Not My Mother (The Changeling)

She is young, maybe not quite thirteen, and her face is round and moon-like. Her skin is pale and slightly ashen, her eyes great dark craters in her face ringed in shadow. Her hair is long and black, straight and voluminous as space itself. Little specks of dust flicker like stars among the tresses. Her hands are cold and bony and remind him of birds.
    “You’re just this week’s face, you know,” she sneers. Her little teeth are nearly perfect; her eyeteeth jut inwards like she had pulled them out too early. Her lips are grey, too.
    He rolls one shoulder in a casual shrug, which is hard to do leaning against the damp wall. He can feel the cold through his corduroy jacket. The musky scent of mildew tickles his nostrils. The paper is faded. It was green bamboo, now it is grey bamboo.
    “Next week there will be another,” the girl continues. His indifference must have bothered her. Her lips press together in a tight line and her small black eyebrows come down so far in a scowl that they are parallel with the clean, but worn carpet on the floor.
    “Whatever your mum wants,” he replies, daring a small smile at her insolence.
    As if the mention summoned her, her mother walks out onto the small balcony above the stairs and stands at the top of the stairwell. She had the same round moon face as her daughter and the same dark eyes but hers were ringed in eyeliner, not tired shadows. Her lips were painted apple-red, sumptuous and tempting. His serpent stirs.
    “She is not my mother,” hissed the little girl. She turned and walked soundlessly down the hallway and disappeared into the kitchen.
    The woman runs a hand through her bleached-blonde hair and shrugs her shoulder in perfect imitation of him just moments before. She was wearing an evergreen dress that clings to her like moss and her skin is so pale it might have been glowing under the pale luminescence of the bare light bulb above them.
    As he gazes up at her, transfixed, the light bulb flickers. The walls around him begin to rumble and shake. He is suddenly disconcerted, unsure, confused. Anxiety uncoils in his belly and the uneasiness snakes its way up to his chest. He is short of breath. It is like a train is rolling past the house.
    She laughs at his discomfort, a purring expression of deep pleasure.

She fingers the base of her wine glass and leans closer to him, over the table, pressing her breasts together as her lips come about in a smile. She stares at him intensely, conspiratorially. She tells him she is going to tell him a secret and he is nervous but thrilled at his catlike companion. Her green eyes are flecked with candle light.
    “Have you heard of changelings?”
    For a moment he is bewildered. He sips at his own wine and wonders when she will be drunk enough to take him back to her place.
    “They are child-like creatures. Fairy folk. Every so often the fairies take a liking to a human child, so they take it.”
    He’s looking at her cleavage because he does not believe in such nonsense.
    “But fairies are just that – fair, so if they take a human child they leave a changeling in its place. Most of the time that child withers and dies because it cannot live in the human world because it doesn’t have mana, or human soul.”
    “What’s the point in giving a creature that will just die when they get a child that won’t?” he humours her, dragging his gaze up to her round, open face.
    “If you find a changeling’s fairy ring, the ring that it came through into this world, it can tell you how to keep it here. And if you keep it here, and keep it well, then your own child won’t die in the fairy realm because a changeling and a child are actually linked.”
    A man behind him laughs raucously and he is paranoid that the man has heard their conversation and is laughing at them.

When he wakes he is alone in his own apartment. His head is throbbing; it feels like it is mutating as memories from the night come back to him. The little girl’s distaste. Lots of – too many – red wines. The darkness of the bar she took him to. Pointing out a toadstool fairy ring in the forest park. The length of her lashes brushing against his chin as she kissed his neck. Her tugging at his ring finger.
    Groaning, he presses his hand to his temple as he pushes himself up into an upright position.
    “Breakfast, darling,” sings his wife as she walks into the room. She settles down into the feather duvet next to him. The whiteness of the walls is blinding him. She smells like lily of the valley and her golden hair is pulled into a ponytail to better expose her equally golden tan. Her skin annoys him: it is winter, she shouldn’t be so bronzed. It looks artificial.
    His wife reaches forward and switches on the clock radio. The morning show is just about over. She sets his cup of coffee down on the bedside table, not before putting down a pale pink coaster. “Did you have a good work dinner?” she asks.
    Hate rises in him because she is so foolish and human. “Marvellous,” he murmurs back, frightened to say anything more that might give away his disgust.
    Her blue eyes go wide and one blonde brow perks up towards her hairline.
    “Where’s your wedding ring?” she whispers.

