The Four O’Clock Fairies
 
By
 
Jillian Kaczak
 
 
 

​At the day’s end, a driblet of water played from the base of a four o’clock’s trumpet, the sound of it mourning and slow. The gardener cupped her hands and caught its descent while its wings were still ripe and forming. One breath, and the warmth of it helped them unfurl. The cool air of sunset did all the rest.
 
More of them fell dripping out in a flood. She caught another. It slipped from her grasp and hit the ground with a splatter. She caught another, and this time it stayed in the curve of her palm; there it was safe enough to be something more than regrets. The tail end of Taps completed the drizzle, an echo of bugles coming from soft yellows and pinks as freshly grown fairies cried and got fussy. They stumbled about, glad that they were no longer dew drops. Wa wa wa, they barked in high, brassy notes. They circled her singing, a rattling of bones that danced through her garden while she pinched off the dead growths of their flowers and sang along too. As night tore across the sky overhead, the depths of it listened. Every star was a witness who winked in ovation.
 
There weren’t many who appreciated the sound of extinction, if any at all. It was a very particular and lonely blackness that birthed four o’clock fairies, though not necessarily deliberate. She didn’t mind it. She’d tend to anything that grew here, especially the seeds that blew in on screams and shaky exhales. It let her witness with soft curiosity which village sowed whichever color from faraway kingdoms she’d never seen. One wasn’t particularly prettier than any other because Someone made people in all sorts of colors, and for that what they became when they passed was always so vibrant. Becoming their collector was just a way to see more.
 
So every night into day she’d catch any last breaths still wandering the corridors, scattering them throughout the garden to let them take root. Then when they bloomed, they had until the next morning to live their short life-after-life before they’d wither away, and she’d spend the next day alike, and so on and so forth. It wasn’t a job that was appreciated. But it was what this lonely place needed, and sometime before, so long ago she could hardly remember how in any correctness, she became Death to get over the mystery of it.  Back then it had made perfect sense to her: if Death was a gardener, then what was death but a garden? Both were very green places without any stillness, where life still knew itself afterward within its decay. There was no need to tame them, but a pruning would always be welcome.
 
For centuries of which she’d lost count, she’d strolled along these paths measured in exact ninety-degree angles and kept the soil between them watered and warm. In the evenings, she fed the bare spots more breaths. At the smallest of hours she’d rest, and enjoy the brass chorus of four o’clock fairies who reached adolescence. Within that short while, their music was metallic and bright, and utterly unapologetic.
 
Of course there were times when this routine was interrupted and some traveler or company would approach her castle. Today brought an old, struggling man, who hobbled along the trellis one shuffling step after the other. He wore a robe of deep crimson, and his mule brayed as the outer walls drew nearer. Under the moon he shined like a young inkcap, the pale fur on his hood curled like its mane. She didn’t bother to acknowledge his presence and continued gathering the petals she’d pinched. He’d reach her eventually. They all did, expecting some gift, for her to honor them for their deeds.
 
She spit to the side and licked at the smear of what caught on her lip. There was no honor here to be given, only the now, this moment regretless, and that wasn’t ever enough for men who thought themselves great. The four-o’clock fairies circled above her, sniffing the wind. She did so too and smelled the rot in the man’s season. It took him until sunrise to find his way past the entrance. Dragging one foot behind his cane, he weakly folded in on himself, and wheezed.
 
What’s the point when you’ll only deny me? she thought to ask him. Instead, she sighed and leant to his level, sitting on the bulk of her surcoat. Small bodies came and perched on his limbs. He stiffened, and waited for her to speak, but she knelt there quietly, watching the heavy rise and fall of his chest like a novelty. They shared in that silence, and in it, his robe grew littered with pinpricks of foaming saliva. Tiny carrion feet skittered over his spine and made of its ridges their playground.
 
On top of his person the fairies cultivated the rest of their lives; the sun rose, morning tea passed, and so too did they. With them, autumn drifted around him in brown and crumbling wings, and the things in the soil reached up and tore into their matter. Tears wore down his cheeks.
 
“What is it you seek?” she then asked him.
 
Like everyone who came before him, he answered, “Surely not this.”
 
She raked her fingers along their remains, breaking them down into fine pieces. His hand shot out, and encircled her wrist, desperately pulling it away from the dirt.
 
“That’s enough! Please,” he said roughly, his broken nails digging into her skin.
 
“It’s life. It’s meant to be repurposed.”
 
“It’s death–”
 
“And where do you think your journey has lead you?”
 
He told her: This realm was of magic. It’s every stone held power and purpose. It sat so far from the rest of the world because it ran lush with ghosts.
 
And there it was, what he sought— or whom.
 
“I can’t bring them back,” she told him. “But I can give you a choice.” A simple yes or a no, that was all that she needed. If he denied her, then he needed to be on his way. “I can pluck the seed of you and plant you inside my garden. If they are not already in bloom, then you will have one more day with them. But you will not know them. And they will not know you.”
 
He blinked furiously, and suddenly his eyes began darting between the various flowers, searching. Those that were orange, those that were pink, he gave his attention to what rose in the quadrants, what green crept over the rooftop. Stared at everything she raised until he understood the impossibility, because he knew none of these.
 
The realization was so terrible he collapsed, faint at the number of seedlings and beds and each outreaching stem. At all the lapses of colors that still played in the shadows, the same cellulose skin that crinkled beneath him; whose sound left him heaving.
 
She wondered who it was that left him so desperate. A brother, a child, a wife?
 
She let him be for a while, and he fell apart pretending she could not see him. That the pale, trialing hem dragging itself gray on the litter around him was somebody else’s. When more four o’clocks inevitably opened she let their fairies mature, then brought them along as she went back for his answer. This bunch was more courteous and had a few manners, so she figured he’d better see the appeal. But he was not where she’d left him; rather, he’d taken to ripping out shrubs in a corner. Dawn caught the furor within his eyes, and at the sight of her, he trembled.
 
