They’re at it again. Gremlins. The little bastards!

A lot of maintenance guys will tell you it’s mouse damage, but I know gremlin stuff when I see it. Ever since “The Good Land”—sheesh, what a name—and the human world paired up again when I was in middle school, I’ve been picking up on stuff like this. See, mice? Mice will just chew through wires. Half the time, you’ll find a dead mouse right there because they hit a live wire and pow! Not Mr. Mouse’s day. Plus, mice crap everywhere.

Gremlins are more like us. They like some people. They don’t like others. And if they don’t like you, they figure out which wires connect to your apartment, and they only cut those wires. Cut, not chew. They make a mess, but it’s tiny murals drawn on the insides of the baseboards and little nests of cloth scraps all tangled up; they’re like the nest somebody stuck out on the streets makes, only tiny. I hate cleaning them out. But hey, I’ve got a job to do. I’m the maintenance gal in this building, and the gremlins aren’t paying rent. If they’re going to leave nests in empty cupboards and corners, well, I’m going to clean them up. Sorry, little guys, but that’s the drill. Make a nest somewhere out of the way, and I won’t have to move it. Same thing I tell the mice and the spiders.

Problem is, mice and spiders don’t have beef with me for months after I clean up their nests. And they don’t understand how to screw up everything from wiring to wi-fi reception. Gremlins do. Mice and spiders don’t go and cut wires to make my lights go out. Not to mention, smash my favorite mugs and plates. Gremlins do. 

This keeps up, either the gremlins are leaving or I am.

My big black-and-white cat sticks her head in, trying to see what I’m doing with the cut wires and the flashlight in the crawlspace.
“I’ll be out in a sec, Hilda honey,” I murmur, gently shoving her back. Last thing I need in a crawlspace with stripped wires is a sniffing kitty. I cannot believe they cut my wires again. I never get a break with these guys!

It isn’t just me they mess with, either. They go for Mr. Eiger in 3A too; no surprise there, really. They keep scaring 1A’s cockatiel. They took all of 3B’s books and made a fort with them. Oh, and don’t ask me how, but they put a frog in the bathtub in 2B. And I got calls about all of it.

At least my wiring is an easy fix this time. I wiggle my butt until I’m sure I’m out in fresh air and back out into the living room. Hilda watches me like she’s amazed at the clumsiness of humans.

I’m not even sure these little guys are gremlins, really. They could be brownies or nisse, I guess, or one of those other little urban breeds. They do look kind of like mice for a second: little and quick and brown, scampering right by the baseboard. But mice don’t run on two legs, and mice don’t turn and give you this look like they’re sizing you up before they duck out of sight.

I flip the light switch, and the warm bulbs flick on. Okay, I have light again. Now I can get back to what I planned to do today. It’s my time off. I had things to do in my time off, dammit. 

When you’re the building maintenance gal, you don’t exactly get “time off,” per se. There’s always a clogged sink or a fire alarm battery somewhere. This place is one of those gorgeous old red-stone buildings built back when this was the hoity-toity part of town, and all these places were single-family mansions. All the floors are sub-divided into condos now, so normal people get gracious living and old-world charm. And hundred-year-old pipes. But hey, that’s why I live in the building. The owner’s a doll, and she says I should ignore everything but ceiling-is-falling-down emergencies on weekends. The tenants are a good group—eight condos full of all sorts, pretty nice. A couple crotchety types, but no trouble. It’s a good deal: I get a place I could never afford in exchange for work I like to do, and I get weekends to myself. At least, I did have time to myself, before the gremlins moved in last spring. Now I never get a break. These little bastards are running me into the ground! 

I settle in with a plate of cookies and my favorite tea, and grab my phone. Edna picks up on the second ring, like always.

“Hey, Edna,” I mumble through a cookie. 

“Hey, Mancy,” Edna replies, nice and easy. “How’s things?”

“Gremlins’re in the wires, but most everything else’s good. You?”

“Gremlins? Again?” Edna exclaims. “Honey! What happened to ‘I’m going to ask Verde to have a talk with them?’ They’ve been making your life hell for months now!” 

