We found the fairy after a three-day thunderstorm.
We were rock hunting at the time. During the summer construction workers had scooped out one of the trails that wound up the ridge behind our house. Dad complained endlessly about the pulled-up trees, but the yellow Cat diggers did shake a lot of pretty things loose from the dirt: clay-smeared chunks of amethyst and rocks with black garnet chips and sheets of mica as big as your head. Once my sister Sadie found a fist-sized golden lump that was called pyrite. Whenever I stared at it glittering on our dresser, I wished more than anything that it was mine.
At first we both thought the fairy was a clump of muck broken off the carved-out mountainside by the wind and rain. I was the one who found it, as I poked a stick into the mud under one of the crouching diggers and hit something that didn’t give. Sadie was the one who noticed the yellow eyes. Sometimes the lids would slide over them, as gray and crusty as rock, but no other part of it moved. A sticky blackness oozed down the side of its head.
I was bigger than Sadie, but she was older, so she was the one who took off her red rain slicker and grabbed the thing through the cloth. Up in her stick arms, it was about as big as a good-sized cat. A gray foot hung out of the coat, each little toenail yellow and hooked. Without knowing why, I started to cry.
“Shut up, Omie,” Sadie said. “It’s okay, but just shut up.”
She carried it all the way back down through the steep wet woods to our house. Twice I thought I heard something behind us, just a touch different from the rhythm of the dripping trees. But as Sadie often pointed out, I was always noticing things that turned out to be nothing.
Back home we put the fairy in Ghost’s crate, in the soft spider- webby hollow of her empty bed. Ghost had been a Great Pyrenees Dad was sure would keep coyotes away from our chickens and would watch over me and Sadie when he was gone. Only she’d snarled and snapped at the chickens and trembled in the corner of the crate whenever we approached her with a bone. She’d crashed through the screen door one day and when it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Dad moved her crate down to the basement. He had not gone down there since.
“Do you think it will get out?” I asked.
The fairy hadn’t moved since Sadie set it down. The ratty edges of the bed seemed to creep up around it, like sand sucking down a stone.
Dad was at a gig that night, so we were able to make as many trips to the basement as we wanted. We pushed bits of our dinner sandwiches through the bars, my peanut butter and banana and Sadie’s dry turkey, along with some old dog food and a carton of blueberries, because who knew for sure what fairies ate. We edged around the crate with a flashlight, examining what parts of it we could see. It had no hair. The shadowy lack between its legs made us suspect it was a girl.
We were no strangers to fairies and their various races. In fact, we were probably as close as any two girls could be to experts. In the stories Dad told to tourists at the Folk Art Center on Friday nights, the root people—as yellow and hairy and creased as old carrots—lived in tunnels beneath the mountains and hunted chipmunks with arrows the size of hairpins. In Mom’s gold-gilded English books, the fairies were shy and dainty, but would steal babies or pretty ladies and swap them for a Changeling, a mean-tempered fairy version of the person, if they had a mind to. I imagined we might count as an exotic pet to them, like a peacock or a tiger.
We weren’t sure what sort of fairy we had. Not a particularly exciting one, anyway.
We tossed around a few names, like Moonlight, Fern Gully, and Mountain Dew (which I thought was the most beautiful pairing of words there ever was). Nothing seemed to fit, though, so we just sat there on the concrete with the damp seeping through our jeans, watching its outline waver in the dark until it almost seemed to shimmer.
That night I climbed into the top bunk with Sadie, dragging Fat Jamie, my favorite Cabbage Patch doll, up with me. My bed was level with the window and the patter on the porch outside our room sounded like footsteps, soft soled and creeping. Sadie whined and dug her elbow into my belly, but not very hard.
“I think we should tell Dad about the fairy,” I said. Dad knew all about strange things in the mountains: big cats that walked on their hind legs and glowing will-o’-wisps that lured hunters into swamps.
“No way. What about Peter?”
