By Martha Hipley
The tail first appeared before her thirteenth birthday and grew in at the base of her spine, right above the cleft of her backside. Her mother told her that this was normal. Her grandmother complained that she was too young—maybe it’s all the hormones in the milk, she said. In any case, she had to learn how to wipe carefully around it when she took a shit. Her little brother had a tail too, but his tail was on the front and had always been there. He also never thought one way or the other about how to wipe away his shit, which she knew because she helped with the laundry and saw the smears in all of his underpants. And she had seen his tail when they were small and ran through the sprinkler on hot summer days. Her mother told her no one should ever see hers. When her tail was the length and width of her pinkie, her mother showed her how to snip it off with the kitchen scissors. Then the little pink wound turned into a little white scar and then into a new little bump that stretched out over the days into another fleshy tube. The second time it grew, she cut it off herself.
***
Sometimes, when she was older, she would be too busy with her studies or her work or a man to cut off the tail. She would wear bulky sweatsuits and tuck the tail up into the waistband of her panties. She would feel it pressing into her spine as she rode the bus to work and swear to herself that she would remember to cut it off that evening. She learned that the men never noticed it, or if they did, they were too concerned with having access to other parts of her body to say anything. Sometimes these men even stayed in her home, long enough to leave their own filthy underpants for her to wash, and none of them seemed to care as the little tail grew and wriggled until she snipped it off with the kitchens scissors and flushed it down the toilet every month.
***
Just on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, a new disease spread, and everyone left alive boarded up their homes and only talked through wires and light. By this time she lived alone in a little house by a river, and the end of the world felt like a blessing of loneliness. She let the hair under her arms and on her legs grow long and dark against her pale skin, and she let the tail grow to see how long it would want to be.
It grew to the size of her pinky and then to the size of her thumb. It stretched out into a sac like an egg, and then like an apple, and then a grapefruit. It swelled, and something began to writhe inside it and press against the pink membrane of the sac. She fashioned a belt from an old silk scarf to hold it tight against her spine as she walked from room to room in the tiny house. She carried it on her back for many months as it throbbed and grew. She always wiped around it carefully when she took a shit.
***
When it reached the size of a basketball, or maybe the size of a small monkey in a grocery bag, the sac spun on the little base that connected it to her spine and twisted off from her body like a sausage link twisting off the chain. It fell to the floor, and the membrane splattered open with a wet, slopping sound. There in the middle of the ruined pink flesh, there on her now ruined rug, stood a creature with gray, leathery skin and long, boney limbs that must have been folded three times over inside the sac.
“What are you?” she asked.
“Oh, you people always want a name for things,” it said with a scowl. “I’m a fairy, I’m a fae, I’m a leprechaun, I’m a pixie, I’m a gnome. You’re never happy with calling us folk any one thing, and we don’t care for anything you call us. It doesn’t matter what I am but why I’m here,” it said.
“So why are you here?” she asked.
***
It told her this story:
Long ago, long before the English brought their language and their law, long before the Saxons brought their kings, long before the Romans brought their baths, long before all of them brought their new kinds of disease and strife, your grand dam lived in a little hut by a river that passed through my dark wood. One day, her man came home with three fish he had caught with his bare hands and clubbed to death: three long, slick arms as black as pitch on one side and white as her own white belly on the other. She gutted them, hung them over the fire to roast, and went inside to fuck her man for doing right.
And here I came out of my wood, because who can resist a free meal? These were meager times, and when are times not meager? Anyway, I thought it was my due for keeping the wood free of nastier things than myself. But your grand dam and her man heard me snuffling about and ran out of the hut in a fury of their white bellies and dark hair. Her man smacked me over the head with that same fish-club, and she cut me into bits with that same fish-knife, and they cooked me in a stew and both et me all up before I could say a damn thing about it. And after all that, they went back to their fucking. But we folk can’t die, and all these miserable centuries I’ve been trapped in her bloodline, trapped in her spawn, trying always to push my way out. There are thousands of little specks of me hidden all over this nasty world, but you are the first host to let me steal some of your flesh and be free. And for that I will give you two gifts ere I go.
First, I will give you a fish that will always feed and will never spoil to replace the ones I stole. So long as you eat it every day, and place its clean, white bones on a clean, white plate before midnight, you will wake in the morning to a new fish, and you will never go hungry.
Second, I will give you a coin that will always buy and will never spend to pay you as I should have paid your grand dam. So long as you exchange it every day for some good or some man’s labor, you will wake in the morning to find it weighing anew in your coat pocket, and you will never be poor.
***
The brownie, the goblin, the elf, the imp, the gremlin, the changeling, the troll, the hag gestured with one hand to reveal a fresh, slick eel curled into a question mark on her coffee table and then held out the other to reveal a golden coin scrawled with runes. She took the coin from its hand and felt the dry rasp of its skin and the dull scratch of its talons as it took the opportunity to caress her arm with a smile. It winked, and then it was gone, and so was the mess on her floor, and so was the little pink wound above her ass where the tail had grown and festered for so long. She put on some pants, she covered her face, and she went outside for the first time in months.
Around the corner, down the way, she stopped in a little wine shop.
“What would you pair with a fish?” she asked. The man behind the counter offered a sensible, sharp wine and accepted the strange coin without question.
On the way home, she stopped by a fishmonger’s, and she asked him how to cook such a thing.
***
She never tired of eating eel because who can resist a free meal in meager times like these, and the coin was always just enough to pay the debts of one day into the next. Just before her daughter’s thirteenth birthday, she showed the girl how to slit a little hole right at the bottom of the eel’s white belly, and slide the blade up to its gullet, and pull out the little sacs of organs and the veins, and roast it over a fire.
Martha Hipley is a writer, artist, and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland. Her stories have been published in 45th Parallel, Utopia Science Fiction, and Maudlin House. She is an associate member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. When not working, she enjoys training as a triathlete and boxer and exploring flea markets.