Fairy Circle (5 page)

“
I like being here,” Saffron admitted. “But it’s totally weird too.”

The big, black pupils roped in purple settled on Saffron’s lips. The fairy frowned for a fleeting second. “That does not exist here, that idea -
weird.
It is a human concept, invented to shame others. Why do you feel this shame?”

Saffron bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know.” She thought about the fairy tales she grew up on. She thought about changelings and lost time. She thought about that fairy that may or may not have eaten a humongous beetle off of a pine tree. “Are you going to let me go back?”

Li clapped her hands and threw her head back, her hair cascading like a fall of ice. She laughed. “We hold no one against her will.” She added with a wink, “We only take infants; you’re much too old!”

Saffron snorted. “Oh, yeah, that’s right, fairies steal babies.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “I just can’t believe this is happening. It’s too unbelievable.”

“
Yes.” Li’s upper lip twitched. “Many of the creatures you have read about exist, but they do not necessarily live the lives you have been led to believe they live. Some of the creatures you have read about do not exist at all, but were invented by humans to…” Li looked heavenward, trying to come up with the appropriate words. “…to name a fear. To be able to tame the unknown and give something horrible an existence, so that, in turn, this horrible thing, with a certain form, might be conquered and destroyed by useless potions and ineffective incantations. Or, at the very least, the monsters can be put in a little, symbolic box and tucked away in the mind.”

Saffron leaned forward to speak, when suddenly, Li held a hand up to silence her. The fairy cocked her head to the side and turned to peer behind her. Her eyes became slits as irritation rolled across her face. She turned toward a small group of her kind that had been lolling under an adjacent pine.

“
Take her home.” The fairy’s nostrils were slightly flared. “Do not dally in this; her mother is awake.”

The fairies flew to Saffron’s side and clasped warm hands around her arms. That was all it took for Saffron to collapse. It was as if she had just been injected with the most powerful sedative on earth. She had no muscle control and her mind dissipated into a haze.

Li stepped forward and caressed Saffron’s cheeks with both hands. She smiled as tears filled her eyes and made the purple and black orbs shimmer. “How good it was to talk to you again. How long I have waited in the trees, watching you, wishing for the reunion we have had on this night. You must stay in your house. You must not leave the circle for any reason. You know this to be true.”

Then she leaned forward and placed her lips on the petals that clung to Saffron’s head and whispered in her strange language. She trailed her white fingers through the ends of Saffron’s long, red hair one more time, then turned and walked into the black void of night.

Saffron struggled against the nothingness that pulled her down. Flashes of fairies dancing around a big fire, fairies laughing, fairies in fear roamed her skull. Ny, naked before her, his face filled with disdain. Then, he too, was gone.

“
Sleep, Saffron. You will be home soon. ”

She slept.

Ny watched her depart. He looked at the ground, his long, black lashes covering the pain in his petulant eyes. Li came across him as she wandered aimlessly in the shadows. She frowned. “What do you play at?”

Ny’s eyebrow popped up as the blood ran darker beneath his thin skin. “What do we always play at?”

“
Again? It is murder.” Li hissed like a threatened snake. “It will not go unpunished. You infect me with this!”

He sniffed. “There are many words for such a deed.” He held his hands before him in a placating manner and smiled his most dazzling smile.

She considered him for a moment, her eyes going dark with passion and a steely, possessive glint. She shook her head. “Murder.” She shivered and hugged her arms to her body. “I will not stand by and watch your attempts quietly.”

Ny laughed, chucked her under the chin. “Yes, you will. She is venturing out of her little nest. It is not our will she minds in this life. Let us be done with it all and try our hand at her next incarnation. Who knows what will happen to her if we do nothing? Dear One, you will watch as I try my hand.”

“
What you are doing is not good. We will suffer here, longer.” The deep, dark pupils of Li’s eyes were cavernous and filled with a sadness that touched even him. He kissed her brow as she looked off at nothing.

