“A Tiny Feast”

It took them both a long time to understand that the boy was sick, though she would point out that she had been the first to notice that he was unhappy, and had sought to remedy his discontent with sweeter treats and more delightful distractions. She thought it was evidence that she loved him more—that she had noticed first that something was wrong—and she said as much to her husband, when they were still trying to outdo each other in love for the child.

Neither of them had much experience with illness. They had each taken many mortal lovers, but had cast them off before they could become old or infirm, and all their previous changelings had stayed healthy until they were returned, unaged and unstuck from their proper times, to the mortal world. “There was no way you could have known,” said Dr. Blork, the junior partner in the two-person team that oversaw the boy’s care, on their very first visit with him. “Parents always feel like they ought to have caught it earlier, but really it’s the same for everyone, and you couldn’t have done any better than you did.” He was trying to make them feel better, to assuage a perceived guilt, but at that point neither Titania nor her husband really knew what guilt was, never having felt it in all their long days.

They were in the hospital, not far from the park on the hill under which they made their home, in the middle of the night—early for them, since they slept all day under the hill and had taught the boy to do the same, but the doctors, Beadle and Blork, were obviously fatigued. The four of them were sitting at a table in a small windowless conference room, the doctors on one side, the parents on the other. The boy was back in his room, drugged with morphine, sleeping peacefully for the first time in days. The doctors were explaining things, earnestly and patiently, but Titania was having trouble following along.

“A boy should not be sick,” she said suddenly to Dr. Blork, cutting him off as he was beginning to describe some of the side effects of the treatment they were proposing. “A boy should play—that is his whole purpose.”

“It’s hard to see him like this,” Dr. Blork said, after a glance at his superior, “and I’m so sorry that your beautiful boy is so sick. It’s going to be a long haul, and he may be sicker before he’s better, but we’ll get him through it.” He started talking again then about the specifics, the drugs they would use—the names seemed rather demonic to her—and the timing of the treatments, which parts could be done at home and which parts must be done in the hospital. This was all of a sudden very boring. She waved her hand at them, a gesture practiced over centuries, and even though there was no magic in it, Blork was instantly quiet.

“You will do your mortal thing,” she said sadly. “I know all I need to know.”

“Pardon me?” Dr. Blork said.

“Leukemia!” Oberon said, breaking the silence he’d maintained all through the meeting, and it sounded as if he were somehow trying out the idea behind the word. He was smiling, and crying into his lovely beard. “Can you cure it?”

“Yes!” said Dr. Blork. But Dr. Beadle said, “Maybe.”

She could not remember the quarrel that had brought her the boy. A real or perceived dalliance or slight, a transgression on her part or her husband’s—who knew? They had been quarrelling for as long as they had been in love. She forgot the quarrels as soon as they were resolved, but the gifts her husband brought her to reconcile—even when she was at fault—she never forgot. The boy had been one of those gifts, brought home to the hill, stolen from his crib in the dark of the night and presented to her by dawn. “That is not sufficient to your crime against me,” she remembered saying, and remembered as well that she barely paid the child any mind during her restless sleep, except to push it away from her when it rolled too close. Oberon had rubbed poppies on its eyes to quiet its crying, so it was still sleeping soundly when she woke. For a while she lay on her back, watching the stars come out upon the ceiling of her grotto, listening to the little snores. Oberon was snoring more magnificently. She turned on her side to better look at it, and noticed for the first time how comely it was, how round and smooth were its face and shoulders and belly, how lustrous was its hair. It made a troubled face as it slept. She put her hand out to touch it, just very lightly. Right away it sighed and lost the troubled look, but then it gave a moan. She draped her hand over its shoulder, and when it did not quiet she rolled it closer to her. It stopped moaning only when she held it in her arms, and put her nose in its hair, and breathed in its scent—poppies and milk and warm earth. Oberon had woken, and was looking at her and smiling, propped on one elbow with a hand against his ear, the other lost under the sheets, but she could hear that he was scratching himself. “Do you like it?” he asked.

“I am indifferent to it,” she said, holding the boy closer, and squeezing him, and putting her face in his neck.

“This place is so ugly,” Titania said. “Can anything be done about that?” She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, and a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer. “Nonmedical things,” she had said. “You know— everything else!”

“But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping track of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive names, and actually rather faerielike. Alice gestured expansively around the room, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and to blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him out of the room whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.