I sigh. “She’s working on it. Guess what else they’ve started doing? Stealing food out of tenant fridges.”

A gasp of “no!” Edna’s always a good audience. 

“Yep,” I affirm with a grimace. “I swear, we’re about ready to give up. I never get a break anymore. Right now the little fuckers are—”

And the phone goes dead. Crap. 

I glare up at the ceiling of my airy garden-level place. “Do you mind? I am having a conversation here!”

I poke at my phone. Dead. Won’t even turn on.

“Okay!” I call into the air. Look, I know this looks crazy, trust me. But it works.

“Milk and black bread with butter left for you in the utility room tonight, deal?”

Nothing.

I sigh. “Milk and black bread with butter, and no mouse traps in the building this month. On the condition that you guys deal with the mice. Okay?”

Still nothing.
“I’ll throw in some honey?” 

Goose egg. Absolute silence and a dead phone. 

“And cookies, as an apology for being rude?” I offer desperately.  “And I’m very sorry, and I won’t call you names?”

My phone rings.

“You called them ‘little fuckers’ again,” Edna observes on the other end. 

I groan. “Can we talk about the Center now? That, I can actually do some good with.”

Edna’s tone is dubious. “Alright, but I hope you know what you’re doing over there. Anyway, we found housing for Cecile and her kids, so that’s good news.”

“Oh yeah?” I swallow a sip of tea. “That’s great! And Robbie?”
“Six months in the position, no problem. Having some trouble with community college, but Tom got him some tutoring services.” Edna sighs. “And then there’s Hank. He lost it and started screaming at another guy in his building when the dude picked up one of his packages in the mail room by mistake.”

I drown my frustration in another bite of cookie. “Shit. Is the super after us?”

“We’re mediating it; Carlos is on it. Poor Hank went right back down into ‘they’re going to steal my stuff and I’ll freeze.’”

“Think maybe he’s not ready for living by himself yet?” At my feet, Hilda curls up and starts to purr. She always comes to sit on me when the volunteers talk about Hank. 

“Let’s give it another month,” Edna replies. “Then we’ll see. He likes the new therapist, and he’s keeping clean and up on his meds, so maybe it was just one of those things.”

I nod. “Yeah. So what about the co-op situation?”

Talking with Edna always gets me in a good mood. She’s an amazing volunteer coordinator, a good friend, and one of those people you never really want to stop talking to. But we finish our lazy Sunday chat a couple hours later, with an agreement for me to check in with Verde about the community garden. It helps when one of the Center program members lives right in the building. Makes things easier, especially when it’s snowing outside. Verde doesn’t step foot outside in the winter. Which makes sense; I mean, it’s freezing and dark, and Verde is basically a plant.

Okay, that was rude. Verde isn’t a plant; she’s a Vert-Velle. You ever heard of them? No? Okay, think dryad, but not specific to one tree. A sort of summer-forest gal. She’s pretty tied to seasons, and she’s fighting off some wicked hibernation instincts this time of year. I’ll probably need to wait another couple hours before I go up for a chat; she’ll sleep past noon on a day like this. I make a note to check in and dunk another cookie in the tea.

And that’s when something smashes in my kitchen. I groan.
“Oh are you kidding me?”

Verde is sleepy-eyed when she opens her door around one, but she smiles, big and warm. “Mancy. Come on in. Did you and Edna talk?”

“Yeah, and I’ve got some stuff for you, with next year’s work-schedule and volunteers. Uh, you got the energy?”

Verde gives me a dreamy smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t fall asleep on the cookies… again.”

I have to crack a grin at that. I brought Verde hot chocolate and cookies on that real cold day a couple weeks ago, and damned if she didn’t nod off at the table, head right on the plate. She tells me her people all do a community hibernation thing back home, but when you live in a human city, you run on a human schedule. She tries to, anyhow.

I open my mouth, but 3A’s door slams open and Mr. Eiger comes tottering out, calling my name like a magpie. 

“Mancy! Mancy, they’re in my place again!”

I sigh and paste on a smile. “Coming, Mr. Eiger!”

