Fantastical Ramblings (5 page)

<<>>

The sound of weeping drew me to the fading rural community
of Sweetgrass. I sensed the deep, silent mourning of a soul without hope. I
heard in those tears an opportunity to help, and a chance for a trade.

Let me introduce myself: Cinnamon Schtick, Fairy Godsister
At-Large. Are you missing something vital? Chances are there is someone in this
world with a surplus of that very item. To them it’s a plague. To you it’s life
itself. So we Fairy Godsisters work the trade and everyone is happy. That’s my
job and I take pride in keeping the world balanced.

To those of us in the profession, a trade is like a meal of
steak, baked potatoes, Caesar salad, and pecan pie. I am always hungry.

So I followed the sound of deep distress behind the weeping
and popped in on Emma. Old-fashioned name. Old-fashioned lady, living in a
generations-old farmhouse that was falling apart at the seams. The farm wasn’t
in any great shape either. My freshly pressed cinnamon-colored overalls, straw
hat, and tight braids seemed too neat for the setting, so I faded a little.

Emma looked like everyone’s favorite grandma with white hair
twisted into a knot on top of her head and the smell of baking cookies in the
oven as her only perfume. She was small and as dainty as the antimacassars on
her threadbare easy chair. Who could resist rushing to her rescue?

She wasn’t startled to find me sitting on her coffee table,
sucking on a cinnamon candy. She’d been a school teacher in her younger days.
Not much surprised her anymore.

So, after brief introductions, Emma told me her story. “There
aren’t any young people left in Sweetgrass. They all left to find jobs and
excitement in the city. Oh, dearie me, I do miss them.” She heaved a tremendous
sigh and dabbed at her eyes with a lace-trimmed hankie.

I missed them too. She ignored the sticky cinnamon stains on
my linen.

“I haven’t had children in the school in nigh on twenty
years. Now, those of us who are left in Sweetgrass are too old to have more
children and too frail to properly work the farms. There is no money left to
pay the taxes,” Emma finished her tale, slapping my sticky hands for wiping
them on my overalls.

“But this is a nice town,” I protested. “No crime. No
pollution. People ought to be fighting for the chance to live here. Surely we
can find something to bring people back.” I sucked on my stinging knuckles,
making sure I eliminated any left-over sugar.

“We did have some excitement once.” Emma’s mind drifted
away.

I let her ramble. Sometimes the client’s memories are the
key to making the trade.

“We had a plague of flying rats.”

“You mean bats.”

“No. Rats with wings. The creatures ate everything in sight,
and oh, so vicious. They were filthy and carried diseases. We tried everything,
traps and nets and guns, but the rats were too smart. They simply flew above or
beyond our reach.”

“So how’d you get rid of the nasty little beasties?” I’d
never met a flying rat in my wanderings. Didn’t think I’d want to, either.

But a memory nagged at me. Something sounded familiar. I
just couldn’t put my sticky fingers on it.

“Our ordinary house cats sprouted wings.” Emma clapped her
hands in delight. “They caught most of the rats. The rest flew away to
someplace less dangerous to them. People came from miles around to see our
winged cats. But now that there aren’t any flying rats, the cats don’t need to
fly. Every last cat keeps its wings hidden.” She petted two purring balls of
fur who shared her chair. A third jumped into her lap to get its share of
affection. From the kitchen I heard two more playing a game of keep-away with a
dust ball.

Emma scratched the cats’ ears and beneath their chins. The
purrballs obligingly craned their necks and yawned, showing long teeth. “There
is nothing exciting about our kitties now, except there do seem to be too many
of them—no teenagers to chase them away with their pranks and loud music.
Without wings to make them extraordinary, no one comes to see them. No one
comes here at all. Except the tax collector.”

Who needed the menace of flying rats when you had tax
collectors?

This situation required some research. With hasty excuses I
popped out of Emma’s living room. I emerged with my hair tucked into a neat
chignon at my nape, half-glasses perched on the end of my nose; ankle length
A-line skirt in a deep rust color and creamy blouse. Very conservative, very
respectable—you know, typical spinster librarian garb.

