She slid open the door and let the light breeze cool her off and dry the sweat. It felt nice, so she stepped out onto the porch.
There wasn’t much of a view. She could see a small square of grass that constituted the private yard belonging to the property, personalized with bits of plastic furniture. The yard was contained by a tall, chain-link fence, just in case anyone was concerned about exactly where the ownership diverged. Directly across and to the left and right were other houses. The people in the yard to the left were cooking meat on an open flame. The smell reminded her of a more literal hunger.
“I’m not sure if I’m gonna get complaints from the neighbors or compliments, if you’re gonna stand out there like that.”
“The clothing here is scratchy,” she said, turning around but remaining where she was. “I prefer not to wear it.” The man watching his meats cook would have a decent view of her back if he chose to gaze in the right direction.
Rick was sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at her. He had the courtesy to not put on any clothing, but was also not prepared to step out on the porch with her while unclothed.
“Here. You keep saying things like that. How did the clothes feel when you were doing all this traveling of yours? Wherever that was?”
“It was looser and softer. When I wore clothing.”
“Right. So how many is most?”
“I don’t understand your question.”
“You said I keep up better than most.”
“Oh that, yes.”
“I… I’m sorry, I just realized how rude that was. Something about you made me think I could ask… no, forget it.”
“It’s all right. I am trying to think how to quantify my response, but… it would have to be several hundred. I never bothered to count. Presupposing the existence of math, which we should not do. Are you considering both genders? Only humans? What are your parameters?”
He fell back onto the bed. “Of course, we must consider the non-human element.”
“It’s a fair question,” she said. She drifted back in and next to him. “Vampire, goblin, elf. And satyrs, of course. Werewolves, too. They’re all viable.”
She ran the back of her hand down his hairless chest. He was warm.
“Faery?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. It was their realm I left before coming here.”
“Of course,” he laughed. Then he gasped as her hand found its way down past his waist.
“And incubi and succubi,” she said.
“Angels and demons?”
“Never a demon. They’re repulsive. Even their women think so. And I’ve never met an angel.”
“I think you might be one,” he said.
She climbed up on her knees and straddled him.
“I’ve been a god,” she said. “But never an angel.”
She lowered herself down and let him in. It was time for another round.
* * *
“So you aren’t an angel,” he said later. Much later.
The sun had taken its leave entirely. They hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights in the bedroom, but between the stray lamplight from the street and what was coming in through the doorway to the living room, there was no need.
They had eaten. On the kitchen counter was food ostensibly of Chinese origin in cardboard boxes. Eve had an intimacy with most regional foods, and considered the appropriate source region for this cuisine to be America. It might have been cooked by the Chinese, using techniques from East Asia, but the ingredients were too distinctly local for it to pass as authentic.
It also tasted better than the authentic version.
“I’m not an angel, no,” she said.
She was sitting in a folding chair on his porch. The night had cooled, so she wore some clothes, and was wrapped in a light blanket. He was sitting in another chair, in the clothes he’d put on when he answered the door for the food.
“I doubt angels are real. I’ve not met one, which makes their existence unlikely.”
“But demons are real? And faeries, and succubi and vampires and all that?”
He said it in a lightly mocking sing-song. He was treating this like a joke, which seemed an appropriate response under the circumstances. Most people didn’t take well to the idea that there were other creatures living right next to them that they never saw, or saw but never noticed.
“Of course.”
“Okay. If you say so.”
“Their existence doesn’t rely upon my testimony, Rick. They exist independent of my opinion.”
He smiled. He had a shy smile. She enjoyed seeing it. “But your opinion is adequate on the matter of angels. And look, now I’m talking like you.”
“It is, because angels are different. I can only testify that I’ve never encountered them. It’s true, this doesn’t negate their existence, but it makes their existence less likely. However, I have met these other creatures on many occasions. I don’t suppose they exist. They simply do exist.”
“I’ve never seen an angel either, since you’re not one and you were my best candidate. But since I’ve never seen any of those other things either, it seems like they’re on equal footing. Why does your not seeing an angel make it so unlikely that they’re real? Mind you, I’m pretty sure this is the most ridiculous conversation I’ve ever had. You keep raising the bar.”
“The reason my opinion is weightier is that I’ve witnessed the entirety of humankind. If an angel walked the Earth, I expect we’d have met.”
He laughed. “And you’ve raised it some more.”
When he saw she wasn’t laughing, he sobered up.
“You’re serious,” he said.
“I am. And if your next question is, what could that possibly make me, if I’m not an angel or a god? The answer is the same as what I said before: many have considered me a god, and probably a few have thought of me as an angel. I’m neither, if those positions are defined by any kind of supernormal magical power. True magic of that kind doesn’t exist, but I can do things that may appear magic to someone slightly more tethered to their mortality. I’m a woman, and that’s all. What may make me different from the next woman is that it’s possible I’m the very first one.”
