Red Stilettos

There's no beer in Faery

What Maven Thinks Lurleen Needs

When her wand started vibrating, Maven, Fairy Godmother, knew a wish was brewing, one as strong and bitter as her morning coffee. Before she could even set the spell to poof to the client, she was lost in the vertigo zilchzeit between the dimensions of Faery and Mundane. She followed the buzz of the wish anyway. Where else could she go?

She felt the weight coming back to her feet and a sense of where up was. She stepped forward and found herself in a redneck, white sock, blue ribbon bar, where the floor probably collected blood every night. Backing up a step or two, she bumped into the wall–dead solid. No wish granted—no exit.

Dead neon signs covered with dust hung as moth-eaten trophies on the wall in the fluorescent glare. Stained plywood siding, scratched from many close encounters with edges of furniture and boots made up the bar, which had four stools. The place reeked of second-hand smoke and rented beer.

The skinny woman hunched over the bar was hardly a princess in her jeans and tight t-shirt, but she was the kind that made the wishes.

Unaware of Maven, she scribbled in a spiral-bound notebook, her stringy blonde hair a curtain to hide what she wrote. Her leg gripped the bar stool as if it would keep her from being sucked into despair.

She growled through clenched teeth. "I wish this thing was written!"

She threw her head back, tossing her hair out of her face. She was young, maybe 30, but she looked like she had been ridden hard and put away drenched.

She stretched, slid off the stool and turned around. She startled, jumping back against the bar at seeing Maven.

"Be careful what you wish for." Maven had decided that she would always greet her clients that way, even if most of them wouldn’t listen. "You might get it."

The woman stared at Maven, and then glanced at the front and back doors—both closed and chained. "How the hell did you get in here?" She started easing toward the end of the bar so she could duck behind it to get an equalizer, most likely. “What do you want?”

She never took her eyes off Maven, but her face changed from startled surprise to fear, and then curiosity as she took in Maven's gossamer garb. "Did you take a wrong turn off the interstate? The Renaissance Faire is up in Charlotte, not down here. "

Maven spread her arms slightly to show that she wasn’t threatening. "You made a wish. I’m your fairy godmother.” She nodded at the notebook. “What are you writing? A term paper?"

At that, the woman did duck behind the bar and came up with a baseball bat, one with dings and stains to match those on the bar. She shook it at Maven. At least, she held it, and it shook.

"Daddy, you come out here," she called. No answer.

Maven listened to her wand, trying to take in the woman's story and assess who, where, and when she was, and maybe why and how. "Your name’s Lurleen? And you’re writing a novel." Maven pulled energy to her, moved her wand a little, and when the energy was just right, she flicked. "Want it hard-bound in leather?"

A book appeared, brown leather with a name stamped in gold: Lurleen Snipes.

"Wait, no!" Lurleen pushed the book away though her hand lingered a moment on the leather cover. “You can’t do that. I need to…”

"So, write. You want a bestseller? Just give the word."

Lurleen shook her head. She got a firm grip on the bat, as if she was the cleanup homer in the bottom of the ninth, and she took a step towards Maven. "If you don’t tell me who you are or how you got in here, I’m going to beat you to a bloody pulp." She was upset, but she wasn’t kidding, and she had been in training all her life for this kind of battle.

"I did tell you," Maven said, holding her ground, but speaking softly, "I’m your fairy godmother, and I’m here to grant your wish."

Usually, the clients were ready and eager, not needing to be convinced. But this was Mundane, and this girl hadn’t ever gotten lucky.

Lurleen stepped closer, more in control. Her eyes narrowed in anger, and the bat cocked higher over her shoulder. "You gotta a lot of damn gall to show up here and now. I ought to beat your ass just for that."

"But I’m here now." Maven resisted the urge to back up. She remembered how solid the wall felt where she had just stepped through from Faery, cutting off her escape. If she gave any ground at all, Lurleen would come after her across the bar. "You can’t go back, but you can go on."

Where did that come from?

"You come here now after I crawled back to this hellhole, with my tail tucked and my belly dragging?" The bat quivered over Lurleen’s shoulder. "You better be a hallucination, or I will, by God, kill you."

Through the wand, Maven could feel the woman's pain as well as her rage. She remembered the mess she’d been in at 30.

"The trick," Maven whispered, "is to see where you are, and to decide where you want to go."

Lurleen froze for a second, shaking and turning white as a turnip. When her rage thawed her out, she slung the bat at Maven.

Maven dodged, springing towards the open space between the bar and the pool tables. The bat bounced off the cinderblock and rattled on the linoleum covered slab, breaking off paint chips three colors deep just behind the spot where her head had been.

"I’ve had to do everything on my own so far." Lurleen's breath whistled between her teeth. "I ain’t likely to start trusting such as you at this late date." Her chin quivered, and a tear streaked down her cheek.

