Black Heart, Ivory Bones

My Life as a Bird CHARLES DE LINT

Charles de Lint is a writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife MaryAnn Harris, an artist and musician. His most recent novels are Trader (nominated for the World Fantasy Award) and Someplace to Be Flying, both set in the imaginary town of New-ford. He has also published three Newford story collections: Dreams Underfoot, The Ivory and the Horn, and Moonlight and Vines.

From the August 1996 issue of the Spar Distributions catalog.

THE GIRL ZONE, No. 10. Written & illustrated by Mona Morgan. Latest issue features new chapters of “The True Life Adventures of Rockit Grrl,” “Jupiter Jewell” and “My Life as a Bird.” Includes a one-page jam with Charles Vess.

My Own Comix Co., $2.75

Back issues available.

Mona’s monologue from chapter three:

The thing is, we spend too much time looking outside ourselves for what we should really be trying to find inside. But we can’t seem to trust what we find in ourselves — maybe because that’s where we find it. I suppose it’s all a part of how we ignore who we really are. We’re so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in. Or we do it to someone else. We try to edit the people around us.

I don’t know which is worse.

Most people would say it’s when we do it to someone else, but I don’t think either one’s a very healthy option.

Why do we love ourselves so little? Why are we suspect for trying to love ourselves, for being true to who and what we are rather than what someone else thinks we should be? We’re so ready to betray ourselves, but we never call it that. We have all these other terms to describe it: Fitting in. Doing the right thing. Getting along.

I’m not proposing a world solely ruled by rank self-interest; I know that there have to be some limits of politeness and compromise or all we’ll have left is anarchy. And anyone who expects the entire world to adjust to them is obviously a little too full of their own self-importance.

But how can we expect others to respect or care for us if we don’t respect and care for ourselves? And how come no one asks, “If you’re so ready to betray yourself, why should I believe that you won’t betray me as well?”

“And then he dumped you — just like that?”

Mona nodded. “I suppose I should’ve seen it coming. All it seems we’ve been doing lately is arguing. But I’ve been so busy trying to get the new issue out and dealing with the people at Spar who are still being such pricks …”

She let her voice trail off. Tonight the plan had been to get away from her problems, not focus on them. She often thought that too many people used Jilly as a combination den mother/emotional junkyard, and she’d promised herself a long time ago that she wouldn’t be one of them. But here she was anyway, dumping her problems all over the table between them.

The trouble was, Jilly drew confidences from you as easily as she did a smile. You couldn’t not open up to her.

“I guess what it boils down to,” she said, “is I wish I was more like Rockit Grrl than Mona.”

Jilly smiled. “Which Mona?”

“Good point.”

The real-life Mona wrote and drew three ongoing strips for her own bi-monthly comic book, The Girl Zone. Rockit Grrl was featured in “The True Life Adventures of Rockit Grrl,” the pen and ink Mona in a semiautobiographical strip called “My Life as a Bird.” Rounding out each issue was “Jupiter Jewel.”

Rockit Grrl, aka “The Menace from Venice”—Venice Avenue, Crowsea, that is, not the Italian city or the California beach — was an in-your-face punkette with an athletic body and excellent fashion sense, strong and unafraid; a little too opinionated for her own good, perhaps, but that only allowed the plots to pretty much write themselves. She spent her time righting wrongs and combating heinous villains like Didn’t-Phone-When-He-Said-He-Would Man and Honest-My-Wife-and-I-Are-As-Good-As-Separated Man.

The Mona in “My Life as a Bird” had spiky blond hair and jean overalls just as her creator did, though the real-life Mona wore a T-shirt under her overalls and she usually had an inch or so of dark roots showing. They both had a quirky sense of humor and tended to expound at length on what they considered the mainstays of interesting conversation — love and death, sex and art — though the strip’s monologues were far more coherent. The stories invariably took place in the character’s apartment, or the local English-style pub down the street from it, which was based on the same pub where she and Jilly were currently sharing a pitcher of draft.

Jupiter Jewel had yet to make an appearance in her own strip, but the readers all felt as though they already knew her since her friends — who did appear — were always talking about her.

“The Mona in the strip, I guess,” Mona said. “Maybe life’s not a smooth ride for her either, but at least she’s usually got some snappy comeback line.”

“That’s only because you have the time to think them out for her.”

“This is true.”

“But then,” Jilly added, “that must be half the fun. Everybody thinks of what they should have said after the fact, but you actually get to use those lines.”

“Even more true.”

Jilly refilled their glasses. When she set the pitcher back down on the table, there was only froth left in the bottom.

“So did you come back with a good line?” she asked.

Mona shook her head. “What could I say? I was so stunned to find out that he’d never taken what I do seriously that all I could do was look at him and try to figure out how I ever thought we really knew each other.”

She’d tried to put it out of her mind, but the phrase “that pathetic little comic books of yours” still stung in her memory.