Peter had been a tiny shut-eyed squirrel we’d found at the base of a pine. We’d dreamed of raising him to ride on our shoulders like a parrot, and Dad promised we could keep him. Only we’d come home from school to find that he’d taken Peter to the Nature Center in Asheville, without even letting us say goodbye.
“Fairies are different than squirrels.”
“We’re not telling him. I saved your life, remember?”
This was true: Sadie had saved my life back when the fairy Changeling wrecked the car we were all in. When I was little I used to think she owned my life: a yellow flicker she kept in a jar, like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan. Either way, it meant I had to do whatever she said.
“I guess we could just keep it to play with, then.” I imagined the fairy and me walking hand in hand through a glittery green wood, flowers crowning our heads.
Sadie drew a sharp breath and rolled over. Her eyes were an inch from mine, black and sparking.
“I bet it could bring Mom back.” Her voice was low and hungry. “I bet we could make it.”
I looked away, like I always did when she got that hard, sparkly look. The rain from the window cast funny shadows on the opposite wall, slithering down like worms.
Mom had been taken by the fairies two years ago, when I was six and Sadie was nine. She was just the kind of human they wanted for themselves: dainty and beautiful, more like a girl than a mother.
I couldn’t remember her well, but Sadie could. Sometimes when we were in bed at night, she’d start talking out of the blue: Mom this and Mom that, the words tumbling down from the top bunk and piling all higgledy-piggledy around my head. Even though I never cared much for stories I couldn’t see myself in, I always let her talk.
Mom and Dad met in college and it was Love at First Sight, according to Sadie. He had been playing fiddle at the Friday night contra dance; she had been dancing with other girls from her Advanced Folk Dance class. She could leap higher and spin faster than any of them, and Dad kept noticing her floating up and down in the crowd, a ball of bouncing light.
Afterward, she complimented his fiddling and he complimented her dancing, and they went for a walk. Dad was majoring in Appalachian Studies; Mom was an English Major with a double minor in Sustainable Agriculture and Dance. Dad had traveled all over the state begging old folks in their trailers or dusky retirement homes to tell him stories and knew hundreds by heart at only nineteen years old; Mom could quote whole pages of Shakespeare and Tennyson, so beautifully that it almost made you hurt. They were amazed by each other.
Then Mom fell pregnant with Sadie. Her grandparents had a summer house in the mountains, and because they loved Mom, they gave it to her. When Dad was away at gigs, Mom and Sadie would do all sorts of things together: make cake out of the puckery persimmons growing in the woods, catch grasshoppers and pull open their rainbow wings, drag Dad’s old-fashioned record player out on the porch and dance through the long grass. After I came along, Mom strapped me to her back and kept dancing. Sometimes I wished I could remember what it felt like to be leaping and spinning along with her, hidden under the silky sweep of her hair.
There was just one memory of Mom I could see clearly, all on my own. She and Dad were sitting on the porch with their gasoline-smelling whiskey drinks after supper, swatting the no-see-ums out of their eyes. Dad had told me broccoli would make me invisible, which had the desired result of me eating the stuff like it was Cheetos. He exclaimed in fear at the unseen footsteps thundering along the porch, the ghostly hand ruffling his beard, as Mom laughed so hard that she hunched over in her chair, yipping like a coyote. That was still the Mom I saw in my head whenever Sadie talked about her: mouth gaped and drooling, unable to catch her breath.
Although I knew it wasn’t true about the broccoli, I still couldn’t help examining myself every time I ate it, as if I’d be able to see the grain of the table through my fading bones.
The Changeling showed up suddenly, Sadie remembered. The fairies had snuck it into Mom’s side of the bed during the deepest part of the night. The evening before Mom had been cuddled up in the top bunk as usual, soothing us to sleep with her sing-song English Major stories, and the next day she—or rather, the thing that looked like her—wouldn’t get out of bed. When Sadie went to tug its hand, it snatched it away and called her a mean name. Its eyes were black except for a bit of blue left around the rim. A strange smell, like snake musk, crept out from the blankets. When it finally stood up to go to the bathroom it walked like it was just learning how, banging into corners and hissing through its yellow teeth.
