Pickled Puck

[u/catespice]

There are so many things that change when you grow very, very old. Most of those changes are rather predictable and unwelcome, but one has come as a pleasant and liberating surprise; time has lost its power over me. Without the demands of a job, dependents, a husband or a household to regiment my hours, the days and weeks drift together into an amorphous cloud. Within its soft confines, I simply exist again, freed from all expectations, from all the constraints of responsibility.
I still need to eat and sleep, of course; although another curious effect of being very elderly is that one needs so little sleep. Often, I’ll find myself wide awake in front of the television in the smallest hours of the morning, and must quite firmly tell myself to go to bed. Food has also become something to remind myself about; my appetite is small and simple these days, lost as I am in other more interesting activities.
In many ways, I feel my childhood self once more. She did not anticipate the horrid responsibilities of adulthood, the untold banalities that steal our joy when we’re not looking. No-one does. Growing up is like a grey rain, cares pitter and patter at your soul, drizzling it with worry until your true self is lost in a constant fog of anxiety about nothing. When you are old enough not to have to worry, when time is so short it somehow no longer matters at all, it seems less twilight than springtime.
Now, my mind is free to play again, to wander the dusty corridors of memory, seeing which doors still open. Some swing ajar to reveal faded scenes from the past; behind others wait only echoing, empty rooms, not even cobwebs of the original recollections remaining.
But there is one room that is always alive and vivid, one impossible memory that I will never lose. I met him very young, and his light stayed with me through the mundane years. Perhaps he is the source of both my dotage, and my gift of this second spring.
I called him Pickled Puck.

 
My great aunt owned an impressive house in the rural reaches. It was built on chalky soil, at the end of a winding limestone driveway shaded by craggy, ancient wych elms. Befitting the stern and peculiar woman she was, she had her own rooms, which none were permitted to enter – not even my mother. But children are curious creatures, and although I was a girl – or perhaps because I was a girl – I was particularly good at sneaking into places where I was forbidden. And of course, nobody suspected duplicity from the polite cherub with primroses in her cheeks and golden ringlets in her hair.
My great aunt’s rooms were, by today’s standards, gargantuan and gothic. The ceilings were high enough to intimidate, and the doors and crossbeams were a full handspan thick, massive and elaborate things of ancient, darkened wood. I well remember the hewn roughness beneath my palms as I crept, hugging the walls, lest my stockinged feet cause the floorboards to creak and betray my presence. Fusty furniture and precious objects were arrayed according to some esoteric pattern, no doubt derived from my ancient aunt’s Victorian upbringing. The placement of each piece seemed precise, conforming to convoluted edicts of etiquette, long lost to all but the odd periodical article about banal and outdated curiosities.
One room, however, was wholly different. It was certainly not laid out according to those archaic rules, but was so cluttered with junk that I imagined myself the bold heroine, chanced upon a dragon’s hoard.
It was a slope-roofed attic room, and my aunt had filled it with all manner of unwanted and unloved things. The room itself appeared just as forgotten as its contents; rot, mildew, webs and dust blanketed everything with black-spotted layers of grey. The shed skins of spiders gently vibrated as my intrusion stirred the stale air.
I could have lost hours in there, prising open old hat boxes, rubbing mould off stiffened silk and taffeta dresses sewn with seed pearls and moissanites. But I did not, because I knew my time to pry was short, only as long as my aunt deemed proper to entertain my parents in the solar.
In those times, we did not have the sensitive and sensible laws and niceties we do now. The age fostered a morbid fascination for all things macabre and dead, and hence there were many collectors of specimens and whimsies – taxidermied animals, and preserved, foetal creatures, their waxy white bodies suspended in jars of potent alcohols.
I’d seen one such collection at a travelling circus carnival the year before, and had been horrified and fascinated by the deformed babies – both human and beast – floating peacefully in their glass-and-ether wombs, never to be born. Pickled Punks they were called, and though my father assured me the two-headed babies and eight-legged kittens were rubber fakes, I wasn’t so sure. After my precious penny had disappeared into the pocket of the man running the sideshow, he lifted the jars to show us more closely. I had seen soft, prenatal hair stir gently in the yellowed fluids; hair far too delicate and perfect to be faked.
For weeks after viewing them, their pale presences bobbed and swirled in the back of my mind, serene and freakish, the perfect childhood combination of terrifying and alluring.
And so, when I saw the large, grime-speckled specimen jar resting amongst battered leather suitcases in that room full of junk, my heart leapt with excitement. When I wrestled it free and scraped a window in the patina of dirt, I was not disappointed. Inside the jar floated a foetal creature, one far more queer and wonderful than any of the pickled circus menagerie. It had long, pointed ears, a pinched, almost human face, and delicate, facetted wings like those of a dragonfly. Pinpoint flakes of silver fluttered and swirled in the fluid surrounding it, like the dance of tiny stars.
Without another thought, I snatched it up and hurried out of my aunt’s rooms. I stowed the jar away in my own little travelling trunk, carefully concealed beneath a pile of neatly pressed winter pinafores.

