His long saggy lips twitched up into a smile. “I don’t need to. I’ve been a demon for hundreds of years. Teenage angst is, as you humans say, our ‘bread and butter.’ “
I sipped more hot chocolate. He’d added some cinnamon this time, which tasted weird. But I didn’t want to go to school yet, so I sat and drank.
“So what do retired demons do anyway? There has to be more to your life than making hot chocolate and annoying me.”
“Sadly, not much.”
“Really? Don’t you occasionally, you know, cause strife in the hearts of man? Maybe a curse or two every once in awhile?” I pictured Katelyn Sams again, her perfectly arched eyebrows falling off in the middle of cheer practice. Or maybe growing thick and bushy, turning into two fat, squirming caterpillars above her blue eyes. I smiled into my hot chocolate.
“Let me guess. You have a few names in mind?”
“Maybe,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“Too bad. You’ll have to take your own revenge, as pathetic as that will likely be. I am no longer in possession of my former powers. All I have left is what I showed you, a mere hint of my previous glory. I am a useless shell, left out here to perish. In Minnesota.” He swirled the liquid around in his mug. He wasn’t drinking much today. He could probably use something a whole lot stronger than Hal’s hot chocolate.
“I don’t know. That fireball was pretty sweet.” I didn’t know why I wanted to comfort Molakesh. He was a demon, after all. The Destroyer. Who knew what kind of horrible crap he’d pulled in his undoubtedly long lifetime? But I kept thinking of my grandpa, a husk of a man being spoon-fed pudding by a nurse while blankly watching “The Price is Right” on a flickering old TV.
“Would you like it?” That horned head swiveled up from regarding the mug in his claws, his red eyes fixed intently on me.
“A fireball? What the hell would I do with a fireball?” I tried to push down the fiendish satisfaction I’d taken in imagining the school in flames, my poop-stinking locker reduced to ashes.
“Whatever you wish. The power of demon fire would be yours to control. You are young, fresh. It would be more powerful in you than even I could produce. Just a one-time use, mind you. You are human, after all. More than that would kill you.”
I eyed the patch of yard where the deep rut in the ground was buried under snow. Then I stood up. The wicker chair creaked again, as if glad to be free of my weight. “I’m late for school.”
“Enjoy your day, Shit-face.”
My gloved hands clenched into fists. “Why would you give me something like that anyway?”
He stared at me, unblinking. “Because I have no one else to give anything to.”
I sighed, watching the mist of my chocolate-scented breath puff out in the icy air. “So how will I know how to use it?”
“You’ll know.”
• • • •
I could feel Molakesh’s fireball burning somewhere deep within my chest, a warmth bordering on the uncomfortable, except when I was outside and it was better than the best goose-down coat. It burned in me as I passed Katelyn and her sheep climbing into their new cars to drive home. It burned in me as I discovered that she and her friends had cut the bottom out of my backpack, forcing me to awkwardly carry my books the whole walk home. It burned in me as I slipped and fell on the ice, scattering books and papers all around me into the snow.
I held the fire close to my heart, imagining.
As I turned the corner onto my block, I noticed Molakesh’s front door was open. Wind gusted it back and forth, and had knocked over the wicker chairs left out front from our conversation two days before.
“Molakesh?” I called, climbing the steps to the porch. I pushed the door all the way open with my shoulder, my arms full of wet books. “You okay?”
No answer.
I walked in, trailing slush onto the ugly gray shag carpet. The air was as cold inside as out. I eyed a mirror hanging above a plain wooden entryway table. My birthmark looked redder than usual, angrier.
I set my books down on the table and walked into the living room. The only furniture sitting there was a threadbare, patched armchair in front of one of those ancient blocky TVs. Eerily similar to my grandpa’s set-up in the nursing home, except for one thing.
Molakesh had candles of all sizes and colors, on every surface. None were lit, but the wicks were all blackened with use, and puddles of cold wax coated the carpet, the top of the TV, the kitchen table. He may have been a demon, but I knew instinctively the candles weren’t for any satanic ritual. They were a reminder. A pitiful attempt of used-up demon in a northern Minnesotan winter to surround himself with flame.
An empty pot sat on the stove. Two packets of Hal’s hot chocolate lay on the counter next to it, along with our two mugs. Cleaned and waiting.
The only thing keeping my insides unfrozen was the ball of fire in my chest, flickering uncertainly.
“Molakesh?” I called again, though I knew there would be no answer, even before I found his body lying unmoving and cold in the twin-sized bed in the center of his otherwise empty bedroom. Empty except, of course, for dozens of unlit candles lining the walls. His eyes were open to the white ceiling, the red in them completely gone.
A one-time use, Molakesh had said of the gift he’d given me. I thought one last wistful time of Katelyn Sams and her cronies coming out of the school, their mocking laughter turned to screams as flames erupted from my hands and torched her shiny new car right there in the parking lot. I thought of them sobbing and running and never daring to so much as look at me ever again.
Winslow sucked, but I would leave it all behind one day. I’d leave behind Shit-face, leave behind essay-writing punishments and bell peppers with dinner, leave behind winters that stretched on endlessly.
And now Molakesh could, too.
