Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline, page 10
part #1 of Punked Up Fairy Tales Series
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You are?”
“Miriam Fee, Mr. Ashley.”
He scoffed. “Why does everyone insist on calling me ‘mister’?”
“Well, you are a man.”
“Yes, well, some things are out of our hands, aren’t they? How may I help you, Miss Fee?”
“I’m looking for someone and I thought maybe your sisters—”
“Stepsisters.”
“Of course.”
“They made up and live together next door in the bigger house.”
“Are they home?”
“They rarely leave but they do take in a party now and then.” He raised his voice as if he thought they might hear him from across the yard. “Not that they would ever tell me…” He looked at me. “I’m not their ‘real’ sibling so they treat me like I’m an interloper. Who are you looking for again?”
“Whoever has the match to this.” I opened the matchbox and showed him the crystal slipper. He pushed open the screen door and joined me on the porch.
“Where did you find that?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“Do you know the young woman who has the match to this?” I asked.
Ash Hixson frowned. “Young woman?”
“The man who gave me this asked me to find the young woman who wore these earrings last night to his party. He said he saw her arrive and intended to speak to her but when he finally had the opportunity, she’d left abruptly.”
“Some girls can’t wait all night for their prince to arrive, can they?” He gave me back the box. “The slippers belonged to my mother.”
“Your stepmother?”
“Right. Of course. Either way they belonged to her.”
Jeanine the maid floated back into the room. Her skirt was so long she seemed to glide over the marble floor and I thought I picked up the gentle whir and flap of moth wings.
“Mr. Ashley—Ash—it’s almost time for your one o’clock salon appointment. Should I have the car brought around from your sisters’ house?”
“No. I’ll walk. Thank you, Jeanie.”
Jeanine laughed and glided back into the kitchen.
“I just adore her,” Ash Hixson said. “If you’ll excuse me…”
“Just one thing.”
“Hmm?”
“What happened to the penny in your right shoe?”
“Spent it on some candy, of course.”
Ash Hixson went down the steps and through the gate whistling Bessie Smith’s ‘Second Fiddle’ on his way. It made me think of the wager I had Billy Gruffman place for me. Perhaps it was a sign, an omen, but I wondered how the Charm would feel knowing I had used my abilities to cast for profit.
“Oh,” a woman said. “Who are you?”
I looked down to see a plus-sized woman standing at the gate. She wore a yellow dress that came up high around her neck and rivulets of sweat trickled along her temples from the mound of brown hair on top of her head. She made her way up onto the porch. The first step groaned a bit under her step.
“Easy, Daisy I have you…”
I hadn’t realized another woman was standing behind the first until the second woman put her hand on the first woman’s back to steady her.
“I’m fine, Petunia,” the woman in the yellow dress said.
“Of course, Daisy,” the second woman said. She was shorter with a bit of an overbite and whistled slightly on ‘s’ sounds.
I blinked. I must have been in a daze. I hadn’t seen the two women approach the house. On top of that, standing next to me was Jeanine, the maid, and I couldn’t recall her coming out of the kitchen let alone onto the porch.
“This is Miss Miriam Fee, Miss Daisy. Miss Petunia,” Jeanine said. “She’s a private detective.”
“Private detective? Oh, it’s much too hot for inconsistencies such as these. Jeanine, please go and make a pitcher of gin blossoms for us, if you would.”
Jeanine smiled at me. It wasn’t pleasant. It was a snarl. A warning.
“Yes, Miss Daisy.” Back into the house went Jeanine with a slam of the screen door behind her. Daisy Hixson yipped.
“This heat is positively murder on my nerves.” She sat down on a wicker settee that, like the lower porch step, groaned. “Please do sit. Your standing is apt to give my heart palpitations.”
I sat in a fan back rattan chair on Daisy Hixson’s right.
“Now why has a private detective come to my house?”
“Our house, Daisy.” Petunia said with that slight whistle.
Daisy smiled patiently. “The last thing we Hixsons crave is scandal.”
“If it involves us.” Petunia continued to whistle.
