by Paula Guran
You learned Pigwidgeon’s story the first time you listened to the flier and grew desperate enough to go seeking after ENDINGS GUARANTEED. Here he sits, the spurned fairy knight who fell in love and wooed Queen Mab of the Winter Court, and so brought down upon his head all the ire of Oberon.
“Where is my wife, thou rogue?” quoth he,
“Pigwidgeon, she is come to thee;
Restore her, or thou diest by me!”
His skin is pale as milk, and his hair is even paler, almost translucent. It almost looks spun from glass. His silver eyes are filled with starlight.
“You again,” he sighs in a voice like soured honey and wilted flowers. His voice is as weary as you feel, and there’s about it a blankness even more absolute than the stubborn emptiness on page thirty-four. Seeing him, hearing him, you want to turn tail and run away home.
“The hob sent you,” he sighs. “The hob can’t keep his mouth shut, not if some delicacy is dangled before him. One day, I’ll take up needle and sinew and sew that filthy squealer’s lips together.”
You almost say, I can come back some other time, but all days are the wrong day to seek an audience with Pigwidgeon, and you’ve already paid too dear a price to turn back now. Instead, you say, “You know why I’m here. Ask your price, and I’ll pay it. I need to find the shop. I have a deadline.”
“And you take the easy way out,” the fairy sneers. “You sorry, pitiful mortals, so willing to barter with your souls, rather than unriddle a bewilderment by your own faculties. You’re cowards, every mother’s son of you, every mother’s daughter, every whore or rake’s bastard child.”
“Then my failings are your gain,” you reply. When facing Pigwidgeon, nothing is more sure to tilt the scales in your favor than an out-and-out admission/show of human weakness.
“You’ll regret this, one day or one night,” he assures you. “And, given how short the span of your days, the regret shall come sooner rather than later.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
The fairy scowls and picks at the ruined upholstery.
“Would you give me every drop of blood in your veins?” he asks without meeting your eyes. “Would you grant me every breath you would have taken from this moment on?”
“I think that would defeat the purpose,” you reply. This is part of Pigwidgeon’s song and dance, dog and pony, the exorbitant arrangements he suggests before naming the same price he always asks.
“Would you grant me the life of the woman you love? Would you give me both your eyes?”
And, just like always, you refuse him these things. And, just like always, he finally, inevitably, demands his reward for sending you off to the one who knows the current whereabouts of the shop that sells the services advertised on the flier from the coffeehouse.
“Fine,” he says and stops picking at the frayed pomegranate upholstery. “Then it’s settled. Take off your clothes, woman. Take off your clothes and come to me. Every stitch. Every scrap. Come to me naked as the day you were birthed.”
You begin to undress, and Pigwidgeon smiles from his raggedy throne. The air in the garret is as warm as an October evening, and no warmer; when you stand before the hungry fairy, your arms and legs are pricked with gooseflesh. He raises his alabaster head and furrows his brow, appraising his purchase and, as always, finds it wanting.
“Such an ugly, hollow countenance,” he frowns. “And yet one such as you was deemed fit vessel for a soul, and all the fair folk go without. Proof of the madness of God.”
You agree with him, purposefully making the same mistake you always make, and Pigwidgeon stands and slaps you so hard you taste blood. He tells you to be silent unless told to speak, and you nod and stare at the bare floorboards, your feet, his boots. This is nothing you haven’t earned, by your own shortcomings, your own devotion to the path of least resistance. You’re temptation’s bitch and won’t ever argue otherwise.
“I’ve seen more comely bogarts,” he whispers, leaning close. His breath smells of dying roses. “I’ve seen cowslug sprites with a more rightful claim to beauty. But even the foulest clay may be fashioned into an exquisite simulacrum, in the hands of a skillful artist.” Then he paints you with a glamour so that he might spend the next hour or two pretending you’re not the aging, corporeal woman who has come to beg a good turn. You become the image of his lost queen. You are clothed in her chartreuse and malachite complexion and a gown woven from dew and spider silk (which your lover tears away). You take him inside of you. And you suffer the violence and gentle moments of Pigwidgeon’s affections, and deliver all your lines on cue, as scripted fifteen score years before you were born.
