Faeries

By Clara Dunn

How we got there doesn't matter. It's what happened after that that does. The drive up was the same. The streets we used to bike down every weekend seemed comfortably foreign from the front seat of the car. Our legs are longer now, but we hardly noticed how much shorter the journey was. Everything was the same as we had left it. The picnic table. The creek. The tunnel of trees leading through to the soccer field. Best friends since pre-school, we explored the park until the only secrets that remained were the ones whispered between the cicadas and the grasshoppers on warm summer nights. As time skipped on, we visited less often. The only times we would see each other would be in the hallways at school. Her brown curls, grown long over the years, would flash past as she ran to her next class. My own hair has faded from bright gold to honey brown. We are both getting older.

She lived a few streets down from me. We are both Aires, April babies, born with passion and fiery tempers. The spring we were born a plague of cankerworms descended on our town. They were everywhere. Everywhere you walked, everywhere you stepped, there they were, small green worms hanging on threads, falling from the trees. I was terrified. I hated the worms always falling into my face. I screamed and cried every time my parents took me outside for a walk.She didn’t mind as much. She was a calmer baby than I was. Eventually, the city had no choice but to wage war on the worms. They sent out planes to drop poison onto the trees in an attempt to annihilate the population completely. It didn’t fix the issue immediately, but over the years fewer and fewer cankerworms dropped out of the trees. Now, you might see one or two.

She grew faster than me. Faster than all of us in the neighborhood. She was the first one to walk, first one to talk, first one to run. She was always taller than me by just an inch or two and her hair was always longer even though it was curly. She had more friends and was more confident than I was. Her birthday parties were always a dozen people from her elementary school, plus me. I got to know some of them through games of Sardines or Hide and Seek but we formed no real friendships. They were kind to me, it wasn’t their fault that I struggled to connect with people. I stuck to her like glue at those parties. She was my shining star, my beacon of light. She was interesting and smart. She listened to my stories and joined in, making up characters and places those characters could go. Sometime around our seventh birthdays, we created a magical land in the local park. On the way back, far from the parking lot, there was a garden. Set in a small valley, a small creek ran through the middle of it with a small wooden bridge running over it. Flowers grew up tall and thick in the center with an orchard of fig trees behind them. We would run from the playset over the hill and across the bridge and spend hours there imagining and pretending. Sometimes we were princesses, sometimes knights, but mostly, we were fairies.

The last time we visited the garden was a warm summer night. Fresh from the movies, home seemed too dull, too real. We couldn’t go back, at least, not yet. Something about that feeling you get after seeing a good movie late at night led us to the park we used to frequent as kids. We were looking for magic, for adventure. Our old pilgrimage from the parking lot to the garden took us straight past the Fairy Queen’s palace. The palace was a low stone wall that ran alongside the creek at the far side of the garden. Moss had long ago made its home in the gaps between the stones, and years of heavy rainfall caused it to start sinking into the ground. The path we walked that night had been the land of fairies and magic. There were knights and princesses, dragons and witches, mermaids and fair maidens, all vibrant and beautiful in our minds. When the heat of the summer got too much, we would go into the woods behind the creek and battle the evils of our make-believe world, holding hands the whole time. When we tired, we would collapse on the hill near the edge of the creek and tell each other the thoughts that were bursting forth in our minds, too important to contain.

That night, as we lay in the grass near the flowers, our conversation turned from the movie to crushes and back to the movie until we landed where we always do: our stories. Stories of pirates and spaceships and the tragic lives of courageous girls that just so happened to look like ourselves. We were giggling over a particularly insufferable tale when we saw her, a small blue glow that grew into a small woman the size of my thumb. Her hair flowed and sparkled like water and her pointed wings seemed to be made of moonlight. Through the heavy silence of the humid night, we heard her faint humming of an old and faraway song. The breeze drifted through the little valley of the garden as the fairy flitted to and fro, collecting what seemed like drops of starlight from the flowers around us. They fell off of leaves and petals like drops of dew into her cup. As she did this, the world began to glow. The moon got brighter. The stars twinkled like sunshine on the ocean. Color became more vivid and the stench of exhaust was carried off by the wind and replaced with the sweet perfume of sun-warmed camellias.

