by jeffrey-dallas » Fri Sep 25, 2020 11:22 pm
(Part 3) (The finale)
* * *
Fairies indeed are strange, and Peter, who understood them best, often cuffed them.
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
Four Found Girls seized my limbs and hauled me into the air.
“We fly west.” I searched their eyes for any hint of my Lillian. “As fast as you can.”
Higher and swifter we flew. The lights of London soon faded behind us. We passed over Reading and Bristol and Cardiff, and then the lights of civilization were replaced by cold wind and the dark waves of the ocean.
Faster yet we went—the shooting star that was Tinker Bell, the children whose hands dug into my clothes and flesh to keep me aloft, and the rest of the Found Girls. I studied each one in turn, trying to pierce whatever magical delusion kept me from the truth.
We moved like a school of fish swimming through the clouds. For hours we flew, following wind and moon and stars. It was like a memory of a dream, more vivid than reality itself. Even as my despair grew heavier, part of me yearned to fly like this forever.
All too soon, the lights of another coast rose from the darkness. From there, it was easy enough to adjust course over North America. I used my phone’s GPS to lead us to our destination. We dropped to Earth in the middle of an ill-maintained road winding through a familiar trailer park in central Ohio.
A few dogs barked as we walked. Figures peeked through their windows, but nobody challenged us.
I stopped in front of a green-and-white double-wide with a beat-up SUV parked beside it. The Found Girls started toward the trailer, but I put myself before them, my arms spread protectively. “Where is Lillian?”
Tinker Bell flew past me to the window. On a faded curtain, the silhouette of a young boy bounced and swung a toy sword. The boy who had forgotten.
“You stupid ass. What game is this? That’s not Peter.”
I barely heard her. I couldn’t look away from that magical child who jumped and played and flew. I moved closer, until my hands pressed the cold aluminum siding. Tinker Bell might not see, but I knew who he was.
Uncomfortable laughter from the Found Girls. Two of them seized my arms. I had no fight left. Let them hit me and cut me and kill me, so I could fly again. Far from everything, until I found my Lillian.
A man inside the trailer called out, “Pete, have you brushed your teeth yet?”
The bouncing stopped. “Yeah, Dad.”
Another voice, this one female and tinged with warning. “Peter . . .”
“All right, all right.” If it was possible for a shadow to look sheepish, this one did. It vanished as the boy—Peter—hurried off to brush his teeth.
How I longed to be a fairy. To be too small to feel more than one thing at a time. Tinker Bell never had to deal with such a tangle of confusion and grief, longing and pain, all of it hollowing me out like a Halloween pumpkin.
“You’re a liar.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Who’s out there?” called the man. Peter’s father. I knew his voice in all its shades. Loving and tender. Pained and grieving. Cold and helpless.
The curtains parted. I ducked away.
Tinker Bell and the Found Girls vanished in an instant. I pressed my body against the trailer, out of sight, and hugged myself.
I barely noticed when the curtains closed and the Found Girls reemerged. I felt lost, trapped in that place between sleep and awake, where dreams and reality danced and chased each other in an endless game.
Lillian wasn’t here. All those years . . . I hadn’t been searching. I’d been running.
Étoilée moved closer, tapping her club against her open hand. “Want us to punish her?”
“You can’t,” I whispered. I raised my chin and waited.
“She’s a madwoman, broken and lost. Let her live, trapped in her own lunacy.”
When they started to disperse, I spoke without thought. “Don’t leave me, Tinka Bell!”
She flew back to me. “What did you call me?”
Fragments of memory cut through the dreams. “I used to call you Tinka Bell.”
“You said your daughter was one of my Found Girls.” She moved closer, peering into my eyes. “She wasn’t. But you were.”
They were the cruelest words she could have spoken. If Tinker Bell had taken Lillian, it meant there was a chance I could get her back. But she hadn’t. That truth pierced me like an arrow and tossed me to the ground, to memories I’d fled for so long. The beeping of hospital equipment. Pale, sunken skin. Powder spread on Lillian’s skin to prevent bedsores.
“We lived in a house outside Columbus,” I said numbly. “I was home with Lillian. She fell down the stairs and hit her head. She never woke up.” For more than a month we’d stayed with her at the hospital, hoping and praying.
