Fairies in the Yard

The fairies dance around the CRT static, casting faded shadows onto the concrete basement walls. You watch with droopy eyes and falling lips as their cartoon forms dart from tree to faded tree. The volume is off; it’s past your bedtime, and your sister Olivia said she would only let you stay up with her if you promised to stay quiet. She’s already in enough trouble with Dad, she says, although you don’t know why. It seems like she’s always in trouble with Dad lately: she’s gotten “mouthy,” he says, ever since she started ninth grade. She sits next to you on the torn yellow couch—it’s missing a leg, so everything dips toward her as she sits there, typing on her phone, and you keep having to scooch yourself away and back to the center of your cushion.

You want to yawn, but you wouldn’t dare. That would be like admitting you’re tired, and you’d also have to stop watching the fairies for a moment. A few bully fairies with big noses and long yellow hair have pushed a nice fairy back against a mushroom, and it looks like they’re mad at him.

“Are they going to fight him?” you say, only daring to breathe the words.

“Shush,” Olivia whispers back. “Just watch, or you have to go to bed.”

One of the bullies with a big, jiggling belly picks up the nice fairy and throws him into the air, where he lands heavily on a big leaf.

“Why are they mad at him?”

“Shush,” she says again. “It’s cause he’s a human who got shrunk down, and they don’t like humans in the forest. Cause humans are mean and stinky and they keep messing up the environment.”

“I’m not stinky.”

“Yes you are. Shush.”

The nice fairy—the human—grabs onto a ladybug and flies away from the bullies, who rev up their wings like motorcycles and fly after him.

“The fairies would like me,” you huff.

“Fairies only like you if you leave them gifts.”

You look at Olivia, her eyes still locked on her phone. It’s slid open so that she can type on the keyboard, the pink rhinestones shimmering in the light of the television.

“What do you know about fairies?”

“Shush Jaden,” she says.

You keep watching the movie. The human slides down the stem of a flower and lets go, and the flower whips back up and smacks one of the bullies in the face.

“What kind of gifts do fairies like?”

Olivia shrugs. “Teeth and stuff.”

“Teeth?”

Olivia claps her hand over your mouth. You forgot to be quiet, and you wince as the little gems of her phone dig into your cheek. She listens, eyes darting around the ceiling above you like she might see Dad stomping around before she hears him, like she might watch him storm downstairs to whoop her for waking him up on a work night. You two stay like that for a few minutes before she exhales.

“Shut. Up.” She squeezes your face for good measure before letting you go. You watch the movie quietly, rubbing the imprint on your cheekbone. After a few minutes, she glances at you.

“The ones in the backyard like money,” she says.

You almost shout in surprise, but her hand is already raised to muffle you, so you choke it down.

“There are fairies in the backyard?” you breathe, trying to temper your excitement by remembering your sister is a dirty liar sometimes.

She nods. “You can’t see them unless they want you to. You’ve gotta make friends with them first, you know? Otherwise they don’t know if they can trust you. You might be one of the stinky ones.”

You flare your nostrils. “How did you make friends with them?”

She shrugs.

“I just left a note under my pillow,” she says, “and put my week’s allowance with it. They seemed to like that.”

Your eyes widen. You want to ask more questions, but she won’t let you. She just keeps saying shush, and pointing to the screen. The fairies keep playing there, twisting in their wild colors, gleaming in the fuzzy trees.

*

You shower quickly the next morning and make sure to scribble a quick note for the fairies on the back side of your science homework—a charcoally picture of a boy and a list of body parts to find, like “head,” “foot,” and “eye.” A boring creature, now that you think about it. You probably spelled “fayrees” wrong, but that’s alright. They’ll know what you mean. You fold the paper up and stuff it under your pillow and put five dollars with it—five whole dollars! That’s an entire week of scrubbing counters, picking up trash, and washing dishes with Olivia. You practically have to peel your fingers away from it, but you remind yourself that it’s worth it. Worth it if you get to be friends with real, actual fairies.

Downstairs, Olivia has toast and jelly ready. Dad’s already gone for work, and you eat quickly and wash your plates and hurry along the muddy gravel path to the bus stop. Olivia has to stop and run back home because she forgot something, but you know the way. You watch the trees to either side of the path, straining your eyes to see little fairies zipping between the dew-touched leaves. You see none: they must not have gotten their mail yet.