You have never yet learned, nor even tried to learn, why the second and third and fourth fairies move about as they do. Why each time you seek the shop, their whereabouts have changed. You suspect, though, that it may not be the fairies who move about, but, rather, the thin places between worlds that shift, those points on the city map where they may be encountered. You also know far too little about the taxonomy of fairies to know, for certain, what the third creature in the chain might be rightly called. You could make guesses, and you have, but they’re not educated guesses and you set little stock by them. Were you a betting woman, you’d never play those odds. But she is always called up from water, and like Pigwidgeon and the alley goblin, her price is fixed. You come to her knowing what it’s going to cost, knowing exactly what you’ll lose and exactly what you’ll gain. The hob takes a memory. The elf takes your body and the pretense of passion. And the third fairy, she takes a song. It’s a bad joke. You can gain her indulgences for a song, when there’s nothing the least bit cheap about the fee.
By the time Pigwidgeon is done with you and has restored your own face, by the time you leave his attic and the house that won’t be there the next time you visit Benevolent Street, sleet is falling from the cloudy Providence sky, a sky that glows orange with reflected streetlights and the lights of parking lots and all the bright lights that burn because human beings will never cease to be afraid of the dark. You have a feeling there will be snow before dawn. The air smells like snow.
Last time you sought out the blue lady (you don’t even have a name for her), the elf sent you to the old marble drinking fountain (ca. 1813) in front of the Athenaeum. The time before that, he sent you to the muddy banks of the Seekonk River behind Swan Point Cemetery. This time, he says you can find her in the women’s restroom of the train depot on Gaspee Street across from the south façade of the capitol building. You catch a taxi, because you’re too cold and much too tired to walk all the way from College Hill.
The restroom is all mirrors and white-tiled floors, the stench of disinfectant and the lingering undertone of urine that can’t be scrubbed away. But it’s empty. No one sees you enter, unless it was whoever sits on the other end of the security cameras. This isn’t going to take long. It never does. But there’s still the fear that someone will walk in and find you talking to yourself. You do as you’ve been told and enter the third stall on the left and flush the toilet four times after dropping a sprig of thyme into the bowl (you almost laugh at the undeniable absurdity of the ritual).
Then you return to the long mirror above the row of sinks. Whatever else she might be, she’s punctual, and you don’t have to wait very long. She appears behind you, and you know better than to turn and look directly at her. Do that, and she’ll vanish. Do that, and it’ll be as if she were never there, and worse, she’ll never come to you again. Usually, you manage this trick with a compact; tonight, she’s made it easier.
“I remember you,” she says. “You’re the poetess.”
“I’m not a poet,” you reply. “I write novels.” And she smiles at that.
“I remember you,” she says again. Her voice is all the innumerable sounds that water makes. You could make a list of analogies as long as your arm, and never reach the end. Her voice has been fashioned from all the wet places of the world. Her voice
is a prosopoeia of water.
“I need to find the shop again,” you tell her. “I need to find the shopkeeper.”
She smiles, unhinging her jaw to reveal row upon row of translucent needle teeth that would be better suited to the mouth of some deep-sea fish. Just another wonder in the tedious string of wonders, that she can speak with teeth like that. Her eyes are as black as hot tar, and they gleam and glisten beneath the fluorescent bulbs. Her skin glistens, as well, the deep blue of glass infused with cobalt ions. Her lips are the vivid Majorelle blue of Berber burnouses. Her long wet cerulean hair hangs down about her shoulders and breasts, but doesn’t conceal either sapphire nipple. There’s webbing between her fingers and toes, and she’s never come to you dressed in any garment more modest than her flesh. She drips, and rivulets wind down her legs to puddle at her feet.