The card catalogue for complaints against over-zealous tax
collectors took up an entire wing. Ironically, so did the complaints against
governments that refused to fund various activities due to lack of funding.
Emma’s problem came from not so obvious sources.

Flying rats stank of magic. As well as other things.

Acting on the surest of evidence, my gut instinct, I sought
out reports of outlawed magic.

This card catalogue took up only one shelf in the arcane
arts reference wing. I opened the drawer to the catalogue. Three moths, a
tornado of dust, and a mouse flew out. I sneezed delicately into a clean hanky.
Then I reached for the first item.

Usually I needed to hunt through hundreds of useless bits of
information.

This time, the card latched onto my dusty palm before I
could think about lifting it for closer examination. Something of the urgency
of the problem leaked through the card.

I read the bold-faced type with care.

Former Sister Macadamia Knuckt
Banned from all contact with
Cats
Rats
&
Teenagers
Forever more.
Or until she repents.

Repent? Fat chance of my ex-comrade in arms against universal
problems ever admitting she might have made a mistake. She kept coming back
like a bad aftertaste.

The catalogue led me to a fat tome—also covered in dust—of
judicial actions taken by the League of Fairy Godmothers. But I did not need to
read the lengthy trial proceedings. I knew that Sister Macadamia had created
the flying rats just so she could concoct a neat solution to them and thus earn
extra gold stars in her file.

She had of course been caught in the act and removed from
the ranks of the sisterhood. She had been made—shudder—
mortal
and mundane. What worse fate for a Fairy Godsister than to
become one of the victims we were created to rescue?

That could happen to me if I did not find a solution to Emma’s
problem. Fast. My stomach growled. The number of gold stars in my file
diminished rapidly with each passing moment. I really needed a scoop of
cinnamon ice cream. No time. Not enough gold stars.

I popped back into Emma’s living room... er... parlor. She
hadn’t even noticed my absence while she reminisced about cats and rats and the
teenagers she had taught in school.

Just then, I heard a new set of tears from a whole group of
people three towns to the north. Their compounded distress drew my attention
away from Emma.

I interrupted her monologue with, “Would you be willing to
trade all of your cats for some healthy teenagers?” There are always too many
teenagers in this world.

Emma nodded, tears of tentative joy in her eyes.

“Would you love those teenagers with all your heart?”

She hugged the breath out of me and soaked the bib of my
overalls with her tears.

“Let me see what I can do.” I closed the interview with Emma
as fast as I could.

<<>>

“What’s up, Mr. Mayor?” I dropped into Greengrass City
Hall, three towns north, wearing my favorite red-brown business suit. My bright
auburn hair was tucked neatly away into a chignon again. Not nearly so severely
as when I was a librarian, though.

Mayor Merritt stared at me like a fish drowning in air,
mouth opening and closing uselessly, eyes bulging, face the same color as his
over-stuffed, over-starched shirt. So I handed him my card.

He breathed a little easier and confided in me. That’s
another trick we Fairy Godsisters do. We make it easy for people to talk to us.
Can’t tell you how. Trade secret.

“Teenagers. Lazy. Ungrateful. Think the world owes them a
living,” he babbled. “And their music! Loud, obnoxious, no melody at all. And
who can understand the words? Enough to drive a parent crazier.”

“So, what else is new? They’re teenagers. That’s their job.”

“We try to teach them responsibility and the value of money.
What do they do in return? They lie and they cheat. It’s worse than if they
just stole the money from us!”

“Sounds a little more serious than a normal teen. How do
they cheat you?” I made myself comfy on the edge of his desk and leaned over
him solicitously.

“We pay our children to catch those nasty rats that fly
through town in swarms. Pay them well, too. What do they do? They steal an
already dead rat from the garbage heap and tell us they just killed it so we’ll
keep paying them for the same rat carcass day after day and they don’t have to
work for the money. If they hadn’t scared away all our cats with their music
and nasty pranks, or if they weren’t so lazy and selfish, Greengrass would be
free of rats. We have two plagues in this town now, flying rats and cheating
teenagers.”

“I think I can help you, Mr. Mayor.” Excitement pounded in
my chest. A trade. A big trade. Enough to fill my file with Gold Fairy Stars.
Enough little stars to buy all the cream cheese and cinnamon bread I could eat.
I popped a red candy into my mouth to tide me over, mindful to keep my fingers
clean.

