Fantasy Gone Wrong

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “No, no, you first—you’re the entrée,” the assortment of squash, beans, and carrots would counter.

  “Don’t be silly—you’ll get cold,” the steak or fish or chicken would reply.

  “Don’t argue—I’ll go.” Leave it to a phlegmatic side dish of potato or rice to behave more sensibly than anything else on the table.

  “You’re all going,” Morty Ropern would tell them. At least their incessant demanding chatter helped him to eat sensibly, compelling him to vary his intake without favoring one dish over another.

  All this and more he explained to the attentive Dr. Alderfield that Friday morning and on subsequent visits. She remained neither judgmental nor accusative, gently bringing him back to the subject at hand when he threatened to wander, prodding him for details when it appeared as if he were going to hold back. With each successive session he felt better and better. She noticed the change, too, until at the end of one visit she finally felt it was time to challenge him with the next step.

  “Are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

  “What?” His eyes widened slightly.

  “Tomorrow night. Are you doing anything? Do you have any plans?”

  “Plans, no, I—I thought I might take in a movie.”

  “Good.” She made sure the recorder was off. “Then it’s a date.”

  “A date?” He looked bemused. “Is that kosher? I mean, a therapist going out with one of their patients? I thought ...”

  “You’ve seen too many television shows. This is not a specifically social occasion: it’s all part of your therapy. A movie will be nice—after we’ve had dinner.”

  “Din—oh no.” He rose from the couch. “I couldn’t. I mean, it would be—”

  She interrupted him gently. “What? Frightening? Amusing? You’re doing much better, Morty. You’re not obsessing about culinary conversation anymore. Each time you come in, you end up talking more and more about other things. About aspects of your daily existence that don’t involve gossiping food.” She smiled encourag ingly. “About the rest of life. I think it’s time to take the next step.” She implemented a deliberately exaggerated pout. “Or is it just that you don’t want to be seen with me?”

  “Oh no,” he said quickly. “I mean, I find you quite attractive—for a therapist. Hell, that didn’t come out right.” A grin partially compensated for the faux pas. “I’d be delighted to go out with you. To a concert, to the seaside—even to a movie. But dinner. . . .” Concern creased his face as he slowly shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” she told him confidently. “You’ll see. Another step forward in your progress. Tomorrow night then.” Rising, she ushered him toward the door. “We can meet at the snack bar downstairs and then go to a real restaurant. You like French?”

  He nodded. “Most of the time. Not when it starts trying to convince me to start smoking again. There’s nothing more annoying than a know-it-all main course.”

  He had high hopes, and dressed accordingly. It had been a while since he had been out on a serious date. Even though he expected it to be as much session as date, there was no denying the somewhat steely attractiveness of Dr. Alderfield and his anticipation at spending the evening with her. If only the food would cooperate. Perhaps she was more right than he suspected. Perhaps the only ones talking at their table would be the two of them.

  No such luck.

  It started, naturally enough, with the appetizers. Es cargot he didn’t mind. The sautéed snails usually kept their somewhat snooty chatter to themselves. But the garlic sauce that accompanied them was sputtering right from the start. Aware that she was watching him intently, he did his best to ignore the insults and queries the food kept flinging his way. He succeeded in disregarding the comments of the steaming snails as well as the frequent admonitions and repeated tut-tutting of the Caesar salad that followed.

  The main course, however, defeated him.

  He had chosen the blandest entrée on the menu; a simple, straightforwardly prepared coq au vin. Unless embellished, wine sauce rarely uttered more than a mumble, and any chicken dish tended to be sufficiently boring to ignore. But Erin (he could hardly spend the entire evening calling her “Dr. Alderfield,” they both had decided) had ordered a fantastic veal smitane. When you put veal, mushrooms, and sour cream together, the result was bound to be a conversational as well as gastronomi cal free-for-all.

  Even so, he did not lose control until she started to bring a particular forkful of the main dish toward her mouth.

  “Don’t eat that,” he heard himself saying, much to his horror.