“I don’t mean the room,” Titania said. “I mean everything else. This whole place. And the people, of course. Where did you find them? Look at you, for instance. Are you deliberately homely? And that Dr. Blork—hideous!”

Alice cocked her head. She did not hear exactly what Titania was saying. Everything was filtered through the same normalizing glamour that hid the light in Titania’s face, that gave her splendid gown the appearance of a tracksuit, that had made the boy appear clothed when they brought him in, when in fact he had been as naked as the day he was born. The same spell made it appear that he had a name, though his parents had only ever called him Boy, never having learned his mortal name, because he was the only boy under the hill. The same spell sustained the impression that Titania worked as a hairdresser, and that Oberon owned an organic orchard, and that their names were Trudy and Bob.

“You need to take care of yourself,” Alice said, thinking that Titania was complaining about feeling ugly. “It might feel a little selfish, but you can’t take care of him if you can’t take care of yourself. Did you know we have a manicurist who comes every Wednesday?”

“You are so sweet,” Titania said, “even if you are homely. Did you ever wish you had the eyes of a cat?”

“A hat? You can buy one downstairs. For when his hair falls out, you mean? That’s weeks away, you know. But the baseball caps are awfully cute. But, listen, not everybody wants to talk about this at first, and not everybody has to. I’m getting ahead of myself . . . of ourselves.”

“Or would you rather be a cat entirely? Yes, I think that would make you lovely.” Titania raised her hands and closed her eyes, seeking words sufficient to the spell she had in mind. They came to her in an image, words printed on a little girl’s purse she had glimpsed in the waiting room outside the surgical suites downstairs. She started to speak them—Hello Kitty!—but Oberon walked in before she had the first syllable out.

“What are you doing to the nurse?” he asked her.

“She’s the social worker. And we were only talking.” Alice’s head was turned to the side, and she was staring at Titania with a mixture of curiosity and devotion. The glamour had slipped as Titania was about to strike, and the woman had seen her true face. “Her name is Alice.”

“Stop playing,” Oberon said. “He’s almost finished. Don’t you want to be there when he wakes?” The boy was downstairs having things done to him: a needle in his hip to take the marrow from his bones, and another in his neck to give him a special I.V. that would last through the weeks and months of the treatment.

“I’ll just stay here and wait,” she said, sitting on the bed and idly petting the Beastie when it sidled up to her.

“He’ll be looking for you,” Oberon said.

“You’ll tell him I’m waiting here with his Beastie.” She lifted it into her lap, as if to show him the truth of what she was saying. Alice, still standing between them, was looking back and forth, catching glimpses of their majesty as their mounting anger caused them to let it slip, and getting drunker on them.

“Did I give you your meal tickets yet?” she asked them. “The cafeteria is really not so bad, for what it is.”

“You’d rather rest your terrible ass than comfort him. Do you love him at all?”

“More than you do, and more than you’ll ever understand. You like to see him undone and ailing, but I can’t bear to look at him like that.”

“Those are very normal feelings,” Alice said. “I validate those feelings. Haven’t I been saying how hard it is to see him like this?” She turned to Oberon. “Haven’t I?”

“Heartless and cowardly,” Oberon said. “A most unattractive combination.”

“That’s normal, too,” Alice said. “The anger. But don’t you know it’s not her that you’re angry at?”

“You stupid sour cock,” Titania said, and then they just called each other names, back and forth, while Alice turned back and forth so swiftly it seemed she was spinning.

“How can I make you understand how totally normal all of this is?” Alice cried aloud at last, just before collapsing in a heap. The Beastie, whose nature was to comfort, tried to go to her, but Titania held it back.

“Now look what you’ve done,” her husband said.

At first he had been like her own sort of Beastie, a creature who followed her around and was pleasant to cuddle with. It didn’t take long before he stopped his agitated weeping for the mortal parents he’d hardly known, and then he smiled for everyone, even Oberon, who barely noticed him for months. He was delightful, and she was fond of him in the way she was always fond of the changelings, and yet she had dresses and shoes of which she was just as fond. She liked to dress him and feed him, and took him to bed every night, even when Oberon complained that he did not like to have pets in the bed.

