Fae

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by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

“Don’t,” he gasped. “It will kill you.”

  “The fairfolk… would give a message…” she spoke between gasps of pain. Her fingers moved quickly, deftly. The skin on her hands and fingers blistered and bubbled an inflamed red. Soon blood bubbled out of the blisters, marbling her moonlit skin, but still she moved.

  “Please, stop. Don’t do this,” he urged as her trembling fingers set him free.

  Her face paled still more by the light of the moon. The trembling spread up her arms, as did the burning red blisters. Tears welled, slipped slow down her cheeks. Her breath came in small, painful hiccups, every touch a singeing pain.

  But at last, she set him free. She fell back to the earth, and he fell beside her—limbs weak and quivering. She lay still beside him. She grabbed his hand, smearing her fairfolk blood over his hands and fingers, touched his face, leaving a trail of the same earthy brown liquid there too. “I have marked you as our messenger. Keep the fire within you—the earth will revolt with you. The mother needs her children, fairfolk and man, alike. Give him the message, Cedric.”

  He nodded through his tears. “I will.”

  “And the message?” she asked, the light fading from her eyes.

  “A message of fire and blood.”

  Her eyes widened a bit. “Now you’ve seen the love of the fairfolk. Wait… watch for the beauty—the wrath of the fairfolk.”

  She passed. The light extinguished. He wept, for Lina and Rhoswen, for his people and the abused earth. Rhoswen’s form shrank as a hollowed out shell of a burned log. Her body crumbled in on itself and faraway he heard a tinkling, mournful song rise from the trees. The fairfolk wept too as Cedric stood. He braced his feet wide, tracing her blood on his face.

  The fire inside drove him on—drove him on to deliver the message.

  ~*~

  Since she was a child of nine years old, Alexis A. Hunter has reveled in the endless possibilities of speculative fiction. Short stories are her true passion, despite a few curious forays into the world of novels. Over forty of her short stories have been published, appearing recently in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Read Short Fiction, Scigentasy and more. To learn more about Alexis visit www.idreamagain.wordpress.com.

  ~*~

  The Fairy Midwife

  Shannon Phillips

  Every birth is different. Any midwife will say that, especially if she’s talking to a shiny-eyed mom-to-be. “Your story,” Tara would say, “is special and unique and I am honored to be a part of it.” And then she would give her best benevolent earth-mother smile.

  It wasn’t bullshit, not exactly. It just wasn’t always completely true. After you’ve delivered a couple hundred babies, it turns out that lots of births are very much alike. First, there’s the waiting; second, the earnest attempt to follow the birth plan; and then there’s the part right after the birth plan goes out the window, where everything happens in a messy inexorable tide and a new little human enters the world in a wash of blood and pain and wonder.

  Which is why Tara didn’t really mind when she got a call from the birth center at 4:00 AM. It was only strange because it wasn’t her night on call. And because it was the director on the other end of the line.

  “This one’s a bit unusual, Tara,” Madon said. “You’ve done home births, yes?”

  “I—yes,” she said, blinking sleep out of her eyes. “In my old practice we did them all the time. But I don’t have a kit together anymore.”

  She’d only been with the Greenbud Birth Center for a few months, and very much wanted to keep the job. They didn’t jack her around with the scheduling, they didn’t overbook their birthing suites, and they paid twenty percent above her previous salary. Madon, a thirty-something single dude with thick-rimmed glasses and a perpetual scruff of beard, was pretty far from the Wicca-hippie-lesbian-yogini profile she associated with directors of midwifery clinics: but he seemed to keep things running smoothly, and kept the breakroom stocked with really good coffee.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m going to send a taxi to your apartment, loaded with all the gear. We’ll bill for time and a half on this one. Thanks for being a team player.”

  Team player, Tara chanted to herself as she detangled her hair with her fingers and went hunting for a clean pair of jeans. She splashed some water on her face—no time for a shower—and rinsed her mouth with Listerine. The intercom buzzed as she was lacing up her sneakers. Team player.

