I was hiding in shadow, watching my step-father fish. My step-father from back when I was mortal. Not one of my Goblin step-fathers. Confused yet? Welcome to the club.
My step-father was old. He was young back when I was eight, but fifty years had passed.
My Goblin uncle/brother/step-father, Jordan, sent a ripple through the shadow. He was in the family before the family adopted me. He watched out for me and felt responsible for me, but when we played, we were equals.
Jordan passed by again gently rippling the shadow’s edges. He wanted me to follow him. Great, I was about to be lectured about shadow burn again. I followed him through the dappled shade of the bayou and upstream past swamp and into woods. He stopped high in a Spanish moss draped oak tree with limbs big enough to lie on.
“You want to look like Dennis?” Jordan asked.
I said, “I stay in clear shadows. Unless you’re making ripples, I’m safe.”
“Are you mad at your stepfather or do you miss him?”
I shook my head.
“Answer me.”
I said, “Just curious.”
Jordan sat with his legs around a large limb, leaning his back on the trunk. “I need to take you to meet the Wize. You won’t want to linger in shadow after you see them. If you’re going to watch from shadows, hide in shadows, don’t merge with shadows.”
I was lying on my back with my legs dangling through a large Y in the branch I was on. We were just high enough to feel the tree rock as the wind changed.
I glanced over at Jordan. “I just want to know if there is any reason for me being this way.”
“Phil, your human parents were wrapped up in themselves and couldn’t be bothered. We couldn’t help ourselves. You needed taking care of.”
I told him, “I understand. I avoid the city because of David.”
“You still wish you had adopted him?”
“No, David’s parents were desperate when they found out he was missing. They didn’t seem to care, but they did. David’s grown up now, so there’s nothing there. I avoid the city because I might want to adopt another lost child. I have enough trouble taking care of myself. I don’t think I’d be a good parent anyway.”
We lay on our branches for a while just watching the wind in the trees. I felt the shadows flex as Brad slid in and slipped out of shadow to a limb over the one I was lying on.
Brad looked down over the limb at me and made like he was going to spit on me.
I asked, “Do Goblins ever grow up?”
Brad said, “Jordan did. He used to be fun. Sure, he looks ten, but he acts like an old man.”
Jordan asked, “Have you checked the trout lines?”
Brad said, “Yes, I checked the trout lines. The fish have been delivered. The restaurant in Shreveport is trying to pay less, though. I hate shadow stepping that far north, and we have a new restaurant in Baton Rouge.”
I said, “I can manage Shreveport. The restaurant is far enough from any houses so I probably won’t meet any children. I don’t mind the trip, and they probably are beginning to wonder why you’re staying the same age anyway.”
Brad asked, “How you gonna manage them?”
Brad already knew. The truth was simple. My skin wasn’t as dark as his so some folk that would deal with me honestly would try to take advantage of kids like Brad and Jordan. Made no sense but there it was.
Jordan said, “Phil, don’t linger in shadow.”
I dropped off the limb, slid into the shadows, and headed home. I could feel Jordan and Brad following me as I slid from shadow to shadow. In front of the cement tanks, I saw three more of the boys sitting in shade. Monroe was cooking. It smelled pretty wonderful. I looked down at the fish in the tanks. I walked along the planks over the largest tank and did a quick estimate. We were catching fish faster than we were selling or eating them. I needed to develop a few more customers.
I yelled, “How’s money?”
Monroe yelled back to me, “We just had to restring the bass and get new hair on a violin bow. We’re doing okay, but if you want an advance on your allowance, you’re out of luck right now.”
I made a quick jump into the shadow around the tank and got beside Monroe. “I could work up a few more places for us to do business with. We have lots of fishing places no human can get to. We could run a few more trout lines.”
Monroe looked at me. “Your ears are going to need work soon.”
I winced and reached for my ears. He was right, the points were growing back. I hated it, but if I wanted to pass for human, I was going to need my ears trimmed soon. I hated having ears trimmed even more than when a tooth fell out and a new one came in.
***
The old man came out and said, “That smells mighty good, Monroe.”
Monroe asked, “Phil, can you hand me the file powder?”
