Wild
Anomalies

Fae Surveillance

I hesitated before knocking on the door of the van. I’d watched it for the past three nights, parked in the empty block across the street. Eerie lights lit up the windows in the dark. Occasionally, puffs of brightly coloured smoke would come out of the ventilation fan on the roof.

It fixated me. I had to know what was going on. My older neighbour, Noreen, had already tried to call the police on them. “It’s a bloody drug gang, I tell ya! You can tell by the lights!” I had no idea what she meant by that, and I doubt the police did, but we both watched as the police arrived, walked all the way around the van as if unable to see it at all, shrugged and left. Noreen was ropable. “This bloody government!” she said, and slammed her front door. I was more curious than furious, and over the next couple of days the idea of simply going over to the van and knocking on the door had taken hold of me.

The block had been empty since before I moved in. The grass would grow longer and longer until Noreen complained loudly enough to the council that they’d come and cut it. The block had also grown a couple of tyres, some cinder blocks and a shopping trolley at some point.

Now that I was standing on the block myself, I could see they’d burned a ring in the grass right around the van. As I approached the van, I could see that inside the burned circle were runes written in salt. Or at least what I took to be runes — my entire understanding of runes came from video games. Were these guys really into metal, or something? Wait until Noreen got the idea into her head that these guys were Satanists. Then there’d be some phone calls…

The windows of the van were obscured with tin foil. Only some tiny gaps allowed the weird colourful lights to flash through. I put a foot on the little fold-out steps and knocked on the door. I was surprised when it just swung open from the rapping.

“Sorry, I thought it was shut,” I called out to whoever was inside. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the light and the shapes resolved. Dozens of tiny little figures. Tiny little figures with wings.

“It’s a narc!” came a tiny squeal from somewhere.

“Hide the product!” came another.

The creatures frantically buzzed around, covering up tiny tubs of glitter, and some strange machine with a tiny typewriter attached.

“Uh…” I said, frozen to the spot and trying to understand what I was looking at. Finally I thought of something to say. “I’m not a narc.”

One of the creatures buzzed right up in front of my face. “Who the fuck are you?” it squeaked.

“Uh, I’m Dev. From over the road.” I pointed my thumb in the direction of my place, but immediately regretted identifying my address.

“Really…? Dev?” The pixie, as I couldn’t help thinking of him, put its hands through its mohawk, straightened its tiny leather jacket, and looked me up and down sceptically. “Are you a narc, Dev? You know what we do to narcs around here?”

“Uh, give them a warning and let them go?”

“Tell him what we do to narcs, gang!” The chief pixie looked around at the rest of his crew. They were all tiny flying creatures, but came in a vast variety of types. Some were humanoid, but pink, blue or green. Others were tiny versions of real animals, including a tiny flying giraffe, a seahorse and a hippo. Some were more abstract and hard for me to slot into any category. There was also a moth buzzing around, but I wasn’t sure if he was part of the crew.

They responded to their chief in a high-pitched chorus: “Narcs get the Mark! Narcs get the Mark!”

“Uh, the Mark?” I asked, as I tried to surreptitiously back out of the van.

“Be still!” cried the Chief, in a voice that resonated far deeper than should have been possible from this bug-sized being.

I couldn’t move. I was poised precariously with my back foot on the step. I could sense in my peripheral vision the circle of runes glowing slightly. I could breathe, and I could move my eyes, but nothing else. A pixie lowland gorilla appeared at the inside of my wrist on my outstretched right arm. I swivelled my eyes and tried to focus on him. He was wearing jeans and a singlet with a red bandana on his head. He had a strange machine. Squinting revealed it to be a pixie-sized tattoo needle. He whirred it into life and began buzzing around, only stopping momentarily to take a drag on an impossibly small cigarette. The needle stung my skin as I came to the sinking realisation that I was about to end up with a non-consensual tattoo. He finished, wiped the tattoo down with a rag, and inspected his work. He grunted with satisfaction and buzzed off.

The Chief nonchalantly waved his hand. “Move,” he said.

I fell off the step.

After I picked myself up, I took a proper look at the tattoo. It was a braided ring, taking up most of the width of my wrist. In the middle was a tangle of runes, in the style of the ones drawn in salt on the burnt grass. Truth be told, it looked pretty cool. As far as forced tattoos went, it wasn’t so bad.