“He used to like the fact that I was so different from the people where he works,” she said, “but I guess he just got tired of parading his cute little Bohemian girlfriend around to office parties and the like.”

Jilly gave a vigorous nod which made her curls fall down into her eyes. She pushed them back from her face with a hand that still had the inevitable paint lodged under the nails. Ultramarine blue. A vibrant coral.

“See,” she said. “That’s what infuriates me about the corporate world. The whole idea that if you’re doing something creative that doesn’t earn big bucks, you should consider it a hobby and put your real time and effort into something serious. Like your art isn’t serious enough.”

Mona took a swallow of beer. “Don’t get me started on that.”

Spar Distributions had recently decided to cut back on the non-superhero titles they carried, and The Girl Zone had been one of the casualties. That was bad enough, but then they also wouldn’t cough up her back issues or the money they owed her from what they had sold.

“You got a lousy break,” Jilly told her. “They’ve got no right to let things drag on the way they have.”

Mona shrugged. “You’d think I’d have had some clue before this,” she said, more willing to talk about Pete. At least she could deal with him. “But he always seemed to like the strips. He’d laugh in all the right places and he even cried when Jamaica almost died.”

“Well, who didn’t?”

“I guess. There sure was enough mail on that story.”

Jamaica was the pet cat in “My Life as a Bird”—Mona’s one concession to fantasy in the strip since Pete was allergic to cats. She’d thought that she was only in between cats when Crumb ran away and she first met Pete, but once their relationship began to get serious, she gave up on the idea of getting another one.

“Maybe he didn’t like being in the strip,” she said.

“What wasn’t to like?” Jilly asked. “I loved the time you put me in it, even though you made me look like I was having the bad hair day from hell.”

Mona smiled. “See, that’s what happens when you drop out of art school.”

“You have bad hair days?”

“No, I mean—”

“Besides, I didn’t drop out. You did.”

“My point exactly,” Mona said. “I can’t draw hair for the life of me. It always looks all raggedy.”

“Or like a helmet, when you were drawing Pete.”

Mona couldn’t suppress a giggle. “It wasn’t very flattering, was it?”

“But you made up for it by giving him a much better butt,” Jilly said.

That seemed uproariously funny to Mona. The beer, she decided, was making her giddy. At least she hoped it was the beer. She wondered if Jilly could hear the same hysterical edge in her laugh that she did. That made the momentary good humor she’d been feeling scurry off as quickly as Pete had left their apartment earlier in the day.

“I wonder when I stopped loving him,” Mona said. “Because I did, you know, before we finally had it out today. Stop loving him, I mean.”

Jilly leaned forward. “Are you going to be okay? You can stay with me tonight if you like. You know, just so you don’t have to be alone your first night.”

Mona shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine. I’m actually a little relieved, if you want to know the truth. The past few months I’ve been wandering through a bit of a fog, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Now I know.”

Jilly raised her eyebrows.

“Knowing’s better,” Mona said.

“Well, if you change your mind …”

“I’ll be scratching at your window the way those stray cats you keep feeding do.”

When they called it a night, an hour and another half pitcher of draft later, Mona took a longer route home than she normally would. She wanted to clear her head of the decided buzz that was making her stride less than steady, though considering the empty apartment she was going home to, maybe that wasn’t the best idea, never mind her brave words to Jilly. Maybe, instead, she should go back to the pub and down a couple of whiskeys so that she’d really be too tipsy to mope.

“Oh damn him anyway,” she muttered, and kicked at a tangle of crumpled newspapers that were spilling out of the mouth of an alleyway she was passing.

“Hey, watch it!”

Mona stopped at the sound of the odd gruff voice, then backed away as the smallest man she’d ever seen crawled out of the nest of papers to glare at her. He couldn’t have stood more than two feet high, a disagreeable and ugly little troll of a man with a face that seemed roughly carved and then left unfinished. His clothes were ragged and shabby, his face bristly with stubble. What hair she could see coming out from under his cloth cap was tangled and greasy.

Oh my, she thought. She was drunker than she’d realized.

She stood there swaying for a long moment, staring down at him and half expecting him to simply drift apart like smoke, or vanish. But he did neither and she finally managed to find her voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just didn’t see you down … there.” This was coming out all wrong. “I mean …”

His glare deepened. “I suppose you think I’m too small to be noticed?”

“No. It’s not that. I …”

She knew that his size was only some quirk of genetics, an unusual enough trait to find in someone out and about on a Crowsea street at midnight, but at the same time her imagination or, more likely, all the beer she’d had was telling her that the little man scowling up at her had a more exotic origin.

“Are you a leprechaun?” she found herself asking.

“If I had a pot of gold, do you think I’d be sleeping on the street?”

She shrugged. “No, of course not. It’s just—”

He put a finger to the side of his nose and blew a stream of snot onto the pavement. Mona’s stomach did a flip and a sour taste rose up in her throat. Trust her that, when she finally did have some curious encounter like the kind Jilly had so often, it had to be with a grotty little dwarf such as this.

