Off With the Fairies

Old Mrs Greivers did not believe in lying to children. She had never told her son that Santa was real. When his teeth wobbled then fell out one by one, she handed him a dollar to his face and called him a good boy. When his grades plateaued then dropped in middle school, she told him he was a lazy slump, and when he announced his desire to be the next Michael Jackson, she handed him a statistics sheet full of people who had said the same.

“Might be harder than you think, dear,” she had said. So instead, he became a drummer.

In hindsight, she often wondered if she shouldn’t have lied to him just a little bit.

Perhaps this was why she lied to her granddaughter.

When the weather changed and neither daughter in law nor son returned, she told Angelica they would be fine. When the hours passed and still no sign, she told the child the emergency team would bring them back tomorrow. She said this for three months. During this time, there were four cases ‘extreme weather’. Search and rescue filed them as ‘long-term missing’, and Nancy Greivers found that a lifetime of honesty wasn’t enough to save her soul, apparently.

“The fairies took them in,” she told the girl. “No, they aren’t dead. They aren’t dead. Of course not. They will show up eventually.”

Nancy had sat before the mirror long into that night, unable to so much as blink. She was lying to more than the girl, she realised.

Angelica had not thought much of fairies till that point. Now there was nothing in the world that could shake her belief. At five, she exhibited the same practical mind of her grandmother, meaning, from a very logical point of view, so long as she stayed in the fairies’ good graces, her parents would one day return.

They lived not far from the bush they had hiked off into never to return, and she often took her doll to sit on the fence and stare into the trees for hours, noting every sign of life.

“We’re watching for fairies,” she told her friend’s mother one day. “Not Ruby, of course,” she hurried to clarify, holding the doll up for examination. “She’s not really alive. But if the fairies see two people looking, they’re more likely to come.”

When she was seven, she decided to become a scientist. A very famous scientist, she decided. Like Albert Einstein, or Tesla. She told Nancy as she ate her breakfast.

“Yes, very good dear,” Nancy said. Her eyes remained fixed on the stove.

A year later, during a class presentation, she collected her findings into a large esky bag and brought them to school for peer review. The bug carcasses were displayed first. They had funny indents in them, like a small person had ridden them. Then some mushrooms she had found the other day. They were wilted now, but they had been in a small circle, she said. She had photographs of prints in the mud: too small to be human, and wrong to be a dog, she declared. And lastly, the gem of her collection: some twigs that had grown in the shape of a small chair. She laid them on the table before her in triumph.

“You know fairies aren’t actually real,” Lucy Curtis told her during lunch. “They’re only for babies.”

Blood was shed that day, and three people got detention.

As she sat at the table that night, crying while Nancy scolded and bandaged her knee, she realised that things were not quite the way she thought they were. “If,” she asked through sniffles. “If fairies aren’t real, then who are Mum and Dad with?”

Nancy did not answer immediately. She found the words were obstructed by the lump in her throat.

As the years flowed by, the threads of Angelica’s life seemed to slowly fray apart. If not with the fairies, then where? Once she lay on her bed, pulling at the twine on an old cardigan. It had slowly loosened, coming apart, the holes growing large the more she tugged, and she noted how similar it was to the way she felt now. It was like there was great, gaping hole in her soul that she either had to fill or patch up. It was like a door, perhaps, that she knew she must close, but remained open.

Somewhere, out there in the world, her parents waited for her. Dead? Who knew. Nobody knew. The case sat cold and collecting dust.

Nobody had found them! Surely, they were still alive somewhere. Surely. If they were, they needed help. Were they wondering why she wasn’t looking for them? Were they angry with her? Did they sit alone, hating her, asking themselves why their only daughter wasn’t doing more?

Where they dead? Did they hate her? Were fairies actually real?

At the age of twelve, she once again sat in her customary place on the fence, her grandmother’s house behind her, and the tall, dark trees swaying in the breeze ahead. There was no conscious decision made. She felt no crippling resolve, and never verbalised that enough was enough, even to herself. But her feet hit the ground and took her deep into the bush, deeper even than she had ever gone before.

The sky grew darker, and the wind picked up. Clouds swirled above her head and the trees began creaking with the effort. She stepped over roots, and climbed through gullies, wandering aimlessly, yet looking for something, something, something.

Literally anything.

There was nothing.

Rain began pattering down through the leaves around her, reaching her as the first tears began dripping down her face. Nothing. There was nothing.

She fell against a tree, and sobbed.

Day turned into night. The rain ceased and crickets began to chirp. She felt a headache begin throbbing, and her mouth was dry.

Uncertain, she rose to her feet and once again began walking.

The woods were loud, at night. The breeze moved listlessly through the trees, and creatures scurried through the leaves out of site. Bushes moved, and she would spin in time to see a dark shape loping away into the night. Her breath began to shorten as her stride lengthened. Soon she was running, dashing over roots and between rocks as fast as she could, fleeing from something.

Branches whipped her face, grass sliced her legs and a root at last caught her foot, sending her stumbling headfirst down a gully. Pain erupted around her skull as she hit earth and she screamed as hot blood ran down past her eye.

The gully was darker than everywhere else. Creatures scampered away into their corners. She threw up, then pulled herself into a ball, away from the bile and wrapped her arms around herself as tightly as she could against the cold.

Tears began creeping down her face again. Her blinking became heavier and her shivering settled in. As she grew drowsy, she looked around her one final time, searching for….something. She was very tired.

She saw, a small stone’s throw away, a small ring of mushrooms gently glowing in the darkness. A tiny human—at least, it looked like a tiny human— sat in the midst of them, staring at her and pointing further down the gully.

Angelica’s fear ebbed away as she and the tiny human watched each other. A warm blanket of peace settled over her heart and she giggled as the worry for her parents lifted and slowly became lighter.

The sun broke the horizon, peaking over the edges of the gully and warming her face. She woke, bleary and aching, and stumbled down further into the gully where the fairy had sat in the night. She stood, confused and alone for a few seconds, fear once again gripping her heart, till she saw where the whisp had been pointing into the darkness.

In the goldens sun, in a blanket of moss, two skeletons sat in a throne of earth, poking between the fallen leaves and the soil. In the distance, she heard thunderous roar of a rescue helicopter, but she stood awhile longer, staring, and noticed that, like the king and the queen of some mystical world, their crowns were adorned among rings of mushrooms and flowers.