“It’s a mistake,” I said quietly.
“What’s it now?”
“A mistake. I’m…I’m nobody. I’m nobody. I’m not supposed to be here.”
I had made it and didn’t even audition. Maria auditioned, with her whole heart. I was supposed to mess around in the back and say nothing. I wasn’t supposed to suddenly have to function in Athens. This was Maria’s place and she couldn’t even see it.
“Wake up, Maria, wake up,” I sobbed. “Wake up. There’s unicorns, like you said, and magic, and…”
And she didn’t stir. But her breathing was better, deep and even, and she had locked her arms around my waist.
“Well, Nobody,” the driver said softly, “where to?”
I rubbed my nose, flowing with snot and tears. “What about these people? Don’t they need to get…places? Go where they want to go. We don’t care.”
“Tourists,” he shrugged. “They wait for the…ah…fuel stop, and go where the Trolley goes. It’s exciting—they never know what they might see. Besides, the old monster’s not too reliable as a method of mass transit. The kids come on sometimes, to haze each other—if it goes, they aren’t as tough as they say. But mostly we just glide, child. It’s part magic and part machine and neither of the parts work quite right, so sometimes you’ll say: dinner at Cafe Cubana, hoss and it’ll take you pert as a duck to Elfhaeme Gate and you’ll be dining on fines and forms. Sometimes it’s nice as you please, right up to the door at Cubana and no fuss. Not its fault, you understand. The magic wants to go Realmward and the machine wants to go Worldward, and in a mess like that you can’t ask for any straight lines.”
“Then why ask where we’re going?”
The driver looked down at me, his blue eyes dark in the starlight, like crystals.
“It don’t run without desire, kid. Nothing does.”
Well, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? What you’ve been doing. I wanted somewhere for Maria to get well, to get fed, to get happy again. Something like a Denny’s, something I could sing in front of, somewhere with coffee all night for $1.10 in a cup like a grail and just a little more room on the blank pages in the backs of my books. Just a little more room.
I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. But the Unicorn Trolley veered off sharply into the shadows and light of the city, into the sound of it like a wall.
And I looked over my shoulder, back toward the moon and the gnarled, thorny weeds of the road. Something banged there, hanging from an iron pole, banged in the wind and the night. On a scrap of tin that might have once been painted blue, I read: Starfire Station.
And just then, just then, Maria opened her eyes, bright and deep as a fairy’s.
And that’s my story, Mr. Din. If you don’t mind I’ll take that beer now—I’m still not brave. It’s Titania’s world but I’ll never be Hermia, and not Helena neither. Just Fig, in the background, with the rest of the fairies.
Now. I see a microphone up there, Mr. Din, and my girl and I are hungry. May I?
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland— For a Little While
In which a young girl named Mallow leaves the country for the city, meets a number of Winds, Cats, and handsome folk, sees something dreadful, and engages, much against her will, in Politicks of the most muddled kind.
History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or wheth
er it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.
History is like that.
Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.
No matter where one begins telling a story, a very long road stretches out before and behind, full of wild and lovely creatures performing feats and acts of daring. No matter how much a narrator might want to, she cannot pack all of them into one tale. That’s the trouble—history goes on all around the story at hand, it is what made it happen and what will happen after, all of those extraordinary events and folk and dangers and near-misses, choices that had to be made so that everything after could happen as it did. A single story is but one square of blueberries growing in one plot, on one farm, on the fertile face of the whole world. A heroine steps in, and sees a wickedness in need of solving—but she is never the first, or the last. She plays her part, blessedly and necessarily innocent of that fat old cat sneaking around the borders of her tale, licking its paws while she bleeds and fights, whipping its tail at her trials and yawning at her triumphs. The cat does not care. It has seen all this before and will see it again.
In short, Fairyland has always needed saving.
This is a story about another girl, and another time, and another terrible thing that wanted very much to happen in Fairyland. You may have heard of her, for that striped old monster called history sat very happily in her lap and let her feed it milk.
Her name was Mallow.
Once upon a time, a girl named Mallow grew very tired indeed of her little country house, where she grew the same enormous luckfigs and love-plantains every summer, slept on the same talking bed, and studied the same tame and amiable magic. Her friends would visit her from time to time, for she lived on the shores of a whiskey lake where trifle-trees hung heavy with raisin and soursop tarts, but they had their own quite thrilling lives, and Mallow did not insist that they stay just to make her happy. She was not that sort of girl, and prided herself on it. One of her dearest and handsomest friends was a sorcerer, and from him she had learned so much magic even her hairpins got up and started living serious-minded lives, writing hairpin-ballads, celebrating hairpin-holidays, and inventing several new schools of philosophy. But still Mallow was discontent, for all the magic she knew was Dry Magic, and she longed for more.
Now, magic, like people, turns out quite differently depending on how it was brought up. Long ago a quorum of the sort of folk who knew about such things (almost all young, excitable, and prone to declaring things at high volumes) decided that mere Light and Dark Magics were insufficient to Fairyland’s needs, and rather boring to boot. Soon after the mystical scene exploded with new notions: Dry Magic and Wet Magic, Hot Magic and Cold Magic, Fat Magic and Thin Magic, Loud Magic and Shy Magic, Bitter Magic and Sour Magic, Sympathetic Magic and Severe Magic, even Umbrella Magic and Fan Magic. Fairyland knows more sorts of magic than I could ever tell you about, even if you and I had all the time and tea we could wish for.