*

When you get home after school, you run all the way back from the bus stop, leaving Olivia in the dust behind you. The sun bakes the morning mud under your feet, and you barely remember to wipe your feet on the mat before entering. Dad’s not home yet, but it’s still a rule, so you grind your Skechers against the tattered welcome mat and dash up to your room. You don’t even take your backpack off before throwing your pillow to the floor.

And there it is. There, on your scratchy blue sheets, neatly folded over into thirds, is a letter from the fairies. With shaking hands, you unfold the paper. It’s loose-leaf, like the kind you have to use for your spelling class, only the lines are thin and close together. There’s still a few little scraps of paper clinging to the edge where it must have been torn from a notebook—you didn’t know fairies had notebooks—and they waggle in the air like a loose, toothy smile as you hold the paper to the afternoon light of your window.

On the page is a wild, loopy sort of writing that you’ve never seen before. You can only recognize a few of the letters: it must be fairy language! Real fairy ABCs, written in shimmering purple ink and surrounded by little crayon drawings. In the drawings, the fairies have big wings like a butterfly’s and pointed hats and smiles made all up in pink and blue and white. You stare at the pictures for a few minutes, hopping up and down even though Dad’s always saying you shouldn’t do that. You run downstairs to show Olivia.

“They wrote me a letter!” you squeal. “They wrote me back a letter, just like you said!”

“The fairies?” she says, not looking up from her phone. “Told you so. What’d they say?”

“I don’t know! It’s written in fairy.”

She frowns and looks up at you.

“Can you show me?”

You hand her the letter gingerly, as if it might dissolve into pixie dust if anyone’s too rough with it. Her eyes scan the page.

“This is cursive. You can’t read cursive yet?”

You shake your head and she purses her lips.

“I didn’t know that. Guess the fairies didn’t either. Here, how about I read you what they said in this one, and then next time you write them back, just let them know you can’t read cursive, alright?”

You shriek and hop and she scowls at you until you stop. Then she reads. The fairies were so excited to get your letter that they had a big party in the woods, just like in the movie. That’s where they live, by the way: in the forest just behind the woodshed, up in the leaves and under the mushrooms. It has been so long since any of the big people—other than Olivia, of course, who was their very good friend and was very cool and smart—had talked to them, and they can’t wait to hear from you again!

As you hear all this, you try to keep your feet planted on the ground, but you still find yourself bouncing back and forth from foot to foot. You imagine the little crayon-colored people out there, slipping through the smelly wet leaves and dancing across the underbrush. They fly just out of sight, laughing from the powerline and using dewdrops like binoculars to watch you as you stumble around the yard.

“Remember,” Olivia says, handing the paper back to you, “they’ll only respond if you give them a bit of your allowance each week. To show you’re one of the good humans. And you can’t tell anyone else about this. They don’t like it when people look for them, so we’ve gotta keep this a secret, okay? You can’t even tell Dad.”

You nod, and you mean it. Normally you tell Dad everything. You have to—he’s Dad. But this? These little silent friends that watch you and laugh and want nothing more than to read your letters, who throw parties in the leaves just because you want to be their friend, too? Olivia was right: nobody else could know about them. They wouldn’t get it. Not like you and Olivia do.

You bound upstairs and get right to work on your next letter. You tell them about second grade and church and how much you hate mustard on your hot dogs. You draw them pictures of yourself, of Olivia, of Dad, and you even start drawing one of Mom, but you can’t remember if you should use brown or yellow for the hair. Dad threw all her pictures out after she moved away, and that was a few years ago now. You decide to turn her into your house, instead. By the time you finish your letter, the sun has already gone down and Dad’s home, stomping around and calling for dinner.

*

For a few weeks, you write back and forth with the fairies. Whenever you have some quarters to spare, you send a letter to the fairies, and they send one back. You tell them when you’re feeling lonely, and they tell you when they’re feeling shy. One night when Dad pushes you down and you scrape your knee, the fairies leave a chocolate on your bed and tell you that they’re scared of him, too, and they stay away from the house when he gets like that. Dad’s one of the stinky ones—the stinkiest they ever did smell, in fact—and they didn’t like him, but that was a secret. Everything they said was a secret to everyone in the world except Olivia and you. Then they let you know the chocolate cost a dollar and fifty cents, so if you could just add that to your next payment, that’d be great.

