hen I could focus again, I was staring up at the backlit sky. Trees shimmered at the edge of my vision, and thick black lines, like in a coloring book, edged each object. My skin glowed. My body radiated color.
And all this was less awe-inspiring than it sounded: it was a bewildering, migraine-inducing visual cacophony. Thus, it didn’t take long for the novelty of the overlapped faerie world to lose its luster. Of course, the sparkle might have endured if the faeries, who had seemed so intent on bringing us together, had shown themselves or continued our written conversation or in some way indicated that I had done right by pulling them in with me. Instead, they stayed silent, and I found this unacceptable.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!”
Nothing.
A whole page of alphabet soup thrown down for them.
Nothing.
Wandering around in case they were somewhere else within the property.
Nothing.
Add to that, I was starting to feel seasick, irrespective of my landlocked state. The overlapped world was like watching a film with random frames removed. Example one: Amber had vanished, into the house surely, but via a jump cut, with that chunk of film just gone. Example two: moving my hand across my vision produced a discrete track of images. Clearly, the melding of faerie and human worlds was a bumpy mixture — heterogeneous, as the physics textbook might say.
That thought was clever enough to merit inclusion in my notebook. I flipped it open.
BRING HER HERE
A smile of relief rounded my cheeks. The faeries hadn’t abandoned me here, and perhaps they hated ripping out pages from my notebook as much as I did. Obviously we were copacetic, even though I had no intention of doing what they wanted me to do right away, assuming HER was my mother.
BRING HER HERE
“I will, just let me ask you a few questions first.”
I flipped the page.
BRING HER HERE
“Firstly, about this song that she stole: can anyone sing it and get powerful? Maybe even people with no discernable magical talents?”
BRING HER HERE
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand. You want me to bring who where?”
BRING HER HERE.
The addition of a period to the end of the sentence was not lost on me.
“Except I need some way to bring her here, don’t I? I can’t just walk out into that.” I gestured to the dark. “You made sure of that. So how about teaching me the song and I’ll summon her magically?”
Nothing.
“I promise to do my best to sing on key.” Just in case they’d heard my shower-time warblings and were fearing for their sanity and ears.
BRING HER HERE
“Have you not been listening? I have no way to get her here!”
WHITE OBLONG BOX
“Puppy paranoid jack rabbit.”
QUESTION MARK
“Oh, we’re not just saying random words now?”
SHE IN HOUSE CAN
“Can what? Use magic?” This was a sudden lurch in the midst of my nauseated state. “Amber Holden has magical abilities and I don’t? How is that fair? I’ve been wanting my whole life to do magical things, and all she’s ever wanted to do is be some brilliant geriatric psychiatrist and cure Alzheimer’s or something.” Even such a noble goal shouldn’t mean Amber got to be magical. “She doesn’t even believe magic exists!”
NO MAGIC FOR HER
A relief.
“Then, as to me, are you sure,” I said, “that there is no way I can practise magic to get better at it?”
YOU HAVE NO MAGIC
“Yes. I believe we’ve been over that.”
SHE HAS YOUR MAGIC
“Amber? You just said she didn’t.”
NO
OTHER SHE POWERFUL SHE
SHE HAS YOUR MAGIC
TAKE THE HATCHLING MAGIC UNTIL THEY ARE TAUGHT
THEN GIVE IT BACK
THAT IS SONG
SHE KEEPS YOURS AND IT ROTS INSIDE HER
DISINTEGRATES HER DESTROYS HER UPSETS THE BALANCE
YOU HAD MAGIC AND SHE TOOK IT
“Why?”
SHE MISINTERPRETED IMPLICATION ARROW
SHE: SONG TO GIVE MAGIC
US: SONG TO TAKE MAGIC UNTIL PREPARED
“This seems …” I searched for an appropriate word “… fanciful,” I said measuredly.
