Faerie Grandmother

By: J.R. Harrington.

Great Grandma Mary always said she was a faerie. A stroke of whimsy for a young mind. She said “maybe someday” when you asked to see her wings; but before Someday came, Great Grandma went insane.

When you were small she lived far outside of town, in a little house with a big yard verging into the deep green New York woods, alone but for Pretty Kitty, a white ragdoll with piercing blue eyes. Your brother called her “the dark great-grandma,” after her dyed-dark hair, but somehow you always knew her name.

You remember the long drive, arriving late at night—God only knows why. The quiet stillness of the deep woods stretching out in the distance; a forest you never entered. The verdant color and subtle stirring of foliage always struck you as something just a little magical.

Entering through the deck, the scent of powdery floral perfume hung in wisps in the wet air. The smell always brought you a sense of ease, comfort, in your turbulent young life that feeling was rare. A lovely lone woman would greet you in the kitchen, smiling with what seems now as pained-relief.

She was tall, then, or you were small. You remember the softness of her skin and the well-formed curls of her dyed-auburn hair, covering the tips of maybe-pointed ears. The elegant clothing she always wore, golden jewelry and the styles of an out-of-date real-estate agent. It seemed impossible, to you, that she could be anything but put-together. It intimidated you, a little, but you longed to grow up fast and become just like her.

She gave you a coloring book of stained-glass sprites, floral and insectoid, alongside a regular paper one of faeries labeled for the plants that inspired them. You colored thick translucent paper with great care, the one with big wings and honeysuckle, which reminded you of your faerie grandmother.

She taped it, prim and straight, on the glass door to her deck. In the mornings when the sunlight streamed through and scattered sporadic rainbows on the walls at your fathers house, you wondered how the colors of that page flowed outward, falling on tile and Pretty Kitty’s soft white fur as he sunbathed. As you thought and imagined, a whiff of floral scent coaxed open the door and became at home in you.

You asked her daughter for a faerie skirt for your birthday, and so it was sewn; triangular panels, two layers, scalloped points gently rounded like cat’s ears, flowery print like the smell of Great Grandma. You wore it everyday when you got home from school, and you spun, and made up nonsense words to form your own system of magic; waving sticks ending in stale leaves and shouting “Scaboomba!” at squirrels. Nothing ever happened, but you still didn’t doubt that you were something magical. How could you? If Great Grandma Mary was a faerie, that meant you were part of that world too.

After an age and a day you forgot your firm belief in her honesty. What use were faeries, when so many things tore at you on the daily? What reason did you have, to wonder if your great grandfaerie still hung your stained-glass portrait for Pretty Kitty to lay under?

You felt other, separate. Disregarded by your peers, you sat flicking pages and pretending it didn’t hurt. You wore your strangeness as a badge of honor, deciding if they didn’t like you it was only because you were better, smarter, bigger inside than out in a way they could never understand. You told your peers you were a vampire, an alien, a were-cat. You told them

that you meowed at the full moon, and sprouted great fluffy ears and a big feather-duster tail to match your piercing blue eyes.

Eventually, you stumbled upon a book that reminded you, tangentially, of your great grandmother. A version of Wonderland full of strangely shaped creatures with mischievous tendencies. As you read of a girl who was part faerie without ever knowing, you dreamed of falling into the fold of the fae.

You clung to old words as an explanation, the real reason you were so different, distant, detached from the people you were meant to be the same as. A reason you couldn’t look anyone in the eye, why you cried when you lied, why you always forgot to say “thank you,” why you felt so much safer in the woods with a breeze stirring the leaves. Why the deep night and the croaks of summer-frogs and chirps of cicadas soothe you so, as you play the character of “wild thing”.

You scoured the internet for further information—lore from old epics, crackpot theories, new age hippie websites—you took it all, and compiled it in daintily written notes in stark black pen. At a certain point you began to compare and contrast, applying what you had learned to who you knew. You created a world that welcomed you, more than the real one ever had.

Faeries never lied—using that as evidence must be some kind of logical fallacy. But Great Grandma Mary only wore gold. In the Celtic mythology, faeries were weak to iron. Some of your internet sources said silver as well, and some said that stainless steel, as a composite of iron, was also off-limits.

You began wearing a pliable gold M ring that was sent across the country to you when Mary went senile. Rubbing your thumb against that reminder of her made you miss what used to be, but you still wore it every day for a year.

