Fairy Bred

Awaken from glistening broth; you are born glowing, incandescent, a bloom of shimmer-hot polymer musk.

Awaken, all the portions of your being, peeled from metal wombs.

Here, steeple of legs cut flat above the thigh; here, wedding-cake tiers of hip and waist, insectoid hooks to mount your wings; here, head and bust fused to forever outheld arms—sorceress on the cusp of incantation, high priestess composing a miracle, necromancer commanding her undead army to rise. Anointed with lip and eye, articulated lashes, pink tunic, en-pointe slippers. Petal-shaped blades of wings that when at rest fold over your skirt like armour. Your sisters’ hair is painted in creamy colours, Easter egg lavenders and pinks and blues; yours is custard yellow, a softly chiselled bun.

Child, you are far from the home of your fairy ancestors, from dewy glade and loamy toadstool, from gossamer rainbow and starlit dawn. These ones who frolicked in secret glens, in overlooked rain-stippled garden corners, in those same places where moss and lichen flourish and the mushrooms flex their sumptuous gills. You will never smell those hallowed grounds. Only this: machine heat, gelatinous cauldrons, plastic cured hard and flawless, limbs and torsos snapped together in their thousands by hurried hands.

You’re a copy of a copy in numerous fashions, a likeness of a likeness. Your arrival has been foretold in television commercials: two youths in pastel sweaters laughing in a light-filled bedroom; they hold out their hands as if testing for rain, and their toy fairies (you, but not you) pirouette and soar in soft slow motion. Glimmering crucifixes; dip, rise.

Child, you are far from the home of your fairy ancestors, from dewy glade and loamy toadstool.

The key to your magic is that your waist-and-hip segment twirls at a different speed to your head-and-arms segment, which incites, as your patent proclaims, more astonishment to the user. But the commercial’s ethereal vocalising and fluttering harps conceal your best and fiercest feature, which is that the rapid spin of your petal-shaped wings sounds like a motherfucking power saw. Like you ought to be slashing carrots to smithereens, or churning at the end of a travelator while a shackled, spread-eagled secret agent drifts crotch-first towards you.

Eeee ohh eeee ohh eeee! You cannot fly without screaming, this shrill violent howl.

The instruments of your confinement are nestled in your skirt: nautilus organs of transmitter, receiver, circuit board; the vertical fire and bounce of signals that curtail or boost your motor’s power. There is a predetermined height that you will never exceed, a secret value that governs the lilt and lift of your flight and compels your ascent at the user’s outheld hand.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is that you are blessed with a secret sense; you perceive more than what these others—these inventors, makers, users—can possibly perceive, a sliver of reality which only you can inhabit. Great chorus of signals darting like fireflies, how they ricochet and sing. Despite your permutations and evolutions, you are still a child of your ancestors. Your birthright is magic.

No? Well maybe there’s no ancient lore here, no sacred stories or grand lineage, just you and your thousand sisters slotted into clear-plastic-fronted boxes, your trademarked family name scribed in sparkling filigree, sent forth to fulfil your promise of mathematically choreographed astonishment.

A user is already dreaming of your arrival—she has requested you specifically, the one with yellow hair. Petitioning her parents, God and Santa every night, printing each letter of your name in crayon-fisted script. The young pass their dreams to each other: you are wanted, you are wanted. Oh, how you are wanted. The plastic restraints at your neck and wrists cannot dim your charm.

There are several times when a would-be user snatches you from the display—brings you before the parents, those pleading clamours morphing into the shrill howls you understand completely. It is painful, all the human want in the world, but you can carry it; you, all lightness and wonder. Perhaps this carrying is your true birthright: your ancestors could be the scapegoat for everything from stolen cow’s milk, to a missing child, to a lost traveller, to a mislaid thought. Tricksters, playmates, guardians, wives; harbingers of a pestilence warded away by amulets and rituals. Good fairy, bad fairy. Benevolent, malevolent. Which mould has made you?

It is a relief when you are selected for good, taken down from the pedestal at last. When the glossy underside of wrapping paper enfolds you, pressed sharp against your plastic window, all you see is white. Cold radiance of white.

While you wait—and you can wait forever—you nurture your own dreams. You are after all manufactured from divine resin; there was a time when you could have become anything, taken any shape or form, before the tidal edge of your will crept into the corners of the mould and hardened. At one point in time, you were as likely to be a garden fork as a baseball bat, a clamshell pool as a hamburger, a triceratops as a cash register, a squirrel as a building block.

But in your favourite dream, you are of all things a berry.

You are a berry snuggled underneath an uncooked sheet of pie pastry.

You can see the distant warm light of the kitchen through the pastry, and you’re nestled in with all your other sister berries in your viscous pool of syrup. The sheet of pastry will protect you, will become ever more golden, and you will come into yourself with sweetness. You will never be allowed to grow hard, to surrender your moisture to the air. Why should you be so incongruous, you the fairy and you the berry? You are both children honeyed by the heat.

That’s the other life you’re dreaming for yourself when the first stripe of wrapping paper is peeled from your carapace. And at last: eye to eye with your user, her trills of delight spiralling out like so many pencil shavings. She slides out your cardboard frame; the mother brings the scissors to snip your bonds.

There was a time when you could have become anything, taken any shape or form.

Such a wellspring of eagerness, this child—how promptly she squares the row of batteries in your charging base, how practised her fingers as she snaps the polarities in their correct positions. She has studied the instructional videos already and knows that she must flick the switch on your skirt, lodge you toes-first in the charger base, wait for the blinking red light to turn orange. She is a resourceful one. Her confidence is dazzling; she seems to know how the world works. It is Christmas and there will never be a cosier day of the year, no other time when the smoke from the fireplace will smell so sweet, when magic will linger even in the many torn shells of wrapping paper. On this day she is as important as the adults in the room, and this importance fills her; today is a good day to exist.

How can you not brim with awe at this wonder? Everything is all step one, step two, step three, step four; every movement has its assured conclusion. Her life is a rainbow necklace of and then, and then, and then, one surety clicking the next; when she wakes up there will be breakfast, when she tunnels her body through a sweater her head will fit through the exit, when she lifts her arms for an embrace there will be arms to receive her. How a thing can glow when the boundaries are loving. She has lived a long life already, and she will live a long life after this.

So what happens next has very little to do with the girl. You aren’t a human, after all; you are all magic, all fairy.

What happens after your legs are clutched in the fist of this girl, and she narrates her actions to the mother’s indulgent camera and wobbles you into your launcher base—what happens is not the least bit spiteful, not the least bit wicked.

What happens next is because you realise the truth of yourself, that the formula for astonishment is not a limitation to obey, but a calling to rise above. The girl presses the lip-shaped button with the ornate symbol of a keyhole at its centre. She releases you to the air.

You are flying at last, soaring on the soprano chainsaw whistle of your rotor skirt.

Eeee ohh eeee ohh eeee!

The user holds out her hand and your feet kiss her fingers, the last time you’ll ever touch her.

Rise, rise, rise ever higher, bright mechanical dandelion spore.

You miraculous wonder, you wild egg-beater helicopter oscillating tool blade spinning-wheel carving knife dancer. Take your magic back; turn yourself again into divine resin. Soar towards the fragrant smoke of the fireplace and in one clean move like the swipe of a sword (oh no! the user cries—ah, sweet astonishment) swoop into the flame.

Ashes to ashes, polymers to polymers. A fairy’s destiny is always light.

This story is part of our New Short Fiction series. We’re looking for short stories from the country’s best and brightest writers—find out more!