To the Sea

Now that I am sitting in the worst of entering LA traffic might be a good time to tell you about my sister and brother. Both of them have weird idiosyncrasies to remember when in their company for extended periods of time. I guess I do too. We all do. It is the parts that make us human. Fox will not use a fork that was left on the counter. Even if he watched you take it out of a drawer and put it there, he still grabs for another. He also has a specific way of putting the toilet paper on the hook to come over the top and hang down. He says there might be spiders living in it when it hangs under, but we both know he is full of what he should be wiping.

Our biggest difficulty together is his lack of culinary adventure. There are only a handful of privately owned restaurants he frequents. His favorites are chains. One time he asked me to go with him for ice cream. I am thinking we are in Hollywood, the mecca of cultural meshing. What extraordinary parlor will we end up to dine on frozen flavored cream? He took me to the only Dairy Queen in Southern California. Right next door they sold Persian style ice cream. I still have no idea what that is because he refused to go. Fox is completely satisfied with what he already knows to be good. There is merit in this. Not for me, though. I have this claustrophobic insanity of always needing to experience the new. Fox can be satisfied. I can never be.

We were born nearly polar opposite. My rain cloud darkness standing next to his pale white and nearly translucent skin makes this that much more obvious. Shortly after he was born the Dogons threw us out of their peaceful African village. They snidely called him the White Fox. Tribal society fears and worships what they do not understand. I guess it did not help their piece of mind to be natural born tricksters either, but it might have been worse if he was born green. Fae have no color preference with which to give their offspring. Like everything else, it heralds who they will eventually become. By the time we hit adolescence they ran us out.

Mekkhala was charged with babysitting us on Earth while dad was out pretending to be a god. There are gods. Dad just was not one of them. Mom died bringing Fox into the world, another reason the Dogons thought the heavens cursed our family. Giving birth to one Halfling is enough of a strain on a human’s uterus. Two killed her. Very shortly after Mekkhala washed up on shore from some Polynesian island in the Pacific. Evidently, dad tossed a major tropical storm at her kumulaa’au, blowing it halfway across the world despite the currents. Asians still name the most devastating storms in her honor. You have to get your power where you can. She was born in turbulence and she left in it. The rest of the crew died. Being spiritual god fearing creatures, the Dogons thought of her arrival as a replacement to this newly orphaned child’s mother. It was her penitent salvation in exchange for surviving the harrowing voyage. Little did they know they were partly right. No sooner did we meet were we leaving again.

Out of Africa we went north into the Caucus Mountains and unleashed fury onto the villagers like they had never experienced before, Mekkhala’s idea of course. She has a real temper especially when she feels wronged. We flooded the Nile and drowned the Sahara. Grassfires erupted all over the Serengeti. This did two things. It established us as cradle of civilization weather deities in an assortment of cosmogonies and it used up a chunk of water that northern Africa and the Middle East will never recover from. All that water had to go somewhere, so we changed the direction of the Nile to flow North, thinking it was all ocean up there. Thankfully, some crusty old guy named Noah built a boat to save two of every species.

She taught us the way of the Folk. She gave us the weather from herself. We were using it to get back to her island, but we missed. We were too good. We ended up on the pre-Californian coastline, where another group, the Chumash, took us as their own despite our broad flesh colored spectrum. Fox and Mekkhala found their home there. I was destined to blow with the winds. The two of them really are peas in a pod. You could say they go together like thunder and lightning. 

Fox works in the entertainment industry. Further back than the Silver Screen and the Tesla / Edison radio wars. He was as much an instigator for that as Mekkhala was for Chuck Yeager to break the sound barrier. Keep on going past the nutcase Bennie Frank flying his kite in a New England barn buster and stop right around the time where the first picture carved wood case was put under a flame to spin around and throw shadow stories on the cave wall. Here we find the origins of Fox. For the Folk that skate the line of the limelight without tipping, he is the master. Being centered in electricity and light, Fox easily made background fame behind a camera. George Lucas would still be some student film project schmoe making endless sequels to American Graffiti and only dreaming of Star Wars grade special effects had it not been for my brother. The trickier Hitchcock’s were all him too. Throughout the centuries he has been spotted and on the cusp of outed before retracting into the fade to start all over again. He used a wag of the dog whisper campaign in Roswell when citizens started catching on to his advanced experiments in light magic. His detractors surreptitiously get planted seeds of alien forces at war here on earth. His opinion is that if you believe in faeries you probably believe in aliens, right? Those disciples were immediately cast into the crazy category by the rest of humanity, which is more than easy to slap on anyone. They get rooted out like bad McCarthy dreams, discredited, ostracized, and then people forget about them. Fox resurfaces as the heir to himself, entitled to his own fortunes. Except during the 90s one of those crazies became a writer for a conspiracy based television series. Next thing you know Fox has a prime time character based on him.

