the stairs. His parents hosted a barbecue after the short ceremony; there was beer and food and we popped champagne. My dress was blue silk; bought at a second-hand store. The diamond on my finger was new, bought with locksmith money. My parents were absent, though they sent flowers and a card. Olivia and Ferdinand, the latter freshly dropped out of college, made an appearance late at the barbecue. My sister wore a champagne-colored dress that made her look old and matronly. Ferdinand wore a wrinkled shirt and a tie with tiny elephants on it. He had a beer. Olivia nibbled on a chicken leg.
“You didn’t want them to come, right?” Ferdinand asked, when the clock had struck midnight. Olivia had long since gone home and one beer for my brother had—with surprising ease—become many more.
“Mother and Father? No—of course not.”
“Good. I would hate for them to not show, if you really had wanted them to.”
“Did they say anything, at home? About why they didn’t?”
“She said it wasn’t ‘their kind of celebration,’ the barbecue … You know Mother can be a bit of a snob. I am happy for you, though. Olivia too—we both are.”
“Tell Mother I said thanks for the flowers. Tell them I thought it was thoughtful and sweet.”
See? I was already learning to pretend. Say the right things to appease the beasts.
With a few years, I would master it fully, and so would Pepper-Man-in-Tommy. We were strangers in disguise, living there among them.
No one ever suspected a thing.
* * *
After all the dirty plates were gathered and carried inside, every empty beer can located among the trees and shrubbery in the Tipp family’s garden, Pepper-Man-in-Tommy and I went into the woods, where we married again at the mound.
Pepper-Man and I had no need of rites of blood, to cut and mingle our life-streams, we had already done so long ago. Neither would we jump the broom, knowing there would be no more fruits. We just celebrated ourselves, and looked forward to our life together—and my freedom from the white room. We lifted our cups to Tommy Tipp, to his heart, that hard and stringy organ that had brought us to this bliss.
Pepper-Man left his Tommy-shell, dressed up in red, and danced with me, fast and wild. The piper and the drummer whipped up a shrilling reel, a feisty waltz, and a tango so dangerous it cut our legs with its razor-sharp edges. Mara danced too, skirts a haze, changing partners faster than the music could follow. The honey cakes were plentiful; stacked with red apples far out of season and sugared nuts and violets. Sweet wine ran from barrels down into bottomless cups. My blue silk dress ripped, my left heel broke. The diamond on my finger sparkled. Mara pressed a kiss to my lips, her skin warm and flushed from dancing. She placed a wedding crown on my brow, made from wild roses, hawthorn, moths, and silver bells.
“A faerie bride,” she whispered. “That is what my mother is.”
“A faerie child,” I whispered back. “That is what my daughter is.”
* * *
I guess that through all this you have started to wonder about Mara. Who is this person so dear to me, yet absent from your mother’s memories, this woman who draws me to the mound and calls me Mother? The young girl I have been fighting with—and warning you about, though perhaps not strongly enough?
I’ll tell you about Mara, and how she came to be.
* * *
My little girl came about when I was fourteen. She was an accident—the result of my brief stint as a fertile woman.
I was wholly unprepared for puberty in that way. Didn’t expect to wake up on sticky sheets, see Pepper-Man trail the new blood with his fingers and stare at it, as if mesmerized. I had some idea of how these things worked, of course, I was no fool and I had read books, of course, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so grisly.
“The blood means you are ripe for plucking.” Pepper-Man stretched out behind me, placing a hand on my aching belly, on the faint swell that had appeared overnight. “You can have children of your own now, make life in that tiny cauldron of yours.”
“What if I bleed out.” I pressed my face hard into the pillow; my voice was muffled by the down.
Pepper-Man chuckled behind me. “You will not, women have bled always. It is the curse of your kind to sometimes bleed. Occasionally it