Fae

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  “What is it?” Lina asked, clearing her throat of sleep.

  “We have fairies!” Elly complained.

  “Oh, is that all?” Lina closed her eyes again. “They won’t hurt anything. Don’t get so worked up.”

  Elly whimpered as she rolled over and wrapped her arm around Lina’s waist. “Well what do they want? Can’t they bother someone else?”

  Lina kissed Elly’s head and let an amused laugh escape her lips. Elly rolled her eyes.

  Later, and every day that week, Elly poured vinegar into a spray bottle and set to chasing the fairies away. Day after day they returned, multiplying in number as they did.

  Elly decided she was cursed.

  4. The Idea

  After all her other extermination attempts failed, Elly went to where the fly swatter hung from a purple thumbtack on the wall. Grabbing it, she swatted a lily-white tree fairy dead with just one try. Its blood, a too-bright green, sprayed across the counter and left a trail of splatter on Elly’s shirt. Despite the blood’s distinct vanilla scent, Elly wrinkled her nose in disgust. The flattened creature reminded her of the roaches she crushed beneath her shoes. Because of course a fairy problem wasn’t enough. She had to have a roach problem, too.

  Carefully, she peeled the fairy off the counter with two fingers. With her free hand, she wiped up the gooey mess with paper towels. A moment later, the idea came to her. She would feed the fairies to the snap traps. She had fourteen plants by now—more than enough to take care of the problem.

  Elly bounded down the steps into the basement. “Eat up, Mo,” she said as she dropped the fairy into her favorite plant’s stomach. She should have felt bad, unsettled, disturbed. Fairies were more like people than bugs after all. But all she felt was… relieved.

  A second later, Mo snapped shut and set to work devouring the tiny creature. Elly laughed. “Better than slugs, right?”

  Upstairs the front door creaked open. It was Lina, home from the store. Elly wanted to tell her what happened. She didn’t want yet another relationship filled with secrets and lies. But she had a suspicion that Lina would not approve. And so she said nothing.

  5. A List

  As with people, there are many types of fairies:

  A. Within the water fairy family, sirens and selkies and mermaids are the most common. At least, these are the ones Elly most often finds spit out through the faucet into her tub. They’re smaller than she would have guessed. And they have green wings that remind her of kelp.

  B. The air fairies consist mostly of ill-tempered Tinker Bell types. They’re always whispering about what needs fixing around the house. And they act out something fierce when Elly and Lina crawl beneath the sheets. Elly learns quickly enough that it’s straight to the basement with them.

  C. Fire fairies. The untrained eye sometimes mistakes fire fairies for lizards. They get along with no one, save the air fairies.

  D. The earth fairies that frequent Elly’s bungalow most often are tree nymphs and trolls. She finds the tree nymphs tending the potted plants in the kitchen. The trolls sneak into the refrigerator to eat up all the rotten vegetables.

  E. House fairies. These fairies supposedly live only to help with household chores. Elly finds such a claim more than a little suspicious. She trusts these fairies less than most. Why would they want to help someone like her? What did she ever do to deserve it? It has to be a trick.

  F. There are also goblin-like fairies that speak mostly Spanish and some Portuguese. These are called Duende. Elly has considered taking up the study of Spanish in order to understand their whispers. But she hasn’t found the energy.

  G. The Moon fairies appear only during a full moon.

  H. The soul catcher fairies. Whenever they’re around, Elly feels like something is eating at her from the inside out.

  I. As a child, Elly had heard that fruit fairies help crops grow. This, she has learned, is true. But there is a limit to how much fruit one can eat.

  J. Music fairies. These are Lina’s favorite. But Elly can’t stand it when they sing.

  K. Finally there are the ice fairies. They think it’s funny to freeze the water in the pipes. Despite their name, Elly has learned that they do not limit their appearance to the winter months.

  Lina likes lists. She tells Elly that making lists might help her take more control of her life. Two months into their relationship, Elly has made several lists. But she still hasn’t revealed how she rids the house of the fluttering, singing, sugar-smelling fey.

