awoke well rested and with a smile on my face. Sleeping in true darkness, as opposed to the artificial darkness of a blackout curtain, had been glorious. After that blissful sleep, full of energy, I leapt up, arms above my head, in a well-deserved stretch.

“Let’s go!” I shouted.

A bit of the ceiling agreed with me. It went, pulled down by gravity right onto my head with a smack.

“I didn’t mean literally,” I said to the newly made hole in the roof. Bits of the second floor poked menacingly through.

At least be glad any rain is holding off so we’re not soaking wet. And roll up the sleeping bag in case the weather changes its mind.

I did, tossed my backpack on top of my pile of stuff (after extracting a juice box, two large oranges, and a package of crackers for breakfast), then burst through the front door and into the sunshine, ready for the new day.

First step: get the extension cords out of the shed. The shed door was padlocked closed, but action movies had taught me that all padlocks could be forced open if hit with a heavy object, like a softball-sized rock. Luckily, softball-sized rocks made up the ornamental edging of our back garden, and the one I chose was definitely heavy enough (my poor arms!) to break open a padlock.

Exceedingly heavy rock in hands, I shuffled, muscles straining, in the direction I remembered the shed being; without my mother to cut them back, the shed was now obscured by branches, moss, and thistles. The overgrowth, however, hadn’t stopped whatever had left terrifying gouges all along the shed’s door. (Skunk? Wolverine? Therizon-saurus?) Or maybe faeries had broken through the tree line to leave me a message in angry scratches? Either way, I could be in danger. Fear overwhelmed me, thoughts racing, sweaty palms almost dropping my burdensome über-pebble onto my unprotected toes.

But then the wind caught the overhanging tree branches, dragging them across the plywood door, and the cause of the scratches became clear.

See? Nothing untoward. Wind, pointy branches, wooden door, cheap paint, scratches: all perfectly normal.

My heart, unconvinced, still raced.

I lifted my rock as high as I could, bringing it down with a satisfying crash on the of the padlock.

Action movies, I then discovered, may have exaggerated how easy it was to break open a padlock with a heavy object.

I moved on to bashing the rock against the square locking mechanism of the padlock instead of the , since maybe that had been what action heroes had been bashing when they smashed padlocks apart in the movies. Also a failure: the padlock remained decidedly in one piece, locked.

My next option was the more conventional way of opening a lock: using keys. After elegantly (and in no way dropping it with a loud crash) releasing my rock to the ground, I tried to remember all my mother’s favorite quotes to see if any were about locked doors or sheds or jars of rusty nails, to hint at where she’d hidden the padlock’s key. Nope. And there weren’t any flowerpots or hollow rocks around that a key might be hidden under, either.

Deciding to give physical force another go, I shouldered the door. It didn’t budge. The rusty hinges didn’t even give a weak rattle. And now my shoulder ached.

Despair overcame me. Why hadn’t I grabbed a crowbar at the hardware store just in case? There was no way I was going back to town now to get one. Firstly, the more time I spent in town, the more likely I was to run into my mother, or Dr. Holden, or Dr. Sivaloganathan, or Amber Holden, or Mrs. Delavecchio, or, really, anyone the faeries might use to try and upset my machinations. Secondly, the chances of another opportune power outage so I could future-pay for more supplies seemed extraordinarily unlikely. Thirdly —

Thirdly, why don’t we try the shed window?

I’d forgotten about the shed window, likely because its size (minuscule), its cleanliness (not applicable), and its location (facing directly onto a tree trunk) meant that it blended into the wall. But, obviously, now that I remembered it was there, the window could be my entry point. Plus, based on the furrows on the shed door, branches had likely broken the window for me already (if not, tossing my rock through the window would do it). Make a hook out of branches, wrangle it through the broken window, grab the extension cords, and I’d be good to go.

Spirits buoyed by those thoughts, I eagerly pushed my way through the greenery to the back of the shed. And there, in the sunless, mucky, mosquito-breeding edge of the forest, my eyes beheld a sight that was even more beauteous than a broken window I’d have to negotiate extension cords through: the back wall of the shed lying on the ground.

