Faerieland

It's 2667 I.T., dab in the middle of the 618th Olympiad. 1695 AD.

The Faerieland Appellate Court is outlawing ‘Changing,’ the stealing and substitution of upland children.

Unto 2961 I.T., in order to vote or own land, the otherbound descendants of these ‘Changed,’ the aufGaolaí, must speak as follows:

 

Hereby, before the Darkness and the Watching Light, before the Un-Raped Mother and Faer Avatar in the Wealds, Faer Imperial Radiance [Artea e.g.], and before God, do I, [Legal Name], Grand-descendent of the Changed, singly and without trickery, forswear kinship with the changelings’ hosts; their descendants in the Uplands; their families entire. I forswear what-and-ever debt of blood, title, and property is owed my clan and kin by Sí-e, no matter sê-faer clade, and all right to either seek, to either ask after, to nor either benefit by the closure thereof.

 

2983 to today marks the Sgiesaetthum’s longest era without execution, formal or otherwise, of incarcerated aufGaolaí.

It is 2997.

 

—

 

In tiny silver letters spidering the back muscles and abdomen of Red’s accuser was the following.

Build. Build again. Build a next thing. A next. Build. Let the building break you. Build like cracks form. Like teeth chip. Fill the cracks with the dust of your own ground-out tissue, dried-down skin. Build. Break your lips. Mouth. Tear your tongue lengthwise and learn to speak again. Break from the pit. From the muck and sod and grab your fangs for purchase. Grab on and say – don’t say – eke the noises you can eke. Make your mouth a receptacle for any sound that comes and scream it, whatever word, whatever voice. Now – good or shit – you are the word and the word is your charge. Now feet gather under. Lips take shape. You are broken. Broken. Broken and still breaking. The breaking is you. You are alive and the breaking is living. Break like crystals scour and scuff and grind out through centuries, centuries. Break like mountains die. Break like geysers melt. Shrink a single inch and break. Break. Topple and totter and, like a cascade of prions, build. Build. Proteinaceous infectious praxis.

In a clutch of yellow elastic tentacles, way up on stage, Night arched and bowed in reverse. Her spine and, written on it, the pull quote from Red’s famous article folded toward us. Four therapists ago, and this therapist was Aos sí, a therapist asked why I did not come forward about another assault – a different assault, one relevant at the time – and I said, “‘Believe women’ is a great principle.” The therapist nodded. “For the Uplands, it’s great. With them, the sort of division up there, it’s tidy.” The therapist nodded again. “Here it’s fae accusing fae. Or in aufGaolaí communities, often enough still, it’s women accusing women.” Whatever muscle supported the constant smile failed. A slack of negative space filled the jaw region. A minute passed. “Right” sounded faer conclusion. “Right.”

Night was Red’s accuser. But Red was Night’s accuser too. On Night’s bare skin were written the words of Red’s defence and counteraccusation. But for the dick, breasts, pubic triangle, and face, the quote enclothed this, Night’s body, up in its nest seizing, jittering, wrenched back like a solar bridge to welcome the grey, gold, grey strobe of the factory’s ceiling as our new and worse, but necessary sun.

Out of love for Red I will not give the name “rape” to our first event. Night, I guess, never loved Red. Do I still? It’s tricky. The catch in her throat meant she could never speak facing an audience. Her “performance” of key lines from Quivering Haecceities – now the urtext of what we’ll call anti-transmisoaufgynlaích literature – and other of her finest works of short fiction was cutups pasted to Modh Gallery’s walls and small boxy speakers pasted underneath, repeating a scratch in her natural affect as the scratch of the audio.

The function seeped innocence, literally rang with it. And more, a new and violenter kind of innocence, pled per a weakness that was not softness nor even weaponisable. “Sure,” the installation that was Red’s voice said, “I’m guilty if that’s what turns you on.” Singular but multilocal, at one turn of the hall this speaking bore the face of an inner child or, back another alcove, a severally limbed monster (the style of narration suggested). But it all shouted “seems like you want me to be guilty?” with a high-rising terminal or question-tone not native in Red’s accent to declarative sentences.