  She was too groggy to make small talk with the driver. In retrospect, she might have paid more attention to a few things: like, it wasn’t actually a taxi. Just a regular sedan. And the driver was very, very short, with tufts of white hair that stuck up almost like horns. But it was 4:00 AM, she’d only been awake for fifteen minutes, and while she noticed these things they didn’t exactly register.

  The mom and dad were an odd couple too. Tara had a hard time getting a read on them: when the door first opened to her knock she had an initial impression of an old, bent-over man, but as she stepped into their apartment she saw a young hipster type in skinny jeans and plaid. He told her his name and she promptly forgot it. Five minutes later she asked again, and he told her, and she forgot that time too.

  The mom was already fully dilated and experiencing intense contractions, so not really interested in chitty-chat. Tara felt for the baby’s head, confirmed that it was in the right position, and got the basic details of the woman’s medical history. No other children; no prior surgeries, high blood pressure, or other factors that would render the pregnancy high-risk; she said she’d had prenatal care. There was a complicated backstory as to why they’d ended up calling Madon at the last minute. Tara didn’t fully understand it, but it wasn’t her place to judge. She explained to the mom and dad that Greenbud had a standing arrangement with a local hospital and that they would transfer the mother there if Tara observed any complications developing. But from her initial examination it looked like a perfectly ordinary labor.

  Well, it was and it wasn’t. The mom bore up in near-silence; the dad faded into the background, startling Tara several times when she’d catch sight of a stranger out of the corner of her eye. Each time she thought it was someone different—a burly man, a long-bearded vagrant, a redheaded little boy. Then she’d look up and it was always the same hipster dad in skinny jeans. Tara started to wonder if her Listerine had gone bad.

  She kept the laboring woman mobile for as long as feasible, walking with her slowly around the apartment, pausing to offer counterpressure and massage as the contractions came on. During this time Tara couldn’t help but notice that only the front two rooms of the apartment had been furnished. All the others were dusty and bare. When Tara suggested that the mom step into the shower for a bit to let the warm water ease her contractions, neither she nor the dad seemed to know where the bathroom was.

  Three hours later there was a baby, a purple-faced and wrinkly little girl. Tara cleaned her carefully and helped the mom position her for nursing. They had some trouble establishing a latch but the baby eventually suckled for a few minutes before falling asleep.

  The dad reappeared then, with a little pot of ointment that he carefully smeared over the sleeping newborn’s eyes. Erythromycin, Tara presumed—the antibiotic that hospitals would routinely administer to prevent infection—except that the brown ceramic pot didn’t look like anything a pharmacy would dispense. “Where did you get that?” she asked curiously.

  The dad smiled at her. “From oak and ash and thorn,” he said, “and seven grains of wheat laid on a four-leaf clover. Your own father made the same ointment for you, but you have forgotten.”

  Strangely, Tara only remembered that conversation afterwards, when she was falling back into her own bed in a haze of exhaustion. And she could not for the life of her remember what she’d said in return.

  ~*~

  “Thanks for handling that special case,” Madon said in the breakroom. He’d installed an espresso machine, and offered to make Tara a cappuccino. She watched him as he steame
d the milk and brewed the coffee, his hands precise and steady on the controls.

  “Every birth is different,” Tara said dryly.

  “We might be doing more home births,” Madon said, folding the milk into the espresso. A deft flick of the wrist at the end left a swirl in the foam, like a heart. “The schedule is unpredictable, but if you’re willing to be called up, there’ll be a bonus for each one.”

  “Sure,” Tara said.

  The cappuccino was the best she’d ever had.

  ~*~

  The next call came in the afternoon, so she didn’t have the grogginess of sleep-deprivation or even the Listerine to blame. There was just the same dark sedan, the silent little driver with thistle-white hair, and, at the clients’ address, a nondescript apartment that looked like it had been hastily staged for a realtor’s tour. It had a couch and a rug and a spray of pussy willows on the coffee table, and at least this time they’d put in a bed. But there were no hangers in the closet, no toothpaste in the bathroom, and the refrigerator light didn’t even turn on.