The fire came to me when I wished it, just as Molakesh had said it would. A ball of flame hovered above my hand. I wasn’t practiced at throwing like he’d been, but it didn’t seem to matter. When the fireball hit his body, the flames erupted upward, blackening the ceiling, spreading outward to catch the carpeting.
The heat seared my face and choked me, but I stayed just long enough to see his body totally consumed in flame. Before I left the house, I grabbed the two mugs and carried them home on top of my pile of books. I was halfway back to my house when I heard the massive crack of the bedroom collapsing in on itself.
I called 911 when I got home, then microwaved myself a cup of hot chocolate. Mom wouldn’t be home from work for another hour or so yet, so she’d miss the show. The wail of approaching sirens sounded as I settled myself onto our porch with the Tweety Bird mug. I watched the flames shoot upwards from my demon neighbor’s house, gorgeous threads of red and orange against a gray winter sky.
Molakesh would have liked it.
* * *
Megan Grey lives in Utah with her husband, two kids, and two dogs (all of whom are incredibly supportive of the time she spends writing about retired demons and other supernatural outcasts). This is her second appearance in Fireside, and her fiction can also be found in One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology, Sybil’s Scriptorium, and in The Book of the Emissaries: An Animism Short Fiction Anthology. To find out more about Megan, visit her website at megangrey.com
Wooden Feathers
By Ursula Vernon
The carving was going badly.
Sarah examined the duck decoy before her and sighed. The bill was shaped entirely wrong. It was supposed to be a mallard, but she hadn’t taken enough off before she began shaping and now the bill was half again as long as it should be.
I’ll flare the bill and make it a Northern Shoveler, she decided. Nobody has to know that it was supposed to be a mallard.
Two customers came in, so she set down the knife and put on her best customer service expression. “Hi, there!”
Two middle–aged women nodded to her. They gave the stall a professional once–over, looking for bar
gains or hidden treasure, then left again without speaking.
Give it up, ladies. The internet got rid of all that. Go bid on storage units or estate trunks or something if you’re hoping to strike it big.
Well, you didn’t say things like that aloud. Not to the customers, anyway. Sarah picked up the knife and turned the decoy around. The hind ends of many ducks looked alike. She wouldn’t have to change anything much to transform her mallard.
Rauf, who ran the stall across the way, waved to her. She liked Rauf. He sold popcorn and boiled peanuts and curry rub and never complained about sawdust getting tracked across the floor.
The sawdust got everywhere, but people liked to watch a carver work. On a good day they would come in and stare for long enough that they felt guilty and bought something small. She did a pretty good business in tiny duck keychains that way.
Given that there were three other woodworkers in the flea market, all of them better than she was, Sarah figured that she needed all the help she could get.
She didn’t talk to the other carvers much. The old–timers at the market wouldn’t talk to you until you’d been there at least a couple of years.
Another customer came in. She looked up and stifled a sigh.
“Hey, there,” she said. “Good to see you again.”
The old man nodded.
He was a repeat customer, but she’d never learned his name. He wore a dusty black suit with frayed bits at the cuffs. The only things that moved quickly about him were his hands. When he picked up one of her carvings, his face stayed old but his hands became young, gnarled but deft. He ran his thumbs over the carved edges of the feathers, traced a circle around the glass eye, and looked up at her inquiringly.
“Common Goldeneye,” she said. Which was true enough, and nobody needed to know that it had started life as a Long–Tailed Duck, but she’d knocked the tail off and then had to get creative.
He nodded. He set the duck down and his hands were old again. He slowly opened his wallet and began to pull out wrinkled bills. The wallet was even more frayed than the suit.
Sarah took the money. She could smell him on it—old man smell, Bengay and fabric washed so many times that it had lost any hope of getting clean.
He came in every week and bought the cheapest of her decoys. He paid cash and brought his own shopping bag over his arm. Sarah worried about him.
“There’s a fifteen percent discount,” she said, sliding the change back.
“There is?” His voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear it over the sounds of the market.
“Yeah,” said Sarah, who had just made it up on the spot. “To celebrate—um—the new duck stamp coming out.” She waved her hand toward the wall, where she’d put up a poster just this morning. “It’s a Ruddy Duck.”
“Is it?” He looked at the poster thoughtfully. She sometimes thought, for a man who bought so many decoys, that he knew very little about ducks.
He took the change and put it very slowly away, then slipped the decoy into his bag. She had stopped offering to wrap them months ago. Then he made his slow way out of the stall and vanished into the crowd.
She slumped back on her stool. She needed the money, but she felt strange taking it from the old man. Why would anyone buy a carved duck decoy every single week?
On good days, she pretended that he was secretly a millionaire, one of the ones who lived cheap, but that he was overcome by admiration for her duck carvings and had to own them.
On most days, she figured that he had a shopping addiction.
Rauf came over, holding a bag of popcorn. “Here,” he said. “We’re about to start a new batch and you haven’t eaten all morning.”
“Thanks, Rauf.” She wiped her hands off and took a handful. “How’s it going?”
“Slow.” He shrugged. “August is always bad. Everybody’s spent all their vacation money and now they’re looking at back to school sales.”