The Changeling stopped brushing its long hair, greasy clumps hanging over its face. One day it got into such a scary fight with Dad that it took a butcher knife and stabbed the kitchen table, not even stopping when the blade slipped on the hard wood and cut its palm. Dad asked why it was doing that and it screamed, “Because you fucking made me.” (I hadn’t wanted to believe that part, but the gouges were still there, each as long and crooked as a claw mark.)
The last day Sadie saw the Changeling—that we both saw it— was when Dad was away and it was just the three of us at home. The Changeling had gotten out of bed early and put on a pretty dress, looking almost as sweet and happy as our mother had. It told us we were driving down to Sweet Dreams, our favorite ice cream shop in the city, and that we could get whatever we wanted. Sadie and I had been giggling in the backseat as we slid into each other around the curves in the road, when all of a sudden the car leapt and crunched and we were all sucked down into something black and wet.
That’s when Sadie saved my life. She’d climbed out of the car window, but when I tried to go after her, the Changeling grabbed me by the back of my overalls and wouldn’t let go. So Sadie scratched its arms until it did.
The car wreck was what made Sadie certain Mom had been swapped for a Changeling. Fairies didn’t think like humans did. They had devilish sides, drinking dewdrops from acorns one moment and dragging sobbing babies out of their cribs the next. Probably that was why the Changeling had wrecked the car: it had just felt like it.
The Changeling went away after that and we never saw it again. The only good thing about it all was that it meant Mom was still out there somewhere, wherever the fairies lived: in a glittering cave, or some tucked-away grove dripping with flowers. Probably she was dancing and reciting Shakespeare, all dolled up in gauzy skirts and leafy crowns. Probably, the fairies loved her as much as they were able.
“How can we make the fairy bring Mom back?” I asked Sadie, still watching the wormy shadows. “We can’t even talk to it.”
She squirmed around onto her back, sucking at her teeth.
“We need to show the other fairies we’ve got one of them.”
I wanted to leave a note that explained the nuances of the situation, but Sadie pointed out that this type of fairy probably couldn’t read. After all, our fairy seemed about as dumb as the rock it resembled. Dad didn’t let us have brain-rotting cell phones and we didn’t have a printer anyway, so taking a picture was out. It was Sadie who thought up cutting off a piece of it—its pinky toe or its shrivelly ear, whatever was easiest to clip with gardening shears—to set out in the woods. “It’s the only way to show them we mean business, so don’t you start whining,” she warned when my mouth began to jump. Sadie would do the actual cutting since she had to do everything, anyway.
For a while after the Changeling went away, I had been sure the fairies would come for Sadie next. She was just like Mom with her honey skin and flossy hair, a perfect target. I used to stand up on my bed and look over her every morning before she woke, certain I’d find something different: a wild rotten smell, a dark gleam under her white eyelashes.
But I hadn’t needed to worry. Sadie never acted sadder or more devilish than usual. There was something about her the fairies just didn’t want.
“So they’ll give us Mom and we’ll give them our fairy.”
Sadie huffed. “They’ll know what we mean. That’s how fairies think, in swaps.”
I looked out the window, down at our dripping porch, at the dark droopy couch Sadie liked to sit on when I was bugging her too much. I tried to picture Mom there instead, her mouth a drooling hole.
In the morning, I half hoped to find the fairy had vanished; surely that was the sort of thing fairies could do. But it was still curled up on the dog bed, blinking its yellow eyes at us.
I wanted breakfast before we did anything gross to it, so Sadie fried me an egg and paced around while I ate, staring out the windows. “Look,” she said. Even though it was still February, the grass was scattered with dewy red flowers, like the ground had been pricked all over with a needle.
