He thinks He has me this time. As always, He underestimates me.

The happy couple never knew what befell them. One minute they dance to their joyous, ear-stabbing music, kissing their smiling families, the bride’s white gown billowing around her as she skips from groom to cake to groom to guest. The next, they cling to each other in delicious, unabashed horror as they are whisked from their festivities into the suddenly maddening sky.

She said it would start with a chill. It was the first time she lied to me.

It started with a hunger, deep and hot like the burn of a branding iron. I felt it when I smelled the heavy stench of the slaughterhouse, when I watched my raven-haired Vivian slipping across the black ice pond, when I heard wolves baying late in the night. It came to me when I drank snow from her cold cupped hands, when I followed her down the lonely game trails deep in the foothills.

I recall the day everything changed. It was winter, the happiest time of year for children who lived on houses that floated about a lake. We spent our days outside with finally some room to play.

That morning the women had been in a hurry. They were possessed by something and began slaughtering many of the animals and smoking their meats. Their fur and feathers covered the slaughter-house floor and blood scented the air.

The day Mary turned Daniel on, they were sitting under the apple tree. She had chosen this spot in the garden because it was the last place, perhaps the only place, that she could remember being happy with him. The trial had been over for six weeks. He had been sent to her days ago, but she had put this moment off, knowing that she needed more time to heal and to adjust to the idea of having him home again.

1.

Evita was twenty eight years old when she got married.

She wove herself a man out of rainbows and stardust. His bowels were doorways leading into other doorways. When he spoke it was like hearing the memory of a dream, or music one has forgotten but wishes to remember.

“I am yours to command,” the woven man said. He bowed low and curtsied as if he were a gentleman of noble birth.

“Look,” Melaine called, waving the bunch of meadow flowers she’d just picked. “What’s that thing flying up there? Just above the plum trees. It isn’t a bird, is it?”

A small object was dancing in the dusk-clouded summer sky.

“It’s a heart!” declared Antonia, who always knew everything. “A flying heart. Male, and quite young.”

“It must be the prince’s,” the third girl, Magda, said. She was well-informed about everything the royals did. “He sent his heart on a quest, because he’s looking for a bride. He’ll marry the girl who captures it.”

“You lied to me every step of the way!” Leha stared impassively at Joshua as he tumbled with the forward momentum of his vicious attack. “You’re not human!” he screamed as he fell. His knife blade had ripped only flesh-foam and her clothing; nothing critical was affected. As he fell, the knife turned a little inward, so that the tip tore into his gut when his weight fell upon it.

Jacob looked back towards the sea and his eyes filled with tears. He knew the burn would happen soon. When he held the chart to the evening sky the moon almost filled the hole at the center. He kept adjusting the longitude and latitude slides, hoping to find an error. Each time his calculations were confirmed. The burn would come in the next day or two. He trudged up the steep trails. His supply of sweet bread and wine from the seaside village was now gone. Once again he was eating the hard blackberries of his homeland and trying to catch the greasy rats that ran among the rocks.

"Here's how we'll do it," my mistress said.

She trapped light dancing in through her window, traced the patterns of exotic blossoms onto thin parchment, a dash of cerulean blue - silver shadow tipped the wing. White feathers floated in through the casement - she caught and pressed them onto the page

Loren McDougal, he was my grandfather. You may not know the name, but the stories? Everyone knows the stories. You grew up with his lyrical, metrical, fanciful tales of faeries – he insisted on the old spelling – in the garden. Everyone younger than sixty read them as a child. Twenty-three books he crafted, lovingly detailed masterpieces with lavish illustrations of proper little faeries going about their proper little faerie business in the fictional front garden of a fictional hedge-row cottage on a fictional lane in some nonsense town in Scotland.