How’s that?

Well, all the plants grew up and made a damp microclimate back here. The damp probably warped the wall. As the wall warped, it pulled away from the shed’s frame. While pulling away from the frame, the nails that connected the wall to the frame must have popped out. Then, with the back wall no longer attached to the frame, gravity did the rest. Thump. I pointed at the former wall, now fallen to the ground.

I kind of wish we’d checked round the back here first. It would have saved us a lot of time. And we wouldn’t have aggravated any of our injuries further. Our arms are really sore, not to mention our shoulder from trying to bust down the shed door, and —

“Oh hush,” I told myself. “Or I’ll just pretend that this wall never fell and make a hook anyway just to teach me not to complain.”

I hushed and then I hopped into the shed, stuffing the longest extension cord (mystery for later investigation: why did we have so many extension cords of varying lengths?) into an abandoned garbage bag rescued from the shed’s floor. I was about to add in a pair of rusty scissors with which to snip some grass (fingers crossed the scissors wouldn’t pierce through the cheap plastic of the garbage bag) when my foot banged against something twangy. Whatever it was had been wrapped in an impermeable black sack, which I stabbed at with the scissors until the bag revealed its contents: our old push lawnmower with grass catcher attachment. The bag had cocooned the mower, keeping its blades, unlike the scissors’, sharp and unrusted and perfect for cutting grass. I needed grass clippings to conceal the extension cord: the mower could get me grass clippings far more easily than the over-oxidized scissors, and far more quickly as well. A most fortuitously magnificent find for Enid! I pulled the mower out of the shed and behind me to the field across the road.

Now, the field across the road was government land, but our government was run for and by the people, and what was I if not a person who needed to make use of government land and should therefore be free to do so? Plus, I was going to mow some of the grass. If anything, the government should be commending me for my volunteerism. A medal or a plaque would be appropriate, I decided, not some flimsy paper certificate.

Triumphantly, I marched to the middle of the field. Then I had to march less triumphantly back to the farmhouse to get the lamps and light bulbs and two ropes and a piece of plywood about twice as long as my foot and three quarters as wide (this I pried off the felled wall of the shed), plus all the other miscellany I’d forgotten to haul out on my first trip.

“Curious?” I called out as I took my second load out to the field.

No response. Not even that tingle on the back of your skull that says someone or ones (i.e. faeries) are watching you. But if the faeries weren’t here, where were they and what were they doing there and just how were they planning to thwart me thwarting them?

I dumped all my supplies in the middle of the field, far enough from the road that my provisions wouldn’t be too obvious to any casual passersby but not so far that the extension cord wouldn’t go the distance. I extracted the ropes and the board from my pile. With apologies to Mrs. Delavecchio and her Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown books, it was crop circle–making time.

I unraveled the two ropes and compared sizes. I used the shorter to tie my right foot onto the plywood, taking the rope’s ends in hand so I could lift and lower my foot-attached-to-board like a marionette leg. Walking like this wasn’t too unwieldy, provided I didn’t accidentally step on the board with my left foot and trip or mash my left foot under the plywood when it was my right foot’s turn to step. After tying the long rope to the lawnmower’s handle, I stomped away from the lawnmower until the long rope was stretched out as far as it could go. I had my radius with the rope, my center with the lawnmower, and, keeping the long rope taut as I walked, I made the edge of my crop circle, flattening down the long grass with my plywood board until I got back to where I started.

Boundary successfully trampled down, I moved on to mowing the grass inside the boundary. (Had I been making a true crop circle, I would, of course, have used my board to flatten all the grass, but that was more time-consuming than mowing and I simply didn’t have the time to spare.)

No longer needing my stomping board, I whirled around like an Olympic discus champion and tossed the board away, deep into the still-grassy part of the field. Falling to the ground as the world spun around me, I became an island of Enid in a sea of crunched-down green. As tempting as it was to spend the waning light of the afternoon in grassy repose (creating a crop circle, even with a mowing shortcut, was much more time-consuming than anticipated), I still had to roll out the extension cord, hide it under grass clippings, and then set up the lamps.

