A Dance with the Fairies
by Christiana Santos
My boots scuffed the damp pavement as I made my way to my best friend’s house on a route I had memorized by heart:
Past the house with the old silver van
Past a rusted gate
Past the tree whose branches curved like witch’s fingers.
I hadn’t seen Carmen since she went off to study sociology, so of course I was delighted to hear she was home for the weekend. I was glad she had found her calling even though I had not. I wasn’t used to watching from the sidelines without her. When we were alone, we were alone together.
When I first arrived at Hawthorn Public School for sixth grade, Carmen already had a reputation for being the class loner. As my teacher instructed me to occupy the empty seat next to Carmen, she told me, “It would be lovely if you could talk to her. Carmen’s a special child and doesn’t socialize well.”
When I set my backpack down next to the girl with butterfly clips in her hair, I remember the other kids glanced back at me with the same look of silent pity that my relatives give me today when I tell them I’m taking a gap year.
I counted seven houses down past the witch finger tree until I stood on the creaky porch of Carmen’s house. I pulled out six Polaroid photographs from my satchel. They showed Carmen and me at the park, both eleven years old, dressed in lacy white pajamas with dandelion flowers in our hair. In each photo, Carmen smiled a toothy smile that pulled at the sides of her cheeks and squeezed her eyes shut.
We posed on a picnic blanket beside trees with flat images of fairies in dresses made of petals. Our classmates weren’t as amused with our little art project and told us we weren’t fooling anybody. Carmen and I knew that they were cutouts propped up on pieces of cardboard, but they were real to us.
“Have you ever heard of the Cottingley Fairies?” Carmen asked me. She had read about two girls in 1917 who had staged an encounter with the fae folk using this exact method. Carmen and I thought ourselves very clever when we decided to print and cut the pictures and pose next to them in the park. I was sure she’d be delighted to see them again. I eagerly rang the doorbell.
“Laura! It’s been a while!” Carmen greeted me, smiling demurely. All her teeth were perfectly aligned, not a single one protruding from her lips.
We sat down in her parents’ living room, which was exactly how I remembered it. Family photographs lined the wall next to a vase of plastic flowers. A thick woolly blanket covered in a gaudy floral pattern was draped over the sofa.
“How are you doing?” Carmen asked. “Has college been torturing you with work as well?”
“No. I’m doing a gap year, remember?” Those words still sounded pathetic. “Still trying to find out what I want to do while taking some jobs here and there.”
“My bad, I completely forgot! I’m just swamped with reading and research. It’s interesting, though; we’re going over how people develop superstitions and hysterias.”
“Superstitions, huh? Does that include the fae folk?” I asked, hoping to shift the conversation in a more nostalgic direction.
“Hm, I’d like to explore other subjects. You know, expand my horizons.”
She spoke calmly, without an ounce of the endearing awkwardness I loved about her. She had grown up, while I was still stuck between childhood and the rest of my life.
“It isn’t all work,” Carmen added. “My friends at school know how to have a good party. You really should have been there for our karaoke night. You know what happened?”
My fingers clutched the photos in the satchel.
“What?” I said, hoping I didn’t come across as impatient.
“So my roommate, Jen, made me and this cute guy do a duet as a joke. I think it was because of a dare —“
I tuned out. I wanted to be happy for her, but every new name and event blended into a murky blur of social interactions I felt I should have experienced. I spaced back in right as Carmen finished her story.
“— anyways, Derek and I really hit it off,” she said, and I noticed how strange it was that Carmen was making perfect eye contact with me. I knew she never carried on conversations like that, because eye contact made her lose her train of thought.
“That’s great for you!” I said. “By the way, I have something to show you.”
I laid our photos out on the table.
Carmen squinted as though she were examining a specimen.
“Remind me,” she said, that unfamiliar smile crossing her face again. “When did we do this?”
“Sixth grade, remember?”
Carmen shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “don’t know, don’t care.”