Sadie refused to make me any more eggs because I was too fat anyway, so I followed her back down to the basement. She handed me a softball bat and a butterfly net and told me to stand behind her (when I whined and hesitated, she had to remind me again that she saved my life).
She crawled into the crate, garden clippers in one hand. Her spine curled up against her T-shirt like a lizard’s. Then she took a good, hard look over the fairy and pulled its ear away from its skull. It looked so much like a spongy lichen that I was sure she could just pluck it off.
But as soon as the clippers clacked the fairy started screaming. It was like the yap of foxes and Mom’s coyote-laugh and the screech of broken-necked chickens all at once.
“Shut up,” shouted Sadie. “Shut UP!”
She flung back the hand that held the shears and hit it on the side of its round head, so hard that when she drew her fist back it was trembling. It just kept on screaming. Being the baby I was, I started to scream too.
Sadie had only managed to cut off the lobe of the ear, which was sitting in a mess of blackish blood and squashed blueberries. She fumbled around for it and grabbed me by the arm and we both scrambled back up the stairs. We could still hear the fairy screaming after we slammed the basement door.
“It made me do it,” she said, staring at her swollen knuckles.
It took a while for me to calm down. I was sure that the muffled screaming was coming from a hundred different places: Dad’s empty bedroom, the carved-out ridge, from deep under the long, dead grass. Finally, Sadie pushed Fat Jamie into my arms and said she’d let me pick out the dish we’d put the ear in, if I’d just quit bawling.
I chose a china saucer rimmed in faded violets. Ringed by the flowers, the earlobe looked like a bit of spat-up mushroom.
Because I was still blubbering and in no shape for a potentially dangerous mission, Sadie told me to wait inside—lock the door behind her, just in case—while she went up to the construction site to set out the plate. The fairies were sure to find it there.
I pressed my nose against the window as she marched off into the rhododendrons at the edge of the yard, her white hair and red rain slicker bright among their dull curled leaves. The fairy was quieting down below me, and I thought about what I’d do if she didn’t come back. Eat all the eggs I wanted, for one thing. Not cut off any ears. Have my life all to myself. But none of those things seemed worth being alone for.
When a knock came on the door I had a notion I’d find a whole crowd of yellow-eyed fairies on the porch. Or even Mom, back from fairyland, still red-faced and howling. But it was just Sadie. When I asked her if she saw any fairies, she said no. Probably we should give them a couple hours to find the plate.
But we couldn’t go back to check that day, because that afternoon Dad banged into the house with his fiddle case. He said hello and kissed us both on our heads, like we were normal girls and not ones who had put a fairy in the basement and its ear up on the mountainside.
The older we got, the less Dad came home. Sometimes I got startled if I opened the bathroom door in the morning to find him shaving his beard hairs off into the sink. It was how I might feel if a raccoon broke in: pleasantly surprised but knowing it didn’t really belong.
All he said to us was to be sure to take baths that night, because the Aunts were coming tomorrow.
The Aunts came to see us every other Sunday. This was never much fun, because they didn’t like Dad. They didn’t like that he’d named me and Sadie after murdered girls from Doc Watson songs, they didn’t like that he made a living as a fiddler and storyteller, and most of all, they didn’t like that our house was his and not theirs.
The Aunts were Mom’s sisters. They both lived two hours away, in big square houses with square-headed husbands. Aunt Evie had two thick-necked sons who were off at college. Aunt Katelyn didn’t have children but had been talking for ages about how God had called her to adopt a baby from a starving place. She would make us look at the online ads for the sad orphans, our possible cousins, touching their cheeks through the phone screen with a sighing wet-eyed look.
Every time the Aunts visited they acted like the house was theirs, walking from room to room, clicking their tongues at the Virginia creeper curling against the windows, the dusty piles of ladybugs crawling over each other in the corners. Sadie said none of that stuff had been there before Mom was taken, but I couldn’t imagine living in a house without ladybugs.
“Good Lord, it smells like a cave in here, Alex.” Aunt Evie flared her powdery nose. “Do you have mold?”