I flitted into shadow and grabbed the bottle of file from the kitchen. I handed it to Monroe and smiled. If he was adding file to the gumbo, it was nearly done.
***
I was watching my step-father fish again. As he took a beer out of the cooler, I could see seven empty longnecks floating. He fumbled and the bottle opener fell through a slit in the pier. I was wet from working trout lines earlier, and since I had been hiding in shadow, my clothes were still damp. I slid into the shadows under the pier, turned solid, and quietly slipped into the water to get his bottle opener. I didn’t have a good way to give it back to him, so I took it with me into shadow. He didn’t need to drink anymore, anyway.
He started crying. He lost Mom ten years earlier, so I wasn’t sure what was wrong with him.
He asked, “Phil, is that you?”
I nearly fell out of shadow. Human eyesight was weak when it came to dim light. In full sun, he couldn’t have seen me in the shade under the pier. I glanced down. The sun was nearly at its apex above us, and the light was going straight down through the cracks. He was looking for his bottle opener and could have seen me as I’d left shadow, sank into the water, and picked up the bottle opener. He probably saw me step out, dripping from the water, and disappear. I was a fool. I trusted a human’s poor eyesight and didn’t think about the sun.
He said “Phil, do you hate me?”
I slid out of shadow. “You’re the only original family I have left. I never really knew you. We weren't close enough for hate. We ain’t related, but you are as much as I have. You didn’t look for me, but you married my mom, not me. I was the bad part of the deal.”
“Are you a Fairy?”
“That’s kind of offensive.”
“Are you a ghost?”
“I’m a Goblin.”
My step-father braced his hands on his knees and hung his head. “I’m drunk, aren't I? I should have looked for you when your mother told me to, but we needed me to work the long hours, and I was scared to look for you.” He shook his head. “I should have quit that job and stopped trying to fill that stupid hole. Are Goblins alive?”
I said, “We live, we have fun. We’re mostly free, but adults resent paying children for work, think we should be in school, and get suspicious when we don’t age. We can’t show up in the same place for long, and we can’t wander around when school’s in session.”
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He didn’t say anything. We sat. I wanted to beat a rhythm on the pier’s slats. The old weathered boards had a nice sound to them. My step-father was fishing, so I didn’t think he’d appreciate the noise. He didn’t catch any fish, so I might as well have done drum rolls and danced on the planks. After a long silence, I left. I didn’t know what to say really. I snuck back, and when he opened his cooler, I dropped a couple of fish in it. More as a prank than anything else. I left the can opener. It had been long enough for him to have gotten sober.
***
I was on my bicycle awkwardly riding with a small pole and a Styrofoam cooler on the back. Until we got a pattern down with a new restaurant, we tried to make every appearance of being from a poor family and just wanting to work extra to help. It was the truth, really, but not the way they thought it was. I stopped at a gas station to air up my tires. My bike almost fell over. The last thing I wanted was to be brushing gravel off the fish and trying to put it back in a broken cooler. The gas station sold coolers and ice, so it wouldn’t be as bad as it could be, but we tried to deliver pretty fish.
A man signaled me from the open window of a car. Nice car. Black, clean, large, and expensive. It had tinted windows. I walked my bike over. He was a big man. Handsome, rugged. The kind women fell for.
“You selling fish, boy?”
For a moment, I thought of trying to sell him some fish. I didn’t think he was the type that cooked, and his car said city. I didn’t trust him.
He smiled at me. Like he knew me. Like he had plans for me. He scared me somehow.
I said, “I caught a few fish, but I—”
Something told me I didn’t want to start lying. I said, “I shouldn’t talk to strangers.” I got back on my bike and kept riding. I was halfway to the dive I was going to sell fish at when I was passed by a truck with high school kids yelling stuff at me from the back. I stopped and let them drive past. I looked back, and the black car was sitting by the side of the road a good distance behind me.
I’d spent a week exploring this area by shadow and finding out where the locals bought fish and how much they paid. I found out which ones were family oriented. I always tried to avoid those. I wanted the country dives with low numbers. It was safer to avoid big restaurants and the restaurants in town. Trendy places were the scariest. In spite of all that work, my gut instincts were telling me to run and abandon the locations I’d scouted. Something about the man and car seemed familiar and off.