He isn’t wrong. The gremlins have taken his sugar bowl and drawn mandalas in sugar all over his table and counters. Then they put the sugar bowl up on one of the blades of his fan. Mr. Eiger is older than God and walks with a cane, so I start cleaning up the mess while he… okay, yeah. He rants. 

“I don’t know why you people don’t exterminate them!” Mr. Eiger’s accent is that thick New York yawp that gives every complaint extra oomph. “You should put down poison! Fumigate the place!”

“That’d be against sentient rights law, Mr. Eiger,” I repeat for the millionth time. “We have a request for aid with the State Office Of Coexistence. They said they’ll get back to us next month.”

“Because of course they can’t use Human Rights Laws! Because they’re not human!” he kvetches, waving his hands around. “They’re vermin!”

And this, I think, is why your place gets trashed at least once a week. Because you’re a rude old so-and-so.

“They’re Good Folk, Mr. Eiger, just like Verde down the hall. You like Verde, yeah?” I add patiently as I toss out the paper towels. Good thing it’s winter, or this mess would bring in ants.

“Oh, now Verde, Verde’s a lovely girl, great neighbor, wonderful landlord! She helped me get my African violet to flower again! But she doesn’t break into my place and stuff my socks down the toilet,” he adds, “and she doesn’t put malware on my computer! And she doesn’t put thorns in my bed! Thorns in my bed, Mancy! They’re a menace!”

I let him have his say while I sweep the floor. There’s no harm in him, really; he just blows off his steam by shooting off his mouth. With gremlins in the house, that’s not the best plan.

“And another thing! They’re stealing my food again!”

“Oh?” I ask, half paying attention.

“Yes!” Mr. Eiger grumbles. “A whole gallon of milk, I hadn’t even opened it! It’s in the fridge the night before. In the morning: poof! Bupkis. And who’s going to pay for that?”
“Verde will discount it from your rent, Mr. Eiger.”

Eventually, I finish cleaning up and get out of there. Verde gives me a commiserating smile when she opens her door. 

“I take it the Little Cousins are getting into trouble again?” she asks as we take our seats. I love coming to Verde’s apartment on cold days. Every surface has a plant on it, and they’re all loving life. It’s like the Botanic Garden in here.

Verde pours me a cup of tea as I roll my eyes. “Yeah. And they cut my lights again today. I’ll get the repair paperwork put into the building file.” I look over at the building owner. “I get why they get after Mr. Eiger; there’s times I think a few things about him myself. But what’d I do to piss them off? And what’re they stealing food for? Are they trying to get me fired?” My question sounds awful close to whining. “Can you get an answer out of them, V?”

Verde tips her head for a moment, watching me with eyes the color of good topsoil. Don’t let anybody tell you that all the Good Folk are weird-looking. Verde looks mostly human. I mean, supermodel human, but yeah, human. But there are those times when she really pays attention to you, and you get reminded why humans evolved with the Uncanny Valley in our brains. Some little part of your brain shouts ‘only looks human, is not human’ when somebody like Verde stops watching herself. For one thing, she triangulates sound, so she slowly tips her head from side to side when she’s listening carefully. Kind of like a cat before the pounce. For another, if she’s really paying attention, she doesn’t blink. 

She smiles and waves an easy hand. That’s another reminder: her hands. Humans have three joints on our fingers. Our cousins from Sideways? They’ve got four.  

“I’m not going to fire you because my Cousins are playing pranks,” she offers. “You’re doing a great job for the building. They’re just being… well, them. And the Little Cousins don’t exactly talk as we do. It’s not how they work. But I’ve tried to reason with them for days now.”
“And?” I ask. 

Verde shrugs helplessly. “They refuse to tell me about the food. As for you? They think you’re funny when you’re angry. And you did upend several of their… settlements?” She considers translations, tasting them on her tongue. “Homesteads? No…”

“I’ve been calling them nests,” I offer. 

She nods. “Close enough. Let’s put our heads together and try offering them somewhere specific to rest; then they won’t keep settling wherever they please.”

I consider the idea, nodding. “That could work.” 