The little man wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket and grinned at her.

“What’s the matter, princess?” he asked. “If I can’t afford a bed for the night, what makes you think I’d go out and buy a handkerchief just to avoid offending your sensibilities?”

It took her a moment to digest that. Then digging in the bib pocket of her overalls, she found a couple of crumpled dollar bills and offered them to him. He regarded the money with suspicion and made no move to take it from her.

“What’s this?” he said.

“I just … I thought maybe you could use a couple of dollars.”

“Freely given?” he asked. “No strings, no ties?”

“Well, it’s not a loan,” she told him. Like she was ever going to see him again.

He took the money with obvious reluctance and a muttered, “Damn.”

Mona couldn’t help herself. “Most people would say thank you,” she said.

“Most people wouldn’t be beholden to you because of it,” he replied.

“I’m sorry?”

“What for?”

Mona blinked. “I meant, I don’t understand why you’re indebted to me now. It was just a couple of dollars.”

“Then why apologize?”

“I didn’t. Or I suppose I did, but—” This was getting far too confusing. “What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want anything in return.”

“Too late for that.” He stuffed the money in his pocket. “Because your gift was freely given, it means I owe you now.” He offered her his hand. “Nacky Wilde, at your service.”

Seeing it was the same one he’d used to blow his nose, Mona decided to forgo the social amenities. She stuck her own hands in the side pockets of her overalls.

“Mona Morgan,” she told him.

“Alliterative parents?”

“What?”

“You really should see a doctor about your hearing problem.”

“I don’t have a hearing problem,” she said.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Well, lead on. Where are we going?”

“We’re not going anywhere. I’m going home, and you can go back to doing whatever it was you were doing before we started this conversation.”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. I have to stick with you until I can repay my debt.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, it’s very much so. What’s the matter? Ashamed to be seen in my company? I’m too short for you? Too grubby? I can be invisible, if you like, but I get the feeling that’d only upset you more.”

She had to be way more drunk than she thought she was. This wasn’t even remotely a normal conversation.

“Invisible,” she repeated.

He gave her an irritated look. “As in, not perceptible by the human eye. You do understand the concept, don’t you?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“No, of course not. I’m making it up just to appear more interesting to you. Great big, semi-deaf women like you feature prominently in my daydreams, so naturally I’ll say anything to try to win you over.”

Working all day at her drawing desk didn’t give Mona as much chance to exercise as she’d like, so she was a bit touchy about the few extra pounds she was carrying.

“I’m not big.”

He craned his neck. “Depends on the perspective, sweetheart.”

“And I’m not deaf.”

“I was being polite. I thought it was kinder than saying you were mentally disadvantaged.”

“And you’re certainly not coming home with me.”

“Whatever you say,” he said.

And then he vanished.

One moment he was there, two feet of unsavory rudeness, and the next she was alone on the street. The abruptness of his disappearance, the very weirdness of it, made her legs go all watery, and she had to put a hand against the wall until the weak feeling went away.

I am way too drunk, she thought as she pushed off from the wall.

She peered into the alleyway, then looked up and down the street. Nothing. Gave the nest of newspapers a poke with her foot. Still nothing. Finally she started walking again, but nervously now, listening for footsteps, unable to shake the feeling that someone was watching her. She was almost back at her apartment when she remembered what he’d said about how he could be invisible.

Impossible.

But what if …?

In the end she found a phone booth and gave Jilly a call.

“Is it too late to change my mind?” she asked.

“Not at all. Come on over.”

Mona leaned against the glass of the booth and watched the street all around her. Occasional cabs went by. She saw a couple at the far end of the block and followed them with her gaze until they turned a corner. So far as she could tell, there was no little man, grotty or otherwise, anywhere in view.

“Is it okay if I bring my invisible friend?” she said.

Jilly laughed. “Sure. I’ll put the kettle on. Does your invisible friend drink coffee?”

“I haven’t asked him.”

“Well,” Jilly said, “if either of you are feeling as woozy as I am, I’m sure you could use a mug.”

“I could use something,” Mona said after she’d hung up.

“My Life as a Bird”

Mona’s monologue from chapter eight:

Sometimes I think of God as this little man sitting on a café patio somewhere, bewildered at how it’s all gotten so out of his control. He had such good intentions, but everything he made had a mind of its own and, right from the first, he found himself unable to contain their conflicting impulses. He tried to create paradise, but he soon discovered that free will and paradise were incompatible because everybody has a different idea as to what paradise should be like.

But usually when I think of him, I think of a cat: a little mysterious, a little aloof, never coming when he’s called. And in my mind, Cod’s always a he. The New Testament makes it pretty clear that men are the doers; women can only be virgins or whores. In God’s eyes, we can only exist somewhere in between the two Marys, the Mother of Jesus and the Magdalene.

What kind of a religion is that? What kind of religion ignores the rights of half the world’s population just because they’re supposed to have envy instead of a penis? One run by men. The strong, the brave, the true. The old boys’ club that wrote the book and made the laws.