I took her with me that night to a winter thing run by the then-oathed of my then-ex, a flutist and noise artist called Aura. (Now Ana a.k.a. Speedy Ana, Aura’s ex-oathed, and I are together again.) Red was beautiful in person, in a way new to her, like she’d only that day realised it. Every day, still, she’s like that: wakes up forgetting and, each day, discovers that power again. The effect, I think, would short out be it not for its nightly wilting and daily rebursting. We kissed but I left with the friends on whose patronage I even got in. About three fortnights of voice-talking carried us through until, comfortable with each other, she came from seeing a friend onto my throughway and admitted the conflict: “Wish we were on Disc” vs. “let me come to you”. (We referred to the mini-clade’s cod et al. channel as ‘Disc,’ never by name.) Offered travelling but I don’t have a station like she does, not portable, and couldn’t join at hers. So we met at the front lower gate of the rear- and front-enterable townhouse I live in, walked to hers, collected the portable station, walked back to mine. We re-entered my place by the back upper window door, kissed, and did later, much later on, get on Disc. Everything took longer than it should. There was an insistence simultaneous with reluctance I now speculate was premeditation in its throes. Eyes-eyes-locking eyes. Please for the love of God fuck me already until I didn’t want it. Then. Begging. Having begged. Fed up with begging. Then. You can look at a body and know it’s strong but, no, you can’t. Every muscle that counts for anything keeps itself a secret. “Stop, stop.” No like really stop. Then. It physically speaking is not possible to get up and you off me and I said what I said so why’s it still. Then. Locking eyes-eyes-eyes. Then she’s inside and you’re trying stop a couple extra times and “look at me.” You idiot you are raping me she must not know. If she knows then. What is why the fuck is happening. Eyes-eyes-eyes-eyes. After, you know, I came from it. So naturally they say it takes minimum sixish weeks to assign the obvious name to that species of series of events which out of love for Red I still don’t. There’s a neuropathy there, in me (not a prion disease; the prion motif was ever her thing), that makes it not possible. (But what if not a prion?) Night’s sequence of images aligns exactly with my firsthand visions of my own body in play, beneath Red’s, and is beyond reasonable doubt not a lie. That’s sayable. It’s sayable Night was not lying. But no it’s not sayable Red was lying, either. That Quivering Haecceities was all technics minus fact. It’s a thing I’ve found ways to think only in the negative.

Night’s fingertips arched, out of the nest, to grace and, stretching harder, grasp a dark red electrical device crowned by these raw nodes of current that, now, shook through and shook the woman’s body, thrashed the grace out of it. Miraculous contortions spread every length, bolted the dick upright, jolted the performance to a more-than-overdue conclusion. Seizure done, neck rolling, she tried her best to yell but scarcely audibly said, “We are the dead and dreaming is dying. But dream. Dream.” The gold, grey, gold sun blinkered out and in the dark she said, “Dream,” and the yellow tentacles fluttered open to a sound like applause and the factory’s darkness cheered her name. I looked for Night in the later a.m. I wanted to talk, or at least, look at her and think about talking. Found her alone on the rooftop like you’d expect and took the final third of her cigarette, smoked it watching the sun blur up between two sheets of railside cement way down, looked anywhere but at her. “Sorry,” I said.

“Awful,” Night said.

“Whose was awful? I loved you and, obviously, Laea’s set.”

But she looked at me. My boots. My rainjacket pockets bulging with changes of clothing, six prescription medicines, pens and a notepad. Covered by green. And never at my eyes. “What’s obvious, Britt?” And I remembered, a few hours back, I watched this woman electro-torture herself in a plastic cage over a hundred-head audience (despite the shrouding and shadows) and rethought, as when the terminal’s rivets coursed her, these same words the pattern of her alopecia matches mine before the tilt and she raped you one time. One. Non-penetrative. It did that much? and not everyone can hack it and unexpected that I’m strong and stronger versus others. Other women. Comparatively. Never planned to be.

