Seasons Turning

by Donaya Haymond

  For some reason I liked it better in Ireland than anywhere else. Maybe it’s because the grass is ridiculously green, a green you’d think a first-grader picked rather than some Creator with a sense of subtlety. Maybe because hardly anyone sounded like they did in Georgia. I was so tired of Georgia.

  Ireland was just more okay than other places. Like an echo of something I’d never seen that I might actually like.

  I never chatted with anyone beyond the basic autobiography, comments on the weather, and in the case of work, what size latte they wanted. Dublin’s more cosmopolitan than I thought. I’m not good at judging, though. I knew people growing up who thought Africa was a country.

  Five weeks in, a Saturday, eleven a.m. and thirty-four seconds, was the first time someone really interested me.

  She was about my height, five foot eight maybe, though she probably only knew centimeters and I hadn’t figured out what they meant yet. Her hair was the color of October. Really. Mostly deep, burnt red with streaks and flashes of gold, brown, and what looked blue in certain lights. Her eyes were to the impossibly green grass what the red of fresh blood is to the old crust of a scab. The wind blew open the door and she headed for the corner.

  I had no idea how old she was, beyond not having white hair and wrinkles. I really couldn’t tell. She could have been anywhere from nineteen to forty-five with good skin cream. People never could tell my age either. Just yesterday I received estimates of seventeen, twenty-two, and thirty.

  “I’m sorry, but we have a shoes policy,” I said. I remember wondering how far she had walked in her bare feet.

  “I have shoes,” she said. It was as if I heard someone talk for the first time. Everything before had been a shadow.

  “No, you …” I began, but she did. They were green velvet loafers with mystic fire topaz accents.

  I was pretty sure she hadn’t been wearing them before. Huh. I thought I caught a smile at the corner of her mouth just before I turned around to get her menu.

  I brought her what she ordered, seltzer water and bread, a green salad with no dressing, a ginger cake and milk. I’m all business, usually. I had the strangest feeling that I should curtsy, settling for dipping my head and bending my knees slightly whenever I proffered an item.

  “Time was when people would just leave them out, glad for a little luck,” she had mumbled when I brought the milk and gingerbread. “Still, even if you need prompting, any service deserves a good turn.”

  Her voice had the frost in it. It was cold, but also dazzling, lit, crystalline. It could kill and beautify, chill and cheer; all one.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” she said when I finally brought the bill. Her payment was two gold coins - or at least they looked gold - and an onyx pin carved in the shape of outspread, raven-feathered wings. On the napkin was written, “From Mab, for the Changeling.”

  Confused but feeling intrigued with what story this would lead me to, I uncomplainingly pocketed the offerings and paid the bill myself with normal Euros.

  The gold did not vanish. The wings did. Couldn’t find them the next morning. Didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, since I misplace things all the time, and possessions are just an elaborate version of molted snakeskin anyway. Also my back hurt like hell. I was going to buy some chalk and do some harmless semi-vandalizing on the sidewalk that Saturday. My favorite way to spend a day off.

  I kept bumping into the walls of my loft. Unaccountable. It was small and everything, but my proprioception was generally better than this, and I wasn’t clumsy. I actually astounded people with my lack of clumsiness, whether ice skating, dancing, gymnastics, or martial arts. Yet here I was, banging and scraping, something...

  ...Three feet behind me...

  Rather than waste time in disbelief or deciding on reasons, I stripped off my shirt to examine myself in the mirror. A really scary thing happened then. My shirt came off fine. Met no resistance. Touched nothing, but the ache three feet behind me felt cloth snag and ruffle. I saw nothing with my eyes open. My back looked perfectly normal.

  I tried shutting my eyes. Only then did I get the full shape.

  You know how you know where your hands are when you’re not looking at them? You know how to touch your knee to your chin in the dark? You can scratch your ear without missing it, even though you can’t see it, unless you’re drunk or high or otherwise impaired.

  Proprioception, body-map, kinesthetics, whatever. When I shut my eyes, I knew where and what they were.