I’d like to find him and ask him, “Is that it, God? Did we really get cloned from a rib and because we’re hand-me-downs, you don’t think we’ve got what it takes to be strong and brave and true?”

But that’s only part of what’s wrong with the world. You also have to ask, what’s the rationale behind wars and sickness and suffering?

Or is there no point? Is God just as bewildered as the rest of the us? Has he finally given up, spending his days now on that café patio, sipping strong espresso, and watching the world go by, none of it his concern anymore? Has he washed his hands of it all?

I’ve got a thousand questions for God, but he never answers any of them. Maybe he’s still trying to figure out where I fit on the scale between the two Marys and he can’t reply until he does. Maybe he doesn’t hear me, doesn’t see me, doesn’t think of me at all. Maybe in his version of what the world is, I don’t even exist.

Or if he’s a cat, then I’m a bird, and he’s just waiting to pounce.

“You actually believe me, don’t you?” Mona said.

The two of them were sitting in the window seat of Jilly’s studio loft, sipping coffee from fat china mugs, piano music playing softly in the background, courtesy of a recording by Mitsuko Uchida. The studio was tidier than Mona had ever seen it. All the canvases that weren’t hanging up had been neatly stacked against one wall. Books were in their shelves, paintbrushes cleaned and lying out in rows on the worktable, tubes of paint organized by color in wooden and cardboard boxes. The drop cloth under the easel even looked as though it had recently gone through a wash.

“Spring clean-up and tidying,” Jilly had said by way of explanation.

“Hello? It’s September.”

“So I’m late.”

The coffee had been waiting for Mona when she arrived, as had been a willing ear as she related her curious encounter after leaving the pub. Jilly, of course, was enchanted with the story. Mona didn’t know why she was surprised.

“Let’s say I don’t disbelieve you,” Jilly said.

“I don’t know if I believe me. It’s easier to put it down to those two pitchers of beer we had.”

Jilly touched a hand to her head. “Don’t remind me.”

“Besides,” Mona went on, “why doesn’t he show himself now?” She looked around Jilly’s disconcertingly tidy studio. “Well?” she said, aiming her question at the room in general. “What’s the big secret, Mr. Nacky Wilde?”

“Well, it stands to reason,” Jilly said. “He knows that I could just give him something as well, and then he’d be indebted to me, too.”

“I don’t want him indebted to me.”

“It’s kind of late for that.”

“That’s what he said.”

“He’d probably know.”

“Okay. I’ll just get him to do my dishes for me or something.”

Jilly shook her head. “I doubt it works that way. It probably has to be something that no one else can do for you except him.”

“This is ridiculous. All I did was give him a couple of dollars. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Money doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Jilly. It was only two dollars.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s still money, and no matter how much we’d like things to be different, the world revolves around our being able to pay the rent and buy art supplies and the like, so money’s important in our lives. You freely gave him something that means something to you, and now he has to return that in kind.”

“But anybody could have given him the money.”

Jilly nodded. “Anybody could have, but they didn’t. You did.”

“How do I get myself into these things?”

“More to the point, how do you get yourself out?”

“You’re the expert. You tell me.”

“Let me think about it.”

Nacky Wilde didn’t show himself again until Mona got back to her own apartment the next morning. She had just enough time to realize that Pete had been back to collect his things — there were gaps in the bookshelves, and the stack of CDs on top of the stereo was only half the size it had been the previous night — when the little man reappeared. He was slouched on her sofa, even more disreputable-looking in the daylight, his glower softened by what could only be the pleasure he took from her gasp at his sudden appearance.

She sat down on the stuffed chair across the table from him. There used to be two, but Pete had obviously taken one.

“So,” she said. “I’m sober and you’re here, so I guess you must be real.”

“Does it always take you this long to accept the obvious?”

“Grubby little men who can appear out of thin air and then disappear back into it again aren’t exactly a part of my everyday life.”

“Ever been to Japan?” he asked.

“No. What’s that got to—”

“But you believe it exists, don’t you?”

“Oh, please. It’s not at all the same thing. Next thing you’ll be wanting me to believe in alien abductions and little green men from Mars.”

He gave her a wicked grin. “They’re not green and they don’t come from—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she told him, blocking her ears. When she saw he wasn’t going to continue, she went on, “So was Jilly right? I’m stuck with you?”

“It doesn’t make me any happier than it does you.”

“Okay. Then we have to have some ground rules.”

“You’re taking this rather well,” he said.

“I’m a practical person. Now listen up. No bothering me when I’m working. No sneaking around being invisible when I’m in the bathroom or having a shower. No watching me sleep—or getting into bed with me.”

He looked disgusted at the idea. Yeah, me too, Mona thought.

“And you clean up after yourself,” she finished. “Come to think of it, you could clean up yourself, too.”

He glared at her. “Fine. Now for my rules. First—”

Mona shook her head. “Uh-uh. This is my place. The only rules that get made here are by me.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“None of this is fair,” she shot back. “Remember, nobody asked you to tag along after me.”