“Then you’ll sing for me,” she says. “You’ll sing for me a sweet, sweet song you’ll never hear again but that it brings a sense of regret and loss so keen as to be almost unbearable. You’ll never hear this song again without weeping. From this night forth it will always be a lament, a requiem, the most sorrowful of threnodies and nothing more, so choose carefully, poetess. And remember, it has to be a song that is dear to you. Dear to you almost as much as the woman you love. Take the time you require. I am patient. I can wait.”
But you decided before you left home which song it would be this time. So you answer her immediately. And she licks her narrow lips with a tongue like India ink.
“Now,” she says, “you must sing it for me, each and every word, every note. You must sing it with all your heart, understanding this will be the last time you shall take even the meanest portion of joy in the act.”
You halfheartedly pray to a god you haven’t believed in since childhood that someone will come in and interrupt. You wish someone would. A passenger in a hurry, late for her train. The janitor. Anyone at all would do. But then your weakness passes, and you sing for her, a Kris Kristofferson song your father taught you.
She shuts her black eyes and listens.
The eerie acoustics of the depot’s restroom makes something lilting and unfamiliar of your voice. This is a song you love, and now you’re letting it go forever.
“Oh,” she said: “Casey, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”
“Here,” she said: “just a kiss to make a body smile.”
“See,” she said: “I’ve put on new stockings just to please you.”
“Lord,” she said. “Casey, can you only stay a while?”
When you’ve finished, she leans forward and whispers the whereabouts of the shop into you ear (always your left ear, never the right). Her teeth click, and her breath smells like seaweed and silt and brine.
“Your voice is lovely,” she says before stepping back and fading from view. “You may come sing for me any time.”
You stare at your dingy self in the mirror for a while, and splash your face with water so cold it stings. You dry your face with a brown paper towel from the dispenser mounted on the wall.
The green woman didn’t give you an address. Instead, she gave you an image, the awareness of a point in space and time, a conjunction where and when the shop will be, very briefly, accessible by any who are trying to find it. Odds are very, very good that you’re the only one. You know that, which somehow makes the whole business that much worse. You can’t excuse your actions with a simple “Everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?” You attempt to find consolation in the fantasy that there exist a thousand other copouts at least as execrable as whoring oneself out, piece by piece, to a quartet of fay. The attempt fails utterly, but you settle for the meager solace of having tried. After the train station, you walk. The sleet has changed over to enormous snowflakes that spiral lazily down from the orange Rhode Island sky, frosting the city, dusting lawns and rooftops and sidewalks. If it keeps this up, by morning the unsightly crust of the last snowfall will be buried and hidden decently away, and the snowplows will be making the rounds.
You consider catching another taxi. Two or three pass you by, but you don’t flag them down. Suddenly, taking a taxi seems like another brand of cheating, that warm, effortless ride for a few dollars. Better the long walk through the night and the gathering storm, better the wind’s tiny, invisible knives slicing at your unprotected face. If you can’t butch up and withstand the incompleteness of page thirty-four, much less summon the acumen necessary to complete it, you can endure so minor a tribulation. Let the two-mile walk be your halfhearted hairshirt; it’s hardly Saint Catherine of Siena with her sackcloth and thrice-daily scourgings. You put one foot in front of the other, leaving tracks in the freshly fallen snow.
Past the Biltmore and the bus mall, you ford the slate-dark Moshassuck River at Kennedy Plaza. Heading east, you cross South Water and South Main and Benefit streets to Waterman, which leads you all the way to Hope Street where you turn north. Your shoes are wet, and your feet are on fire. You grit your teeth so they don’t chatter and manage to block out the worst of the chill by counting your footsteps. You wonder if any among the fairies practice mortification of the flesh. But, then, why would they? With no souls to lose, why ever deny or punish themselves the way that women and men do in all their fruitless bids for forgiveness and salvation. The fairies know better. Even Pigwidgeon locked in the cloistered, mock-asceticism of his garret is a decadent, sating his darkest appetites whenever the opportunity arises.
