Fairy Circle (3 page)

“
Oh, yeah. I won’t get hurt. I’ll get someone to lock me in my room wherever I go so I’ll feel all cozy and secure. Who will be that someone? You? Everywhere I go? Or will we train some of my new college buddies to lock me in when the moon is full?” Now the pancakes felt heavy in her gut. They had never covered this angle out loud before - how she was going to become a world traveler when she needed to be in lockdown on nights approaching and during a full moon.

Audrey’s usually-straight back curved. She didn’t look at Saffron when she murmured her reply. “You can commute to the university from home.” She cleared her throat. “Just come home at night.”

Saffron dropped her spoon into her bowl with a clank, pushed herself up from the table, and brushed past her mother. She stomped upstairs and into the bathroom, slammed the door, dragged a comb through the rusty tangle that was her hair, and snatched her toothbrush from the holder.

The phone rang.

Terror sluiced up and down Saffron’s limbs. Nobody ever called this early in the morning. It couldn’t be good.

A few moments later, her mother knocked on the bathroom door, then opened it a crack until she was staring at Saffron in the mirror. “That was the Black Chicken. They said you can go in to train today.”

Saffron held the toothbrush suspended in her mouth. She stared at her mother while the fear bore down and squeezed her chest. What kind of mother was she? Not helping your kid when she was obviously traumatized. Why did she keep pushing this?

Saffron shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t want to go.”

Audrey watched a drooley toothpaste string stretch down from Saffron’s lips as she not so much as brushed her teeth but began scrubbing her gums raw. “What are you afraid off?”

Saffron spit hard, smeared her mouth with a facecloth, then chucked the cloth at the back of the sink. “I’m not afraid of anything! Okay? God!”

Audrey sucked in a deep breath and looked with bulging eyes at the ceiling. She blinked several times before she again leveled her gaze on Saffron.

“
Just tell me, Saffron. If you tell me, you’ll get it out and you’ll be able to start to help yourself. I don’t care if you tell me you’re afraid of a holocaust, the dirt under your feet, or fat women’s panty lines. Just tell me. I promise I won’t laugh or lecture you or anything. I just want to help you. Tell me.” Audrey huffed. Now she was whining.

A vision popped into Saffron’s mind - squirming bodies, bruise-sucked skin, a leer that made her groin ache. She crossed her arms across her chest and blinked back hot, angry tears. She wanted to get past her mother but the woman was standing there in the doorway. Saffron didn’t have it in her to push past, so she stood before her mother and grew angrier by the second.
Get out of my way.
Why can’t I just shove past her? I should shove past her. Why can’t I tell her to get the hell out of the way? I can’t stand here all day!

Audrey sighed into the loud silence of the tiny bathroom.

Saffron pressed her lips. Why the hell was her mother always sighing? She was going to hyperventilate.

Audrey moved aside. Saffron scuttled past her mother with her if-looks-could-kill eyes cast down. Audrey followed Saffron to her room. “They said to bring a lunch, unless you want to buy something from the store. You can train six hours today and eight tomorrow with some woman named Bea. I spoke to her on the phone. She seemed very nice.”

Saffron looked around for something sharp to poke the headache from her eye. She grabbed her bag from the closet. It was a gift from her mother - a caramel leather courier bag with antiqued buckles and dark red roses on the strap. A bag meant for people who were going places. It was three years old, clean and shiny. The leather was so stiff that it squeaked when she raised the flap to throw in a sweatshirt, some loose change and a couple of ones, some ChapStick so she wouldn’t have flaky lips, some tissues so she wouldn’t be caught with any hangers-on, and hand sanitizer to protect against getting a cold, which would cause flaky lips and hangers on. She ran down the sloping treads of the old farmhouse stairs and grumbled, “Fine, I’ll go get my lunch for my glamorous new job.”

She stomped to the kitchen, almost yanked the door off the Lazy Susan, grabbed a can of Spaghettios and threw it into her talking bag, the smell of leather wafting up when she ripped at the flap. Then she was out the front door, letting it slam behind her, and onto the farmer’s porch, where she jerked to a halt.