“Nobody asked you to give me that money,” he said, and promptly disappeared.

“I hate it when you do that.”

“Good,” a disembodied voice replied.

Mona stared thoughtfully at the now-empty sofa cushions and found herself wondering what it would be like to be invisible, which got her thinking about all the ways one could be nonintrusive and still observe the world. After a while she got up and took down one of her old sketchbooks, flipping through it until she came to the notes she’d made when she’d first started planning her semi-autobiographical strip for The Girl Zone.

Notes for chapter one:

(Mona and Hazel are sitting at the kitchen table in Mona’s apartment having tea and muffins. Mona is watching Jamaica, asleep on the windowsill, only the tip of her tail twitching.)

MONA: Being invisible would be the coolest, but the next best thing would be, like, if you could be a bird or a cat — something that no one pays any attention to.

HAZEL: What kind of bird?

MONA: I don’t know. A crow, all blue-black wings and shadowy. Or, no. Maybe something even less noticeable, like a pigeon or a sparrow.

(She gets a happy look on her face.)

MONA: Because you can tell. They pay attention to everything, but no one pays attention to them.

HAZEL: And the cat would be black, too, I suppose?

MONA: Mmm. Lean and slinky like Jamaica. Very Egyptian. But a bird would be better — more mobility — though I guess it wouldn’t matter, really. The important thing is how you’d just be there, another piece of the landscape, but you’d be watching everything. You wouldn’t miss a thing.

HAZEL: Bit of a voyeur, are we?

MONA: No, nothing like that. I’m not even interested in high drama, just the things that go on every day in our lives — the stuff most people don’t pay attention to. That’s the real magic.

HAZEL: Sounds boring.

MONA: No, it would be very Zen. Almost like meditating.

HAZEL: You’ve been drawing that comic of yours for too long.

The phone rang that evening while Mona was inking a new page for “Jupiter Jewel.” The sudden sound startled her and a blob of ink fell from the end of her nib pen, right beside Cecil’s head. At least it hadn’t landed on his face.

I’ll make that a shadow, she decided as she answered the phone.

“So do you still have an invisible friend?” Jilly asked.

Mona looked down the hall from the kitchen table where she was working. What she could see of the apartment appeared empty, but she didn’t trust her eyesight when it came to her uninvited houseguest.

“I can’t see him,” she said, “but I have to assume he hasn’t left.”

“Well, I don’t have any useful news. I’ve checked with all the usual sources and no one quite knows what to make of him.”

“The usual sources being?”

“Christy. The professor. An old copy of the Newford Examiner with a special section on the fairy folk of Newford.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am,” Jilly admitted. “But I did go to the library and had a wonderful time looking through all sorts of interesting books, from K. M. Briggs to When the Desert Dreams by Anne Bourke, neither of whom write about Newford, but I’ve always loved those fairy lore books Briggs compiled, and Anne Bourke lived here, as I’m sure you knew, and I really liked the picture on the cover of her book. I know,” she added, before Mona could break in. “Get to the point already.”

“I’m serenely patient and would never have said such a thing,” Mona told her.

“Humble, too. Anyway, apparently there are all sorts of tricksy fairy folk, from hobs to brownies. Some relatively nice, some decidedly nasty, but none of them quite fit the Nacky Wilde profile.”

“You mean sarcastic, grubby, and bad mannered, but potentially helpful?”

“In a nutshell.”

Mona sighed. “So I’m stuck with him.”

She realized that she’d been absently doodling on her art and set her pen aside before she completely ruined the page.

“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” she added. “I finally get the apartment to myself, but then some elfin squatter moves in.”

“How are you doing?” Jilly asked. “I mean, aside from your invisible squatter?”

“I don’t feel closure,” Mona said. “I know how weird that sounds, considering what I told you yesterday. After all, Pete stomped out and then snuck back while I was with you last night to get his stuff — so I know it’s over. And the more I think of it, I realize this had to work out the way it did. But I’m still stuck with all this emotional baggage, like trying to figure out why things ended up the way they did, and how come I never noticed.”

“Would you take him back?”

“No.”

“But you miss him?”

“I do,” Mona said. “Weird, isn’t it?”

“Perfectly normal, I’d say. Do you want a shoulder to commiserate on?”

“No, I need to get some work done. But thanks.”

After she hung up, Mona stared down at the mess she’d made of the page she’d been working on. She supposed she could try to incorporate all the squiggles into the background, but it didn’t seem worth the bother. Instead she picked up a bottle of white acrylic ink, gave it a shake and opened it. With a clean brush she began to paint over the doodles and the blob of ink she’d dropped by Cecil’s head. It was obvious now that it wouldn’t work as shadow, seeing how the light source was on the same side.

Waiting for the ink to dry, she wandered into the living room and looked around.

“Trouble with your love life?” a familiar, but still disembodied voice asked.

“If you’re going to talk to me,” she said, “at least show your face.”