Verde makes an approving noise into her tea. Setting the cup down, she stares into it. “And how are they doing, upstairs?”

I wince.

“I haven’t checked this week. I left a casserole, a bunch of groceries, and a hot bake there around the funeral, but… yeah.”

Verde nods, fiddling with her cup. “Same here. I’ve checked twice, but Tam isn’t coming to the door.”

“They might be sleeping a lot, with a newborn to take care of,” I suggest. Verde nods, but it’s a doubtful gesture.

“I wish I could have gone to the funeral in person,” she adds quietly. “But with the cold…”  She gives a little “what can you do?” gesture.

I nod; I get it. A day outside in this cold would knock Verde out for months. She might not wake up ’til spring, even. And hibernating without the right prep is dangerous for a Vert-Velle. She could’ve slept forever. We set up a Zoom connection for her, and she took care of poor baby Willow while she watched from inside. Everybody else from the building went, so at least Tam wasn’t alone.

“I hear the babe wailing in the night,” Verde adds, some of her modern-city-talk slipping off. “And the grief falls down from the rooms above. It’s deep. There’s fear in it, too. It smothers. Like… snow.” She hugs her mug a little tighter.

I glance up at the ceiling, thinking about grief soaking into the walls. Poor Tam. Losing their wife in labor was so unfair. Tam and Andrea were the best couple, and the two of them were so excited to have a baby. Not to mention how hard it’s going to be for Tam now: raising a baby as a single, working parent isn’t anybody’s idea of easy.

I should’ve checked up on them before this. It’s been a month since Andrea’s funeral. I really should’ve checked before this.

I sigh. “Yeah. Okay, so I’m replacing the fridge in 2A tomorrow; I can check in on Tam after that. See how they’re doing.”

“It’d be good,” Verde agrees quietly. “No one should be alone in their time of winter.”

I’m pretty sure she doesn’t just mean the cold.

The new fridge arrives right on the dot at eight the next (fricking cold) morning. I’ve already got the old one out in the back for the recycling guys, and now I’ve got the floor under the old thing to scrub down before I get the new one in. Do not get me started on what ends up under fridges when people have lived there a while. Least favorite job ever. 2A has only been here six months, but that’s long enough.

“Uh, you sure you got that?” 2A asks as I double-check the paperwork. You hear that a lot when you’re a small woman who likes to work with her hands. 2A is a nice guy, though. Big, sure, but kind of shy and—there’s a word—diffident! Small town boy, I bet you.

“I got it,  but thanks,” I reply with a smile. 

He gives a wincey little smile back. “Um, yeah. Look, I hate to do this, but I really need to get to work. Could you—”

I get there before he does. “No problem,” I offer, nodding at his groceries spread out all over his counters. “I got this. Go ahead and go to work.” 

This time I get the genuine smile of somebody realizing life isn’t going to screw them over after all. “I really appreciate it.” 

Then he’s bundling up and out the door. Now I can relax into my work. Finally.
I draw a bucket of water, get it sudsed up with cleaner, and slide in behind the new fridge to scrub down the floor. Did I say I hate this chore? I wish everybody could just move their big stuff once a month and clean, but I know that isn’t fair. This stuff is a beast if you don’t know how to distribute weight. Still, a girl can dream.

I have to laugh at myself for that line; most girls are talking about romance when they say it. Me? I’m talking about clean floors under appliances. 

I put on an audiobook and get down to it. This is why I like working with my hands. I get to zen out with a good story or some tunes and just be for a while. And before you know it, I’m standing up to grab some paper towels and dry the floor. Just in time to see a pint of ice cream walking off. Literally. I can see two pairs of little legs under it. 

“Oh, no you don’t!” I growl, and start shimmying my way out from behind the fridge. The little gremlin legs break into a run. 

I catch a glimpse of them going out the window, onto the fire escape. I take off after them, racing up the rusty metal stairs slick with sleet. The pint of Mint Delight is a landing ahead of me and gaining speed. Gremlins! The little bastards! 

I really, really hope they’re not looking to go up to the roof and dump a tub of ice cream on pedestrians. I do not need this!

