The Gray House

No one could say he had it easy. In the bed of his pickup truck there were twelve little mattresses, a box with clean baby clothes, a bag with the dirty ones, another bag, this one with disposable utensils, a boombox lashed to the side with wire, and eleven kids, aged one to three. At least he got lucky with Rat Fairy. She drove while he busied himself in the back with the children, and sometimes spelled him for a short time in this capacity, so he could get some sleep. Not too often, because it meant that the truck wasn’t moving. She looked more like an evil enchantress than a good fairy, but she was neither evil nor good, she was just fulfilling the task she had been charged with.

With the children he was also lucky. They were all smarter than their age, and almost all of them endured the trip quietly and patiently. But they still would get carsick from time to time, they needed to eat and drink, many were not toilet-trained yet, those who were still couldn’t do it sometimes in the shaking truck bed, and no matter how he tried, each day it became harder and harder for him.

People who saw this strange family were surprised that many of the children were of the same age while not being twins, and that none of them looked like their father. Also suspicious was the father’s relative youthfulness, the crow ensconced on his shoulder, and the wide-brimmed black hat adorned with a ring of the yellowed skulls of some small animal.

“Gypsies, I’ll bet,” they said, glowering. “And the kids are stolen.”

“They are not all mine,” he would explain self-consciously, when the questions became particularly probing. “Half of them are my sister’s.”

And he pointed at the raven-haired girl behind the wheel. She chain-smoked, resting her sharp elbow on the edge of the window, and her shoulder featured an unusual tattoo: a scowling rat. As soon as people had a good look at it, even the most inquisitive of them thought it best to walk away, and the questions tended to end abruptly.

The truck rolled around seemingly without purpose, but Rat Fairy did, in fact, constantly check the map. Some houses were marked on it with a red cross. They tried to reach them at dawn and without disturbing the neighbors. Each time they were met there, usually by a man and a woman, but sometimes only by women and once by a single man. A brief hushed conversation ensued, one of the children would be transferred from the truck to the house, and they left as quietly as they came. Other houses were marked with green crosses. These they visited openly, at any time of day or night, and picked up boxes of baby food.

And even though there were fewer and fewer children, they grew more and more tired, and their journey became more arduous. They started forgetting days and dates, talked less and less, confused the kids they’d already fed with the ones who were still hungry. Twice Rat Fairy lost her way, making the quest longer by many hours.

Still, when it came the time to part with the last child, he started crying. Rat Fairy slapped him on the back.

“Oh, come on. You’ll have your own someday.”

She wasn’t really evil, it was just that there were things she had no way of understanding.

The Waitress

Every night when her shift ended, about half past eight, she would go out into the backyard of the café carrying the scraps for the cats. She distributed them between two paper plates, leaned with her back against the deck railing and simply stood there, resting or maybe dreaming, until it became dark. The cats strolled around. Gray cats did it invisibly, of course, black-and-whites were half-visible. She stood there, also almost invisible except for the apron and the lace cap, hands tucked under her armpits, and waited. “The twilight is the crack between the worlds.” She’d picked up this phrase in some book, back when she still had time to read. She no longer remembered what happened in that book or who wrote it, but this phrase alone stuck in her mind. The crack between the worlds, she kept thinking, staring into the deepening blue dusk. Here. Now. When it became too dark to distinguish the shape of the lilac bush near the fence, five feet from the deck, she went back. Feeling rested and full of energy, as if the half hour she spent doing nothing cleansed her of the tiredness, the kitchen reek, and the kitchen gossip.

Because of that strange habit, the other kitchen girls started calling her Princess. Some days, when she returned to the kitchen for her bag before leaving, she heard them talking about her.

“You’d think she would run back to the child, right? But no, first she needs to nip out back for an hour, day in and day out. Some mother, is what I’m saying. If you ask me, I wouldn’t let people like her within a mile of children.”

“She must be doing this because she doesn’t like taking care of the baby. I have no idea who she dumps the poor thing on while she’s here.”

Sometimes the woman who was relieving her shift would chime in.