Lanvalia

I met him the summer after I graduated college. I was living in the hollowness of my senior year house after the roommates I tolerated went home. Nothing painful or tragic, but true purgatory.

A week into June, I finally broke the routine. After the morning shift at the restaurant of Sunrise Ski Lodge, I flattened the back seats of my SUV and laid out the couch cushions in the space. The engine struggled to turn over a few times before managing, and I pushed the pedal to the floor all the way up Idaho’s premier ski mountain.

In the end, I was on the roof of the SUV, the metal bowing underneath me, fingers wrapped around a liter of Liberty Creek’s Sweet Red, feeling the warmth of it in my throat.

I was supposed to be an adult, and it was all I was trying to do, but no one wanted to hire me, and all the apartments were shitty or two thousand a month. At least I was old enough for cheap American wine.

Being drunk kept me from spiraling around these facts for too long, but I still felt the lack in the middle of me, my fingers stretching out for something I would never grasp.

And then the bottle was empty, and my stupidity hit me dully. I rolled into the hatchback's body and fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke to purplish light dancing around the interior of my car, flitting in through the windows. My head pounded with reality, but the world was soft like a dream.

I sat up, slamming my head against the ceiling. I squeezed my eyes shut to push away the pain. When I opened them, the same purple light spilled through the forest, darting between the trees, playful almost. With dull decision-making, or perhaps the assumed reality of a dream, I pushed the side door open and slid out. My bare feet were cold against last year’s fallen leaves.

I leaped over a creek that burbled down the hill, my feet sinking into the muddy bank on the landing. The light traced an alder tree's pale trunk. By the time I touched the large tree it had claimed, the violet glow was almost within reach, and then it disappeared all at once. Even though I had always been alone, the loneliness returned and stole the breath from me.

I circled the tree three times before a hand grabbed my jaw, its fingertips soft, its grip hard. Jagged nails that felt as if they’d never seen a file lightly scratched the skin of my cheeks. Then his breath was on me, hot and living.

He had a pair of stark green eyes, pupils thin like a cat’s. Then the rest of the face came into focus: skin white as bone, mouth parted to reveal animal fangs, cheekbones high and sharp, trailing back to his pointed ears. At his hairline sprouted shoulder-length brown hair, as well as two goat horns that curled to the back of his head. Something inhuman and almost devilish, terrifying, but also beautiful.

“What do you most desire?” the creature asked. His accent was strange, hard to place. Something ancient and inhuman.

There was so much I desired. To be independent, to make a paycheck I could live on, to have a real friend, to stop hating myself. Nothing that could be asked. “I want to be okay,” I said.

He sighed and pulled away, dragging those scraggly nails across my face. “Well, now you’ve ruined it. You’re the first mortal I’ve beheld in a fortnight. Do you know how much harder these farces are when I feel bad for you?”

The word mortal scraped against me like his claws. I didn’t recognize what he was because he wasn’t like romantic fantasy books, but something older. He was something conjured instead by all the years of studying Celtic folklore, a whisper from my undergrad thesis. It had been on my mind with the audiobook I’d been listening to on the way up. He was my drunken dream.

The faerie scoffed. “You bat no eye at my misfortune. To you, it must seem very small indeed. Tell me, what is the mortal dilemma now? Is there a new war?”

I shook my head. “Same war. Rent goes up as wages go down. How are the job prospects for woodland beings?”

When he laughed, I knew why the Christians used to call them neutral devils. Not evil, just tricksters. “I miss the old days, when lulling mortals with faerie fruit and glamours was fun.”

I shrugged. “At least the rent’s free.”

His cat eyes narrowed. Was that eyeliner? How did he get that out here? “Will you at least pretend to be bewitched?”

“On the rare chance that this is real, I won’t. You can talk to me like a normal person, though. Maybe I’ll tell you my true name then.”

“How self-centered,” he spat. He turned away, arching his neck up to the tips of the aspens. His horns gleamed like bone. Then, “Do you really wish to hear of it?”

I would hear anything at this point, even if it was coming from something unreal. A fantasy. A distraction. “We’re two creatures far away from their kin, marooned by humanity. We’re more alike than you think.”

“Ah, so you’ve read the literature warning against my kind. Does being my servant for eternity not scare you?”

It was a dream. Nothing unreal could scare me. Looking back, a part of me saw the solid edges of reality, the harshness of waking life in the lines of his face. But I was lonely and desperate, and I needed to hold onto a dream for a few weeks longer.

