The Goblin

I was thirteen when I turned into a goblin.

The world was big and I was small and my dog was my sidekick. I packed up my school bag with pencils and notebooks to make leaf rubbings and design my adventures. The fairy palace was my own creation. I drew it into being. I scrawled a tiny door on the rock, and just like that, it was real. 

            Major Event was the keeper and the guard who stood watch over the drawbridge.

            “How do you stop the kids from storming the castle?” I asked, looking at the bustling park. Tommy Swan was nipping the girls and running away, making them chase him. Part of me longed to be with them instead of here in the brush with Major Event. 

            “I wait and I watch,” he said.

            He was the only reason I found the palace the second time. He’d been waiting for me with a royal invite from the fairy princess. That’s what he’d said. 

Mum told me I was too old for fairy tales and cartoons. She’d thrown out my baby books and told me that now that Dad was gone, I had to learn some responsibilities. 

            The worst of the new responsibilities was going to the shop with a note stuffed in my clammy fist. 

The gummy man behind the counter shook his head and wiped away the crusty spittle from the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand. 

            “Tell her it’s the last time,” he said and handed over the brown paper bag. 

            Although I had more jobs, I was allowed to stay out later; there wasn’t a bedtime anymore. She was usually asleep on the sofa by the time I got home. 

            I’d felt lucky to be free to roam the expanses of the known universe with Troy as my trusty companion. Troy thought he was a stallion, made for show jumping and medals and bows. He never came to terms with the fact he was a poodle with matted ears and a missing front tooth. 

            Major Event said the princess only grew to real size further down the banking, in the gloom of the tree shadows. Troy didn’t want to go. He flattened himself down like a dead weight.

            “I’m not allowed near the lake,” I said in a tiny voice, not entirely sure what I was and wasn’t allowed to do anymore.

            “Don’t you want to meet a fairy princess?” Major Event asked as I struggled again with Troy. 

            “Yes,” I said, using my own weight to lever the dog into a standing position. 

            I followed Major Event into the depths of the palace. The dungeons. The shackles. The stretching racks. 

It was there in the damp moss, I spread out my fingers and sucked up the dark magic from that place. It rushed through my veins like fire in dry grass. I was changed: green. 

The goblin was angry and told her mother to shove her notes and take her own fat arse to the shop. 

            The goblin screamed into her pillow at night while her mum slept off a drunken stupor.

The goblin told her waste of space Dad to fuck off when he rang every other Saturday morning. 

            The goblin set bus stops alight and tormented the homeless man who lived under the bridge.

The goblin drank cheap vodka and smoked cocaine from a crack pipe with men she barely knew. 

The goblin’s reign was long and violent. The scars like the veins of the leaves I captured in the back of my schoolbook all those years ago. She had festered in the darkness of the grotto, surrounded by other goblins languishing in a well of self-hatred, all of them chasing the promise of a few minutes of blissful abandon.

            Until their numbers grew fewer, sobered by swollen bellies and suicide. I began, bit by bit, to claw my way out through the rind of the beast. I scaped so hard my nails came loose and left me with bloody stumps. Even when I was finally out, there were times I would wear the husk like a coat. It was warm and familiar and I was naked without it.

I stare at the deformed rock that I’d once believed was a fairy palace. Despite the seasons, there is a lingering mark of the pen my childhood hand had scrawled.

The world is small, and I am big, and nobody is my sidekick. I pick up the stone and turn it over in my hands. I should feel angry at the fairy princess; she abandoned me in the reeds, mud embedded in my kneecaps. But there is a yawning hole where the rage burned away my insides.

The goblin was born of this magic.

The lake is black and still, swallowing fears and secrets whole. I pull back my arm and launch the stone into the nothingness of the lake. It ripples and disappears. It ripples and disappears.It ripples and disappears.ples and disappears.

The goblin is dead.