The Stars and the Cookie Jar

It was too hot to sleep. How Pen had managed it with a fitful, fretting toddler in their room, Seelie couldn’t imagine, but on the other side of the shared wall was silence. It was maybe two in the morning – no one had wound the kitchen clock – when she got up, in her damp chemise, and pinned up her hair. Too humid to strike a good light, but she knew her way blind to the clothes-press with the towels and spare quilts; by touch she found the oldest, ragged-edged ninepatch, all buff and blues from the War for Independence. The last time she’d slept on the porch roof had been with Pen, younger, though sleep then meant watching for fallen stars and talking until light. 

Pen was sitting across the old rocking chair in the cobwebbed corner of the porch, feet up on the railing. Their denims were rolled to their knees, and from the shoulders they were down to their jumps and a layer of sweat. A candle, not a charmed light, lit their reading – only a coin’s width of wax and a wick that should have dropped long since. She could never see the edges, with Pen’s work, but Seelie thought they held the candle to the moment before the light died. 

“Tell me he’s not awake again, or kill me fast.” 

“Asleep,” she assured them. “I couldn’t. I thought I’d suffocate.” Seelie dithered on the porch, the quilt gone body-warm in her arms, and wondered what the polite thing was to do. She didn’t trust her own wards, with a baby alone indoors and all the windows open. What’s a charm against haints to a catamount?  

Without being asked or asking, Pen balanced their book aside and went down through the front garden barefoot. Between the last vegetable beds and the brook they paused; took out an ordinary Barlow knife, nicked the inside of their elbow and drove the knife into the earth. Seelie felt it from her own bare feet to her hairpins, and just for a breath or two thought the black cherry and the crab-apple had blossomed together. The hemlock and birches trembled like a wind had hit them, and the mountainside fell quiet. 

“What cantrip’s that, then?” 

“It’s fuck off.” Pen bowed, elegant for a person in their jump stays and rolled-up denims. “At the lady’s service. It’ll hold ‘til morning.” 

“It’ll hold a century.” Seelie bundled up the ninepatch quilt and tossed it onto the porch roof. 

“‘Spect you’re right, but I do want my knife back.” 

She was short in the leg, and had to make her way to the overhanging roof by the house’s corner notches – always a dreadful angle at the last moment. She yelled, when a hand came under her arm and pulled, and nearly finished the night broken-backed in the foxglove border. 

“Please don’t wake him. I’d have to get down.” 

“How’d you get up?” 

Pen finished laying out the old quilt, only a little mossy at their knees and elbows.“The way land people do, not stubby little seals.” 

“I’m not any kind of seal. I’ve never seen salt water.” 

“Your dad was from Ocracoke, and he’s not buried here.” 

“No.” She stretched out on her back and stared into the dark, no cooler and shivering anyway. “He didn’t stay here a week after Mama died. They found his clothes folded up at the tide line.” 

“You never once went out there to see your kin?” 

“I used to think – I still think it,” Seelie corrected. “Mama was the prize he got in exchange for his whole old life. Never saw any kin. Never talked of ‘em. Grandpep Coffin left me the money for high school, from the damn hat to the half-boots.” 

“Coffin? Your mother’s people are Coffin?” 

“What?”

“Somebody was real pleased with a joke.” 

“I will find the damn hat, Pen, and put it on you in your brother’s store. You must have one, in the Grandame’s house, we didn’t burn it.” 

“Ah, no, they’re illegal now in the Carolinas, on account the rest of me’s in my brother’s clothes.” 

“Pen!” 

“Four weeks’ hard labor,” they said, extraordinarily calmly, and not lying. 

“Sweet fucking firmament, Pen, that’s not where you were?!” 

“Any time or place I could be, rather than that.” They shook their head. “All the nights we came up here, I wished your folks had a telescope. You can’t get this in the hollow.” 

She pointed up toward the Milky Way, because Pen was done on other subjects. “What are the fancy names for those two, the brightest?” 

“Altair; Alpha Lyrae.” Pen gestured, in their turn.

“The princess, the goose-girl, and the river between them.” 

“I don’t know that one.” 

“It ends how you expect.” Seelie shrugged. “The river takes. It doesn’t give back.” 

“There must be someone worth the crossing.” 

“Around here? You, maybe.” She hesitated, but it was no good not telling Pen things; the words were carefully-chosen, still. “When your boy goes in for the first time, I’ll help him out again.” 

Pen knew, without bringing me into their business, she thought. They must have known before this morning. They looked up to the Summer Triangle and the fast-moving clouds as if Seelie hadn’t said something fearful, hadn’t promised a sharp, short life and a cold drowning for their son. 

“Is his father a sin-eater?” She paused, from discomfort enough to choke on, when Pen never so much as blinked. “Or didn’t… didn’t he tell you? That’s awful, if he –” 

“It was a long time ago.” Pen said it as if Bran hadn’t just begun his second summer.

“You’ll have to watch him – Bran. Watch him and teach him to swim. He’ll go when the river calls him, and – he’s yours, he’s like to have your gifts too. I don’t know what you’ll get, once he’s old enough.” 

 “How old were you, when you went – elsewhere for the first time?” 

“Elsewhere, oh, the riverbank. I was four.” 

“I brought him in time, then. I thought…I’d been too long away.” 

They were quiet so long Seelie thought they’d fallen asleep, shingles sticking them in the back and all. She risked making a light – as if that could scare a Green – and under the cold, faltering blue Pen looked back at her, curious. “Since when are you afraid of the dark, Seal?” 

“When you said away, just now, do you mean away to sea or away to the Good Neighbors? You went a bit creepy.” 

“Sure, with a corpse-candle over my head.” They blew at it like smoke and the light rose a little, more golden than blue. “Just away, not here.” 

“If your mother wants you home, I’ll ride down often as I can –” 

“She does not.” There was no heat or weight to it. “Where would she put one-and-a-bit more? She expects us to supper, Fridays.” 

“Stay here, then, and we’ll both keep our eyes on him. Bran can have the parlor. The fire’s best there in winter.” 

“Would you – be all right with him, if I’m called away?” 

“Away, again! Why?” 

“For my living. I work for the Friends. Rather not say what.” 

“There hasn’t been a Society here in twenty years. Where –” 

“Ohio, the Banks, the Dismals. It’s never left up to me.” 

“I’m no good to the living, Pen. Every time I ride through the hollow – they hate me, they think I come down to take their children. You can’t leave yours with me!” 

“But I trust you, Seal. And Bran’s more than a match for you.” 

“You’re my friend, and something will happen to him and you’ll hate me too.” She tried to draw a deep breath, and she came out of it into sudden, ugly tears. “Don’t you see–” 

“Keeper of last breaths, I see you.” Pen took her hand, as if what she needed was a little courage and not a rest cure. “I always see you. We promised.” 

There was more to that than she could stare down, without sleep, up on the porch roof. Seelie dropped it in the drift of life is strange and thought of Bran, who would need to walk and speak in more worlds than seemed fair for one small child.