She couldn’t step off the porch.

She couldn’t mount her bike and ride to that job. She couldn’t. After two agonizing moments, she practically threw herself down the porch stairs and marched to her bike.

Her feet and lower back ached as she forced her way past the mushrooms that had grown back at the base of the driveway. She didn’t slow down the whole first mile. When she did slow, she was so exhausted the bike started to wobble. Toward the end of the trek, she had to get off the bike, her legs so rubbery with fatigue, and walk the rest of the way down Main Street.

When Saffron arrived at the store, Bea informed her that after her training days, she would work second shift with a girl named Coco. Then Bea continued to talk, nonstop, for the next two days.

After the second day of training, Saffron was exhausted. It was hard learning how to dust the shelves (the proper way), stock the cooler, and learn the register program, while not being allowed to sit, ever. Saffron ripped the black winged baseball cap off her head and whipped it into the corner of her bedroom. Her jeans and t-shirt smelled like deli, so, even though it was early evening, she changed into a wife beater tank top and pink cotton pajama bottoms. She tipped, face-first, onto the bed. Somewhere around six pm she fell asleep.

Chapter
3

S
affron woke up nauseous and heavy-limbed. Above her, a wooden butterfly hung suspended from the ceiling, each of its brightly painted parts strung with fishing line. The wet night air that seeped in from the window moved it now. Saffron meant to stare at it until the grogginess cleared so she could get up and go to the bathroom.

Why was the window open? She had kept it shut the last few nights because the humidity was so bad. It felt better just to have the fan running. The fan was still.

There was a beat of vacuumed silence, followed by the loud tearing of a branch in the apple tree outside her window. She seized up and held her breath.

The air around her began to thicken as if it was gathering itself. It pushed on her neck, arms and chest. It felt like a heavy gas as she carefully took a few short breaths and exhaled frigid puffs.

Another resounding crack, then quiet except for the blood that pounded in her ears. After several moments of stillness, she sat up and grabbed the edge of the mattress. The waffle blanket slipped to the floor, leaving her shaking in her pajamas. She hunched down, drawing her shoulders forward. Her eyes reflected the waning moon as she stared out the window.

Beyond the window frame, in the black night, chaos started. The screeching of an owl joined the burp-croak of a bullfrog. The screams of small prey floated out of the woods. Dogs from near and far howled, and bats began darting in and out of her shutters, causing the weakly-bolted wood to clack, clack against the wall of the house.

She stood up, tiptoed toward the window, and gnawed on her fingernails. As she moved closer, more of the apple tree came into view - the top of the tree, the next branches down. She was halfway across the wooden floor when she heard a thump on the grass outside. She stopped and stood poised, the heel of her back foot off the ground.

Then she leaned back, putting all of her weight on that foot. She pulled her other foot back too, and in this way, did a shuffling return to her bedside, both eyes still locked on the empty window. She eased back into bed and curled into the fetal position as she pulled the blanket from the floor and up over her head.

The animals bleated and hooted, screamed and croaked. The crashing of the ocean amplified, smashing at the rocks. She began to whisper to herself, a habit she’d had since she was a child.

And then, there was a voice.

Go to sleep.

The words were an edict which burst forth in her head like fireworks in a black sky. The voice seemed alien - not machine, and not human. It was commanding, and oddly enough, it was soothing.

Her senses dulled as she studied the blanket tented by her nose. Her lips went slack, her breathing slowed. She stared without seeing till finally, her lids closed completely and she lay still.

As quickly as the ruckus had started, it stopped, as if the animals had been cheering the start of a performance and now the show was to begin. A cloud drifted across the moon, leaving the house in momentary shadow.

In the undulating nebula of her mind, that dark place you pass through before you dream and never recall when you wake, she heard the far-off beating of many tiny wings. Then someone called her name, high and mellifluous, like a note puffed through a glass bird whistle. The wings came closer until the vibration was there, in the room with her.

Suddenly, both of her legs lifted and moved over, her torso rising and moving like a marionette. Her eyes remained shut as the blanket fell away.