  6. A Normal Day

  Elly wakes up and starts shooing fairies while Lina has a cigarette or three.

  “Why can’t I get rid of them?” Elly always complains.

  “Maybe you should ask them what they want,” Lina keeps suggesting.

  But Elly doesn’t hear her, not really. She goes on swatting and shooing and yearning for the moment of Lina’s departure, so she can herd the fairies to their deaths. She only ever kills them—or rather sends them to be killed—in private. It’s her little secret, and by now she likes it that way.

  When Elly takes a rest, or when Lina begs her to stop, they have coffee at the kitchen table. Then Lina jumps in the shower. She’s a geologist and works as a researcher for the University. Pretty much all she does there is read and write—that’s why she prefers TV at night. Elly still works second shift at the Saves-A-Lot three times a week. She could do something else. She has a degree in economics, after all. But she assumes she’d just be fired so doesn’t bother to try.

  Before Lina leaves for the day, she always says one of two things. It’s either “I love you, babe,” or, when she’s feeling playful, “I lava ya.” Elly never responds. Even to the playful confession of love. Sometimes, as Elly hears Lina start her car, she thinks about this and wonders why Lina sticks around. But she doesn’t think about it for long.

  She doesn’t because she can’t. Because she has fairies to kill.

  Elly has developed a nice little routine. First she captures several fairies under household miscellany—like hats and mugs and old honey jars. Then she gathers a batch in her hands, as she would a bouquet of flowers, and takes them down to her carnivorous plants.

  Sometimes she watches the snap traps as they eat. It doesn’t make her warm inside like Lina’s eyes once did. But it still passes the time. Regrettably, because of the plants’ slow digestive processes, she can only feed each snap trap about one fairy per week.

  When Elly is feeling all right—when she doesn’t feel threatened or hopeless or ambivalent or insecure—she lets the fairies be and feeds the snap traps grasshoppers and slugs. But this doesn’t happen very often. Mostly she just complains about the tiny-winged creatures, about how they’re ruining her life.

  7. The Mermaid Fairy

  When the mermaid fairy appeared, things between Lina and Elly took a turn for the worse. Like regular mermaids, the fairy had both tail and gills. The gills were very small, hidden beneath her hair and behind her ears. Lina didn’t like this fairy. Not one bit. She said it reminded her of another woman she’d dated, and that things between them hadn’t ended well.

  Elly didn’t know what made her do it—spite, perhaps—but she let the mermaid fairy live. Later, she almost enjoyed seeing Lina uncomfortable in her own skin. Other fairies kept showing up—most of all little trolls with stupid, goofy grins and dirty toenails—and Elly sent them straight to the snap traps. But she wouldn’t get rid of the mermaid, no matter how much Lina squirmed.

  And the longer the mermaid fairy stayed, the less Elly and Lina spoke. When the fairy was in the room with them, Elly said nothing at all. Lina just chain-smoked cigarettes, angrily stamping them out in her spaceship ashtray.

  “It’s not the mermaid that’s the problem,” Elly said whenever Lina complained about her emotional distance.

  “I didn’t say it was,” Lina would respond.

  “It’s all the rest of them.”

  “No, Elly,” Lina said gently, “That isn’t the problem. They’re
not the problem.”

  “Yes they are,” Elly snapped. “They’re a curse.”

  “I know what you do with them,” Lina finally said one day. Her voice held no emotion but her caramel-brown skin seemed to grey as she spoke. “I followed you into the basement yesterday. I guess you thought I was still asleep.”

  Inside, Elly’s organs twisted and turned. Outwardly, she only shrugged. “So?”

  Lina’s eyes went flat, cold. They were no longer those deep and warm pools of black. This was when Elly knew her girlfriend would leave.

  The next morning, Lina packed up all her things. Elly sat on the couch as unmoving as that first squashed-dead fairy. She refused to apologize or cry, to give Lina what she wanted. She had no reason for refusing, other than that she was somehow more at ease when her life was a mess than when it was good.