So I listened to him rant about the tourists’ fantasies and the drought of summer in a ski town, of being an island, stranded from his origin point, of knowing he has to make a change, and not being able to give up the past. After, we went back to my car, and he let me talk. He listened for all the ways to trick and beguile, to hear me slip up and reveal my true name. He was so easy to talk to, and even easier to be silent with, that I almost told him my secrets. It became a blur of warm hands and rough lips, and I felt less human wrapped around him, but more like myself.

In the haze of sunrise, as sleep finally pulled me back down, he asked, “Your name, now?”

“Lanvalia,” I lied softly. The feminine version of someone from one of those old stories.

The next morning, the heat of the sun woke me. I was alone in the back of my car, perhaps as I had always been. The next two days, I tried to keep it unconscious, that forbidden part buried in me. With melatonin to aid my sleep the next few nights, I did not dream, especially not of him. But every moment when my mind was left to wander, I thought of him, and I hated myself for it. I gave up believing in magic too far into adolescence, and now it's snuck back in.

The third day, I came home from a long, slow shift, and there he was, his long body stretched over the rental couch, horn tips scraping the plastic blinds behind him. “Finally,” he said.

I halted at the doorframe, fingers loosening around my purse. “What–How did you find me?” I asked, as if that was the only logistical question in this whole situation. Not how are you real? or wby are you here?

“I followed the scent of desperation,” he said, rising from the couch. He looked more unreal in my living room, fluorescent lights instead of moonlight. It harshened him.

Dream or hallucination, I couldn’t blame it on the drink anymore. This was possibly a real mental disorder.

Go with it. I took a breath. I hadn’t given up on magic yet. Why now?

“You missed me,” I said.

His lips pressed together. He shook his head. “No, no, but it’s awfully dreary up there.”

“You want to hear more about my mortal life?”

“Fine, if you’re going to compel me into it.”

That’s how it started. I didn’t expect it to become so normal so quickly, but maybe we both needed a friend that badly. Okay, even I’ll admit that’s laughable. He didn’t need anything…he wasn’t real. But we talked for hours at a time, and naturally, it became sexual. I only saw him in the dimness of my house at night. The sex still felt blurry, but it was something.

For weeks, I lay with him at night and never told a soul. Fear kept me. It was the image of my mother’s face when I told her I’d study English. She’d called me an idiot then, and it took four years for me to believe her. I stopped believing in faeries long ago. I never stopped thinking I could get a job with a background in the fantastic.

But I kept inviting him in because he felt like warm chamomile in my throat. Something to tide me over, to keep me sane. It was a different kind of purgatory, but I didn’t realize it then. It was delaying hell.

One morning in the middle of July, I pulled up to work at the Lodge. At ten dollars an hour for my six-hour shift, I was set to pay half of my car insurance, maybe even knock off some of that credit card debt. Sitting and waiting for customers wasn’t glamorous, but it did pay meagerly. Then my manager told me to go home, that we we overstaffed.

In my car, I clenched my teeth so tight I heard a crack. Screaming was too melodramatic. This was my fault. I chose my major. I decided not to go home after college like everyone else. I wanted to scrape by, so it was me who had to deal with the consequences.

Still, I wanted him. He didn’t show up in daylight, not even when I asked. This wasn’t Lanval. He wasn’t a faerie queen coming to whisk me off to Avalon. This wasn’t a stab between the ribs. This was a buildup of multiple scrapes to the same place. One or two or five wouldn’t do a thing, but a thousand marks hit bone.

Without thinking, I drove up the mountain.

At the summit, I took a breath. I knew why the faeries stayed away from human civilization.

Maybe an hour later, I returned to my car. I turned my key in the ignition, and the engine sputtered and rumbled, but did not start. The lights flashed green and red on the dash. My battery died.

I stepped out and slammed the door. Birds scattered. The battery. What an easy fix. All I needed was a friend to come up here and jumpstart me. All I needed was a friend.

Except the only one I had was an apparition at worst. At best, he had no car. There were acquaintances from work, but they didn’t really know me, did they? And then there were my parents. The ones I moved a thousand miles into the fucking potato state to get away from. It was dumb to follow a dream. You spend four years racking up student loan debt, just to spend a few more racking up credit card debt until you give up on fiction. You sigh and submit and get a real job.

I walked ten miles down the mountain that day to the ski lodge, where I finally got service. I called a tow truck, put it on my credit card. Got a new battery, and–why the hell not–let’s put that on the card too.