A warm churning began in her stomach. It grew steadily, until it consumed her entire midriff, surrounded her hips and lower back. Invisible fingers of pressure rolled up her spine, over her shoulders and around her neck. As the heat moved past her ears, her head fell back. Her scalp tingled; she could feel every follicle hum as if each generated its own electrical current. The current lifted and separated the lengths of her hair and supported the roiling, red mass of it while it hung in empty space. She looked like a mermaid sitting under water, her hair waving in a ghostly tide.

From her belly she felt a tug, like an invisible elastic, pulling forward. It made her stomach spasm, and her entire body vibrate like a twanging metal rod. Then, three more pulls in rhythm with the pulsing of her hair. She dipped one toe forward, toward the floorboards, but quickly retracted. This was not the way. She responded on the fifth summons - the strongest pull yet - just floated up, a drowning victim whose body has expelled all air and makes its unconscious way to the top of the sea.

Behind her, her
body slumped on the mattress.

Her entire soul levitated to the ceiling, moving as she rose so that she no longer was in a seated position, but hovered belly-down above the bed, seeing her stuffed panda in the rocking chair below her.

All of the windows in her room flew open without the usual moan of forced wood. Saffron coursed along the ceiling, then down and out into the waiting night. A gust of wind shrieked past her ears. She hung suspended above the crooked apple tree just for a moment before the pull in her gut strengthened, and soon she found herself coasting at high speed above the earth. Up ahead she saw a herd of deer leaping for the cover of the trees.

The voices that surrounded her told her to relax, to enjoy the ride, but not to be concerned with milestones or markers. She wasn’t meant to know where she was going and therefore would never know. She flew across forests and lakes, mountains and oceans. She drifted in and out of semi-consciousness. Sometimes she rode the wave on her stomach and sometimes she spiraled slowly through space, her hair wrapping about her shoulders.

After an indeterminable amount of time - it could’ve been moments or hours - small hands grabbed at her fingers. She started to descend. Her feet drifted down until she was standing upright in the air, her hair snapping around her like crimson ribbons.

She touched down on a bed of brown needles surrounded by towering pines that crowded like stanchions. Lights swirled and bobbled in front of her, in back of her. All around her the trees sighed and grunted, moaned and snored. She blinked once, then looked sidelong at the massive tree to her immediate right. She took two steps away from it.

One of the phosphorescent globes stopped to hang in front of her face. Saffron heard a giggle, then the light zigzagged away. Some of the other orbs lowered to the forest floor. Their glow was soft, like tiny, solar-powered bulbs. Then the lights began to pop in showers. In the place of each little explosion stood a magnificent person - a fairy - with iridescent skin. Their glow came from the inside, and twinkled out from every pore. They were all taller than she was.

The one closest to Saffron turned to smile back at a friend. The being had great silvery wings, mottled as rice paper and veined with the same fuzzy radiance. The wings arched high over her head, curved down above her buttocks, then molded with the skin on her back.

Saffron couldn’t decide if they were boys and girls or men and women. Their ages seemed to swim and change as she watched them. When they giggled at her, they seemed no more than five years old; but when they smiled at her, it was the proud grin of a parent looking down upon a cherished child.

Their lips were plump and red, pert as cupids, but their murmuring was sophisticated; their fathomless, bright eyes seemed at once silly, wise, and ancient. They each had different colored eyes, every hue, and shine. Some like jewels, some like metal. But the line of color was slim; it roped around the great black holes that were their pupils. Pupils so large they looked owlish.

The skin was completely transparent on some, while others had skin like the underbelly of a frog, milky-white and thin, so that in all of them you could see the network of veins and the lines of bones pulsing and working. Some had amber-bottle glass skin, some wild blue, and others, sea green. One even had licorice-black skin with golden veins vibrating in her wings, in her arms, across her chest and down her legs. The material that covered them wasn’t like any material Saffron had ever seen. She couldn’t figure what it was, but would later be told it was a weave of millions of tiny, impossibly-stretched filament taken from a “glass spider” that lived only within their boundaries.