"The Tooth Fairy Pillow"

 

When I was younger, I had a small pillow, pink with lace trim and a pocket about as wide as the diameter of a quarter sewn onto the front, where I kept the baby teeth that I lost. The night after a tooth had fallen out, I would slip the dead little bit of enamel into the pocket. In the morning, the pocket would hold a coin. My tooth fairy was somewhat lax in her duties, though; often, she left the teeth tucked inside along with the quarter. As more and more teeth fell out of my mouth and ended up in the pillow, I swore that I could hear them clacking together at night, as if someone were talking very quickly, or shivering in the cold.

I hadn't thought much about the tooth fairy pillow until the other day, when I was cleaning the hair out of my brush. I'm used to imagining the tangled bunches that I pull out as tumbleweeds as they drift down toward the garbage can. This time, as it was falling, the mass of hair sprouted tiny legs and feet from its bottom side, landed on the can with its toes curled over the rim, and leaped onto the floor, where it dashed toward a crack in the wall. I thought I had been hallucinating until this morning, when some of my fingernail clippings joined together and grew a hand out of nothing, and afterwards proceeded to run out the front door like the Thing.

Sometimes I've thought about the parts of me that I've lost over the years, and the other lives that I or some other version of me might have gone on to live. Now there's a knocking on my door downstairs, and I find myself wondering, What about all the thoughts I used to have? The stories I once dreamed and the terrors I used to fear? What might have become of them?

"Save Yourself"

 

The faerie coughed and spluttered and shook out her wings. She grasped the straw and began pulling herself up, as if she were a victim of a shipwreck, saved from the sea by a rope ladder. The man watched her through the sides of the pint glass while she hoisted herself toward standing. "You saved me," he heard her say from inside the tumbler. "I never could swim. If it hadn't been for you...."

"No one's going to believe this," the man said. 

"What? That faeries are real?"

"That I did something useful," he replied as he dropped his head between his knees, reached for the potted plant in the corner near his table, and expelled from his stomach the Long Island Iced Tea that he had downed only moments before.

"Then It Will Be Safe"

 

Little Em could hear their yelps and screams all the way in the corner where he usually lurked. With sunset fast approaching, he figured it would be safe to try to sneak a look, so he crept along the wall and climbed up to the windowsill. He had just brought his eyes to the level of the glass when he felt a claw close around his ankle and drag him to the floor.

He looked up from where he had landed and saw his grandmother, bent like the moon, standing over him. "What did I tell you about going out before dark?" she snapped. "What did I tell you about the children? You know what they'll do to you."

Little Em rolled his bright red eyes. "They'll make me ride bicycles and eat ice cream," he dutifully intoned.

"Darn straight they will," said Gram. "Now crawl back through the cracks and practice scratching on the walls."

Little Em ambled toward the shadows while his grandmother marched behind him. He didn't tell her that, before his tumble, he had managed to catch sight of them, because then he'd have to admit that they were every bit as horrible as the stories made them sound. Yet despite their toothy smiles and their upright walk, Little Em still found himself dogged by the notion that children weren't completely awful. All those stories about eating ice cream had to be fake. Maybe, he thought, if no one was watching later while he played under the bed, he'd go see what there was to see. It will be dark, he told himself, suddenly feeling brave. Then it will be safe.

"The Next Big Thing Is Here"

 

The sculptor ran his fingers over the words he had engraved onto the mirrored surface. Then, with a sigh, he took his screwdriver from the pocket of his vest, crouched, and began working to liberate his sculpture from the pedestal that had supported it for the past several months.

It was because each side of the cube he had crafted bore a mirror that he saw the two boys approaching from the other side of the garden. As long and lean as they were, he assumed that their reflections were being pulled thin because of the distance--"Objects in Mirror Are More Awkwardly Adolescent Than They Appear." Only when the boys were next to the sculptor, and he stood to acknowledge them, did he realize that the mirror had actually diminished their gangliness.

One boy said to him, "So did you, like, put this here?"

"Nope," the sculptor replied cheerfully, "I'm just looting and pilfering." The boys looked at each other sideways, and the sculptor eased his stance into something approaching friendliness. "I made this last year," he told them, "and then I set up here back in April. So yeah, I put it here."

"Okay, so," the same boy said. He shifted on the balls of his feet. "What is it?"

The sculptor let his shoulders fall. "Look, if I have to explain public art to you, it's already a lost cause."

The boys said nothing, confirming every little voice speaking out in the sculptor's head. But then the second stepped forward, his arms crossed in front of his chest like a shield. "You don't have to explain it," he said, "but is it, like, metaphor?"