I rattle my way up to the third landing, just in time to see the ice cream dart into a window and disappear.

4B’s window. Tam’s window.

“You little fuckers!” 

Out of breath already, I book it back down the fire escape and up the inside stairs. The little shits! They can take a swing at me; they can go after Mr. Eiger, fair enough. But they are not getting into Tam’s place and painting it in melting ice cream. They are fucking not. There is a line, and harassing a grieving parent with a baby? That crosses it. The gremlins think they can harass Tam, I’ll throw them out on the street so fast they get road rash. 

I’m totally winded by the time I get to the top of all the old Victorian stairs, and I have to lean on the wall outside Tam’s place and catch my breath before I knock. 

“Mx. Thomson? Tam?”

Silence. 

I knock again, hand digging in my pocket for my master key. If the gremlins are trashing the place while Tam’s out and I don’t put a stop to it, I’ll never forgive myself.

“Tam?”

There’s a long, hacking cough on the other side of the door. Not good, that cough. Not good at all.

Slowly, the door opens. Tam’s bloodshot and tousled. They’ve lost weight since I got a good look at them last. They look awful. And on top of that, they look… almost scared of me?

I give them a relieved smile. “Hey Tam. Sorry, did I wake you?”

“It’s fine,” Tam replies, holding onto the door as if they’re just waiting to shut it. What is going on here?

Then they talk, and the penny drops. “I know I’m late, and I’m sorry about that; I’ll have the rent at the end of the week, and—” Another cough wracks their body, doubling them over against the doorframe. 

I step forward, but they wave me off as they straighten. “If everything’s okay, then I probably woke Willow. I should—”

“Tam?” I ask gently. 

They freeze. 

I smile easy, the way I do at the Center. “Is everything okay? See, I had pneumonia a couple years back, and you sound the way I did. Can I get you a chair, maybe?”

“I’m okay,” Tam gasps. 

I’m not buying it. I tip my head. “You sure about that?”

Tam closes their eyes. “Maybe not.” They sigh, finally. “Come on in.” 

The place isn’t exactly trashed, but it’s not loved the way it was when Andrea was here. Tam hasn’t done all the little things around the house, and no wonder. I get them to a seat in the kitchen and start their kettle. All the time, I’m watching for gremlin activity. Nothing so far. I hope like hell they’re not messing with the baby in the other room.

Tam starts coughing again, and I wince. Pneumonia for sure. I remember that sound. 

I turn the kettle off, wash a couple mugs, and nuke the water for tea instead. We need something fast. 

“You want milk in yours?” I ask.

“Just a little, thanks.”

“Right,” I agree, opening the fridge.

And there, on the top shelf, is a pint of Mint Delight. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

I raise my eyes, and there’s a gremlin on the door of the fridge, staring me right in the eye. They—He? She? Do our pronouns even work for gremlins?—have long hair, all browny-gray, and they’re wearing what I’m pretty sure is a mouse-skin cloak over an earthy-red robe, belted at the waist with an old shoelace. Their eyes are pure black.

I stare, shocked. They stare, pissed off. They point at the table, and mime weeping, then cradling a baby, and more weeping. They mime coughing. They point into the fridge, make an expansive gesture at the apartment, then reach down and poke me on the nose. It’s not a gentle poke, either. It feels like they bend the soft part of my nose. 

This is your job. You do it. 

I’m not sure if I actually hear it or not, but man.

Then the gremlin darts off the edge of the door and zips around the bottom of the fridge.

“You find it?” Tam asks.

“Uh… yeah.”

“It isn’t expired, is it?”

“Nope, nope, it’s good.”

I add milk to the tea. Setting the cup in front of Tam, I smile. “So, it’s been a while. How’re you doing?” 

Tam has terror in their eyes. “Heh… okay, I guess? I mean… we’re paying the rent, and we’ve got food…”

“And are the gremlins giving you any grief? I was just scrubbing something down, and it looks like they’ve been stealing food from the other tenants. If they steal from you too, I’m evicting them.” 

Tam stares at me. Their lip trembles. Then they put their head down on the table and start to sob.