  The mom was gorgeous, like she could have been a model, but everything she said sounded exactly like the croaking of a toad. The dad had to give the medical history, and it was, again, some complicated story that didn’t quite make any sense. Tara made a noncommittal noise and set about inflating the birthing ball.

  The mom croaked louder as contractions intensified. Tara rubbed her back and coached her to breathe: fast-fast-deep, fast-fast-deep. They moved from the ball to the bed to the tub, and ended up delivering on a birthing stool. Tara guided the dad to catch the baby, and found herself getting misty-eyed as the mom gave deep, throaty trills of joy.

  The dad tried to pay her in leaves. Oak leaves, brown and crackling, a whole stack of them, and a little bag of acorn caps as well. “No,” Tara said gently, “Madon will send you a bill.” But he insisted on pressing them into her hands. “So,” she said finally, “I guess you guys are fairies?”

  “You weren’t supposed to know,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Tara told him. “I’m not really freaked out.” She didn’t know why, but it was true: she was pretty Zen anyway, ‘not religious but spiritual.’ She had her daily horoscope sent to her email and she kept a rose quartz crystal in her bedroom to pull love into her life. It was not so much of a stretch to believe in fairies. “But I thought,” she said, “that you guys couldn’t have babies? I mean, aren’t there all those stories—about changelings and all?”

  As the words left her mouth she realized how offensive they sounded. It was like accusing a gypsy—no, a Roma person—of stealing babies. It was like asking a Jewish person about the blood libel. Crap, Tara thought desperately, I’m racist against fairies.

  But the dad didn’t seem offended. “That was the old days,” he said. “Things are better now. We don’t take infants from cradles. We steal embryos from IVF clinics.”

  Tara blinked.

  “It’s like vampires and blood banks,” he said.

  “What? Vampires?”

  He gave her a pitying look. “We don’t take anything anyone will miss. The embryos we… divert… are the ones scheduled for destruction. It’s a much better system. Now our wives can carry the children themselves.”

  Tara couldn’t seem to keep her mouth from talking. “I guess it’s an improvement over the whole stealing-babies racket,” she heard herself say, “but that doesn’t make it okay.”

  The dad very deliberately removed one of the brown oak leaves from her fistful, tucking it carefully away in his back hip pocket. “Madon never said you were so judgmental,” he sniffed.

  When she got home Tara dumped the withered leaves and acorn caps into an old coffee tin. Maybe someday it would turn into gold, though on the whole she rather doubted it.

  ~*~

  She thought for a long time about how to phrase things, but when she found Madon in the breakroom (he was loading up the espresso machine with a new single-origin Burundi roast) it just kind of came out. “So your fairy friends are running a kidnap ring,” she said. “And I don’t want to be part of it anymore.”

  Madon gave her a funny look. “Is that how you think of it?” he said.

  “How do you think of it?”

  “Fosterage is the old metaphor,” he said neutrally. “I grant you, the bio parents haven’t consented, and that’s… ethically problematic. But the embryos we take aren’t missed. These babies never would have been born if we hadn’t intervened. We give them long and happy lives. Is that so wrong?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. I just think, what would the bio mom feel, if she knew she had a kid out there that’d been spirited away by fairies? Pretty shitty, I bet.”

  Madon flicked a few buttons on the machine, and it began to purr. “You’re coming at this from the wrong angle,” he said. “You should be asking what happens to the babies. They’re still mortal, after all.”

  “What do you mean? What happens to the babies?”

  “Well, some grow up and get old and eventually die, while everyone they know stays the same forever. But many get restless at some point. They want to go back to the mortal world. They want an education, a job, a family.”

  “…And?”

  He shrugged. “We let them go. But we put a charm on their memory, to block their recollection of growing up with the fae. Instead they have a hazy sense of a family somewhere, that for some reason they never have time to see. They don’t question it. It helps them settle into the mortal world.”

