Fam

Moths were fluttering under a streetlight outside, dancing around to some music only they could hear.  Stood below them were two women on the wrong side of thirty wearing crop-tops and mini-skirts and made up to look like they were in their early twenties.  Their slouch suggested they didn't want to be there; the way they straightened up and posed whenever a car cruised too slowly past or a single man went by suggested they were on the clock.
Pestilence sighed and turned away from the window.  Across the diner table sat Famine, the laminated tri-fold menu held in pale, wasted hands.  "Emphysema," he said.
"Nice," said Famine.  "You don't get that a lot.  And you've avoided anything obvious, like a job-related illness.  Both of them?"
"Nah, I got the one on the left," said Pestilence.  "You can have the one on the right, bro."
"Cool, fam."  He waved to the waitress who wrinkled her nose and reluctantly hauled herself off a counter stool and lumbered over.  She was heavyset and her beige uniform had grease stains on the skirt  and down the left-hand side of her blouse.  She was wearing support stockings that might once have been white but were now a uniform grey and her name badge had been broken in half at some point.  All that was left was a red-bordered white plastic shard reading "AIL".
"A couple of hotdogs for the ladies outside, please," said Famine.  "With extra mustard.  It must be cold out there.  And I'll have the entire breakfast menu.  Twice."  He looked at Pestilence.  "Fam?"
"You're Fam, bro," said Pestilence.  "I'll have a banana split.  Extra whipped cream."
"What from the breakfast menu, son?" asked the waitress.  She shifted her weight from one thick leg to the other and farted.
"All of it," said Famine.  "Twice."
"There's seventeen items on there, hon.  Which of them do you want?"
"All seventeen.  Twice.  That's thirty-four items."
The waitress eyed him coldly while she counted up seventeen twice in her head and decided that the answer was in fact thirty four.  "Fine," she said.  Behind her a cockroach scuttled across the floor.  "Two breakfasts for kings, a banana split with extra whipped cream, and hotdogs for your girlfriends."  She turned away and waddled to the kitchen.  Half-way there she turned back.  "How do you like your eggs?"
"All the ways you do them," said Famine.  He smiled as nicely as he could, but his hollow cheeks and dark-ringed eyes still made it look like a skull grinning.  "You're fam too, fam," he said to Pestilence.
"Nah bro, I'm your bro.  You're fam."
"Not Fam, fam.  Fam."
"Fam?  Shut up."
"Bro, just hang, right?"
"Jesus, Famine, were you always like this?  What were you like when you were a kid?"
Famine stared at Pestilence, his eyes burning in his head like coals.  "The teachers called me trouble," he said.  "They blamed me for the other kids's problems.  Like when everybody's lunchbox turned out to be empty because all their mothers had forgotten to pack them lunch."
"That sounds like something you'd do," said Pestilence.
"Yeah, right, but I didn't know I was doing it back then," said Famine.  "My dad was still Famine back in those days.  When I was eight he got me into the family business, let me team up with Crop Failure and his gang.  I'd go out riding a Harley on the weekends and we'd tear up some cornfields or a potato crop.  Didn't know that the whole Famine thing was going to land on my shoulders.  Bro."
"A Harley?" Pestilence nodded his head slowly.  By the kitchen another three cockroaches had appeared and were creeping under the door.  "Rich fam, Fam?"
"Nah, but War's parents were sharing out the spoils.  They liked horses, so the cars and bikes and aeroplanes were being handed out like candy.  They were good times."
"My sixth grade class all came down with galloping pleurisy three days into the start of the school year," said Pestilence.  "I got exclusive tuition for the rest of the year, and the teachers all treated me like I was the only survivor of a car crash or something."
"I heard about that," said Famine.  Outside a young kid in chef's whites was delivering hotdogs to the women in the lamplight.  Everyone looked confused.  "Didn't the same thing happen the next year."
"Sort of," said Pestilence.  "Half of them got yellow fever and the other half got scarlet fever.  After that  there weren't any kids near my age to be in class with me.  What did you put in the hotdogs then, Fam?"
"Tapeworm," said Famine.  "Classical and classy, that's me.  How're the cockroaches going?"
"Hundred and fifty so far," said Pestilence.  "I don't think we're going to get served you know." Screams came from the kitchen.
"Should have ordered ahead," said Famine.  "You've think we'd remember by now."

