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By Root 481 0

lived in a castle together. They woke up together, bumped wings as they jostled one another for position at the bathroom sink—equipped with gold fixtures in the shape of swans’ heads. When we were younger, it had been the habit of our mother to tell us to go to sleep quickly; that way, the fairies would come sooner to paint stars on our ceiling. I liked believing this was true, and incorporated the notion enough that I often had dreams about those fairies. They were blonde, with the exception of one raven-haired fairy, my favorite, who wore only red and had the look of possible evil in her eyes. The fairies always wore the same thing, sparkly gossamer gowns that tied around their middles with gold ribbon in a crisscross arrangement impossible to duplicate—I had often tried. The only difference between the fairies’ gowns was in the color. There was a pale apricot, a bright yellow, a dusky purple, and many shades of blue. And red, of course, a red so deep it neared black in the small valleys of the folds. The gowns trailed off at the end as though someone had set about erasing them from the bottom up, but then had gotten distracted and gone away. You could not see shoes, or feet; only the disappearing edges of a fantasy.

In my dream, I’d been given a large gold key to unlock the fairies’ closet door. It was a high, white cabinet, trimmed with gold. I opened the door, then stood before a line of their gowns, the sparkles winking at me. I could not believe my nearness. I had just reached out a hand to touch them when Sharla got through to me.

“Let’s go!” she whispered harshly. “Why are you sleeping?”

This seemed a dumb question. I didn’t answer it. Instead, I sat up and straightened my T-shirt and underpants as though I were preparing to leave for work, which I suppose I was.

“You have to wear your robe,” Sharla said. She was wearing hers, and she handed me mine. It was a white quilted thing, with rhinestone buttons. It was just like Sharla’s, only smaller. We hated our robes. They were a gift from our grandmother, our mother’s mother, who always sent us clothes we hated. She did not understand us, we felt. And she would call us from her home in New York the day after we had received whatever she sent and we were expected to go on and on about it. “Did you notice the buttons?” she’d asked about the robe.

“They’re very pretty,” I’d responded dutifully. Actually, I did like the buttons. But not there. I wanted to use them for something else. Eyes in a voodoo doll I intended to make, for example. I needed someone else’s hair for that, though. I was waiting to cut Sharla’s when she was sleeping, but the occasion hadn’t presented itself, because so far, when she was sleeping, I was sleeping, too. I was waiting for her to get sick.

“Why do we have to wear robes?” I asked.

“Because it’s someone else’s house, dummy.”

“But it’s empty!”

“Be quiet, or we’ll get caught.” She cupped her hands around my ear, whispered into it, “You can’t be in your underwear in someone else’s house. Just put your robe on. Let’s go.”

I was hungry, I realized suddenly. I wanted to eat something before I went to work. But Sharla, walking before me with her back ramrod straight, was going to be in no mood for dillydallying. Still, when we passed through the kitchen on the way to the front door, I opened a cupboard and grabbed the first thing I felt, which was a bag of marshmallows. A good choice, and a lucky one.

The moon was full and bright white; you could have read by it. I stowed this information away; next time, we would do that, bring out books and read by the light of the moon. They would need to be the right books, of course. Ones about witches, say, or magazine love stories with plenty of kissing scenes. You could find them in the Ladies’ Home Journal, complete with illustrations. The women always had their red lips parted; the mens’ heads bowed low, moving toward the women in perpetuity. A wind was always blowing, so as to arrange the women’s hair in wild and irresistible styles.

Outside Mrs. O’Donnell’s door I felt a sudden rush of fear.