Goblin Market

“Rare pears and greengages, // Damsons and bilberries, // Taste them and try: // Currants and gooseberries, // Bright-fire-like barberries, // Figs to fill your mouth, // Citrons from the South, // Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; // Come buy, come buy …”

Lizzie rested on her balcony, the city lights glinting below her like jewels. She breathed in a lungful of smoke before letting it drift into the night where it curled and merged into the dark. Eventually she flicked her cigarette butt over the balcony and down to the distant ground. As she watched the tiny ember of her cigarette was snuffed out by the dark, and all she could think of - as she looked at it - was Laura, her younger sister. She’d lost Laura in Ireland when Laura was only a youth, so many decades ago. She still blamed herself for indulging Lauras wilfulness, for it had lead to her downfall. The Irish police had searched and searched for Laura when Lizzie had reported her missing, but they never found so much as Lauras bones. Lizzie knew though, with a dark certainty, that they’d never find anything of Laura … no matter how hard they looked.

“Look at our apples // Russet and dun, // Bob at our cherries, // Bite at our peaches, // Citrons and dates, // Grapes for the asking, // Pears red with basking // Out in the sun, // Plums on their twigs; // Pluck them and suck them, //Pomegranates, figs.”—

It was a Callery Pear tree, a pretty ornamental variety of pear trees, that had caught Laura’s eye as they drove. It’s reaching bows, heavy with a froth of waxy blossoms had an otherworldly beauty. The susurrus of its leaves in the wind and the gorgeous pungent scent of its flowers had beckoned Laura, who couldn’t bear to ignore something so splendid. She had begged Lizzie to pull the car over, and Lizzie - who couldn’t resist Laura - had agreed. Elizabeth was the elder sister and Laura the younger. Both were tow-headed and tall. Where Lizzie was pale, with icy blue eyes and mop of fine, thin blonde hair offset by her plain even features, Laura was lithe and gamine. Where Lizzie was forgettable, Laura had a fey glint to her eyes, an impish smile and honeyed skin that spoke of time spent outdoors. Beneath Lauras golden brow her eyes were blue-black like Sloe and glimmered like glass beads. The girls were a hardy pair, with a wild Irish mother who warned them of the Tuatha Dé Danann and a Scandinavian immigrant father who indulged his wife to a fault. Never enter the goblin market, their mother had whispered to the girls. Lizzie had listened, Laura had not.

And that was how they’d entered the goblin market, and otherworldly Bazar nestled in an expanse through the woodland trees, hidden just behind the Callery Pear. It was nothing either girl had seen before, a menagerie out of the fairytales their mother had told them late at night. Laura had tumbled past the Callery pear tree, its blooms forgotten, and pulled Lizzie into the dark of a goblin twilight, and into the trilling of goblin voices:

“Come buy our orchard fruits, // Come buy, come buy: // Apples and quinces, // Lemons and oranges, // Plump unpeck’d cherries, // Melons and raspberries, // Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, // Swart-headed mulberries, // Wild free-born cranberries, // Crab-apples, dewberries, // Pine-apples, blackberries, // Apricots, strawberries;— // All ripe together // In summer weather,— // Morns that pass by, // Fair eves that fly; // Come buy, come buy …”

“Eat nothing,” Lizzie warned Laura as they descended into the whirlwind, who nodded noncommittally, too enthralled by the surreal bustle of the many faerie peddler’s hawking their wares.

“Can I interest you?” A goblin man called.

He was spindly and bat-like with desiccated skin the colour of slate. He came no higher than Lizzies waist. Lizzie was repulsed, Laura delighted. In his hands he held a bolt of diaphanous cloth that glinted and caught the fading light in its threads. Behind him swathes of other wondrous fabrics were stacked. Laura reached forward to touch it, but Lizzie pulled her back.

“No thank you,” Lizzie singsonged, forcing a smile, and pushed Laura back into the undertow of the crowd. The crowds pressed against the girls like a living entity, pulling the girls deeper into the whimsy of the goblin market and further from the now distant Callery Pear tree. The strange folk of the market had begun to take notice of the girls, their eyes lingering on the florid, gleeful face of Laura.

Eventually, inevitably, the crowd wedged between the two girls, forcing them apart. A goblin woman gripped the startled Lauras arm, pulling her away from the thoroughfare.

“Watch yer step girl,” the woman crooned in a voice that was both sibilant and homely at once, “Tis a wild place, and easy to get lost ‘ere.”
Laura bobbed her head.

“Say,” the goblin woman smiled, “You look mighty parched. Can I tempt yer with some liquor or ripe fruit?” And with that the woman flourished a branch from her little store heavy with red Bartlett pears. They glistened in ripe temptation, a crimson tug at Lauras mouth.

“I’ve never seen a pear that colour before,” Laura reached her hand out, running a fingertip over the soft curvature of the pears flesh, “I don’t have any money though.”
“You have much gold upon your head, buy from us with a golden curl. You’ve ne’er tasted anything like it before, I promise.”

Laura clipped a lock free from her head with an army knife kept in her pocket, and extended the lock to the woman, who took it with a smile. The woman pulled a voluptuous pear from the branch, then, and pressed it into Laura’s open palm.

Far away in the crowd Lizzie watched the goblin woman, whose maw opened in a laugh as she mouthed ‘Slag’ at Lizzie as Laura ate, rivulets of juice running down her face.

“And now you dance,” the goblin woman pushed Laura back into the market.

Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck // Like a rush-imbedded swan, // Like a lily from the beck, // Like a moonlit poplar branch, // Like a vessel at the launch // When its last restraint is gone.

As Laura danced, Lizzie ran, back to theCallery Callery pear tree, back to the car with the keys still in the ignition. The sky was dark. She waited by the Callery pear tree, waited the entirety of the night, resolute and sure in the fact that Laura would stop her antics at some point and come back to her and that they would get in the car, turn up the ac to ward off the cold and drive home. While Lizzie waited Laura danced.

She whirled past the many goblin vendors, nothing but a blur of silver-studded leather and denim so at odds with her porcelain beauty. Eventually she found herself in the arms of a goblin boy, He grasped her waist with hands whiter than milk, his tattered velvet and brocade doublet catching on her jacket. Laura thought he looked so regal with an iron crown threaded through his white-gold hair. She laughed giddily as he spun her through the goblin stalls and amongst the twilight sky and drifting women garbed in gossamer gowns. She ran her hands over the goblin trinkets as she danced, the goblins laughing with her. One began to weave a crown of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown, and pressed it upon Lauras brow.

And when Laura did not come, not for nights or weeks or years, Lizzie left, because;

Twilight is not good for maidens; // Should not loiter in the glen // In the haunts of goblin men.

Sometimes, late at night, half hidden by the cacophony of city noise, Lizzie thought she could hear them - the Goblin men - calling "Come buy, buy!" and every so often, she thought she heard Laura's clean peeling laugh, before she dismissed it as her imagination.

* The Italicised verse imbedded into the writing is verse from the poem 'Goblin Market by CHRISTINA ROSSETTI