The Chief floated over while I was admiring the gorilla’s handiwork. He clapped his hands impossibly loudly. My new tattoo lit up in blue flame, and an agonising pain went up my arm and straight into the back of my head. I frantically smacked at my wrist, trying to put the flames out, but it did nothing. The Chief clapped again, and suddenly the flames were gone, along with the pain. I stared at my wrist, expecting a horrible burn, but there was no sign at all of the flame.

“It’s magic fire, you stupid normie narc!” shouted the Chief.

“What the hell does that mean?” I was still staring dumbfounded at my arm.

“It means we own you! So do what we fucking say, or you’ll get the Magic Flame again!”

“And if you cross us,” said a purple chinchilla perched menacingly on the rim of a jam jar. “We’ll set the whole of ya aflame!” A raucous high-pitched laugh echoed around the van.

“And, and, and,” added the Chief. “If you even think about hurting one of us, or ratting us out, the Flame will automatically light up!”

“Alright, alright,” I said. I wasn’t entirely convinced that any of this was real, despite the searing pain seconds earlier. Perhaps if I just rode out whatever triggered this intense hallucination, I would snap out of it, finding that I’d fallen asleep on my couch and was having some kind of high fructose syrup induced fever dream.

“Now get inside!” said the Chief, flying into the van to perch on a dream-catcher hanging from the ceiling, that had certainly seen better days. “The name’s Squinklebum, and I’m the Big Cheese around here.” He put his arms behind his head and tried to look tough, but I’d been swallowing a giggle since he’d mentioned his name. “Listen very carefully, narc, because we have a job for you!”

Squinklebum snapped his fingers at someone. “The list, Juniperbooboo!” The seahorse fluttered over and handed him a tiny piece of paper. “We require the following info…” He took a tiny pair of specs from inside his jacket and began to read. “What is Joe at number 32’s middle name? Who owns the most striped socks on the street? Who did Noreen vote for in the 1975 federal election?”

I had to interrupt. “Wait, wait, wait. I can’t remember all this stuff…”

Squinklebum threw his tiny hands up in frustration. “Then write it down in your electric mirror there, tree-legs!” He pointed at my hip pocket.

“Oh, my phone. Right.” I took it out and began typing his requests into the notes app as he listed his demands. He got more and more annoyed every time I had to stop him so I could catch up. Finally I got them all down, approximately a dozen questions in all. Most of them I had no clue how I could find out the answer without asking some very odd questions of the neighbours I hardly knew. By the end of this I’d surely be arrested or beaten to a pulp.

But it didn’t matter, because none of this was real. I told myself that again, and nodded resolutely. Squinklebum just glared at me.

“What are you still fucking doing here? Get the fuck to work!” He held his hands apart, threatening to clap them together, sparking the Magic Flame.

I blinked and turned around and stumbled back into the night. I scratched the glyph tattooed on my arm. Perhaps there was some way to get it off, or at least make it inoperable. As I approached my door, Noreen jumped out of somewhere with a wild, questioning face.

“Are they druggos? Are they gonna steal our electricity?” Her eyes frantically demanded answers as she smoked one of her menthols.

I tried to formulate an acceptable answer. I even momentarily entertained telling her the truth, but I immediately felt my arm begin to burn. I quickly hid my wrist from view. “There’s no one in there,” I spat out, unconvincingly.

Noreen looked disappointed. “Eh, they’ll be back. Bloody druggos.” Then she disappeared into the night, leaving only a thin trail of menthol smoke. I sighed and entered my apartment. It was ten-thirty already, and all I wanted to do was sleep and wake up with the world being reset to normality.

I woke to screaming pain in my arm and blurry shapes buzzing about my eyes.

“Wakey, wakey, tree-legs!” It was Squinklebum, of course — normality had not resumed. I sat up and tried to blink myself awake. I wondered if I should tell Squinklebum that “tree-legs” wasn’t the cutting insult he hoped it was. “How’s the list going?” he asked.

I wiped my face, and noticed the tattoo again. “Huh? I just went straight to bed last night. It was already eleven. Too late to go around asking people about their socks.”

Squinklebum clapped, and the Magic Flame lit up. The pain came back, snaking from the tattoo, up my arm and spine, to the base of my skull.