  She paused. The evening had gone better than expected, validating her somewhat unorthodox invitation (unorthodox phobias required unorthodox therapies, she had decided). There had been no indication from her patient that the food that had been brought to their table and subsequently devoured by the both of them had voiced so much as a casual greeting. Until now.

  Fork halfway to mouth she looked over at him, hesitated, and slowly lowered it back to her plate. “I beg your pardon, Morty? Why not?”

  “It’s mostly cartilage, with a bit of bone in the center. It’ll go down, but it won’t sit well.” His eyes dropped, embarrassment reflected in his expression as well as his voice. “It—told me so.”

  She eyed the fork that was now resting on her plate. It looked like any other mouthful sliced from the entrée. “It told you so?”

  He swallowed hard. “It’s started complaining as soon as you made the cut. It’s potentially upsetting, and it’s been complaining about it. Loudly.”

  Loudly. “Morty, food makes the person who’s eating it upset. It doesn’t upset itself.”

  He looked miserable. “You’ve eaten the good half,” he told her. “The rest is undercooked.”

  Her characteristic self-control shaken, she found that she was growing angry. She firmly believed they had made a great deal of progress, and now he was just being—silly. Not a medically accurate description, perhaps, but an appropriate one. Sitting up straight, she brought the linen napkin to her mouth, dabbed delicately at her lips, and eyed him evenly. Sometimes therapy, especially in the field, required a directness that might be frowned upon if delivered in the office.

  Deliberately, she raised the fork, bit off the bite-size piece it held, chewed, and swallowed. Ropern looked quietly stricken.

  She smiled back at him. “It’s fine,” she told him. After studying her plate, she cut another slice, divided it, and proceeded to down both halves. The sour cream-based sauce was delicious. She told him so.

  “Well?” she prompted him. “What is my dinner saying now?”

  “Nothing,” he replied quietly. “But the peas and onions are lamenting the situation, while the au gratin is remaining determinedly neutral. Potatoes usually do.”

  She took a sip of the wine they had chosen. The only noise it made was as it slid refreshingly down her throat. “We’ve done a great deal of work together, Morton . . . Morty. Let’s focus on the progress we’ve made. The last thing we want is regression.” She eyed him sternly. “Food does not talk. Not my food, not your food. It doesn’t tell you when it’s safe or gone bad, it doesn’t call out to you from greengrocer’s stands, it doesn’t fill your head with the kinds of inane inconsequentialities that allow the truly disturbed to set aside the real world in favor of some comforting imaginary one.” Reaching across the table, she took his right hand in both of hers. Another bit of atypical therapy, but one she felt was vitally necessary at that moment.

  “Does it?” she challenged him, her eyes locking onto his.

  He paused. For longer than she would have wished. Just when she was starting to lose hope and thinking they might have to start all over again, from the beginning, a smile creased his face. It grew wider with every passing second.

  “I—I guess not,” he murmured. “Not if you say so.”

  Breakthrough. Not perfect and entire, but she would take it. Starting next week, they would build on it. Letti
ng go of his hand, she sat back in her chair and took another sip of wine. Knife and fork dug into the remnants of her meal with gusto. She found she was looking forward to the after-dinner movie.

  They let him ride with her in the back of the ambulance. He stayed with her all the way to the hospital. The appalled restaurant management not only comped the meal, including the wine, but paid for the transportation to the emergency room. They let him accompany her therein, too, and afterward to the private room where she spent a restless, uneasy, stomach-churning night. Despite her intense discomfort, it was a night of revelations and further progress—though not of a kind she had anticipated.

  Not long thereafter, friends were surprised to see them together on increasingly frequent occasions. They were even more surprised when she invited him to move in with her. No one was more startled at this than Morton Ropern himself. Not so much because of the invitation she smilingly proffered, but because he eagerly accepted.

  “I don’t see it,” her best friend Miriam told her when they met for lunch the following week. “I mean, he has a good job and he’s decent-enough looking and he isn’t gay and he hasn’t been married before, but really, Erin, he’s no great catch.”

