By Robin Page Copas
WHEN I WAS a girl, I would often put strange things in my mouth. The whole of an orange, both its skin and seeds. Dandelions, with each and every pappus. Insects, their spindling legs, along with the patches of dirt I grabbed them from. I would show off to other kids; my classmates, cousins, family friends, reading their disgusted reactions as invitations to continue. I began to keep track of who was afraid of what. The neighbour’s girl was crippled by arachnophobia, driven to hysterical screeches at the sight of a spider alone. Her wailing resounded the time I picked up a pair of daddy long-legs, let them scurry across my tongue as she begged me to stop.
‘Spiders eat faeries, Hazel,’ she pleaded. ‘If you eat a spider, you’re basically eating a faerie!’
A part of me wanted to argue with her, to affirm to her that I’d simply be eliminating one of their natural enemies, but I knew she would give me a long spiel about the intricacies of the paranormal relationship between faeries and spiders. It was a regular occurrence for her to lecture me about this type of thing. She was just a year older than me and would tell me ad nauseam everything she knew about faeries. Whenever my mother grew tired with me, she would send me over to play with her and her brother. They lived down the gravel road I grew up on, in a refurbished eighteenth century farmhouse. Her mother was a sculptor and her father was a landscape architect. As much as they encouraged her interests—her room adorned with statuettes of butterfly-winged women and illustrations of their homes—they were always happy for her to have someone else to channel her ramblings to when I came over.
On our playdates, she would tell me about the faeries that lurked over by the creek that ran through the woods. She taught me what they ate, the runic spells they cast (transcribed at length in her journal) and the danger of faerie circles—rings of stones, mushrooms, and flowers. She had an old dollhouse on the side of her family’s yard, adorned with daffodils she had picked down by the stream, dead stems delicately tied around the furniture in each room. The walls were wooden and decayed, too decrepit to be antique. That’s not to say it wasn’t well constructed; I assumed that it was much more beautiful when it was in better condition, but the neighbour’s girl told me the aging made it prettier.
‘The faeries visit me at night,’ she would say. ‘They flap their little wings very fast when they float down into the little cottage and then they take one of my fingers and kiss it, and then they blow magical pink dust into the palms of my hand!’ Her brother would roll his eyes at her stories, and force himself into our conversations to undermine her claims.
‘You’re making that up. We had fireflies in the yard last night, not fairies.’ He would cringe when saying the word, like he was describing some sort of vile insect. ‘That’s residue from glitter glue on your hands.’
She gracefully picked herself up, sneering at him and looking back at me. What an idiot, her glance seemed to imply. Some people just don’t understand.
She was tall enough for her age already, towering over me as I looked up at her, my knees folded on a picnic blanket. Her auburn hair was tied together in braids with assorted butterfly clips and daisies she had sloppily tangled through it. Her pigtails draped over her shoulder, flowing like cattails as she snapped at him.
‘It’s faeries,’ she said, emphasising a noise between the long ‘a’ sound. ‘For one thing, faerie is a prettier way to say it. For another thing, fairies aren’t real. Faeries are.’
The distinction never really made much sense to me, and the cynic in me questioned whether you were meant to even verbalise a phonetic difference. Still, I trusted that her expertise in the subject gave her pronunciation credence. Her brother grumbled something as he walked away, head buried in the zipper of his fleece. He was much too old to bicker with her like they did, but I don’t think he would be nearly so angry if she ever talked about anything else. Whenever I’d suspend my belief to entertain her games, he would shoot a cold look in my direction.
She had a notebook where she’d draw groups of smiling faeries, exclusively in pink crayons (razzle dazzle rose and carnation pink, primarily). Next to the illustrations, there were encyclopaedic descriptions of different kinds of mystical fauna, their habitats, and profiles of the ones she’d met. Sometimes we'd pretend to be specific faerie characters that she’d describe, mixing dirt and weeds in honey jars to brew restorative potions. There would occasionally be elements other than faeries to our playing, of course; dragons, unicorns, superheroes. But regardless of what we played, faeries had to be involved. If I wanted to be an astronaut, there were faeries on the moon. If I wanted to play mermaids, we had to be sea faeries. She had a vivid imagination, maybe, but as time went on, a part of me was convinced to believe with her. I wanted to see the world she did, to escape into daydreams of a mystical world so much that I would begin to believe them.