  “Creepy,” she said. “Look, Madon, I’m giving notice. I’m not going to go to the police or anything… but I’m quitting Greenbud.”

  “Tara,” he said. “When’s the last time you called your mom?”

  The question irritated her, because it was irrelevant and a distraction and she couldn’t answer it offhand. Sure, it had been a while, but she talked to her mom enough. She really didn’t want to think about it. She opened her mouth to tell Madon to mind his own beeswax, but he kept looking at her in that funny way, and then suddenly she decided to sit down.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  He took a steaming cup of black espresso from the machine and slid it over to her. “Take the weekend,” he said. “If you decide you still want to go, I’ll write you a nice reference.”

  ~*~

  Tara spent the weekend walking in the park, staring at blowing leaves and splashing fountains. Dimly she was starting to remember things. A man with antlers on his head, throwing her in the air and catching her again. A woman’s voice singing a lullaby laced with Irish words. Oddly, she felt no real need to know more, and also no curiosity about her biological parentage. Those questions existed like rocks in the stream of her thoughts, patient, offering no disturbance to the surface currents. She thought someday the answers might become important to her, but for now they were not.

  She noticed babies. She always noticed babies, perhaps like an interior designer notices fabric: she could guess ages and weights with an accuracy that often startled parents. But now she saw a baby and thought of the person it would become, the life it would make: which ones would be happy? And which would drift through life with no sense of fulfillment or purpose, ending as the pinched and bitter faces that also passed her as she walked? She noticed which ones were held, which ones were wheeled, which ones had bottles, which ones were nursed. She knew very well the bitter arguments parents waged over these issues. But she found herself doubting that any of it made much difference. It seemed to her that a baby was his own person from the beginning, that he contained his own flowering as the acorn contains the oak.

  On Monday she haunted the espresso machine until Madon wandered in. “Make me a latte?” she asked, and he smiled as he opened the mini-fridge for the milk.

  “I hope this means you’re staying,” he said.

  She chewed her lip. “I don’t, you know, endorse it. But you guys are doing what you’re doing, and the babies exist, and I guess it’s better for there to be some me
dical support at the births. What’s gonna happen if we need to transfer one of these moms to the hospital?”

  “I’ll show up,” said Madon, gently rocking the milk as it steamed, “and handle the paperwork, which will mysteriously vanish shortly after.”

  “I was wondering,” Tara said, “what your story is. I mean, if you want to tell me. You seem to know more of my story than I do.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Not the important things.” He glanced up from the machine, and she noticed how soft his brown eyes were behind the glasses.

  “Maybe I could take you out to dinner,” she said, daring, “and you could explain some things to me. Like where I can sign up for a self-defense class against vampires.”

  Madon smiled, and poured the foamy milk into the shape of a perfect shamrock. “I’d like that,” he said, and offered her the cup.

  Cradling the latte in her hands, its warmth spreading into her fingers, Tara thought about how all the old stories warned against accepting food from a fairy. So before she took a sip, she dipped the tip of her pinkie into the foam and drew a line in the shamrock’s top-most leaf—turning three leaves into four. “Now it’s lucky,” she said, and drank to her new life.

  ~*~

  Shannon Phillips lives in Oakland, where she keeps chickens, a dog, three boys, and a husband. Her first novel, The Millennial Sword, tells the story of the modern-day Lady of the Lake.

  ~*~

  The Price

  Kari Castor

  The snow was thick, even under the trees. Addie’s feet sunk deep into it as she trudged farther and farther from the cottage where her mother and sisters waited for her return. She scanned the undergrowth as she walked, hoping for a glimpse of red berries. The bucket she carried was nearly empty.

  There! A crimson flash. She plodded forward to examine the bush that had caught her attention. A few berries, not many. A bird chittered at her from a tree nearby, evidently upset by her intrusion. She peeled one heavy mitten off, tucked it under her arm, and delicately plucked the handful of crimson spheres from the bush.

 

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