Dad didn’t answer right away—like me, he was probably wondering how Aunt Evie knew what a cave smelled like. She was right, though: there was a new smell in the house, something dark and mossy.
“Maybe a bit in the basement,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of rain this month.”
Aunt Evie snorted. Then we all had to sit around our knife-clawed table and talk. Dad told them he was interviewing for a substitute teacher job at the district high school (this was not true; Dad hated the public school system). Sadie said she had gotten all As on her last report card (also not true; she’d failed her English oral report because she’d tried to do it on Flowers in the Attic). I’d gotten two Snickers for the price of one from the cafeteria vending machine last week (this was true, but only because I was still too riled by the fairy business to think of a good lie).
There were some things we never told them, of course. They didn’t know that me and Sadie looked after ourselves when Dad had a gig. They didn’t know I’d had a bubbly rash on my chest for most of the winter that had gotten worse when Sadie drenched it with peroxide. And they didn’t know that when the weather was warm we skipped school to pick blackberries; that for supper we’d eat a pailful each, drowned in sugar, and leave red fingerprints on the walls for days.
“I talked to Meg the other day,” Aunt Katelyn said, once the question-asking was over. “She misses you girls so much and told me to give you both a big hug.”
She delivered the hugs with that wet-eyed look. The Changeling was in some place in Arizona. Sometimes Aunt Katelyn told us what it was doing out there—taking yoga classes and talking with other crazy people, mostly—but none of us much cared.
“I brought you girls a little something.” Aunt Katelyn was forever bringing us little somethings. This time it was a Breyer Horse for me (never mind that I was scared of horses) and a strappy dress for Sadie, the same silky blue as her eyes.
“My, aren’t you lucky girls,” Aunt Evie remarked disapprovingly. “Now go put those things away so we can chat.”
What she didn’t know was that we could easily hear the chat from our bedroom. It was always the same: Meg’s treatment bills were draining Mama and Daddy’s retirement; when was the last time Omie had a haircut because she was looking mangy; was Sadie eating enough, because she was awfully thin.
Dad usually laughed and mumbled during the chat. This time, he was dead quiet.
In their clipped cheery voices, the Aunts said that Wildwood Homes, the same people who were going to build houses up on the ridge, had made an offer on the house and property. The title was in Meg’s name, of course, but the Aunts wanted to be respectful, talk it over with Dad. They’d give him some of the money, as long as he promised to use it properly, put it into college funds. The girls could stay with Katelyn for a time, give him a chance to get things in order.
Dad didn’t say anything for a good while. One of the Aunts was jigging her heel against the floor. Tap-tap-tap.
Then, so soft we could barely hear him: “Over my dead fucking body.” It was a bad word and the Aunts gasped, but there was a limpness to the way he said it. In my head, bare-headed vultures swooped down on his corpse, picking at a string of flesh.
Before anyone could say anything else, Aunt Evie started coughing. She coughed and coughed and coughed. We peered through the crack in our door; Aunt Katelyn was trying to help her stand up. But she kept coughing and something pink splattered on the floor in long ropes. For a second I thought her insides were coming out, until I realized it was just the pasta salad she’d brought us all for lunch.
“You do something about that mold,” she rasped. “Or I’m calling CPS, don’t think I won’t.”
“Evie,” said Aunt Katelyn.
“You need to leave.” Dad followed them to the door and watched until they drove away.
Then he went to the kitchen window and wrenched it open. Paint flakes fluttered up and the creeper coils spilled inside. He went to all the other windows and opened them, even stomping into our bedroom like he didn’t even see us there. Then he went and lay down on the couch with his arm over his eyes.
If anything, the mossy smell was stronger with the opened windows. I imagined it spreading up into the squiggly crevices of my brain, green and furred.
Dad came into our room and told us a story that night. He usually only told stories when he felt bad about something (after the Changeling first went away, we got one every night for weeks).