DECOMPOSITION OF YOUR POWER BLOATS INSIDE HER LIKE CORPSE GAS
That was an image I didn’t need in my mind.
BRING HER HERE
“Are you going to help her? Fix her?” We were nearing the end of my notebook. Hopefully the next few answers the faeries gave me would be able to run the fine line between articulateness and thrift.
CHANGELING WILL NOT WORK TOO HARD TO DO
Which is what I’d said, assuming the not work part meant that people would notice I wasn’t me.
BRING HER HERE
“How? We never really clarified how we were going to do that.”
“Enid?”
More relief. It would be so much quicker to talk talk to the faeries than caps lock write talk to them.
“Thank goodness,” I said, “you’ve figured out how to talk.”
“When I was two.”
I spun around. The faeries weren’t talking to me; this was Amber Holden, who had wandered back out from the farmhouse.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked, static crescendoing before dropping to an intermediate hum. “I can’t sleep with your babbling out here. That house has no soundproofing whatsoever.”
“Faeries.”
Amber’s lips thinned. “That’s it. I’m done. Here.” She rooted around in her pocket and thrust her smart phone at me. “You are going to call Margery right now.”
WHITE OBLONG BOX
“Puppy paranoid jack rabbit,” I whispered.
“Seriously, Enid, something is wrong with you,” Amber replied. “She’s under Margery.”
Amber’s phone lay in my palm. I regarded it warily.
“I press what, exactly?” The ancient rotary at our house had not prepared me for using a phone that had more computational power than a NASA computer circa the moon landing.
Amber groaned and took the phone back. “Here,” she said after pressing some buttons. “Talk.”
“It’s ringing,” I told her. “Still ringing.”
“Not to me; to your mother,” she hissed.
“Yes,” my mother said, picking up just then. “Amber?”
“Actually,” I said. “It’s Enid.”
There was a decent-lengthed pause.
“So.” I decided to go first. “I’m at the farmhouse.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you could borrow Dr. Holden’s car and come and pick me up?” I would indeed BRING HER HERE.
“No.”
I sighed.
“Please.”
“I have no interest in driving out there.”
“Please.” I tried to sound as pitiful as possible.
“Fine.” I wanted to fist-pump Amber, but she didn’t raise her hand. “I’ll get Dr. Holden to pick you up.”
“No!” I squeaked. “No, not Dr. Holden. It has to be you.”
“Why?”
That was a good question. If I only needed a drive, my mother was right in questioning why I was so particular as to who was doing the driving.
“We-e-e-l-l-l.” I dragged out the one syllable as long as I could stand. “I’m here with Amber.”
“Yes.”
“And —” I swivelled so I was out of the immediate reach of Amber, who I figured would be coming after me once I got the next sentence out of my head “— she got drunk last night and now she’s hungover and she doesn’t want Dr. Holden to know because she’s underage and feels miserable and she doesn’t want to get into trouble.”
“Why you little —” Amber began, trying to grab her phone back. I zigged to the side, then zagged to try to avoid her.
“Dr. Holden can be somewhat of a teetotaller,” my mother said.
“Exactly.” Amber had my arm in her grip and was twist-ing my shoulder in a way that suggested I was going to need some long-term physiotherapy after this. “So, can you come instead?”
“Fine. But I —”
But I didn’t care what was going to follow my mother’s “But I” as long as my mother was coming. “Thanks, love you, bye, Godspeed,” I rapid-fire spat out, pushing a button on the phone in the hopes that it hung up the phone and then tossing Amber’s white oblong box as far as I could into the overgrowth.
“You better not have broken it!” Amber shouted, letting go of me. “Why did you have to tell Margery that?” She dashed over to where her phone had landed.
“It’s the truth.”
“You know what, Enid?” Amber picked up her phone from its bed of wildflowers. “Sometimes you’re a real jerk.”
“It’s what little sisters are for,” I told her.
“Don’t,” Amber said with a growl, “remind me.”