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by M.K. Hobson
Fantasy, 29 pages.
Originally Published in Interzone, 2008
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Pamela didn’t bring the faun home from Central Park because she was lonely for companionship; for that she had her beloved son Riley, not to mention a fat tabby named “Buttons.” And it wasn’t that the faun was an exceptionally winning creature who entranced her with a cheerful air upon his rustic pipe; when Pamela found him, he was quite dirty, skimpily clad in raw skins, and there was a provocatively belligerent gleam in his eye that promised infinite recursions of unsavory mayhem.
No, Pamela brought the faun home from Central Park because she wanted to annoy Magdalena Delancy.
In all fairness, Magdalena Delancy was the kind of person who was so infuriating that one might think it a reasonable bargain to destroy one’s own life in the service of causing some slight perturbation in hers.
Magdalena was a creative genius at making other people feel miserable. She held fortnightly gatherings at her apartment on the Upper West Side, and at the focus of every one of these gatherings was a “challenge.” What vast swathes of misery lurked unexpressed within that simple noun! For Magdalena would ask her guests to do things... things like compose extemporaneous villanelles in front of beard-stroking experts from Columbia University; receive hip-hop dancing lessons from unimaginably fit young black women with names like “Edge” or “Funky Cleopatra”; and/or scrounge up mind-bogglingly arcane costumes (“no, no, the exiled French Court of sixteenth century Aquitaine, you poor fat goose,” a grinning Magdalena had once chastised a red-faced, houppelande-clad Pamela).
Magdalena’s most recently posed challenge was a scavenger hunt. “You are to bring the most interesting thing you can find in Central Park!” she had breathed over the phone line into Pamela’s unwilling ear, before hanging up with a tooth-jarring crash.
Oh sure, a scavenger hunt. It seemed innocent enough. Too innocent. Pamela knew Magdalena well enough to foresee some bitter sting hidden in the tail of that innocent seeming. Magdalena was sure to make her guests take the objects and do something dreadful with them; lick them or render them in pastels or incorporate them into a hat to be worn on a walk down Madison Avenue.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to dissatisfy Magdalena. Like a super-evolved playground bully or the movie-version of a Nazi nurse, Magdalena was one whose cruelty held strange fascination. Her brutally whimsical power, so randomly employed and to such unpredictable ends, imbued her with a kind of attractive glamour. Pamela found herself thinking at odd moments of the cruel hollows where Magdalena’s slender throat met her knife-sharp shoulder bones. At moments like that, Pamela had to calm herself by mentally reciting the ingredients for a type of Jell-o salad her son Riley was particularly fond of.
So it was that Pamela had gone down into the Ravine, a wildish, woodsy part of Central Park, and had spent the better part of an afternoon poking around listlessly with a stick, hoping to turn up a giant puffball or muskrat or something she wouldn’t necessarily mind licking.
Then she’d come across the faun, sunning himself on a glittering outcropping of granite. He was compact, jockey-sized; his man-half was elegantly muscular, his goat legs were stocky, and he had a face that was a very beautiful mingling of sweetness and menace.
Pamela’s heart gave a leap. It was, at the start, a leap of surprise, but by the end of the leap it had transmogrified into a leap of subversive joy, of rebellion, of delicious anticipation at the thought of striking Magdalena so crushing a blow. She envisioned herself arriving triumphantly at Magdalena’s apartment with the most unarguably astonishing and unique thing from Central Park that there ever was or possibly could be. Magdalena might kill her or kiss her. The uncertainty was thrilling.
“Will you come to a party with me?” she asked the faun eagerly.
The faun turned a piercing gaze on her. Before she’d spoken to him, he’d been carefully and thoughtfully disassembling a pinecone with his slender fingers.
“Is there something you desire?” he asked.
Pamela scrunched her nose.
“Well, of course. I want you to go to a party with me. I just asked you!”
“That is something you want,” the faun said. He seemed to be holding his breath. “What I want to know is if there something that you desire.”
Pamela thought about it. She thought about Magdalena. She thought particularly about Magdalena’s eyes, of making their condescending hardness melt into slush. Into humiliation and remorse. Into something human and touchable.
“Yes,” Pamela breathed. “Yes, there is.”
The faun sighed wearily.
“Then I will help you,” he said.
Quickly, Pamela bundled the wild youth in her cashmere coat. She hustled him out of the park, glanci -- [End of Preview.]