He grew. This was unexpected—she had completely forgotten even this basic fact of human physiology since the last changeling—but quite exciting. He didn’t fit anymore in the footed pajamas in which he’d been stolen, and so after that she kept him naked. Many evenings she would stare at him hoping to see him get bigger. She liked to feed him. Milk and dew and honey on her finger to start. Then she woke one morning to find him attached to her breast, and she wondered why she hadn’t fed any of the other changelings this way. It was easy enough to make food come out of her nipple; not quite ordinary milk at first, and then less usual substances—weak wine and chocolate and peanut butter and yogurt.

It wasn’t long before Oberon regretted his gift, and started to hide the child elsewhere on the hill, attended by faeries, so that he could have his wife to himself. She tolerated that for a few weeks, but soon she couldn’t stand to be apart from the boy, though she couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was because he smiled at everything she said and never argued with her; for months and months he never even said a word, only babbled.

The child grew, and changed, and became ever more delightful to her, and she imagined that they could go on forever like that, that he would always be her favorite thing. Maybe it would have been better if he had stayed her favorite thing—a toy and not a son—because now he would just be a broken toy. She ought to have had the foresight to make him dumb, or Oberon ought to have, since the boy had been his terrible gift to her. But one evening the boy ran to her and climbed upon her throne, and giggled at the dancing faerie bodies leaping and jumping all around them, and put his face to her breast, and sighed a word at her, “molly” or “moony” or “middlebury”—she still didn’t know what it was exactly. But it was close enough to “Mommy” to ruin everything.

They poisoned the boy exquisitely. Beadle and Blork had reviewed it all with them, the names and the actions and the toxicities of the variety of agents they were going to use to cure him, but of that whole long conversation only a single sentence of Blork’s had really stuck. “We’ll poison him well,” he’d said, rather too cheerily, and he had explained that the chemotherapy was harder on the cancer than on the healthy boy parts, but that it was still hard, and that for the next several months he would act like a boy who had been poisoned.

The chemotherapy came in colors—straw yellow and a red somewhere between the flesh of a watermelon and a cherry—but did not fume or smoke the way some of her own most dramatic poisons had. She peered at the bags and sniffed at the tubes, but there was nothing in them she could comprehend. She was only reluctantly interested in the particulars of the medications, but Oberon wanted to know all about them, and talked incessantly about it, parroting what Beadle and Blork had said or reading aloud from the packets of information that the nurses had given them. He proclaimed that he would taste the red liquid himself, to share the experience with the boy, but in the end he made a much lesser faerie do it, a brownie named Doorknob, who smacked his lips and proclaimed that it tasted rusty in the same way that blood smelled rusty, and went on to say that he thought he liked the taste of it and was about to sample it again when he went suddenly mad, tearing at his hair and clawing at his face and telling everyone that his bowels had become wild voles, and perhaps they had, since there was an obvious churning in his hairy little belly. Oberon knocked him over the head with his fist, which brought him sleep if not peace, and it was weeks before he was himself again.

The boy had a very different response. Right away the poisons settled him down in a way that even the morphine did not. That put him to sleep, but in between doses he woke and cried again, saying that a gator had his leg or a bear was hugging him to death or a snake had wound itself around the long part of his arm and was crushing it. Within a few days, the poisons had made him peaceful. Titania could not conceive of the way they were made, except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist, or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog. Oberon had voiced a fear that the boy was sick for human things, that the cancer in his blood was only a symptom of a greater ill—that he was homesick unto death. So she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy.

He seemed to thrive on it. If she hadn’t been so distracted by relief, it might have saddened her—or brought to mind how different in kind he was from her—that a distillation of grief should restore him. His whole body seemed to suck it up, bag after bag, and then his fever broke, and the spots on his skin began to fade like ordinary bruises, and the pain in his bones went away. She watched him for hours, finally restored to untroubled sleep, and when he woke he said, “I want a cheese sandwich,” and the dozen faeries hidden around the room gave a cheer. [#unhandled_cartoon]

