They took me to a building housing a collective that reminded me of a manor I kept for them in Houston. I thought, Oh, that’s where that thing is. I had seen a poster for it at a coffee shop that I used to love, but decided currently to hate for disconnecting their dining space from the main counter. From a business perspective this did not seem economically viable.
I paused in my articulation of the errands I ran from the ground up to check it out. The live-in resident, Nick, told me to come back later. They were not currently open right now. They would be later. I did. More people had arrived at the designated time, but the show was nowhere near beginning. I left again, not planning to return until I saw the bees.
Bees are one of the messengers of the fae. All pollinating creatures are. Butterflies will bring you to something beautiful or colorful or aesthetically pleasing, the wind will whisper sweet nothings in your ear, even the land based animals transporting seeds in the fur of their feet are their agents. Bees bring forth an activity. I followed it all the way to the hive. One of the traveling queens, who arrived here from Maine, told me a story about removing mountain tops for the sake of lights.
“We destroy the mountains because we are afraid of the dark.”
She used a large, twenty five foot, black and white banner to transport me to Appalachia, pronouncing it with a sharp third ‘a,’ with a fable about the true cost of coal.
“This was the land before colonization, the indigenous animals, plants, people and those that settled the area. With the onset of your Industrial Revolution, they removed the tribal people for corporate interests. They gathered mineral rights, digging under the farms and occasionally destroying our homesteads. They built large black smoky factories that choked us like the swomee swans.”
We were hurtling through time as she spoke.
“Present day operations leveled entire mountains for your growing electrical and war needs. The frogs were forced to work in labor camps that polluted the drinking water of their tadpoles.”
Technology replaced the workers with machines, propagating massive job losses in the surrounding communities that depended on the mines. These effects were underwhelmed by pharmaceutical displacements in the name of oxycodone and vikatan administered in the same manner as opium on the Chinese railroads.
“You only need twelve people to take down a mountain,” she said. “The tadpoles, now grown with their own sets of legs, used those new appendages to follow the thousands of footprints to the bus station out of town. The foxes and rats paper wrenched your bureaucratic machines with regulations while the other animals sabotaged the equipment in our names. The final chapter has not yet been written. Hopefully, it will reveal the future of land reclamation for our kind. Energy was once defined by how much one can do in a day and power is the amount done by a community.”
A gremlin arrived on her foot heels. He wore a priestly robe with wild fanatic eyes and garnered the forces of two devout apostles at his side. He was a bit more aggressive than simply painting pictures or telling stories. He demanded immediate action through unspeakable means that he dared not utter. “Do what you say,” he said, “do not say what you do.” Then he remarked with the devilish grin that gremlins own, “This machine costs 80 million dollars. I don’t care who you are, 80 mill is a lot of money.” He did not go into technique or ask for volunteers or specifically rally a time and date for the nefarious operation. He did not say sugar in the tank only attracts temporary flies. He did not suggest the use of bleach because it would actually kill them. He did not need to. I knew what he meant.
They wanted to hit them where it financially hurt. They discussed the two major reasons for not being an active agent in the war against “the mother earth fuckers.” One was breaking the law and going to jail. This never bothered me. I have always followed my own laws based upon a self morality. The other was death. I knew death was not the end. It happens to everyone. I am not afraid. My concern was stooping to the level of actions that you oppose to sanctify your cause. An indian in a teepee once told me that he owned a cell phone so he could have the same weapons as his enemies. The second speaker ended the segment with a quick wrap up of their message. “Fuck shit up. Destroy your reality. It is all bullshit anyway. Any questions?”
There were none. The final gremlin had a muse, which is odd for a gremlin to befriend. He stood in the park shouting poetry with a guitar he did not play. The blue meanies made him stop. He killed them in his mind. “You have to kill them in your mind first,” he gargled. Then, he stripped down naked and beat on drums he did not play either. Although noisy, the energy he directed onto them could save a hundred mountains from inevitable destruction.
I almost left, but the faeries stopped me. They told me I had not yet seen all of what they brought me here for. I stayed and was thankful. A group from Grand Junction joined the fray with a trumpet. It was not ska. It was not eighties crap. It was dreamy like fifties swing on the love boat. The frenzied crowd of fae folk that gathered created a drunken feeling slow motion mosh pit. More musicians stripped away their clothing and performed for the mass singing, “Holy Holy Holy” gypsy war songs with bent saws, bows, and washboards. The audience removed their own cloth masks to dance in the buff. The bodies glanced sweat from one to the other in an anarchistic circle of rhythm. Hair flung across the arena from the participants, among them, caught in the menage, were humans, the faeries and I. Normally, I see them from the corner of my eyes unless they make a spectacle like this. Here they played in plain sight, hidden only to those who do not know to look for them between those of this world and their own.
Custard could not figure out why the native peoples were so pissed off on that last stand. The night before they were singing, dancing, and playing drums.
The three gremlins chatted amongst themselves.
“I am going to remember not knowing you.”
“I am going to remember something that never happened.”
“And I will remember nothing.”
