(no subject)
Blue Fairy (Original)
It started when she was small. On the TV there was a green man and the story said that his heart was two sizes too small. She thought, maybe mine is the other way. Big and bleeding and that is why my chest is so tight. Something is beating hard against the skin. Black and blue, she felt black and blue from it and she imagined the blue filling her like tropical water, like blood without oxygen escaping from veins to fill a cavity. There was a rhythm to it and her blue jeans couldn’t hold her legs quite still.
And so she slammed around, fists connecting with the ribs of whatever buildings held her while her toes twirled on old-sneaker pointe. They began to move out of the way.
Except the boy who laughed, of course. His long legs and boy’s laugh when she twirled. He swept her up, ran with her, ran faster even. His face red with sweat when they fell down. Giggling. He sprawled on the bed and made her kiss the bruises he got when she kicked in her sleep.
She found blue eyeshadow that felt like the heavy pollen of white roses fed on electricity, that cool and thick. The color stung her own eyes when she saw it framing them in the mirror. She painted her face with it, curls and spirals spelling her name across her cheeks. No more freckles on her nose. Some things can be hidden.
On her chest it was his name she wrote. Peter. Peter in block letters, Peter in script, the ‘P’ as thin as a finger next to her nipple, the ‘R’ blockading her heart. Once she had sewn a dress out of a green silk slick like living leaves, but now with her blue dust she could take a deep breath and fly, dance in the air. The stomping of her feet across the molecules of oxygen was frenetic. There was no room for skirts, for a bodice constricting the words on her breasts.
I am the blue fairy, she whispered to his cheek whenever he blinked. Her eyelashes fluttered against his ears and then came his laugh, bubbling like a boy’s. There, that moment, she thought. The gold of his cheeks was gilded with blue when she moved away, as if she had been a butterfly shedding color from her wings. I am the blue fairy.
The blue fairy was hard inside her as they ran through the street holding hands. It fluttered and beat under the ‘R’ on her chest, knocking on her ribs, slipping through. Faster. Faster. All of the lights looked blue to her and so she darted across the street, dancing in the middle. Stomping. Whirling. No hands.
Shit, he was yelling as he pushed her onto the sidewalk. Dizziness gave her double vision as she watched his hand wave to the beeping cars. So many Peters waving goodbye. Shit, he yelled again, you trying to die? You think you can run in traction? I’m not paying your hospital bill.
It sounded so incongruous from him, the shit. Such a grown-up word. Such a juvenile sentiment. She wiped her eyes to clear her vision and then pressed two fingers to his lips. The powder stuck and sealed them and then there, that moment, that laugh. Right, he said under her fingers, and he grabbed her hand again. She felt like toy soldiers as they marched down the street, parallel to the cars that moved like Hot Wheels around a track.
They had to jump the fence to get into the playground. It was empty; in the dark she was the only one who saw Peter fall clumsy on his hands. She hit the ground running for the swings. Up in the air with the greatest of ease. Up in the sky so blue. Night blue. Blue night following blue night. Heavy handed in her chest and she found herself tracing the letters on her breasts with a sewing needle, sometimes, just to let air in. To let light out. The blue powder stung in the scratches and the pressure ebbed. And there was that blue tropical water. She smiled to think of him touching his name in her that night.
That night. Shit, he said. Shit, I’m not seeing this. I’m not dealing with this. He threw her shirt at her before he slammed the door. She could hear him cursing all the way down the street in a child’s voice. She threw her shirt on the floor and stomped it into the fibers of the carpet.
*
The next time she saw him it was outside again, in daylight. His hair was longer and his summer tan was fading, leaving the freckles standing stark across his cheeks. His arm was around the waist of a woman at whom he stared like a supplicant. A woman with brown hair and a pink sweater and the blue fairy fluttered and beat and saw, in a flash, this woman with wrinkles around her pretty brown eyes in which shone tiny images of a baby Peter.
The blue fairy twisting. She glanced at the lights. Blue again. She ran into the street and waited for the yell and the sweep and the saving. A car screeched to a stop at her heels. He wasn’t even looking at her. Wings beating against the scratched scars in her skin. She scrambled up, only noticing later that up meant onto the hood of the car. Shouts and curses and he never turned around not once she leapt off the car hit the ground running running home no coat cold air against her arms her reflection in the mirror of her bathroom with the needle on the shelf below it and her fist and the glass and the blue fairy was flying around the room.