“I’m sure we’re both high and awake,” I said. “But it’s the next morning and my capacity’s semi reduced.” Then I looked Night in the eye and said, “Can you rephrase that?”

All scuffed and silver, the sunrise flattened the bones and narrow arches of her face and summoned a revised comment to the lips and second cigarette to the fingers. “Were you scanning for me downstairs? Kept finding little empty bits of the crowd to stand in and walk your friends to, to search around, you seemed to. Two explanations re: the fuck your problem is and that’s you and that person are so fully the same I’m not safe here, that’s likely, or we’ve got something in common you want help with or think I can give. One of those kind of ‘you want something from me – you can’t get it – I literally don’t have it to give’ things. Which. Look. If it’s the second I’m really genuinely sorry but you saw how my time around it turned out. Red wasn’t hardly getting traction before you hove in. You turned it out the way it turned out. Which I’m not grateful, okay, or comfortable really about.”

“The word I’m not using is rape,” I said.

“Which I never used.”

“Am I mistaken yours wasn’t penetration?”

With the detached task-at-handness of the plausible victim, “If with you it was then.”

“Then. Three it was. Two it wasn’t. Then.”

Glancing up, past the jacket, at my sinews and neck and rods of snappable matter. “Giving...”

Tracing the gaze, fingernail across own collar, curving to chin and tapping, tapping the cheekbone, “Eyes.” She looked right at me. “You? No. But I might have it to give,” I said. Then we kissed. Shuddered. She vomited. Kissed again. She had her own catscale. I texted Speedy Ana I was leaving and Night sailed to hers. It was coming eight p.m. as I dressed and Night agreed my big bulky pockets full of changes of clothing and days of medicine was a good idea. (The sex was terrifying in a ‘we are helpless to do this again’ kind of way.)

 

—

 

 

Red says nothing’s harder to sell than reality. Internally I correct to ‘the Real’ and agree. To me the ‘reality’ is she raped me and Night and Night and I fixated on each other, roleplay-reenacting it, it was fun. To me the Real is the series of actions and events with an obvious name (‘obviousness’ being the exchange-mechanism bonding reality and the Real). “Offenders,” Red writes, “are masters of realness. An offender’s recall is side- and back-lit and shot day-for-night and its rim sparkles like DiCaprio’s wine-filled margarita glass. That looks right. That’s how that went down isn’t it. But when’s the last time your misery looked the way it should?” Night asked where Red ever learned. How she put it so exactly. We agreed she said it well. It’s just writing. She reads. People write whatever, I said. And Night cried my spit from her eyes and begged me not to stop.

 

—

 

I’m not an idiot. Second, third, subsequent effects occupy more of my attention than the immediate real. But it’s necessary I’ve found to pretend that’s not true because there’s so much necessary harm at the extent of those lines and no one likes you if you say I knew it would hurt. I did it anyway. But everything hurts someone. I cannot for example will myself to put non-aluminium “recyclables” in the recycling box because the route map of the disposal trucks is publicly available and I know what pickups go to MelaMix Regional Landfill and which to Soléice Loch Recovery Centre and unlike most my gullet tastes my own helplessness in this regard and, like the chlorine and chloramine in my tap water, swallows it no complaint. But still I like not to lie. When I told Night all this I said also of course don’t tell anybody, I don’t want the fight she lost and plus Red’s someone I care about. The broad strokes of what I told Speedy Ana were the same. But Night was fucking somebody – fucking me – who as far all knew was dear friends with Night’s accusee/er. And Speedy Ana’s partner was, that is, I was, fucking and/or dear friends with, across the battlements of this mutual accusation and public discourse, the pariah and figurehead of either faction. (Red as far as all knew was dear friends, too, with the woman fucking her accuser/ee (me.)) We had a predicament, a predicament that clockworked as I knew it would from my little “don’t tell anyone” and that I, in a chemical sense, let happen. But that’s America. Live in it or not, you unfurl it. The one who lets it is you. But, the mugger’s the guy with the gun and the towers were brought down by two wide-body airliners and Ford held no obligation to reinforce the Pinto rear engine. (I was twelve: my parents’ divorce was not my fault.)

