f I had been the faeries, I would have made the path from the driveway to the road like turnstiles at a subway station exit, i.e. once you exited, you couldn’t get back in (although, you could get back into a subway station by going around to the entrance and paying for a new fare. In that case, and in prime punniness, I was going to make sure that the faeries were going to pay for their lack of securing the perimeter, except I was the one who had exited, so I would have to pay in this metaphor … )

Enid?

Right. Focus.

“Hey!” I shouted, running back to my mother. “Did you like my jog? Wasn’t it worthy of one of your acerbic remarks?” If I could draw her fully into this layer, then maybe she could escape the magical noose that had tightened around her in the other.

No response.

“What are your shifts like this week?” I asked.

No response.

“If I was a tree,” I began, purposefully ignoring the subjunctive tense, which could only serve to aggravate my mother.

No response, plus a time jump. We stayed in the same spot, but the shadows around us had shifted. Shifted significantly, at least an hour’s worth. My mother was still managing to hang on, but only just.

“Pizza toppings,” I shouted. “Power bills. Rent payments. Report cards. Cotter pins. Overdue library fines. Plastic clamshells of Mexican strawberries at the grocery store.” I kept going with my list of commonplace stuff, but to no avail: my mother didn’t react in the slightest. So I moved on to Plan B: instead of talking about usual things in our usual layer, I would try talking usual things in the magical one.

But the layers had calcified during the last time jump. I pushed my elbows out to make some more space and kicked here and there, like having a tantrum, to rip a hole. I clawed at the air, hoping to tear a hole even though I knew doing so was useless; I always kept my fingernails short and sweet, cut below the tips of my fingers.

“Why won’t you let me through?” I hissed.

(Likely because they were worried I’d interfere somehow.)

Fortunately, faeries weren’t the only ones adept in the art of deception.

“Come on,” I whined, slipping on my poutiest face. “I want to see her punished as much as you do. She stole my magic, you know? It isn’t fair that I don’t get to see her comeuppance.”

A beat.

And I slithered through.

Most excellent.

As much as I wanted to smugly gloat over my deceiving the faeries, there wasn’t time, my mother’s decrepit state becoming more pronounced as each second ticked by.

Added to this: a thin blue thread was being dragged from her. I tried to follow it, but the end always rested just outside my vision, just off in my periphery, and I knew what was always lurking, just off in my periphery: faeries.

“Now you really look like a dog trying to sit,” my mother muttered. She was watching me with empty white eyes as I spun, trying to catch sight of the end of the thread, trying to catch sight of the faerie that must have been winding the thread round and round like a bobbin, while my mother slimmed down to Giacometti-statue-dimensions.

“Ruff ruff,” I replied.

“Did you bring a raincoat?” My mother’s voice mixed into the wind, almost lost.

She was trying. My heart pounded in relief. She was trying to drag herself back into the mundane world with her talk of dogs and raincoats, I just knew it.

“All my friends have smart phones,” I said. “I want one.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Delavecchio.” My mother’s body heaved. Her hair fell to the wind. “Your friend,” she panted. “No phone.”

Again, I tried to make my way to her, but couldn’t. The thread coming off her was thicker now, less a thread and more like yarn, then ribbon, then rope. Thick, heavy, intricately woven rope. And I was trapped in what felt like a mime’s box where I banged on sides I could neither see nor break through.

“Don’t let them win!” I yelled. “Fight back! What’s the weather supposed to be like tomorrow?”

No response.

“Come on,” I begged. “You know the best indicator of tomorrow’s weather is today’s.”

She hesitated. “Sunny, I assume.” There was no voice, just the moving of her lips.

“You assume?” My vocal chords were ready to snap from my screeching. “What about accuracy? Assumptions make asses of you and me.”

No grin. No chastisement for vulgarity.

And then she collapsed.

It wasn’t easy to get through the next few minutes. I banged and kicked at my invisible prison, my skin scraped raw by clouds of gravel tossed into the air by my frantic attempts to break free. But I stayed put, watching my mother’s chest rise and fall, although more and more slowly, the breaths more and more shallow.

“No,” I wailed.

Her breathing slowed further.

“No,” I whispered.

Her breath let out.

And with that, the faeries no longer needing to keep me away, the invisible mime box cracked. I fell in my rush to reach my mother’s side, dropping to my knees and sliding the last few feet. I grabbed my mother’s hand, expecting it to be cold, but it wasn’t. It was warm and still lifelike. There was a faint squeeze. With my free hand, I wiped away tears and shifted so I could see into my mother’s face.

Very slowly, very deliberately, and with great effort, she winked.

I wasn’t the only one who had fooled the faeries.

“Oh,” I blubbered. “I think I left the light on in my room.” Swallowing was hard, but not impossible; I managed it with a croak. “Did you turn it off for me?”

Her fingers fluttered.

“Report cards should be available for pickup next week.”

Now her wrist.

“I watered the lawn for you.”

Her hand lifted, just slightly from the grass. Her fingers stretched out, and around them, gossamer thin, she began drawing the blue thread back to herself.