I gripped my temples. “Arghh! Stop it!”

He clapped again and it was gone. I leaned over to grab the water glass from my bedside table. I took a long sip. “Listen,” I put the glass back. “You can’t just go around asking people weird questions in the middle of the night. You’ll get punched, or have the police called on you.”

Squinklebum was puzzled, but then seemed to consider the idea. He turned to his crew. “Lollydots, is this true?”

A tiny flying hammerhead shark buzzed over. “That’s what our intel says, boss,” she said. “Humans are belligerently reserved about even the simplest of questions, such as, ‘who do you fancy?’ and ‘what’s your banking password?’ It’s what makes our job so hard.”

“Hmm,” said Squinklebum. He turned back to me. “What’s wrong with you pricks?”

I didn’t know where to begin. “Okay, the first of those questions is highly personal. And the second will likely get all your money stolen out of your bank account. We’re not magical beings. We need money to live.”

The pixies broke out in hysterical laughter. “You idiots don’t have magic, because eons ago you traded it for money,” said Squinklebum. “Because you’re stupid,” he added. More hysterical, high-pitched laughter.

That, of course, was all news to me. “Whatever, but you still can’t ask those types of questions. Even the questions on the list will probably get me ostracised from the community. Then I won’t be able to get any answers for you at all.” I figured that was a pretty good argument.

Squinklblossom gave a dismissive shrug. Or at least I think he did. He was too close and too tiny for me to be able to focus on him properly. I wondered if my eyesight needed checking. “We don’t give a shit about stupid human problems. Do your fucking job, or we’ll give you the Magic Flame again!”

The crew buzzed closer to me and tried their best to look menacing. They were so close that I was tempted to just clap my hands and smoosh them all like mosquitoes. But the very though set my arm ablaze again, if only for a moment.

“Hah!” scoffed Squinklebum. “Don’t even think about it! Stupid tree-legs. Get us some answers by tomorrow, or else! Let’s fly crew!” The pixies all buzzed out the window like a rainbow swarm of wasps.

I grumbled to myself and went to shut the window. I rubbed my arm, the pain still lingered in some kind of vestigial sense. I guessed I would just have to try to answer those questions. Some on the list weren’t too bad. I’m sure Noreen would bang on and on about who she voted for in… when was it? 1975? Maybe I could just give them one answer a day, string them and hope they lose interest and leave. Eventually they’d be eaten by a gecko or something. Or, I could just release a gecko or frog or something like that into the van.

Again my arm burned with imaginary fire, until I explicitly banished the thought.

“Fine! I won’t do it!” I said, to whatever invisible magical force was now ruining my life.

So it was that I found myself introducing myself to Joe at number 32.

“Oh, that’s great, that’s great,” I said at his answers to my questions. He had two kids, but was divorced. He was an electrician. Loved fishing. I started asking these questions just to seem genuine, but soon I realised I was stalling for time. How the hell was I going to get the actual info I needed? Finally a brilliant stratagem came to me out of the blue. “Sorry about all the questions, mate. Next I’ll be asking your middle name!” Followed by a proper blokey laugh.

Thankfully, he laughed too. We were two blokes having a blokey laugh. Until his face contorted into mock pain. “Ugh! It’s Ferdinand!” he said, covering his face in embarrassment. “I think my mum was was still high on painkillers, and my dad wasn’t in the room to stop her!”

“Oh wow. I don’t actually have a middle name. Always felt like I was missing out. Anyway I’ll stop bugging you. Have a good one!”

“You too, mate!” And I left him to it.

Thus I got my first bit of intel for the pixies. I entered it into my phone as I walked back home.

I showed the pixies my two bits of hot info. In addition to Joe’s middle name, I’d managed to get all of Noreen’s voting history. I’d only asked about 1975, as required. Strangely, she seemed to regret every single vote.

I knocked on the door of the van. It opened by itself.

“Oh, look who it is,” said Squinklebum. He was perched on the dream catcher again, trying to look intimidating. “You finished the list?”

“Well, no,” I said, subconsciously hiding my tattoo behind my back. “But I have two answers.” I showed him the answers on my phone. He squinted at the text.