“I came to inquire about the match to this earring.” I showed the crystal slipper to the Hixson sisters.
“Never saw it before,” Daisy Hixson said.
“Never saw it before?” I was flummoxed. “Your brother said the earrings belonged to your mother.”
“Oh. So today he is our brother, Ash, and not our sister, Ashlee.”
“That’s with two Es at the end,” whistled Petunia.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Our stepsibling views gender as an option, Miss Fee,” Petunia said. “One day he’ll be Ash and a few days later he’ll proclaim to be Ashlee.”
“Whole lot of nonsense,” Daisy said.
“When our mother married his father, we knew him as Ashley,” Petunia explained. “That’s with an l-e-y. Then one day he came to dinner in a dress and announced he was Ashlee—”
“With two Es,” I said.
“I blame his father,” Daisy said. “He came from that place they call Little Hell. Married our mother for her fortune. I don’t know what she saw in him. It was as if she’d been enchanted. Ah, good, the gin blossoms.”
Jeanine stood behind Petunia’s chair holding a silver tray with a glass pitcher and three tumblers. I hadn’t seen or heard her come out and I was facing the door, so that was something. Jeanine set the tray on a small wicker table, poured two drinks, and handed them to the Hixson sisters. Before they could take a sip, Jeanine snapped her fingers three times and said, “Se faner!”
French for ‘fade’.
“They can’t hear or see us,” Jeanine said. “I’ve faded us from their consciousness.”
“Are you part of the Charm?” I asked, surprised. “I didn’t know there was another apprentice in the area.”
“I’m more of a free agent. I know why you are here, Miss Fee. It’s about the woman killed after the party last night, isn’t it?”
“I actually came about this crystal slipper earring. The man who hired me wants me to find its owner and bring them to him.”
“Yes, well, I think I need to explain what happened. You see, I’ve been with Mr. Ashley—Ash—for a very long time. From the day he was born his mother—his real mother, that is—began to notice things about her son she feared would upset her older husband. When the father was away on business, Ash’s mother allowed her son to play dress-up and that was how he came to be known as Jacqueline even though his Christian name was Jackson. But the father traveled less as the child got older and one night the mother took her child into the forest to hide him from his father who had found him dressed as a girl. The mother made a desperate wish upon a star for help and I materialized.”
“So you weren’t sent. You were summoned.”
“Something like that. I told the mother her wishes would be granted and took the child. The mother came up with a ruse about kidnapping.”
“How did Jack Rumple become Ash-slash-Ashlee Hixson?”
“I needed someplace to hide him so I delivered him to Stilts Weaver who I knew had been friends with the mother and said I would help Mr. Weaver find another wife if he promised to raise the boy as his own. He agreed.”
“But what of the boy’s birth mother? What became of her?”
Jeanine paled. She wrung her hands together. “I screwed up. Ephraim Rumple believed the rumors his wife knew the kidnapper. Said she plotted with him to use the child as a pawn to take his fortune. They argued and, in a fit of drunken rage, he beat her to within an inch of her life and sealed her inside the wall of his wine cellar.”
I was aghast. Appalled. “Why didn’t you rescue her?”
“I know. I know. But Lydia Rumple had wished me to protect her son, not her.”
“The Charm would have approved.”
“I told you. I’m not with the Charm.”
I understood why. Rogue fairies like Jeanine made the rules up as they went along. Sometimes they got lucky. Most of the time they screwed up in notably disastrous ways.
Jeanine continued. “Ash was older so I thought telling him what happened and giving him the earrings would appease him. I was wrong. He became obsessed with returning them to her. I tried ‘forget’ and ‘ignore’ spells but Ash is persistent. So we made a deal. He wanted to go to a party at the castle as a woman—a real woman like he told his real mother he always wanted to be. I said he could go to the party and told him where to look to find her, but he mustn’t, under any circumstance, tell anyone why he was there. And he had to be home by midnight because that was the extent of the magic I had in me for the day. Masking these two really takes it out of me.”