***
Monroe was watching me; I could feel him watching. I slipped into shadow and joined him in the shade of the large cypress. “You’ve been watching me for a while.”
Monroe pointed to the trout line. “You were slipping shadows through the water. That scares me to death, Phil. You could end up half-fish or worse. Things live in the deep shadows.”
I looked up through the tree’s canopy and squinted as I momentarily glanced at the sun. “Out here, the shadows are crisp. Safer somehow.”
Monroe got up quickly, dancing clumsily, and taking off his pants. “Ants, Phil.”
I took his arm, pulled him into shadow, and moved us to the shade of another tree.
Monroe stared at me. “I’d be scared I might become half-ant, going into shadow like that. You don’t even worry, and you managed to take me and leave the ants. What do I do to leave the ants behind?”
I gave him a sly smile. “Teach me to cook like you do, and I’ll try to teach you all I can.”
Monroe nodded. “It might keep you out of trouble. I worry you’re overextending yourself.”
I asked him, “How? I don’t even know what you mean by that.”
Monroe buckled his belt and sat. “The more contacts you make with humans, the less attention and thought go into all of them. The more exposure and danger you risk. Money’s nice and it’s good to have a bit in reserve, but exposure can cause issues. If you draw the wrong sort of attention, everything we have can come crashing down.”
***
“Monroe, how did you learn all of this without hiding in shadows?”
Monroe smiled as he stirred. “Without being in shadows, a lot of places have spots you can watch from and still be solid. But the real trick’s even simpler. A lot of folks keep notes on their recipes when they alter them and their family likes the result. I just copied their notes.”
I suspected that Monroe probably hid on the other side of the shadows but didn’t want to admit it. Since he cooked, he didn’t have a lot of time to get in trouble with shadows, so he might have started cooking as a substitute for more dangerous behavior.
***
Monroe and I were playing tag in the shadows. I was showing him tricks he never knew. How could someone have used shadows to move every single day for nearly two hundred years and not have figured these things out?
After stepping out of shadow, Monroe asked, “Why do you always take the long way? Is it so the rest of us won’t notice how fast you are?”
I sat and pointed to the stream we stood near. “I always try, well, mostly always try to go with the flow of the light. It feels better that way. I can’t do it going up or south. I can’t do it when I go east in the morning or west in the afternoon. But when I can, I follow the light.”
Monroe looked around and walked to a fallen tree. He straddled it and sat looking at the stream the fallen tree nearly crossed. “That only sort of makes sense. If you go both ways, you have to go in the light direction just as often as you go to shade. Still, you barely ripple the shadows. What’s your secret?”
I looked for ants and considered his question. I sat on the grassy bank with my feet on the pebbles below. “About fifteen years after I became a Goblin, I met the Queen of Shadows. The shadows didn’t leave a ripple or a trace as she moved. She told me, ‘A flashbulb can erase the shadow you hide in. How would you face that?’”
“I didn’t have an answer at the time. If I met her again, I’d tell her, ‘By teetering on the edge.’ I stay on the edge of falling out of shadow.”
Monroe peeled a strip of bark from the fallen tree he was straddling and tried to hit the water with it. It came closer to hitting me. “Is that safer?”
I shook my head in a wobbly, non-committal sort of way. “It lets me go through shadows in the water, but if things go odd like a fast wind change, I can be thrown out of shadow. I swallowed a bit of water and sputtered for a while the first few times it caught me.”
Monroe asked, “Does that really make you safe from a flashbulb when shadow stepping?”
I got up and dusted off the back of my pants. “I think so, but that isn’t the sort of thing I’d test without a good reason.”
Monroe got up. “Teach me. Teach the rest of the boys. Who knows? It might work. Why haven’t you brought this up before?”
I winced and took a deep breath. “Dennis will have to test it. You know how he is. If he disappears a couple of months after I mention this, I’ll always think I killed him. I can share this with you since you aren’t stupid and impulsive. Some of the things I’ve figured out, I just keep for emergencies. I think I know how to do them, but I wonder how many Goblins have disappeared because they thought they thunk up a new trick.”