“Two! Two whole answers! Wow! It must’ve really eaten into your walking around time, or whatever the fuck you humans do.” He snapped his fingers and Lollydots fluttered over to inspect the list. She then flew to a tiny machine with dozens of buttons that was set up in one corner of the van. She tapped away at the keys, occasionally flying back over to double-checking something against the list. When she finished, she pushed some button and a tiny print-out scrolled out of the top. She took the print-out and fed it into another machine, where it was shredded and fell into a little container as rainbow glitter.

Lollydots stuck a finger into the glitter and tasted it. “It’s good, boss.”

“Well that’s great,” said Squinklebum. “That’s fan-fucking-tastic. But it’s not the dozen or so bits of info we ordered, is it?”

“Well no,” I said, sheepishly. “But like I said, some of these questions are really hard to get an answer to. Some of them might not even be possible. Look…” I scrolled through the notes and pointed to a question. “‘Who in the street is most likely to fall into a bog?’ I don’t think you can even answer that question. Not definitively, anyway. You can only guess at it. Maybe if it was ‘who has fallen into a bog?’…”

Squinklebum looked at me as if I was extremely stupid. “But that’s not the fucking question is it? Answer the actual fucking questions, Suburb Ape! No ad libbing!”

I had to admit, ‘suburb ape’ stung a little more than it should’ve. “There’s only what, thirty to forty people on the street? Why don’t you just run every possible answer through your machine, and see which one works? For the glitter dealy?”

Squinklebum buzzed right up to my eyes. “I’m sorry, are you going to pay for a brand new, and very hard to acquire, infomogrifier machine?”

“I thought you guys didn’t use money?”

Squinklebum turned a shade of red that I wasn’t sure was natural or not. “We use fucking magic beans, don’t we? You dumb, lumbering club swinger!” He screamed in a very high-pitched voice. “Now get out of here, and go do your dead simple job!” He shaped to clap his hands, and I scampered out of the van, far more cowardly than I would have liked. It dawned on me that I’d been trained, like a cat that was being threatened with a spray-bottle.

I propped my head in my hands at the sales desk of GamesArcadia. The store was quiet, and Gigi was on her break, so my mind had had a chance to work itself into a knotty anxiety. There were still almost a dozen questions on my list. Who had the most striped socks? Who was most likely to fall into a bog? Who had the smartest dog in the whole street? The only way forward I could see was to make educated guesses. Maybe the pixies would let me go once they realised I was useless. I wasn’t convinced they had anything worse than the Magic Flame to threaten me with.

Someone jolted me out of my fretting by plonking a game down on the counter. I almost fell off my stool. The game was Curse Gangs 2. I looked across at a young girl who was looking back up at me with expectant eyes, presenting a gift card like a Japanese salaryman presenting his business card. I recognised her, she lived on my street, and I often waited at the bus station with her in the mornings, while she was off to school.

I paused, wondering if I should say anything, when she suddenly lit up and exclaimed, “Hey! You live on my street!”

“Yeah, I think so.” I took the gift card from her. It said ‘Happy birthday, Lilly! From Gran and Pa’ on it. “Oh, Lilly.” I read it aloud without really thinking. “I’m Dev,” I offered, as fair exchange.

She nodded. “Do you live with the old smoking lady?”

I laughed. “No, we live in separate houses. It used to be one big one, but it was split in two.”

Lily seemed to puzzle over the idea of houses being split in two. “She’s kinda scary.”

I laughed. “Don’t worry about Noreen, she’s harmless. Unless you have your bins out on the wrong day, then she’ll call the council.” I scanned the card and bagged the game for her. “So, Curse Gangs 2, huh? I heard there were even more curses this time.”

“372 curses to collect! I’ve been watching YouTube guides all day at school. I mean… at lunch time.” Her correction didn’t really convince me.

“Awesome, have fun, Lilly!”

She took the bag and grinned. “I have to do homework first, but then… the Curses begin! Mwahahaha!” The evil laugh was well practised. She skipped off, almost running right into Gigi, who was coming back from her break.

“Woah!” said Gigi, who basically had to cushion Lilly with her hands. “Hey! We’re stripy socks twins!” And she pointed at her knee-length socks, which were pink and black. I could see now that Lilly was also wearing striped socks. Blue and white. They high-fived.

“I have different coloured striped socks for every day of the week!” said Lilly. “Plus two pairs for footy.”

