“I don’t fear death,” said Polypherous, “I fear not being able to say something original about it.”
As he sauntered across the freshly blackened road, its newly laid tar still odorous, to Quinit’s bakery on the corner of Beach Street, where the paving stones were still reddened by the blood of martyrs, and overflowing flowers in iron baskets bedecking the sills of tiny apartments filled with shouting boat-wives, hung like curtains, affording cool in the midday heat, he turned to Archegoron walking alongside, and asked him, “Do you fear death, Arch?”
Have you ever wondered about that egg,- the one desperate Nagaina dragged with her into the abandoned rat-hole we called home? The one that Kipling doesn’t mention again. I was that egg. Now I am full grown. I’ve re-located. Living in another country you can deceive yourself that the past is insignificant, even that it never existed. In my reformulation, the story would have ended so very differently. Mostly I can forget that I was born an orphan, with 24 siblings slaughtered by that treacherous Rikki Tikki Tawi. I prefer the condensed moniker RTT;-to grace him with his full name may re- flesh memories preferred forgotten. Still, on hunting nights when the moon is waxing, I sometimes find myself involuntarily hissing it’s entirety, so magic-ing -up his mongoose wraithness.
Mom, you remember, perished but not before hiding me under the dung-enriched earth of a side alcove. Snakes,-cobras in particular,- have an excellent sense of smell and near-perfect recall. The offensive sweetness of desiccated rat-pellets mingling with the stink of jubilant mongoose, the muffled distant cries of Man as Mom was murdered, the jubilant rasping of RTT as she lay dying, these are my earliest memories.
Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m just telling it as I saw things, without bias of species or kind. Everyone knows that fairies are generally delicate, helpful, magical creatures. Even so, like every species, there is a rogue element amongst the fairy community. My kindred gnome brothers and sisters have long known this. If we have rogue elephants and rogue humans, rogue fairies are inevitable (I’m not saying gnomes are perfect either).
We’ve all shouted ‘I believe in fairies’ to make sure Tinkerbell is revived and her light is rekindled. That’s a decent, humanitarian, cross species response to a kind creature in trouble; a very worthy fairy. But we also have to talk about those fairies who have fallen from grace.
Charlie looked down at his shoes. They were scuffed with curves of light-brown roughened leather where the door panel he kicked in earlier that morning scraped across the shiny toecap. He tutted and reached into the glove compartment for his shoe-shine kit. He always kept one in there, along with a tub of hair gel and a clothes brush.
Charlie liked to look smart. He thought it gave him an air of authority, a kind of lawyerly feel, judicial even. He chuckled at that: Charlie was no judge. In fact, he never made judgements. Things were simple in Charlie-World, there were just three states of being: a problem, not a problem, and no longer a problem. Simplicity was his byword, which was just as well because having too many thoughts about his line of work could lead to problems.
Oswald, aged 120, a spry wrinkled gentleman with flowing grey locks and all his own teeth, sat in his armchair. His chair was strategically placed as near as possible to the reception desk next to the Nursing Home door, he was waiting for his next victim.
Most of the residents had warned their relatives about him, nearly always too late of course, as Ossie was always in his prime position keeping his ears alert for the ring of the doorbell, and keeping a vigilant watch through the bay window for any approaching prey.
Death was being promoted. She had been second in command for eons and now it was her turn. She didn’t know how it happened, in that line of work who knew how anything happened. Anyway, she was going to give it her best shot, after all, she knew the ropes.
What nobody ever knew was that she still had a tiny spark of humanity left which she had hidden well for all of these centuries.
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