Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Author:Caitlin R. Kiernan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction.Horror, Fiction.Dark Fantasy/Supernatural, Short Fiction, Collection.Single Author
ISBN: 9781596064737
Publisher: Subterranean
Published: 2012-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

Murder Ballad No. 7

No one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least. No one who is only a human man or woman. In this modern day and this disenchanted era, there are none who might even suspect the simple truth of her. She herself did not know until the age of thirteen and the onset of menarche, when she woke one morning to find the bed sheets stained red, and from the blood of her menstruation had sprung minute sprigs of rye-grass and wild thyme. She wadded the ruined and oddly fecund bedclothes into a heap and hid them beneath bulging plastic bags at the bottom of a trashcan. The garbage men and their rumbling truck came and carried them away, and that night, an unruly procession of goblins and pixies arrived and danced in the flowerbed beneath her windowsill. They trampled the pansies flat, and nibbled the impatiens to ribbons, so that the next morning the woman whom the girl had always believed to be her mother blamed the damage on a neighborhood dog. The next evening, the fairies returned and sang for the girl, who, by proxy of blood, was no longer a girl, and who, of course, had never truly been a girl. They serenaded her in their high, reedy voices and played raucous, bawdy songs on petite flutes and lyres and drums no larger than a thumbnail. She sat on the floor and listened, though her heart ached to rush outside and join in their revelry. In the long, last hour before dawn, a hairy little bogie of a man perched himself haphazardly upon the window ledge and, more or less off key, and with no evident heed to the tempo set by the musicians below, he sang:

Fast, fast, through the greenwood speeding

Out in the moonlight bright,

Her fairy raid she is leading,

The dainty Queen so light,

And the baby heir of acres wide

She is carrying away to fairyland.

A changeling is left by the nurse’s side

And she in the young heir’s place shall stand.

And when his song was clone, he whispered to her that this must forever be a secret thing between them, a confidence. Before she could object or even think to ask why, the bogie quickly related to her all the mischief that had been done to people only suspected of being changelings. He noted, with an obvious, smug sort of pride, that virtually none of the condemned had actually been born to the Shining Court, for the Sidhe are generally much too cunning to allow the babes they leave in place of stolen human children to be found out.

She listened, only half believing, for her life had been easy and kind, and she was unaccustomed to such awful tales. Besides, they’d all happened a very long time ago, in a more superstitious age, in countries far across the sea. All those suspect infants left out to freeze on cold Welsh and English nights, abandoned on cairns or graves or in ditches, the ones flogged and the others placed on hot shovels and held over the coals.

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