Fine. Fine Peter. Fine.
Her legs shook in the rhythm of her chest.
*
She wasn’t sure if he would answer to her phone number so she went to the bus stop down the street where there was a glass phone booth shaped like a pirate ship’s lantern. His voice across the wires sounded thin and cool, like there was a little boy in his throat. She imagined her how own voice must sound to him now- cracked with electricity. No, he said, no. I can’t handle you, I can’t take care of you. I need to be taken care of myself. And there’s Wendy-
Wendy?
I can’t. I’m sorry. Click.
She pressed the palms of her hands to the glass and stared outward, thinking, what if this door never opened? For a moment she felt like the fairy behind her own ribs.
*
It filled her the way light fills a room, the anger. No rhythm to the way her limbs jumped. The twisted wires of the fence scratched at her legs as she scrambled over into the playground. She thought of scabs, scars starring across her skin, nature’s tattoos.
*
From the street she could see the light on in his room. His shadow moved against the window. She wanted to take the needle and sew it to the wafer-thin scars in her chest. Peter’s shadow springing from her heart. Yes. She put her hands to the brick of the building and tried to hoist herself upward but it was too smooth, her fingers were not small enough to fit into the cement grooves. The blue powder of eyeshadow wasn’t enough to let her fly anymore. I? I am not the blue fairy. There was such a pressure on her ribs.
She dreamed that night of running through streets up over cars up into the air staring at stars. Something tugging at her hand which felt connected to her eyes and she looked back and there was the back of his head the side of his face as he stared at a woman with the milk-filled breasts of a mother. And then she was falling falling falling and she thought she felt the tar before she woke up.
Never, said the blue fairy. I will never never let him. Never never.
*
There was a man with skin like an alligator’s flesh, that hard and full of teeth, in the doorway of a house across from the playground. The patch over his eye seemed to own his face. She stopped with one hand on the fence and stared at it, at the bone smile beneath it. It was as cold as the fence; or the fence was as cold as it. She let go and walked toward him, reaching into her pockets.
Fairy dust, he said, as if it were the mantra of a clock. Tick tock. Where is the music in your voice, old man? Fairy dust, he said. A little at a time. He waved the bag. It might have been silk- smooth like the green silk dress. Where is the child in your voice, old man? Where is the green silk dress twirling did I rip it into shreds like hair spilling out of me? Fairy dust, he said, chuckled. Green things that don’t matter. She handed him her wallet and she took the bag and she ran. Hard.
*
She called him that night knowing that he wouldn’t pick up. Hello Peter she said and from the inside of her skull her voice sounded strained and high as if her vocal cords had shrunk. Hello Peter hello Peter hello Peter can you hear me are you hearing me now? I’ve seen you and I’ve seen your Wendy and she has wrinkles by her eyes, Peter, already she is old, Peter, and she is going to die die die die die. Die dead. Peter. Oh but you will never die to me, Peter. And neither will I. Here I am. And whether you are here or not I still see you and I am the blue fairy. And I have my Fairy Dust and I will swallow it like a clock like all of time eternity holding you here inside it with me. Peter. I’m swallowing it for you Peter. So you don’t have to. You remember that. And maybe you want to be taken care of like a boy forever but you have to grow up someday. But I never will. I never will.
She felt the air ringing as she hung up.
*
As she mixed the powder into a glass of milk she felt abruptly like her own mother, stirring medicine intro fruit punch to calm the manic stomach of a child who danced in gauze wings and skinned knees. Here baby girl drink this right up you’ll feel better. Fairy child, here’s your medicine.
Whoever heard of drinking drugs in your milk? Fairy dust in a glass of thistle nectar to let us fly right out beyond the stars. Drink up baby girl.
*
“Peter, you can’t. She’s just trying to get your attention. You can’t encourage her, sweetie. She’ll know all she has to do is sound crazy on your answering machine and you’ll acknowledge her again.”
“You don’t know her, Wendy. She isn’t pretending to be crazy. There’s this thing in hr- why do you think I left? It’s too intense,” he said, staring at the phone.
