The Tallow Heron

What it looks like, and what it does

A tall, narrow silhouette on two long cream-coloured legs that read as candles. Small grey head tipped as if listening. A faint flame at each knee joint, never shortening. A ring of still water on dry linoleum.

Arrives at dusk once a household has cooked together. Stands facing the heat source. Does not react to people, though children are reported to talk to it. Leaves in the night without disturbing the water.

What is known

It appears at the end of the evening meal. Witnesses describe water to the ankle across a floor that is dry when the lights come on. The bird stands in it facing the stove, motionless, a flame at each knee burning without a wick.

Within a week the household eats less. Not from illness: from satisfaction. Plates are cleared slowly, then left, then forgotten. The heron has never been seen to feed on anything. No household has been harmed by it except by the plain arithmetic of not eating.

What it can do

• Removes appetite from every person in a house for as long as it stands there, and for weeks after
• Keeps its legs lit without consuming them
• Passes through closed doors as the smell of warm wax

Where it stops

• Cannot stay in a kitchen where someone is truly starving, and withdraws at once
• Is gone after one night of a cold stove and a dark room

An encounter

Called to check a damp complaint, Marchetti found the family of four calm, courteous and thirty-one days into a diet none of them remembered choosing. In her report she wrote that the kitchen floor was dry. In the margin she wrote that it was not.

Ilse Marchetti, housing inspector, Third-floor flat above a bakery, Lindenstrasse, Eleven nights in November

What is established, and what is only said

• established: In seven of seven recorded households, weight loss preceded any medical complaint and ended within two months of the last sighting.
• rumor: River-town grandmothers say it is a debt: it comes to houses that wasted bread.
• interpretation: It may not remove hunger at all. It may supply whatever hunger was for.

Still unresolved

Tallow is rendered from animals. Every heron seen has had legs of a slightly different colour. No one has asked what the bird was before it was rendered.

Where it has been recorded

• Lindenstrasse (confirmed) — Recorded by Ilse Marchetti, housing inspector.

Stories about it

• The Flooded Kitchen at Fenwick (Grotesque encounter, 4 min) — A council officer checking the damp in a terraced house finds the kitchen under ankle-deep water on a dry day, and a grey bird of tallow standing in it, patient as a heron on a river bank.
• A Supper Nobody Wanted (Entity story, 3 min) — A family on Lindenstrasse stops being hungry. It takes a housing inspector to say why, and a cold stove to end it.

Connected entities

• The Long Dog of Calder Row — Both are household-scale presences whose care has a cost that nobody has yet measured.