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Description
          I thought of my grandmother the second I walked through the unlocked screen door. She once told me, in that head-wagging way of hers, that unexplainably nice smells were due to the presence of angels. Not that I couldn’t explain why my senses reeled in delight – the baker had been at work for hours before I arrived, and the products of his labor greeted my nose before I saw them.

          I felt faintly ridiculous, as usual. Here I was trekking around this dinky town with its poor lighting, poor paving, and street signs that seemed to vanish just as I needed them most. Bad enough that it was 4 AM, that uncomfortable time when my body cannot decide whether the day is just beginning or over already; worse still that my subject of inquiry – fairies – would get me laughed out of any reasonable person’s presence in two minutes flat. Nevertheless, Rennie had assured me, in conspiratorial tones over several glasses of red wine, that this guy was the one to talk to.

          “Andreas…?” The humming wall of industrial sized ovens probably swallowed my voice, but I could see him through the plastic divider that hung on the wide doorway. I parted the strips of rubbery curtain only to hear AC/DC blaring over the radio at ear-obliterating volume. My nose, already weakened by the barrage of fresh croissants and apple tarts, could do nothing to withstand the assault the scent of motor-oil-strength coffee brewing.

          He was bigger, and fitter, than I expected, with a lean waist and shoulders as broad as Hephaestus’ under a white t-shirt. Instead of hammering away at the anvil of the gods, he pounded the living tar out of a sizable slab of dough. Briefly entranced, I watched as he flipped it. It seemed a sensual dance – the way his palms rolled forward and back, shaping the untamed mass; the clean, resilient, vaguely pornographic way the naked bulk slapped against the table. Almost embarrassed to interrupt such an intimate affair, I stepped into his field of vision and waved timidly, half afraid he’d chuck that rolling pin at me. “Mr. Erwachen? My name is Luke. A friend of mine, Renate, said I should come speak to you…” I trailed off, too embarrassed to flat-out admit my purpose for coming.

          Reaching over to turn down the radio to a more civilized volume, he briefly sized me up. “Yeah, she mentioned you’d stop by this week. Wanted to hear some fairy stories?” Rennie said he’d left Austria eight years ago, but his heavily accented English toed a fine line between barely intelligible and completely incoherent.

          “Something like that, yes.”

           Brushing his flour-dusted hands off on an already smudgy apron, he turned around to face me, crossing his arms and leaning against the wood-topped work table. I noticed there was nowhere to sit, so I stayed put. “I’m not going to tell you some crap about little naked women with sparkle wings.”

          “I had hoped not.”

          “Good. That seems to be all the American audience wants, anyway. You have all those different words for them, too. Leprechauns and sprites, wee folk and brownies…” He laughed mightily, gesturing towards a tray nearby. “Those are my kind of brownies. Dark Belgian chocolate, caramelized brown sugar, pure black espresso, framboise ganache.” His voice went low and soft, and I couldn’t help but feel… seduced? “They do not do my chores at night, but they sell very well,” he went on, chuckling.

          “So, you want to know. I’m from Steyr. Very old city, over a thousand years old. People in new cities, they got no history, yeah? Everything’s just been built, nobody lived there long, no one remembers the past. My family always lived near Steyr. My father, his father had the bakery there. My grandmother, she was the one, told me stories about fairies. The old things, old folk, she called them. Things left from when people killed a goat on the fall harvest. Not to eat it - to give its blood to the trees.”

          “And did you believe her stories?”

          “Maybe I should say it different. It was not so much stories, it was like facts. These things, the fee, are just as real as Uncle Karl and Cousin Anton, and probably more important. My grandfather would holler, he didn’t believe her stuff, but she used to take the flour and draw symbols with it over the door frame of the bakery. To keep the fee out - you don't want them to visit. You want them to pass you by. They’re not the cute little Tinkerbells you see in movies.”

          I didn’t recall any symbols painted outside, but then it was pitch black when I walked in. “Did she ever see them in person, the fairies?”

          “See them? She knew them! Well, one of them. I was there when he walked in. I must have been seven, eight years old.”

          “Wait,” I interrupted. “A fairy walked into the bakery?” My mind boggled, still stuck on a foot-tall creature with pointy shoes and a silver-bell giggle.

          He laughed, running a hand over his clean shaven head. “Ja! He looked just like any man; light-haired, light-eyed. Dressed like he's from the countryside, maybe. He came in, walked right up to the counter, spoke to my grandmother, quietly. No one even looked at him.”

          “And she told you he was a fairy?”

          “I knew he was,” he snorted.

          “But you said he looked like any other man.”

          “It is not so much what he looked like that made me know. It is how I see. Some things, they are too hard for people to take. Scary things, different things. So they choose not to see them. I choose to see it all. Grandmother, she saw that way too.”