A brewery of egg-shells

Grey Ellen stood in the corner of the Innishere public house.  Outside it was raining, a slow but solid curtain of water that fell down relentlessly from a sky the colour of polished lead and turned the hillside roads into ad hoc streams.  Birds huddled on branches under broad leaves, heads tucked under wings, and the smells of wet peat and dark loam rose up around them.  Inside, the fire in the long stone hearth crackled happily throwing out waves of heat into the main room and any rain finding its way down the tall chimney evaporated back up before it ever reached the flames.  Cooking smells -- browning pastry, popcorn and burning sugar swirled amongst the tables, and the drinkers held tall glasses of dark ales and golden lagers to their lips while they listened to their companions hold forth on myriad topics.
Mrs McAleethie came in, shaking her umbrella off so that rainwater glistened brightly in the air before spattering on the nearest tables.  She hung it on Grey Ellen's arm, and then draped her sou'wester over Ellen's head where it joined two others.
"I'm a glass of white, Seamus," she said to the barman, looking around the room.  "And I'm not a one to go calling out the Queen of the Fairies or nothing, but she's up and taken my wee bairn and left me with a thing that looks like a raven had sex with a stick and they got to arguing over who should be pregnant."
There was a moment of silence while the drinkers considered what that might look like, and then a gentle hubbub returned and Seamus poured a glass of white wine at the bar.  He picked a fruity Sancerre as it seemed like Mrs McAleethie was a mite upset.
There was a clatter as Grey Ellen dropped the umbrellas and shook the raincoats off of her head.  She kicked aside outdoor boots and trampled Wellingtons, and generally made a complete pig's ear of a mess in the corner.  Mrs McAleethie scampered to the bar to grab her glass of wine before Ellen might think to take it for herself.
"Sweet chaos, sister," said Ellen.  She was called Grey because the locals believed that she straddled, somehow, the world of men and the world of the fay, and naturally that meant she couldn't be trusted.  It was pure coincidence, so they said, that her hair had greyed before she reached the age of twenty-five, and that a chance encounter with leprosy had left her with skin that only a zombie could envy.  "When you make bold statements like that you risk drawing the gaze of Our Mother of Nails.  What on earth could bring you to think that she'd violate the treaties and truces that we have and swap out a bairn for a boggart?"
"Aside from the fact we seem to make a fresh treaty every three months, swearing that this time we believe they'll honour it?"  Seamus's words seemed almost incidental, but somehow no-one else had been speaking when he spoke.  The gentle hubbub rose around him again and he swabbed the bar with a stinking, grey cloth.
"The child is little more than a toast-rack with the head of a Barbie doll," said Mrs McAleethie. "And not a new one, neither, but one that your older sister tried to barbecue one summer to punish her for putting out for Ken too often.  Calling it a child is a mercy to it, so it is; if it had feathers we'd pity it and drown it in the Holy Water at the Kirk, but as it is the Father, Lord bless his inebriate soul, says that the thing is just afflicted with the ugly and should be loved despite it."
"But are you sure it's a changeling?" asked Grey Ellen, her eyes bright in her thin, undernourished face.
"That I'm not," said Mrs McAleethie in the tones of a woman who was sure she was right but was trying hard to appear humble.  "I guess it's possible that I've bore a child who looks so little like me or my husband that we've both been wondering if we were both cheated on."
"You must be sure," said Ellen.  She hugged herself. "Have you suckled the child?"
"Bejesus no!  I'd sooner let the dog!"
Heads turned.
"But I won't!"
Heads turned away again.
"Then do as I say," said Grey Ellen, deepening her voice and ducking her head.  "Set the child before the fire in a bassinet and set a pot of water onto the fire to heat.  When the water seethes and bubbles as though raging at the injustice that Our Mother of Nails has committed to you, you must crack a dozen eggs and discard the contents.  Place each shell in the liquid, and bring it back to the boil.  If the child be a changeling it will surely reveal itself, and then you must seize it and plunge it into the boiling water as well.  But watch carefully -- when it flees your child will be returned and you must pluck it from the water before the heat hits it."
"Boil the baby," said Mrs McAleethie with an unwholesome tone of pleasure in her voice.  "All you drinking here, you're witness to what she just said.  I'm off to boil the baby, as per her instructions."
"That's not quite what I said," said Ellen, but Mrs McAleethie was hauling on a sou'wester and unfurling an umbrella and heading out into the curtains of rain.

The fire was small, but still enough to heat the McAleethie kitchen, and the baby in the bassinet was set in front of it and sweating like it was the middle of summer.  As Mrs McAleethie cracked eggs and set the white and yolks aside, casting the shells into the pot, the baby sat up.
"Have you been talking to Grey Ellen?" said the baby in a deep, masculine voice that suggested a lifetime of rich foods and courtly dancing.
"What if I have?"
"Only she's the only witch I know who thinks boiling eggshells is a sovereign remedy," said the baby.  "A dozen, right?"
Mrs McAleethie stopped cracking and turned to the child.  "You're a changeling," she said. "Ellen said that this would force you to reveal yourself."
"You could have just asked," said the baby.  "I've been here eight months and you've not said one word to me.  If I was really your child I'd be struggling to acquire language right now.  My first words would likely be "I want a divorce.""
"And what are you doing here anyway?  Where's my wee bairn, Johnnie Sebastian?"
"Dead," said the baby.  "He had kidney failure at nine days.  The Queen didnae want to see you upset, so she provided you with a surrogate for a wee while."
"Dead!" Mrs McAleethie sat back. "So it is.  And how does having you here help?"
"With the grieving," said the baby.  "You've had much longer to come to terms with losing the child, you'll get over this better and you'll have other children.  What are you going to do with the eggshells you're brewing so, then?"
"Ellen said to boil the baby," said Mrs McAleethie absently.  "Sodom and Gomorrah child, now I've no child at all.  What am I to do then?"
"Get pregnant," said the baby. "Or adopt."
"That's like stealing, but it's legal, right?"
"Mostly," said the baby.  "Though I'd not tell them about Grey Ellen and you taking her advice to boil babbies if I were you."
"Gomorrah," said Mrs McAleethie.  "I always thought I'd get the true child back after all this."
"He's a bit decomposed," said the baby.  "Quite runny in a lot of places too.  I... wouldn't."
"I can understand that," said Mrs McAleethie. "Of course, it seems a bit unkind to leave him with your Queen in that state too, ye ken?  I'm thinking maybe you could deliver him to Grey Ellen?  By way of thanks for all her advice?"
She and the baby shared a smile.