Night met Speedy Ana at mine and we tried watching Fire Walk With Me but I kept talking over it and no one stopped me. When, faced with Bobby’s jealousy, Laura says, Come on, just a little one, and he gives up, smiles, and says, I love you, babe, I grabbed Ana’s arm and said, “Are you okay? There was a cuck. You didn’t say ‘me.’”

Nobody laughed but Night said, “Red’s sat through all of Twin Peaks three times, she claims.”

Then Speedy Ana paused. And in the shift of light, the dry, extracted heat of the common area singed. Retinas stung. Jaws clacked. Iron frames groaned behind paper-packed sheets of wall. A bad-coloured sunset stained through, soaked the woodboards, my neck squealed and creaked, and Speedy Ana’s chin was undershone by the greyblue dying cornflower light of the phone she’d paused the movie with’s lockscreen, contouring and exaggerating, making it massive. My focus, a little pink-tinged and fraught, filled with Ana’s chin. “I meant to say,” the chin said, “sometime to you but should probably say to both anyway I met Red two days ago and maybe should only tell you” when the boarding underfoot rattled like the fifth of six alarms and, buzzing, Speedy Ana lunged to steady the television while Night and I dressed quick as we could to answer the moot call of Faer Imperial Radiance, Blatance the Un-Raped. Nothing else mattered. Aos sí tread so light the rumble interrupted their lives not a whit. But the call sounded for all, every citizen, person, localisable region of sentience in Mionchain. Sí caught it in their hairs, goose tremors through the leyweb, and we in our feet. Hear; hear and be summoned. Heed the knell of the Un-Raped Mother. Faer Avatar’s eye beckons you, little ray. Be its light. Thus we trod, thus paraded, under lilac canyons over emerald seas, to the Shimmerlands and the realm of festival there raised. Red hailed our arrival and the summerlight alternately crackled and oozed, oozed and crackled, rivuled-through and messy with leystick. “Good to see you,” sang we four in unison; we bowed in like fashion. Then the fugue settled. Provided none of our party stepped a toe outside the Shimmerlands for the moot’s duration, Blatance was done with us. Red’s eyes flicked. Just the four. Faer All-Gleaning Eye, faer parasiticity, had paired us for the Sun Rite.

“Fuck,” I said. “Fine.”

Red shrugged. “It’s the moot.”

“No,” Speedy Ana said. “Red? Carve with me?”

I tried my best, my honest-to-God best, to stitch together the words of an objection, but I failed. One imagines the same befell Night. She stared and stared and said nothing. A crust of iron-coloured leystick, dew-tipped, thawing, hung from her lower lid. She’d not blinked all fugue march.

“Yeah,” Red said. “Fine.” Then Ana took her arm and, in bond, the two vanished around a cluff of mintflowers.

 

—

 