“That’s why you can’t, baby.” Wendy worked herself between Peter and the phone, ducking her face into his line of vision. He wouldn’t meet her eyes; before his slid away she thought she saw skulls in his pupils. Crossbones.
“No, he said to the wall. “That’s why I have to. She doesn’t lie, whatever else she does. So whatever she’s done- it’s bad.” Peter’s hand came down hard on the answering machine, slamming into the ‘delete’ button with a violence that made the table rock. He turned to the door.
Wendy twisted her fingers together- in, out, and between. She sighed. “Don’t forget your coat,” she said.
*
It is like a dream when Peter pushes on the door that has never been locked by a girl who could not slow down for things like keys or boys or staying safe. All I have ever wanted, he thinks as the door swings inward, is to hold us all still in time. To hold us all still. For a moment he stays still in the doorway. He cannot hear the blue fairy crowing or screeching or beating or singing in the next room. No sound in these rooms is like deafness and like a word that sounds like ‘deaf’ and he is scared the way a little boy is scared in his bed at night looking at the closet door. Something is going to come out. He can see the opening of the kitchen from here and his heart beats. Nothing is going to come out.
It is like flight, the way his feet carry him so fast and so much lighter than ever before to that door over the stepping stones of his fear. His child’s fear and in this moment he ages thirty years forty years a hundred he can’t count he whole face is blue as it has been before except this time it does not rub off when he touches her neck. Blue skin and freckles standing against it like drops of wax has someone held a candle to your skin? And there is a small plastic bag and he doesn’t know what and there is milk on the floor as if a kitten has spilled its drink.
Shit, he whispers. His tongue is swollen or his mouth has shrunk like an old man’s. And like an old man’s his hands are shaking as the clap onto her chest, the thumps and the thin pounding blood in his ears like the slow applause of a shocked theater. Clap and clap and clap and faster and he feels it in him now, what he has seen in her face so many times, the anger and the beating speed and he pounds it out on her chest, until he feels like a butterfly in a jar, a cage, clap clap clapclapclapclapclap and it is the sound that will save her in the end, he knows, the rhythm so like her own.
He remembers how she described it once, this fairy fighting in her chest. Pumping its fists. Oh pump again. Clapclapclap.
And she gasps, suddenly, like a mermaid sucking water down. He stills his hands, weak and arthritic with relief. How is it, he wonders, that fear and relief both make him old?
He stands up without looking at her and he walks to her phone and he punches 9-1-1 into it and he walks out of the room and out of the apartment. He walks back to Wendy.
*
This is how she is breathing. There are swirls in front of her eyes, trails of butterfly dust and smoke. The tips of her fingers are tingling and numb and her thighs feel like heavy weights, like sandbags or anchors. If she were to move, she knows, she would be slow.
He chest is black and blue and aching.
“Two broken ribs,” the doctor says later. “Whoever it was that brought your heart back- he sure was enthusiastic about it.”
But she knows. She knows the blue fairy broke them to get out. Broke them flying away.
*
They kept her for almost six months. ODs are serious, they told her. Your mother is paying for it. Your apartment, too.
My mother? But I-
Your mother.
She had almost forgotten she still had one.
When she got home, finally, her apartment was jarringly familiar. Nothing in the sink, the kitchen had been cleaned, but there were still clothes flung across her bedroom floor and tissues all over the bathroom. The mirror was cracked as it had been and on the shelf below it, the needle and the mostly empty tin of thick bright blue powder eyeshadow, side by side. Next to them, something new, pill bottle and prescription. She could tell even through the amber bottle that the pills were a blue of a different sort, light and pastel, the blue of babies. Take your medicine, baby girl.
For a moment she thought she felt it flaring up inside her, saw the blue fairy making footprints in the eyeshadow. She reached for it. She felt the needle prick at her skin when she got too close. Trying to sew the shadows back into me, she thought.
Her hands closed around these things and she turned with them and walked out of the apartment, onto the sidewalk, down the street. When she got to the playground, she did not climb the fence. She watched, for a moment, the ghosts on the slide, herself smaller and wilder swinging up into the air up in the sky so blue and like the arc of a swing her hand moved up and back and forward and she flung them, the needle and the powder, she flung them hard so that the powder left the tin and spiraled through the air like a dying whirling, like the trail of a fairy as it flies away.