“Get those away from me!” he cried. The heads of what flowers he’d torn out laid heavily beside him, and his fell as if suddenly weighed down by every one of his years
 
“I do not decide,” she said with some severity, “how they come and go.”
 
The man started to scream, and the fairies flew to him, wondering at his flat yellow teeth. One of them tittered and crawled down his collar. His expression deserted. She knew exactly when he began mourning the rest of a life he hadn’t yet lost.
 
“How is this fair?” he asked in a whisper.
 
“There is no reward for living.”
 
“There should be.”
 
She considered him. “Do not think yourself so monumental. It is mercy and grace to lose yourself. To know someone again without actually knowing. That is the only gift I can give you; the choice.”
 
“So this is your magic. Death and uncertainty.” His mouth wobbled. “Don’t I deserve more for all that I’ve done?” She wouldn’t know what he did, nor did she care. The man got to his feet, and she steadied him lightly, but his shoulders shook away from her touch, and still she said nothing. “She’s gone then. She’s become…this– something so hideous?”
 
“No, she’s become something this beautiful,” she said, and he scowled at her bleakly, his denial almost certainly deliberate. She found it distasteful. “Perhaps you did not ever deserve her if you do not still see her in the mold that’s grown over her tombstone, or the ghouls that rise up before it. Perhaps you did not truly love her if you are unwilling to join her in decomposition, to share her uncertainty as you both blossom again and wait for decay. Is that not the very foundation of romance?”
 
His lips pursed. The first rays of sunlight traced the extent of the trestle, steeping the cedars below in the blue of a glazed composition. The invitation in it spread slowly out and back to them. He watched it come for him, and she watched an important piece inside of him change as he trampled the four o’clocks he’d pulled. They stared at him sadly through the long eyes of their stamens, necks thin and flattened. Their fairies blew through their lips a name that sounded like his, the bratty demand in them buzzing. Yet he did not see familiarity within their colors, or hear how the music in them pitched and howled to the beat of a heart he should know. He backed away while they tittered and spun as there wasn’t a lovelier morning to them because this was their only. He still had many left and did not understand this, or them for the matter. 
 
She reached out, and let some of the fairies land on her fingers. Theirs was a fragile weight, barely that of an acorn. Against her knuckles, mandibles clicked and wings brushed her with kisses. She gave a few back in return.
 
He swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut. “I was promised a blessing!”
 
“Yet you won’t accept mine. If that is your answer, then go.” Her words bore no preference.
 
“You were given a choice, and have made it. Now leave.”
 
Somehow that made the man laugh, an uncomfortable barking that choked off his sobs. He finally looked at her, maybe to see this creature that denied him the prize of his journey, or maybe to spit in her face. He did just that, and it hit the cheek of a woman who was tall and old, features not so much gathered in the corners to be gracefully aged, but carved deeply as if each crevice was well earned and necessary. Her mantle was the same one she sewed with the silk she got at her wedding. The mud dried on it looked like old blood. She was as hunched as a dowager, and he hated her so much then that he wept.
 
“Go.” The good will she’d humored him with had fled. Her voice strained to keep barren of fury.
 
He left, retrieving his mule from the salt lick with some coughs and a shudder, stiffly making his way back over the trellis. Before long, he disappeared with the last cockcrow.
 
The fairies drifted back to her side. Their throats closed like a mute, the disappointment in their cries mellow and low. She whistled in bitterness along with their sadness till the loss of their new friend was no longer as crisp a feeling, and their attentions retired. Lingering did not exist in her castle, even if she had an eternity to spend. For the first time that day, Death gave a smile. It was browning and fragrant.
 
The memory of him was not one she held onto. Years could pass her by without notice. More visitors came and went and not one wanted her magic. It took less than a hundred years to fade and be just a name, and a hundred more to be known only by the land itself you were buried in. Integrity was the first thing devoured, so she celebrated them all equally. Maybe some achieved greatness. Or maybe they simply became the petals of a flower that blooms for a day. It didn’t necessarily matter.
 
But she did find him again, or what became of his body. When a dew drop slipped her by and blew into the valley, the unpredictability of its destination was new; a curiosity outside the rote. So she descended the castle to find it and walked under the trees that protected her home with their branches. For as far as they stretched, the growth of them curled upwards like the outskirt of clouds. Beneath them the floor fruited in all sorts of directions. Here there were no footprints or tracks, no disturbances to the usual springtails and hyphae. The threads of their collective reached further and out towards the edge of the valley, the bodies protruding in thicker groupings as she continued, following the echoes of a choking B-flat.
 
Eventually she reached a black trumpet thicket nearby a blanket of moss that held the vague shape of a mule. Their mouths were sipping her dew drop, smothering a fairy out of its chance to be born. She vaguely knew it was him by the notes of his to persist; the damp scent of his season, the rot of his breath. But the lips of his trumpets no longer held any temper to spew, and for that she found him more pleasant. Her fingers caressed the striations along the length of his necks and she admired at how he became so many more than the man that he was. 
 
She said goodbye with polite indifference. But a few of the fairies wanted to stay, playing within the mushrooms, and she did not stop them. Eventually they’d wilt and inevitably he’d joined them. If there was love in the nightside of existence, it was in acquiring every part of eachother until you were selfsame. The gardener fed them a breath, the shade of it crimson, and left them to be.
 
 
Jillian Kaczak is a writer and illustrator from New Jersey. Her portfolio of work currently resides on her computer and over the span of fifteen or so notebooks. She enjoys writing fiction and children's books, and has an interest in mythology and folklore. Rumor has it she makes a mean banana bread.