And here he is with all of his friends that call actors by their first name, extending his hand, saying, “Daudi! You made it. I am so glad. I did not know if you knew.”

“Yeah, I got the message. Millixent told me. She told Mekkhala too.”

“Oh,” his white face turned a few shades whiter if that was even possible. “Did she . . . um . . . who did she . . . uh . . .”

“She told us at the same time.” Mekkhala stepped into the entryway behind me.

“Mekkhala?” Fox was shocked to see her, but he held his composure. The electricity flickered.

The sky grumbled.

The urge to make it pour and douse these two angry dogs was overpowering. I held off. This was a happy day. No sense making rain out of sunshine even if it might cause a rainbow.

Mekkhala had been working a 12 step anger management program based on the principles of AA. She told me about it in the Jeep on the way here. The humility step provoked her to confront the people she has hurt, whether she believed it was her fault or not. She was okay with the confrontation. The making amends part was hard. This was the only reason she decided to come. I giggled in my mind thinking of thunder apologizing for starting a forest fire from a lightning strike. It was his fault as much as hers. More than either of their fault it was mine, but I would never say that to either of them.

Fox spoke first. It was his house. “Welcome. Either of you want a drink?”

When you put this many Folk together there is bound to be trouble afoot. The gnomes played tag under the tables like miniature children with faces of kind old blue collar men. Somehow they know what gender each other is. Everyone else has to take their word for it. Muses in the Renaissance period kept them as pets. Artists of that time painted them as cherubs, cute toddlers with angel wings playing harps or dancing around the feet of Mary. In actuality cherubs are hideously ugly beasts with hearts of gold, silver wings, and iron swords coated in blood. You might be worried if you stumbled across one in a dark alley or even a well lit church.

Steve, the bastard offspring of a well mannered troll and a fire pixie, tended the barbeque pit. Despite California fire bans, Steve got an itching to honor his brethren. His logic was to smuggle fireworks in from Mexico. To avoid the California authorities while in the combusting state he chose low rising sparkle launchers. By that process he was correct. If they only shot up five feet, there would be no way the police station at the corner of the block would even notice. Right? On the other side had they zoomed high into the burgeoning evening the cops would have no way of discerning the source location. They also would not have sprayed fifteen feet in all directions and not set my brother’s front yard ablaze. Good thing his wife had a water sign in her horoscope. We all told him not to light it over the sewer cap, but for the sake of his first child experiencing the second largest fire display next to the Chinese New Year for the first time first hand, there was hardly any stopping him. His baby made a small belch. It should have been guessed that water and fire make gas. A tiny burst of methane escaped the sewer cap, igniting, and giving off a green colored effect as the grass went up from the heat blast. With a flick of his wife’s finger, the sprinklers popped out of the ground to douse the flames.

“That was amazing! What are the odds?”

The party was split sixty-forty with Folk to Human ratio. We were the majority, but we still had to be careful. Earlier in the day a bunch of coworkers showed up from the crew in Cuba. They just finished shooting the latest Hunter S. Thompson adaptation out there. Hunter met faeries the old fashioned way - with lots of hallucinogenic drugs. They kept talking about some guy named Johnny. Eventually, I had to ask who Johnny was. They looked at me like I was crazy. I wondered if on set they had to call him Mr. Depp. My brother assures me they did not. Mr, Hoffman prefers it, not Johnny though. I, however, also heard a couple of them mention Dustin by first name basis too. There was some story about him taking a leak on a tree between shots and functional alcoholism as opposed to non.