Sometimes it takes a while for them to respond: your handwriting isn’t great, and every now and then the fairies tell Olivia they don’t know what a word means, and she asks you, so you tell her and she tells the fairies, and then they can write you a letter back. They send you more drawings, and you learn that fairies look all sorts of different ways. Not all of them have wings, and some of them have beards that twist all the way down to their shoes, and some of them wear Converse, like Olivia, because they think she’s so cool, but most of them wear little curly shoes that twist over and over again at the toe. Some of them have pet frogs that they like to ride around on when it rains, and they use the quarters you’ve been giving them to play frisbee or cook butterfly eggs, which taste just like normal eggs, but they’re pink, and they already have cheese mixed into them.

You learn that there are daytime fairies and nighttime fairies, and that the fairies you’re talking to are the daytime kind, and that’s why they only respond to your letters while you’re gone for school. That’s also why they like cash instead of teeth: teeth are a nighttime fairy thing, and the nighttime fairies don’t like cash, which is why they leave it behind when they take your teeth from under the pillow.

You still can’t see any of the fairies in person, but they promise you it’s nothing personal. Even when they want you to see them, they’re so small and so very, very fast that you can’t always catch a glimpse of them. Every now and then, though, when you’re playing in the woods because Dad has a headache and doesn’t want to hear you, you swear you can see a little splinter of blue in the leaves, or a sub-second flash of purple down in the brush. Less than a blink, and it’s gone, but you know now that it was never nothing at all.

*

The first time you see fairies in person, it’s late at night. You’re asleep in your bed, but a crash from downstairs wakes you up. You’re used to sleeping through those noises: they just mean that Dad’s in one of his stinky moods. But then there’s another, and another, and he shouts and Olivia shouts back, and everything sounds different from when they shout at you.

You slip out of bed and start to move downstairs, but the sounds are loud and deep and you decide to stop moving halfway down the staircase. You stand there, gripping the railing and silent as a fairy, feeling your heart beat against the shirt of your pajamas.

Olivia whips around the corner, all hair and sweat, and she freezes when she sees you. Her cheek is a pale green color, and her eyes are wide and red. You almost slink back upstairs, but then she smiles and puts a finger to her lips. She waves you down to her, and you listen as she pulls you by your shoulders and whispers into your ear.

“The fairies told me a secret a few minutes ago,” she says, wet and trembling. “They hid something extra special for you in the woods, and they want to see if you can find it. It’s not too far, but it’s far enough that you can’t hear anything from the house where they hid it. Okay? You understand? You gotta go see if you can find it, but be extra quiet. I’ll come find you when time is up and see what you found.”

You look at her face and her smile is stringy and white. She nods, but her eyes are still so small and wiggly.

Dad shouts something, his voice all syrup and truck tires.

Olivia ushers you roughly toward the back door and you’re out on the lawn just as she turns and shouts something back at him, shutting you outside in the dark. You slip back toward the forest, bare feet wet on the midnight grass, trying to guide by moonbeams your way to the treeline. You step over the roots and feel the pinch of pine needles on your feet, but you keep going back until you can’t hear anything but the roar of the crickets and pluck of the bullfrogs.

Then you start searching. You and Olivia have looked for critters before, and even though you don’t know whether or not the hidden thing is a critter, you figure that’s as good a place as any to start. You flip over logs and stones and smear dirt on your pajamas. You find a few bugs and frogs and a skink that flits away from you before you can grab it, but nothing that seems too special. You can’t give up, though. If the fairies were so excited about this secret that they told Olivia even when Dad was in one of his moods, it must be really important. You picture a star-topped wand, fairy dust that makes you fly, magical beans that can launch you up to a cloudy mansion made of candy. You push back branches and scoop leaves apart, scanning the blackened ground for anything that seems important. Every time you hear a car pass by the road on the other side of the forest, you gauge your distance, and every time you hear a loud bang from your house, you shuffle further away.

