Peaches

firelight cast shadows on the curved walls where he kept his curious collection of belongings: tiny bird skulls, feathers, a few stones that looked like any other stones but which he treasured, and a beloved collection of exotic items that had washed ashore over the years, which he had found scouring Neverland’s shores. A book, the pages stuck together, the ink blurred. A tarnished metal cup. And, most beloved of all, a box that told time—still ticking away, its mechanism having somehow survived a shipwreck or a long journey across the sea from the continent. The Englanders divided the endlessness of the world into seconds and minutes and hours, and Tik Tok thought this was wonderful.
    Tiger Lily moved across the room quietly, examining the clock, the little metal bit he used to wind it, and bending her ear to the loud, steady ticktock, which Tik Tok had renamed himself after in a solemn ceremony attended by the whole village.
    Now she sensed a movement, and turned to see that he was observing her.
    “Well, my little beast, I hear we have a visitor,” he said, looking her up and down with an amused smile. She always managed to look like a wild beast, mud-stained and chaotic. Her hair was constantly escaping her braid to cling to her face, stuck to her, covered in dirt.
    “Will we help him?” she asked.
    Tik Tok shook his head. “I don’t know.”
    Tiger Lily waited for him to say more, trying her best to remain in respectful silence.
    Tik Tok smeared away some of the charcoal he used to line his eyes. “Have you seen my pipe?” he asked.
    He stood and moved about the house, searching. He had carved it over two weeks of long intricate work, but it was the fifth one he’d made. He was always losing things. Finally he found it buried under his covers.
    He turned his attention to her question, and sighed. Englanders had come to Neverland before. They’d brought their language with them and given it out as a gift to the Bog Dwellers, who had given it to the other tribes in turn over the years. But they’d also brought a strange discomfort to the wild, and they’d been loud and careless in the forest, and gotten themselves murdered by pirates, who hated their fellow Englanders more than anything else on earth and liked to kill them on sight. They’d brought fevers and crippling flus too. But it wasn’t any of this that the Sky Eaters feared.
    The Englanders had the aging disease. As time went on they turned gray, and shrank, and, inexplicably, they died. It wasn’t that Neverlanders didn’t know anything about death, but not as a slow giving in, and certainly not an inevitability. This, more than the beasts of their own island, or the brutal pirate inhabitants of the far west shore, was what crept into their dreams at night and chased them through nightmares.
    You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much younger. Some people said it occurred when the most important thing that would ever happen to you triggered something inside that stopped you from moving forward, but Tik Tok thought that was superstition. All anyone knew was that you came to an age and you stayed there, until one day some accident or battle with the dangers of the island claimed you. Therefore sometimes daughters grew older than mothers, and grandchildren became older than grandparents, and age was just a trait, like the color of your hair, or the amount of freckles on your skin.
    It was because of the aging disease, Tiger Lily knew, that the Sky Eaters wouldn’t want to help the Englander. They didn’t want to catch what he had.
    But something about the tiny lone figure, floating from one certain death into another, tugged at her—I could hear it. (As a faerie, you can hear when something tugs at someone. It’s much like the sound of a low, deep note on a violin string.)
    “He won’t survive without our help,” Tiger Lily said. “We’re supposed to be brave, aren’t we?” The wrinkles in Tik Tok’s face moved in response. The story they told was familiar to her.
    “I’m not a stranger to your love of lost causes, dear one. But you have to be careful who you meet,” he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. “You can’t unmeet them.” He took a long drag of his pipe. Being near Tik Tok always gave one the feeling that everything in the world was exactly in the place it ought to