I have been performing this story for about two years, and now seems like as good a time as any to finally post it up on my site – 

The Recall of Cthulhu

The trinket in the charity shop window snagged at my eye. It’s shocking familiarity transfixed my gaze and threw my thoughts off into stark memories that had only just been forgotten.
The tiny statuette was Art Deco in flavour and gleamed with a dull gunmetal sheen.
I knew the piece well, it was part of a popular collectible series. A few years ago they’d been everywhere, ubiquitous in new age shops, tawdry fairy-tat fit only for St. Audrey’s fair.
They came with different gemstones inlaid, different cute poses, different blessings – fertility/protection/love/peace – or with different curses – disappointment/hubris/self-pity/solitude.

The little pewter love fairy, pretty but anodyne, with a ruby red inlaid heart,
had been given to me and my husband, I mean  ex-husband, as a wedding gift from a relative stranger. Although it sat on our “wedding blessings, shelf”, enshrined for many years,
truth to  say I never really liked the thing. It wasn’t my cup of tea, no.,
No, it offended me actually, it was a Lady Cottington fairy, a Flower fairy, a fluffy-bunny new-age denatured, deracinated post-ironic anthropomorphised cherub-fairy.
A Walt Disney  fairy.

Not the fearful fulsome fae in the ancient tales that I have heard whispered in the places hereabouts.
Traditionally, we humans fear the fairies, we lay devotional altars to beloved land wights deep in out-of-the-way places,
we beg the unliving for permission to live,
if they call at our door we dare not invite them in,
yet must not turn them away,
we avoid treading on their fairy paths
or jumping in their fairy rings,
and we never ever eat a single morsel of food at faerie feasts in the Hollow Hills. For fear of enchantment, lest we never return home for hundreds of years.

The Fae are dark, and among us still.

More than that, and I’m going to speak my mind now, the gemstone at the figurine’s heart laid waste to the spell of unconditional peace promised by the fairy talisman. The cut ruby was a product of murderously cut-throat gemstone mining, human rights abuses and land-rape par for the course and if you think about it, if you think about such things, that’s a very heavy karmic charge to be carrying. The piece was, in its totality, an enduring damnation of the vanity and disingenuousness of New Age commercial pretensions.

No wonder it all ended in divorce.

Strawberry Fair Wild Strawberries Stage 2017. Photo by JS Watts

I scrutinised the trinket through the plate glass window, I could swear, I really thought, it was the same, it seemed to me, the very same.
But it wasn’t. I knew it couldn’t be, because after the Decree Absolute, just before I moved out, I buried that love fairy, upside down, anointed in cat shit and toxic toad spit,  leaving Tinkerbell forever in sprite-ish torment, under the offering table to the unspeakable, beneath the onerous shrine of Cthulhu – blasphemous, swooning,
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,
at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

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