Tonight’s was a particularly good one. Two girls named Omie and Sadie found a magic ring in a tree hollow. They took turns trying it on. The ring made Omie sprout snowy wings and fly between the mountain peaks. Then it made Sadie talk to animals and they both got invited to the Deer King’s Winter Ball. Dad did all the animals’ different voices and swooped around our bedroom, peering down at treetops the size of broccoli heads.
“Is our house really getting sold?” I asked Sadie, after he shuffled off to his own room (I knew better than to ask Dad, who tended to answer questions with sighs or, if he had the wind for it, more stories).
“It’s Mom’s house.” Her voice was low and hungry again. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to hold onto the picture of the two girls from the story: glowing with magic, lighter than air.
Dad hung around for three days, so we couldn’t check the ear plate or feed the fairy. He slept on the couch during the day, shivering and twitching beside the open window. When I tried to wake him up to make supper he just blinked his cruddy eyes at me. “I was dreaming,” he said, but wouldn’t say what about. At night he kept us up with his coughing and pacing. He went from the living room to the kitchen and back in long, slow circles. A few times we heard his feet stop right by the basement door, but he never went down.
Then he was gone again, leaving behind a note for Sadie that Burlington Old Time Music Festival was on and that there was lasagna in the freezer. The first thing we did was hike up the ridge to look for our plate. Behind Sadie, I dragged my heels into the wet leaves, dreading what I was sure to see: a white ear, dainty and curled as a seashell, or maybe a long strand of hair attached to a bloody tag of skin.
But there was nothing there. We looked all around, kicking over rocks and clumps of leaves—even climbed up into the empty cab of the Cat digger and rustled through the water-wrinkled underwear magazines someone had left on its floor—but the plate was gone. I speculated that the fairies may have just wanted to keep it for their fairy parties, since it was so pretty. Sadie told me to shut up.
The house looked different when we walked out of the woods. It took me a minute to figure out why. Had the rhododendrons always been leaning so close to the windows? Had those weird red flowers always been poking up through the cracks in the porch? But then I saw it: a violet-rimmed plate, waiting right in front of the door. There was nothing on it, but my insides still shriveled.
Sadie wasn’t scared at all. She just looked at it and laughed. She laughed so hard that she started to cry, dribbling snot all over the painted flowers.
I felt all mossy-headed after we found the plate, but Sadie was excited. She leapt and spun around the house like a much littler girl, her white hair tangling around her. She pranced down the basement steps and laughed at the blood-crusted fairy and dashed back up. She jumped on the couch, in the greasy hollow Dad had left, and the creeper vines bounced like they were excited too. She twirled over to me and squished my cheeks between her cold hands.
“We’re getting Mom back, dummy.” Her eyes had that sparking look. “Why aren’t you happy? I order you to be happy!”
I let her spin me around and laughed too. It was easier just to do what she said.
Sadie wanted to take the fairy up the mountain and swap it for Mom right away, but I was too tired to hike all the way back up there. So we decided to wait until morning.
After Sadie started to snore, I went down to the basement alone, Fat Jamie’s best silk dress balled under my arm. The wood steps were slimy under my bare feet and I had a notion that I was walking over faces, mushy and sucking. I grappled in the dark and pulled the lightbulb chain. The fairy was slumped against the side of the crate, its head black and crusty. I wondered if it missed the other fairies. I wondered if it had helped take Mom, years ago. If it had ever thought of letting her go.
I opened the crate. Its eyes turned toward me but didn’t move. I reached out and ran a hand down one of its legs. I thought it might feel cold and rough, but its skin was hotter than mine.
It didn’t do anything as I pulled each of its thin arms through the dress sleeves, tied the ribbon at its throat. I wondered if Mom had a hard time dressing me when I was a baby, if she’d struggled to stuff my limp arms through the sleeves, or worried that my fingers would snap when they snagged in the gaps of the lace.