“Little Angela. I remember you. So happy to come with me, away from rules and lessons and manners. Look at what you’ve become.”
I was a child again, burning in shame at Tinka Bell’s disapproval.
“Who was that boy in the trailer?”
“My son. I named him Peter.” My shame grew. He’d been eleven months old when I left. Too young to remember me.
“You pitiful ass. You meant to give me your own son?”
“No!”
“Then it was a trick!”
“It wasn’t—I didn’t know.” I’d forgotten my own son. Or had some part of me remembered? Had this been my unconscious goal, the endgame to my madness? Tinker Bell realizing this wasn’t Peter Pan and ordering her Found Girls to punish me, to put an end to my long hunt?
“I remember the night we lost you. We’d taken four girls, but a man with a gun shot you from the sky. He shot me, too. Your belief helped me fly away.”
I’d been with Tinker Bell for decades, never aging. When I returned to this world, my parents were both long gone. I’d been passed from one foster home to another, given countless colorful pills while doctors talked to about depression and psychosis, about abandoning my childhood imaginings of flight and freedom.
Slowly I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the other Found Girls. At Clover. I remembered the grief in her mother’s eyes.
For the first time in years, my thoughts were clear. My hand shot out to close around the fairy’s slender body. Fairy dust shivered from her skin onto mine. I clung to those memories of freedom and innocence and worship among the Found Girls, remembering a time before I knew what pain and grief truly meant, and I flew.
* * *
“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
The Found Girls tried to follow, but I remembered now. How to fly, how to maneuver between the trees, how to ride the whirls and gusts of the wind. I led them on a merry chase, laughing through tears as one by one they fell away, unable to follow where I was going.
Tinker Bell squirmed and fought until I gave a warning squeeze. I couldn’t kill her, but immortality wouldn’t protect her from the pain of crushed bones.
Soon we raced over another ocean, through salty, rumbling clouds. An island grew beneath us. I couldn’t tell if we were descending, or if the island was coming toward us. Maybe there was no difference.
I landed in a clearing made of granite, smoothed and polished to a cold, glass finish. Rose petals rained from the sky, melting into red-tinged rings when they touched the ground. Weeping willow trees surrounded us. Wind whispered through their branches.
I loosed my grip, and Tinker Bell shot up out of reach. “This is the Neverland. How—”
“It’s not, exactly.” I began to walk. “This is my Neverland. This is where I fled when Lillian died.”
With each step, the grief and nightmares came to life. A wet breeze carried the sharp smell of antiseptic. Through the willow branches, I glimpsed shadowy doctors rustling about, their fingers tipped with the needles they’d used to try to save Lillian.
“I never truly forgot you,” I said. “No matter how many doctors I talked to, how many medicines they gave me. No matter how I grew up. After Lillian made me a mother, you began to return in my dreams. You didn’t want me, of course, but I was terrified you’d take her. Night after night I woke up to reassure myself she was still in her crib. In her bed. Then, in the hospital, I woke to make sure she was still breathing. I still wake up in the night, but I’d forgotten why.”
“I don’t like this place. Take me back!”
“I don’t want to.” Here, I could forget. Here, I could fly. On this island, I was Peter Pan. I was key and compass and master and prisoner. “It took a long time to make my way back to the real world, last time.”
I hadn’t made it. Not entirely. My thoughts and memories were too heavy. I’d had to leave some behind. I’d smashed the remaining fragments together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces. “All those years I was afraid you’d take her. But at least if you’d stolen her, I had a chance of getting her back. So that’s the story I told myself.”
“I’ll let you be a Found Girl again. You’ll fly and dance and play and believe. You’ll be happy.”
I stopped walking. “I’m too old.”
“You don’t have to be.”
It struck me that Tinker Bell wasn’t angry anymore. Her rage would return soon enough, but right now there was no room for it. Right now, she was afraid.
“You can be one of my children. I’ll be your mother again.”
Had I been happy? I knew I hadn’t wanted to leave. I remembered sobbing and screaming after her the night she left me behind.
I also remembered the four girls we’d stolen that night, and the man who’d fought so desperately to stop us.
When he found me, his grief and anger hadn’t changed, but another emotion joined them—compassion. He’d driven me to the hospital, made sure I was cared for. He never threatened or tried to hurt me. He simply asked—begged—for me to tell him how to find his children.
