Chapter Text
“You're kidding me.”
The silence in the kitchen had spanned seconds, creeping up to half a minute, before Marianne managed to scrape together enough words to form a sentence, barely paying attention to the arrangement of them, her attention still dominated by the unlikely object dangling in her open window.
A yellow strip of fly paper hung in a sticky spiral from the top of the window frame, sprinkled with the black remains of a few persistent fruit flies and mosquitoes that defied the cooling weather and continued to plague the area. This was all in order, exactly as Marianne had left it. But the spiral was pulling taut under the weight of a new victim that was buzzing and flailing so violently that the strip was bouncing up and down, the coil of it compressing and stretching at the fluctuating weight of the defiant insect.
Marianne squinted her eyes at the way light hit the creature's buzzing wings, fracturing and scattering in reflected rainbow sparkles over the sill, then glanced around the room for a makeshift weapon to dispatch the oversized insect with. The flyswatter seemed to have hidden itself again and she wasn't sure it was up to the task of the specimen thrashing and buzzing like some sort of postmodern wind chime. Maybe a quick whack with her shoe to stun it? Except she was bare foot and that thing looked big enough to make a horrible crunch and leave a gory smear. Her eyes fell on the mostly empty mayo jar upended in the drainer. Maybe catch and release, then. But releasing was going to happen a long way from the house to make sure the crunchy little intruder didn't get any ideas about a return trip.
Marianne slipped the jar under the fly strip, reaching up and detaching the other end from the window frame. The strip swayed back and forth above the jar and Marianne held her breath, trying to time the drop just right. The moment the indignant bug hovered over the jar's mouth she let go of the fly strip, letting the whole thing drop. One quick movement turned the jar over and slammed it top down onto to the sill, the end of the strip sticking out like a tail but it's prisoner secured inside.
“Gotcha! And it's your lucky day. Usually I'm a take no prisoners kind of girl.”
The trailing fly strip was trimmed off and Marianne shoved a piece of junk mail underneath the jar, flipping it back upright and holding the jar up so she could inspect her captive. She had gotten the impression that the thing was a grasshopper or some relative, three or four inches long.
“Grasshoppers have wings, right?” She asked nobody in particular, tilting the jar and trying to peer through the streaks of dried mayo and past the yellow tape trapped in the jar with the bug. “Or is that locust? Huh. If you're a locust maybe I should perform the happy dispatch after all. Can't have you swarming around and eating our crops. Not my crops personally, mind you, just crops in general.”
The swift and sudden capture seemed to have stunned the possible locust into stillness, and it rolled passively with the tilting of its prison. A small metallic clink sounded against the glass and Marianne squinted harder, trying to see if the thing's exoskeleton was hitting the glass and making the noise. With another firm shake she got the bug to flip over. The fly strip was sticking to the jar and the insect dangled long, skinny legs in the air. Her nose almost smashed against the jar, Marianne puzzled out transparent wings, four of them, two stuck to the fly strip and the other two hanging limp. Ouch. She hoped that wouldn't tear if she tried to pull them out of the glue.
The thing didn't look like a grasshopper. Or locust. It looked a bit . . . person shaped. She counted four limbs and looking carefully she might have hazarded that two were arms and two were legs. It wasn't until her prisoner lifted it's head, revealing a tiny face, that she was at all sure she wasn't just imagining things.
A tiny, distinctively humanish face blinked up at her, eyes light in a shadowed face, disappearing and reappearing with each dazed blink.
Marianne tried to say six different things at once, but all that came out was an inarticulate noise of surprise, and the jar and envelop dropped from her hands and bounced off the kitchen linoleum. She instinctively made a grab for it as it rolled across the floor, but smacked her head against the handle of a skillet that was sticking off the edge of the counter. Marianne went down, clutching her head, the skillet descending with her, the jar hit the bottom of the fridge and came to a wobbly stop, rocking back and forth.
“Oooow!” Marianne groaned, “Locust is a crunchy cockroach fairy and I think I need stitches!”
A faint, hollow groan echoed hers and a distant but distinct voice said, “I'm not a fairy, you blundering oaf!”
“I must've hit my head harder than I thought . . .” Marianne kept her eye on the mayo jar while she prodded her hairline, feeling for skull fractures or gapping wounds.
“Sire?” A wavering voice squeaked from somewhere above Marianne and she banged the back of her head on the dishwasher in shock. Groaning redoubled, she looked up and saw a tiny yellow shape perched on the edge of the counter. Through watering eyes she thought she could make out goggling eyes and tiny hands being nervously wrung.
“Sire?” The new concussion-induced hallucination asked again, “Need any help?”
“No!” The voice from the jar shouted, “Get out of here! Run!”
“Told you!” A third hallucination, this one merely auditory, chimed in. The nervous yellow hallucination darted out of sight and Marianne vaguely heard something like what tiny claws scrabbling across a tiled counter top might sound like.
Silence fell over the kitchen.
“So,” Marianne drew out the word, watching the mayo jar warily, “If you're not a fairy, what are you?”
Seconds ticked away in heavy silence. Somehow Marianne knew that the lack of response was not because she was talking to thin air. It was a deliberate silence, the silence of someone very loudly not speaking. It was the kind of silence that went with murderous glares and the irritated grinding of teeth.
“Because if you're just a bug I'm going to stomp you and then go get myself checked out for head trauma.”
A murmur came from the jar, sounding almost sulky, “. . . goblin.”
“Goblin?”
“That's what I said.”
“I guess we're not talking Tolkien goblins.”
There was more deliberate silence.
“Alright. So. To recap. You're a goblin who was caught in my fly strip and indirectly gave me a severe concussion. Right.”
“Oh, poor wee baby,” The alleged goblin sneered, “Bumped your tender head.”
“Okay, okay, dude,” Marianne said, wincing at the sarcasm, “I get it. You're not having the best day either.”
There was a noise that might have been a snort.
“Do you need help?”
The silence stretched on even longer this time. Marianne finished checking her head for damage and found no serious dents or gouges.
“If you would be so kind,” The goblin said, grudging every word spoken, “that would be . . . lovely.”