“Did you really think,” my mother said, “that they would forgive me?” It was impossible that I could hear her in her weakened state over the roar of the wind, but I had. I had heard it. It was magical.

She wove more blue thread through her fingers until she had enough, finally, with which to yank herself up. She did so in jerks, like a skeleton reforming in an old horror movie. Trapped pockets of air in her joints snapped and popped. She jolted and fell and pulled herself back up again and again, until, ultimately, she struggled to her feet and released my hand.

“I stole nothing,” she bellowed, gaining the strength and the sound to do so from some deep well of resistance within her. “This —” she pulled the blue thread into her body “— is all mine.”

The faeries retaliated with some sort of punch in the gut. My mother doubled over and screamed. Blood, but not the color of blood, a liquid the color of discount green mouthwash, trickled from her mouth.

“It’s mine,” she howled.

“Do you have a first aid kit on you?” I asked. “I think this cut is infected.” I tried to show her my palm.

“Mine!” she cried.

“No, not exactly.”

“Exactly. Exactly mine!” She pulled the thread harder.

This time there was a crack. My mother’s shins collapsed under her, and she fell to her knees. We were level, face to face, eye to eye, nose to nose. I grabbed her hand again. It was like holding onto toothpicks wrapped in paper napkins.

The wind or the faeries or my mother screeched in anger. She dragged her hand from mine and glared at my face.

“You let them take it from me,” she barked. Her eyes were still covered in milky white cataracts as they stared at a me she wouldn’t have been able to see. “You let them!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that they’d —” I was crying again.

“You let them!”

“It was a mistake. I thought I was helping just like you thought you were helping. The song you sang when I was a baby. You thought —”

My mother’s face contorted and fell and disassembled itself. If before she was a Giacometti, she was now a Picasso. A demoiselle d’Avignon.

“Stop lying,” my mother’s mouth, now closer to her forehead than her eyes, hissed.

“I’ve forgotten when to use which versus that,” I said, hoping to change the subject.

“You don’t get to take what I earned!” My attempt at subject-changing thus denied, my mother grabbed even more thread in her skinny fingers and brought the whole ball to her mouth, tried to suck it back down into her gullet. Her neck and her collarbone snapped, and her arms, at the elbows, bent at angles that made my own joints wail in sympathy. The air smelled of scorched ozone, and still my mother kept on pulling the blue thread to her. “I never thought,” she muttered, “that she’d be so vindictive.”

“Who? The faerie you stole the song from?”

“It’s mine,” she mumbled.

“No.”

“Mine,” she repeated.

“Stop it!” I managed to stand despite the wind pushing me down. I towered over my mother’s prone form. “It isn’t yours. It’s mine. And your trying to keep it is killing you! Just let go!”

“Mine,” she whispered again, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“Enough!” I wrenched a stick from the ground and swung. It cut through the air with a swoosh, slicing the thread before making contact with the marionette twigs that had once been my mother’s hand. I swung and I swung and I swung.

“I am,” I shouted, still waving the stick back and forth like I was Babe Ruth, “so tired of your stubbornness. Why can’t you just accept what the world is? Why can’t you just accept me? Why can’t you —”

“Honestly, Enid, your melodramatic tendencies are more endearing when they aren’t directed at impugning my behavior.”

I dropped the stick. We were back on the drive. The world was one layer. The sun shone as normal and time had smoothed out. There was no more blue thread. There was no more slim mother. There was no more clamoring magical wind. Everything was normal, except I’d been swinging a stick around without any discernable reason.

“But we —” I began. “Are you —”

“Am I what?”

I reached my fingertips towards my mother’s lips. “Your mouth is underneath your nose.”

“As it always has been.”

“No,” I shook my head. “Not always. There was —”

I stopped. Was my mother pretending? Was this a ruse? Did she really not remember what had just happened? Or did she want me to pretend that what had happened was nothing?

“You don’t remember the other world? The one that was here?” I asked.

“No,” she said wryly.

“The faerie world. It was overlapped and —”

“Our location relative to the trees provides protection from faeries. Honestly, you know that, Enid.”

“Yes. ” And it was a stick, from a tree, that had cut through the magical blue thread, that had severed the worlds’ connections. “But —”

“But nothing. I did not drive all the way out here in order to be subjected to your shouting harassments at me, followed by me having to re-teach you magical rules I know that you already know.”

“You didn’t drive out here just for me. You also drove out here for Amber.”

“Who?”

“Amb—” But I stopped. A worry, like at itch, tingled at the base of my skull, and whatever I was going to say evaporated into the ether. “Nothing. I-I-I don’t know.” Something was missing, wasn’t it? Maybe going back and forth between the layers too many times was playing tricks on my brain. “I thought for a second someone else was here with me.”

“Someone else is here with you.” My mother grinned. “I am here with you.”

“You are,” I conceded.

“Good.” My mother nodded. “Let’s go home.”

“I still think of here as home,” I admitted.

“You know what?” my mother said, her face faintly sad. She pressed the unlock button on the key fob, making it beep three times in succession. “So do I. So do I.”

The whole ride home, I looked for the faeries.

But they were gone.