“Is this a new rule?”

Mona shook her head. “It’s just disorienting to be talking into thin air — especially when the air answers back.”

“Well, since you asked so politely …”

Nacky Wilde reappeared, slouching in the stuffed chair this time, a copy of one of Mona’s comic books open on his lap.

“You’re not actually reading that?” Mona said.

He looked down at the comic. “No, of course not. Dwarves can’t read — their brains are much too small to learn such an obviously complex task.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know you didn’t, but I can’t help myself. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“As a dwarf?” Mona asked. “Is that what you are?”

He shrugged and changed the subject. “I’m not surprised you and your boyfriend broke up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He stabbed the comic book with a short stubby finger. “The tension’s so apparent — if this bird story holds any truth. One never gets the sense that any of the characters really like Pete.”

Mona sat down on the sofa and swung her feet up onto the cushions. This was just what she needed — an uninvited, usually invisible squatter of a houseguest who was also a self-appointed analyst. Except, when she thought about it, he was right. “My Life as a Bird” was emotionally true, if not always a faithful account of actual events, and the Pete character in it had never been one of her favorites. Like the real Pete, there was an underlying tightness in his character; it was more noticeable in the strip because the rest of the cast was so Bohemian.

“He wasn’t a bad person,” she found herself saying.

“Of course not. Why would you let yourself be attracted to a bad person?”

Mona couldn’t decide if he was being nice or sarcastic.

“They just wore him down,” she said. “In the office. Won him over to their way of thinking, and there was no room for me in his life anymore.”

“Or for him in yours,” Nacky said.

Mona nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it? Generosity of spirit seems to be so old-fashioned nowadays. We’d rather watch somebody trip on the sidewalk than help them climb the stairs to whatever it is they’re reaching for.”

“What is it you’re reaching for?” Nacky asked.

“Oh, god.” Mona laughed. “Who knows? Happiness, contentment. Some days all I want is for the lines to come together on the page and look like whatever it is that I’m trying to draw.” She leaned back on the arm of the sofa and regarded the ceiling. “You know, that trick you do with invisibility is pretty cool.” She turned her head to look at him. “Is it something that can be taught or do you have to be born magic?”

“Born to it, I’m afraid.”

“I figured as much. But it’s always been a fantasy of mine. That, or being able to change into something else.”

“So I’ve gathered from reading this,” Nacky said, giving the comic another tap with his finger. “Maybe you should try to be happy just being yourself. Look inside yourself for what you need — the way your character recommends in one of the earlier issues.”

“You really have been reading it.”

“That is why you write it, isn’t it — to be read?”

She gave him a suspicious look. “Why are you being so nice all of a sudden?”

“Just setting you up for the big fall.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Thought of what I can do for you yet?” he asked.

She shook her head. “But I’m working on it.”

Notes for chapter seven:

(So after Mona meets Gregory, they go walking in Fitzhenry Park and sit on a bench from which they can see Wendy’s Tree of Tales growing. Do I need to explain this, or can it just be something people who know will understand?)

GREGORY: Did you ever notice how we don’t tell family stories anymore?

MONA: What do you mean?

GREGORY: Families used to be made up of stories — their history — and those stories were told down through the generations. It’s where a family got its identity, the same way a neighborhood or even a country did. Now the stories we share we get from television and the only thing we talk about is ourselves.

(Mona realizes this is true — maybe not for everybody, but it’s true for her. Agh. How do I draw this???)

MONA: Maybe the family stories don’t work anymore. Maybe they’ve lost their relevance.

GREGORY: They’ve lost nothing.

(He looks away from her, out across the park.)

GREGORY: But we have.

In the days that followed, Nacky Wilde alternated between the sarcastic grump Mona had first met and the surprisingly good company he could prove to be when he didn’t, as she told him one night, “have a bee up his butt.” Unfortunately, the good of the one didn’t outweigh the frustration of having to put up with the other, and there was no getting rid of him. When he was in one of his moods, she didn’t know which was worse: having to look at his scowl and listen to his bad-tempered remarks, or telling him to vanish but know that he was still sulking around the apartment, invisible and watching her.

A week after Pete had moved out, Mona met up with Jilly at the Cyberbean Café. They were planning to attend the opening of Sophie’s latest show at the Green Man Gallery, and Mona had once again promised herself not to dump her problems on Jilly, but there was no one else she could talk to.

“It’s so typical,” she found herself saying. “Out of all the hundreds of magical beings that populate folktales and legends, I had to get stuck with the one that has a multiple personality disorder. He’s driving me crazy.”

“Is he with us now?” Jilly asked.

“Who knows? Who cares?” Then Mona had to laugh. “God, listen to me. It’s like I’m complaining about a bad relationship.”

“Well, it is a bad relationship.”

“I know. And isn’t it pathetic?” Mona shook her head. “If this is what I rebounded to from Pete, I don’t want to know what I’ll end up with when I finally get this nasty little man out of my life. At least the sex was good with Pete.”