  Dr. Erin Alderfield munched on her salad. She looked, if not quite radiant, eminently content. “Morty has his special points. It’s just that they’re not all visible.”

  “Oh so?” The other woman was far from convinced. “Like what?” Seated at one of the café’s sidewalk tables, she indicated the flow of humanity rushing to and fro nearby. “Tell me one thing I don’t see that makes him such a special catch.”

  Erin looked up from her salad. “You should eat more fruit,” she told her friend. “Good for the both of you.” A secret smile caused her lips to part. “You could say that Morty’s very good at foreign languages.”

  “For instance?” Miriam prodded her.

  The look in her friend’s eyes was distant, and glittering. “He can speak chocolate.”

  MOONLIGHTING

  Devon Monk

  Devon Monk lives in Oregon with her husband, two sons, and one dog. Her fiction has appeared in Rotten Relations, Maiden, Matron, Crone, and Year’s Best Fantasy #2 anthologies and in magazines such as Amazing Stories, Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, Talebones, Cicada, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. In addition to writing short fiction, she is currently working on several novels.

  THIMBLE JACK CREPT OUT of the broom closet and surveyed the tidy stone kitchen. Watery beams of moonlight flowed through the windows and pooled in the sink, giving Thimble plenty of light to work by. Pixies were creatures of the night, and did their best work when the sun had gone to the soft side of dreaming. He put his hands on his naked hips and strolled around the kitchen looking for dirt. Floors nicely swept, stove turned off for the night, and a small bowl of water left out for him. Everything perfectly in place, everything perfectly clean. Thimble frowned. The mistress of the house was a compulsive housekeeper. He hadn’t had any real work to do for months.

  Thimble stretched his dragonfly wings and flitted into the tidy living room, dining room, and small den. All clean. Thimble scowled. He’d been replaced by vacuum cleaners, spray bottles, and scrubbing bubbles! With nothing to clean and no one to punish for being lazy, he was doomed to a life of tedium, with nothing but a bowl of water for his trouble. He was going to go crazy as an ogre.

  Wait! The child slept upstairs in the nursery. Surely there would be a misplaced toy, an unstacked book. Thimble felt the heat of wicked hope warm his pixie bones. If he were lucky, he might even have time to tie the child’s hair in knots for not picking up her toys. Joy!

  Fast as snow melt beneath a unicorn hoof, Thimble danced up the stairs, his bare feet making the sound of distant bells.

  He didn’t bother looking in the parents’ bedroom—the woman didn’t even allow a wrinkle in a raisin. But the little girl’s room would be gold.

  He shoved at the door and walked into the nursery. A single open window at the far side of the room poured silver moonlight across the floor, bookcase, toy chest, and bed.

  Thimble pulled at his ears in frustration. Nothing was out of place. Not good. Not good. He flitted to the girl’s bed, his wings clicking softly. Maybe she had smuggled a cookie under the covers, forgotten to brush her hair, wash her face—something naughty, anything at all.

  He landed on the freshly laundered linens and strode up to inspect her face.

  “Dolly!” she screeched.

  Thimble jumped and quick-footed it backward. He tripped over her pile of extra pillows.

  “Go to sleep,” he whispered. It had been decades since he’d been spotted by a human and even longer than that since any creature had spoken to him. He was getting slow, losing his edge. This too-clean house was dulling his pixie reflexes. He pushed up to his feet, and gathered a fistful of magic, ready to send her sleeping if he had to.

  The little girl frowned and pulled her dolly out from beneath her covers. She looked at the doll, looked at him, and held the doll out for him. “Dolly,” she said again.

  Thimble shuddered. It was one of those stiff plastic, yellow-haired, painted-faced things. They gave him the creeps.

  “Yes, yes. Lovely. Go to sleep now.”

  “All gone.” The girl tugged the pink ruffled dress and shoes off the doll, wadded them up in her sweaty fist, and shoved them at him. “You.”