The summer she got diagnosed, her daughter took you and your brother back to her house. You didn’t see your stained-glass faerie in the dining room on the door. Your aunt said you could take something to remind yourself of her. It felt wrong to take a memento of a woman still living. You wandered the house like a ghost while your brother and grandma stayed in the garage sifting through stuffed animals.

Her cozy house didn’t smell like you remembered. You took one last chance to explore her basement, crying at plastic tea-cups you used to play with as a kid, smiling at the pillow your brother sewed her still on that old couch. The rooms you used to hide in didn’t feel so scary, now, though spider-webs caught in your hair.

In her bathroom you found a small heart-shaped box, gold with ivory-white enamel and stained-glass flowers adorning the lid. It had an unexpected worldliness to it; nothing strange, just ornate and old. You were expecting powdered perfume within, but when you pushed in the locking mechanism and clicked it open there was nothing but a few pills in the empty plastic shell.

You set the pills on the sink-counter, not thinking too long about what they could be. Holding the container to your nose, it still smelled just faintly of that floating sweetness of home. With guilty tears in your eyes, you nestled the dainty case into your pocket, hiding it and feeling like a bandit.

When you saw her again she was living with her daughter, your great aunt, in an apartment that felt like another world. A comfortable place; all her favorite bedclothes and

porcelain cats, Pretty Kitty laid on her bed waiting for her to remember him, and pet him so gently and nicely again.

She thought you were your mother. Everyone always said you looked just like her, but when she called you by her name it hurt like nothing else ever had before. Suddenly, she was frail. Suddenly, she was like a child. She didn’t mention the fair folk. You didn’t either. Her only focus was her confusion and her Pretty Kitty.

She showed him to you over and again, forgetting that she already had. She told you “you can pet him,” in gentle cooing tones like she sensed the sob you were holding tight in your chest. You had never felt further from home as you excused yourself to another room to let yourself cry for a few minutes. By the time you came back, she had forgotten you were there at all.

“What’s your name?” she asked you, calm and kind like she was speaking to an unfamiliar child lost in a grocery store. You thought of her assertion that she was a faerie and suddenly you didn’t want to give it to her, for fear that she had forgotten she loved you and would steal it away.

Your great-aunt asked you to stay and make sure she didn’t wander while she went to get groceries. You don’t remember what you talked about, and neither does she. You wonder if she remembered that she was supposed to love you, somewhere deep inside. You try to tell yourself that’s why she spoke so softly.

Things took a turn for even-worse, as they’re apt to. She became volatile, violent. She slapped your aunt, and said that she was trapped, and lamented how much she just wanted to go home. Great Grandfaerie Mary stole her daughter's truck one day and went on a joyride, down the highway to Walmart. After her joyride, she was sent to a nursing home. You wonder if her mind remembers to be lonely. You can’t decide if you hope it does or not.

You think constantly that you never spent enough time with her. You wish so strongly that you could just speak to her again. That you could tell her about the love she grew in you, for the strange and otherworldly things. You want to tell her that wildflowers make you feel like you’re safe and home with her again—you rarely saw her, but in some strange way she was home.

You wish you could discuss your research of the faeries she introduced to you, of your longing to find a circle of glowing mushrooms in the forest and disregard your self-preservation instinct to step inside.

You’ve read that if a human spends too long in the realm of the fae, they become one themselves; slowly losing their saneness and becoming that feral tricky sort of beast. You decided at some point that Great Grandfaerie Mary’s illness was that working in reverse. She spent too long away from the fae, and lost her wildness. Became soft, and sweet, and eventually, lost her sharp edges altogether. It’s ridiculous, but that at least means she can be saved—if you just find the fold quick enough, that mythical portal rumored to live on the old family farm where she came from—you can help her down within the earth and meet her again, in full.

You imagine her as a butterfly, entering her domain and constructing a chrysalis on instinct; human caterpillar preparing to dissolve into insectoid goop. Only to emerge a month later with swooping wings, the kind you always imagined her with, smelling once again of soft

floral notes instead of lightly-scented soap. A new-old her, with great stained-glass wings beating through rich blue skies.

Instead, your great grand faerie lives in a nursing home, and you stay in her melancholic apartment when you work at the county fair. You slowly accumulate all her gold jewelry, which the rest of your family won’t or can’t wear. Her Pretty Kitty lives with a relative you don’t remember meeting. The only trace of home is found in the stuffed owl your aunt sent out for Christmas, though even that blessing slowly fades…