          I was beginning to think I had come across a highly functional schizophrenic, but I’m nothing if not an enabler. “How does that work?”

          Andreas sighed heavily. “It is difficult to tell… I always lived in a different time, different space. I am up way before dawn and in bed by noon. Most people are asleep when I am hard at work. I live in that part before sunrise that’s not night, not day. Twilight, it’s called? Zwischen Zeit – between time. It’s easier to see these things, to know them, when you are… between…” His brow furrowed. “It is harder to explain in English.”

          “I think I understand what you mean,” I offered, though I understood diddly-squat. “What happened, after he spoke with your grandmother?”

          An almost sad expression crossed his face. “He just left. She was upset, but would not tell me what he said. She became fearful of everything. It was after that, that she began drawing wards on the doors to keep them out. He never came back, but I don’t think it was because of her symbols.”

          “Did you ever see other fairies, after that? More recent encounters, in particular?” This was the main point of my inquiry. The agency had made that much clear.

          “You make it sound so simple,” he huffed derisively, “like they pop out from behind bushes or peek in your windows. The fee that came to my grandmother, he came for a reason. Whatever the reason, it turned a strong mountain woman into a frightened old lady. I have made a point not to bring attention from the alte Völker.”

          “So you have not met anybody like that within the last few years?”

          His nostrils positively flared. “And I do not want to!” Pausing, his look became bitter, paranoid even. “I thought you were here to listen to an old fairy-tale.”

          “I… well, I am…” I stammered. This opposition was unexpected. Why would a man built like a professional wrestler fear a mystical creature, and an unconfirmed one at that? “I was hoping to find updated information too.”

          Abruptly, he turned back to his table and resumed his work. “You are trying to open doors that should stay shut. I will not have those things coming to me. I don’t know what you’re after, but you will find no more stories here.”

          I waited, expecting some gesture of goodbye as closure, but he kept kneading without so much as an upwards glace. Once he reached for the narrow rolling pin and started waling it against the pale slab of dough, it seemed best to make my exit. Edging back towards the screen door, I mumbled something polite only to be cut off by AC/DC returning to full volume.

          Hastily stepping back outside, it only took a second and a bit of dim light projected from my cell phone to illuminate the symbols finger-painted in flour around the door frame. I copied them down then hurried through the dark to the car.

Description
          I thought of my grandmother the second I walked through the unlocked screen door. She once told me, in that head-wagging way of hers, that unexplainably nice smells were due to the presence of angels. Not that I couldn’t explain why my senses reeled in delight – the baker had been at work for hours before I arrived, and the products of his labor greeted my nose before I saw them.

          I felt faintly ridiculous, as usual. Here I was trekking around this dinky town with its poor lighting, poor paving, and street signs that seemed to vanish just as I needed them most. Bad enough that it was 4 AM, that uncomfortable time when my body cannot decide whether the day is just beginning or over already; worse still that my subject of inquiry – fairies – would get me laughed out of any reasonable person’s presence in two minutes flat. Nevertheless, Rennie had assured me, in conspiratorial tones over several glasses of red wine, that this guy was the one to talk to.

          “Andreas…?” The humming wall of industrial sized ovens probably swallowed my voice, but I could see him through the plastic divider that hung on the wide doorway. I parted the strips of rubbery curtain only to hear AC/DC blaring over the radio at ear-obliterating volume. My nose, already weakened by the barrage of fresh croissants and apple tarts, could do nothing to withstand the assault the scent of motor-oil-strength coffee brewing.

          He was bigger, and fitter, than I expected, with a lean waist and shoulders as broad as Hephaestus’ under a white t-shirt. Instead of hammering away at the anvil of the gods, he pounded the living tar out of a sizable slab of dough. Briefly entranced, I watched as he flipped it. It seemed a sensual dance – the way his palms rolled forward and back, shaping the untamed mass; the clean, resilient, vaguely pornographic way the naked bulk slapped against the table. Almost embarrassed to interrupt such an intimate affair, I stepped into his field of vision and waved timidly, half afraid he’d chuck that rolling pin at me. “Mr. Erwachen? My name is Luke. A friend of mine, Renate, said I should come speak to you…” I trailed off, too embarrassed to flat-out admit my purpose for coming.

          Reaching over to turn down the radio to a more civilized volume, he briefly sized me up. “Yeah, she mentioned you’d stop by this week. Wanted to hear some fairy stories?” Rennie said he’d left Austria eight years ago, but his heavily accented English toed a fine line between barely intelligible and completely incoherent.

          “Something like that, yes.”