I became significantly more enthusiastic when I started to write my own stories about faeries and share them with her. I spoke of humans whose vanity had led to faeries enacting nature's cruel revenge. They would inflict them with grimdark curses, punishing them in their last few moments of mortality. My mother would often reprimand me for speaking so morbidly, but that wasn’t what bothered the neighbour’s girl. The issue was my inaccurate depictions of faeries. She’d shake her head and correct me, telling me I had it all wrong; faeries are not barbaric, they just protect nature against mankind’s foolishness.
Over time, I didn’t visit her quite as often. I was old enough that I could find ways to entertain myself other than playing pretend with the neighbour girl, and I began to forget about her. She ran away when I was thirteen. I hadn’t talked with her much in the past year when I first heard the news, and our only recent interactions hadn’t gone further than passing smiles when I’d walk by her on my route home from school. Nobody ever told me why she ran away, but I did hear that when she left, the only things that went missing from her house with her were a loaf of bread, two jars of peanut butter and jelly respectively, a cup of blueberries, and her old faerie journal.
I felt a type of grief that didn’t feel earned. I hadn’t spoken with her in so long, and we’d never had a particularly deep bond. We had that type of kid friendship you have where you know that somebody makes you happy and that you make them happy too—a symbiotic sandbox bond, unaware of the way that time splits children apart. We played while we were young, but life had gone on. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I never spoke to the neighbours again, afterwards. Her older brother went off to the army about a month after her disappearance, and her parents moved away not long afterwards.
I went through countless sleepless nights, haunted by questions about her. Somehow, it came into my head that it was my fault. That if I had stayed friends with her, if I had kept playing faeries with her, she would have been okay. Some sort of butterfly effect would have to have taken place that would prevent her from ever running. I’ve always kept a diary—I only wrote in it every few weeks, but I had a lengthy section where I wrote about my memories of her. There were other things in that diary that I would have been scared for my mother to find, and certainly, I could have been in much worse trouble, but I was still disheartened when she found me writing in it. She didn’t know I had a journal to begin with, and furiously took it out of my hands to read through the last few pages I had just jotted down. I was in the middle of writing a little story to console myself, fantasising about the neighbour’s girl running off to the forest together and living with the faeries, in harmony with nature. She would sing to the animals, and I would come along with her, hunting for us and keeping us safe.
‘You can’t be still playing pretend at this age,’ she told me. ‘I’m deeply sorry for whatever happened to that girl, but I shouldn’t have let you spend so much time with her. It feels like every day I hear some new story of some kid running away and being kidnapped by some sadistic monster.’ I paused for a moment, attempting to connect the dots from what she had just said, trying to process whether she had just blurted out a secret that had been kept from me.
‘Is that what happened to the neighbour’s girl?’ I asked, locking eyes with her.
Her expression weakened, and she went back to doing the laundry. I wasn’t sure whether to take that as confirmation of what had happened to her, or whether she had simply come to her own conclusions.
Enough time passed that her face had stopped showing up on the sides of milk cartons. I began to accept—or know—that she wasn’t coming home. I started to visit the woods a lot. I would write notes and create life drawings of everything I saw out there, peppering in made-up stories about faeries; pieces of folklore that she had passed down to me, mixed in with my own little ideas. It was just for fun, but there was still a sentimental part of me hoping I could create something similar to her own journal, and a glimmer of hope that I might find something supernatural.
I knew my mom was right. I was too old to still be believing in this stuff. When you’re thirteen, you first begin to feel the weight of the world on your shoulders and are eager to carry as much as you can take. I was convinced that I had reached the epoch of my maturity, anxiously teetering on the borderline of adulthood. I didn’t have time for crayon fairy-tales and ghost stories. Soon I would be paying mortgages, following politics, smoking cigarettes, and whatever else adults are supposed to do. Still, there was a sort of wonder I had never felt when we had played before. The obsession with faeries had never fully made sense to me, but now I understood; it wasn’t just about the faeries. It was about the fulfilment to them, the rush of passion, and the gift of sharing that.
