"Pick-It Fences"

 

"See, there's that whole saying about how good fences make good neighbors. The thing is, though," John said to the giantess with a nervous cough of a laugh, "that you've gone and, well. You've decided to use our fence to make your toothpicks."

John looked at his new neighbor, all the way up at her, twenty feet above him as she stood. She had been using what was once the corner fence post to work either a large head of broccoli or a small tree free from the space between two incisors. "Seems that I have," she said. "Does that bother you?" she asked, leaning forward and blocking out a small part of the sun. Her shadow easily crossed the space that the fence had previously divided. All along his back, the summer heat pressed against him and pounded on his skin like boulders unleashed in an avalanche, but in front of him, her shadow and his forearm were nearly touching.

Yes, he wanted to say, it bothered him, very much.

"Water Carries It All Away"

 

[Making up for yesterday's missed story...]

Mae sat on the edge of her bed as lightly as her weight would allow and began loosening and peeling back the fraying leathers she wore over her arms, as carefully as if she were peeling away a layer of skin. The practician's orders sang in her mind like a hymn of absolution: "The healing pools are yours tonight, girl. Use the mineral salts."

Her skin exposed, Mae started to study the cuts that the practician had rubbed clean, the joints that she had shifted and worked as close as possible back to normal. "Got you good today, didn't they?" the practician had said to Mae, not needing to hear the answer. "Well, go, get yourself changed, and go sit in the water, then. Water carries away all that pain."

It was a saying in these green hills--water carries it all away--yet as Mae approached one of the pools and began to scoop salt from a nearby barrel into the water, she found herself angry at the practician for offering it. She was divided; her body ached for relief and responded to the hot water with what felt to Mae like its own wave, a wave of release; yet her mind wanted to hold on to the image of each wound that marked her, to examine it like a map, so that she would never again lose her way on the practice field. Sinking into the pool up to her chin, Mae turned so that she could see the barrel of salt. She thought about what she knew of the way that rocks and minerals formed: layers of earthen material, becoming hard under thousands of years of pressure. Inside, she willed herself to turn to stone. Water carries it all away, she told herself, but rock remembers.

"Better Than Snail Mail"

 

When I was a kid, there were plenty of times when I wanted to send someone mail but couldn't get to the post office in time or was a few cents short of the money I needed to buy stamps. In those cases, I made a trip to see Mr. Aves.

I still remember the time I made a card for my grandmother when she lost her job. Allowance Day was two days away; I was a sucker for tater tots and so had gone back and paid for seconds at lunch at the school cafeteria; in short, I was a handful of pennies away from what being I called "broke," and so I went to ask if Mr. Aves could help. I was only expecting a robin or a sparrow. But he took my pennies and from the bunch plucked one that had all the shine of the morning on it. "Well, now, here we have something special," he told me. "For this, we can do for your grandma something very nice." From his cages he brought out a kestrel, young and razor-thin and spectacular, and gave the bird my card to deliver to my grandmother. 

More than anyone, I think Mr. Aves understood the magic of getting a letter in the mail.

"The Faerie Mosh"

 

He was tall, lanky even, with two spindly legs that carried him behind her like exclamation points at the end of her name. The faerie queen liked this boy very much. She tucked her hair behind her ear, letting the multiple piercings catch the moonlight, and took him by the hand to lead him toward the cluster of erratically grown mushrooms beneath the oak tree.

"Just to be clear," she told the boy, "this is what they call 'being pixie-led.' You're being pixie led right now."

"You know, I think I knew that," he told her with a shrug and a smile. He stopped at the edge of the mushroom cluster and poked at one toadstool with the toe of his plaid canvas shoe. "Why did I think that faeries dance in, like, a circle of mushrooms or something?" He suddenly moved his foot back. "Should I not touch that?"

The faerie queen laughed and wove her fingers into the spaces between his. "Relax," she told him, "we're much less formal than you think. Circles are fun, but we can dance just fine without them." She thought of how he had looked at the club, jumping and bouncing to the music on those skinny legs that had shouted to her from across the room. His hair was a crown of red-tipped spikes that had held its shape despite his frenzy. She couldn't wait to see what kind of mess she could make of it.

"A Fresh Start"

 

[For brownie lore and background information, click here.]

The brownie slumped down the night-swamped street, the doll's clothes that had been left neatly folded for him in his corner of the old house now tucked under his arm like a bundle of rags. He was cold, and he had already started to despair.

When he glanced up at one point during his walk, he did so intending to ask the heavens for some form of deliverance from his current plight. He did not expect to see a sign already waiting for him.

