by Leslee Green
The woman moved the direction of her flashlight.
“Are you suggesting I ride a mule all the way to Helena?”
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to steal a mule either.”
“It’s not stealing if he was abandoned.”
“But I’m wearing a dress and I don’t have a sidesaddle! Much less one for a mule! It’s twenty freaking miles to Helena, how would that work? I thought you were going to help me!”
“I am helping you. Come on, do you want to be like Cinderella or not? What would she do?”
“Her fairy godmother would give her a dress.”
“Her fairy godmother gave her a dress, what else?”
“She would make her a coach.”
“Right.”
“Out of a pumpkin.”
“Right.”
“I don’t have a pumpkin.”
“Do you have a coach?”
“No?”
“Are you sure?”
Linda thought about it for a moment, not seeing any possibilities at first, but the old woman was heavily implying something with a look she was giving her.
“The stagecoach?” Linda asked.
Her fairy godmother gave her a smile. Linda looked back, out the barn window to the end of the driveway at the antique stagecoach that had stood in the same spot without moving for at least as long as she had been alive, probably much longer.
“That won’t work.”
“Why not?”
Linda thought again for a moment.
“I guess it would work! But I told you, I’m not going to steal any horses.”
“Carl can pull it.”
“Do you think?”
“Are you kidding me? That’s what mules are for. If he can’t pull a cart a few miles then he belongs in the factory.”
Carl grunted loudly, almost as if in response to what the woman said, which made Linda briefly paranoid that her suspicions were correct and he had understood her insults all these years, but she wasn’t ready to accept full blown fairy tales, not just yet.
"It'll be a slow ride," Linda said.
“You’ve got time.”
“Just barely.”
“What are you waiting for?”
She was waiting for the moment when pulling an antique stagecoach down a public road for twenty miles behind a fat mule didn’t seem crazy, but that moment certainly was not coming, and a lot was riding on her being at the rodeo. It looked like maybe Carl was going get the chance to help out with his own rescue.
It wasn’t quite the fairy tale that she would have picked out for herself, but there was something fun about the idea. She wouldn’t quite go as far as to call it “magical” as she pictured watching Carl fertilize twenty miles of country road from directly behind him, but it had its charm.
“I guess if I could get him moving, we could get there in a couple hours and I should make it just in time for bull riding.”
"Arriving suspensefully late in your horse-drawn carriage, wearing a sparkling white dress, just like a fairy tale."
“You really had this all planned out.”
“Sure,” the woman said without conviction.
“I don’t have a harness for Carl.”
“You’ve got something.”
"Yeah, I've got something," she said reluctantly. "I know there's a collar somewhere and we definitely have reins, I'm sure I can find something to harness him up with."
“That’s the spirit.”
Linda began going through the lockers; the old ones that nobody ever looked in anymore. The stables had been around for a long time and there were all kinds of tangled leather commodities left to the spiders in the dusty boxes.
Sure enough, she eventually found a harness that she could adjust to fit Carl, and she made quick work of equipping him with it while her fairy godmother explained to him what was going on.
Carl and the two women made their way out to the stagecoach and Linda looped his harness into place and tossed the reins up to the driver's seat.
“I hope this thing doesn’t break,” she said to her fairy godmother, expecting some reassuring words to give her the boost she needed to kick off this journey.
“Yeah, then you’d be stuck on the side of the road,” the woman said.
Linda nodded, her lips pressed together.
She climbed up into the driver’s seat and took the reins, looking onward to the road and the adventure ahead.
“I think Cinderella had her own driver,” she said, looking down to her fairy godmother.
“She had a lot of things.”
Mustering up an ounce of courage and hope, Linda smacked the reins down lightly on Carl’s back, hoping he would understand.
“Giddup!”
The mystery of whether all this build-up would amount to anything lingered in the air, whether this would be a victory of perseverance over adversity, ending in triumph or with something underwhelming.
That mystery was solved when Carl jumped into action and yanked on the harness, breaking a piece of the stagecoach’s tongue and axle off with it and freeing him completely from its pull. Linda watched as Carl, who was suddenly a great athlete, galloped away down the road as the sounds of the broken wood under her cracked, broke, and eventually gave way.
A wheel fell off the wagon, dropping its chassis sideways onto the ground and causing Linda to do an unflattering shuffle and roll down into the dirt, her butt and hands buried in mud on the ground.
She sat with her hands in the mud, watching Carl as he continued to trot quickly away on his little legs, eventually disappearing into the distance.
“Well. That didn’t work,” she said.
Eventually, Linda mustered the will to lift herself up out of the dirt and she pulled the side of the dress forward while twisting herself around to see the back of her outfit, hoping that somehow the magic dress had miraculously remained spotless as she fell into the mud.
Nope.
There was a huge, brown stain covering the entire seat of the dress; every crevice of the tight lace saturated all the way through to her underwear, and beyond.