The time I spent there gradually increased. I acquainted myself with the wildlife, and began to be able to distinguish all the flora in the forest. One particular mid-August morning, I made my way over at dawn to spend the whole day in the woods. I scribbled down sketches of the deer tracks I saw and flattened some bluebells I found into the back of my notebook. The pages of it were near running out and its leather spine was starting to fall apart. I was equal parts proud and ashamed of the devotion I had put into playing pretend.
When I followed the tracks, I came across a lone fawn. She walked with a limp, and froze upon noticing me. Out from the brush, her whole herd joined her. One of them would have been beautiful, but there were enough of them that it felt like a death sentence. Their stares alone felt like a stampede, as the buck with the biggest horns slowly started to move a little closer. I winced, averting my gaze to the leaves at my feet and slowly easing backwards before catching myself in place. Stand strong, I told myself. They’re more afraid of you than you are of them. I looked into the fawns' eyes and saw nothing.
They began moving faster. I started to run, afraid of the wrath of prey animals. I began to think this was some sort of karmic retribution for the hunting trips my father took me on when I was little. I could still feel the weight of the first kill on my back. Adrenaline overtook my body as I sprinted, too afraid to look back and see if they were after me or not. I turned my head to look back, but before I could get a glimpse, I stumbled over a rock and fell head first, my body splayed upon the dirt.
When I came to, the setting sun had left only a faint orange hue at the edge of the horizon. I picked myself up, and looked down at my body. My knees were bloodied and blistered, but not in the way that hurts too much. It always felt like a little badge of honour, although I knew my mother would scold me about my recklessness when I got home. I looked around at my surroundings. Little white stones were arranged in a round loop over the dirt and moss I was caught in.. A faerie circle, I smiled to myself. I fought the urge to begin sketching, knowing I had to get home. I brushed the dirt off my blouse and looked into the sky, searching for Polaris in between the towering tree branches. As I tried to orient myself, lost amongst the stars, I heard the sound of singing. A sirenic, high-pitched voice—almost yodelling, with expert control. It didn’t sound familiarly human, but was unlike any animal cry I’d ever heard. I walked through the woods to follow the sound, guided by luminescent fireflies. Eventually, I reached a clearing to be greeted by her.
The girl was equally decayed and ethereal, waifishly falling apart, transfigured by the time she had spent here. She turned her head and gazed at me. I studied her face, still recognisable, but practically decomposed. She was missing her right eye, and the left one was glazed over. Her deep brown iris had become a pale blue. Her hair was a sickly orangish-pink, tousled and entangled with poison ivy. She was frailer than she had been before, and I could see the shape of her skeleton where her freckled, greyed skin was beginning to peel. Her cracked lips formed into a dollish half-smile as she extended her hand to invite me in.
I stepped towards her, my apprehension quelled by awe. I put my hand into hers, with every moment of my life flashing upon me upon the grasp of her fingertips. The day I was born. My first steps. Losing my baby teeth. The first time I saw Dad cry. The last time I saw him. The last time mom took me to church. My dog’s death. Every fight I had with Mom. Every lullaby she had soothed me with. All of it dissipated, and I became nothing but the girl who had played with the neighbour’s girl who played with faeries. For a passing moment, our bones were one and the same. She was me and I was her.
My eyelids fluttered open, and she gently released my hand. Off the cobwebs growing on the side of her wrinkled dress, she grabbed a handful of spiders and cupped her hands to hold them steadily, reaching out to me again. I complied, and reached out my shaking palm. The spiders crawled onto the tips of my fingers, their gentle touch calming the storm of emotion descending upon me. I raised my hand to hold them over my head, and could fixate on details on them that I never could before—every hair on their body, the symphonic movement in their legs, the quivering of their jaws. I looked into each of their eight eyes, and I could see a resigned acceptance of fate. I placed them on my tongue as they rested in symbiosis. Untethered to the strings of mortality. Ready to die.
I drop them into my mouth and swallow.
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