“Masking? Why?”
“I’m cursed! Their mother served me red valerian tea!”
“She trapped you. How long are you held?”
“With these two it could be quite some time. It was their mother’s wish a man must fall in love with the person within them and not how they looked.”
“How do they look?”
Jeanine dropped the mask spell. Daisy still had curves and Petunia still could use some orthodontic work, but they were attractive. They looked at one another as if seeing a stranger and Jeanine quickly replaced the spell.
“We must be drunk,” Petunia said.
Daisy nodded. “I know. For a minute there you looked pretty.”
They laughed and went back to drinking gin blossoms. I was pretty certain Jeanine was in need of one herself. She would have never been in the predicament had she been in the Charm.
“What happened at the party?”
Jeanine sighed. “Ashlee panicked. There were too many people and men kept approaching her. Before she knew it, midnight was close at hand. That’s when she saw Duke Diamond coming towards her. She ran from the castle, dropping the earrings on her way. She got to her car but the chauffer had already dematerialized. She just wanted to get away before she, too, reverted to her natural state and in her haste to escape, she lost control of the car and hit that young woman.”
“Where did you get the chauffer? The car?”
“I couldn’t use the Hixson’s actual driver or car. I portal-jumped into Manhattan, found an old man sleeping in Central Park and brought him back in a bag of infinite holding. I promised him youth and food for the night. The car I winged. I popped what I thought was a penny out of Ash’s loafer only it was a British tuppence he had acquired from a soldier he met. When I conjured the car, it gave us a British car. I should have ended it then.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“He was so happy to be Ashlee. Completely Ashlee and not pretending to be Ashlee. It had been so long since I’d seen him like that I couldn’t take it away from him. I’ve watched over him for so long it’s like he’s my son. And I will do anything to protect him.”
She snapped her fingers three times and cried, “Oblier!”
French for ‘forget’.
I counter cast. “Reorienter!” and sent the spell back at her.
“Oh, Jeanie,” I said. “Your power is too weak right now, to cast ‘forget’ on me. You’ve got ‘fade’ and ‘mask’ and who knows what else going on.”
The fade spell faded. The mask spell dissolved. I quietly walked down the sidewalk to the wrought iron gate.
“Goodbye,” Daisy Hixson said.
“Thanks for stopping bye,” Petunia Hixson said without whistling.
Jeanine just stood there staring at the street. Her spell had been quite strong after all. She must have forgotten who she was when I redirected it back at her.
I walked back to the Ambrose Hills depot. Halfway there Billy Gruffman pulled up next me.
“I thought you were going to find me, lady. I got your payout. Forty-six bucks.”
“Keep it.”
“Naw. That’s too much.”
“My union won’t let me profit from games of chance while I’m on a job.”
“The union won’t know.”
“Yeah. This one will.”
“Well, you want a ride?”
“No, thanks. I’m in no hurry. I’ll walk.”
“Okay. Thanks again, Toots!”
I rode the first passenger train to arrive back to Rumple’s Crossing. My thoughts were muddled. How could I tell Duke Diamond the woman he found so alluring was a phantasm? How could I explain to Arthur Knightly his daughter Aurora was killed by that phantom in a car that didn’t exist?
The bigger concern was how would I tell the Charm I had wiped clean the thoughts of Jeanie? I was still on probation for misuse of magic. This would tip the scales against me.
For a gangster, Duke Diamond took it easier than I thought he would.
“Did you find her?” he asked.
“I did but she asked to remain anonymous.”
“Married, I guess. Or engaged.”
I left it at that. “Here’s the glass slipper.”
“I would have thought she’d want it back.” He took it.
“And your money.”
“No, you keep it. You did your job. You earned it.”
Arthur Knightly snatched the money out of my hand when I offered it to him. “I was wrong about you, Fee. I’ll go to Manhattan. Get someone who knows what he’s doing. You country bumpkins are a sad lot.”
I thought about transmogrifying him, but frogs were the whole reason there was that whole probation thing already hanging over my head. Turn one bad date into a frog and leave him that way until he’s kissed by a virgin and everyone gets pissed.
