So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction

by Christopher Barzak

  Eugie Foster's fiction has received the 2002 Phobos Award; been translated into Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and French; and been nominated for the British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Southeastern Science Fiction, Parsec, and Pushcart Awards. Her short story collection, Returning My Sister's Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice debuted March of 2009, from Norilana Books. Her website is eugiefoster.com

  Ever So Much More Than Twenty

  Joshua Lewis

  She was called Jane, and always had an odd inquiring look, as if from the moment she arrived she wanted to ask questions. When she was old enough to ask them they were mostly about faeries. Her father, Michael, began to tell her faery stories when she was very young indeed--abridged and expurgated tales of the fantastic, in which evil lost and good won, in which there was violence without blood and romance without sex, and in which monsters were always outwitted and children were always saved. Later, when she was older, he told her the real versions. It was always their private world, their place that they shared, Jane's whole life.

  In turn, Jane was Michael's world--except for George, of course, and now George was gone.

  George had been "gone" for a long time, of course, grown distant and disconnected, and Michael had felt George's different aspects leave him and Jane slowly over the last few years. In fact, George's physical presence had been about the last thing to go, and it had been a year since then, and only now had it really sunk in.

  When people asked Jane, she liked to say, "I don't see Pop any more. He's gone back in time," and Michael thought that was pretty accurate. Fifty was not an age that agreed with George. Or perhaps he didn't agree with it. Somewhere 'round about thirty-eight he'd decided he wanted to age backward, like Merlin. He dressed like a man half his age; he started frosting the tips of his hair again; he spent hours and hours in the gym. When Michael had first known him, the hours he spent in front of mirrors had been pure delicious adolescent vanity. But eventually, accompanied by a constant worried moue, it became a careful cataloging of defects–the inevitable creasings in his face, creams and unguents notwithstanding; the slightly, slowly widening forehead; the slow cruelties of gravity.

  During which time Michael usually sat in his armchair, graded papers, and quietly aged.

  The fights started, escalated slowly over the whole of Jane's teenage years. What began as gentle teasings ("oh, sweetie, we're busy this weekend; your dad needs ironing") and friendly suggestions ("just try a little of this on the sides of your eyes--look at me, no crow's feet here") gradually became colder, harsher. If George couldn't stand the thought of his own aging, how could he share a bed and a life with the ever-aging Michael? As the years went on and George poured more and more time and money into what Michael called his "Dorian Gray project," Michael became his portrait, a reminder of time and its power.

  The last day, the day George finally packed a bag and left and didn't come back, the fight started, as most truly significant fights start, with a tiny insignificance, a trifle. It was a typical early evening--Jane ensconced in her room doing homework, Michael sitting at the table writing lesson plans, George trying his best to distract him. Eventually Michael found him tickling his fingers gently down Michael's cheek as if he were searching for something. Michael did his best to evince no reaction whatsoever. And if George noticed that Michael was holding his breath, he didn't say anything.

  "You know," he said. "You know, when I look at you, I don't see a fifty year-old man."

  "Forty-eight," said Michael automatically.

  "That either. I see the twenty-eight-year-old boy I met years ago. He's in there. I can just barely make him out--he's run talc through his hair, and disguised himself with actor's putty. So now his cheeks droop a little," tracing the shape with his hand, "and that stubble I found so sexy is a dull grey...." He took his hand back self-consciously, and gave Michael a little half-smile. "You're still that twenty-eight-year-old boy," he said. "You're just wearing a fifty-year-old-man costume."

  "That's funny," said Michael. "Because you're a fifty-year-old-man wearing a twenty-eight-year-old boy costume."

  A little while later, when they were all shouted out and George had driven off--and not even said goodbye to Jane, Michael thought--he wondered if perhaps he should have been less mean. George's tone had been kind, and he had probably thought he was being kind. He decided to go and find Jane.

  She was in her room, of course, flopped on her bed, of course, some well-worn paperback propped on her pillow, of course. "So," she said, not looking up, "how did that go?"