Bad sign. Time to change strategy.

"You could grant my wish." Maven kept her eyes on Lurleen but tried to spot the corner of the bar from her peripheral vision in case she needed to duck behind it.

"Do what?" Lurleen’s shoulders dropped, and she stood up straight, cocking her head. "Huh?" Her mascara dripped down her cheek like black blood.

"A wish. I would really like a beer. Your best draft, please."

In familiar territory, Lurleen's automatic pilot kicked in. "You got cash money?"

"I work in trades. I do for you. You do for me."

"No credit, Fairy Honey." Lurleen pointed to a sign in front of the cash register, where the red enamel paint barely showed through the grime. "I won’t even run a tab for kin. That’s why the bar stays open."

"Why not wish for more customers?" Maven swung her wand in a slow arc away from Lurleen. "You’d at least see that I am what I say I am. But that’s not your heart’s desire."

Like a deer in the headlights of a semi, Lurleen stared at Maven, the whites of her eyes showing under the raccoon blackness of her makeup.

Maven nodded at the notebook. "What’s it about?"

You leave that alone!" Lurleen snatched the notebook and held it to her chest like a squalling baby.

Maven fumbled in her pocket, twitching her wand a bit by her side. She brought out a twenty-dollar gold piece. "This ought to be worth a couple of beers at least, more if you sold it for coin instead of gold."

She laid the coin on the bar, moving closer as if the woman was a feral cat she wanted to catch. "One of us might as well get what she wants."

After a few seconds, Lurleen picked up the coin and bit it. She peered at it for a minute, laid it on the register, and pulled a tall one from the nearest tap.

"It's a local craft brew by one of those German boys up at BMW. Local folk like it." She set it on the bar in front of Maven, who nodded and picked it up.

The beer smelled good, and it drank thick, like liquid bread, bitter, but with notes of honeysuckle and maybe some wisteria. Maven swallowed and savored, hoping that Lurleen would take a few more minutes to decide.

No beer in Faery.

Through the wand she listened to Lurleen's life: she'd failed out of college, she'd failed out of marriage, and she wasn't even much good as a barmaid in her Daddy's whorehouse. She couldn't get the courage up to leave if there was a chance she might have to come back.

Maven set the mug on the bar, nodding at it significantly. "Take your time to make up your mind. Where's the restroom?"

Lurleen nodded back towards the wall Maven had come through. "Even fairy godmothers have to pee, I guess."

Maven went back to the wall and felt it again. Then she almost doubled over in pain. She needed to go right now. When she got back, Lurleen had turned on the neon signs and unlocked the door.

A man sat at the bar talking to Lurleen. Maven didn't need her wand to get that story, sad as it was for both of them—how many times had he asked, and how many times had the barmaid said no?

Lurleen took payment for the beer, and he left. She filled the fairy's mug again.

"But you don't love him." Maven said.

Lurleen jerked her head. "Did I say that out loud?"

"They could hear you in Greenville. If you'd wanted him, you'd have married him at seventeen."

"How come you know so much about me?" Lurleen put the money in the register.

Maven held up her wand. "Tool of the trade. It not only slices and dices, but it tells me about my clients. What's on their minds. What they think they want, and what they do want."

"So tell me, then what I really want." Lurleen took on the redneck pose: her hands on her hips, her backsides stuck out and her head forward like a chicken ready to pounce on a June bug.

"Can’t do it. Against the rules." Maven sighed. She drank a long swallow from her beer for punctuation. "You've got to ask for what you want, and I have to give it to you without any hints or guesses. And if you don't ask for what you truly want, well, it's your one wish."

"You can make it happen, but you can't tell me what it is."

"Pretty much."

Several men came in and sat in the corner booth by the front door. They were talking low amongst themselves, with a snigger now and then.

Lurleen pressed a button under the counter once for each man, and then she went over to take their orders. "What can I get for you boys while you're waiting?"

"When's the bus get here?"

"Give them ten minutes," she said. "They'll be right along." She brought their drinks and took their money.

"Why ain't you on the bus, pretty thing like you?" one of them asked. "Too good for the likes of us?"

"Somebody's got to watch the bar," Lurleen said, smiling a cold smile. "Can't have Daddy Dub drinking and driving."

They liked that. "Got to have one who can count the money. Probably keeps the books too!" They laughed.

But that wasn't why she didn't work the bus, which pulled up out front and honked after a few minutes. The men went out, leaving her no tip, but she'd get her cut.

The wand said Lurleen did keep the books, and she got the business back in the black after her mom passed. She'd brought home more than a broken heart when she came back. Maven saw the way of it now, and what she might be able to fix, but it was such a part of who she was now that Lurleen would never ask to be cured.

