Ticket: a token from the arcade down the street from my apartment that I found cast away in a puddle on the side of the road.
Toothbrush: purchased fresh this morning from the drugstore. I chose a plain one—the instructions said that I shouldn’t pick one that’s too flashy or sparkly. If it’s too attractive it may be stolen before you can get to the ticket-takers and you will be stranded.
I’m told the ticket-takers live surrounded by mischievous creatures of the night, goblins and wisps singing in low tones, trying to mimic the ticket-takers and failing. These creatures love to steal, to ensure that your sacrifice is in vain, that you enrage the ticket-takers’ senses of etiquette and are cursed rather than gifted. Perhaps it is vengeance, because they hate that they can never be granted the ticket-takers’ favor, that the ticket-takers’ love does not extend down towards them, their dim, frail ghosts whickering in the underbrush.
Egg: purchased from an underground robin-breeder. The robins are mostly extinct now after the cullings, but here and there in aviaries sunk into the ground there are still those who know how to treat the eggs as offerings to the ticket-takers. The breeders never deal directly with the ticket-takers—they know too well the downsides if they fail to please the fickle beasts—but there is still something of the eldritch about them, a flash of fur or too-pointed teeth from the corner of your eye if you aren’t paying attention. I’ve painted the form I hope to take on the pebbled curve of the egg, the form from the dream I’ve had and lost and had again and again until the need, the absolute urgency of it, grew so strong it overtook my feeble resistance, my thoughts of what my family, my friends, would think, of its irreversibility, and replaced it with a great wash of certainty. I am pulled forward, as if the ground grows steadily steeper beneath my feet, inevitably drawn onwards towards my true form.
My resolve almost falters when I step into the woods, from the bright plain into a murky green dark. The signs posted outside the woods blare dire warnings in massive text—IF THEY KNOW YOU THEY HAVE YOU, say the signs. IF THEY TASTE YOU THEY WILL KEEP YOU FOREVER, they warn. And yet, the knowledge that my journey is almost at an end drives me on, even as a sick feeling rises in my throat.
The forest smells of moss and blood. Ironic, considering the ticket-takers’ attitude towards iron. Some people say that they used to be more benevolent, gave their gifts freely and often, but as the world grew bounded by man’s thirst for iron, entangled in webs of iron tracks and iron skyscrapers and iron cars, they grew colder, more bitter, became calculating and sparing in who they doled their gifts out to.
I wear no iron, only a simple white shift that clings wetly in the humid air. I am painfully aware of the shape of myself, of how I protrude and recede, the way that I am forced to be on display as something I am not.
The fairy rings glow in the woods like lost stars. I can pick any one of them, I think, but I plunge further into the depths where the light of the sun grows dim and murky. I know it’s irrelevant. All the contraband books passed from hand to hand in shadowed club basements recommend the ones near the front, but I want this to be a final and true decision, to show—who? My mother? The world? The ticket-takers?—that I am true in my determination.
Once I step into the ring of mushrooms, glistening with a green-blue light, the sun winks out. I’d read that this would happen, but the suddenness of it takes my breath away. I kneel down and gently brush at the mushrooms, clearing them of dirt and pine needles so that they glow clear and bright in the inky black night, casting ghost-light on the trees surrounding me.
Standing up, I brace myself, holding the delicate robin’s egg. My hand is shaking so hard that I must steady it with my other hand to stop from dropping the egg. In one swoop, I swallow it whole. As it cracks inside my esophagus, I realize that I can never go back. The die has been cast and I will have to watch it roll.
The fear of the hunted rabbit throbs inside my chest as if jaws already clutch around my throat. I want to scream, to weep. I want to laugh, to burn myself alive. I swallow that down, too. I read that they will spring on any faltering of your will, will devour you whole.
They emerge from behind the trees, tall as three people standing on each others’ shoulders. They are like massive hairless deer, blood-soaked velvet dangling obscenely from their antlers. They are alight with the witch-flame streaking through their muscles and pulsing with the beat of their blood. I am afraid, so afraid, but there is nothing left behind me but sucking blackness. And so I bow. And so I extend the token.
One of them steps forward to the edge of the fairy ring and extends a tongue like a length of severed muscle across the border. I place the token on it with the delicacy of a butterfly landing on a leaf. It withdraws with an extended slurp.
The transaction is complete. I back away, my eyes still low, and as I step from the ring I step out of my old skin, my body transforming and changing into what I knew it was always meant to be. My limbs grow long and slender, my jaw extends and my teeth sharpen, and I spring forward into the sun. I feel streamlined, and the cold wet air streams past my fresh and tender skin. A million scents fill my lengthened snout, blood and grass and scored bark. The sun is brilliant, a cacophony of scintillating colors in spectra my eyes could never have seen before, and things invisible to the perception of humans dance in the air and beckon me onward into the light. My claws dig into the soft sodden earth and send me hurtling forward out of the woods and into the world.
Behind me, the ticket-takers and their imps swarm forward to gnaw and rend my left-behind flesh. I am made anew. I am free.
© 2026 Malcolm MacDougall
Malcolm MacDougall (he/they/she) writes surrealist, magically-inflected short stories and novels. His serial, Quiet at the End of the World, can be found at ofortuna.substack.com. His work has appeared in Earthwords, Little Village Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, and Angel Rust Magazine. When he’s not writing, Malcolm gardens, LARPs, and is a stay-at-home parent to his daughter.