As for the Charm, I will present the story as I have here. What I did to Jeanine was out of self-preservation not maliciousness. Still, it is doubtful her powers will be restored or that I will become a full fledged fairy godmother.
But it is no longer in my hands. It is in theirs.
What’s French for ‘good luck’?
***
Jack Bates is a three-time finalist for a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. In 2007 he co-wrote WHITE OUT, a horror screenplay that had its option picked up twice by Triboro Films in New York. His stories have appeared at crime sites such as Near to the Knuckle, Shotgun Honey, Beat to a Pulp and many others. He has also appeared twice before in Mystery Weekly. Most recently his short, ‘The Fakahatchee Goonch’ was included in the Bouchercon 2018 anthology, FLORIDA HAPPENS.
Drawing on his experience as an educator, Bates sets his Cinderella based story in the Hudson Bay region of New York. The homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is not accidental. After deconstructing both stories, certain tropes and themes align. Re-inventing self is a major component of each story. Both characters yearn to be free of their poverty level lives. One takes matters into his own hands while the other has a chance encounter. Either way, fate has a way of putting a twist on the final outcome.
늑대 - The Neugdae
Juliet Harper
In the burnt out edges of the bombed and gassed villages of South Korea, a little girl was handed a bundle in the early fog of morning by her mother. “Chae-Won,” she said, “take this to your Auntie. Tell her it’s all we can spare.” In the bundle were rations—dry, tasteless foods handed out by the soldiers in place of the crops they had spent so long tending, only to see them ruined just before harvest. Chae-Won fastened her Saekdongot hanbok, her favorite due to its bright color, the stripes of vibrant shades of red, like a patchwork flower, and prepared for the long walk. She had to go, rather than her parents or older sister, because she was the only one still too small to work in the fields or do odd jobs for the army camps. “Tell your Auntie she will need to evacuate soon, or be bombed too,” her mother called after her, already on her own way down the road, in the opposite direction.
The road was long and dusty back to the farm where her Auntie lived, barely making a living on what little was still left after the bomb had turned her fields, cow shed, and husband into one big crater. But she refused to leave it. Chae-Won admired her Auntie’s tenacity, her refusal to let the war break her, even if her mother said it was bullheaded and sure to end in the old woman’s death. But Auntie did not listen, and so neither did Chae-Won, nor did she mind the long walk. She enjoyed the breeze that wafted away the burnt, sulfur stink of the bombarded land, the pong of unwashed bodies and the shit of the last few remaining cows. Bundle in one hand, Chae-Won broke off a branch from a low-lying shrub brush, swinging it back and forth in the other.
When she passed the wreck of a bombed jeep, the once green sides now singed black and dusted with dull brown dirt, the tires melted flat and slumping into the earth, seats nothing but bare springs and oil stains, she banged her stick against its metal side and listened to sound as it echoed back from the foothills. When she passed the makeshift altar to a family that had died, their graves still faintly visible as truncated lumps, she bowed her head and let her swinging stick fall still. When she passed a flowering bush, she dropped her stick in exchange for a few blooms, thinking her Auntie might like them. When she passed the beastly tank silent at the side of the road,the closest she had ever been to one of the great behemoths, she expected it, too, to be dead, the hulking shell cool to the touch. But the scent of diesel was still ripe, the oil still thick and warm in its leg joints. She did not expect that, nor did she expect the man.
Hopping down from the top of the turret far over Chae-Won’s head, the man was undressed from the waist up, with dark hair covering his chest like a forest. Sweat gleamed on him like rain. He wiped his oil blackened hands on a white cloth, staining it. “Hello, little sister,” he said in accented Korean. An American. Chae-Won nodded to him politely, eyes averted, but kept walking. “Where are you going that way?” the American asked, again in rough Korean. “The road gets dangerous.” He gestured to his tank, toward its insect-like multitude of mechanical legs. That gave Chae-Won pause. The road had not been dangerous before.
