The Ivory and the Horn

I'm half a block from the shop. The area's changed. The once-neat cobblestones are thick with grime. Refuse lies everywhere. Most of the storefronts are boarded up, their walls festooned with graffiti. When I reach Mr. Truepenny's shop, I see a sign in the window that reads, CLOSING SOON DUE TO LEASE EXPIRATION.

Half-dreading what I'll find, I open the door and hear the familiar little bell tinkle as I step inside. The shop's dusty and dim, and much smaller than I remember it. The shelves are almost bare. The door leading to the gallery is shut and has a CLOSED sign tacked onto it.

'Ah, Miss Etoile. It's been so very long.'

I turn to find Mr. Truepenny at his usual station behind the front counter. He's smaller than I remember as well, and looks a little shabby now. Hair thinning, tweed suit threadbare and more shapeless than ever.

'What... what's happened to the shop?' I ask.

I've forgotten that I'm asleep on the sofa out on my balcony. All I know is this awful feeling I have inside as I look at what's become of my old childhood haunt.

'Well, times change,' he says. 'The world moves on.'

'This— is this my doing?'

His eyebrows rise quizzically.

'I met this little girl and she said I was evicting you.'

'I don't blame you,' Mr. Truepenny says, and I can see in his sad eyes that it's true. 'You've no more need for me or my wares, so it's only fair that you let us fade.'

'But you... that is... well, you're not real.'

I feel weird saying this, because while I remember now that I'm dreaming, this place is like one of my faerie dreams that feel as real as the waking world.

'That's not strictly true,' he tells me. 'You did conceive of the city and this shop, but we were drawn to fit the blueprint of your plan from... elsewhere.'

'What elsewhere?'

He frowns, brow furrowing as he thinks.

'I'm not really sure myself,' he tells me.

'You're saying I didn't make you up, I just drew you here from somewhere else?'

He nods.

'And now you have to go back?'

'So it would seem.'

'And this little girl— how can she know about you?'

'Once a reputable establishment is open for business, it really can't deny any customer access, regardless of their age or station in life.'

'She's visiting my daydream?' I ask. This is too much to accept, even for a dream.

Mr. Truepenny shakes his head. 'You brought this world into being through your single-minded desire, but now it has a life of its own.'

'Until I forgot about it.'

'You had a very strong will,' he says. 'You made us so real that we've been able to hang on for decades. But now we really have to go.'

There's a very twisty sort of logic revolved here, I can see. It doesn't make sense by way of the waking world's logic, but I think there are different rules in a dreamscape. After all, my faerie boyfriend can turn into a crow.

'Do you have more customers, other than that little girl? 'I ask.

'Oh yes. Or at least, we did.' He waves a hand to encompass the shop. 'Not much stock left, I'm afraid. That was the first to go.'

'Why doesn't their desire keep things running?'

'Well, they don't have faerie blood, now do they? They can visit, but they haven't the magic to bring us across or keep us here.'

It figures. I think. We're back to that faerie-blood thing again. Jilly would love this.

I'm about to ask him to explain it all a little more clearly when I get this odd jangling sound in my ears and wake up back on the sofa. My doorbell's ringing. I go inside the apartment to accept what turns out to be a FedEx package.

'Can dreams be real?' I ask the courier. 'Can we invent something in a dream and have it turn out to be a real place?'

'Beats me, lady,' he replies, never blinking an eye. 'Just sign here.'

I guess he gets all kinds.

***

So now I visit Mr. Truepenny's shop on a regular basis again. The area's vastly improved. There's a cafe nearby where Jeck— that's my boyfriend that I've been telling you about— and I go for tea after we've browsed through Mr. Truepenny's latest wares. Jeck likes this part of Mabon so much that he's now got an apartment on the same street as the shop. I think I might set up a studio nearby.

I've even run into Janice— the little girl who brought me back here in the first place. She's forgiven me, of course, now that she knows it was all a misunderstanding, and lets me buy her an ice cream from the soda fountain sometimes before she goes home.

I'm very accepting of it all— you get that way after a while. The thing that worries me now is, what happens to Mabon when I die? Will the city get run down again and eventually disappear? And what about its residents? There's all these people here; they've got family, friends, lives. I get the feeling it wouldn't be the same for them if they have to go back to that elsewhere place Mr. Truepenny was so vague about.

So that's the reason I've written all this down and had it printed up into a little folio by one of Mr. Truepenny's friends in the waking world. I'm hoping somebody out there's like me. Someone's got enough faerie blood not only to visit, but to keep the place going. Naturally, not just anyone will do. It has to be the right sort of person, a book lover, a lover of old places and tradition, as well as the new.

If you think you're the person for the position, please send a resume to me care of Mr. Truepenny's Book Emporium and Gallery, Mabon. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

The Forest is Crying

There are seven million homeless children on the streets of Brazil. Are vanishing trees being reborn as unwanted children?

— Gary Snyder, from The Practice of the Wild

The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.

— Pat Cadigan, from 'Johnny Come Home'

Two pairs of footsteps, leather soles on marble floors. Listening to the sound they made, Dennison felt himself wondering, What was the last thing that Ronnie Egan heard before he died? The squeal of tires on wet pavement? Some hooker or an old wino shouting, 'Look out!' Or was there no warning, no warning at all? Just the sudden impact of the car as it hit him and flung his body ten feet in the air before it was smeared up against the plate glass window of the pawn shop?

'You don't have to do this,' Stone said as they paused at the door. 'One of the neighbors already IDed the body.'

'I know.'

Looking through the small window, glass reinforced with metal mesh, Dennison watched the morgue attendant approach to let them in. Like the detective at Dennison's side, the attendant was wearing a sidearm.