“Nice,” said Gigi. She returned to the counter as Lilly skipped off. She must’ve wondered why I looked like I’d just had an epiphany. “Hey! Cool tattoo!” She pointed to the Mark on my wrist.

I got off the bus after work and made a beeline for the pixies. I’d been trained, domesticated. I felt pathetic, but excited to show my new masters this little morsel I’d found. I was also a little annoyed that I had to stop for a van turning into a driveway. Wetlands Conservation Services was displayed on its side. The driver hopped out, kitted out in waders, and gave me a little wave. I waved back, politely, and heard someone call out from the front door, “Allan! Can you check the mail?”

Allan, wetlands worker, most likely to fall into a bog. Two epiphanies in a day. I raced to the pixies’ van.

The infomogrifier happily verified both bits of info as I waited nervously. Lollydots typed them in. Glitter was spewed out, and she gave it an approving taste test. I felt like I’d won a high-stakes poker match when it turned out that my new friend Allan indeed was most likely to fall into a bog. Maybe I should warn him? But when it was confirmed that Lilly did indeed have the most stripy socks, I began to feel sick. I felt like I was going through people’s garbage for their secrets. Until then I was only concerned with myself, about avoiding the agony of the Magic Flame. Now I realised that I wasn’t the only one involved in this twisted game of theirs.

Squinklebum kicked me out of the van once the facts had been verified. “You still got a bunch of those questions on that list. Better get out and get ’em, Suburb Ape, or you’ll get the Magic Flame again!” I trudged back home, sunken.

I spent a sleepless night stewing over the ethics of what I was doing. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t stand the briefest use of the Magic Flame. The best I could do was gamble on the answers to the questions on the list, and hope the whole thing would work out.

The rest of the week I parked my ethical dilemma and did my best not to get caught snooping around the neighbourhood, while I sniffed out enough clues to make my best guesses. Noreen, naturally, was a great source of gossip to glean from.

Big Samuel at number twelve was most likely to have the biggest shoes. Dolcie at number three was literally a librarian, so she was most likely to have read the most books. Cheryl the firefighter? Most likely to have broken the most windows. Noreen was both the oldest, and, by her own confession, the one with the longest police record. I once saw Jojo the border collie let himself back into his own yard by opening the gate latch with his paw. Apparently he’d gone on a walk by himself while his owners were out. He was a sure bet for smartest dog on the street.

As for fastest solver of the Rubik’s Cube? After months of practising during down times at GamesArcadia, I’d finally cracked it a little over a week ago. I’d since solved it once more, so I was betting on no-one else on the street having bothered and winning this category by default.

And that proved to be correct. In fact, all my guesses proved to be correct. Every one of them produced the little piles of glittery pixie-crack that the little buggers were so desperate for. I was suspicious. It was like getting every answer on an exam right. For some people that might be expected, but for me I’d assuming some kind of clerical error. Though I’m not sure if I’d ever notify anyone of it, and I was willing to take any error in my favour here, too.

“Okay, okay, tree legs. You’re in luck,” said Squinklebum. “There’s only one question we have left for you, and then we’re done.”

I tried to swallow the optimistic feeling that was rising. I knew there had to be some kind of stinger. “Done?”

Suddenly Squinklebum was relaxed, almost bored. All his tough posturing had vanished. “Yeah, there’s only so much information you can mogrify in an area. Diminishing returns and all that. We gotta go somewhere else. Thank fuck.”

I was surprised to be offended by his slight on my street. “And me?” I asked, hopefully.

Squinklebum smiled and spread his arms wide. Well, relatively wide. “We never have to see your gigantic, ugly mug again! Lucky us!”

“And the tattoo?”

A tiny shrug. “I don’t know how tattoos work. Don’t they come off? What’s with you guys bathing all the time if they don’t?”

I guessed that meant it was permanent. At least Gigi liked it. “So what is the last question?” I was almost afraid to ask.

“Well, let’s see…” Squinklebum took out his specs. “The question, Juniperbooboo!” The seahorse fluttered over with a piece of paper. Squinklebum began reading it, but stopped to look at me expectantly. “You wanna do a drumroll or something?”

“No, not particularly,” I said.

He shrugged, before putting on his best tiny reading voice. “Who, on this street, has had an affair? Oooh! A salacious one!”

My stomach churned.

He was waiting for my reaction. “A juicy one! Only need one name, though, so no need to look so… traumatised?”