Was this real? This fairy was familiar to us, we had played with her in childhood, but to be seeing her with our eyes and not with our minds was disorienting. We watched, silently, as she continued to gather starlight from the plants into her cup. And then she turned to us and smiled, waving for us to follow. I hesitated. It wasn’t real. The fairy was a hallucination. I had been tired recently, often awake late into the night packing and preparing to move thousands of miles away. The fairy was part of my imagination, nothing more. But then I looked over at my friend. She looked at me, a halo of moonlight shining from behind her long brown hair. We looked back at the fairy together. She was watching us expectantly. She smiled and waved at us again.

So we followed her. Hesitantly, we stood and followed around the flower beds and down the path, right to the Fairy Queen's palace. We sat on the low wall and watched the Blue Fairy pour her cup of starlight into the creek. It spread quickly through the water, glowing and sparkling until the entire creek was illuminated with an unearthly shine. One by one, more fairies emerged from their hiding spaces and gathered by the water. Before long, hundreds of fairies were gathered near our spot on the wall. They danced and sang with a joy we hadn’t known for a long time. It was such a beautiful scene that we couldn’t help but stand and join in. We danced and laughed with them, careful not to crush anyone underfoot.

The song started softly at first, just one or two of the fairies humming to themselves, but it grew quickly. Within seconds, every fairy had stopped moving and started singing this song. It was the same song the Blue Fairy had been humming to herself when she appeared to us. It was the sound of love and happiness, that feeling you get in your stomach when everything is perfectly right. It was the sound of laughing until your stomach hurt, of a quiet night with the wind in the trees. It was the sound of a good night's sleep and a wonderful dream. The fairies taught us their song. It sounded like life. They twirled and shrieked through the mist of light, and peals of laughter were sure to be heard from miles away, though all anyone else could hear was the chirps of the grasshoppers.

Then, like all good things do, the song ended. We sat in silence for a while, all of us staring at the sky and taking in the quiet stillness of the night. After a while, the creek darkened, and the moon dimmed. The fairies flew back to their hiding places, one by one, leaving only the Blue Fairy behind. She led us back to our spot on the grass, flew up and kissed us both on the cheek and disappeared like the others, back to where she came. We sat in silence for a bit, looking up at the stars and listening to the cars drive by on the road over the hill behind us. Any movement, any words would ruin the moment, pull us back into reality. Nothing else seemed real or important at that moment. But, like it always does, time passed. The moon got higher in the sky and our minds turned from magic to curfew. The walk back to the car was the same as ever. Past the playset and picnic tables and up to the parking lot. The drive home was quiet. Every glow from a window or glitter on the asphalt reminded us of the fairies and their song. How could we ever recreate that? It was the best moment of our lives, filled with light and contentment. Would the fairies ever show themselves again? Could we go back and listen even just one more time? The looming move from home and the beginning of a new life seemed even more oppressive than it had when we left our houses several hours ago.

After that night, every step away from home was a desperate struggle. She left a week before me. We didn’t discuss the fairies after that night. We both knew that no answers could come of our wondering and we spent our remaining time together reminiscing. The night before she left I went to her house to help pack. We finished quickly and laid on her bed just staring at the ceiling. I had lain there so many times before. I had hidden in the now-empty closet during party games and perused the now-barren bookshelves when I was bored at sleepovers but it was all going away now. She was going away. And she did. And so did I. I moved to a city of concrete, of gray skies and red brick. There were no fairies to be found here. Or so I thought. One evening I was out walking alone a few miles from where I lived. It was a warm day but there was a cool breeze and the late afternoon sun shone through the leaves of the trees on the side of the road. The sky was a clear blue with high, thin clouds scattered about. That's when I heard it. When I was looking up at the clouds, I heard the fairies' song. I heard it in the wind and from the mouths of birds singing from the trees. The notes were written in the sky and the lyrics were in the conversations of strangers passing by. I called my friend that night and she told me she had heard the song that day too. She heard it while laughing with her new friends outside of a cafe where vines grew up the walls and her drink tasted like the first day of autumn.

We were so far apart and so far from the fairies and yet, we both heard them sing. Maybe they followed us away from home. More likely, every place has its own fairies and its own songs. That's what I think. She thinks that the song is always the same and can be heard no matter where you are. It doesn’t really matter. We get to hear it. We get to listen. That is enough for me and I think it's enough for her, too.