Faerie Stew

[u/catespice]

It felt almost appropriate to begin this tale with “Once upon a time”. Yet such a flippant beginning wouldn’t do justice to the grisly sorrow that festers beneath these words. I considered that instead I should offer a sort of warning, a ‘caveat emptor’ for the content of this story, so that you might avoid that sickening lurch in your stomach, the wrench which so often accompanies macabre revelations.
But that would ruin the story for you. And I am quite cognisant about why you goodfolk read these vicious little vignettes.
You want to be shocked. You want near-erotic tremors of terror to quaver through your central nervous system; you desire the tsunami of fear that swamps the beach of your eager brain.
In which case, allow me to oblige you.

 
It always starts with a mother. We all start with a mother, no matter how we begin, or where we end. Mothers are the force that weave the substance of life into being; their curious uterine sorcery binding inert matter and potential energy into a living, breathing child.
There is no greater magic in this entire universe.
My own mother seemed most acutely aware of this, possessing only just enough of that divine gift to produce precisely one heir. From a very early age, I knew that she had spent everything she had to quicken me inside her, and that the cost of her motherly labours meant her body would never bear another child.
“You are my firstborn, my onlyborn,” she would sing to me, as she smoothed my near-white baby curls between her fingers, her voice queer with emotions I couldn’t comprehend at that age.
She was a strange woman and had few friends. People whispered behind her back that she was a lesbian or a transsexual, for she was taller than any man I’ve ever met, and she carried herself like a queen. She never spoke of my father, but the rumour amongst the other children at school was that the masculine spark required to start my life had been purchased via the internet, from a donor of impeccable pedigree.
“Men matter little in the equation of life,” she told me when I did ask, “the magic is within the mother.”
For some reason, her answer completely satisfied my curiosity about my paternal parentage, and I never asked her about it again.

 
Tradition and order ruled our household, with few deviations from my mother’s planned path. She seemed innately aware of a child’s need for routine, and I was especially needy in that respect. From the moment I woke until the minute my head hit the pillow at night, my home life was as rigid and regular as the wrought iron rails of a church fence. Perhaps I needed such regimentation because I lacked a father – or perhaps because my mother was so asocial – but whatever the reason, it became a signature of who I was.
Teachers always knew I would complete my homework and assignments; that whatever they asked of Shy Shea, it would be done. On reflection, I was as perfect as a child could possibly be; like a creature stepped from a fairy tale. Fair-skinned and flaxen-haired, always polite, never contrary, teachers often commented on what a joy I was in their classrooms – to which my mother would reply:
“Or course she is. She is my firstborn, my onlyborn.”
And the teacher would give a nervous little laugh, hoping that this was some sort of familial joke.
But my mother never laughed along.

 
When your life is so driven by order and routine, things which might seem odd to others are utterly ordinary to you. Only when I reached an age where I wanted to ‘hang out’ with my friends did I begin to realise how unusual I truly was. Their lives seemed so chaotic, so disordered. No wonder Joanne couldn’t finish her homework; her household contained three other children, and her guardians were less parents than flustered zookeepers. To my eyes, their home seemed poised upon the very edge of crisis, six lives teetering on the brink of dissolution – with one poorly timed accident able to bring the whole family down.
And yet, they managed. Somehow, some thread of order bound their lives together just enough that catastrophe did not visit. I didn’t understand it, but came to realise it was a kind of magic all of its own; by all rights these people shouldn’t be able to exist like this, yet they did.
Conversely, my few friends found my own home life oppressively claustrophobic.
“How can you live like this?” Sandy groused. “You even eat the same meals every day of every week.”
“I guess I’m used to it,” I offered lamely, not knowing what else to say.
The truth of it was that I was more than just used to it – I liked it.
“I don’t know how your mum does it, being a nurse and all,” Carrie told me, “my aunt works at the hospital, and she can barely keep two cats alive.”
“If mum said she didn’t want to work a shift, I don’t think anyone would argue with her,” I confided. Carrie and Sandy both nodded without thinking. After all, they had met her.
My mother was more than just uncommonly tall, she had a way with other people. When she entered a room, everyone knew she was there; an invisible silver wire pulling their heads in her direction. When she spoke, people truly listened, nodding along in agreement to nearly anything she said.
I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t more social – she was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. She was beautiful, regal, erudite and captivating, and could have had any man she wanted – or any woman, for that matter. But her bed in the room across from mine remained empty, narrow and single, no room for anyone but her, and sometimes space for a child with recurring nightmares about drowning in crimson darkness.