You keep swinging back and forth along the forest floor like this until you stop to wipe sleep from your eyes, smearing dirt on your face. Just then, as you pull your hand away and stifle a yawn, you see it. There’s a glint of green down there, on the forest floor: not the right kind of green, though. It’s not like grass and leaves. It’s like seawater and glass, like stormy clouds and crushed-up dandelions.

The way it’s looking at you, fuzzy and faint, reminds you of Mom.

You stoop and reach for the thing with shivering fingers, and it vanishes. In its place is a little shard of smokey glass, shimmering in the moonlight. You wipe the grime from its surface, careful of the jagged edge, and you know at once that you’ve found it. The secret treasure of the fairies.

Just then, you hear your sister’s voice, a low hiss bouncing along the bark of the trees.

“Jaden,” she says. “Time’s up. Come back inside.”

You hop back through the woods with your treasure pinched tight in your slimy hands, and you almost stumble on a wet root, but catch yourself as you burst into the yard. Olivia sways there in the night. Her hair is frenzied and her shirt is torn, and she presses a paper towel to her lips and nose to slow a steady, pumping stream of jelly-like blood. Her cheek has gone from green to blue.

You stop on your toes when you see her there, your gut dropping down to your grass-tickled shins. She’s been bruised before, and Dad makes her bleed every now and then, but she’s never looked like this. Her eyes are red and wild like a fish’s, and she pinches her torn shirt together at the chest to keep it from slipping off of her shoulders.

“What’d you find?” She kneels down as she sniffs, chewing on the paper towel. Her voice is thin and dry.

You hold out your treasure for inspection. “I saw one of them. It showed me this.”

Olivia nods, but doesn’t seem to be looking at the thing.

“Good job,” she says. “Go to bed now, and keep it hidden. It’s got magic powers.”

Then she turns and stumbles back inside.

*

Olivia doesn’t go to school the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. You don’t see her much, except she still leaves you some toast in the morning. You stop eating it with jelly because you keep seeing the blood from that night, slipping in great globs down her chin. Soon enough, you stop eating much at all.

Olivia still listens through her bedroom door to hear what you and the fairies have been talking about. They still answer your letters, but they don’t take any more of your money, and they don’t draw much anymore. They’re tired, they say. Instead, they start to tell you how to use your magic treasure. They leave you strange instructions, like putting all your clothes in a trash bag, or running as fast as you can to and from the bus stop every day. If you do these things, they say, the magic will get stronger, but they still don’t tell you what the magic does.

In one of your letters, you ask them if other Dads are like your Dad.

They say no.

You ask why he’s hurting Olivia. You ask why he doesn’t hurt you as bad.

They say it’s because she’s bigger, and she reminds him of Mom.

You ask if this is all Mom’s fault.

They say no. Mom was just like a fairy: Dad scared her off.

Some nights you lie there in your bed, running your thumb over the flat side of the treasure, feeling the cold glass against your skin. You wonder if it can make you fly, or turn you invisible, or bring Mom back from wherever she is now.

You decide one day to leave a secret letter for them out behind the woodshed. You tell them that you know they don’t want your money anymore, but you leave them a few quarters just in case they want to play catch with them. You tell them you’ve been trying to get your magic treasure to work, but nothing’s happened yet. You tell them that Olivia hasn’t been feeling very good, so if they could use some fairy magic to cheer her up, you’d really owe them one. They could even make that the reward for finding their special treasure, you say, if there’s a reward for things like that.

The letter slips neatly behind a windowpane facing the woods, and you whisper to the fairies to come pick it up while you’re at school, but to make sure they don’t tell Olivia about it because it’s a surprise for her.

They don’t pick it up, and it gets soggy and cold in the wind.

*

A few nights later, Olivia wakes you up. She’s sweaty and panting and shaking, but it’s a different kind of shaking than when she sent you on your treasure hunt. In the dim glow of moonlight from the window, you can see a splotch of jelly-blood on her arm, but there isn’t any coming from her nose this time.

“Jaden, wake up.” She runs a clammy hand along your brow. “I have some awesome news. You did so well on the treasure hunt that the fairies are going to take us to Fairyland!”

“What’s Fairyland?” you ask, still chewing on sleep. “I thought they lived in the backyard.”

