s for that sunset, it dazzled (a lesser mortal might have said burninated). I’d been so eager to get away from my mother and Dr. Holden’s love-nest that I’d left without packing a hat or sunscreen, and I hadn’t had the foresight to grab some from the impulse aisle at the hardware store either. To add insult to injury (freed from my mother, I was going to use all the clichés now), I started to feel uncomfortably crisp right outside the town drugstore’s sun protection display. The past few days of walking around without sun protection had finally caught up with me.

Only $20.99!! the promotional cardboard cutout of a cartoon sunscreen bottle told me.

I didn’t have $20.99, and, unlike the hardware store, the drugstore didn’t let you buy on credit (perhaps considering their clientele too transient.) But a trial-size bottle of sunscreen probably cost less than $20.99, maybe even less than the $8.24 in my pocket. It wouldn’t hurt my sunburned skin to check.

What did hurt, however, was walking smack into the glass door of the drugstore.

Power outage. No automatic doors, remember?

Clearly not.

Since no one came forth from inside to jimmy open the door for me, I figured the staff had used the power outage as an excuse to close up early (oh, my kingdom for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy) and I had to let go of my dreams of zinc- and/or chemical-based UVA and UVB sun protection.

We’d better hope that the power is back on by the time you need to power all those lamps you stole will-pay-for-at-a-future-date-in-time.

I hadn’t thought of that.

Hmmm.

Future Enid’s list of problems was growing quite lengthy.

And my sunburn, on the back of my neck and arms and shoulders and head, stung.

Left with no other option to shelter myself from the sun’s rays, I unzipped my suitcase and pulled out my hooded rain poncho.

“Oh, is it supposed to rain?” a woman asked me, walking by.

“Yes,” I answered, adding another lie to the mix. I didn’t like how devious I had become, what with the sneaking and taking and fibbing and all that, but agreeing with strangers about rain seemed easier than explaining wearing a raincoat to keep from burning in the sun instead of simply going home and getting a hat.

“Well, we sure need it,” she said genially, before moving along.

By the time I got to the edge of town I had forty-five more minutes of walking ahead of myself, had sweated through the poncho’s army-green nylon, and had a throat as dry as the Kalahari. My limited stores of water wouldn’t be able to hold out if the poncho remained on.

“Fine then,” I said aloud. “Off you come.”

I needed to prioritize. The parts of my anatomy that needed the most protection, I decided, were aural: my ears. I stuffed the poncho back in my suitcase and rooted around for a less dehydrating option, which was socks, pulled over the tops of my burned ears. First wandering around town sopping wet, then draped in a rain poncho under the setting sun, now footwear as headwear, I was fast becoming the town’s most avant-garde clothing trendsetter. I looked about for my faerie, eager to see what it thought of my getup.

Nothing. Not even a flash of movement in my periphery.

Well, I reasoned with myself. It’ll show up again. And even if that faerie has lost interest, there’ll be others I can catch. It won’t matter which faerie I get, as long as I catch one.

I don’t think faeries are like Legos or Baby-Sitters Club novels, i.e. interchangeable. I say we need to catch the same faerie that cast the spell.

I disagree, magic is magic. It’s like playing a musical instrument — anyone can do it with practice.

But some people practise more than others.

So? I’m sure where we’re going to there are plenty of faeries. Just lousy with them. Eventually I’ll catch one that can do what I need it to do.

If I say so.

I do.

I did.

I gave myself a firm nod and continued.

Out past the Official Town Limits sign, the sidewalk faded away, as did the asphalt. Underfoot: red dirt; to the sides: fields melting into copses of trees, then copses of trees thinning back out into fields. I walked. I roll-roll-roll-kthunked. I occasionally kicked a rock or a piece of gravel along a few paces. And I hovered on panicking over all of Future Enid’s problems.

To quell my brain’s disaster mongering, I decided to deconstruct what had happened with Amber at the fish tank. Perhaps — I stumbled over a half-buried tree root but managed to right myself before I face-planted — perhaps, with Amber, I was witnessing someone going from an inactive relationship to an active one. There were already plenty of similar case studies (although they were generally called fairy tales or fables rather than case studies), but nothing was stopping me from adding my take to that wealth of knowledge. All I had to do was observe Amber Holden in a controlled environment.

Future Enid.

That’s right. Observing Amber was a Future Enid concern.

Halfway to the farmhouse. I considered taking a break but decided to push forward, with a new brain-busying plan to say aloud all the vegetables I knew; no triggering of uncomfortable emotions could come from vegetables.

The vegetable list (ending on romanescu) took me until the For Sale sign came in view, actually a For sign and a Sale sign, as the sign had cracked down the middle and each side now hung lopsidedly off its own hook. Our realtor, clearly, hadn’t been here in months (unlike whomever delivered phone books, since a water-logged one sat underneath the For Sale sign), but I didn’t fault the realtor for her lack of attention: one can’t show a house that no sane person would pay money for. The For and the Sale signs blew back and forth opposite to each other, meeting up for a millisecond in the middle before swaying back out again. Odd, since there wasn’t any wind.