Jilly’s eyes went wide. “You’re not …?”

“Oh, please. That’d be like sleeping with the eighth dwarf, Snotty — the one Disney kept out of his movie, and with good reason.”

Jilly had to laugh. “I’m sorry, but it’s just so—”

Mona wagged a finger at her. “Don’t say it. You wouldn’t be laughing if it was happening to you.” She looked at her watch. “We should get going.”

Jilly took a last sip of her coffee. Wrapping what she hadn’t finished of her cookie in a napkin, she stuck it in her pocket.

“What are you going to do?” she asked as they left the café.

“Well, I looked in the yellow pages, but none of the exterminators have cranky dwarves listed among the household pests they’ll get rid of, so I guess I’m stuck with him for now. Though I haven’t looked under exorcists yet.”

“Is he Catholic?” Jilly asked.

“I didn’t think it mattered. They just get rid of evil spirits, don’t they?”

“Why not just ask him to leave? That’s something no one else but he can do for you.”

“I already thought of that,” Mona told her.

“And?”

“Apparently it doesn’t work that way.”

“Maybe you should ask him what he can do for you.”

Mona nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I never thought of that. I just assumed this whole business was one of those Rumpelstiltskin kind of things — that I had to come up with it on my own.”

“What?’ Nacky said later that night when Mona returned from the gallery and asked him to show himself. “You want me to list my services like on a menu? I’m not a restaurant.”

“Or computer software,” Mona agreed, “though it might be easier if you were either, because then at least I’d know what you can do without having to go through a song and dance to get the information out of you.”

“No one’s ever asked this kind of thing before.”

“So what?” she asked. “Is it against the rules?”

Nacky scowled. “What makes you think there are rules?”

“There are always rules. So come on. Give.”

“Fine,” Nacky said. “We’ll start with the most popular items.” He began to count the items off on his fingers. “Potions, charms, spells, incantations—”

Mona held up a hand. “Hold on there. Let’s back up a bit. What are these potions and charms and stuff?”

“Well, take your ex-boyfriend,” Nacky said.

Please do, Mona thought.

“I could put a spell on him so that every time he looked at a woman that he was attracted to, he’d break out in hives.”

“You could do that?”

Nacky nodded. “Or it could just be a minor irritation — an itch that will never go away.”

“How long would it last?”

“Your choice. For the rest of his life, if you want.”

Wouldn’t that serve Pete right, Mona thought. Talk about a serious payback for all those mean things he’d said about her and The Girl Zone.

“This is so tempting,” she said.

“So what will it be?” Nacky asked, briskly rubbing his hands together. “Hives? An itch? Perhaps a nervous tic under his eye so that people will always think he’s winking at them. Seems harmless, but it’s good for any number of face slaps and more serious altercations.”

“Hang on,” Mona told him. “What’s the big hurry?”

“I’m in no hurry. I thought you were. I thought the sooner you got rid of Snotty, the eighth dwarf, the happier you’d be.”

So he had been in the café.

“Okay,” Mona said. “But first I have to ask you. These charms and things of yours — do they only do negative stuff?”

Nacky shook his head. “No. They can teach you the language of birds, choose your dreams before you go to sleep, make you appear to not be somewhere when you really are—”

“Wait a sec. You told me I had to be born magic to do that.”

“No. You asked about, and I quote, ‘the trick you do with invisibility,’ the emphasis being mine. How I do it, you have to be born magic. An invisibility charm is something else.”

“But it does the same thing?”

“For all intents and purposes.”

God, but he could be infuriating.

“So why didn’t you tell me that?”

Nacky smirked. “You didn’t ask.”

I will not get angry, she told herself. I am calmness incarnate.

“Okay,” she said. “What else?”

He went back to counting the items on his fingers, starting again with a tap of his right index finger onto his left. “Potions to fall in love, to fall out of love. To make hair longer, or thicker. To make one taller, or shorter, or—” He gave her a wicked grin. “—slimmer. To speak with the recent dead, to heal the sick—”

“Heal them of what?” Mona wanted to know.

“Whatever ails them,” he said, then went on in a bored voice. “To turn kettles into foxes, and vice versa. To—”

Mona was beginning to suffer overload.

“Enough already,” she said. “I get the point.”

“But you—”

“Shh. Let me think.”

She laid her head back in her chair and closed her eyes. Basically, what it boiled down to was she could have whatever she wanted. She could have revenge on Pete — not for leaving her, but for being so mean-spirited about it. She could be invisible, or understand the language of birds and animals. And though he’d claimed not to have a pot of gold when they first met, she could probably have fame and fortune, too.

But she didn’t really want revenge on Pete. And being invisible probably wasn’t such a good idea since she already spent far too much time on her own as it was. What she should really do is get out more, meet more people, make more friends of her own, instead of all the people she knew through Pete. As for fame and fortune … corny as it might sound, she really did believe that the process was what was important, the journey her art and stories took her on, not the place where they all ended up.