She did not wait to see where it would land.
It started when she was small. On the TV there was a green man and the story said that his heart was two sizes too small. She thought, maybe mine is the other way. Big and bleeding and that is why my chest is so tight. Something is beating hard against the skin. Black and blue, she felt black and blue from it and she imagined the blue filling her like tropical water, like blood without oxygen escaping from veins to fill a cavity. There was a rhythm to it and her blue jeans couldn’t hold her legs quite still.
And so she slammed around, fists connecting with the ribs of whatever buildings held her while her toes twirled on old-sneaker pointe. They began to move out of the way.
Except the boy who laughed, of course. His long legs and boy’s laugh when she twirled. He swept her up, ran with her, ran faster even. His face red with sweat when they fell down. Giggling. He sprawled on the bed and made her kiss the bruises he got when she kicked in her sleep.
She found blue eyeshadow that felt like the heavy pollen of white roses fed on electricity, that cool and thick. The color stung her own eyes when she saw it framing them in the mirror. She painted her face with it, curls and spirals spelling her name across her cheeks. No more freckles on her nose. Some things can be hidden.
On her chest it was his name she wrote. Peter. Peter in block letters, Peter in script, the ‘P’ as thin as a finger next to her nipple, the ‘R’ blockading her heart. Once she had sewn a dress out of a green silk slick like living leaves, but now with her blue dust she could take a deep breath and fly, dance in the air. The stomping of her feet across the molecules of oxygen was frenetic. There was no room for skirts, for a bodice constricting the words on her breasts.
I am the blue fairy, she whispered to his cheek whenever he blinked. Her eyelashes fluttered against his ears and then came his laugh, bubbling like a boy’s. There, that moment, she thought. The gold of his cheeks was gilded with blue when she moved away, as if she had been a butterfly shedding color from her wings. I am the blue fairy.
The blue fairy was hard inside her as they ran through the street holding hands. It fluttered and beat under the ‘R’ on her chest, knocking on her ribs, slipping through. Faster. Faster. All of the lights looked blue to her and so she darted across the street, dancing in the middle. Stomping. Whirling. No hands.
Shit, he was yelling as he pushed her onto the sidewalk. Dizziness gave her double vision as she watched his hand wave to the beeping cars. So many Peters waving goodbye. Shit, he yelled again, you trying to die? You think you can run in traction? I’m not paying your hospital bill.
It sounded so incongruous from him, the shit. Such a grown-up word. Such a juvenile sentiment. She wiped her eyes to clear her vision and then pressed two fingers to his lips. The powder stuck and sealed them and then there, that moment, that laugh. Right, he said under her fingers, and he grabbed her hand again. She felt like toy soldiers as they marched down the street, parallel to the cars that moved like Hot Wheels around a track.
They had to jump the fence to get into the playground. It was empty; in the dark she was the only one who saw Peter fall clumsy on his hands. She hit the ground running for the swings. Up in the air with the greatest of ease. Up in the sky so blue. Night blue. Blue night following blue night. Heavy handed in her chest and she found herself tracing the letters on her breasts with a sewing needle, sometimes, just to let air in. To let light out. The blue powder stung in the scratches and the pressure ebbed. And there was that blue tropical water. She smiled to think of him touching his name in her that night.
That night. Shit, he said. Shit, I’m not seeing this. I’m not dealing with this. He threw her shirt at her before he slammed the door. She could hear him cursing all the way down the street in a child’s voice. She threw her shirt on the floor and stomped it into the fibers of the carpet.
*
The next time she saw him it was outside again, in daylight. His hair was longer and his summer tan was fading, leaving the freckles standing stark across his cheeks. His arm was around the waist of a woman at whom he stared like a supplicant. A woman with brown hair and a pink sweater and the blue fairy fluttered and beat and saw, in a flash, this woman with wrinkles around her pretty brown eyes in which shone tiny images of a baby Peter.
The blue fairy twisting. She glanced at the lights. Blue again. She ran into the street and waited for the yell and the sweep and the saving. A car screeched to a stop at her heels. He wasn’t even looking at her. Wings beating against the scratched scars in her skin. She scrambled up, only noticing later that up meant onto the hood of the car. Shouts and curses and he never turned around not once she leapt off the car hit the ground running running home no coat cold air against her arms her reflection in the mirror of her bathroom with the needle on the shelf below it and her fist and the glass and the blue fairy was flying around the room.