I usually talked to my dolls when I dressed them up—told them I’d make them beautiful, that they’d feel much better now that they had something decent to wear—but all the things I wanted to say to the fairy dried up in my throat. After I was done, I rocked back on my heels and we stared at each other for a good while.
It looked like a wet rock someone had stuffed into a cheap princess outfit. I took the dress off again, not sure why I’d expected to see anything different.
When morning came, we both got dressed in the dark. Sadie put on her new blue dress from Aunt Katelyn. She told me to wear my red Christmas jumper and pinched me, hard, when I said I wanted jeans: “Do you want Mom to see you looking all raggedy?” Then she combed out my hair, tugging the snarls until my eyes stung.
In the basement, Sadie fastened the fairy’s wrists and ankles with some rubber bands she found in the junk drawer, even though it was limper and duller than ever. She picked it up like a baby, its yellow eyes turned into her bony chest. Then she carried it up the stairs and out into the pale, shivery light. Her hair ran down the blue dress like creek froth.
“You look like a butthole in that dress,” I told her. She ignored me. It was a lie: she looked so grown-up and beautiful, I hardly knew it was her.
Mist snaked out of the rhododendrons and into the grass. Sadie told me to pick some of the red flowers to give to Mom. When I yanked them up the roots hung on, sprinkling dirt all down my jumper.
Sadie climbed the ridge like a deer, slipping around the briars and tree trunks. I stumbled and panted, trying to keep up. Part of me—the same silly part that used to think she kept my life in a jar—was sure that if I let her out of my sight, I wouldn’t see her again.
The mist was still thick when we got to the construction site, the crumbling red walls and ditches veiled and silvery. Sadie set the fairy down. She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me up next to her.
“Okay,” she said, breathing deep. “Okay.”
The fog stirred around, but nothing else happened. The fairy lay curled on its side, eyes closed except for a yellow sliver. My heart quieted a little and my head started wandering toward breakfast, to our kitchen and Fat Jamie and the buzzing ladybugs, a million miles from here.
Then, I saw it.
It didn’t appear out of nowhere or float out of the trees, just walked out of the mist and stood there. It was like our fairy, the muddled color of dirt and rocks and naked trees. Another walked up beside it, bowlegged and staring.
Sadie’s hand was jolting in mine. The mossy feeling spread from my brain down into the well of my belly, because I knew Mom was going to come out of the mist next—like Sadie but older, taller, stranger—and that she’d walk up and take the flowers from me, maybe give me a big hug, and I’d have to just stand there and soak up whatever cold, musky magic she brought back with her.
We shivered together for a long time, watching. But nothing else came. There were just the two fairies, standing there with their toes squishing into the red clay. One lifted a hand and scratched its lumpy gray butt cheek.
“Where is she?” Sadie’s voice was high and thin. “Where is she?”
She started screaming things I couldn’t make out. The fairies jumped and the bare trees rattled but she just kept on screaming, pulling at her hair until shimmery white clumps tangled in her fingers. I tried to stop her and she pushed me so hard I fell in the mud. She kicked our fairy, again and again. It rolled over and its head lolled up at the white sky.
Sadie crumpled and dropped to the ground, clay smearing over her wet cheeks. The other fairies started to come forward, knobby hands reaching for the still gray form at her feet.
“No.” I scrambled up and stamped, like I was trying to scare a dog. I scooped up our fairy and turned my back to the others so they couldn’t see how its eyes had stopped moving.
I told Sadie let’s go and reached for her hand. Curled inside the dirty folds of her dress, she looked tiny: a little kid hiding under the covers. I thought it might be hard to pull her down through the woods while carrying the fairy, but they both felt like nothing.
When we got back to the house, I glanced over my shoulder. Something was crouched at the edge of the yard, glaring yellow-eyed through the raspy grass. I knew it couldn’t do much more than that.
In the basement, I sat Sadie down on the concrete and put the fairy in the crate.
“It’s okay,” I said, petting her torn-up hair. We both looked through the bars. The crisscrossed shadows seemed to cut the fairy into pieces.