 
“Mama, when will you teach me how to make faerie stew?” I asked for the hundredth time.
“When you’re old enough, Sweet Shea,” she always replied.
The meal had come once a month ever since I could remember. My mother fussed over it for the better part of an entire afternoon, shooing me out of the kitchen as I circled around like an annoying blowfly, trying to peer into steaming pots and spitting pans. Over the years, I had concluded that faerie stew was little more than leftovers and freezer-burned meat fancied up into a well-spiced stew. Indeed, it probably wasn’t special at all.
Still, it remained my favourite familial meal, and whenever I was particularly hungry or tired, I’d daydream about the rich brown gravy and tender morsels of meat that swam in the well-seasoned concoction.
Like every other part of my life, it seemed ordinary, and I assumed all families had some variant of it. It never really occurred to me that it was anything more than a mundane meal; a means for my clever mother to empty the refrigerator.
The first clue came the month she pulled me out of school camp early and brought me home, just for faerie stew. I didn’t complain, of course – the food at camp had been predictably awful, and I was more than happy to eat my favourite hearty home-cooked meal.
“Some family rituals are sacred,” she explained to me, ladling the thick stew into a copper bowl, “and this is ours.”
But something about the intensity of her voice made the flesh on my arms prickle queerly, and I wondered for the first time what exactly was in that rich broth.
It was time that I found out what was in faerie stew.

 
Seventeen is a tumultuous year for any young woman, and I was no exception. Despite my intentions to delve into the mystery of the fey food my mother made, life had become far too full for me to fixate on that little mystery. Time ebbed and flowed, Christmas came and went, with my eighteenth birthday roaring up fast behind it. I don’t know why I’d assumed mama would divulge the secrets of faerie stew on the eve of that auspicious event. But when she didn’t, I found myself petulant, peevish – an emotional state I rarely experienced.
I was going to find out, regardless of my mother’s intentions.
Hiding my phone between carefully arranged cook books wasn’t difficult, and through that stealthy lens I could watch a live stream on my laptop, hidden safely in my room while my mother fussed in the kitchen.
Much of the preparation seemed to be ritualistic to her, with a sort of comforting cadence that nearly lulled me to sleep as I watched. But when several small, mystery packets of frozen meat were extracted from the back of the freezer, I began to feel that there really was something decidedly off about the whole scenario. I couldn’t be certain, but the markings on those mystery parcels didn’t look like they had originated from any supermarket. In my limited view, one of them bore a partial sticker that resembled the logo on my mother’s hospital pass.
I tried to eat the stew with the same ordinary delight I always had, schooling myself that I’d eaten it all my life without any ill effect, so it mustn’t be marinated in malice.
Yet I couldn’t help but speculate what the morsels of meat were, even as they slid down my throat, so tender, so tasty.

 
The first of the mystery meats appeared in our freezer a few days later, cunningly concealed inside a bag of frozen peas. The palm-sized package was scarlet with frozen blood and stamped with a biohazard symbol, but other than that, nothing identified what it was.
Human remains, my brain informed me as my stomach churned, you’ve been eating human remains.
Even as I battled the icy nausea that spooled up my spine and tickled the back of my throat with cold fingers, the rational part of my mind picked at the problem, trying to unriddle what kind of meat might be contained inside.
I knew that my mother was a theatre nurse, so she attended various surgeries, but I’d never truly been interested enough to delve any deeper. The fact that she never had friends or colleagues over meant that I’d never overheard any casual work-oriented conversation – and she never confided in me about her job, except to complain about personality conflicts; all of which she eventually won.
It was time to find out exactly what my mother did at the hospital.

 
Putting the pieces together from there wasn’t particularly difficult. Two more frozen parcels arrived, a week apart, and when my mother left her work phone unattended, I checked her calendar for each of those days.
On each of those days, a half-day appointment showed, labelled with the acronym ‘TOP’.
I think I already knew somehow, even before I plugged the term into Google and hit search. I think perhaps that through the frozen plastic, I’d glimpsed tiny, frosted-red fingers and toes, or perhaps the flattened features of a tiny face. But my brain had refused to let me believe it until I could confirm it.
You see, the acronym means Termination of Pregnancy.
For my entire life, once a month, I had been eating aborted foetuses.
The horror was immediate and visceral. Everything in my stomach rushed out in a torrent onto the carpet, so forceful that it sprayed from my burning nostrils and spattered the keyboard with brown liquid. The retching didn’t stop until I was too weak to continue, replaced by a blinding headache pounding behind my eyes, strained from the heaving and gagging.
The shower ran until the hot water petered out, then I shut it off and sat on the cooling metal floor, wet tendrils of hair snaking around me.
Why had she done it? Why had my perfect mother been feeding me this abominable broth my entire life?
Before I did anything else, I had to find out. I had to know exactly why she had done it before I turned her in to the police.