Fine. Fine Peter. Fine.
Her legs shook in the rhythm of her chest.
*
She wasn’t sure if he would answer to her phone number so she went to the bus stop down the street where there was a glass phone booth shaped like a pirate ship’s lantern. His voice across the wires sounded thin and cool, like there was a little boy in his throat. She imagined her how own voice must sound to him now- cracked with electricity. No, he said, no. I can’t handle you, I can’t take care of you. I need to be taken care of myself. And there’s Wendy-
Wendy?
I can’t. I’m sorry. Click.
She pressed the palms of her hands to the glass and stared outward, thinking, what if this door never opened? For a moment she felt like the fairy behind her own ribs.
*
It filled her the way light fills a room, the anger. No rhythm to the way her limbs jumped. The twisted wires of the fence scratched at her legs as she scrambled over into the playground. She thought of scabs, scars starring across her skin, nature’s tattoos.
*
From the street she could see the light on in his room. His shadow moved against the window. She wanted to take the needle and sew it to the wafer-thin scars in her chest. Peter’s shadow springing from her heart. Yes. She put her hands to the brick of the building and tried to hoist herself upward but it was too smooth, her fingers were not small enough to fit into the cement grooves. The blue powder of eyeshadow wasn’t enough to let her fly anymore. I? I am not the blue fairy. There was such a pressure on her ribs.
She dreamed that night of running through streets up over cars up into the air staring at stars. Something tugging at her hand which felt connected to her eyes and she looked back and there was the back of his head the side of his face as he stared at a woman with the milk-filled breasts of a mother. And then she was falling falling falling and she thought she felt the tar before she woke up.
Never, said the blue fairy. I will never never let him. Never never.
*
There was a man with skin like an alligator’s flesh, that hard and full of teeth, in the doorway of a house across from the playground. The patch over his eye seemed to own his face. She stopped with one hand on the fence and stared at it, at the bone smile beneath it. It was as cold as the fence; or the fence was as cold as it. She let go and walked toward him, reaching into her pockets.
Fairy dust, he said, as if it were the mantra of a clock. Tick tock. Where is the music in your voice, old man? Fairy dust, he said. A little at a time. He waved the bag. It might have been silk- smooth like the green silk dress. Where is the child in your voice, old man? Where is the green silk dress twirling did I rip it into shreds like hair spilling out of me? Fairy dust, he said, chuckled. Green things that don’t matter. She handed him her wallet and she took the bag and she ran. Hard.
*
She called him that night knowing that he wouldn’t pick up. Hello Peter she said and from the inside of her skull her voice sounded strained and high as if her vocal cords had shrunk. Hello Peter hello Peter hello Peter can you hear me are you hearing me now? I’ve seen you and I’ve seen your Wendy and she has wrinkles by her eyes, Peter, already she is old, Peter, and she is going to die die die die die. Die dead. Peter. Oh but you will never die to me, Peter. And neither will I. Here I am. And whether you are here or not I still see you and I am the blue fairy. And I have my Fairy Dust and I will swallow it like a clock like all of time eternity holding you here inside it with me. Peter. I’m swallowing it for you Peter. So you don’t have to. You remember that. And maybe you want to be taken care of like a boy forever but you have to grow up someday. But I never will. I never will.
She felt the air ringing as she hung up.
*
As she mixed the powder into a glass of milk she felt abruptly like her own mother, stirring medicine intro fruit punch to calm the manic stomach of a child who danced in gauze wings and skinned knees. Here baby girl drink this right up you’ll feel better. Fairy child, here’s your medicine.
Whoever heard of drinking drugs in your milk? Fairy dust in a glass of thistle nectar to let us fly right out beyond the stars. Drink up baby girl.
*
“Peter, you can’t. She’s just trying to get your attention. You can’t encourage her, sweetie. She’ll know all she has to do is sound crazy on your answering machine and you’ll acknowledge her again.”
“You don’t know her, Wendy. She isn’t pretending to be crazy. There’s this thing in hr- why do you think I left? It’s too intense,” he said, staring at the phone.
