically made. Two feet and two calves and three quarters of a lower body and half a torso and one arm and one hand. It was an artist’s job, this, no sinew or stain in sight, everything perhaps unsuitable to the eye tucked inside a half-wet periwinkle dress. Albert Drach remembered not the name of the poet or the sculptor or the gynecologist, but remembered another immortal work of him, the god Elohim.

The other two sat in an awkward gang. Left girl had her legs crossed, again in periwinkle paper, ruffles rolling over boulders and bishop sleeves. Right girl held a Rodin pose, and a belt of red crepe paper encircled somewhere not her waist. Their faces pale and puffed, eyes small and round, hands fit for a life of craftsmanship at first sight, and after a thought, hands like those after a life of craftsmanship. Left spoke:

“We were waiting for someone else.”

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