Truly Elemental: And Other Retro Faerie Tales

Barren

"It is said Mother Leed's had twelve children right as rain. But her thirteenth, she claimed, would be like the Devil."

He rescued her from the train tracks. She married him under the crook'd fingers of a lightning struck pine tree.

Together, they buried the preacher deep in the hollows, tangled in the roots of a long-dead stump. Together, they carved a heart in the bark and hardwood and marked it: "Forever, 1939."

Entwined, they found the county highway.

Heat shimmered, thin as specters in the sun. Warm blacktop led them to the city.

• • •

Clean boots and a black dress.

He always wore a tie and smoked a cigarette, brown. She brushed the polished wood with a chiffon hip; fingers trailing shoulders as her poison-red lips parted for her illicit, honey lies.

Dice rolled. Chattering promises against the cup. Dollars, beaten and frayed from rougher days, slid out of pockets and into theirs. Cards were their best trick. No one saw his hands move. No one noticed his halo of smoke tremble from a pair of wings that couldn't be seen.

They only noticed her: A lush silhouette sparkling under the lights, wrapped in a grinning gray fox. High heels left imprints in the wine carpet when she swayed. Black nails dug into just the right arm at just the right moment.

Distraction.

This was their game.

• • •

Moonlight on water was their vice. A full moon. Burnt orange by the waxing month and fat as a pig's heart. And under it, he watched her dance. The sand folded wherever her bare feet fell as she twirled in cotton and fragile lace. Not a year earlier, those same ankles had been crossed at leisure on the steel rail. Waiting.

Waiting for him.

Black hair uncurled, she dipped her scarlet scarf into the river, pinching it tight against the current. He slipped up behind her—a smell of forest fires, a hush of stagnant summer air—his long fingers traced her hips.

She sighed against him when he finally touched her, eyes closed.

They found another tree. One in a thousand pine trees. And after a while, when the moon crested and began to fade for dawn's approach, they paused on their backs on the browned needles and carved "Forever, 1940" into the brittle trunk.

It bled for them, the tree.

She cried for him beneath it.

• • •

A man came to their table.

He never played a card.

Night after night he sat, staring, whisky and ice sweating in a crystal-cut glass. His fingers ticked against his knee. He was all long bones and pressed corners. A fedora sagged in the heat, shadowing his crook'd nose and scarred upper lip.

They only appeared in summer, the pair. In a city full of tourists, ice cream, and boardwalk casinos. Seaside fun for families. A haunt for hungry men and deep pockets. He watched them as if they would vanish—salt mist in the sunshine, burning to nothing in a blink.

Distraction was a word he didn't know.

Not until too late.

What he did know couldn't be seen by any normal eyes, only those with Sight.