"'Garage Sale,'" the brownie read aloud. He mumbled the address to himself several times over, until it stuck in his mouth like taffy. There would be a large house there, one that had been emptied of some of its stuff and was ready to be cleaned, one with space that a brownie could fill nicely. He smiled then, took his sorghum-bristle broom out from the bundle on his back, and began twirling it as he resumed his walk. It was a broom well made for sweeping, which made it a fine accessory for a fresh start.

"The Need for Measurements"

 

"So you just go around, tagging sewer covers with labels saying how wide they are?" I asked the tunnel gnome.

"Kind of," he answered, removing his goggles. "Well, all right, as a matter of fact, yes." It was odd to watch him work, just because the aerosol can he carried was half as tall as he was. He used both nubby hands to hoist it back into his satchel. "It's a much more useful task than it sounds like when you say it that way," he told me. "Along the busiest travel routes, it's helpful for a gnome to know where he can fit. Almost like your bridges, when you have signs posted to inform everyone how high the underpass is so you know which trolls can go there and which can't."

"Gotcha," I told him. Then I blinked. "Wait, did you say 'trolls' or 'trucks?'" I asked. But he had already lifted the heavy metal lid and slipped away.

"How Much?"

 

The troll looked like a ball of mud until, having rolled onto the middle of the wave-swept path, it popped open like a pillbug, in this case revealing short, stubby limbs and a face like squished clay. "Not so fast," it said as it stood. "There's a toll to pay if you want to go forward." The group looked at the troll, then at the path ahead, or at least what they could see of it. "What do you say?" the troll asked them. "Do you want to continue?"

"The Giant's New Shoes"

 

Piotr the giant sat in the kitchen in his house, which occupied the tops of ten different mountains and was always hidden from below by a disguise of clouds, and removed the shoes from the box his wife had given him. "Oh," he said carefully, "they're very nice. Very lovely." And they were; the soles had a spring to them, which he felt when he pressed into the heel with his enormous thumb, and the leather for the uppers was soft and thoroughly worked. The hides of at least a hundred cows must have gone into each shoe. He tried the left one on.

"I've seen how you rub your feet after you've been trampling the countyside all day," Galena said with a shrug and a smile. "Perhaps these would be kinder on your feet than those two boulders you carved holes into."

"I'm sure they will be," said Piotr, even as he thought about all the little truths still hidden from her after all those years: that there were times when he didn't want to trample the countryside; that it felt right for him to wear large rocks, so sharp and heavy, on his feet; that he often was glad that it didn't take long for him in his boulder-shoes to pillage and ruin an entire town. Sometimes, it was best if the end came quickly. 

"Thank you," Piotr told Galena as he slipped on the other shoe. It was the one kindness at the moment that he could offer her.

"The Bag Lady"

 

I saw her every day, wearing the same dirt-faded clothes but carrying a different bag each time. On some days the bag was made of linen or some other cloth; on others, plastic, and it obviously had been found alongside the rest of the scraps she carried.

She collected what people in the neighborhood threw out or abandoned. I saw her pick up someone's potential once, right off the curb. It looked like an orange rind. Another time she tried to pick up an old woman's true love from where the woman had dumped him. The bag lady had had trouble fitting him into her sack, for a while.

I went to her once with a cheese sandwich in hand, in case she was hungry. She smiled a refined smile, the kind offered by old ladies who like to work in gardens, and told me thank you, but she was doing quite well with what she had.

"Do you have a place to stay?" I asked her tentatively.

"Oh, I've made a very nice home for myself," she said. "Would you like to see it?" I hesitated before even trying to give her an answer, but it didn't matter: she placed her hand on my shoulder and pushed me into the bag anyway.

"The Cage"

 

After the city fell, Graciele led most of her prisoners into ditches that she and the men had dug by the river, below the level that the water usually reached during the summer floods. There was one prisoner that she kept, though, a girl of maybe twelve who gave her name as Nerri. Nerri she placed in a cage that she made from bones and dry branches, everything dead she could find.

"Set me free," Nerri said one day, grinning at Graciele through low grey eyes as angular as two flints.

"You'd try to kill me if I set you free," was Graciele's simple answer.

"I'll try to kill you if you keep me here." Nerri continued to grin. "As far as I see it, you're already dead."

Graciele regarded Nerri with a tilt of her head; her skin caught the white-hard glimmer of the late spring sun. "I don't think you're fully aware of the accuracy of what you've said," Graciele told her. With two fingers as thin as icicles, Graciele pinched the skin covering her own chin. The pale white skin lifted to reveal pale white bone, and teeth fixed in a jaw that moved with Graciele's laughter. Nerri's eyes dulled.