The air is cold and nibbles at his fingertips like a persistent rat. His knuckles burn against the cold as he knocks on the cracked wooden door. He feels the splinters embed themselves in the thin flesh there. The young girl opens the door. She is wearing faded jeans and an old black t-shirt. She rolls her eyes at him but doesn’t say anything. She slams the door shut again and when it opens in a few moments time it is her mother.
    Her lips are painted red still. He wonders if she was expecting him. “I’m just painting my nails,” she says by way of greeting, standing aside to let him in.
    “Not a very friendly one, is she?” he asks her following her into the damp hallway and out of the prying stares of the rest of the tenement residents.
    He realizes that she is not following him and turns back to see her standing with her back to the door, watching him closely. She is smiling softly as she replies, “She’s probably just hungry.”
    The cold is cloying in its intensity. How she dried her nails in such wet air was a mystery to him. His wife had a tiny machine with a fan in it that she placed her fingertips into to speed up the drying process. Perhaps she had one of those, too?
    “Whatever. I’ve come about my wedding ring.” He tries to assert some feeble control in her home by gesturing that she follows him into the kitchen, where he can feel some kind of heat leeching out. Instead she gives him a look that withers his masculinity and he creeps after her into the lounge at the front of the house, where the paper is peeling at the ceiling and the hearth is empty. A picture of her hangs above the dead mantelpiece. She is standing alone at a park, pointing at a fairy ring of daisies. The heavy velvet drapes are drawn and she sits on a big armchair underneath a lamp. She picks up the tiny brush from the small bottle of black polish.
    “What makes you think I know anything about that?” she hums as he finds his own seat in an uncomfortable couch opposite.
    “You were playing with my ring hand last night,” he mutters, trying to sound confident. He shifts uncomfortably as strength flees him and the rumbling walls awaken again. Once more the fear uncoils in his stomach, travelling up his throat so that he thinks he might vomit. The air is dusky and sinister and filled with the scent of nail varnish. “It’s one of the only things I remember from last night,” he chokes out, as if this assurance might spark some honesty in her. “Is… is that a train?”
    He was right. She doesn’t look up from her nails but she answers, simply, “Oh, yes. I threw it in the fairy ring.”

He flees the house to check the park. It is night time now so he has to use the light of his cell phone to try and locate the ring. He can’t see it anywhere. All he smells is smog and decay.
    “Fuck,” he mutters.

His wife is not talking to him because he has lost their wedding ring. So he goes to visit her in the tenement instead. The night is foggy but he is pleased for the cool air. He is worried about his infidelity and the repercussions. He does not want to lose his apartment, or his wife’s money, or her contacts. He tugs at the sleeves of his leather bomber in agitation. When he first came here he wondered if someone might not beat him up for his Armani crocodile loafers or his Gucci tie.
    The little moon-faced girl answers the door again but this time she lets him inside without a word. She walks down the wet hallway and pushes open the kitchen door. Heat floods out like a monsoon. It is so hot that her translucent little hands are tinged pink. She is waiting there patiently with the door open, waiting for him to follow her. The intensity of her black eyes frightens him. However, he follows her.
    This room feels like it is on fire, the white-hot dryness of the heat hits him like a wall. She throws an arm out in a delicate gesture for him to sit down on one of the wooden chairs by the table. The linoleum is sticky as he pads across to do as he is told.
    “Where is your mother?” he asks.
    “She is not my mother,” replies the girl, rolling her head around on her neck in a weird sort of shrug. “Do you believe in fairies?”
    The question catches him off guard. Like mother, like daughter. He goes to answer and the walls begin to rumble. The girl pulls herself into the seat opposite to him. She throws something on the table that makes a metallic ring as it settles. He looks down slowly. He is frightened of this girl and her mother. When he looks at the girl something flashes behind her eyes, something wicked and arcane. His skin crawls and he knows she has thrown his wedding ring on the table. “I found this in my fairy ring,” she states.
    Suddenly he snatches at it but she is just as fast, grabbing a hold of his wrist with inhuman strength. He tries to pull away but she holds his wrist down, the small bird-hands tightening around the bones in his wrist, grinding them together. “Your wife will never find out,” she tells him, her voice airily full and cavernous. The room stinks like a sepulcher, a crematorium, of ash and bone.
    The man whimpers. “Of course not. I’ll never come back.”
    “You’ll never go back,” she corrects him instantaneously.
    “What are you going to –“ he cries out as his wrist snaps. Visions of demons dance before him and the snake uncurls again, escaping through his mouth in a powerful profusion of vomit at the pain that lances through his body. The rumbling increases in treble but he can still hear the little girl’s voice above the racket even though she speaks in a normal tone.
    “I’m hungry,” she spits in her sonorous voice. He feels like a slab of meat. “I can feel your blood coursing and your flesh trembling,” she continues, squeezing his useless wrist again to make sure he is listening.  “Just this week’s face, you see?” She licks her ashen lips and wiggles her body like a cat about to pounce. “You will keep me in this world as I wipe you from it.”
    The windows are shaking with the walls like a thousand trains are travelling past the window. His thoughts race by like a train as he wishes her mother would come in and put a stop to this madness so he could go home and forget about this place this girl this woman and be with his wife and appreciate that he leads a charmed life and no the grass is not greener and yes he promised to treasure and love her for eternity no he vowed it and then he was bored and then he was seduced by her mother –
    “She is NOT my mother!” screams the girl, and then there is nothing.