All That You Are

Capretto didn’t believe in faeries. That is, before he got married he didn’t believe in them. A devil-red one floated overhead now in a state of suspended gesture, a little simper playing about its face, small clouds slipping by it. Capretto’s wife Mafalda had summoned it for their tenth anniversary. She had a number of faery friends who were always doing her favours. She said they were a blessing on their lives, but Capretto could not care less about these fussy creatures. Any magic they possessed only manifested itself in stingy drips and drabs. They never delivered the goods entire, the total show. They never exerted more energy than was necessary to trick their human contacts into letting their nonsense slide.

Hiding his indifference to the faery, Capretto embraced his wife vigorously in their yard by the fuchsia tree. He stroked her shoulder and planted his muzzle into her neck cavity.

“Your breath, dear,” Mafalda said, averting her face.

“Sorry,” he said. “I ate an onion this morning.”

“You eat them like apples.”

“And how are they supposed to be eaten?”

She didn’t want to argue with him this morning. Yesterday they’d argued about him eating her tulips. “Was not!” he’d protested. But she’d seen him munching them from a vase on the kitchen table with an unnatural gleam in his eyes. Anyway, exhausting. The happiness of life depended on the quality of discourse, yes, but also on compromise and good manners. Even love couldn’t overcome a lack of these qualities. Fortunately, good and cheerful things existed on the world to offset the negatives. She looked up and waved at the red faery who smiled and waved back.

“He’s so high up there,” she said, screening her eyes with her flattened hand.

“So it’s a male, this one?” Capretto said. “How can you tell?”

“Oh, don’t be silly. That’s Fabrizio. He’s a real character. He’s going to do one big thing for me today. He promised. He’s just waiting for my signal.”

“What’s he going to do?”

Mafalda closed and opened her eyes. “You’ll see.”

Capretto followed her back to the house. He loved his wife, but her humanity often angered him. He saw it as a character flaw, if not a crippling weakness. He had tried to explain this one evening over beers to his friend Giacomo, a full-blooded goat, but he wasn’t sympathetic. He didn’t like humans. He thought they smelled horrible. “That’s the least of it,” he’d say. “They also stink, behaviorally speaking, as fellow occupants of this planet.” But Capretto always steered Giacomo away from this line of talk. It could lead to trouble. You never knew who was leaning in with an ear. Now he wished he was with Giacomo so he could ask him what he thought of faeries, if he considered them as useless as he did, as absurd as he did.

“You’re frowning,” Mafalda said. “Why are you frowning?”

“I’m not frowning,” Capretto said, standing at the kitchen window. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. For god sake, can’t a person think anymore?” He moved his mouth in pseudo-disgust and stomped the floor. Mafalda had replaced the ingested red and white tulips in the vase on the table with tantalizingly vibrant yellow ones. Mafalda thinned her eyes at him. He cleared his throat and asked, “So what’s this special thing your faery friend is going to do?”

“Only if you want,” she said. “He’ll do it only if you want.”

Capretto winced at the sound of this. And it didn’t take him long to figure out what Mafalda had up her sleeve. She wanted him fully transmogrified! She wanted him to go one hundred percent! Yes, they had talked about it. If they planned children, wouldn’t it be better if both parents were one hundred percent and so on, this sort of thing. That’s what Mafalda had posited. That he should transition to fullness for the sake of these hypothetical future generations. He found the idea laughable. He asked her, why she didn’t go half-and-half and let the faery do his business on her? Wouldn’t that amount to the same thing? No, she’d said. It was a technical impossibility. The faeries could only perform the transformation on him.

“What if I need more time to think about it?” he said. “It’s no small thing, Mafalda.” “I know, but it’s for the best, I think.” Indeed, it was no small thing. Mafalda was making an ultimate ask. Was he prepared to commit? “At dawn, birds can do nothing but sing,” he said. Mafalda glared at him. “How’s that?” “At dawn, birds can do nothing but sing.” Exasperated, she shook her head and went back out. Capretto stood at the kitchen window and watched her converse with the faery — what was his name again? Didn’t matter. What could she be telling him? That her half-human husband was a deadbeat and a bore? And would it have been that bad in the end? Being fully human? He thought about it as he watched Mafalda waving at the faery. She looked so earnest it made him glance over at the trembling yellow tulips on the table.