Shelly’s mom was too busy baking cookies and talking on the phone to notice Shelly hiding under the table. Shelly was too busy smelling the sweet almond-raspberry of thumbprint cookies to notice much of anything else. At least, she was trying not to notice anything else. She wasn’t very good at ignoring things.
“Marie said she’d bring two dozen orange balls, but we already have five dozen. I don’t care if Andrew has a nut allergy, we need more peanut blossoms. He’s old enough to know not to eat things without asking.”
Shelly noticed the light passing through the red and green tablecloth. She noticed how light traveled differently through each color and how they illuminated her pale skin. She noticed the warm cough of the heater on her feet. She noticed the growing tone of frustration in her mother’s voice and felt her stomach twist. Shelly was glad that she was able to notice things without anyone noticing her.
There were sixteen fairies in Shelly’s closet. Each in their own baby food jar, which had been carefully excavated from the trash and cleaned after her baby brother had emptied them. Each jar had holes poked in the top so the fairies could breathe, if they needed to breathe. They glowed different shades of green, like tiny little Christmas lights.
Shelly counted them every night: one came after mom said she was being dramatic. One came after she misspelled “ghost” in the spelling bee. One came after the girls pointed out her greasy hair and hand-me-down jeans. And on and on. She made sure they were all still alive and glowing, and then she closed them back into her closet until the next night.
At lunch, Shelly sat down at her table with Anastasia, Ava, and Ally. When she opened her lunch bag, all three became very quiet and stared at her.
Anastasia spoke first, “I thought we told you yesterday. We’re not friends anymore.”
Shelly’s stomach curled into a tiny ball. “I—I thought you were kidding. Like it was a joke.”
But Anastasia’s face was dead serious. Ava rolled her eyes. “You have to stop being so weird. People are starting to make fun of us,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Shelly put her hand on her stomach as the queasiness grew.
It was Ally’s turn to speak. “You suck on pens ‘till your mouth turns blue. And you read upside down. That’s weird. Everyone thinks you’re weird.”
The tears were lighting Shelly’s eyes on fire. She snatched up her lunch bag and ran.
Her stomach felt like it was collapsing in on itself. It burned, it squeezed. She thought it might become a black hole inside her, sucking out all her insides.
She made it to the bathroom just in time. After she locked the stall behind her, she opened her backpack and dug out a baby food jar. Just as she unscrewed the lid, the heaving started.
It was kinda like throwing up. It had the right burn, but the relief never came, only a little green fairy that Shelly immediately captured. She watched this one for a while. It rammed itself against the inside of the jar for a long time before it gave up and hovered a few millimeters from the bottom.
When school was over, Shelly went to the gymnasium where her mom was setting up the school’s 2006 Holliday Fair and Cookie Walk.
“Hi, sweetie,” Shelly’s mom said when she realized she was standing there. “We’re gonna be here a while. Why don’t you find a spot to do your homework.”
“Can I help?”
Her mom was checking things off of a long list. “No, honey. Let the adults handle it.”
Shelly hid under the bleachers and read a book about fairies that she stole from the library. It was on the shelf that required a permission slip to check it out, because some parents didn’t want their kids reading about magic. Shelly thought her mom probably would have signed the permission slip, but she didn’t want to ask.
Out of habit, she flipped the book upside down and started to read. She read the most when she was sitting across from mom at breakfast, when mom had a hardcover crime or romance novel spread on the table while she ate her toast.
Shelly stopped reading, and deliberately flipped the book right side up. The words seemed like alien shapes, and it hurt her eyes to move left to right, but she did it anyway.
Shelly’s mom microwaved TV dinners for the two of them to eat. Shelly’s baby brother ate mashed carrots. The macaroni in Shelly’s little plastic bowl tasted sad, like it wanted very badly to be real cheese.
“I got sick at school today,” Shelly said as her mom stabbed at microwave tortellinis.
Shelly’s mom glanced up. “You look fine.”
“Sometimes I feel sick.”
Shelly’s mom put down her fork. “Listen, sweetie, you know this is a busy time. The school really needs me to lead these events, and they’re very stressful for me. I don’t have time to take you home every time you feel a little sickish.”
Shelly looked down at her imposter cheese macaroni. “I know.”
She heard her mother pick up her fork again. “I just want to make this school the best it can be. For you.”
After dinner, Shelly went to her closet and added the seventeenth fairy to her collection. In the book, she learned that sometimes fairies grant wishes, and that they looked like tiny people, not Christmas lights. But Shelly knew that her little jars held fairies.
They were all quiet and still, none were thrashing or trying to find an escape. They had either given up hope or Shelly had all of their attention. She hoped they were listening.
Closing her eyes and clasping her hands together like a prayer, Shelly whispered her wish:
“I wish for no more fairies.”
About the author:
Emlyn Meredith Dornemann is a queer fantasy and horror writer living in Milwaukee, WI with their husband. Their work has previously appeared in Factor Four Magazine, Diet Milk Magazine, and on The No Sleep Podcast. They are an alum of the Stonecoast MFA program.
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