           Brushing his flour-dusted hands off on an already smudgy apron, he turned around to face me, crossing his arms and leaning against the wood-topped work table. I noticed there was nowhere to sit, so I stayed put. “I’m not going to tell you some crap about little naked women with sparkle wings.”

          “I had hoped not.”

          “Good. That seems to be all the American audience wants, anyway. You have all those different words for them, too. Leprechauns and sprites, wee folk and brownies…” He laughed mightily, gesturing towards a tray nearby. “Those are my kind of brownies. Dark Belgian chocolate, caramelized brown sugar, pure black espresso, framboise ganache.” His voice went low and soft, and I couldn’t help but feel… seduced? “They do not do my chores at night, but they sell very well,” he went on, chuckling.

          “So, you want to know. I’m from Steyr. Very old city, over a thousand years old. People in new cities, they got no history, yeah? Everything’s just been built, nobody lived there long, no one remembers the past. My family always lived near Steyr. My father, his father had the bakery there. My grandmother, she was the one, told me stories about fairies. The old things, old folk, she called them. Things left from when people killed a goat on the fall harvest. Not to eat it - to give its blood to the trees.”

          “And did you believe her stories?”

          “Maybe I should say it different. It was not so much stories, it was like facts. These things, the fee, are just as real as Uncle Karl and Cousin Anton, and probably more important. My grandfather would holler, he didn’t believe her stuff, but she used to take the flour and draw symbols with it over the door frame of the bakery. To keep the fee out - you don't want them to visit. You want them to pass you by. They’re not the cute little Tinkerbells you see in movies.”

          I didn’t recall any symbols painted outside, but then it was pitch black when I walked in. “Did she ever see them in person, the fairies?”

          “See them? She knew them! Well, one of them. I was there when he walked in. I must have been seven, eight years old.”

          “Wait,” I interrupted. “A fairy walked into the bakery?” My mind boggled, still stuck on a foot-tall creature with pointy shoes and a silver-bell giggle.

          He laughed, running a hand over his clean shaven head. “Ja! He looked just like any man; light-haired, light-eyed. Dressed like he's from the countryside, maybe. He came in, walked right up to the counter, spoke to my grandmother, quietly. No one even looked at him.”

          “And she told you he was a fairy?”

          “I knew he was,” he snorted.

          “But you said he looked like any other man.”

          “It is not so much what he looked like that made me know. It is how I see. Some things, they are too hard for people to take. Scary things, different things. So they choose not to see them. I choose to see it all. Grandmother, she saw that way too.”

          I was beginning to think I had come across a highly functional schizophrenic, but I’m nothing if not an enabler. “How does that work?”

          Andreas sighed heavily. “It is difficult to tell… I always lived in a different time, different space. I am up way before dawn and in bed by noon. Most people are asleep when I am hard at work. I live in that part before sunrise that’s not night, not day. Twilight, it’s called? Zwischen Zeit – between time. It’s easier to see these things, to know them, when you are… between…” His brow furrowed. “It is harder to explain in English.”

          “I think I understand what you mean,” I offered, though I understood diddly-squat. “What happened, after he spoke with your grandmother?”

          An almost sad expression crossed his face. “He just left. She was upset, but would not tell me what he said. She became fearful of everything. It was after that, that she began drawing wards on the doors to keep them out. He never came back, but I don’t think it was because of her symbols.”

          “Did you ever see other fairies, after that? More recent encounters, in particular?” This was the main point of my inquiry. The agency had made that much clear.

          “You make it sound so simple,” he huffed derisively, “like they pop out from behind bushes or peek in your windows. The fee that came to my grandmother, he came for a reason. Whatever the reason, it turned a strong mountain woman into a frightened old lady. I have made a point not to bring attention from the alte Völker.”

          “So you have not met anybody like that within the last few years?”

          His nostrils positively flared. “And I do not want to!” Pausing, his look became bitter, paranoid even. “I thought you were here to listen to an old fairy-tale.”

          “I… well, I am…” I stammered. This opposition was unexpected. Why would a man built like a professional wrestler fear a mystical creature, and an unconfirmed one at that? “I was hoping to find updated information too.”

          Abruptly, he turned back to his table and resumed his work. “You are trying to open doors that should stay shut. I will not have those things coming to me. I don’t know what you’re after, but you will find no more stories here.”

          I waited, expecting some gesture of goodbye as closure, but he kept kneading without so much as an upwards glace. Once he reached for the narrow rolling pin and started waling it against the pale slab of dough, it seemed best to make my exit. Edging back towards the screen door, I mumbled something polite only to be cut off by AC/DC returning to full volume.

          Hastily stepping back outside, it only took a second and a bit of dim light projected from my cell phone to illuminate the symbols finger-painted in flour around the door frame. I copied them down then hurried through the dark to the car.