I forced myself back to standing and pulled the mower out of the circle and over to the fence. The extension cord was next. My plan contained multitudes.

Once a faerie is in close proximity, catching it is simple enough: surround it with banishing powder so it can’t escape, then trap it with a net. The difficulty lies in getting the faerie close enough to capture.

First, make use of faeries’ natural curiosity by doing something faeries have never seen you do before, e.g. why are you making crop circles? And why are you sitting calmly in your crop circle surrounded by mini-suns? (NB: this method may not work if you frequently make crop circles and/or surround yourself with lamps in your spare time.) Determined to solve this mystery, the faeries, like a penny spinning towards the center of a centripetal force funnel, will come closer and closer and closer until, espying the faerie shadow in your periphery, you follow the instructions of the previous paragraph: banishing powder, net, caught.

Now, the crop circle and the mini-suns (which are actually Angelpoise lamps powered from a power bar run off an extension cord) aren’t just for attracting the faeries’ interest: they also serve another purpose. When sitting in the center of your crop circle surrounded by your mini-suns, the only shadow you want to see is your sneaky faerie’s shadow. You do not want to be distracted by shadows of grass rustling the wind, and you do not want to be distracted by your own shadow if you move to scratch your elbow or wiggle a foot that’s fallen asleep. The crop circle ensures the first: the grass around you is levelled so that it casts no shadow, and the circle is wide enough so that the shadows of the unflattened grass at the edges cannot reach you, even the long shadows at dusk. The Angelpoise lamps ensure the second, once you’ve positioned them in such a way that you cast no shadow.

You should also make sure that the extension cord, which you are running to power your mini-suns, is well-hidden. You wouldn’t want the faeries to shut off your power, causing a mountain of yourself-made shadows to distract you. Grass clippings can hide your cord; make sure to get some while creating your crop circle.

I can foresee absolutely no reason why such an attempt at capturing a faerie would not work.

I’d had enough sense, before I started rolling out the extension cord, to make a trench in the road in order to disguise the cord from the faeries as it crossed the road. I made my trench by pulling a branch behind me and walking back and forth across the road as if pondering some intractable problem. I even spoke aloud a few times, saying, “Oh no, that couldn’t work” and “I suppose, if I must” and “That hardly makes sense under the given conditions.” Obviously, it would have been more efficient to cut through the dirt road with a shovel, but that seemed rather conspicuous, and, if the faeries had returned without me noticing, I didn’t need them to be too interested in what I was doing until all my prep work was completed.

Night approached. I’d dragged too long a cord from the shed, but there was no time to get a shorter one. One end already coming out the front room’s broken bay window, I wrapped the excess around a sad-looking tree trunk just inside the driveway, then nestled the next few feet in the trench I’d just dug. Then I dashed across to the field to lay down the rest of the extension cord, plugged the power bar into it, dashed back to the fence for the grass clippings, dumped them over the orange rubber that snaked across the field, took a deep breath, and then surveyed. My subterfuge wouldn’t have fooled someone with a keen eye or a leaf blower, but, as they say, a horseman riding by could hardly tell the difference (unless no one says that and it was a genuinely certified Enid bon mot, though I probably would have said horseperson if I’d made it up, so it must have been a cliché I’d picked up somewhere.)

The sun finally sank beneath the horizon, the indigo at the edges of the sky flooding in. A whole day of preparation had exhausted me. If only wireless electricity existed, the way wireless Internet did, I’d have been finished hours ago (and how can we have wireless Internet and not wireless electricity? Wasn’t everything electrons? Stupid, unhelpful electricity chapter from my mother’s physics textbook not explaining why wireless electricity didn’t exist when I wanted it to.) Even so, I couldn’t stop yet, so close to the end.

I plugged my first lamp into the power bar.

I turned the switch of the power bar on.

I took a deep breath.

I reached for the on/off knob of the lamp.

I put my fingers on the knob and turned, eyes closed to give the lamp some privacy. There was a slight click. I cracked open my left eyelid, then the right.