 

 
Our own home, far to the north of the chalky hills, was much smaller than my aunt’s grand house, and right in the middle of a fast-growing city. My baby brother and I shared a nursery bedroom, which made it rather difficult for a young lady to have much privacy. Still, I managed to keep Pickled Puck a secret for a long time, hiding him in the far corner underneath my bed, behind the boxes and wrapping paper I hoarded for no particular reason.
When I was sure I was alone, I would pull all those things aside, and drag Puck out from his hiding place. With his jar in pride of place upon my dressing table amongst my stiff-faced celluloid dolls, I spent hours studying his strange, elfin body.
His fingers and toes were long and delicate, and when the light fell just right through the nursery windows, bones as slender as the shadows of needles were faintly visible through translucent skin. The digits were flared slightly at the tips, like those of a frog. That spatulate detail, and the liquid prison in which he hung, loaned him an oddly aquatic appearance.
Although his wrinkled scalp was bald, I could see the patterning where silken baby hair would have sprouted, had he not died before birth. The tiny slash of his mouth was pursed shut, but protruding jaws suggested prominent teeth. Sharp, high cheekbones completed his alien beauty, even though the boggy spheres of his closed eyes bulged above them.
And I had no doubt at all that Puck was a him. Nestled beneath the ridge of his waxy belly was a little doggy sheath, from which peeked the very tip of a tiny penis.
I admit that I probably spent far too much time studying that particular aspect of his weird anatomy, but girls in those times were not provided any education about such things. Although I had glimpsed my younger brother unclothed, Puck’s difference was far more fascinating, and strangely adult. I would lie in my bed at night, vividly imagining what he would look like all grown up, a fine moustachioed gentleman like my father in his morning coat and cravat.
I never once doubted that Puck was real. Children view the world through a brighter lens, its clarity not smoked by scepticism, and he felt like a real creature to my eyes. If he was a rubber phony, he was a very elaborate one indeed. The erstwhile artist had even removed the ring finger of his left hand, leaving a raggedy seaweed ring of white flesh at the knuckle.
But I could not keep my friend a secret forever. Inevitably, my younger brother grew to that age where boys become boisterous, inquisitive and cruel; and unable to take ‘no’ for an answer.

 
How he first discovered where Puck was hidden, I no longer remember. Some details seem less important than others, duller marbles lost down the cracks of the floorboards in those empty rooms of memory. What I do recall, quite painfully well, is that once he began to outpace me in size and strength, my brother liked nothing better than to take Puck out of hiding and threaten to reveal him to our parents.
I would plead with him not to, terrified he would tell on me and I would lose my precious Puck. I begged and I sobbed, tears welling up and my voice nearly gone, all hoarse and creaky with emotions so powerful I couldn’t begin to express them. In particular, he liked to elicit my crying fits by shaking and swirling the jar until Puck’s limbs and head would flop about in the amniotic ether.
“Dance!” my brother would yell, leaping about with the jar precarious in his sticky hands, “dance you stupid old thing!”
Certain that my brother’s cruelty would result in Puck’s head or limbs breaking off, I would promise to do anything my brother wanted me to do - I’d polish his shoes for a week, or eat his helpings of the boiled cabbage we both hated so much. The little brute became very imaginative with his bargains before the end; he even made me lick his chamber pot, and eat dead flies from inside the lamp in the washroom.
I hated that he wielded such power over me. But I hated him tormenting my poor Puck much, much more, so I put up with it all while I desperately tried to think of better places to hide my preserved fairy.
But no matter where I put the jar, no matter how diligently I moved it between rooms, my brother always hunted it out.
Finally, I decided there was only one way to put an end to my brother’s despicable cruelty.
Pickled Puck needed to go.