Carmen picked up one of the pictures and laughed. “We do look funny here. Were my teeth really that crooked?...You know what? I’ll take them! I could show these to Jen. She’s already shared embarrassing secrets with me, so I could return the favour!”
I thought of Carmen and her new friends teasing those relics of our childhood, mocking our immaturity just like our classmates had, or looking with derisive pity the way my relatives looked at me.
“Excuse me,” I choked out as I strode briskly to the bathroom.
I hunched over the sink, fuming with embarrassment. I hated Carmen. I hated that she’d turned into someone I barely knew, and I hated that she seemed to be better off. “This isn’t her, this isn’t her,” reverberated in my head like a mantra. I reached for the Carmen I knew and recalled another one of her stories.
We were hiding under the gym bleachers, sparing ourselves from another round of basketball drills.
“Laura, did you know people used to think kids who acted strange were changelings? You know, like fairies in disguise,” Carmen whispered to me.
“Then you might be one. You’re always weird. You can’t keep any of the stuff you read to yourself.”
“If I’m weird, you’re worse.” Carmen retorted proudly. “Besides, I couldn’t be.” She pulled a ring out of her pocket. “It’s iron and if I were a fairy, my skin would burn.”
I peeked out of the bathroom and saw Carmen rummaging through the fridge like a feral raccoon. When I was sure she couldn’t see me, I tiptoed over to the storage closet where I knew Carmen’s dad kept all his tools and picked out a heavy iron wrench. I was aware of how delusional I seemed, but I would believe anything before accepting I had lost Carmen for good.
I crept up behind Carmen, who was in the process of drinking cream straight from the carton and lightly touched her neck with the wrench. Carmen immediately let out a bone-chilling scream as she recoiled, spilling the cream all over the floor.
“Laura, you bitch! Why would you do that?”
Carmen snapped, covering the red spot on her skin where the iron had touched her.
My heart raced. Did I expect to be right?
“Where is Carmen?” I said, shakily brandishing the wrench at the thing that wore her skin. “I want her back.”
The thing I now recognized as a changeling shook its head.
“The fairy queen has chosen her as a handmaiden. She’s happier in our realm than she could ever be here. How could you ask something so selfish?”
I stood there, my jaw agape. Fairies were real, but knowing that didn’t comfort me. They had taken Carmen, and no one else would believe me. I had to act now.
I lunged forward and swung. I hoped to strike the false Carmen on its lying mouth, but it dodged my blow.
“Would you steal from her the lovely emerald gowns she now wears and pull her from the fairy circle, condemning her to a life of toil and rejection, all for your sake?”
Then, it shifted to a sympathetic tone.
“I can sense your inadequacy, Laura. Carmen didn’t think she was enough, either.”
Tears welled in my eyes. I was angry that my friend was stolen, but I was surprised to find I was even angrier that I hadn’t been stolen with her.
“Why did you leave without me?” I asked. I knew I wasn’t talking to Carmen, but it looked so much like her. I prayed she could hear me. “Surely if you went willingly, you’d have brought me along.”
The false Carmen remained unmoved. I snapped out of my humiliating stupor and remembered this creature was not my friend. It was a parasite I would crush under my boot.
This time the wrench landed. It hit the changeling on the jaw and it crumpled to the floor. I seized the opportunity and pinned it to the ground, pressing the iron onto its cheek. Carmen’s skin began to sizzle and burn as I watched her cringe in pain. My resolve wavered as I almost considered releasing her, until I noticed the creature’s disguise beginning to fade. Its skin became a mottled greenish brown and its long hair shifted to a texture resembling dusty cobwebs.
“There’s no point in hiding from me anymore,” I said.
Now, the false Carmen’s face looked as though it had been crudely sculpted out of clay. The eyes were two misshapen hollow sockets that lay too far apart. Its teeth were sharp and thin, like fishbones. Each agonized scream that left its mouth sounded less and less like Carmen.
“Give. Her. Back.” I demanded, removing the wrench from the changeling’s skin.