Lurleen wiped the table and dropped the bottles in the recycle box. "Only known double-deck, rolling whorehouse in the world, right here in Sparks County."

"Interesting concept," Maven agreed. "Kickbacks or locally sanctioned?"

"We have our own deputy on site. We pay him, the county pays him, and we don't have any trouble. County even uses the bus to set up a sting now and then, drugs mostly." Lurleen sighed. "Daddy don't truck with the drug trade. Competition with Uncle Arlo."

Maven chuckled. "Your sisters are honest. They know what they want and who they are. You, on the other hand, are lost."

"Thanks for your kind assessment," Lurleen said, so coldly that the words could have frozen in the air and shattered when they crashed to the floor. "I feel so much better now."

"At least you know what you don't want. When you'll decide what you do want, I'll be on my way." Maven took another sip. "But you can take your time. I'm fine right here."

Lurleen wiped the bar. "We ain't playing this game right. You tell me your troubles, and I use that half a degree in psych I got to tell you it's going to be all right." She propped elbows on the bar. "How'd you get in this line of work?"

Maven took another long swallow. "I dropped out of teaching--English."

"Ooo-ooo!" Lurleen's sarcasm dripped. "I guess I'd better watch my grammar then."

"Suit yourself." Maven shrugged. "I got my psych training on the couch from being where you are. Stuck. One night after a long day of job hunting, I made a wish on a star, and voila! Fairy Godmother, at your service." She held out the mug. "Speaking of service…."

Lurleen filled the mug. "So, you just pop into bars and save barmaids in distress?"

"No, a dairy maid here and there, a princess or two, and once, a troll. Good idea though. There's no beer in Faery." Maven relaxed into a light buzz. "I was thinking about having a real beer, so I followed my wand around the corner, and through the wall to here where you were wishing."

"Okay," Lurleen said, "you like your life, except for not having beer. Why can't you just wish for some?"

"Ah, we have rules." Maven shook her head. "Can't grant our own wishes, and so far, nobody's been able to make beer. I think it has something to do with physics and chemistry, which don't seem to work in Faery either."

"So tell me the best wish you ever granted."

"That would give you something to write about, wouldn't it?"

Lurleen felt her throat close up around the tears that she had kept pushed back for so many years. It felt like shards of glass stabbing her throat. "I got plenty to write about, thank you very much." Lurleen picked up her notebook again. "I just have to change the names and all, to protect the guilty."

"You want to get out of here so much? Why don't you just leave?" Maven held an airline ticket in her hand.

"Where's that ticket going to?"

"That's up to you. It's your decision." Maven laid the ticket on the counter, but when Lurleen didn't pick it up after a minute or two, it disappeared.

Maven pushed the mug forward, but Lurleen took it and put it in the wash tub.

No more beer tonight—just as well. She needed to go back to Faery anyway, and she was determined to give this client what she wanted—and what she needed.

She waved her wand, and a pair of sparkly red stilettos with 2-inch wrapped platforms appeared on the bar. "Do you know the secret of the ruby slippers?"

Lurleen looked at them with undisguised lust. "Who'd want to call this hell-hole home?"

"You must have, sometime. You came back here." Maven waved her wand, and the stilettos fit themselves to Lurleen's size nines. "Nobody ever said they only went one way."

Lurleen held on to the bar as she leaned over to look at her feet below her skinny leg jeans. She clicked her heels three times and disappeared.

"Close enough for government work. Time to go home." Maven swizzled her wand around herself and poofed back to the Twilight Lounge.

* * *

In a few moments, Lurleen returned. She didn't trust the shoes, so she'd just made a little hop to the corner and back.

Her fairy godmother was gone, but she left a note written in purple ink on her notebook.

"Keep writing," the note said, "or this book will write itself, and you won't be able to edit out the truth."

She turned the page and saw that her own actions were being recorded. She grabbed the pen and wrote, "Okay, okay, I'll write every day, at least a page. Don’t you dare write my story."

A scribbled smiley face appeared.

All dressed up and nowhere to go.

A sob escaped from Lurleen's throat, and she broke down, weeping into her hands as the tears flowed down her arms and into her apron. All those years she'd waited, worked, worried, wallowed in self-pity, and once again, she'd wasted her one chance. That feeling slimed her soul, failure, as familiar and overpowering as the smell of rancid ketchup and old fry grease.

She went to the toilet and splashed water on her face and arms until she washed off the rivers of mascara that made her look like a Goth suicide. She put her face back on, layered on more hairspray, and grabbed a new apron to put over her jeans.

When she got back to the bar, the gold coin had disappeared from the register. That bitch fairy godmother hadn't paid for her beer!

She'd have to pay for that too. Shit.

Below the smiley face in her notebook, a new message appeared, "Put it on my tab. I'll be back to grant that wish you didn't make."

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