“Well, I’m going to go in there,” I said, pointing down the long driveway as I came to it. “And you’ll just have to wait. I mean, look at all these old, thick, sturdy trees that guard my farmhouse. No way you could come in with me. And what might I be doing in there, hmmm? Wouldn’t you like to know.” I hoped that sounded interesting enough to pique a faerie’s — the faerie’s — interest, and, being cat-killingly curious, it would stick around to find out what I was up to, at which point I’d trap it. Muahahahaha.

Which faerie exactly are you going to trap? Because I don’t see even a one. Didn’t you say this place would be lousy with them?

I’m still getting ready. It isn’t like they need to be here yet. (Hmph! Future Enid was going to need to give herself a stern talking-to about constructive criticism and self-compassion and not being a jerk to myself.)

I started off down the driveway, now more overgrown than ever. At one point the driveway had been, I guess one would say, cobbled with large stones. The stones were still there, I assumed, underneath the moss and overgrowth (they couldn’t have gone anywhere, rocks having a general lack of self-momentum), but you couldn’t feel them; wheeling my suitcase down the drive was like wheeling it over carpet, a pleasant respite from the bumpy and pebble-filled road to the farmhouse. I strolled along, coming up to the turn in the drive where all would be revealed. (I slowed myself down to draw out the magnificence of waiting for it. Took a few deep breaths. Listened to the leaves, which, with no wind, wasn’t really that interesting a sound. Smelled sun, possibilities. And —) There it was.

Home.

More of the decorative woodwork from the gables had rotted through, and fewer windows were paned than I recalled. The house sloped to one side, and the smell, until I got used to it, was overpowering. A rodent had chewed a hole through the front door, and I got the feeling that at least three undiscovered species of creepy-crawlies resided inside.

But it was home.

And it was beautiful.

Still, I couldn’t glory in it too long since I needed to check the electrical situation and, with the edges of the sky having already turned to indigo, I couldn’t dawdle any further; dark snuck up quickly out here without street lights. I tenderly nudged my way through the front door and reached my arm up the wall until I found the entryway light switch.

“Please,” I said. “Let there be light.”

I flipped the switch.

Nope.

I glanced up at a wall sconce.

“Oh, come on,” I moaned. There weren’t any light bulbs. My mother had probably unscrewed them and taken them with us when we moved into town.

Time a-wasting, I darted about with purpose: back out the door to grab one of the Angelpoises, back in after ripping the lamp out of its box, dropping onto my knees to jam the plug into a wall socket, fiddling around with the lamp in the gloom to find its on-off switch, taking a deep breath, and then closing my eyes (I found giving inanimate objects a little bit of privacy made them less self-conscious about performing). I used this brief pause for positive thinking: to imagine the volleys of electrons vibrating, getting ready to move, getting ready to rumble, ohms or volts or kilajoules of energy eager to start flowing or pulsing or however electricity worked. (I had read the chapters on electricity in my mother’s physics textbook, but that didn’t mean I understood how electricity worked. In chemistry, electrons flicked everywhere. In an electrical wire they stayed trapped inside. Why didn’t they go through the wire and back out into the world? Was wiring jail for electrons or something? I didn’t get it. Not that my confusion was particularly relevant since electricity worked whether I understood how it did or not, and it was going to work for me now.)

“Ready?” I whispered.

Ready.

“Go.”

I turned the light on.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I was still sitting in a grey, twilight washout.

Why hadn’t it worked? I tried the lamp in a few more plugs, venturing deeper and deeper inside the dusky house, but to no avail. The light remained firmly off, as did the other three when I tried them in the hopes that my first Angelpoise was faulty.

Is the power still out?

Nope, because back out on the road, looking towards town, I spied twinkles as street lights and house lights began turning on for the evening.

Okay, assuming at least one Anglepoise lamp worked and my mother had been truthful about the house still having electricity coming in, I had one further option (and thank goodness Barb had mentioned it because I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise): flip the breaker switches, and maybe the big grey metal box by the front door with ELECTRIC written on the front in black permanent marker contained just the breaker switch I needed.

The box was latched shut, but some nifty finger work got it open. In the evening murk, I couldn’t make out the penciled-in labels next to any of the small switches, but next to the big one, in my mother’s block caps and written in glow-in-the-dark ink, were the words an infinite land of day. Day implied sunshine implied light, and using quotes (which I was certain “an infinite land of day” was, even if I didn’t recognize it) to obscure the obviousness of everyday life was exactly the sort of thing my mother would do.

I flipped the switch. A subtle hum, then, at my feet, an Angelpoise lamp buzzed and turned on.

I grinned and got to work.