Sarah nodded. Hand–carved ducks sold much worse than popcorn.
“I see old Jep came by.”
“Who?”
“Jep. Just now.” Rauf waved toward the gap in her line of carvings. “Comes in every week, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, him! Yeah. Didn’t know he had a name.” Jep. It seemed like a name for a mountain moonshiner, not an old, frayed man. Then again, maybe he’d been a moonshiner in his youth, who knew?
“He used to be a carver,” said Rauf, promptly dashing the moonshiner fantasy. “Had a stall over on the high–rent side. That was years ago, though.”
“He was?” Sarah blinked.
“Oh, yeah.” Rauf grinned. “He did a big carousel over in Nag’s Head. Had photos up in his stall. Horses and dolphins and seagulls big enough to ride.”
Sarah stared down into the bag of popcorn, wondering how she should feel about that.
“You said he used to be a carver…” she said.
“He stopped after his wife got sick,” said Rauf, the grin fading. “Closed up his stall. They sell custom hammocks or something in it now. I don’t know if he’s done anything since.”
“He must’ve,” said Sarah. She could not imagine not carving. Even when business was dreadful and she had to spend half the income from waitressing just to keep the stall open, it never occurred to her to quit.
She wouldn’t have lasted three days. She’d be sitting on the couch and her hands would start to itch for sandpaper and a knife. She’d end up carving the arm of the couch if she couldn’t get a wooden blank.
Rauf shrugged. “I don’t know. You could ask him.”
Sarah turned the regrettable mallard–turned–shoveler around. “Maybe I will.”
But when he came in the next week, she asked him a different question instead.
“Did you make these?”
Jep looked up at her. No emotion crossed the long, dragged lines of his face, but she thought that she’d surprised him.
She held out her phone, with the pictures of the carousel in Nag’s Head on it.
He did not take it, but he bent down to look at the screen. After a moment he said “Yes. Those were mine.”
He did not look like a man who was proud. He looked like a soldier admitting that he had been to war. He bought the cheapest decoy, put it into his bag, and shuffled out of the shop.
Sarah stared after him, and then down at the photos of the carousel.
Many carousels were works of art. This was more. This was—she didn’t have the words—glory.
The horses were a riot of color, gilded and painted, their heads thrown back or bowed far forward under scarlet reins. Smiling dolphins leapt and cavorted between the horses. There was a gull with its beak open, laughing, and a narwhal with a golden horn and a pelican so large that a child could ride in the pouch.
Sarah’s favorite was a walrus. It was snow white, with a blue saddle, and its tusks were scrimshawed with starfish and ships. Its lumpy, bristly face was screwed up in a grin of delight. In the photo, a little girl had her arms as far around it as they could go, and she was grinning too.
A carousel like that must have cost a million dollars, she thought. He must have charged tons for it. I hope he’s rich. I hope.
She knew all too well how much artists undercut themselves. She was painting the shoveler this week, and if she made thirty dollars worth of profit on the accursed thing, she’d be happy.
The next week, when Jep came in, she asked him if he was still carving.
He shook his head, mutely. He bought the shoveler and went away again.
Sarah was beginning to feel as if she had struck some kind of fairy–tale bargain. One carving bought one question, no more.
The shoveler had barely been worth a headshake anyway. She sighed.
Her current project was a Ruddy Duck, like the one of the stamp. They were small, cheerful ducks, with jaunty tails. They also had a specific enough shape that she wasn’t going to be able to turn it into anything else if she screwed up.
When Jep came in this
time, she paused before she took his money, and said “Why do you keep buying my carvings?”
He stared down at the floor.
The silence went on so long that she took his money and passed him his change, afraid that she had offended him somehow.
No—surely I didn’t. “Why are you buying this?” isn’t a weird question for an artist to ask!
Jep’s lips moved. She had to strain to hear him over the sound of Rauf’s popcorn maker.
He said “They’re the cheapest ones at the flea market.”
He looked up, once, before he left the stall. She hoped that his eyes were as old as the rest of him, because she knew how stricken she must look. Her face felt hot.
She went to the bathroom, full of shoppers complaining to each other about the price of discount socks and how crowded everything was, and splashed water on her face. She was not going to cry in front of the customers.
Well. What did you expect him to say? That he could see your potential? That those crappy ducks were signs of genius? That he wanted to collect them before you got famous and they sold for thousands of bucks apiece?
She wiped her face with a paper towel. Yes. She had wanted him to say those things. She had wanted to think that the man who had carved those carousel beasts had found something good in her work.
At least it’s better than “because I’m passionately in love with you.”
She choked back a laugh at that, or maybe it was a sob. One of the shoppers looked at her curiously, but didn’t ask.
She closed up shop early that day, told Rauf she had a headache, and went home.
When the next weekend rolled around, Sarah wondered if he’d even come back. He had to know he’d upset her.
Unless something’s gone wrong. Maybe he’s got dementia or something. Maybe he keeps buying ducks because he can’t help it.
She wondered what his house looked like. There had to be dozens of decoys by now. She pictured ducks on every available surface, rooms full of jumbled carvings.
Maybe she should stop selling them to him.
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