  Clothes! The one thing pixies longed for above all others. But these weren’t the clothes he’d spent three hundred years dreaming about: a nice set of trousers, soft jacket, and maybe a jaunty hat. This was a cheap sparkly dress and strappy purple heels. He refused to take them. He would not wear them. He wouldn’t be caught dead looking like a fairy tarted up on a twenty-year bender.

  But there were rules about clothes. Pixie rules. Rules Thimble could not break. One: take the clothes. Two: put them on. Three: dance and taunt. Four: leave the house forever.

  The girl made a grab for him, which he lithely side stepped. She stuck out her lower lip and glared. “You!” She dumped the clothes at his feet.

  By the wands, she was not going to back down. Maybe it was time to knock the little whelp out. Thimble drew back a palmful of magic.

  “Mommy, Mommy!” the girl yelled.

  Thimble heard a deep click as the light turned on in the parents’ bedroom. This would be bad—very bad. If he used his magic to put her to sleep, he wouldn’t have time to turn invisible before her parents arrived. But if he went invisible instead, he would be breaking rule number one: take the clothes.

  “Hush, now, hush,” Thimble said. “See? I have the dress.” He picked it up and reluctantly wiggled into it. The dress was a sleeveless number and had a stiff, scratchy skirt that itched his nether regions. The shoes were no better—they pinched and rubbed and made his ankles feel like they were made out of marbles. He took a couple steps and had to throw out his arms and wings to keep from falling flat.

  The little girl clapped her hands and smiled.

  Having clothes was horrible. But they were clothes, and they were his clothes. He laughed and pointed at the girl—as good a taunt as he could manage without falling off the high heels and breaking his neck.

  He hated these clothes! He loved these clothes! He wanted to hide under a hill so no one could see him! He wanted to dance with joy! The clash of emotions that filled him was staggering. But no matter what he wanted, the only thing he could do was follow rule number four: leave the house. Forever. No more cleaning. No more teasing. No more of anything that Thimble loved. He definitely hated these clothes.

  Thimble took to the air. The dress had an opening in the back that his wings fit through, which was good. He didn’t think he’d make it very far on heels alone.

  “Wait,” the little girl said.

  But Thimble could not wait. Just as the girl’s mother opened the door, he dove into moonlight and flew out the window. The little girl cried, but he did not look back.

  A knot of sorrow set
tled in Thimble’s chest as he flew over the land. Being out of the house seemed as strange to him as going to work in the cottage had three hundred years ago. He felt uprooted, alone, and the dress was riding up his rear.

  He took a deep breath. He had made a new life for himself three hundred years ago, he could do so again. All he needed was a new house to clean. That thought brought a smile to his lips. Surely not all humans were as fastidious as his last mistress. There had to be humans who still left acorns on their windowsills and bowls of water by the door, inviting pixies into the house. And he knew how to find out: check the pixie stick.

  Thimble flew to the magic lands of his childhood and straight into the forest where the pixie stick stood. He angled down and landed neatly next to the stick. The magic stick rang with a sweet constant bell tone, and a shaft of moonlight always found a way through the tree branches to illuminate the oldest pixie artifact. Here every wish in the world could be heard, sorted, and distributed to the creature who could best grant them. Magical notes would cling to the stick until a pixie pulled it off. But there was not a single note on the stick. That couldn’t be right. Thimble put his hands behind his back and took a couple steps. His heels sunk in the moss. He lurched and fell.

  He hated shoes! He pulled the shoes off and rubbed at his blistered feet, trying to think of a rule that didn’t include shoes. Ah, yes. Shoes weren’t clothing, they were accessories. He was sure of it. And the rules did not state that pixies must accessorize their new clothes. Thimble threw both shoes into the surrounding brush, and grinned when the plastic hit mud.

  Now he could find that new house. He stood, brushed off his dress, and walked around the pixie stick again. Empty. Not a wish or a hope or a request visible. No wonder it was so quiet here. There were no wishes left. With nothing to clean, and no one to tease, he would be crazy as an ogre.

  Thimble scowled and kicked the stick. The stick rang like a gong and a single scrap of paper fluttered down and landed in front of Thimble’s feet.