Cool, energy-efficient LED light was spilling into my hands.

I grinned madly.

It had worked.

“Enid?” a voice cried, jagged and dipping as if the act of talking to me was as fraught as climbing a mountain. “Enid? Why are you in the middle of the field? And why is there a light on? You’re so —” The voice fell into a hiccup and then a burst of laughter. “Enid, you’re so weird.”

I stood up and looked over to the road.

And there was Amber Holden. Her hair stuck out at angles that had yet to be invented, and her clothes looked like they wouldn’t have even made it as far as the Fill A Box for $1 bin at the thrift store, with her gait suggesting that her shoes were on the wrong feet. The bottle in her hand, which I’d initially thought to be juice, was clearly something much stronger.

“Enid, I’m coming over,” Amber called. She ambled to the fence, took six tries to haul herself over (apparently, for Amber, drunkenness did not translate into fleetness of foot), and continued to lurch towards me. I realized then that maybe this was not a safe thing for Amber to do at twilight, when she was distracted and drunk and shuffling through the overgrown part of the field where I’d hidden a long, very trip-inducing cord.

I ran to the edge of my clearing and started to kick through the knee-deep grass outside of my mowing radius.

“Just stay there, Amber,” I shouted. “Wait, I’ll come to you.”

But Amber kept coming towards me, and then, in slow motion, she toppled forward.

“Hold on,” I called out. “I’m coming.”

“No, I’m good. See?” Amber popped back up. “See?” But the extension cord had wrapped around Amber’s legs, and almost as soon as she stood up she tripped again.

Optimal Scenario

Swishing through the grass like a sidewinder, Amber’s fall yanked the extension cord towards her from my side, i.e. the power bar and its one attached lamp zoomed towards Amber. Bound in the extension cord and turtled, Amber waited until I untangled her and helped her inside the farmhouse, where I distracted her (drunk people enjoyed reading physics textbooks, right?) while I dealt with the faeries and made everything go back to normal.

Slightly Less Optimal Scenario

Amber was not distracted by the physics textbook. I had to wait until she fell into a drunken stupor-sleep to continue my faerie-catching business.

Actual Scenario, i.e. Disaster

Amber hit the ground with a crack.

“Oh my goodness, Amber,” I cried. “Are you okay?” The crack had had an ominous, broken-bone sound to it. “Amber?” I shouted again when she didn’t rally.

Another crack. Louder. More portentous. Not at all com-ing from Amber Holden’s bones splintering into pieces: the cracking culprit was the ailing tree I’d used as a spool for my extension cord. Amber’s tripping had pulled on the extension cord behind her, which I’d wrapped around the dying tree. That sharp jerk had been all the tree needed to separate from its roots (the cracking sounds), and it was now doing its best Leaning Tower of Pisa impression, resting on the power lines that crossed over the road.

Okay. No problem. The power lines would hold the tree up. I still had power. Amber’s bones were (hopefully) all still intact. It was all good.

One by one, each with a sizzle, the power lines snapped.

And then, with a wallop that rivalled a meteor impact, the tree smashed into the ground. Two live wires danced high above the crash site, sparking off, before they too fell, rocking back and forth in the wind with the halves of the For Sale sign.

Less good.

I turned to check on the lamp behind me. It was off. Of course it was off, and no amount of fiddling with any on/off buttons or breaker switches would yield any other result. There was no more power to the farmhouse. Amber had made certain of that.

I flicked the switch, just in case. The light stayed off. Amber gave a moan from down in the grass.

Again, why did we not have wireless electricity? Physicists wasting all that time to research the dual nature of light but can’t give me power wherever and whenever I want it? How’s that fair?

Amber gave a louder moan, more like a gargle than a moan, really. I was going to have to check on her. Making my way over to her, a whimper escaped me as I surveyed my failed attempt to capture a faerie.

“Enid?” Amber shouted. “I’m a first-aider. Do you need my help?”

“No,” I replied. “But you need mine. Let’s get you into the house.”

My whole day’s work butchered, I scuffled across the field to collect Amber Holden.