“You heard him,” she said, and ordered them with a sweep of her arm out the door and the windows. The laziest went only to the hospital cafeteria, but the more industrious ventured out to the fancy cheese shops of Cole Valley and the Castro and even the Marina, and returned with loaves under their arms and wheels of stolen cheese balanced on their heads and stuffed down their pants, Manchego and Nisa and Tomme Vaudoise, proclaiming the names to the boy as if they were announcing the names of visiting kings and queens. The room rapidly filled with cheese, and then with sandwiches, as the bread and cheese were cut and assembled. The boy chose something from the cafeteria, a plastic-looking cheese on toast. Oberon, asleep on the narrow couch beneath the window, was awakened by the variety of odors, and started to thank the faeries for his breakfast, until a pixie named Radish pointed and said in her thin, high voice, “He mounches! He mounches!” Oberon began to cry, of course. He was always crying these days, and it seemed rather showy to Titania, who thought she suffered more deeply in her silence than he did in his sobs. He gathered the boy in his arms, and the boy said, “Papa, you are getting my sandwich wet,” which caused some tittering among the faeries, many of whom were crying, too, now, or laughing, or kissing each other with mouths full of rare cheese. Titania sat down on the bed and put a hand on the boy and another on her husband, and forgave Oberon his showy tears, and the boy the scare he’d given her.

Just then Dr. Blork entered the room, giving the barest hint of a knock on the door before he barged in. The faeries vanished before his eye could even register them, but the cheese stayed behind, stacked in sandwiches on the dresser and the windowsill, wedged in the light fixtures and stuck to the bulletin board with pins, piled in the sink and scattered on the floor. He stared all around the room and then at the three of them.

“He was hungry,” Titania said, though the glamour would obviate any need for an excuse.

“You have poisoned him masterfully!” Oberon said, and Titania asked if they could now take him home.

He was never a very useful change ling. Oberon had trained previous changelings to be pages or attendants for her, and they had learned, even as young children, to brush her hair in just the way that she liked. Or they had been instructed to sing to her, or dance a masque, or wrestle young wolves in a ring for the entertainment of the host. But the boy only hit her when she presented him with the brush, and instead she found herself brushing his hair.

And she sang for him, ancient dirges at first, and eldritch hymns to the moon, but he didn’t like those, and Oberon suggested that she learn some music more familiar to him. So she sent Doorknob into the Haight to fetch a human musician, but he brought her back an album instead, because it had a beautiful woman on it, a lovely human mama. She looked at the woman on the cover of “The Best of Carly Simon,” golden-skinned and honey-haired, with a fetching gap in her smile, and put on her aspect, and spun the record on her finger while Radish sat upon it, the stinger in her bottom protruding to scratch in the grooves, and Titania leaned close to listen to the songs. Then she sang to the boy about his own vanity, and felt a peaceful pleasure.

Oberon said she was spoiling him, that she had ruined him and that he had no hope of ever becoming a functional changeling, and in a fit of enthusiastic discipline he scolded the boy and ordered him to pick up some toys he had left scattered in the hall, and threatened to feed him to a bear if he did not. Weeping, the boy complied, but he had gathered up only a few blocks before he came to a little blue bucket on the floor. “I’m a puppy!” he said, and bent down to take the handle in his mouth. Then he began to prance all around the hall with his head high, the bucket slapping against his chin.

“That’s not what you’re supposed to be doing at all!” Oberon shouted at him, but by the time Titania entered the room, warned by Radish that Oberon was about to beat the changeling, Oberon had joined him in the game, putting a toy shovel in his teeth. Titania laughed, and it seemed to her in that moment that she had two hearts in her, each pouring out an equivalent feeling toward the prancing figures, and she thought, My men.

They were not allowed to go home. It was hardly time for that, Dr. Blork told them. The boy was barely better at all. This was going to be a three-year journey, and they were not even a week into it. They would have to learn patience if they were going to get through this. They would have to learn to take things one day at a time.

“I like to take the long view of things,” Titania said in response, and that had been true as a rule all through her long, long life. But lately her long view had contracted. Even without looking ahead into the uncertain future, she always found something to worry about.

Oberon suggested she look to the boy, and model her behavior after his, which was what he was doing, to which she replied that a child in crisis needed parents, not playmates, to which he said that that wasn’t what he meant at all, and they proceeded to quarrel about it, very softly, since the boy was sleeping.

Still, she gave it a try, proceeding with the boy on one of his daily migrations through the ward. Ever since he had been feeling better, he went for multiple promenades, sometimes on foot and sometimes in a little red buggy that he drove by making skibbling motions against the floor. He had to wear a mask, and his I.V. pole usually accompanied him, but these seemed not to bother him at all, so Titania tried not to let them bother her, either, though she was pushing the pole, and had to stoop now and then to adjust his mask when it slid over his chin.

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