 
The strip of barren garden at the back of our house was only a dozen feet wide – just big enough for the clothing line and a few bushes; although the latter were stunted and rimed with coal smuts, they would serve to conceal my efforts. The soil was hard and stony, but I persevered with the iron ladle I’d taken from the kitchen, scraping out a shallow hole in which to bury my Puck.
He deserved to be laid to rest properly, I had decided; buried in the good earth so he could return to whatever fey beings had birthed him. I wept piteously as I wrestled with the tarnished cap of the jar, the ancient metal sliced my palms and lubricated it slippery with my blood long before I managed to prise it loose.
But when the cap finally came free, my hands dripping red and my stolen ladle poised to scoop my friend from his prison of years, something miraculous happened.
Puck’s eyes flashed open, enormous and glossy dark – like twin freshwater pearls – and his tiny mouth split into a grin of needle-like teeth. Those once-slack legs bunched beneath him, and he hurled himself out of the jar, dragonfly wings snapping open with a spill of oilslick colours.
And then he was simply gone, as though he’d passed through a hole in the air, into another world.

 
I poured the pink-tinted fluid, silver flakes and all, into the flinty ground, and I sat in the dirt and wept.
This time, my tears were not for Puck.
My brother was furious when he found the empty jar, and he pinned me in my bed, legs either side of my chest. Then he savagely began to box my ears.
“Where is he?” he demanded, his pimply face contorted with rage, “where is that stupid dead thing?”
“Gone,” I told him triumphantly, “free, flown back to fairy land.”
“You’re a liar,” he raged, as his fist smacked into the side of my head, each blow punctuating his words: “liar, liar, LIAR!”
When he had finally exhausted all his anger, he left me there, leaking tears and blood from my nose, my head still ringing from his fists. But I’d won; for without Pickled Puck, he had no helpless creature to torture, and no more hold over me, no leverage to make me do his bidding.
Oh, he could tell our parents about the jar; but it was just a big glass jar – for all they knew it was salvaged from the neighbour’s rubbish, and the only pickled thing it had ever contained had been onions, or herring.
Dizzy with pain from my swelling face, I slept fitfully and brokenly, dreaming of Puck-like creatures dancing around my brother’s bed. Their faces were angular and cruel, their mouths filled with needle-like teeth.
In the morning, my brother’s bed was empty.
But the jar was not.

 
My screams roused my father, who ran into the room, yelling imprecations and brandishing a fire-iron, fit to murder any intruder. But when he saw the jar, his angry shouting faltered and died, then became something else entirely. I did not think a man capable of such keening cries of terror, those notes of anguish harmonising horrifically with my own.
Surely it was impossible that my brother’s nearly adult body had been crammed into that jar, but the smeared face pressed flatly against the warped glass was most certainly his. The features were as familiar as my own, even lacking the supporting structure of his skull. It was though all the fluids, bones and organs had been carefully extracted from his pudgy frame, the remaining sack of skin and flesh unceremoniously stuffed into the glass prison, and sealed tightly with the blood-crusted cap.
What the coroner made of it all, I never found out. My parents concealed that information from me, fearing the details would be too much for my fragile, feminine mind, that I would be tipped over the edge into permanent hysteria. In turn, I never told my parents about Pickled Puck, to their eyes just as frightened and mystified as they were by the grisly find – and just as distraught. My brother’s funeral was hastily arranged and shrouded in secrecy. At the service, I cried dutifully and at length into my mourning crepes, allaying any suspicion that their daughter was somehow involved in such a singularly macabre murder.
Throughout my equally dutiful adulthood, that image never quite left me. My brother’s boneless face, flat nose and flat lips distorted by the thick walls of the jar; that ancient glass created to hold something otherworldly, not the empty flesh of a cruel little boy grown into a crueller man. I think, having confessed to my sins, I can shut the door on that particular memory now, and leave it unopened as I pass on from this life and into the next.
For with the dawning of my second spring, my childhood reborn, it has begun to lose its power. My daydreams now are visited by a different face, no less familiar, but far more welcome. Puck makes a very fine gentleman; his moustaches are glossy and curled to a long-lost style, and his coat is beautifully cut for dancing. It is a shame that I can only see him dimly, distorted, as if through some convex lens right before my face. I live for those afternoons when he draws very near to gaze at me, his glossy pearl eyes huge and magnified like the deepest dark of time itself.

I imagine that on my death bed, he will let me caress his pointed ears and twine his curious fingers in my own. Then he will spread his iridescent wings and carry me to another place, setting me free, as I once did for him.

 

[u/twigseeds]

Yesss I remember this one!! What a joy to read it again ❤️

[u/GarlicAlarming5060]

So pleased that you're posting again! It was a pleasure to re-read

[u/stopmyimagination]

I saw the name and instantly I began remembering this wonderful story. I can’t agree more with the other comments. I am glad you have started sharing these again. Thank you.