500 Words a Day - the Fantasy Pub

This one kind of ran away from me. Not sure how much sense it makes but here you are.

“You should have seen tonight’s catch, my man, it was a real shiner!” Timmy the tooth fairy gestured with his pint glass enthusiastically. “A real shiner!”

“Oh yeah?” nodded his colleague Kate absentmindedly, without much enthusiasm.

“Yeah, I tell you,” continued Timmy, warming to his theme, “don’t get them like that very often any more. Y’know,” he said taking a big swig of beer, “back in the old days kids used to respect us, right? Used to treat us nicely, right? A bit of kindness for the old tooth fairy, maybe a little note under the pillow thanking us kindly and so on and such like. Am I right?”

“Course you’re right Timmy,” mumbled Kate, putting her head on the table and staring at the rising bubbles inside her drink as her wings began to droop behind her.

“But now! None of that, and I mean none of it. Bloody hell, we’re lucky if they even put the tooth under the pillow at all! It’s almost like they don’t care what happens to their teeth any more. I don’t know, man, I don’t know.”

Kate’s eyes began to close. She had had some long nights searching kids’ bedrooms for their missing milk teeth but without much success, and lugging the coins around had given her wing-strain. She just needed a bit of a rest, and then she could get right back to it.

Dimly, Kate could sense some of the other patrons of the bar, and their gentle hum of conversation was downright soothing. There were some cupids in the back, waiting for Valentine’s Day and everyone to get off Grindr. A couple of bunnies downing shots of chocolate milk. At the back, Kate thought she could hear someone faintly singing “Ding dong merrily on high”, which meant the Elves were already wasted.

“Here, hold up a minute,” Timmy muttered under his breath, nudging Kate back to wakefulness. “Look who’s gone and bloody walked in through the door.”

Cinderella and Passover - the Magic of Midnight

    There is a story told across cultures, especially in Europe, of a woman oppressed by her stepmother and stepsisters, who, aided by magical or supernatural help, meets a fabulous prince at a ball. Whether her name is Aschenputtel, Cendrillon or our more common Cinderella, there is a common trope that she has to leave the ball by midnight or else all the magic becomes undone.

    At midnight the coach will turn back into a pumpkin, the horses back into mice, the gorgeous gown back into rags, and the marvelous glass slippers will disappear.

    There is this tendency in western literature to see midnight as the witching hour, the time that is most dangerous, when evil stalks abroad.

    It is no coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven begins “Once upon a midnight dreary” or that the Headless Horseman from Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is described as “like a Midnight blast”. The dead of night is all that is unnerving, disquieting, unsettling, as the dawn seems endlessly far away.

    But the Pesach story is, in some ways, the opposite of Cinderella. Cinderella on the night of the ball was free and happy but at the stroke of twelve all the magic came undone - but in the Torah's description of the Exodus, in Exodus 12:29, we see that our freedom began at precisely midnight:

    29 And it came to pass at midnight, that the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the first-born of cattle.

    At that moment the Israelites were no longer slaves - the midnight hour indeed brought danger and death (even the Israelites had to protect themselves with blood on the doorposts) but it also brought redemption.

What is the significance of midnight?