I still had not met his wife or the unnamed child. They hid quietly in a back bedroom waiting to make an entrance. This is a typical formality in Folk ritual. The Lord mingles at the function, making sure it is safe for the presence of his wife and child before they emerge. When the coast is clear they dive in with a huge splash filled with ceremony and flash. Only then could the rites begin. That moment was now. The door swung open into a hushing silence that spread first into the room and then to outside. Not a bird chirped. There were plenty enough of them there to make a ruckus. She wore a silk white gown with ornate flower print laces running up the wrists to the lower arm. Her blonde hair accented the purity of the flowing dress. She carried the child close to her bosom in a fleece blanket with the same lacey pattern on the outer draperies that hung towards the floor. There were white rose petals at her feet. They appeared from specks of dust in the air and fell to her feet. Standing in front of two pedestals arranged like a stage she scanned the hushed people. From the level vantage, which removed the pompousness of a theatrically inclined stage, she met every eye. A cradle appeared to the side of them, adorned with similar garnishment. She shyly moved her free hand to cover a giggle spilling from her smile. This was how I came to know her origins. Inside our hearts past all of the mischief and good natured mayhem there is a place that stores our innocence. That place started to warm in me. The warmth spread, completely overtaking my entirety. It tickled up into my throat and finally manifested on my own lips, which cracked into happiness. There was nothing funny about her presentation, but I wanted so very much to laugh out loud. I looked around embarrassed at my potential rudeness. It was obvious that I was not the only one. Everyone in the audience darted their eyes to the side with a tiny mirth. She was the spirit of childhood humour, the untainted laugh, the essence of innocent fun, the Giggle. In her honor I let go of my restraint. A wave of soft chuckling washed through the crowd. Her shyness, no longer reticent, imbibed the merriment. She removed her hand, growing with the joyous curvature, and sent the purest vibration of amusement through her audience. As we melted she gracefully knelt to lay the child down. I could see why my brother loved her.

Suddenly, a sarcastic clapping broke. It was the kind that stops a room from enjoyment, that has a long dramatic space between each thunder accentuated by the lack of any other applause, that makes the performer feel coldly worthless for having shared a piece of themselves. Immediately, I glared toward Mekkhala. She was as dumbfounded as the rest of the attendants. She made a perturbed face at my accusation. Towards the back of the room, heads created a wide opening for a new head just entering the party. I recognized the fiery red hair. It could not be . . . I did not want to believe it was . . . it had to be . . . no other creature would have the gall to . . . it was. The Phoenix stepped up to the division. She had a small entourage of harpies scattered disorderly about her feet. One of them was peeing on the stage column. You cannot house train harpies. They are dangerously vile vulture-like creatures with sharp grimy claws that extend longer than an arm, white feathers turned black scattered randomly in heavy patchwork, and they stink. It is fitting that they would associate in a kind of alliance with someone like the Phoenix.

During the inception of first sight the Giggle’s smile became a stern womanly slit of neutral acceptance awaiting reproach at any sign of misbehaviour. I recognized the expression from my childhood. Again, I looked toward Mekkhala, holding a scowl, the next step on the negative side of neutrality. It was not directed at me, thank goodness. Faces like that harbor difficult memories from childhood that still cause extreme physical discomfort. It was directed at the Phoenix.

The leading lady spoke. Her words were soft yet demanding. They conveyed a blunt monotone devoid of emotion with a sprinkle of distrust. They told the Phoenix she was not wanted, but she was already here, what else could be done, you better be on your best while you are in my house. The dart toward the urinating bird and back also said she did not approve. The words she actually used were these, “Who invited you?”

Phoenix grabbed her disrespectful harpie by the scruff of her neck feathers. The yank created much more of a mess than if she were just allowed to finish in one spot. It sprayed up the post, along a wall, across the floor, into the face of a goatee wearing key grip, and down his makeup artist girlfriend’s white shirt. Harpie urine is the second most foul substance I could think of right now. While considering the first, the pheromones of dwarves living in the region of stench bogs trying to attract a mate, I did not notice her answer until I came back to reality to notice everyone staring at me. Phoenix had not spoken yet. Instead she was pointing. Like a slapstick comedy troupe, I looked behind me for a scapegoat to the critical finger. There was nobody else. They had all taken a step to the left or right or backward. I had been thrust upon the stage without moving an inch by the time Phoenix answered vocally, “Daudi did.”

published on September 27, 2009