“Hey, hey.” I shuffle my chair over and give them a hug. “What’s going on, babe?”

“I thought it was… I thought…” Tam gasps for air. And then they’re coughing and wheezing and crying all at once. I go and get a blanket off the couch, and for a while I just hold them while they get it all out. 

Eventually, they’re wrapped in a blanket, sipping tea, and talking to me for the first time in months, even if their voice sounds flat as roadkill.

“It was Andrea’s job that paid the rent,” they admit hoarsely. “And the hospital keeps calling for payments on her… on her hospital bill. I tried cutting back, cut down on what I’m eating, save some cash, but it’s all just disappearing. And then… then my current contract ended, and I haven’t found anything new, and I’m coughing but I can’t go to the doctor, and Willow needs shots, but…” They raise haunted eyes to me. “… I think I’m in trouble, Mancy. When food started showing up, I… told myself it was Andrea, looking out for us. I know that’s crazy, but…” They lower their head. When they speak, it’s at the table. “I don’t know if I can pay the rent next month. Do you think… can I talk to Verde about some help?”

I give them a hug. “I tell you what. Let me get you set up here. Let’s get you and Willow fed, and I’ll talk to Verde. She’s a doll, and you’re a great tenant. We’ll work it out. There’s some programs to get you back on your feet. We’re going to get you settled, then I’m going to go down and finish a chore real quick, and then I’ll be back up and we’ll start getting things fixed, okay?”

Weakly, Tam shoves their hair back from their face, and gives me a smile. “Okay. Yeah.”

I clean up 2A in record time. And then I’m on the phone, up and down the stairs to Tam’s place, doing what I do best. 

 We get Tam enrolled for Medicaid benefits, get them set up with free baby supplies and a food bank until I can wrangle the red tape for SNAP benefits. I get them and Willow set up for doctor’s visits at a local sliding-scale clinic. And all the time, I’m kicking myself for letting it get this bad. The gremlin was right. This is my job: taking care of my friends and my neighborhood. That’s really the main job, when you’re a person in a community. At least, it ought to be. But at least we’re getting it straightened out now.

That evening, I’m absolutely beat. All I want is a glass of Bailey’s, a snuggle with my kitty and a blanket. But there’s one more thing I need to do.

I head into the utility room and set down what I brought: a bowl of whole milk. Three slices of black bread, spread thick with butter and honey. A plate of cookies. I take a seat on the floor.

“Okay. I screwed up. I didn’t realize you guys wanted to help.”

Silence.

I take a breath. “We need to do things a different way. I want to work with you. Let’s talk.”

In the shadows, things move. Black eyes blink. 

And then they’re not in the shadows anymore.

It isn’t easy to fight with bureaucratic red tape, but Tam gets through it with some help. We get the medical bills reduced, and get them on an income-based repayment plan. Turns out a local affiliate of the Center needed a technical writer, so the job gets set up in a way that lets Tam work from home and stay with Willow. Verde waives a month’s rent. She really is a doll.

And me? Turns out, I’ve got a crew of maintenance assistants now. Assistants who can walk under appliances and clean them. Assistants who like climbing around inside walls, checking the brickwork and the wiring. We made some agreements about what kind of pranks are okay to pull when they’re pissed off. Spelling “not nice” in socks on the floor? Cool. Smashing plates? Not cool. And absolutely no more clogging up the toilets with laundry. Since they’re the ones fixing the pipes now, they agreed. Less work for them. And without them pulling pranks all the time, less work for me too. I get my weekends back again. Finally.

Verde and I talked it over, and we gave the gremlins one of the storage rooms to live in. I emptied it out, cleaned it, and presented it to them. In exchange for work, they get room and board. Turns out they can read diagrams, too. Not words, so much, but you hand them a diagram, and they’re golden. And get this: they can see electricity. Who’dve thunk. 

This’s the other thing about knowing when it’s mice in your building, and when it’s not. See, you give a mouse a master key? They might sniff it, probably crap on it, and walk away. But you give gremlins a master key and some respect? You’re going to have the best-maintained building there ever was.