I
woke up as a fairy in the empty restaurant next to the woods. I suppose I always knew when I wanted to live
in the doll house in the attic that my hopes and dreams beat inside of a tiny
heart. But not until I opened my eyes
and found myself crouching in the furthest corner of the kitchen pantry did I
know for certain.
I had been gone for a year—where, I
couldn’t say. But I did know I’d been
very ill, and that during this illness some industrious housekeeper within had
thrown huge dust covers over much of my memory.
I wasn’t sure I minded. Something
about the twilight endlessly falling over the woods told me that the last good
day had been long ago.
The restaurant, however, I
remembered. Quietly elegant, its white
tablecloths, spotless place settings, and crystal water glasses spoke of
another time. Windows ran the length of
the entire outside wall: restless trees
and half-lit sky filled the view as far as the eye could see. In the cramped kitchen, steel gray units and
panelled cabinets housed the pots, pans, and other cooking items. And then there was the pantry, nearly empty,
where I now found myself. I had never
seen anyone cooking in that kitchen.
Save one, I had never seen another soul in the restaurant at all.
In this endless sunset that enveloped
the restaurant, no customers ever came.
Instead, my friend Marietta, the hostess, usually sat at one of the
perfectly made tables by herself, doing paperwork of a kind we never discussed. Only the fading light that rippled through
those whispering trees dared enter the large T-shaped room. Why were there no customers? On my previous visits I’d only seen Marietta
in that hushed hour of solitude. Like so
many other questions I must have forgotten to ask her this one, too.
Now, in the pantry, I stretched
myself and without thinking remembered how to fly—I began running until
suddenly my wings caught air and lifted me off of the hardwood floor. From the kitchen I turned down the narrow,
artificially lit hallway that led into the dining room. No one waited for me; not even Marietta sat
at her usual table. Only I existed,
passing through, a lightning bug in disguise.
But
while the restaurant was familiar, it was not safe. I would need to find some other shelter, to
clear my head, maybe to sleep and wake up again as something else. In the lobby I held my breath and squeezed
through the narrowest of gaps between the locked double doors. When I exhaled again I rolled, tumbleweed
style, into the magnificent hall that joined the restaurant to the great
corridor.
This
corridor, illuminated by glass chandeliers, was, like the restaurant, empty and
silent. The noise of my beating wings
sounded too loud in the stillness around me.
As I buzzed along, weaving and bobbing, expecting to plummet to the ground
at any moment yet moving forward all the while, I felt vaguely troubled. My illness had made the many snickets of my
mind as dusky as the sky outside, but that wasn’t the problem. I’d been ill before. I had forgotten before. But when I’d woken up the other times, it was
to find myself at school and late for a math exam, with just a faint,
frustrated notion of where my classroom might be. I was used to that, even if I hated it. I was not used to this fairy business.
Uneasily,
I wondered if I would ever be big again.
Where would I live until I was?
The doll house in the attic had gone long ago. As with nearly everything else I cared about,
it had been sacrificed for a future that kept morphing into a past I could not
remember.
The
corridor seemed miles longer than usual, maybe because I was so little
now. I peered into all sorts of paper
thin passageways I’d never noticed when I was big, but they were so dark and
uninviting that I dared not travel down any of them. I needed to solve this fairy riddle
first.
Still,
my woolly thoughts seemed to be leading me somewhere, so I pushed out of my
mind the math exams I’d missed, the classrooms I couldn’t find. I didn’t want to think about the times I woke
up in a library, with only a few days left to write a year-end term paper I
hadn’t even started. I never knew how
these crises turned out, because suddenly they would be over, and I would be
here, on my way to the restaurant to visit Marietta. She never asked where I’d been. She was my friend.
Finally
the hallway widened into a large, silent atrium, with massive stairs leading to
the second floor. I buzzed up the
staircase, following its curvature instead of simply flying straight up. In the much smaller hallway off to the right
some instinct, or past experience, brought me to a small bedroom, gently lit by
a reading lamp. I didn’t know whose it
was or why no one slept there tonight, but I did know I would be safe here—at
least for a little while.
The
bed, however, was not an option. I
fluttered over to the tall chest of drawers.
Each drawer had been left open, just the tiniest bit: I settled for the middle drawer, the one with
the thick woolly winter sweaters. When I
was big I’d hated wool and its scratchy, suffocating warmth, but now I curled myself
into a tight ball between a snowflake-patterned jumper and a purple cabled
cardigan and let out a little sigh.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I would be big again.
Tomorrow I might remember why I kept forgetting.