  I had wings. They sprouted from my shoulder blades and did not end until mid-calf in depth, stretching three feet away when folded. Gritting my teeth, I imagined unfolding these inconceivable wings from another dimension, found myself using muscles I never had before but proprioception could handle just fine. They bumped against the wall again.

  Phantom Limb Syndrome. Phantom Limb. That’s what it was. People get amputated and they get itches and pains in the limbs that aren’t there anymore. Rarely, people think they have tails or horns. That’s what a shrink would say. I already have antisocial tendencies and ‘unnatural’ fixations, so I might as well swallow my own padded cell key while I’m at it.

  Most of me said this. A small, small portion, wailing and high, curled its hands around my throat as it whispered that this was what I’d dreamed of. I really didn’t belong. There was something special...I would be able to...

  God damn that bitch!

  This was hollow mockery. The wings felt themselves, but I couldn’t touch or see or hear or smell them at all, and they didn’t even exist except as phantom limbs. What could be crueler? All the pain and none of the exaltation.

  I couldn’t wear a backpack. It jumbled and mussed, though to all appearances it sat perfectly. It was near unbearable. When I went outside for a bite to eat, people ran into my incorporeal wings, wondering “who was this rude girl who cursed and spat for no reason whatsoever”. They even ensnared themselves in a brambly hedge. I felt soreness, weariness, and all-round blight.

  I slept badly that first night. Couldn’t find a comfortable position. Lying on my back made the semi-existent limbs tingle. Lying on my front was suffocating. Lying on my side hurt my downward arm. I ended up twisted, my torso angled and my legs flat.

  Got fired the next day because I screamed when a customer flicked on a lighter where my wings were. Everyone stared at me as if I’d given birth to a pterodactyl when I rolled on the floor to stop the agony. No smell or sight of fire, but the flames licked my flesh, the feathers burning in mute senselessness.

  I already wasn’t popular. I might fascinate or entrance, but I’m never popular. People say they live and let live. They don’t really. They want you to notice them. Can’t stand it if you treat them like a ghost. As if they don’t matter. It’s not personal. They’re just boring. The manager was looking for an excuse. I think he fought with the owners about me being hired anyway. I was apparently unharmed, so he didn’t help me up.

  The shower soothed the immediate pain, but the uneasy discomfort lingered, gnawing at my throat until I decided I needed to track Mab down and figure out what the hell she had done and make her fix it.

  I’d pawned my laptop some time ago. I would only visit an Internet cafe under duress. I’m very conscious of money. Wish I could hoard it in a crock at the end of the fog. People would know to look at the end of the rainbow.

  Instead, I grabbed a phonebook. I knew how slim my chances were. Not only did I not know her last name but also she could likely not be listed at all. Also, she could be under a different name.

  Didn’t know what else to do. I searched. Tried calling some Mabel’s on the off-chance that Mab was a shortened version of that. When I got into the early morning, the hours that are said to be ungodly—but what hours are godly? I think gods transcend time—they threatened to call the police.

  So I quit. Police had tried to catch me before for breaking the noses or arms of people who bothered me, but Will-o-the-Wisps need only one bad day, one missed dodge
.

  I didn’t want to go to bed because my wings hurt so much. I felt some kind of ooze among the festering. What if I got gangrene? Would it look to the autopsy crew as if I simply dropped dead?

  The next time I opened my eyes, still on the floor, the lights were out. They were mainly shut off by switch, but if they sensed no motion for more than an hour they also shut off. The owner of the building was eco-conscious.

  “There’s a way to solve this.” Mab’s voice. The only voice I’d been able to recognize instantly, though I had spoken to her only once, when my mother’s was forever nondescript. I mentioned this.

  “It’s like that because she isn’t your mother. She could have been, but a changeling must be loved as they are, without desire for them to be ‘normal’. It would not have changed how you think. You would, however, have grown up a little differently. You would have become receptive to love and connection with mortals. There would have been no need for my arrival.”