  "You know, you're as long as the bed now."

  "I grew," she said, in that voice that children use when they are embarrassed by their parents' affection and would prefer they stop right now, please.

  "Lying on the bed like that, you could be--well, you could be seven or you could be seventeen. You've been doing that all your life."

  "I'm seventeen," she reminded him. "And I always read, but it wasn't always because I was tuning out the fighting."

  "You tuned it out?"

  "No," she said. "Of course not." She flipped over onto her side. "So, not so good, huh?"

  "Oh, it went great," Michael said. "Just great. You know, some mutual insults, a lot of things we don't mean and will later regret..."

  "Do you regret them yet?"

  "No," he admitted.

  "Well then," she said, and left it at that.

  "Sometimes, Jane, you seem a lot older than you are," he said.

  She rolled her eyes. "Daaad. I'm seventeen. That's old! Old old old."

  "Old old old," he agreed. "Old as the hills and the fairies in 'em."

  ---

  "When I was a boy," began Michael, maybe a year later. He was sitting on Jane's bed, where he'd sat and told this story a million times before. Jane was just about to finish high school, and the summer stretched in front of them both like a deep breath. He used his storyteller voice, and Jane gave him a little smirk for it. "Hey, did you ask for the story or didn't you?"

  "I did." Jane was all mock contrition.

  "Right," he said. "Now, be a good listener, or I'll tell all your new friends at college that your daddy still reads you stories at night. Okay?"

  "Tell the story," she said.

  "Okay. Once, I was a boy, not much younger than you."

  "That's not how it goes! It's 'not much older than you.'"

  "You," said Michael, "have grown. So. I was a boy. Can we at least agree on that?"

  "Long, long ago," Jane intoned. "In a galaxy far, far away."

  "In New York."

  "Whatever."

  "Once, when I was a boy," Michael glared. Jane giggled. "We used to go, Grandma and Grandpa and I, to this house, upstate. It was on a big lake--well, not that big. Medium. You could row across it in, I don't know, half an hour, and they stocked it with trout, and there was a diving platform, and your Uncle Johnny used to row out to the middle and drop a fishing line in the water with no bait, and blast Dean Martin tunes so you could hear them clear to Syracuse, and fall asleep with no shirt on so he turned red as a lobster."

  "Dad, I'm warning you--"

  "Okay, okay. On the other side of the house from the lake were woods."

  "Magical woods," said Jane.

  "Sure, if you want. And I, not liking Dean Martin and finding fish to be kind of slimy and disgusting, used to go for these long walks in the woods. I used to love my long walks in the woods."

  "Also, pina coladas. And getting caught in the rain."

  "Shhhh. Telling a story here. So where was I? Oh, right, walking in the woods. And then one day I met a strange boy there."

  "What did he look like?" prompted Jane.

  "He was tall, but not quite as tall as me," recited Michael. "But quite a lot taller than you!"

  "Not anymore," laughed Jane.

  "No, not anymore. And he had beautiful smooth skin the color of oak bark, and what color were his eyes?"

  "Eyes the color of acorns," Jane said
firmly.

  "Exactly right, but the strange thing about him was his hair. His hair bedded in thick curls, tangled and wild, but what was the strange thing?"

  "It was green. Like fresh moss."

  "That it was. Anyway, I was surprised to meet anybody in those woods at all, so I said, 'hello,' and he said 'hello,' and--"

  "Skip to the great love!" cried Jane. "You had a great love!"

  "We had a great love," admitted Michael, "but not, uh, right then."

  "Ew," said Jane with feeling.

  "So with Piaras as my companion--"

  "--for that was his name--"

  "Who's telling this story?"

  "I'm just postponing the tragic ending."

  "So I spent that summer, and the summer after, and the summer after, by Piaras's side, every day, if I could. He was--"

  "You skipped the part where he was a faery," Jane complained.

  "I thought it was obvious from the green hair."

  "He was a faery."

  "He had green hair!"