She had no reason to tell him this except that he had asked and she had grown tired of shunting his questions to the side or providing half-answers. And he was starting to take her seriously. No more laughter, no smile, nothing visibly indicative of a skepticism she was certain was there. His reaction was that of a person who’d just discovered a companion to be non-threateningly insane. Again, it was a appropriate response given the circumstance.
Eve had told many people a version of her life story on a thousand different occasions. The last time had been some fifteen years prior, to a young girl of whom she was fond. That girl decided to create something that might have been a religion had it happened a few hundred years earlier, and the consequence of her adoration was that many women in many corners of the world started calling Eve the all-mother. It was something she became less and less comfortable with over the years, so she stopped supporting the endeavor. In her last contact with one of the members—not the founder—she asked that the website and the organization beneath it be dismantled. Eve wasn’t remotely competent enough to verify that this had happened.
“You understand how crazy that sounds?”
“I can’t help that. The truth is what it is.”
“Yeah, all right.”
He got out of the chair and paced his way to the railing. He still moved like a coiled animal, even when on his elbows on a wood rail, leaning out over the spit of land beneath them. There was a sense that if he saw prey he would snag it out of the air.
“I feel like I should be asking for some kind of proof here,” he said. “I mean, okay. You turned up out of nowhere in my coffee shop looking… like you do, and you’re, you know, you’re probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And I’m saying that after all of that sex, so it’s not just a line. But
your clothes are all new, you’ve got a bag full of cash, and you talk like someone who’s not just recent to the country. You sound like someone who climbed out of a space ship, or crawled out of a cocoon in some lab. Where did the cash even come from?”
“I knew I was going to need it to start. Before I found employment.”
“Yeah, but that isn’t answering the question. Everyone needs money, people don’t just get it because they need it.”
“Yes, I suppose this is true. I found it in one of the banks.”
“You stole it.”
“It didn’t belong to me, and I took it, yes. I could speak at length on the notion of ownership and possession and how artificial I find intra-tribal commerce, but it may suffice for now to say I felt no moral qualms when I did this.”
“How did you do it?”
“Through the veil. Solid things aren’t as solid there.”
He sighed grandly. “You can walk through walls?”
“Yes.”
“Can you show me?”
“I could. I’m trying not to.”
“I think you better explain that. I mean, I don’t even get why you want a job if you can walk through bank walls and don’t see anything wrong with it.”
Her expression must have soured at the question, only because thinking about a response brought back unpleasant memories.
“I’m sorry, did I hit a nerve?” he asked.
“It’s all right, I’ll answer. It was pointed out to me recently that my disgust for so much of this world may come in part from my… detachment. The problem with traveling on the other side of the veil—which is what you’ve asked me to show you as proof—is when I do it I will leave you here. I’ll remove myself, even if it’s only a tiny bit and for the briefest of times. I’ll be detached. There’s a comfort to being there. I miss it, but I’m trying to wean myself.”
“Someone said that to you? The disgust part.”
“In so many words. My disgust was self-evident, and perhaps my detachment as well. He wasn’t—he isn’t a good man, the one who said this to me. Not good, but he has some wisdom. And I’m not a good woman. I was there to commit a murder.”
“You know, every time I feel like we’re settling down you bring out some new kind of crazy.”
She laughed. “There’s a long explanation.”
“Did you do it?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
“I had been meaning to for a long time. It’s… as I said, there is a long explanation, but I had… it was someone he cared about and I wanted him to suffer, and I thought I had found a way to make him suffer in the same way he made… I wanted him to suffer, and this was a poetically appropriate way. But I couldn’t do it. And he knew, in the end, that I couldn’t, so it didn’t even serve that small purpose. He didn’t know the kind of terror he could have known had there been truth behind my threat. He wasn’t going to feel that loss of control over the life of a loved one at my hand. As soon as I realized that, I knew there was going to be no way of getting from him what I wanted.”
“You wanted vengeance?”
“Yes, that’s very close to right. But the enormity of the task… it would have given me none of what I wanted, and turned me into someone I didn’t want to be any more. So I didn’t do it. Millennia of waiting for such a moment, and I didn’t do it.”
She smiled grimly. “And now I’m here, trying to figure out who I’d like to be instead.”
Rick smiled back. “That’s quite an existential crisis you’ve got going on there.”
“I suppose it is.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t believe any of it. Only thing holding me back here is there’s nothing at all about you that makes any sense, so if we’re going with things that are crazy sounding, what you just said isn’t so bad. Pretty sure I’d be saying the same thing about the spaceship idea or the cocoon thing.”
“Or an angel.”
“Or that. No wings, though.”
She laughed. “I do know a thing with wings.”
“Me too, we call them birds around here.”
“Not a bird. A different thing.”
She uncurled from the chair and stood at the edge of the balcony. They had passed a copse of trees on their way to the apartment earlier in the day, so there was a chance…
She made a series of low trills. There was a very specific note and cadence she was attempting, to issue a sound she’d not tried to issue for many years.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Shh.”