  “Where are you?” I whispered. I didn’t feel a need to thrash around in paranoid questions. If she wanted to show up and explain, she would explain at her own pace. “If you can give me phantom limbs, I’m not that surprised you can read my mind.”

  A throaty laugh. “Go to the mirror, child.”

  I reached for the light.

  “No. Don’t do that. It’ll hide the vision. Humans are so attached to dazzle, aren’t they? Then they lament the dearth of stars in the sky.”

  Her voice was in both my ears, like music in headphones. No clues of direction. I looked at my reflection by moonlight and saw nothing but myself.

  “Look in your left eye, Rain.”

  I took deep breaths to steady myself, for as I peered into my left pupil, I saw Mab’s face. It was as though she had carved out a hollow in my skull and was using my eye as a window. She smiled and bowed. As she moved I saw she was serenely naked, tattooed with swirls in blue, green, brown, and gray.

  “All right. Speak your piece,” I said.

  “That betrays you right there. A human would be paralyzed with shock. Do you know what we are?”

  It’s a sweet thing to be reunited with truth. One may leave bicycles for years but return and balance without a wobble. Stroke victims relearn how to walk. Touch typists, properly positioned, can write in the dark. A single scent may bring memories of ages.

  You are of the Fair Folk, the heartless hopeless feckless fearless careless carefree free free free. You Rain joy and you Rain torment and you Rain your whim and will. You are terrible and beautiful and not of here.

  “Of the Fae,” was all I said aloud. I felt tears stinging my eyes. I had never cried before. Not even as an infant, when I demonstrated my needs by throwing things and hitting whoever was nearby.

  “We switch some of our progeny with human babes. Not through malice, but to prevent our line from dying out, so the inbreeding does not cripple. As I said, if a changeling is loved for its own sake, it can find contentment. Some, though, never adapt. No one loves them the way they need, so I find them and show them the way home.”

  “The wings hurt.”

  “Did you keep the coins I gave you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get them.”

  I pulled them from a drawer. The moonlight was illumination enough. “What should I do?”

  “Swallow them. One at a time. Swallow them whole.”

  “I don’t want to choke.”

  “That has to be a risk you’re willing to take. You must unlearn mortal apprehensions.”

  They turned into liquid going down. They tasted like mulled cider. When the second hit my stomach, blue sparks glimmered about me, crackling on my skin. I felt my wings repair. My bruises elsewhere vanished, too. The paper cut on my thumb – gone, but the wings did not show themselves to the rest of me. They remained phantom limbs. This, the only thing in my life that made me care so, brought me sobbing to my knees.

  “The deepest human instinct is to be loved,” Mab murmured, tendrils of her essence wrapping about my mind, cradling and rocking it. “The Fae enjoy a momentary touch, a coupling, a grouping, a conversation of wit and warmth. These are secondary concerns, pleasant but not essential. The only thing you’ve ever wanted is the only thing we care about more than being respected. You want to be free.”

  “I’m not!” I wailed, clutching at myself as if I would fall apart if I didn’t. “Everything here is so boring and stupid. People won’t let me be me and I want to get away and find somewhere. I need to stop the itching in my soul.”

  “You can. You are only a few steps away from making them real.”

  I calmed myself. “How?”

  “Believe in the wings. Trust them to save you. Only then can they be real. Beware, you can never go back.”

  “If I choose not to?”

  “You can cut the wings off. The coins will heal that injury before they fade, leaving you truly powerless. Your mind will be as it always was. You will have what you’ve always known.”

  “What would be waiting for me?”

  She was gone. I looked in the mirror and saw my swollen eyelids and stained cheeks, but no homunculus peering out. I don’t know how long I stood there. This could all have been a hallucination. They might find my body broken and cold. I had no guarantee that Mab told the truth. I didn’t know what this other world was.

  Yet she was the first person who sparked my interest. She was the first who didn’t make me internally yawn. She shared the remorselessness, not cruel but not kind, that was much closer to nature than the quibbling little codes the ants around me constructed. My loft was on the sixth floor. No elevator. That had been my exercise. The city lights glared. I imagined the wind rushing by my face before it even happened.