I couldn’t help him. Just like I couldn’t help Lillian.
I remembered my screams the night Lillian’s breathing finally stopped. Listening to the howling wind, I realized I’d never stopped screaming.
I twisted around and hovered directly in front of Tinker Bell. “I wonder,” I said carelessly, “how long it will take them to forget you.”
She brightened with fury as I flew away. I plunged through the willow trees. Tinker Bell followed, but I knew this place. I’d fought its hazards. I tore through branches that reached to drag us down. I dodged the numbing claws. I flew higher, shielding my eyes against the sudden rainfall.
It wasn’t long until the ringing of bells fell behind and faded into silence.
* * *
Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was real now. . . .
—J. M. Barrie
* * *
The Found Girls were waiting in the darkness around the trailer. They scattered when they realized I’d returned alone. Those few who still bore active fairy dust flew away like birds. The rest scampered like rabbits.
I swooped toward Clover and knocked her down in a patch of grass toward the edge of the trailer park. She tried to fight, but I caught her wrist and pried the blade from her hand.
She fought and kicked and bit and cried. I wrapped my arms around her and held tight so she couldn’t hurt herself.
She tried to claw my arms. I adjusted my grip and waited. Minutes passed, or maybe hours, until time extinguished the last glimmer of our fairy dust.
“I want to fly,” she whispered furiously.
“I know.” Neither of us would ever fly again. “Your mother asked me to find you. Your parents miss you. Do you remember them?”
She shook harder and buried her face in my arm.
I looked over at the trailer. I knew where and who Peter was now, but I couldn’t come back. Not yet. There were too many parents like Gwen Akerman. Too many families that had never stopped screaming. Too many girls now lost and afraid, facing that terrible journey back.
Purpose took root in the stone inside me. I couldn’t make that journey for them, but I could be their compass. I could help them along the way.
For now, I simply held Clover in my arms. Two Found Girls, grieving together.
("Twisted Fairies: Tinker Bell" by jeftoon01)
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[b](Part 3) (The finale)[/b]
* * *
[i]Fairies indeed are strange, and Peter, who understood them best, often cuffed them.
—J. M. Barrie[/i]
* * *
Four Found Girls seized my limbs and hauled me into the air.
“We fly west.” I searched their eyes for any hint of my Lillian. “As fast as you can.”
Higher and swifter we flew. The lights of London soon faded behind us. We passed over Reading and Bristol and Cardiff, and then the lights of civilization were replaced by cold wind and the dark waves of the ocean.
Faster yet we went—the shooting star that was Tinker Bell, the children whose hands dug into my clothes and flesh to keep me aloft, and the rest of the Found Girls. I studied each one in turn, trying to pierce whatever magical delusion kept me from the truth.
We moved like a school of fish swimming through the clouds. For hours we flew, following wind and moon and stars. It was like a memory of a dream, more vivid than reality itself. Even as my despair grew heavier, part of me yearned to fly like this forever.
All too soon, the lights of another coast rose from the darkness. From there, it was easy enough to adjust course over North America. I used my phone’s GPS to lead us to our destination. We dropped to Earth in the middle of an ill-maintained road winding through a familiar trailer park in central Ohio.
A few dogs barked as we walked. Figures peeked through their windows, but nobody challenged us.
I stopped in front of a green-and-white double-wide with a beat-up SUV parked beside it. The Found Girls started toward the trailer, but I put myself before them, my arms spread protectively. “Where is Lillian?”
Tinker Bell flew past me to the window. On a faded curtain, the silhouette of a young boy bounced and swung a toy sword. The boy who had forgotten.
[i]“You stupid ass. What game is this? That’s not Peter.”[/i]
I barely heard her. I couldn’t look away from that magical child who jumped and played and flew. I moved closer, until my hands pressed the cold aluminum siding. Tinker Bell might not see, but I knew who he was.
Uncomfortable laughter from the Found Girls. Two of them seized my arms. I had no fight left. Let them hit me and cut me and kill me, so I could fly again. Far from everything, until I found my Lillian.
A man inside the trailer called out, “Pete, have you brushed your teeth yet?”
The bouncing stopped. “Yeah, Dad.”
Another voice, this one female and tinged with warning. “Peter . . .”
“All right, all right.” If it was possible for a shadow to look sheepish, this one did. It vanished as the boy—Peter—hurried off to brush his teeth.