I felt sick. My mouth went dry. I thought frantically for a way out, but we were here, and it was only one more question and then I was free of this twee nightmare. I took a deep breath.

“It’s me,” I said. “I’m the one who’s had an affair.”

Squinklebum’s eyes went wide, and his mouth turned into a little O. “You! The most plain grain of the suburb apes, had an affair? Wow!” He turned to Lollydots, who was at the ready by the Infomogrifier. “Punch that one up, Dots. You know it’s gonna work, just look at his face!” He snorted a short laugh.

Lollydots began tapping away at the Infomogrifier. I tried not to stop my leg from shaking, giving away my anxiousness. Suddenly Lollydots looked anxious herself. Then the machine started spewing smoke.

So the machine did actually do something. It did somehow know the truth of things. “Oops,” I said.

Squinklebum tore across the van to inspect the machine. Then he furiously tore back my way, clapping, clapping and clapping. The Mark lit up with the Magic Flame. The pain was so immense that it caused me to stumble out of the van and fall over onto the grass. Squinklebum was now right in my face.

“Yeah, cop that, you big dumb shit!” he squeaked, furiously. “We’re not fucking around! Get us the answer, or we’ll make your life a living hell!”

I got up and scrambled back to my house. I was even further in trouble, but at least now I knew that you can’t fool an Infomogrifier.

Another sleepless night. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go around asking people if they’ve had an affair. My only real chance was Noreen. If I got her going on the right topic, she wouldn’t stop until she told me everyone she’d ever known who’d had an affair — or she suspected of having an affair at least. So my plan was to catch her on her morning smoke and somehow engineer a conversation about infidelity. If that didn’t work… well, I was out of ideas — even stupid ones.

In the morning I caught Noreen as usual, smoking on the step as I pretended to be early to work.

“Morning,” I said.

“Bloody cold,” she replied.

“Are you all caught up on your soaps?” This was my segue, and I only realised how awkward it was when it came out of my mouth.

“What? I don’t watch that shit. Only watch TruthNews and the Shopping Channel. Oh, also the trots when it’s on.”

Well, that explained a lot, but it didn’t help me at all. “Well, got any good gossip?” My last ditch effort.

Suddenly she was focused. “The Council’s putting up a mobile tower on that empty block to spy on us!” She pointed at the pixie’s block with her cigarette. Not exactly what I was looking for. “The only way to stop them is to cover your windows with tinfoil!” She shook furiously at the idea, and against the cold. “At least the bloody druggies will have to move on.”

Well, that was it. I was truly out of ideas. I eyed the bus stop, impatiently, looking for an excuse to exit. “Are you really going to cover your windows in foil, Noreen?” Honestly, I was kind of worried about her at this point.

“You bet I will! No way I’m letting them read my lotto numbers!”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t want them stealing your seventh division prize”. That’d be a whole $27 you’d miss out on. Thankfully I could see the bus turning the corner. I made my apologies and jogged down the road.

At work I told Gigi about Noreen’s theory. She laughed, but showed me her wallet. It was lined with wire mesh. This was very much a Gigi thing, who loved gadgets.

“It’s a Faraday cage.” She was expecting me to recognise the word, and rolled her eyes when I didn’t. “The wire mesh distributes EM radiation along the cage itself, meaning it can’t pass through. It stops random people reading the data on my credit card or whatever.”

I did my best to look like I understood. “So Noreen’s right? If she covers her windows in tinfoil it would stop the signals?”

Gigi tapped her wallet against the counter. “Maybe. If she wrapped her entire house in it.”

“She’ll do it, and then whine to me about how the phone company’s cut the reception inside her house.”

She went on to talk about her curse collection in Curse Gangs 2. Meanwhile a theory was formulating in my head.

On my lunch break I went to the supermarket and bought a roll of tinfoil.

When I got home I gave myself an hour after dinner to think of any way to discover who on the street had had an affair in a way that I wouldn’t end up being disgusted with myself for ever. Or beaten to a fine mist. I came up blank, so it was time to commit to Plan B. Probably less of a “plan,” and more of a “Hail Mary.”

I took the tinfoil and wrapped it around my arm, completely covering the Mark. Then it was time for a provisional test of my theory.

