A Parade of Taylups
By Eugie Foster

t was five o’clock in the morning, but Robin couldn’t sleep.  It was hard sleeping at his grandmother’s with the sharp smells permeating her house--spices like coriander and mace blending with the musty-sweet smell of dust and pollen--and the uncomfortable, lumpy, straw bed she had given him.  He knew from TV shows that other grandmothers’ homes were scented with cinnamon and vanilla, and they gave their grandchildren proper beds with a mattress and box spring.  Why couldn’t his grandma have been one of those? 

Robin tiptoed downstairs and sat on the sofa in front of the big bay windows that overlooked the backyard.  She didn’t even have a TV; she said that televisions were time-wasting fripperies and her garden was entertainment enough for her.  The garden didn’t look particularly entertaining.  She grew herbs, strange herbs he’d never heard of like vervain, yarrow, and mullein.  What sort of food did you put yarrow in anyway?   

It was chilly for March in Georgia.  Robin draped the ragged quilt from his bed around his shoulders and tucked his feet beneath him.  He had been so glad when they’d told him they had found his grandmother--real family to belong to and live with.  Anything would be better than the gray walls and gray faces of the state home.  No one cared about anything there.  It didn’t matter what side of the door you lived on, there was only impatience and irritation in everyone’s flat, dull eyes.  The only brightness had come to him in his dreams--dreams of warm arms embracing him, welcoming him, dreams of belonging somewhere at last.  He’d hoped to find that here.  But it didn’t seem likely now.         

The herbs were sort of pretty in the pre-dawn light with their pale-lilac flowers and tall, feathery leaves.  They were bright in the gloom, sparkling with a milky luminescence.   

The garden underbrush rustled.  The tops of the spiky mullein stalks swayed as if a fierce breeze streaked through them, although the grass didn’t so much as flicker.  Something alive was in there, moving around. 

A small, soft face with button-black eyes, a sleek muzzle, and round, teddy bear ears pushed through.  It had a cream stripe down its face, and a cap of white fur on top of its head. 

It stepped out of the herb patch.  The tuft of white split down its back into two broad stripes to end in a thick, fluffy tail. 

It was a skunk. 

Except skunks were black and white.  This animal was orange and white, and not a dull, almost-brown orange either, but orange like the inside of a cantaloupe.  It had a businesslike quality about it, purposeful and intent, despite the unhurried trundle of its gait. 

Robin almost missed the next arrival as he gaped at the creamsicle-colored animal.  The herb stems rippled and another skunk emerged, its tail waving in the air like a flag.

Robin blinked in disbelief.  This newcomer was turquoise blue with wide, silver stripes.  It followed the first in a beeline across the yard.

“What are you doing awake?” 

Robin jumped.  He hadn’t heard his grandmother steal up behind him.  “Do you see them?” he demanded.  “Have you ever seen skunks those colors before?”

As he pointed, another skunk made its way out of the garden.  In addition to stripes, this one had spots like a cheetah, but the spots were speckles of dark purple against cherry-red fur. 

“Don’t they teach you anything at school?  Those aren’t skunks.  Those are taylups.” 

Robin tried not to bristle at her tone.  He had never heard of a “taylup” before, but didn’t want to admit it.  “They look like skunks to me.”

“That’s because skunks are taylups who have faded.”

Curiosity won out over resentment.  “What do you mean ‘faded’?” 

“A taylup is a fairy creature, like a pixie or elf.  A skunk is the animal they become when they lose their fey virtues, when they fade.”

Robin scowled.  “There’s no such thing as fairies.”

"Of course not.  And there’s no such thing as taylups either.”

A shiny, butterscotch animal--skunk or taylup--sauntered out.  Thin, pink, horizontal and vertical stripes crisscrossed its body.  Robin gasped.  It was plaid.  Yellow and pink plaid.

“That’s impossible.”

"You must be very wise,” Grandma said, “to know everything that is possible and not possible in all the world.”

“But there’s no such thing as fairies.  There can’t be!”

“As you say.”

A lime green taylup followed the plaid one.  This one didn’t have stripes, although it shared the same pointed muzzle and fluffed tail as its predecessors.  Its fur was whorled with marbled streaks of black.

“How do you know about taylups?” Robin asked.

“Doesn’t everyone?” 

Robin crossed his arms and stared sullenly out the window.   But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Grandma wink, her bright eyes glittering in the murky light. “Would you like me to tell you about them?” she said.

Robin uncrossed his arms.  Maybe she wasn’t making fun of him after all.  “Okay.”

She jabbed a finger in his ribs to make him scoot over and plunked down bedside him.  “In the land of Faerie, taylups are highly regarded, revered even.”

“Fairies don’t mind their stink?”

Grandma laughed.  “Taylups don’t stink, boy.  Everything in Faerie is different--scent, taste, touch.  Taylups smell of wild honey, mint, and fresh strawberries.  It’s only when they become skunks that their spray becomes noxious.”

