Every household on Uske Rig loses one left shoe a week and thinks nothing of it. The shoe turns up days later on a roof ridge, wedged in a chimney pot, or sunk in the rain barrel with a pebble inside. The pebble is always smooth and always from the Jarn Dyke streambed, half a mile off. The evil fairy responsible stands four inches tall and carries herself like a bored clerk. Her wings come first in any inventory. They are not glassy, as the nursery books paint them, but the dull brown-violet of a moth's underwing, and the left one is torn along its edge in a crescent notch. Tobiah Kemp, who keeps bees on the slope below Jarn Dyke, has watched her for eleven summers. He says the notch has never grown or closed by so much as a hair.
Next, the hands. They are too long for her size, every finger carrying an extra knuckle, and the nails are stained black from walnut husks she chews to a paste. With those fingers she picks the stitching out of coat linings, and she leaves a mark of her passing: common pins bent into small hooks, set one to a windowsill. They are how Kemp tracks her. When I first visited, a sill held one hook. Last autumn I counted five on his kitchen sill, all bent to the same angle, as if she had been practicing.
The mouth is last, and no one looks at it long. Her teeth are gray and small, filed to points on the inside faces only, so they show just when she laughs, and she laughs without sound. People on Uske Rig keep two habits because of it. Every left shoe goes into a bucket of oat chaff at night with a cut onion pushed into the toe, since she dislikes the smell. And no one whistles after dark, because she takes whistling as an invitation to come closer and hear it better. Kemp says the hollow under Jarn Dyke holds three hundred left shoes, sorted by size. I have no way to check that. The hollow is too narrow for my arm, and nothing I have dropped into it has come back.
I leave Uske Rig by the downhill path at dusk, past the Kemp gate. Halfway to the lane my left boot feels heavier, and with each step something small rolls under my toes. I keep walking. On the gatepost behind me, a single pin has been bent into a hook and set pointing the way I went.
- Classification
- Fey, small and spiteful
- Habitat
- Hedgerows, eaves, hillside farmhouses
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 4 inches tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Hill farms and hedgerow borders
- Binomial
- Nympha acerbula
- Diet
- Walnut husks, spilled cider, dew
- Temperament
- Petty, patient, soundlessly amused