The Fairy Gold
The contract for the gold is amusement.
Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
“I’m starting to think I might be the fae,” I said into a voice note to Meg Elison. I was laying on my bed in the heat of the Bay Area’s summer. Our Septembers roast us just as I’m ready to become mostly flannel. It was the equinoxes, the eclipses, the moons were sauntering through intimate spaces like they owned the place.
“STARTING‽ I assumed this was something you were familiar with about yourself.” I could hear Meg’s bathtub drain in the background.
I have a, ahem, “reputation” amongst my friends. My pursuit of amusement teeters on a chronic condition. My boredom allergy is fatal and its only treatment is plot.
Which brings us back around to the realization in question. Because while the fair folk have a tendency in to entice with generosity, the consequence often leaves the subject utterly disoriented.
The gold always disappears.
The warnings are consistent, “never give them your name” and “never eat the fairy food.”
But have we considered the perspective of the fairy?
I want to come up with a filigreed and tapestried way to say this but all this started because I was flirting with someone on the internet. You know, as one does.
It’s the usual fun unfolding of something that’s going to run its course in, like, a week. And honestly it was very very fun. The dropping of song links, the unwritten postscript of wish you were here on every story and post. That lovely meandering sensation of walking around knowing someone likes me. I’m mysterious and exciting.
But like all August romances, September hits. And there is a grounding sensation in the twilight of the year. I was getting bored. I had asked every question I could think of, and not been asked the right ones back. I had done my most dazzling and exciting work, but now I was growing restless.
Which brings us back to my voice notes with Meg.
“What if I did something like wrote them a handwritten letter and then blocked them so the only choice they had was to write me back or wonder where it all went wrong?” I had moved from the bed to park myself in front of the oscillating fan and have it air out my armpits. “Like ‘I met this amazing woman and she was weird and great and loved cassette tapes and poking dead things, and then she was gone.’”
“This feels like a lot of work on your part for what would amount to mild amusement,” Meg said, clinically. “It’s been a while since I looked up the labor exchange rates, and this doesn’t sound like a very good deal.”
I wanted to provoke my dwindling crush into dramatic action. I wanted to send them crow bones and see what they said. I had a list of possible things I could do to entice and entrap for another week. Maybe two.
I wanted to make the gold disappear. That was it. I didn’t want to give someone the fairy gold and have them do something reasonable or polite and responsible with it. I wanted them to do something exciting.
That’s the true lesson of charmed gifts. The gift is entrapment. The gift is connection. They aren’t meant to pay down debt or for mundane realities. It’s imaginary gold, it’s meant to buy chaos.
The gold disappears when you violate the contract. Every coin you spend you’ll hear the laughter and mirth of the fae. But when you start to get typical, all you’ll hear is silence.
No use throwing good money after bad. And so, like all fairies, I packed up my gold and blew away.
Hear ye, hear ye! I’ll be presenting at Hexenfest this October!
I’m teaching a workshop called Poetry as Ancestor Work at California’s premier pagan music festival Hexenfest. The workshop incorporates meditation, free writing, and generative poetry prompts to help access your ancestral team and build your own spiritual stories. If you’re going, I’d love to see you!
Got questions? Topics your want to see me talk about? Want to book a reading? Email doyouwanttodosomewitchcraft@gmail.com and send me a note. Want to read more of my work? Check out my website, and if you’d like to support me, buy a book or pledge my patreon.
Find me by sending a crow to the only streetlight in the smallest town you've ever heard of.
Or by checking out my website laureneparker.com