Linda leaned back and sat on the broken, sideways tipping stagecoach and did not lament the ruined dress. She realized that she was not going to the rodeo anyway.
There were no tears for her, she had cried enough, and no tantrums or theatrics.
Instead, Linda sat comfortably leaning against the downed stagecoach, her muddy hands supporting her, and gave up bravely.
Carl was absolutely nowhere to be seen.
"At least we saved Carl," Linda said, looking for him.
In front of her, going unnoticed, her fairy godmother was now pacing back and forth.
She noticed the woman was troubled by something, obviously conflicted.
“Oh, phooey!” the old woman shouted.
“What?”
“Phooey!”
“Yeah! Phooey!”
“No, it’s not that.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just that,” her fairy godmother looked around, looking over her shoulders again, “we’re not really supposed to do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
The old woman pulled her shoulders back, stretching out, and bent her head from side to side, cracking her neck.
“Do what?” Linda asked again.
"Do things the old-fashioned way."
The woman’s hand went back down her shirt, and again a bright light lit the fabric from underneath, only this time, the woman did not reveal a flashlight.
What she held in her hand was a thin, white wand with a large, five-pointed star on the end. It was glowing brightly enough to appear to be made out of light itself, yet was not blinding or uncomfortable to look at.
“What,” Linda asked as trails of white light circled the star on the end of the wand, “is that!?”
Incredibly sharp, impossibly small points of white light orbited the star like a small diorama, but nothing was
supporting them. There was only one thing that could cause such a display, but Linda wouldn’t believe it.
“What’s it look like?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It looked like a magic wand.
“What are you going to do with that?” Linda asked, her eyes wide open, reflecting the moving light from the wand in the old woman’s hand.
With one smooth gesture, the woman in front of her twirled the wand once, which seemed to excite it somehow, and tapped herself on the head.
A loud, low harmonic blast was heard, along with a sound like wind chimes like Linda had heard once before, and the woman’s appearance transformed.
Her dreadlocked hair fell down onto her shoulders into beautiful curls that seemed to be comprised of hairs that had been individually separated, cleaned, and moisturized so that every single strand flowed perfectly and almost weightlessly. It was like computer generated hair.
A tight blue dress seemed to bloom instantaneously like a flower around the woman, impossibly fast as if it were a cartoon, her old clothes disappearing.
Any sign of dirt and grime on the woman’s body was replaced by healthy, vibrant skin, and every part of her seemed impossibly manicured, right down to her healthy, bright fingernails.
“Holy Stromboli.” Linda said.
For a moment, she was scared. Seeing something so unreal was uncanny, and a panic shot through her, but she calmed after a couple breaths, not running away, and inquired about what she had seen.
“Is that some kind of quick-change magic trick!?” she asked, her voice lightly trembling.
“It was magic, and I changed quickly?”
“I mean like what pop stars use at live concerts.”
“Most likely not.”
“Then what was it?”
The woman’s wrist flicked another gesture and a beam of light, or something, spun out from the wand towards Linda and, with a strange sound, all the mud and dirt fell from her dress and hands onto the ground, remaining in formed casts of her body and breaking apart.
“What are you doing!?” Linda screamed, shocked.
“Did you want all that mud on your dress?”
“No! But, what’s happening!?”
“I’m helping you get to the rodeo.”
“But I didn’t know you were like a witch or something!”
An offended frown appeared on the woman’s face.
“I am not a witch.”
“Then what are you!?”
The woman’s eyebrows rose in disbelief. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
“But...”
Linda examined her clean dress. She examined the woman's dress and the wand, frantically trying to understand what was going on.
“But what?” the woman asked.
“But what is all this!?”
“What’s it look like?”
“It looks like magic!”
The woman shrugged and held her hands apart in a gesture suggesting that there was no more explanation than that.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this!?” Linda yelled.
The woman remained shrugging. “I told you that I was your fairy godmother? That things I transform change back at midnight? What didn’t I tell you?”
“That it was real!”
“Well, now you know.”
Linda tried to contain herself, her mind racing, adrenaline pumping through her veins.
“But why do you walk around looking like an old bag lady!?”
“Can’t walk around like this.”
“Who were the men that helped me paint?”
“Field mice I turned into humans.”
“But why was one of them walking down the street earlier!?”
“I don’t know. Pretty weird, right?”
Linda grabbed the sides of her own head, not quite yanking her hair out.
“What’s the flashlight for?”
“It’s for seeing things when it’s dark.”
Linda shook her head.
The old woman chuckled. “But Linda, if none of this was real, I’d just be some crazy old woman!”
"Yeah," Linda said, agreeing.
An awkward moment set in.
“Well, I’m not,” the fairy godmother said.
“I know that now.”
Her fairy godmother didn’t bother getting offended.
“Shall we get you where you’re going?”
What could Linda say? What could she do?
“Alright? I guess so!”