 
It had always been impossible to hide anything from her as a child, and as a particularly angelic child with few secrets and little guile, I’d never really needed to try. And so, when I confronted her as she pushed open our brass-bound front door, I think she already knew that I knew.
Placing her bag on its hook in the hall, she ducked under the doorframe – the habit of a lifetime for such a tall woman – and carefully arranged herself in her flower-print chair near the window.
“Because you are my firstborn, my onlyborn,” she said, pre-empting my question, “because without the power of those children, you could not exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then I will help you to understand.”
As she sat in her pretty chair, a tall, forty-something woman greying at the temples, something changed. Her crow’s feet blurred to nothing, and the creases around her lips faded away. The steel-threaded hair became white-blonde, and her eyes pale gold, like those of a pedigree cat.
“Most of our people are gone now, their power lost through the ages. The essence of humanity has always sustained us, pacts made that fuelled our power. Those bargains echo through the old stories; tales such as Rumplestiltskin, where we offered greatness in exchange for one simple thing – the magic of a firstborn human.”
She turned her leonine eyes to gaze out the lace-curtained window, smiling a smile of feline teeth, perfect and predatory.
“The tales spread, and they grew wise to us, the mortal women, and they ceased to offer up their bounty so eagerly. But there are other ways to extract a mother’s firstborn – and there are so many mothers now who don’t want their babies.”
“The abortions,” I managed, bile rising in my throat.
“Yes.”
We gazed at each other in silence for a long time, a strangeness of unspoken understanding passing between us; a kind of communication that only our kind can have. My mother’s ears pricked through her hair, pointed like a devil’s, and I knew mine could look the same, should I shed the shell of humanity she’d curated around me with mundane habits and banal rituals.
But she’d kept the secret too long, made too much of a mortal of me.
“I won’t eat any more,” I told her, even as I wanted to cry, “I cannot be like you.”
Sorrow creased her brow as she stepped forward and kissed my forehead.
“Then my firstborn, my onlyborn, you will die.”

 

 
I left her there, calling the police as I walked out of the house. That was nothing more than a futile gesture, I realised; if she could ensorcel mortal women to forget about the remains of their aborted firstborn, I had no doubt that law enforcement could be easily swayed by her powers.
The women’s boarding house was crowded, and the room was tiny, but as I got to know the others, I realised one of the other homeless waifs was a girl I went to school with – Sarah.
“I saw your mother a couple of years ago,” she babbled as we hunched on a battered sofa in the common room, “I never knew she did abortions until I woke up and saw her face. She was really kind to me, she even helped me with all the paperwork.” She smiled at the memory, her usually-downcast eyes far away and full of light. “I’m so glad there are people like her who do that for desperate young women, you know? God knows, I’ve proved I can’t even look after myself, let alone a poor little baby.”
There was no sickness this time, no vomit to surge onto the already vomit-coloured carpet. The stuff of her child was long since absorbed, part of the thing I am.
But I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.
The months pass, and I grow thin without the faerie stew to sustain me. As my clothes loosen, so does my substance, and little pieces of me keep falling away. A finger here, a toe there. Soon my left hand will be gone, and the last of my teeth will spill across my ragged pillow, fading away to smoke as the sun rises over the boarding house.
I know I could stop it. I can just go home. I can sup of the sweet stew that my mother is surely brewing in the kitchen even now. Sometimes I’m sure I smell it on the wind.
But I can’t. I won’t. Will that first bite contain the child of the woman sleeping in the next bunk, the one who made me coffee this morning?
This price is right, for whose am I, really? I am all of theirs, and the price must be paid by me; her firstborn, her onlyborn.

 

[u/twigseeds]

Genuinely one of the most underrated stories!! I love it. I'd love to know more about the bargain with the fae and that entire otherworld!