“I’d think everyone would prefer them to stay in Faerie then,” Robin said. 

“And so they would too.  But they have to leave or else everyone would be doomed to eternal winter.”

“Why?”

“Every year the Lord of Faerie--they call him the Green Man--and his Queen, the Lady of the Forest, flee from the cold and snow.  If Father Winter catches them, he will imprison them in cages of frozen tears and thereby keep spring from coming forever.  So they run, chased by frost and ice.  And each year they get lost and fall through the veil between the world of Faerie and the world of men.”

“They get lost every year?  Can’t they use a GPS or a map or something?”

Grandma frowned.  “There are no such things in Faerie.  And if there were, they wouldn’t work.  Such tools are unreliable in the land of dreams.”

“Oh.”

“So anyway, in February, on the holiday of Imbolic, the taylups set off on their quest to find the Lord and Lady and escort them back.”

“What’s Imbolic?”

“It’s the start of the spring festivities that end in Ostara, the Festival of Trees.”

“I’ve never heard of those days.”

Grandma's mouth turned down in a sad moue.  “They’re very old,” she said, “and like many old things, they have been forgotten, or misremembered.  You know of Candlemas and Groundhog Day don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Candlemas is when those who wish to aid the taylups light candles to help them find their way in the dark winter night.  Groundhog Day is celebrated because the groundhogs poke out of their burrows to tell the searching taylups whether or not they’ve seen the Lord and Lady pass by.”

“That’s not right.  Groundhog Day is--”

“You want to hear the story or don’t you?”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, Hob Day, which incidentally is today, marks the return of the questing taylups.  On that day they guide the Green Man back to Faerie, and the day after that is the Feast of the Lady when they lead the Lady to her throne.”

“But what about the skunks?”

“I was getting to that.  It’s dangerous for any creature of Faerie to stray through the veil for it is easy for them to become confused.  They forget Faerie and who they are, pining and dreaming of things they cannot remember.  They are never truly happy, but they don’t understand why, and they become doomed to die in the wastelands of man, alone and forlorn.  Yet taylups, even though they know the risk, still go out each year.  Some never return.  Those are the skunks.”

Robin thought that very sad and very brave.  “Can’t they ever go back?”

"Sometimes, rarely, a skunk encounters another fairy before they’ve completely forgotten what they are.  Only fairies can see their own kind.  If the almost faded explains away the magic they see as something rational and mundane, then they are truly adrift.  But the ones that embrace the wonder into themselves, the ones who remember how to see, they can go home.”

A snow-white taylup dappled with fat polka dots in crimson red, tangerine orange, canary yellow, bright green, dazzling azure, and rich violet trotted by.  It was like a little rainbow had passed by the window.

“Grandma?” 

“Yes.”

“I can see the taylups.”  He shifted on the sofa and his feet tangled in the quilt.  But the quilt was no longer a quilt; it was a knotwork brocade of grass and leaves.  And his feet were no longer the pale, soft limbs he remembered, but were reed-thin, and tanned leathery brown.  He leapt up.  “Grandma!” 

“Hmm?”

He glanced sideways at her.  Her ears seemed thin, pointed even, and her skin was darker and eddied with knots and veins, like the inside of an ancient oak tree.  He faced her, and she was just Grandma with her colorless hair pulled into a tight bun, and her eyes lost in creases of papyrus skin.  But when he squinted, he could see, like a superimposed image, the sharp ears and the marbled designs on her skin.

“You said that only fairies could see them.”  No, it wasn’t the strange, eldritch vision that was the overlay, but the white-haired, wrinkled one.

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t that mean--?” 

She turned her bright eyes to him, and her hair was no longer caught in a bun, but loose, flowing down in a wave of mahogany locks, interlaced with thin tendrils of vines dotted with yellow flowers. 

“You remember,” she sighed. 

And Robin did.  He remembered the twinkling sunlight of Faerie as it played on crystalline waters, the smells--wild cherries and fragrant clover and the savor of the air so unlike anything here--the taste of honey fresh from the comb, and the joyous dances beneath the harvest moon. 

“There’s more to the story,” she said.  “Before the Lady of the Forest returns, she tries to gather up those lost and faded who wander in the world of men and help them find their way.” 

Robin remembered stumbling through the rift between worlds on Samhain in October, when the veil was thinnest.  Bewildered, he had forgotten himself and become a human child.  But now he remembered, and he knew what he had been yearning for all this time--the golden afternoons and iridescent skies of Faerie. 

“My lady,” he said, for of course it was none other than she, the Lady of the Forest.  “Take me home.”

The Lady took his hand and led him out the door, overgrown with kudzu and liana vines, and into her backyard where the parade of taylups continued.  Passing through the misty fence that once had been solid, they walked, keeping pace with the frolicking taylups.

They came at last to a ring of toadstools, their caps gleaming white in the silvery pre-dawn.  Each taylup bowed his nose to the Lady before launching himself through the border to disappear in a splash of shimmering light.   

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