To hear Ana’s chin tell it, “Forget me meeting Red in Mionchain. All it was, was she asked to meet, but the asking was in person. Was at her place seeing Ess.” But – the TV room now a warm and delightful, sepia-undertoned black, undisturbed by the passage of four months’ mooting, Bobby Briggs’s sage grin still plastered to the screen, Night gone to hers – the chin ebbed on, “We chose a similar creature. Very nearly got a result.” Of the sixteen creatures, four of rivers, four of sky, four of land, and four of deep places, newly created this moot three – one of deep places, two of rivers – were aufGaolaí inventions. A new record, a landmark for aufGaolaí representation. It’s a record unlikely to be surpassed. The election of creatures works as such: every Faerielander is paired with another of their own clade (bar five or so rounding-error exceptions out of eightish million, always their own); so Tann sí with Tann sí, Beag sí with Beag sí, Aos sí with Aos sí, aufGaolaí with aufGaolaí, etc. Then each departs the other’s company and from the meatshrubs and featherfens and wooden forests carves a lifeform. Yet unsouled, the form is escorted to its partner, and the pair must attempt – if feasible – to breed their creations. If the creations’ mating produces an offspring then that offspring may be entered to the election, tested and contested, until at last (out of eight million failed creatures) sixteen survive to be ensouled and reproduced and released to the far wealds of Faerieland. Lacking the other-attunements and side-sensitivities of the Sí, naturally the aufGaolaí – naturally we – underperform. Three was too many. It generated some social and policy backlash. But who cares. Ana’s and Red’s blood-carved creations mated and almost bred. Together, they very nearly got a result. “A sort of thing did emerge.” Speedy Ana’s voice danced, the TV darkened, chin lost in the pitch black of the room. “But it wasn’t a creature in that way. Had no mouth nor locomotive means. We were half-watching-half-not-watching the carvings fuck and I asked if Red got why you and her stopped talking. She said, quote, to me, Red said: ‘With you I never did anything like,’ quote, ‘what I did to Britt. Always I was careful,’ she said. ‘Always,’ quote, ‘I make a serious effort to not do anything like that,’ and further, ‘With Night I never did: I told her I get close sometimes but never did. Always never. Low, low, low odds Night believes Britt. Bet as she sees it Britt’s got the same defame-to-suicide murder-instinct she does, but outside Britt, there’s nobody I did this to.’”

 

—

 

Speedy Ana’s special power is not only was she fast, she sped the customers up too. She’s so quick she once got six people queuing, made them glom together as a single, new friend group ordering to a single table, and upsold them a bottle of vodka and one of champagne in 31 seconds. The de facto leader of the six she’d upsold to was Red. And that same night Red was at Ana’s knockoff and back at hers came inside her at 100 seconds. Speedy Ana came from 92 to 135 seconds.

Such was Speedy Ana’s power it accelerated even Red’s near-immortally sluggish temporal blast zone. Red fell into and travelled through her, outmatched and fearing. They kept contact, Ana’s responses to Red’s replies instant and preternaturally thorough, and I suspect the mystery of Speedy Ana’s and my attachment despite the astonishment of that pace fascinated Red. Though I was not uranium, I drank, ate, and got it in my eyes. What else might I tolerate or be immune to? But Red’s magic worked on me, same as everybody. She needed and still needs something and I can’t give it. But that was last year, Ana and Red.

 

—

 

“My carving was an eel with a lupine jaw. The idea was a dog with no legs but I wanted the dog to be on land, so a ley-eel. Its organs converted atmosphere to hydrogen and controlled its mid-air suspension, inflating, sustaining energy with solar and ley power. It mated with a prehensile tongue that, with another eelwolf, grabbed and enclosed the mate’s head and sucked from ejaculation points around the neckscruff, drawing in when the tongue retracted. Red’s carving was a jackalope with, in place of horns, an ordinary thick head of ginger human hair on its little rabbit head, and nothing else unusual except, unlike a jackalope, it didn’t lay eggs because (Red says) she forgot they do that. So they were both mammals, but it was all my eelwolf’s mouth closing on ginger locks, clamping the neck, and drinking dry, filling its eelwolf uterus with jackaloid blood. The rodent tried to mate, too, the way carvings will. Fretting and humping at nothing, the mud and wild mint under it. Red watched until the bunny kicked limp then – one funny thing was – she said, ‘There’s a profile of person I keep away and Britt’s that profile.’ Her fingers sort of laced into and out of each other and she went, ‘You are too.’”

I said, “How does being Red’s type make you feel?”

“Then so. So.” In a sweep of traffic light through the curtain’s cracks, Speedy Ana’s chin softened and re-blued and the cold curve of her forehead pressed my shoulder, eyes seeking. We smiled at each other and she said, “The obvious way. But so then...