How I longed to be a fairy. To be too small to feel more than one thing at a time. Tinker Bell never had to deal with such a tangle of confusion and grief, longing and pain, all of it hollowing me out like a Halloween pumpkin.
[i]“You’re a liar.”[/i]
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Who’s out there?” called the man. Peter’s father. I knew his voice in all its shades. Loving and tender. Pained and grieving. Cold and helpless.
The curtains parted. I ducked away.
Tinker Bell and the Found Girls vanished in an instant. I pressed my body against the trailer, out of sight, and hugged myself.
I barely noticed when the curtains closed and the Found Girls reemerged. I felt lost, trapped in that place between sleep and awake, where dreams and reality danced and chased each other in an endless game.
Lillian wasn’t here. All those years . . . I hadn’t been searching. I’d been running.
Étoilée moved closer, tapping her club against her open hand. “Want us to punish her?”
“You can’t,” I whispered. I raised my chin and waited.
[i]“She’s a madwoman, broken and lost. Let her live, trapped in her own lunacy.”[/i]
When they started to disperse, I spoke without thought. “Don’t leave me, Tinka Bell!”
She flew back to me. [i]“What did you call me?”[/i]
Fragments of memory cut through the dreams. “I used to call you Tinka Bell.”
[i]“You said your daughter was one of my Found Girls.”[/i] She moved closer, peering into my eyes. [i]“She wasn’t. But you were.”[/i]
They were the cruelest words she could have spoken. If Tinker Bell had taken Lillian, it meant there was a chance I could get her back. But she hadn’t. That truth pierced me like an arrow and tossed me to the ground, to memories I’d fled for so long. The beeping of hospital equipment. Pale, sunken skin. Powder spread on Lillian’s skin to prevent bedsores.
“We lived in a house outside Columbus,” I said numbly. “I was home with Lillian. She fell down the stairs and hit her head. She never woke up.” For more than a month we’d stayed with her at the hospital, hoping and praying.
[i]“Little Angela. I remember you. So happy to come with me, away from rules and lessons and manners. Look at what you’ve become.”[/i]
I was a child again, burning in shame at Tinka Bell’s disapproval.
[i]“Who was that boy in the trailer?”[/i]
“My son. I named him Peter.” My shame grew. He’d been eleven months old when I left. Too young to remember me.
[i]“You pitiful ass. You meant to give me your own son?”[/i]
“No!”
[i]“Then it was a trick!”[/i]
“It wasn’t—I didn’t know.” I’d forgotten my own son. Or had some part of me remembered? Had this been my unconscious goal, the endgame to my madness? Tinker Bell realizing this wasn’t Peter Pan and ordering her Found Girls to punish me, to put an end to my long hunt?
[i]“I remember the night we lost you. We’d taken four girls, but a man with a gun shot you from the sky. He shot me, too. Your belief helped me fly away.”[/i]
I’d been with Tinker Bell for decades, never aging. When I returned to this world, my parents were both long gone. I’d been passed from one foster home to another, given countless colorful pills while doctors talked to about depression and psychosis, about abandoning my childhood imaginings of flight and freedom.
Slowly I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the other Found Girls. At Clover. I remembered the grief in her mother’s eyes.
For the first time in years, my thoughts were clear. My hand shot out to close around the fairy’s slender body. Fairy dust shivered from her skin onto mine. I clung to those memories of freedom and innocence and worship among the Found Girls, remembering a time before I knew what pain and grief truly meant, and I [i]flew[/i].
* * *
[i]“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.” That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.
—J. M. Barrie[/i]
* * *
The Found Girls tried to follow, but I remembered now. How to fly, how to maneuver between the trees, how to ride the whirls and gusts of the wind. I led them on a merry chase, laughing through tears as one by one they fell away, unable to follow where I was going.
Tinker Bell squirmed and fought until I gave a warning squeeze. I couldn’t kill her, but immortality wouldn’t protect her from the pain of crushed bones.
Soon we raced over another ocean, through salty, rumbling clouds. An island grew beneath us. I couldn’t tell if we were descending, or if the island was coming toward us. Maybe there was no difference.
I landed in a clearing made of granite, smoothed and polished to a cold, glass finish. Rose petals rained from the sky, melting into red-tinged rings when they touched the ground. Weeping willow trees surrounded us. Wind whispered through their branches.