In darkness, I finally dragged myself back to the too-big college house. Scrolled through my email for any responses from the hundreds of jobs I’d applied to, and only found one from my landlord:

Hello Tenants,

The end of your lease is fast approaching and we will be sad to see each of you go…

Of course. In the midst of it all, I’d completely forgotten that the lease ended on Friday. I set my phone down on the coffee table and sighed.

“Your desperation smells stronger tonight.”

I looked up, and there he was. He leaned against the kitchen counter. His jagged nails tapped the granite, the cat eyes yellow in this light.

“Get out,” I said, my voice low and even.

He strutted towards me. “I don’t believe you wish to be alone.”

I shook my head. “I want you to leave.” He was right. Desperation was on my tongue.

When he finally left, I fell to my side on the couch, pulling my knees to my chest. My face pulled together, all the wrinkles and tightness welcoming the tears. Then I walked down the street to the 7-Eleven and slid Liberty Creek’s Sweet Red onto the counter. I pulled out my credit card.

On Indeed, I’d spread my search radius wider. Let me go to Washington or Wyoming or Oregon. Hell, let me go across the country, as long as there was a job and a life there.

When I told people about that time, they said I was strong, no quit in me. Your resilience is astounding. It was always so bizarre to hear because what was the other option? I could allow a night to sit down and cry, drinking wine until the combined dehydration left me with vertigo like you wouldn’t believe. But there was always the next day.

This wouldn’t end until I made it, violently and dreadfully for everyone involved. I imagined an underpaid cleaner mopping up the mess of me after I was gone, and that terrified me more than homelessness. A human witness to the pain.

So I put out over a hundred applications, again. On the last day of my lease, with everything I owned taking up half of my car, the other half cushioned with blankets for my next few nights, I had an interview.

I showered for the first time in days, smoothing down my hair and positioning myself in front of the camera. Deep breath. Sure, it wasn’t what I wanted. It was a sales job in Spokane, calling people about getting their windows replaced. The interviewer asked me questions about my background, my passions. I used my human trickery and glamours, told them I loved talking to people. They offered me a job at the end of the fifteen-minute call. I told them I’d take a day to think about it.

My throat felt tight, and I wasn’t even crying yet. On Google Maps, Spokane looked gorgeous, probably only glamour and illusion. No one was happy selling windows. It was a job with a salary. There’d be no faeries there. What would I rather lose? How much longer could I hold this hunger in my stomach before it changed me forever? How long could a girl sleep with a fantasy before her lease was up and she was forced to move out?

On the salesman contract, I signed my true name next to the X, agreeing to a three-thousand-dollar severance fee should I decide I could no longer tolerate it. That alone took me seventy-two hours. I only broke when I woke up in the greenhouse heat of my car with a knock on my window. The Walmart employee looked apologetic. “You can’t camp here,” she said. I let out a laugh. Camping, right.

On my last night in Idaho, I drove up to where we met and asked for him. After the lovemaking was over, I let him hold me in the back of the hatchback. Warmth spread through me, but I couldn’t be fooled. Still, I had to look at the ceiling when I said, “I know this isn’t real.”

His body stiffened around me. “You can’t.”

“There are too many plot holes. How did a faerie end up in Idaho, and why would he want me? You give up trying to claim me the second we kiss.”

He was quiet for a while, the hallucination having no more arguments to prove its reality. I could bring him out into the streets, try to point madly at the faerie I’d taken to bed, and ask if they saw him too. It wasn’t worth the embarrassment. “I really did come to care about you,” he said.

“I know,” I told him. “That’s what you’re supposed to say.”

“Is that it then?”

I let out a long sigh as if I could slow time with my breathing. Was it self-centered or realistic to see him as my invention? “I’m going to Spokane. I found a job there.”

He paused. He pulled back, disentangling. “You can’t do that. I can’t follow you,” he said. A statement, not a question. Everyone knew the fae didn’t like human cities.

“I can’t live in this car forever. What, do you want me to live in the woods with you?”

“Yes,” he said emphatically. I turned over to face him, and he held my hands. “You needn’t go to the city. Come with me, and we’ll find somewhere.”

“I already took it. I’ll be okay. Spokane has mountains.” If he were real, I still would have been only convincing myself. Spokane wasn’t Avalon, but it was another chance.

“You’ve found employment studying texts, as you desire?”

It hurt more because he remembered. I didn’t even have to say the word no because he read it on my face. “Is there no way to change your heart?”

I shook my head. “We still have tonight.”

“Yes,” he breathed.

I held his hand tight, silently willing him to stay a little longer. He did, of course, pressing kisses to the back of my neck. But when the daylight came, he was gone. Soon, so was I.