“I asked if we should go now, the mating failed in any case. ‘Well, informed consent,’ Red said. She started laughing and so did I. Took my hand. We fucked in the field and got tiny bits of teal and sapphire grassweeds all over us and neither heard the eelwolf choking on the jackaloid. It died watching us. Her heart wasn’t in it, is my thing. I topped. Maybe it really only is you. Maybe that makes it worse.”

 

—

 

I carved a small bird like any other. But its beak was more perfectly diamond and its feathers more perfectly the blue of a midday sky. Night’s was a deep earth insect with a pentagonal frame. She was surprised at my bird. “You love bugs,” she said.

“I don’t think I’ve once spoken the word ‘bug’ in your presence,” I said.

“I’ve mixed people. I’ve mixed two people. No.”

My bird dug for Night’s bug and yanked, licked its pentagonal frame into its diamond beak, crushed it back to symmetry.

 

—

 

At one leg of the long, fugueless trudge from the Shimmerlands after the moot’s closing festival, I checked my devices and saw Night blocked me on everything. In the dark of our home, then, I told Speedy Ana and she said, “Maybe it’s what Red mentioned,” then briefed me on the carving and Red’s plea, Red’s counter-accusation, Red’s shortcomings. Night was not reachable. And I was not about to chase Night’s friends, read them in on this matter, chairing interviews everywhere. I didn’t care enough. So the best explanation for Night’s suddenness with all that is what Red said a week later. But Red’s stories have that quality.

(Night and Red never stopped talking. (That’s meant to be a secret.) So Night gave Red an account of her and my short fling that shared some narrative kinship with accusations made about Red and, as evidence to that effect, showed Red screenshots of a chat where I roleplayed as Red. Then Red, the story goes, showed Night pics I’d sent to Speedy Ana and Speedy Ana sent to Red, sort of describing the terms of the roleplay and proving Night’s screenshots were not, in fact, evidence. So Red claims. I asked to see the images and she said, “Let’s get back together,” so I walked home thinking very seriously about the fingernail-sized Beag sí scarification tattooist I saw but never spoke to in the days I still went to dungeons and where on my body I would ask faer to scar the passage in Quivering Haecceities about artificial productions of realness.)

 

—

 

“You’re the type who’ll bluff and bluff pretty hard and look me in the eyes and say you’re calling it,” Red said. “But not the type who’ll play the hand. Not when it comes to it. I could say I’m bluffing and still you won’t. I’m not criticising really. I admire and sort of adore you for it. And it frees up a kind of limitless energy, you get to make any threat, any size so long as every threat, every size is empty. I’m not expressing myself well. I respect it. I respect you.”

There was nothing in the back garden of that overstaffed and underclienteled café-bar except a miniature gumtree wrapped in a strange amount of plastic and the ash-stink of a faraway housefire. And eyes. Red’s. Taking in mine.

Palms turned, she said, “I am. I am sorry for – in my words – raping you. I am especially sorry considering – you know – Quivering Haecceities. I know you were sort of already a fan before we met. I won’t say I can’t imagine because I can and that’s why. Why I’m sorry. But – like – we’ve each got things we need people to not talk about. Which is why we can be friendly. Can. Are being friendly.”

Her palms unturned and turned back and floated into each other, leaves stuck aloft. “I do get it,” I said. “There are things I get.”

“In terms of me. In terms of options.”

We talked an hour and another, and had I left a minute later, that night’s funeral might have started without me. No idea Red knew this ex. The train was late until Red came running. Then it popped into sight. Materialised, just for her. “Ignore it,” she said, out of breath. “You’ll be late. I’ll drive. We’re going to the same place, I remembered.”

“Are we?”

“The same funeral.”

I waved the train on. I mean why not. Pointing, nodding, “You lead.”

A solitary, unchained car-remote entered Red’s hand. “It’s my ex. The funeral.”

“She never told me,” that much was true. The stripes on Red’s mini were faded and the backseat was full of shopping bags. “She’s mine as well,” I said.