“That’s why you can’t, baby.” Wendy worked herself between Peter and the phone, ducking her face into his line of vision. He wouldn’t meet her eyes; before his slid away she thought she saw skulls in his pupils. Crossbones.
“No, he said to the wall. “That’s why I have to. She doesn’t lie, whatever else she does. So whatever she’s done- it’s bad.” Peter’s hand came down hard on the answering machine, slamming into the ‘delete’ button with a violence that made the table rock. He turned to the door.
Wendy twisted her fingers together- in, out, and between. She sighed. “Don’t forget your coat,” she said.
*
It is like a dream when Peter pushes on the door that has never been locked by a girl who could not slow down for things like keys or boys or staying safe. All I have ever wanted, he thinks as the door swings inward, is to hold us all still in time. To hold us all still. For a moment he stays still in the doorway. He cannot hear the blue fairy crowing or screeching or beating or singing in the next room. No sound in these rooms is like deafness and like a word that sounds like ‘deaf’ and he is scared the way a little boy is scared in his bed at night looking at the closet door. Something is going to come out. He can see the opening of the kitchen from here and his heart beats. Nothing is going to come out.
It is like flight, the way his feet carry him so fast and so much lighter than ever before to that door over the stepping stones of his fear. His child’s fear and in this moment he ages thirty years forty years a hundred he can’t count he whole face is blue as it has been before except this time it does not rub off when he touches her neck. Blue skin and freckles standing against it like drops of wax has someone held a candle to your skin? And there is a small plastic bag and he doesn’t know what and there is milk on the floor as if a kitten has spilled its drink.
Shit, he whispers. His tongue is swollen or his mouth has shrunk like an old man’s. And like an old man’s his hands are shaking as the clap onto her chest, the thumps and the thin pounding blood in his ears like the slow applause of a shocked theater. Clap and clap and clap and faster and he feels it in him now, what he has seen in her face so many times, the anger and the beating speed and he pounds it out on her chest, until he feels like a butterfly in a jar, a cage, clap clap clapclapclapclapclap and it is the sound that will save her in the end, he knows, the rhythm so like her own.
He remembers how she described it once, this fairy fighting in her chest. Pumping its fists. Oh pump again. Clapclapclap.
And she gasps, suddenly, like a mermaid sucking water down. He stills his hands, weak and arthritic with relief. How is it, he wonders, that fear and relief both make him old?
He stands up without looking at her and he walks to her phone and he punches 9-1-1 into it and he walks out of the room and out of the apartment. He walks back to Wendy.
*
This is how she is breathing. There are swirls in front of her eyes, trails of butterfly dust and smoke. The tips of her fingers are tingling and numb and her thighs feel like heavy weights, like sandbags or anchors. If she were to move, she knows, she would be slow.
He chest is black and blue and aching.
“Two broken ribs,” the doctor says later. “Whoever it was that brought your heart back- he sure was enthusiastic about it.”
But she knows. She knows the blue fairy broke them to get out. Broke them flying away.
*
They kept her for almost six months. ODs are serious, they told her. Your mother is paying for it. Your apartment, too.
My mother? But I-
Your mother.
She had almost forgotten she still had one.
When she got home, finally, her apartment was jarringly familiar. Nothing in the sink, the kitchen had been cleaned, but there were still clothes flung across her bedroom floor and tissues all over the bathroom. The mirror was cracked as it had been and on the shelf below it, the needle and the mostly empty tin of thick bright blue powder eyeshadow, side by side. Next to them, something new, pill bottle and prescription. She could tell even through the amber bottle that the pills were a blue of a different sort, light and pastel, the blue of babies. Take your medicine, baby girl.
For a moment she thought she felt it flaring up inside her, saw the blue fairy making footprints in the eyeshadow. She reached for it. She felt the needle prick at her skin when she got too close. Trying to sew the shadows back into me, she thought.
Her hands closed around these things and she turned with them and walked out of the apartment, onto the sidewalk, down the street. When she got to the playground, she did not climb the fence. She watched, for a moment, the ghosts on the slide, herself smaller and wilder swinging up into the air up in the sky so blue and like the arc of a swing her hand moved up and back and forward and she flung them, the needle and the powder, she flung them hard so that the powder left the tin and spiraled through the air like a dying whirling, like the trail of a fairy as it flies away.
She did not wait to see where it would land.