“Can’t do that,” the changeling rasped. “Not within…my power…”
I branded the wrench onto its chest. It let out another horrid, scratchy wail.
“Tell me how to get her back, and I’ll let you go.”
“The fairy queen has claimed her. If you want the handmaiden, you’ll have to make an offering.”
“And what sort of offering does she want?”
“Her Majesty loves a good show, and she’s grown weary of the fairy court’s usual festivities. Come down to Griffiths Park and dance for her. If you can keep her interest, the queen may be compelled to oblige you, and she may look upon me more fondly if I am able to give her such entertainment.”
I felt that further argument would destroy my only chance at appealing to Carmen’s captors, so I released the changeling and it shifted back into its human guise. I picked up my things and stood to leave.
“I never want to see you again,” I said, snatching up the Polaroids from the coffee table, and stormed out the door.
At sunset, I ran down the steep hill towards Griffiths Park, holding my skirt up. The autumn winds had left a carpet of browning leaves upon the ground that would, in a week’s time, be buried under a blanket of snow. A circular spot bordered by mushrooms remained lush as spring. I stepped inside the patch of green and sounds of the outside world ceased. It was only me, the trees, and the emerging of countless voices.
“She’s here.”
“She’s not as pretty as the other one, is she?”
“Will Her Majesty take her, too?”
The fairies emerged from the thicket. A man no more than a foot high held up his chin and trod lightly on the soil like a cat. A pixie skittered past him and coiled his rat’s tail around the waist of his companion, whose voice sounded like the chirp of a songbird. At the end of this absurd menagerie of tails, teeth and wings was an ethereal woman with butterfly antennae upon her forehead. She might have been human, except her eyes were too far apart and her legs were so unnaturally lithe that they might have snapped under natural gravity.
To her right was her handmaiden whose eyes stared at nothing — Carmen, the only human in the procession, lost in a dream. The queen took her seat upon the flowers her subjects had laid out. She waved her hand and the rat-tailed pixie put a set of pipes to his lips and began to play.
Carmen and I used to dance in our own fairy circles, and we always went about it the same way. I spread my arms and curtsied to the left of the circle, then did the same to the right. Finally, I lowered into a curtsy before the queen and though I bowed for her, my sights and my soul were fixed on Carmen.
I moved my arms lightly with the chirps of the flute and stepped with pointed feet, but my attempts to emulate the graceful maidens of folklore soon felt useless. My heart raced and I pounded my feet in frustration, hoping it might drive my fears away.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The pounding grew louder, and I looked up to see the fairies clapping in time with my steps. I realized that because they were such delicate things, the fairies were entranced by my anger and heaviness.
If it was passion they wanted, I would give it to them. I threw myself upon the ground and writhed on the soil. I could hear them laughing and calling out to me. I spun out of control until my feet were bruised. After what felt like hours, I collapsed, and woke up alone at Griffiths Park.
The next morning, I burst through the door of Carmen’s house and ran to her room. I was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, but I needed to know if I had really brought her back. I gently knocked on the door.
“Carmen?” I called.
I opened the door and was hit with the smell of the fairies, fragrant and odorous at the same time. I let out a deep sigh of relief when I saw Carmen on her bed.
She turned in my direction and began rambling. “Where has she gone, my queen, my love? Have my friends gotten bored with me?”
I held Carmen, hoping to anchor her back in the waking world. “It’s me, Laura,” I told her. “You’re home, Carmen. You’re safe.”
Her bloodshot eyes regained their focus and looked at me. She really saw me now.
“Laura, I’m sorry! I didn’t want to leave you.”
Carmen tilted her face upwards. She did that whenever she was about to cry. “It was just so hard. Everything was so overwhelming, and I felt like the people at college hated me.”
Her voice began to break. “I wanted to disappear, I wasn’t ready to let go, so I let the fairies take me. I wish I were braver, like you.”
“I’m not exactly ready to face the world yet either,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “But it would be a lot less scary with you.”