I loosed my grip, and Tinker Bell shot up out of reach. [i]“This is the Neverland. How—”[/i]
“It’s not, exactly.” I began to walk. “This is my Neverland. This is where I fled when Lillian died.”
With each step, the grief and nightmares came to life. A wet breeze carried the sharp smell of antiseptic. Through the willow branches, I glimpsed shadowy doctors rustling about, their fingers tipped with the needles they’d used to try to save Lillian.
“I never truly forgot you,” I said. “No matter how many doctors I talked to, how many medicines they gave me. No matter how I grew up. After Lillian made me a mother, you began to return in my dreams. You didn’t want me, of course, but I was terrified you’d take her. Night after night I woke up to reassure myself she was still in her crib. In her bed. Then, in the hospital, I woke to make sure she was still breathing. I still wake up in the night, but I’d forgotten why.”
[i]“I don’t like this place. Take me back!”[/i]
“I don’t want to.” Here, I could forget. Here, I could fly. On this island, I was Peter Pan. I was key and compass and master and prisoner. “It took a long time to make my way back to the real world, last time.”
I hadn’t made it. Not entirely. My thoughts and memories were too heavy. I’d had to leave some behind. I’d smashed the remaining fragments together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces. “All those years I was afraid you’d take her. But at least if you’d stolen her, I had a chance of getting her back. So that’s the story I told myself.”
[i]“I’ll let you be a Found Girl again. You’ll fly and dance and play and believe. You’ll be happy.”[/i]
I stopped walking. “I’m too old.”
[i]“You don’t have to be.”[/i]
It struck me that Tinker Bell wasn’t angry anymore. Her rage would return soon enough, but right now there was no room for it. Right now, she was afraid.
[i]“You can be one of my children. I’ll be your mother again.”[/i]
Had I been happy? I knew I hadn’t wanted to leave. I remembered sobbing and screaming after her the night she left me behind.
I also remembered the four girls we’d stolen that night, and the man who’d fought so desperately to stop us.
When he found me, his grief and anger hadn’t changed, but another emotion joined them—compassion. He’d driven me to the hospital, made sure I was cared for. He never threatened or tried to hurt me. He simply asked—begged—for me to tell him how to find his children.
I couldn’t help him. Just like I couldn’t help Lillian.
I remembered my screams the night Lillian’s breathing finally stopped. Listening to the howling wind, I realized I’d never stopped screaming.
I twisted around and hovered directly in front of Tinker Bell. “I wonder,” I said carelessly, “how long it will take them to forget you.”
She brightened with fury as I flew away. I plunged through the willow trees. Tinker Bell followed, but I knew this place. I’d fought its hazards. I tore through branches that reached to drag us down. I dodged the numbing claws. I flew higher, shielding my eyes against the sudden rainfall.
It wasn’t long until the ringing of bells fell behind and faded into silence.
* * *
[i]Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was real now. . . .
—J. M. Barrie[/i]
* * *
The Found Girls were waiting in the darkness around the trailer. They scattered when they realized I’d returned alone. Those few who still bore active fairy dust flew away like birds. The rest scampered like rabbits.
I swooped toward Clover and knocked her down in a patch of grass toward the edge of the trailer park. She tried to fight, but I caught her wrist and pried the blade from her hand.
She fought and kicked and bit and cried. I wrapped my arms around her and held tight so she couldn’t hurt herself.
She tried to claw my arms. I adjusted my grip and waited. Minutes passed, or maybe hours, until time extinguished the last glimmer of our fairy dust.
“I want to fly,” she whispered furiously.
“I know.” Neither of us would ever fly again. “Your mother asked me to find you. Your parents miss you. Do you remember them?”
She shook harder and buried her face in my arm.
I looked over at the trailer. I knew where and who Peter was now, but I couldn’t come back. Not yet. There were too many parents like Gwen Akerman. Too many families that had never stopped screaming. Too many girls now lost and afraid, facing that terrible journey back.
Purpose took root in the stone inside me. I couldn’t make that journey for them, but I could be their compass. I could help them along the way.
For now, I simply held Clover in my arms. Two Found Girls, grieving together.
[b]("Twisted Fairies: Tinker Bell" by jeftoon01)[/b]