Monroe nodded. “Great, another explanation for missing Goblins.”
I held my hand out to him. “I should be here if you plan to practice coming out while in water. It isn’t fun and it isn’t quiet. I’ll show you how to go through water, but don’t try coming out in water. Not yet. As far as going with the flow of the shadow, if you go west in the morning and east in the evening, you can mostly go with the flow. There’s also reflected light, so you can often go both ways in a shadow if you pick your shadow carefully.”
I pulled him into shadow with me and moved us to the very edge of shadow. The penumbra of the penumbra where it was hard to tell you were even in shadow. He seemed stable and didn’t fall out, so I took him through the water and back up into the woods. Under a tall mossy oak, I released him, and he dropped out of shadow. I joined him in the shade of the oak.
He shadow stepped up to a limb that would normally be out of reach. “Phil, I couldn’t hold myself in shadow. This is going to take some practice. Tell me about stepping out in water.”
I shadow stepped to the limb he was on but sat straddled on it by a wide fork farther out on the limb. “First time you step out in water, be ready. The water pushes back so you can’t breathe. The water can roar, and the splash is like a dozen boys did cannonballs after jumping from the highest tree. It can feel like you did a belly flop on all sides. I’ve only done it enough to think I can handle it and a few more times by accident.”
Monroe gave me a serious look and then grinned. “Jerk, you may end up learning to cook without having taught me anything. I’ll try and practice, but it seems like you can shadow step near shadow and not even be in it.”
I pointed to the spots of light on the ground that managed to make their way past the oak leaves. “None of these spots are as bright as full sun. Well, maybe that one. As the leaves move, you can see darker and lighter patches. All of these are edges of shadow. They are still shadow. You know how you can’t slide into shadow in total dark or even enter a totally dark area by shadow stepping? I don’t think we travel by shadow. Not most of us. The Queen of Shadows, maybe. We travel by light, but it has to be next to dark.”
***
Jordan asked, “You cooking again? Where’s Monroe?”
I kept stirring. “Don’t know. Are you trying to say my cooking isn’t up to snuff?”
Jordan peered into the pot. “It’s spotty. Not consistent. I mean, Monroe varies things, but he always pulls it off.”
I gave him a weak smile. “Been cooking maybe three weeks now. Give me a break. I do fish and pudding fine. My rice is good enough. Beans, I think, take magic to do right. I do exactly what Monroe does, best I can tell, and they might be goo or they might be tough.”
Jordan returned my weak smile with a grimace. “Then why you cooking beans?”
“’Cause I’m cooking beans.”
Jordan said, “We got a few complaints out on the routes. They like it better when you do delivery. Can we drop you back to cooking one meal a day?”
I turned off the burner and kept stirring. “Talk to Monroe about it.”
Jordan turned to leave. “That’s why I’m looking for him.”
***
I was cleaning up in the kitchen. Randal was helping, so I figured Jordan had probably given him a lecture on not pulling his weight. Nick was playing guitar in the den. Old stuff that no one these days knew. Good stuff, though, once you learned the slang.
Without looking, I could tell when Brad started in with his guitar. They would be harmonizing soon enough. I said, “Go ahead, Randal, I can finish up.”
Randal left and I kept cleaning. I beat a bit of rhythm on the sink, but not much sounded the way my crate did. My crate wasn’t much of an instrument, just an old small crate Dennis brought in for a chair after his chair broke. I traded with him when I found the crate had a few sweet spots for sound, and I’d been sitting on it and slapping it for the last ten years.
The bass and the violin began playing on the next song, so I knew Hugo and Miles were in the den with them. Randal started in on his bongos, and Monroe came in playing the piano. Jordan joined in with his accordion, and the wild night of playing started. There was no need for me to hurry. I liked to half-dance while I cleaned up, and it wasn’t like they needed me to make music. I pretty much beat on my crate, and sometimes used a triangle or a shaker when it was called for. I wasn’t really needed.
The old man who we took care of and mooched off of joined me in the kitchen. He played a penny whistle and didn’t join in on the wild music my uncles and brothers played. He did like to move with the music though.