  "Faery!" demanded Jane.

  "And one day, that first summer," said Michael, as if nothing had happened, "I asked Piaras if he could ever visit me at home during the fall or the winter, and he revealed to me that he was a faery, a nature spirit, bound forever to that one magical wood."

  "Now, you knew about faeries," said Jane.

  "Now, I knew about faeries," repeated Michael, "because I'd always been interested in them and I'd read Irish fairy tales and I'd had endless fantasy novels and faery field guides and who knows what all on my bookshelf since I was a little kid. So when Piaras told me he was a faery, I knew a few things right then. I knew that I was very lucky, because earning the love of a faery was an unusual thing, and a magical thing, and not likely to ever happen again. I knew that he could not lie, but also that I had to treat him well, because his anger could be an unstoppable tempest. And I also knew that Piaras would never grow old, not ever--that he would remain a sixteen-year-old boy forever, and forever he would live and play in those woods. And when I was sixteen, I thought I would come back to those woods every year for the rest of my life, and our great love would keep me, and keep me young."

  "How great was your love?" Jane said innocently.

  "Oh, our love was great and pure," said Michael. "Well, maybe not that pure."

  "Spare me the details."

  "It wasn't just that Piaras was beautiful, and full of life, and took me on great adventures through the caves and treetops of that wood--"

  "--though he did--"

  "--though he did. We spent hours and hours and hours talking, laughing, thinking out loud. He had the most wonderful things to say about the world, and lots of questions about what my life was like, and I had lots of questions for him. And lots of lofty plans, and he thought they were fascinating, and he had all sorts of gossip and stories about the faery courts, and I thought they were fascinating, and we just... got along very well. It was a perfect friendship. And a perfect romance. At least for a sixteen-year-old."

  "Thank you for sparing me the details," said Jane.

  "You," said Michael, "will never get to hear those details."

  "I," said Jane, "never, ever, ever, ever want to."

  "So then a few years passed," Michael continued. "And I was going off to college in the fall, just like you are now. And at the end of the summer, I said goodbye to Piaras, just like I always did, and I said, 'See you next summer,' just like I always did, but I think we both knew I wasn't coming back. We cried a little, and we stayed out later than usual. And when I absolutely had to get back, Piaras kissed me, once, very deliberately, like a gift. Like to say, 'here is this kiss.' But what he actually said was, 'You are bound to the faeries now. That tie can never been unbound. You will return. Promise that you will not grow up until you are beyond the faeries.'

  "And I promised. But that was wishful thinking, if faeries could be said to have wishes. The next summer I had an opportunity for a great job far from New York, and the summer after I backpacked in Europe, and the summer after I lived in an apartment in the city with friends, and so on, and then Grandma and Poppy sold the house on the lake, and that was that. I never saw Piaras again."

  "Do you ever hear his voice?" said Jane eagerly. "On the wind?"

  Michael knew the answer to this, and hated that the question made him sad now. He felt suddenly heavier; a weight dragged his cheeks down, furrowed his brow, lowered his eyes. Smiling would be like hefting an impossible weight. "I used to," he said honestly. "But eventually I got too old to listen for the voice of a beautiful sixteen-year-old boy."

  Jane must have caught the bitterness in his voice, because she said, "Unlike Pop."

  Michael sighed. "I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," said Jane.

  "No," Michael shook his head. "You should still get to be a girl. You don't need to be 'it's okay'-ing me yet. I'm okay. Just lonely."

  "Because he's gone?"

  Michael thought. "I think I was lonely way before he actually left."

  "I know," said Jane. They sat in silence for a moment.

  "Do you miss him?" said Michael finally. "I mean, when you don't see him?"

  Jane rolled onto her back and put her hands behind her head. She stared at the ceiling. "Sure," she said. "But even when I'm with him, mostly I miss who he used to be."

  "Yeah, well," said Michael. "He's living in his past and we're in his present." He waited a moment. "Do you want to hear the end of the story?"

