The Jack Hansard Series: Season Two

Episode 3.6

They were the colour of tea stains, too. Each only a few inches tall, they were clasping their bald heads in their spindly hands. Their skin crackled like antique paper as they moved, flitting in jarring stop-motion sequence through the air, looking for all the world like a poorly rendered sepia animation on top of the room.

Branok was still dusting himself off, while Merouda swatted at nearby piskies with a frilly pillow.

'Be off, yer nasty bleeders,' she shouted.

One piskey caught her pillow with its clawed foot and swung her across the room. She crashed into the nightstand in a heap.

'Narsty knockers!' the piskey screeched. 'It knocks on rocks and eats dirty fat cocks!'

Branok growled. 'What did you jus' say about my Merouda?'

The piskies shook off their dizziness and began to scream at him.

'Sluts! They dig like

mutts they smell like

rotten nuts!

They fuck like rats and

lie their bastard brats

on shit-smeared mats!'

The school-yard cursing was almost funny. Except with every rhyme a piskey divebombed our necks, looking to sink pincer sharp teeth into the skin.

'Where the hell have all these come from?' I yelled, swatting madly around my face.

A piskey stopped and hovered at eye-level. Milk-white pupils narrowed at me.

It hissed. 'Bitch woman caught us in an iron trap. But we throw friends on ferrous teeth, slap slap crack!'

I followed it's pointing finger to where a large birdcage with spindly iron bars lay battered open on the floor. Bits of bloodied piskey were caught in its door hinges.

I slipped one hand inside my trench coat. 'Okay. So you're free now. Time to leave, right?'

'Oh no,' it rasped. 'Won't leave yet. Not til we've repaid our debt. We'll snag you all in a fucking net.'

The last words came with a rip of fabric and the clatter of rails torn from the walls.

'Argh,' I said, muffled under the heavy frills of Bernice's pink curtains.

The cloth pulled tight against my face, smothering me. I could hear the piskies' shrieking titters and feel their hard tugs on the fabric, and behind that were the sounds of other struggle all around the room. My hand was still lodged inside my coat, clamped on the iron horse shoe which would save our hides if only it weren't for these bloody curtains pinning me like a corpse in a comedically rolled up rug.

I strained to get my mouth moving. I probably had enough breath to shout one last thing.

'The Fairy Queen will be very angry if you hurt us!'

The titters stopped. For a moment just the buzzing of their wings filled my ears.

Then fabric loosened and slipped off my head. I was glad to hear the frantic gasps of my friends also inhaling air.

Pale eyes glared again at mine. 'What do you know of the Fairy Queen? Why should she care if we split you open at the seams?'

Quick. Think of every sinister fairy tale, rhyme, and song that skulks in your childhood hindbrain. Somewhere in there is the Evil Queen, the vestigial remains of our species memory for something everyone once knew to be true. Stray to the land of the fairies, and the Queen will snatch you away. She is a lingering, malicious dream on the edge of the stories we tell to our children.