  I stepped out on the balcony, by the fire escape and took off my clothes. They felt too masking. I would make my own warmth.

  As I dived—

  The sky filled with galaxies.

  The buildings twisted and warped.

  I laughed a laugh that startled owls and knocked bats off their course.

  A single black feather detached itself from the whole, without worry, without shame, floating to wherever chance would toss it.

  Eight

  Fall Back

  The man with the shabby top hat and black fingerless gloves waved his cane and bellowed at the top of his voice.

  He needed to get the attention of the downtown Centralian crowd. It took all his strength to be heard over the meat pie sellers, balloon animal makers, fruit kabob caramelizers, palm readers, Hug Dealers, and parrot choirs. Not to mention the swell of ordinary people hustling to and fro on business and pleasure.

  “Step right up, gentlefolk! Step right up to see the most exotic, inscrutable, downright indubitable curiosities in the Seven States! These wonders come from the most exotic parts of the JRMD, the farthest corners of the Temperate Zone provinces, and the farthest Week Districts of the Season Realms. Witness a pancake burned with the face of Cthulhu. The ecstatic sight of flowers tipped with genuine, naturally occurring gold dew. The depressing pig that sings nothing but funeral dirges. Plants solemnly battling. Now featuring Twig, the sarcastic little wooden girl!”

  ****

  The six-year-old behind Lynne kept kicking her seat. After the fifth kick she swung around and peered through the crack between her seat and Jared’s. He sat by the window, she in the middle. “I want to warn you,” she said sweetly, “that before my love came into my life and soothed my tempestuous nature, I would have hanged anyone who annoyed me this much by their thumbs in my dungeon for five hours. I suppose with you I might have modified it to being hung by the wrists, since children’s joints are more delicate.”

  The little boy blinked at her. “Huh?”

  His mother magically noticed Lynne’s threat when she had blissfully been unaware of what led up to it. She tugged out her earbuds and glared at Lynne. “Don’t talk to my son like that!”

  “I’m sorry, the child has a parent? I was unaware.
Generally even street urchins have better manners. If your objection is to the length of my words, let me make it simpler. Kid, if you kick my chair one more time, I will steal whichever of your shoes is closest. I will spit inside it, then play keepaway until you’re tearfully begging for it back.”

  Jared cringed while also holding back laughter. Before the angry mother managed to reply, the overhead speaker crackled to life.

  A strained female voice addressed them. It was the kind you associated with movies where only the romantic leads and maybe a cute child survive. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. There is no cause for alarm, but we would like to know if there is a meteorologist and/or geographer on board. If so, would she or he come up to the cockpit, please?”

  The mother bit her lip and took her son into her arms, despite his squirms. Jared looked out the window and quietly drew Lynne’s attention. “We’re flying over a frozen sea. There isn’t a frozen sea between here and Minnesota.”

  Lynne stared out at the landscape, crackled with snow-covered ice and the occasional berg. She unfastened her seatbelt and stood. “Does anyone here have a small mirror, such as you might find in a makeup compact?” she asked, loudly and slowly.

  “Please sit down, ma’am, we will have this sorted out soon,” the nearest flight attendant said.

  “If what I suspect is true, I am the only person on board who could possibly save us from certain death.”

  “You could really phrase that in a less alarming way,” Jared said. “Just a thought.”

  “I never mince my words. A mirror, someone! Come on! Thank you.”

  A different flight attendant pressed a small mirror in Lynne’s hand. “I know you from somewhere,” he said, face crooked with lost memory.

  “Quite possible.” Lynne licked the mirror and coughed three times. “Vincent!”

  A silver face with pure white-on-white eyes and a diamond crown appeared. “If it isn’t Little Miss Sunshine.”

  Lynne sank back into the cushions. “Haha. Vincent, I’m on a Next Door airplane that seems to have fallen through one of the holes that are growing all over the place. Can you sense us? If so, can you help us land safely and get a rescue party so we don’t all die of hypothermia? I invoke ruler-right and Fae-kin.”