She opened her eyes and looked at Nacky.

“Well?” he said.

She stood up and picked up her coat where she’d dropped it on the end of the sofa.

“Come on,” she said as she put it on.

“Where are we going?”

“To hail a cab.”

She had the taxi take them to the children’s hospital. After paying the fare, she got out and stood on the lawn. Nacky, invisible in the vehicle, popped back into view. Leaves crackled underfoot as he joined her.

“There,” Mona said, pointing at the long square block of a building. “I want you to heal all the kids in there.”

There was a long moment of silence. When Mona turned to look at her companion, it was to find him regarding her with a thoughtful expression.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

Mona shook her head. “Like you couldn’t make me invisible?”

“No semantics this time,” he said. “I can’t heal them all.”

“But that’s what I want.”

Nacky sighed. “It’s like asking for world peace. It’s too big a task. But I could heal one of them.”

“Just one?”

Nacky nodded.

Mona turned to look at the building again. “Then heal the sickest one.”

She watched him cross the lawn. When he reached the front doors, his figure shimmered and he seemed to flow through the glass rather than step through the actual doors.

He was gone a long time. When he finally returned, his pace was much slower and there was a haunted look in his eyes.

“There was a little girl with cancer,” he said. “She would have died later tonight. Her name—”

“I don’t want to know her name,” Mona told him. “I just want to know, will she be all right?”

He nodded.

I could have had anything, she found herself thinking.

“Do you regret giving the gift away?” Nacky asked her.

She shook her head. “No. I only wish I had more of them.” She eyed him for a long moment. “I don’t suppose I could freely give you another couple of dollars …?”

“No. It doesn’t—”

“Work that way,” she finished. “I kind of figured as much.” She knelt down so that she wasn’t towering over him. “So now what? Where will you go?”

“I have a question for you,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“If I asked, would you let me stay on with you?”

Mona laughed.

“I’m serious,” he told her.

“And what? Things would be different now, or would you still be snarly more often than not?”

He shook his head. “No different.”

“You know I can’t afford to keep that apartment,” she said. “I’m probably going to have to get a studio apartment somewhere.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

Mona knew she’d be insane to agree. All she’d been doing for the past week was trying to get him out of her life. But then she thought of the look in his eyes when he’d come back from the hospital, and knew that he wasn’t all bad. Maybe he was a little magic man, but he was still stuck living on the street, and how happy could that make a person? Could be, all he needed was what everybody needed — a fair break. Could be, if he was treated fairly, he wouldn’t glower so much, or be so bad-tempered.

But could she put up with it?

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she told him, “but, yeah. You can come back with me.”

She’d never seen him smile before, she realized. It transformed his features.

“You’ve broken the curse,” he said.

“Say what?”

“You don’t know how long I’ve had to wait to find someone both selfless and willing to take me in as I was.”

“I don’t know about the selfless—”

He leaned forward and kissed her.

“Thank you,” he said.

And then he went whirling off across the lawn, spinning like a dervishing top. His squatness melted from him and he grew tall and lean, fluid as a willow sapling, dancing in the wind. From the far side of the lawn he waved at her. For a long moment all she could do was stare, open-mouthed. When she finally lifted her hand to wave back, he winked out of existence, like a spark leaping from a fire, glowing brightly before it vanished into the darkness.

This time she knew he was gone for good.

Mona’s closing monologue from chapter eleven:

The weird thing is I actually miss him. Oh, not his crankiness, or his serious lack of personal hygiene. What I miss is the kindness that occasionally slipped through — the piece of him that survived the curse.

Jilly says that was why he was so bad-tempered and gross. He had to make himself unlikable, or it wouldn’t have been so hard to find someone who would accept him for who he seemed to be. She says I stumbled into a fairy tale, which is pretty cool when you think about it, because how many people can say that?

Though I suppose if this really were a fairy tale, there’d be some kind of “happily ever after” wrap-up, or I’d at least have come away with a fairy gift of one sort or another. That invisibility charm, say, or the ability to change into a bird or a cat.

But I don’t really need anything like that.

I’ve got The Girl Zone. I can be anything I want in its pages. Rockit Grrl, saving the day. Jupiter, who can’t seem to physically show up in her own life. Or just me.

I’ve got my dreams. I had a fun one last night. I was walking downtown and I was a birdwoman, spindly legs, beak where my nose should be, long wings hanging down from my shoulders like a ragged cloak. Or maybe I was just wearing a bird costume. Nobody recognized me, but they knew me all the same and thought it was way cool.

And I’ve touched a piece of real magic. Now, no matter how gray and bland and pointless the world might seem sometimes, I just have to remember that there really is more to everything than what we can see. Everything has a spirit that’s so much bigger and brighter than you think it could hold.

Everything has one.

Me, too.

De Lint’s story incorporates elements of “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Fisherman and His Wife,” along with other familiar fairy tale tropes — but transplants them to the modern urban setting of Newford, an imaginary North American city where legends come to life.