I stood up and declared aloud: “I’m going to tell National Geographic, and TruthNews and all the other news outlets about the existence of the pixies in the empty block across from my house.”

Nothing happened.

Next test: “I’m going to squash those pixies like slow, fat mosquitoes.” Again, nothing. So far the theory was holding up. I put my hoodie on and hid the foil under my sleeve. Then I went outside and marched over to the pixie van. Maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe I’d end up with my arm on fire again. But I’d had a gutful of this nonsense, and was prepared to risk all that.

I banged on the door of the van.

It opened to a rather smug looking Squinklebum. “Well, Suburb Ape? You got the info we need?”

“No, I don’t, and I’m not going to do this anymore.” I blurted it out so fast that I couldn’t possibly have sounded confident.

“Oh, really?” He turned to his crew and gestured at me — what the hell are we supposed to do with this useless lump. “Look who thinks he’s big and scary now!” There was a chorus of squeaky laughs. He turned back to me. “I’ll give you another shot,” he began speaking very slowly. “Who… on this street… has had an affair?”

Absurdly, I was stung by the jeering of the pixies. I got angry. I thought again of swatting them all like bugs. Of tipping over the whole van with some unlikely source of strength. Of setting the whole thing on fire.

Even those thoughts didn’t trigger the Magic Flame.

I stepped into the van.

Squinklebum was forced to buzz backwards in my gigantic draft. He folded his arms, tried to make himself look big. “I’m not… going… to do it,” I said. This time I could feel the strength of my own words.

“Well, then,” said Squinklebum. And he clapped. Nothing happened. He looked at his hands as if they’d stopped working. He tried again. And again and again. He began to panic as he realised nothing was going to happen.

“You know,” I said. “I can clap too.” I held my hands out wide. I breathed in, menacingly. And with a sudden whoosh of air, I clapped my hands over him. The sound echoed around the van. Tiny gasps were let out. I opened a tiny peephole in my cupped hands. Squinklebum was curled up, hands protecting his head. He realised he was still there, and patted himself down, checking everything was still where it was supposed to be. He fluttered his wings, experimentally. It tickled.

“Next time I’ll do it properly,” I said.

“How? How?” he whispered, discombobulated.

I straightened my back and put on my best Curse Gangs narrator voice. “You said Humans once knew of magic, and that we’d traded it for riches. But there are still some who know the ancient ways.” I turned and gazed poignantly at Noreen’s house. I dropped Squinklebum from my hands. He tumbled towards the floor, until he found his wings. Then he drunkenly fluttered back to his dream catcher perch.

I was still in character. “And now leave this place, and never come back! Lest I spread the word to the townspeople about the villains in their midst! You will be in right trouble when I teach them what I have just shown you.” I may have gone a little over the top, but I was beginning to enjoy it. I steepled my fingers together like a fantasy TV elf. Suddenly I realised that if pixies were real, elves might be too.

Squinklebum looked at me with absolute venom, but also with utter defeat. “Fine,” he spat. “We’ve got enough out of you big dumb shits, anyway. Get the fuck out of my van.”

I did as commanded, but this time I walked away with my head held high. As I crossed the circle of runes, I stopped and scrubbed some of it out, breaking the circle. My nerd knowledge told me that this would break whatever spell it was supposed to affect.

The next morning I looked out at the empty block. The van had gone. Suddenly Noreen appeared at my elbow. She lit up her cigarette.

“The cops finally came and bloody did something about it last night!” she said. “Saw the whole thing from my window.” I must’ve missed that. How long was it after I left?

“Well,” I said. “I guess they can build that mobile tower now.”

Noreen scratched her elbow. “Shit, I forgot about that.”

“It’s okay. I have a fresh roll of tinfoil if you need it.” Noreen scoffed.

“I have heaps of tinfoil! Boxes and boxes!”

“Really?”

“Yeah, my ex-husband was in the kitchen supplies biz. Tinfoil, cling wrap, baking paper… stuff like that. Left boxes of that stuff behind when he split.”

This was a sadder side of Noreen I hadn’t encountered before. “Aw, I’m sorry about that.”

She waved the apology away, ash falling from her cigarette. “Don’t be. Was my fault. Couldn’t keep it in me pants.” She snorted a hacky laugh.

“Goddamn it, Noreen,” I said, and trudged off to catch my bus.

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