by Clare Coffey
It was Aunt Margie who had the idea. After the storm had blown down most of the big ash tree that shaded their grandparent’s front yard, they’d had to call the arborists and remove most of what was left. She felt something had to be done with the stump. “It’s an eyesore just sitting there like that.” They could remove it, but that didn’t feel right–it was bad enough that they’d had to get rid of most of the bole, and there was the carbon and the native pollinators to consider. Aunt Margie was a great one for native pollinators. She had planted the front with beds of milkweed and elderberry bushes and now there was a tidy little sign designating it a native plant habitat. Aunt Margie was a great one for bright and useful civic projects in general, as the cheerfully painted Little Free Library next to the mailbox attested.
She’d found the idea of fairy doors on Pinterest. They were cunning little doors, sometimes painted red, sometimes plain wood, about the size of a human fist. You attached them to trees and stumps which children would (presumably) then think were fairy habitations. All the necessary hardware was available at Michael’s. You could even buy ornamental mushrooms to go with them. Emma’s mother had proved enthusiastic. “They’re so sweet.” She’d said. “Besides,” she said, “it’ll give dad something to do. “
Emma’s grandfather had also proved enthusiastic, mostly because he always was when asked to make something for the grandchildren. Emma hung around watching him sand down the door, attach it to its tiny frame by tiny hinges, resisting the ever present urge to touch the forbidden machines. The only person who was not enthusiastic, in fact, was Emma’s grandmother.
“A fairy door,” she said “I never heard of anything so silly for a grown man to spend time on. Oh, that’s beautiful work, Davey. They’ll love it. Don’t know why they wanted it in the first place. Who ever heard of a door to nowhere? Come and help me make cookies, sweetheart.”
By the time the fairy door was ceremonially installed on the stump, with blueberry crumble and strawberry lemonade and pilsner for the adults and water guns for the cousins, her skepticism had only hardened. “Don’t know why you’d build a door you don’t expect anybody to come through,” she said. “Mom. It’s cute,” Margie said.
All that summer Emma played by the fairy door, inventing little games and stories of her own. Her grandfather indulged her by becoming a full-tilt fairy real estate developer, building little cabins out of wood, gluing down layers of moss to their roofs, and placing them in hidden places all around the garden. Emma’s empire was bounded by the garden, but constantly expanding its territory internally. She lived on lemonade and peach crumbles and whatever recipes her grandmother called her in to test. She would remember it as one of the best summers of her life.
If the adults’ summer was not going quite as well, it was nothing too noticeable at first. Emma’s mother began having to rescue the family cat from strange places at regular intervals (cat sibling rivalry, cat new baby jealous, she’d Googled). Someone stripped Aunt Margie’s elderberry bushes in one go during the night–she had been saving them for an experiment with homemade elderberry cough syrup. And for the first time in her life, her grandmother’s meringues deflated in the oven, one after another. Emma found her doing something very close–close enough for government work, as her grandfather would say–to cursing out her stove. “I don’t understand it,” she said, the sweat of frustration and kitchen heat (she insisted on baking all summer and also on turning on the air conditioner only in heat emergencies duly announced and registered by the local weather lady) plastering iron gray and glinting red strands of hair to her cheek. “I never–I never–forty five years.” She aimed a vicious kick at the Viking range, an anniversary gift and up till now her pride and joy. “It must be this damn fool oven. Just goes to show.”
Emma began silently leaving lemon bars by the fairy door. Her grandmother’s baked goods resumed their perfection.
Minor inconveniences here and there–a pickle jar smashed, a pane of glass broken, food disappearing, small appliances not working. Not till summer was ending did they begin rising to the level of Strange Occurrences worth conferring about. Margie came out one morning, coffee in hand, to find that every page of every book in her Little Free Library had been methodically ripped out. Her lawn was littered with little folded paper swans, which meant she could not even assume herself persecuted on some vague free speech grounds and had to consider it the work of a dangerous lunatic. “Who would take the time?” she asked. Emma’s mother had once found a bird’s nest on Emma’s bed and once a tiny wooden flute, which could be any of the kids because God knows kids lie or forget about things when they think they’re in trouble, but if there was a lunatic in the neighborhood–
Most disturbing of all were Grandad’s tools. He had come down to his basement workshop one morning to find his usual jumbled mass disentangled and laid out in perfect, elegantly composed order. At first he’d reasonably exercised the marital perogative and blamed his wife. “Meg” he’d hollered, so loud she came rushing down the stairs thinking he’d finally done it, he’d finally taken off an arm on that band saw. “Darn it Meg, you know how I feel about you prettifying my tools. I like them that way.” When she had made it clear that she had better things to do than fool around with that hopeless pile of toys for overgrown babies and certain deathtraps, she was worried. Who else could it have been but him? She had known his memory was going, but this was too much, too soon. This wasn’t him.
Police reports were filed. Locks and cameras were bought. Shotguns were retrieved from the safe. The leaves colored and started to fall.
On the night of Emma’s birthday her grandmother outdid herself–a three story cake whose top was a model of her beloved garden, complete with fondant fairy houses and the stump with its fairy door in the center. Emma hugged grandmother’s knees and took her by the hand to give her a tour of her newest setups, jumping with excitement, and they had momentarily left the noise of the family and the firepit and the string lights and walked around to the quiet front garden, illuminated only by the light of the high full moon. Except–it should have been illuminated only by the light of the high full moon. But there was something else. A ball of light was hovering in the air over the rotting stump. Emma and her grandmother froze.
How long they stood there, they could never say afterwards.
“Emma.” The voice was her mother’s, but it was coming, unmistakably, from the stump. “Emma.” This time the voice was high and sweet. One more time it called her, in a voice too deep, far too deep, before her grandmother grabbed her hand, turned her around, and marched her back to the fire pit. She didn’t say anything, but she did not let go of Emma’s hand for the rest of the night. The cousins were not to go near the front of the house, she told the aunts and uncles, because there was a skunk. No one needed to be told twice.
The next day she tore down the fairy door and burned it in the fire pit. Upon her protest, the fairy houses were given to Emma to use indoors as dollhouses, after the priest had been around to bless them and the stump. Her daughters did not protest the destruction of their project as much as they might have been expected to. “After all,” Margie said. “It was a little tacky.”
Clare Coffey writes from Idaho. Send her mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 