From the Archives
21: “Bitter”
Knowing what I do about casters, I have every reason to believe this is not an uncommon occurrence.
I thought perhaps I could find Jenny Fay, given our proclivity for finding cryptids, but I had no luck. If you are a caster out there reading this and you know who Jenny Fay is, please contact me via my publisher—or our mutual acquaintances—so I might reach out to her.
Only 981 tales to go.
Jenny Fay stops at the grocery store on her way home from the university research labs. Classes are out this week—it’s Thanksgiving—but she went in this morning anyway. She was the only one there; after all, it’s the holiday. But they are planning to run protein simulations next Monday, so she’s getting ahead on her coding.
In the lab, she took the plague doctor card from her spellbook and called him forth to assist her. He stood silently until she needed him; she was pretty sure he didn’t see the irony of a plague doctor helping her with her medical work.
She sent him away before she left for the store.
Her prepackaged Thanksgiving meal is ready—she was pleasantly surprised last year to discover how good the deli’s stuffing was—as is the cake she ordered.
“Thanksgiving is a floating day, but because the birthday will always be the same date, the cycle of them falling on the same day is varied, because it changes due to Leap Day,” she says at the self-checkout stand. “I mean, that’s pretty interesting to calculate. If you were trying to figure out how often your birthday falls on just any ol’ Thursday, let’s say, you’d think it would be every seven years. But Leap Years move it an extra day, so it will actually take roughly five or six years, but not in a regular pattern. It takes twenty-eight years to reset the Gregorian calendar as well. Anyway, this year, for the first time in eleven years, they’re the same—birthday and Thanksgiving.”
The clerk who supervises the self-checkout section is on her phone, and so she isn’t listening. Jenny Fay concedes that it must be frustrating to have to work on the holiday, though she assumes they get paid more.
When she pulls into her assigned parking spot at the apartment complex, she notices that almost all the other residents’ cars are gone, their owners presumably heading someplace for Thanksgiving dinner. This makes her feel bold enough to open her spellbook again, this time choosing the card for Walking Sam. He’s extraordinarily creepy, of course, and certainly wouldn’t pass for a normal human under any direct observation, but she wants him to carry her bags for her anyway. And there’s no one to see today.
“I appreciate you, Sam,” she says as he puts the bags on the chipped dining room table in her apartment. It’s the same table she’s had for almost fifteen years—since her parents had both passed, and she opted to wedge it into this space that’s definitely too small for it—and it feels like home. She remembers Thanksgiving dinners when she was a child, when there were no cell phones to distract family from conversations across the table, when she didn’t yet know she was a caster and would be able to find cryptids, the monsters so many people thought were imaginary, and add their essences to cards she would tuck away in her spellbook and hide under her bed.
“Do you remember when we met, Sam?” she says, taking the sparkling cider out of one of the bags and putting it in the refrigerator. “It was the summer my parents and I drove out to Mount Rushmore. I was ten. I found you behind that RV lot outside of Pine Ridge. Remember?”
Walking Sam isn’t Talking Sam, so he doesn’t answer. She thanks him again and dismisses him back into his card. Then she unpacks the rest of the groceries. She is disappointed to discover the deli forgot the stuffing she was looking forward to.
She thinks about turning the television on—the parade should be done, and the dog show should just be starting—but she’s learned before that the TV, or maybe the dogs themselves, are too much of a distraction for her dinner guests, so she leaves it off for now.
Jenny Fay brings both the leaf inserts and the folding chairs from the second bedroom. Once the leaves are added, she mixes the folding chairs in with the four chairs that accompany the table. It will be crowded, but it’s just for the one meal. She knows it’ll be okay.
She puts the pound cake she got from the deli on the table in front of her own plate, by the fake crystal glass she fills with cider. She rummages around in the kitchen’s junk drawer until she finds a candle and matches.
At last, it’s time for the guests. It’s time.
It’s tricky, but if she keeps her concentration to a minimum, she can maintain them all at once. Some are easy—the frogman is calm and patient, and the Dark Watcher just sits quietly in its folding chair and, well, watches—but some require a bit more focus. From the moment she frees Bloody Mary from her card, Mary wants to scream and rage, but Jenny Fay keeps her quiet. The little raccoon thief Azeban and the sneaky dingbelle need to be separated like children to keep them from pranking each other. Mothman and the wendigo take up a great deal of space each. The table gets crowded quickly; the room is full.
It is deathly silent. None of them speaks.
“We’ll do turkey shortly,” she says to them all, though she knows none of them will eat, “but first, my birthday actually falls on Thanksgiving this year. So…”
She lights the one candle on her birthday cake. Jenny Fay is thirty-five now.
“Happy birthday to you,” she begins to sing. “Happy birthday to you…”
The cryptids do not know this song. They don’t sing.
She closes her eyes and blows out the candle, and as she does, she lets all of her concentration slip so that when she opens her eyes again, they’re all gone. Back to their cards. It’s just her again. The room is empty.
She cuts a single slice of the pound cake and takes a bite. It’s not right—whoever prepared it used too much baking powder, and the cake is terribly bitter.
“I don’t care,” she says aloud to no one at all. She is not crying yet. “I like it. It’s all mine.”