  "Sure." Jane sat up again, leaning back on her hands.

  "I never saw Piaras again," he repeated, "but I dated other people, and eventually I fell in love with a boy named George, who was very different from Piaras but who was very right for me, then. And we settled down, or something like it, and after a while we decided we would like to have a child, so we adopted a girl named Jane. She was a beautiful baby, with skin like a white peach and black rabbit eyes that were always looking around. And she grew up like a reed, pale and slender, and she had a pretty long face and straight black hair in a ponytail halfway down her back." He smiled and reached around behind her head to tug at her ponytail.

  "And her dad used to tell her stories all the time."

  "That's right. About ghosts and monsters and angels."

  "And faeries."

  "Them too. And she had a first-edition of Peter Pan that was her prize possession, and he taught her how to take care of it so it would last, but she knew it was too wonderful a thing to put in a case and just look at. She had to open it, again and again, and read it, again and again."

  "And she was really hot, right? And talented and brilliant?"

  "And she was my beautiful girl," said Michael, and he kissed her on the forehead. "I should go to bed," he said, getting up.

  "Thanks for the story," she said.

  "I'm sorry it was sadder than usual."

  "I think it has a good ending. It ends with me!"

  He grinned and said good night.

  ---

  They slipped imperceptibly into summer, with nothing to do. Michael walked around the house day after day, like he'd lost something and didn't know where to start looking. Jane sat on the screen porch and dully tapped at her laptop, looking for summer jobs in the online listings, her elbows sweatily stuck to the pollen-coated vinyl tablecloth. When they talked, they talked idly about going away for a few weeks, or a month, but they didn't have any place in mind to go. George had always planned the vacations and it seemed strange to co-opt his role, even a year after his exit.

  Jane found the house listed on some real estate web site. She had to go get a box of her father's letters down from the attic and check the address, but yes, it was the house, near the woods. Its owners had died and their kids were selling the place off. It didn't look to be in great repair, but it was going pretty cheap. She found herself realizing that she wanted very much to go there. No: she wanted very much to be there. She felt the pull of the house even through the photo on the screen. S
he printed the listing out and just left the paper in the printer, knowing Michael would find it.

  Michael bought the house almost reflexively. He realized that Jane must have found the listing, but he didn't mind the suggestion. It was a good suggestion. He'd been having a hard time knowing what to do with himself, and sometimes, he thought, others might know better. Maybe buying the house was an act of self-affirming spontaneity, the kind of thing people do when they are single and enjoying being single and want to do something without asking anyone else to prove that they can. Maybe it was a frantic unconscious grasp toward something familiar and good. It was about a week before he even thought to mention it to Jane, who smiled like it hadn't been her idea.

  When they arrived at the very beginning of the summer, the house felt strangely untouched, as if it had been preserved for these many years. There must have been several owners in the twenty-odd years since his parents had sold it, but so much seemed to have been untouched--the wallpaper, the painted kitchen floor, the door knocker in the shape of a Celtic knot, the hill down to the lake, the only dock warped. There was no rowboat there anymore, but he didn't exactly miss it.

  The movers showed up a couple hours later, and it took Jane about twenty minutes of watching them unload furniture and boxes to get utterly distracted by the woods across the road (now paved, Michael noted). "We should go for a walk," she said. "So you can point out all the landmarks from the stories."

  "We should," said Michael absently. But of course that day they moved furniture around and unpacked clothes and stocked the kitchen and dusted cobwebs out of corners, and they were tired, and read books on the overstuffed red sofa Michael had bought for the musty living room, Jane's stocking feet propped up on Michael's lap as she paged through the first of a trilogy of extremely terrible werewolf detective novels she'd brought with her.

  The second day he fetched a rusty ladder and examined the state of the roof and gutters, and then he started the long process for scrubbing the painted wooden floors. Jane took a book and disappeared into the woods. She called Michael on her cell phone a couple of hours later to report that she had not yet seen any faeries but that she had found a very nice tree to sit against and was reading.