  8. Why Lina Left

  It is possible that Lina left because of the fairies. It is possible Lina left because Elly refused to say, “I love you.” And it is possible Lina left because she sensed that Elly wanted to sabotage herself. All of these things are possible.

  But Elly blames Lina’s departure on the mermaid fairy entirely. Feeling sorry for herself, she makes a game of throwing objects at it.

  These are some of the things she throws: a “Free O.J.” magnet she found at the thrift store for twenty-five cents; a small glass jar filled with volcanic ash that her grandmother sent from Mount St. Helens; a pillow shaped like a kitten; a juice glass with pink giraffes painted on it; a plastic fish she found beneath a heap of clothes.

  Eventually, the mermaid fairy grows tired of bruises and broken wings. Just like Lina, she leaves through the front door and doesn’t return. Elly considers calling Lina but goes to the freezer and takes out a half-full bottle of vodka instead. She drinks the whole thing.

  9. A Fairy Feast

  Something Elly learned after Lina left: if you let your clothes pile up on the floor until you can’t tell the dirty from the clean, if you leave noodles in the sink until they once again become dry and hard, if you let dust form in thick layers on the bookshelves until you can’t go three minutes without sneezing, your fairy problem will increase.

  In Elly’s case, she soon had somewhere between fifteen and thirty fairies milling around the house—they never sat still long enough for her to get a good count. The fire fairies picked fights with the trolls and dryads, and left burning mounds of debris in their wake. For a while, Elly spent more time putting out fires than anything else.

  What Elly did about the fairy problem was this:

  She got out the vacuum cleaner—which was also caked in a layer of dust and grit—and connected the hose-like attachment. Then she went from room to room, sucking the fairies into the machine one by one. She saw the sadness on their faces. But if they screamed or whimpered, she didn’t hear it. When all the fairies had been caught, she hauled the vacuum cleaner into the basement. Then, one by one, she plucked the nearly unconscious creatures from the bag.

  “Here,” she said to her plants. “A feast.” There was no emotion in her voice. She worried she’d never feel, really feel, ever again.

  A few weeks later, feeling only slightly better, Elly returned to the basement. After thorough inspection, she determined that all the fairies had been devoured. Then she pulled the snap traps by the stems from their earthy homes. She put them in a big black trash bag and tossed them to the curb. Next she took the ceramic pots outside and heaved them into the air. She left the debris lying in the street.

  10. What the Fairies Meant

  With all signs of Lina, the fairies, and the snap traps gone from the house, Elly collapsed onto the couch, closed her eyes, and wished for sleep. Sometimes, when you feel only darkness and sadness inside, it’s easier not to think.

  11. Another List

  After wallowing in self-pity and filth for a whole week, Elly gets up and turns on the shower. She steps inside to find a fairy sitting on the bathtub ledge. This time, after so much solitude, it’s the most welcome sight on earth. The fairy smiles and everything clicks: many of the fairies, like Lina, had been there to help. And all of them had something to say—to teach.

  Elly showers quickly. After, she makes a list. She doesn’t give the list a name or even write it down. Because she knows she won’t forget. But if she had written it down, it would have been called Ways to Stop and it would have said this:

  A. That she should have cultivated and sold the snap traps like she originally planned.

  B. That she should have told Lina about the first fairy she killed and about how killing it made her feel strangely warm inside. That she should have asked Lina’s advice and maybe sought professional help.

  C. That it’s okay to need help.

  D. That she should’ve let herself cry as Lina packed her things to leave.

  E. That she should’ve asked Lina to stay, to give her a second chance.

  F. That she should live as though second chances don’t exist.

  G. That she should have tried harder to understand the fairies, to listen. That, at the same time, she shouldn’t have neglected everything else.

  H. That she should learn to apologize.

  I. That she should have said I love you. That she should have said it a hundred-thousand times. That she should remember how to love herself.