Ny shrank into a ball of light and darted away from her, into the black woods. He returned short minutes later. He held a live rabbit kid in his left hand and offered it to her; its small velvety nose nuzzled his palm. The pain melted off her beautiful face and a faint smile tickled her glass lips. “But the sensation is so fleeting….”

Ny smiled wistfully. “Here. Enjoy him. Let him heal you, if only for a short time.”

Li nodded as she reached for the small rabbit and cuddled him to her chest. Then she inclined her head and opened her beautiful jaws wide enough to clamp the head clean from his body.

“
How do you do it?” Li swallowed. “How do you get inside her head?”

Ny smirked and jutted his hips forward almost imperceptibly, “She lets me.”

Li’s veins pumped black under her glassy, white skin as she chewed.

Ny listened to her teeth grind. So jealous. He rolled his tongue over his teeth. “Sister, you prance around the real issue.
Your
issue. You have placed my love in great danger. Yet, typical of you, you seek to reprimand me for uncommitted slights.”

“
Murder is not a slight, Ny. Mark me now; it would be worse for us.”

“
An uncommitted murder is nothing. And, if she walks off cliffs of her own accord…that is not murder either.”

“
You know it is.”

He smiled. “And, what of your happy, night-lurking bedfellow? You have now
enabled
him to find our girl.” Ny tsked.

Li couldn’t look at him. Her large, dark pupils shrunk to steely pinpoints, making her look like a jungle cat caught in sudden light.

Ny sighed. “My love, if
he
claims her, who is at fault?” His lips twisted up. “Now that she has been here, she will have the sight. And whose fault would that be?” He twirled one of her white locks around his forefinger.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and punched his hand away.

Ny lowered his arm. “Now that she leaves her home again and has become a beacon, we must end this incarnation before he steals her from us. And who was it that brought her here?”

“
You wanted her here just as much as I!” Li cried.

“
In body!” Ny screamed back.

“
You are selfish! In body! Does it never get old?”

Ny leaned right into Li’s face. “I want to look at her when I touch her. I want to touch her body. Her
body,
so I can see her reaction, her mouth, her eyes. No, her worshipping me like a god does not get old. You are jealous. Now go away from me, sister, use your senses quickly before they fade.”

Anger washed her beautiful face and, for just a moment, with her white hair flowing and her white skin glowing, she was more frightening than the black unknown of Hell. She spun around and disappeared into the looming shadows.

Chapter 4

S
affron woke up in her bed. Now she knew; she truly
was
a whack job. She had no proof of where she had been. There were no flowers in her big, bushy hair and no dirt stains on her feet. Of course not - her body had never travelled last night. It was just her soul. A maniacal giggle blew out one side of her mouth. Wouldn’t her mother love to hear this story? Not. She knew mothers pretended to want to know things but they really didn’t want to know things.

She heaved herself out of bed, then barefoot-slapped across the wooden floor to the door. She stuck her head out into the hallway and yelled, “Last night, fairies took my soul to their realm!”

There was a beat of silence, then up from the bowels of the old farmhouse came Derek’s voice. “Oh, yeah, honey? Well, last night George Michael came to the door with flowers, a prenuptial agreement, and a teacup poodle that can fart out Viennese waltzes.”

Saffron smiled and hugged herself. She sighed deep and shut the wooden door with a soft click. Was she crazy? She’d seen enough movies to know that people didn’t always know when they were crazy. She knew people, honest people, honestly believed some things that just weren’t true. Although the notion that she’d invented the tryst was ridiculous, in the end, she decided to sit on her secret for awhile and think it out. She wanted to shut herself away from the world and roll around in the memories. Already the sounds and images from last night were fading, just like a dream. And just like a good dream, she didn’t want to lose the feeling that the visit had given her. That feeling of epiphany and of longings quenched. The only place for that kind of heavy zoning was the woods.