You let Hope Street lead you all the way to the redbrick and silver dome of the observatory. If there’s any significance in being treated to two domes in a single night, it’s lost on you. All that matters is that the blue woman hasn’t led you astray, and waiting between you and the observatory is what could easily, at first glance, be mistaken for a tall, unframed looking glass. It’s not a mirror, of course. It reflects nothing at all. It’s most decidedly accurate to say that its function is, in fact, the opposite of a mirror’s. It wasn’t constructed to reflect anything, but to permit entry.
You spare a single glance over your shoulder, at the snow piling up, the dark or glowing windows of houses, the street, the stark, bare branches of trees. Your fingers brush across the photocopied flier stuffed into your coat pocket. And then you hold your breath and step through the quicksilver doorway.
You smell nutmeg, mildew, and ammonia, each in its turn, before you step out into the shop. Then there’s only a comfortable, musty smell. Just as its entryway might be mistaken for a looking glass, the dimly lit interior of the fairy shop could be confused with a certain variety of New England antique shop. Not the upscale sort, but the sort that’s all clutter and dust, random odds and ends. Odds, mostly. The walls are lined with sagging shelves and wooden red-lacquered apothecary cabinets. On your first visit, you browsed through the drawers of those cabinets. One was stuffed with old theater tickets, the next with doorknobs, a third with bridge and subway tokens, a fourth with skeleton keys, a fifth with the feathers of songbirds, the sixth with a mismatched assortment of chess pieces, and so on and on and on and on. Dried bundles of herbs, peppers, and corn droop from the low ceiling. There are rows of formalin-filled jars, and the milky eyes of countless species of fish, serpents, rats, and indescribable fairy creatures gaze blindly out as you walk down the long aisle that leads to the glass display counter and the hulking cash register that seems to double as a typewriter and telegraph machine.
“Took your own sweet time this time, poet,” the peddler of endings says from her place at the register. The crone of sticks and warts and pebbles is sitting on an aluminum stool that creaks and wobbles alarmingly whenever she moves, as if it’s always poised on the verge of dumping her onto the cold concrete floor. “Thought maybe you’d lost your way, or your nerve, or both.”
“It’s snowing,” you reply.
“Does that, most every winter,” she snickers and chews at the stem of her ivory pipe. Opium smoke curls from the bowl, forming question marks in the musty atmosphere of the shop. Where he
r eyes ought to be, there are fat yellow spiders spinning crystalline webs. She points the seventh finger of her right hand at you, raises a bramble eyebrow, and tilts her head to one side.
“I paid them,” you whisper. “I paid them, every one.”
“You wouldn’t be standing here if you hadn’t, now would you? Seems somewhat south of likely, don’t it?”
You agree and try hard not to stare too long at anything in particular.
“Put you through the wringer,” the crone mutters. “Can see that much. A right wicked lot, those three. Steal the meat off your bones, then complain the marrow’s not sweet enough by half. Hardly seems decent after all they done, but now I have my own small query.”
“I know.”
“Ain’t so much, mind you. Not after those three. A formality, and hardly more.”
“I’m not complaining,” you say.
“Very well,” she nods, and you imagine one of the yellow spiders is gazing directly at you. “I’d ask why you do this to yourself?”
“What else would I do?” you answer.
“And is it worth it?” asks the crone, blinking her arachnid eyes. “All this hurt for another puny tale?”
“It’s what I do,” you say, same as every time before. “I write stories. There’s not much else to me. And my stories have to end somewhere, even if the endings escape me.” The words tumble like lead from your chapped lips.
“Fair enough,” says the crone. “Fair enough.”
“I held out as long as I could,” you add, though she hasn’t asked for more. “This time, I made it a whole week.”
“Not my place to judge,” she replies, and plucks the pipe from her mouth long enough to spit at a clay bowl on the counter. She misses. “Figure you’re gonna do plenty enough of that all on your own, poet.”
“I’m not a poet,” you say.