  J. That she should’ve kept her snap traps.

  K. That she should have been brave enough to admit the fairies were never the problem at all.

  ~*~

  Sara Puls spends most of her time lawyering, researching, writing, and editing. Her dreams frequently involve strange mash-ups of typography, fairy creatures, courtrooms, and blood. Or maybe those are nightmares. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, The Colored Lens, The Future Fire, Plasma Frequency Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s also the Co-Editor of the speculative fiction magazine Scigentasy: Gender Stories in Science Fiction & Fantasy, which you can visit at http://www.scigentasy.com.

  ~*~

  Antlers

  Amanda Block

  (Death)

  The garden is a crypt. Vines grasp at the walls, pulling themselves upwards, right towards the throats of the tallest trees, which bow forward to meet one another, branches clasping branches.

  Inside, there is no breeze, and the air is thick with the musk of pollen and damp, dark earth. The birds that remain stand still in the shrubs, their songs low and mournful.

  At the centre, lies the Lady. Under the netting of shadows, her skin seems to shine and shift, like moonlight upon water. The only colour is at her breast, opening up like a red flower thrust forward through time, blossoming around the arrow that has pierced her heart.

  ~*~

  (Birth)

  She was pulled from the dying Queen, strong and squalling, and they quickly shushed and rocked and coddled her. Her mother, quiet at last, gazed only once upon her girl, before her eyes rolled back in her head.

  There was no time to be respectful, to even check, before they cut into the Queen’s belly and dug around for the other child. It was a small, sinewy creature slipping like entrails through their fingers; the wrong colour, too quiet. They stood back while the midwife snipped at the cord and then, at the sound of the rasping, rattling breaths, surged forward once more. The healthy girl child was snatched from the wet nurse and replaced by her brother. Her screams filled the chamber, but no one heard her.

  ~*~

  (Growth)

  The twins were both pale, raven-haired, he and she versions of the same doll, though everyone could tell them apart. The girl was her mother’s daughter, tumbling outside at dawn and only returning at dusk, covered in grass stains and chattering about the lark’s nest above the gatehouse or the frogspawn in the moat. The boy was weaker, more wary, preferring to play his own games with his own rules. Sometimes he watched his sister through the arrowslits in the castle walls. He knew of the moments that had passed between the beginning of her life and his, when she had tried to steal hi
s birthright by pushing herself first from their mother’s womb. It angered him, as it angered him to see the servants slip her cake, or their father gift her with the private garden within the castle grounds, which had once belonged to their mother.

  As the old King faded, his daughter bloomed, and his son wavered somewhere in between. The Prince hated that the people loved her, the rosy almost-queen, and by the time his father died, and the crown sat heavy upon his brow, there was nothing in the kingdom he loathed more than his own sister.

  ~*~

  (Death)

  Dawn: the Lady is in her garden, knotting together two ends of a daisy chain, when the King comes to tell her she must go on the hunt. He loves to ride far from the castle with his men, set them upon a trail, and give chase with horses and hawks and hounds.

  She sighs, arranges the flowers in her hair. “Must I go?” she asks. “I only slow you down.”

  It hurts her heart to see the birds and beasts of the forest fall to the arrows of her brother and his men. He knows this, of course; it is why he insists she come.

  “We leave within the hour,” he says.

  Before he departs the garden, he snatches the crown of daisies from her head and crushes it in his fist.

  ~*~

  Noon: the hunting party is deep in the forest. A barrel of mead has been opened, and a boy with a lute is singing old ballads, although the men are shouting their own bawdier versions over him.

  The King’s sister sits on a tree stump alone. Two young boar lie at her toes, one slumped over the other, their coarse hides already teeming with flies. Above her head, rabbits, hares, grouse and partridges have been fastened to a rope by their feet, so their long bodies hang down head first. To the Lady, they look like they are frozen in the act of falling, their black eyes bulging at ground they will never hit.

  As the men launch into a new song, she rises and slowly, deliberately, begins to walk away. Nobody notices or cares enough to call after her, so she continues on, her hands brushing against knobbly tree trunks, or sweeping aside the branches and sticky cobwebs that tickle at her forehead. She walks and walks, until the spaces between the trees are narrow and dark. She has never been this deep into the forest before, but she is not afraid, for the air is fresh and sweet here, and the songs of men have been replaced by those of birds.