“Some of them do, yeah!” You realize with a start that she isn’t whispering, and you can hear her voice echoing clearly down the stairs and into the rest of the house. “You know how some people live around us, but when we go into town there’s even more? Fairyland is like that! It’s where all the fairies live, the daytime ones and nighttime ones and all their friends. And the best part? Even Mom gets to come live with us! We just gotta drive a little ways and then we’ll get to live with Mom and all the fairies in Fairyland! Doesn’t that sound fun?”

It sounds more than fun. It sounds like your heart is hopping up and down in your chest, squealing and shrieking with joy. The fairies must have gotten your secret letter! They’re using their magic to grant her wish. Or maybe this is what your treasure does, and it really can bring your Mom back. It sits there on your bedside table, shimmering in the moonlight.

Olivia hauls the big trash bag of your things out of the room while she tells you all about Fairyland, where school is nothing but lunchtime and recess all day, and all the food tastes better than everything you’ve ever had, and all the chores do themselves, but you get all of your allowance anyway.

As you pass by Dad’s bedroom, turning your glass treasure in your fingers, you notice the door is open just a crack. You don’t look inside: Dad doesn’t like it when you invade his privacy. The magic must be keeping him asleep despite all the noise. Besides, you know he can’t come to Fairyland. It’s better if he doesn’t hear you go.

The kitchen, as you pass it by, smells funny, like the bottom side of Dad’s truck, and there’s a big spill all over the ground. Olivia tells you to leave it alone when you stoop to wipe it up. Dad won’t mind, she says. That seems a bit beyond belief, even by magical standards, but the smell is making you dizzy, so you follow her outside anyway. Dad’s truck is already growling in the night.

“The fairies are going to get him a new one,” Olivia explains, tossing your things into the back right next to her own luggage, already packed. “You can sit shotgun if you want. You just gotta buckle up, okay? I’ll be right back.”

The seatbelt is a bit too high for you, and it rubs lines into your neck while you wait for Olivia. The cold window buzzes against your skull as you lean against it, wondering what a fairy truck looks like. It probably won’t smell so bad, and the wheels won’t crunch up gravel and dirt the same way. You wonder if it will have wings, too, and tell yourself that Dad would like having a truck with wings. You wonder if he’ll use it to look for you, but you quickly decide he won’t. The fairies wouldn’t let him.

You jump as Olivia opens the driver’s door and hops in. She says nothing to you as she peels quickly out of the driveway and down toward the road. She’s only ever driven to the corner store and back when Dad can’t do it, so the truck slithers from side to side as you leave. You watch your house fade into the distance and remember all the times you drew it for the fairies. Just as you round a bend, you could swear you notice a small line of smoke rising off of it, stretching above the treeline.

*

The road gets grayer as Olivia drives. You nod off once or twice, but the road is bumpy and you knock your head on the window. Once, Olivia pulls to the side and gets sick, but she just wipes her mouth and gets back in the car and keeps driving.

“How long until we get to Fairyland?” you ask.

Olivia doesn’t answer.

“How long until we get to Fairyland?” you repeat, louder.

“Not very long. You’ll know it when we get there.”

You keep quiet for a while. The radio flip-flops between scratchy music and a sermon.

“Are they gonna shrink us down? Like the movie?”

“I don’t know.” Olivia’s hair is sweaty and stuck to her forehead. In the steadily growing light, you can see bags under her eyes. “I guess so.”

“Is Mom already there? How does she know the fairies?”

Olivia’s hands are white on the steering wheel.

“No,” she says. “And she doesn’t know the fairies. We’ve gotta go find her and bring her there. It’s gonna be a while, but you’re gonna be patient, okay Jaden?”

You stare at Olivia for a while. She glances between you and the road. Just as she’s about to say something else, the road behind you lights up. Red and blue flashes cut through the back windshield, and there’s a wild woop-woop that you learned in school means pull over and stop.

Olivia doesn’t stop. She looks like she’s about to get sick again, eyes darting between the rear-view and the road and you and the dash and back again. The radio keeps buzzing and the road keeps rumbling and you look at your sister, with her white knuckles and wild eyes, and you think she looks so strange. She’s cast in shadows like glimmering wings, made up all in red and blue and sunrise, and you think for a moment that she, too, could be a fairy.