“Mr. Mayor, would you be willing to trade your lying
teenagers for some flying cats to catch your swarming rats?”

“Yes, yes. A dozen times yes.”

“Would you love those cats with all your heart?”

“Sister Cinnamon, if they end the problem with the rats, we
will worship those cats.”

I made the trade.

<<>>

Five years later I heard Mayor Merritt crying once more. A
repeat client deletes gold stars from the files so quickly I’d become anorexic.
I wanted to make him happy again. Fast. So fast I didn’t have time to change
out of my bronze taffeta ball gown. Cinderella would just have to wait a
moment.

“What ails you now?” I sipped at a glass of cinnamon iced
tea. I was flustered and hot and anxious to solve this man’s problem before it
became my problem.

Before I suffered the same fate as Sister Macadamia.

“The cats don’t fly anymore,” he wailed, pushing three of
them off his desk. Two more brushed against my rustling skirts, trying to sneak
beneath the petticoats.

“Do they need to fly?” Hardly. A red-brown one jumped from
the top of the bookcase to the desk to my arms so fast I dropped the tea glass.
It shattered on the floor and three more cats appeared to slurp up the sweet
drink before it stained my gown. I shooed them away from broken glass, but six
more cats replaced them. Easier to dissolve the glass into sand than keep the
cats away from it.

“Well, no, the cats don’t need to fly,” Mayor Merritt
replied. “The flying rats are gone. Then we had a tourist boom when word got
out about our flying cats. We made so much money we didn’t miss the teenagers
at all. People don’t come to see the cats without wings and business has fallen
off. We’re in a recession. But does that keep the cats from eating and
breeding? No. We have so many cats, people go hungry trying to feed them.”

His belly was now flatter than mine. I believed his tale of
woe.

“We have so many cats people can’t afford to have more
children to grow into teenagers who will scare them away with their music and
their pranks. There isn’t enough food in this town for both people and cats.”

I noticed.

“I’d trade all of these cats for one teenager,” he moaned.

“Let me see what I can do.”

I checked back with Emma and the three strapping young men
who worked her now prosperous farm. Five years ago, they had been Mayor Merritt’s
sons.

“Do any of the young people in this town want to return to
Greengrass?” I asked sweetly. “I’ll trade the town some cats.”

“No thanks,” the young men replied in unison.

“Why not?” This was sounding serious. Hunger awoke in my
belly just then, reminding me how fast the little gold stars were draining
away. How close I came to joining their ranks.

“No one in Greengrass really loved us,” the eldest Merritt
boy, now a handsome young man of twenty-one, explained. “They just wanted to
use us and when that didn’t work, they blamed us for all of their problems.”

“Isn’t that what teenagers are for?” Hey, give me a break, I
said I was a Fairy God
sister
, not a
Fairy God
mother
.

“That’s what we used to think,” Emma replied, petting the
cat I still held. “Now we know better. Teens are still our children. We loved
them through messy diapers, whooping cough, and tying cats’ tails together. Why
can’t we love them through rebellion, loud music, and the need to test
boundaries? Though I do miss having a purring kitty in my lap on a cold winter
evening.” The cat I carried began to purr loudly. I shoved it into Emma’s arms.

“Other people’s kids are angels; our own are useless,” I
commented. The rule of the ages.

“No cats, Emma!” the boys proclaimed.

“Just one little kitty? He’ll keep the mice in the barn
under control,” Emma pleaded.

“Maybe one.” The youngest boy petted the cat in Emma’s arms.
A loud purr threatened to drown out our conversation.

“Fix the cat first,” the eldest reminded them all.

“So what am I supposed to do about the plague of cats over
in Greengrass? I’ve got to make a trade, fast.” My tummy ached with emptiness.

“Where’d the flying rats go?” Emma cooed at the cat.

“As soon as I find out, I’m back in business.” For a long,
long time. If I followed the migration of the rats with a passel of cats to
trade, and spread the rebellious kids around to new families who were so desperate
for children, they’d even take a teenager, music and all....