She continued. He watched in silence, amused, confused or concerned, or all three. After about a minute, she heard a response, and then something flew past her line of vision.
“What was that?” Rick said.
“Did you see?” Eve asked.
“I don’t know what I saw. Was that a bat?”
“No.”
It flew past them again. Eve held out her arm in a pose more reminiscent of a falconer. It landed on her wrist.
“Hello, little one,” she said.
“Oh my god, what?” Rick said. He edged closer. “What is that?”
“A pixie.”
“She looks like… Tinkerbell. But with no clothes on.”
Eve didn’t know what a Tinkerbell was, but imagined the description was likely accurate. Pixies were tiny, flying creatures with gossamer wings and bodies that looked human. They didn’t wear clothes, for the same reason most creatures don’t wear clothes.
“Can we call you a she, little one?”
“Uh-huh,” the pixie said.
Rick jumped back about three paces.
“Holy shit, she talks.”
“Of course, they all can. Although not often and not well. They have their own language, which is what I was speaking earlier when I asked her to join us. I’m not fluent in their tongue but I have some words. No doubt I sound as simple to them in their language as they do to us in ours.”
“How did… I don’t…”
“Maybe you should sit down, Rick.”
“Yes, okay.”
He sat in the chair. It took a couple of tries because the chair was not perfectly aligned with his rear, and he couldn’t seem to remove his eyes from the pixie.
“They tend to appear as female to us,” Eve said. “But they are each both male and female. Some identify as male, and so I asked. You understand.”
“No. Yes, sure. No.”
To the pixie she asked, “What can I call you?”
“Dee,” the pixie said.
“Hello, Dee.”
“Hi.” She flew off Eve’s arm, circled Rick’s head twice, and returned to the arm.
“He sick,” she said.
“No, he’s not sick. He’s only confused.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rick? I think Dee is hungry, do we have something we can give her?”
“Um…? What does she eat?”
“They eat insects, mostly, but have a fondness for certain fruits and fungi. Things that grow on or near trees.”
“We have some kung pao left. Would she eat that?”
* * *
Dee didn’t have any interest in kung pao, or in three of the other dishes provided. (Something with noodles and chicken, something with beef and a red sauce, something involving shrimp. Rick ordered enough food for a month, as far as Eve could discern.) Dee did take a liking to the mushrooms that accompanied a stir-fry dish, and seemed to enjoy the white rice. Rick also had an apple in his refrigerator that Dee started eating as soon as it warmed to room temperature.
They sat in the kitchen at the table and watched their new friend eat. Pixies could eat twice their weight in hardly any time at all.
Rick remained utterly flummoxed by the entire thing.
“I was prepared to accept that the stuff you were telling me was real as far as you were concerned,” he said. “You know, because we all have our own… reality, I guess. Dated a witch once.”
“Wi
tches aren’t real.”
“Fair enough, but she thought she was. Like, not wiccan, or I guess not just wiccan. She thought she could make spells and do things, right? And it was fine. We’d be hanging out and something would happen, like, a little thing, something good. Find money on the ground, or make the bus on time, or something like that. And she’d be taking credit for it. I’d be like, hey, I got a decent bonus and she’d tell me she already knew because she brewed some special tea and set a chestnut on fire or something crazy. And I mostly just accepted that this was how the world worked for her. Didn’t mean I had to accept it too.”
“You’re under no obligation to accept anything I say.”
“Well yeah, but…” He gestured wordlessly to Dee. “Don’t think I can pretend this isn’t happening here.”
Eve rubbed Dee’s head. The pixie cooed gently, while continuing to eat.
“It’s been my experience that people are as capable of denying things they experience directly as they are with things they’re only told about. The perspective of humankind is extremely fragile. You’re hardly the first person to see a pixie, and I’ve no doubt you know at least a goblin or an elf. Others are more rare or more regionally common, but all of this is to say you have run across a person or two who was only somewhat human. You only never knew it before now.”
Dee finished eating, and took flight. She circled the room several times—it was impossible to say how many circuits only because pixies in flight are typically too quick for the eye—and then landed on Eve’s shoulder.
“Doesn’t she have to wait a half hour after eating or something?” Rick asked.
“You come see see now,” the pixie said to Eve.
“Come see what, child?” Eve asked.
“Come see see.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“See sick. Come see see, see sick.”
“I still…” Eve looked at Rick, who was nodding.
“Cee, like the letter,” Rick said. “I get it. Cee is a person, like Dee is. Or a pixie. A pixie person.”
“Yes, Cee like Dee,” Dee said. “But Cee sick, Dee not sick.”
“Hello,” Rick said.
He held out his hand, the way Eve had, and soon Dee was perched on him. Eve’s heart broke a little at the idea of this confused man embracing the new strangeness of his world so much more openly than most of those who preceded him.
Immortal Stories: Eve Page 3
