Jack’s paintings were selling. His work had become quite sought-after almost overnight, following a national interview that had run in the newspaper. It was something one of his dealers had arranged and I knew little about until the article ran.
He had stopped selling dope, and we decided I would drop all my classes at the university and continue to work part-time at the bookstore downtown until the baby came. I called in sick one day, consumed with morning sickness, unable to keep anything down. All I wanted was blueberries.
“Will you go to the store and get some blueberries?” I asked Jack as I stood in the kitchen doorway. He was sitting at the table, painting, surrounded by open tubes of paint and wooden-handled paintbrushes. He was using a plate as a palette. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Of course,” he replied without looking up.
The artificial cherry blossom smell of the dish soap, left open by the sink, was turning my stomach. I walked over and dramatically pressed the seal shut with the palm of my hand. I sighed loudly, staring at the back of Jack’s head. I wanted to smack him. “Can you keep the fucking lid closed on the dish soap? It’s making me crazy.”
Jack was silent as I left the kitchen. I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over my head, waiting for him to make a move. I retched, but nothing came up. I swallowed and retched again. My throat felt like it was filled with cuts, raw and inflamed from all the vomiting. Rage was surging in synchronicity with the nausea, intensifying with each passing second. I clutched the bedsheets between my fists and squeezed. “Jack?” I called.
“Yeah,” he snapped, the chair legs scraping against the kitchen floor as he stood. “I’m going.”
When Jack returned from the store, I found the blueberries weren’t the same as the ones I’d had when I was a child. They were much larger than the wild ones we had foraged, and pale and tasteless in comparison.
Sitting at the table, I told Jack how each August my family would hike deep into the headlands of our hometown to pick blueberries and partridgeberries.
“Everyone needs to fill one bucket before we go home,” my father instructed, passing each of us an empty ice cream container.
“Why can’t we just buy berries at the supermarket?” I whined.
“Because I said so,” my father replied.
Walking along the gravel path toward the headlands, I was careful not to venture too close to the edge. The landscape was vibrantly green, peppered with wildflowers of orange, white, and yellow. I plucked a dandelion and held it close to my mouth, and with one large exhale the fluffy white seeds dispersed, gliding gently through the air like feathers.
The land dipped and hollowed in unexpected places, and I stumbled into a groove at one point, rolling my ankle before catching myself. Piles of flat rocks in asymmetrical squares—foundations of former houses—lay throughout the open space, overgrown and forgotten.
I picked a partridgeberry and squeezed it between my thumb and forefinger, watching as the deep red juice trickled down my hand like blood.
My grandmother had told me stories about the faeries. “They’re fallen angels that were kicked out of heaven by God,” she explained as I sat on her knee.
“Why were they kicked out?”
“Because they were too bad for heaven, but not bad enough for hell,” she said. “So they are stuck on earth, and they play tricks on humans to entertain themselves.”
My grandmother warned me that the faeries would lead you astray when you were picking berries. They sang beautiful melodies to entrance you, and you would become hypnotized by it. Carrying bread was supposed to protect you from the faeries because it was blessed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the bakers.
In the community where my grandmother grew up, a baby went missing from his stroller. The entire town converged to try and find him. They organized search parties and sent people into the forest to systematically scour the land.
After searching all day without any luck, the parents returned home to find a deformed creature lying in the baby’s stroller. The faeries had taken their baby, and replaced it with a changeling.
The mother peeled pages from the newspaper, crumpling them into a ball in her hand while the father went outside to collect kindling from their shack. When he returned, he lit a fire, and they impatiently watched as the orange-blue flames doubled and tripled in size. The mother plucked the creature from her baby’s stroller and held it with outstretched arms, as far from her person as possible, approaching the fire. She released the creature from her grip, dropping it in. Engulfed in flames, the changeling began to burn, screeching and crying. Sizzling, demonic smoke-shapes floated overhead as it crumbled to black ash. Then, from the ashes, their son appeared: naked, giggling, newly pure.