"I have a secret for you, you green little girl," Graciele whispered, adjusting her skin and coming to stand next to the bars of branches and bone. "You're not the only one trapped in a cage." She thought of the day the curse had landed on her head, and her soul, barely ripe with the onset of adolescence, became bound to the skeleton she now animated and covered in a costume of flesh. She reached inside. "And just like you, I'd like to be free," she said.

She pulled Nerri close and met her with a kiss to the cheek.

"Save Yourself"

 

The faerie coughed and spluttered and shook out her wings. She grasped the straw and began pulling herself up, as if she were a victim of a shipwreck, saved from the sea by a rope ladder. The man watched her through the sides of the pint glass while she hoisted herself toward standing. "You saved me," he heard her say from inside the tumbler. "I never could swim. If it hadn't been for you...."

"No one's going to believe this," the man said. 

"What? That faeries are real?"

"That I did something useful," he replied as he dropped his head between his knees, reached for the potted plant in the corner near his table, and expelled from his stomach the Long Island Iced Tea that he had downed only moments before.

"Children Made of Stone"

 

Lars knew as soon as he saw his new neighbor step onto her front porch and close the door behind her that she was coming over to introduce herself, which is to say that she was coming over to complain about his kids. There was a certain stiffness of posture and weakness of smile that preceded questions like Do they run around like that all the time? and Lars had learned to spot it well. What he hadn't learned was how to make someone believe that his children would turn to stone if ever they stopped moving.

"Daddy, I'm hungry!" Bianca called as she and James ran around the ash tree in the corner. Lars shook himself free of his thoughts and reached down to the table for one of the sandwiches he had brought outside for lunch. He thought about telling her to run over and pick it up, but then, even as he was watching their neighbor cross her lawn toward them, he decided otherwise and instead jogged toward the ash tree, sandwich in hand, to join the kids in their game of circles. It was the least he could do for the children he would never be able to hold.

"Earthworms"

Poor little worm.

The robin hopped in a circle until it was facing me, stopped, and tilted its head. I tilted mine so that we were mirror-friends and asked, "What are you looking at?"

"Quiet," the robin answered with a snap of its beak. We sat silently for a few seconds. "Ah, they're too far underground," it said afterward. "I was listening to the earthworms."

"You can hear them?"

"You can't?" The robin tilted its head toward the other wing. "Listen," it told me. I heard a lawnmower in action somewhere around the corner. A tree stood nearby with its flowers tumbling down in catkins; I heard them brush against each other in the breeze as if they were bells made of whispers. But I couldn't hear the worms.

"Oh, wow," said the robin. "They're really wriggling down there. I don't know. I think they might be feeding on something. It sounds kinda big." It hopped forward and looked at me, its beak pointing like a finger. "So did you, like, put something down there? Maybe, you know, bury something? Not that it matters to me," the robin said. "I'm just wondering."

I let my jaw drop. "I'm not a killer!" I told it. "And I only moved here a month ago! I don't know anything about this place."

The robin's red breast puffed up as if the bird were drawing in a sharp breath. "Seems there's a lot you don't know," it said, giving its feathers a shake. "You don't know what worms sounds like, you don't know what's going on under your own front yard--just out of curiosity, do you even understand why you're able to talk to me right now?"

I didn't have to answer. The robin saw my frown.

"Okay, let me go speak to a few birds about some things," it said, in a gentler voice than it had been using, closer to its usual song. "Wait here. I'll be right back." I watched it spring into the air, wondering where it thought--given all that I had just heard, and all that I still wasn't able to hear--I would possibly go.

"Then It Will Be Safe"

 

Little Em could hear their yelps and screams all the way in the corner where he usually lurked. With sunset fast approaching, he figured it would be safe to try to sneak a look, so he crept along the wall and climbed up to the windowsill. He had just brought his eyes to the level of the glass when he felt a claw close around his ankle and drag him to the floor.

He looked up from where he had landed and saw his grandmother, bent like the moon, standing over him. "What did I tell you about going out before dark?" she snapped. "What did I tell you about the children? You know what they'll do to you."

Little Em rolled his bright red eyes. "They'll make me ride bicycles and eat ice cream," he dutifully intoned.

"Darn straight they will," said Gram. "Now crawl back through the cracks and practice scratching on the walls."

Little Em ambled toward the shadows while his grandmother marched behind him. He didn't tell her that, before his tumble, he had managed to catch sight of them, because then he'd have to admit that they were every bit as horrible as the stories made them sound. Yet despite their toothy smiles and their upright walk, Little Em still found himself dogged by the notion that children weren't completely awful. All those stories about eating ice cream had to be fake. Maybe, he thought, if no one was watching later while he played under the bed, he'd go see what there was to see. It will be dark, he told himself, suddenly feeling brave. Then it will be safe.