“Okay. First, let’s get you some horses.”
“You mean make horses out of magic, right? Not just steal a bunch of horses from the barn?” Linda said, her voice still shaking a little.
The old woman chuckled to herself. “You can’t make horses out of magic. We’ll have to change some mice into horses,” the woman said as if it were obvious.
“Oh, of course! How crazy of me to think we weren’t going to transform animals into other animals!”
The old woman took a few paces into the field they were standing in, looking for mice on the ground.
“Hey,” she said to a little white field mouse who Linda could see looking at the woman from the grass. “I’m gonna turn you into a horse.”
The field mouse made an audible squeak that sounded like a protest to Linda, but the woman didn’t seem to pay it any mind. As it tried to run away, the woman swung the wand and a glimmer of magic caught the field mouse who, with the loud, familiar sounds Linda was used to, grew instantly into an enormous, powerful horse.
Linda couldn’t breathe for a moment. Now dismissing completely any chance that this was some kind of prank, she looked at the magnificent, shining white stallion in front of her who stood on his hind legs at first, shocked that he was a horse, and then turned his head back to look at Linda.
His face, though very horse-like, kind of resembled a mouse.
“Where are your friends?” the old woman asked the horse and he dismissively nodded his head in one direction and made a little huff. “I see you,” the woman said to some other mice and, with a wave of her wand, transformed three more mice into horses.
“Nobody go anywhere,” the old woman instructed the animals, then turned to Linda. “Alright, what’s next?”
Linda was spellbound, but her mind was eventually catching up to what she was seeing.
“What about cars? You can’t just make a car?” Linda asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman responded. “We need a pumpkin.”
“If I get a toy car, could you make it bigger?”
“No, then it would just be a big toy car. Listen, there is a certain way this is done. I’m telling you, we need a pumpkin.”
“I don’t have a pumpkin.”
“Well, we need one.”
“Can’t you just use something else?”
“What kind of fairy godmother would I be if I used something else?”
“I... don’t know.”
“Sorry, we need a pumpkin.”
“But, it’s summer, there aren’t any pumpkins anywhere!”
“A squash will do.”
“I don’t have any squashes either.”
"Well, you'll have to come up with something."
Linda exhaled and thought for a minute, but came up with nothing.
“This is really what’s going to stop me from going to the rodeo? We’re turning mice into horses with magic wands but I don’t have a pumpkin so all bets are off? Pumpkins don’t ripen until the Fall! In the entire state of Montana there isn’t one thing that even remotely resembles...” and her voice trailed off.
Her fairy godmother smiled patiently and waited as Linda realized what the old woman seemed to already know.
"I'll be right back," Linda said.
She made her way past the white horses and into the barn. She swung open the stall door on the end and there, sitting in the hay of Carl’s stall with a hoof mark punched in it and part of it chewed away, was a round, plas
tic jack-o-lantern. The last one to survive since October.
She carried the jack-o-lantern out to her fairy godmother, unsure if she should feel proud of her ingenuity or embarrassed of her initial doubt.
"It's kind of chewed up," Linda said, noting the frilled top of the opening of the pumpkin-shaped bucket where the plastic was stretched and torn from Carl eating it.
“It’ll be fine.”
“It was kind of squashed so I pushed it back out a little.”
“It’s fine. It’s a pumpkin.”
“Also, it’s got a jack-o-lantern face on it.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. Just set it on the ground.”
Linda set it in the dirt.
“No,” the old woman said, “set it on the driveway, it’s going to be a carriage.”
This was all very new to Linda and she wished her fairy godmother would understand that she hadn’t quite yet learned to think in magic terms.
Once the jack-o-lantern was on the driveway, Linda’s fairy godmother gave her wand a grand twist in the air and blasted it with an impressive ball of, what Linda assumed by now was, magic.
The jack-o-lantern bulged and blew up to enormous proportions; big enough for three people to get inside. Quickly, green plastic vines spewed from its base and swirled into large wheels. The vines formed a driver’s seat and a wagon tongue to attach the horses. A door formed and a carriage step, along with aesthetic details and a sparkle and glow to the whole thing that Linda was used to seeing now with magic objects, and yet it still definitely was a really big, slightly deformed plastic jack-o-lantern, staring back at them.
“Wow,” the old woman said as she looked up at the carriage, “it would look way better without that huge face on it.”
“That’s what I told you!”
“Doesn’t really matter, does it? It’ll get you there.”
“It’ll get me there but some poor elderly person is going to have a heart attack when they see it because it looks like the grim reaper is pulling up in his ghost carriage to take them away.”
“It’s not that scary.”
“It’s a giant glowing face with black eyes.”
“I’ll make it more friendly.”
The woman waved her wand and magic swept across the jack-o-lantern and white, somewhat cartoonish eyeballs appeared in the black cutouts of the carriage’s face. And yet, the eyes had slightly too much realism to be comfortable to look at.