Flip-flops in hand, she crept out her bedroom door and tiptoed past Grandmother’s room. Grandmother’s door was open, emitting trails of Vicks vapor rub, saltines, and Jean Nate. Saffron held her breath as she slid by. She jumped down the stairs two at a time and hurried through the kitchen, grabbing a day-old raisin bagel and an almost-empty carton of orange juice. She didn’t know where Derek had yelled from, but she hadn’t run into him yet. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t the problem. She could stroll past him, but getting past her mother would be a different thing altogether. Audrey didn’t like it when Saffron “loitered” in the woods. But Audrey usually painted late and slept late. Saffron and Derek were the early birds who had enough respect for each other to ignore each other.

She used her butt to back out of the screaming screen door and was just letting it back in its jamb when her mother’s voice rang out, clear and concerned, on the still morning air.

“
Saffron, what on earth are you doing? It can’t be more than five-thirty yet!”

Saffron stood motionless, the door still in her hand. Did her freakin’ mother ever sleep? She stared at the chipping paint on the side of the house and wondered again why her mother didn’t get vinyl siding. They were forever scraping, priming, painting. In any given year, one side was done and another part was ready to be to be done over.

Audrey frowned. “Do you have to….“

“‘
Loiter in the woods now? Yes, Mom, I have to loiter in the woods now. It’s called being a naturalist.” Saffron raised her eyebrows and hitched up the corners of her lips.

“
In your case it’s called ‘avoiding’.”

Her mother’s words were a slap. Saffron reacted physically, snapped her head back and opened her mouth in protest, but remained silent. Her cheeks and neck flushed scarlet.

Derek’s bushy, auburn hair came into view from down behind Saffron’s mother; his curls sparkled shower-fresh. He was kneeling, picking through the herb garden with one hand, clutching a mug in his other paw.

“
I mean really, Saffron, what’s the rush? You need to get some sleep!” Audrey stood erect, weeds choked in her grip. “And stand up straight, you look like a used-up hippie. Did you comb your hair?”

Saffron straightened. Her teeth clenched beneath her pale cheeks. Who was Audrey calling a hippie? She reached down for the wide basket that her mother used to collect weeds. “You know what? We don’t need to have this argument. I’ll give myself a goal. Lemme fill this basket with blackberries.” Saffron’s last word came out at a higher pitch, almost shrill, as if she was trying to gather the attention of a deaf cocker spaniel.

Audrey began to drill her pointer finger into her temple.

Saffron backed away. When Audrey didn’t say more, Saffron took off running for the trees, the hem of her nightdress gathering and getting caught up between her legs as they churned. She escaped the trim yard successfully and ran through the wild tangle of brush that fringed the forest. She picked up her knees to avoid tripping in the mess of white daisies and purple vetch, as grasshoppers leaped from the frill of Queen Anne’s lace. She ran beneath the pines, the ground carpeted in brown needles, smooth and stretching out for miles along the rocky, and wooded shoreline. She passed the boulder shaped like a pumpkin, skirted the giant half-pine whose top was skimmed off by lightning in a long-ago storm, then slowed to a walk. She was almost there - a small clearing by the cliff where light shone down and cast a pool of forest floor in dusty gold. On the far side of the clearing was a prickly, green mess of wild blackberry bushes not completely ravished by little squirrel hands, skunk lips, or greedy beaks. Beyond the blackberry bushes a line of mushrooms disappeared into the thicket.

Saffron sighed.

Opening her backpack and reaching deep, she pulled out a bottle of bug spray. She anointed herself and the surrounding area with the poison. It was a strong brew, able to ward off most bloodsuckers, including the evil deer fly.

Next, she pulled out an old green tablecloth. Its weave had been worked in various directions so that the end result was a series of vines that shone faintly as it was moved around in the diffused sunlight. She shook it and lifted it high, guiding it as it fluttered to the forest floor. She lay down and stared at the sky, feeling like the Lady of Shallot.