As an artist, the sculptor sometimes felt as if he owed it to the world to look upon it with pity. He tried not to reveal this thought as he spoke. "Okay, here's what I was thinking about this work," he said, stepping toward them as if laying out a secret. "It's shaped like a box, right?" The boys looked at the cube and nodded. "With boxes, we're all taught to think about what's inside them. And with the words 'The Next Big Thing Is Here' on it, you assume that the Next Big Thing is inside, whatever it is." He raised a hand and lifted a finger. "But the whole cube is mirrored. All the world around the cube becomes part of the Here. And that means that anything we see around us can be the Next Big Thing. Even--" he folded his hands together "--the person looking at the cube."

The two boys glanced at each other. "So you're trying to get people to think outside the box," said Boy Number Two.

The sculptor's hands separated, and his fingers spread apart like the rays of a firework; suddenly, nothing was as it seemed in the mirror, which made everything around him wonderful. "Yes," he said, his eyes and mouth gone wide, "yes, exactly!"

"Nice," the first boy said as he and his friend turned to leave. As they walked away, the sculptor heard the second one say, "This whole time I thought it was an ad for something." And then the sculptor sighed once more and took his screwdriver to the base of the sculpture, because he didn't want to think about everything being screwed.

"Pen Rest"

Technically, this picture shows a stylus on top of its rest. Oops.

"And that's it for tonight," I said aloud. I tipped my head backward against the couch and closed my eyes, and laid my open notebook across my lap like a blanket.

"Another story?" I heard a voice say.

I opened my eyes. My pen was spinning between my index and middle finger as if I had gotten bored and begun twirling it myself. "Story time?" it asked.

"I think I need some rest," I said. "I'm imagining talking to my pen, for crying out loud." 

"But you can rest later," the pen protested. "You're already dreaming now." 

It was logic I found difficult to argue down. So I cradled my pen between forefinger and thumb with the gentleness I might have shown a child, and I drew my notebook close to my chest, taking comfort between its sheets.

"The Road Less Traveled"

 

For a while, I thought it was the one I saw in front of me, stretching from left to right like a smile and crossing my entire range of vision. I observed only one car moving along the road the whole time I was there. It motored forward swiftly and steadily, its pace like that of a hawk approaching prey.

Then lights came on above me. I saw them reflected into lanes across the rolling sky. A large bird rose from the top of a telephone pole and traveled west along that overhead highway. It was just a trick of the eyes.

Yet knowing that it was a trick--does that really make a difference?

"Buzzing"

 

One afternoon, a young girl thought about sticking her fingernail into an electrical socket, just to see how it would feel. Before she did it, however, she went online to see what other people had to say on the subject, and while she understood that reading other people's testimonies was hardly the same as having an experience of her own, she did decided, based on what she read, that she now possessed enough information that she didn't need to have that particular experience quite yet.

And it was an interesting thing: in the course of reading what people had written about electricity coursing through the body, she learned a bit about both electricity and the body--how each one worked and where each one came from, and why electrical impulses were in some cases good for the operations of the body and in other cases very, very bad. Soon her head was buzzing with Ideas. With those came lots of Questions. And as far as her afternoon chores were concerned, she ended up being about as interested in completing them as she would have been had she gone ahead and stuck her fingers in the socket anyway.

"Cloud Storage"

 

At night, no matter how hot it had been during the day and how much of that heat lay trapped on the tar-black shingles, she would climb from her bedroom window onto the garage roof and lie there, listening to bands play at the outdoor theater. The sound would echo like rain in a tin cup as it traveled the few miles from the theater to where she lay, but she didn't mind. Sometimes while listening she saw a contrail form in the sky overhead. She imagined that the people inside the tiny planes could hear the concerts as well. She told herself that they would carry the songs they heard with them wherever they were going. It was the kind of thought, on nights like that, that almost made it okay to grow up.

"To Go"

 

Harriet was putting away the dishes when, suddenly, her teenage daughter, Elena, appeared next to her, holding a box.

"Oh, hi, hon," Harriet said, closing the cabinet door. "I didn't even hear you come in. Did you have a good night out?"

Elena looked as if she had just seen a car crash. She stared ahead for a few seconds before her eyes shifted toward Harriet. "Night?" she asked quietly. "How long have I been gone?"

Harriet crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Well, Chris came to pick you up around six, so, yeah. That long. You okay?"

"You still remember who I am? Quick: which bedroom is mine?"

"Second one on the right, the one painted green like you've had it for the last three years. Ellie, you're scaring me."

With one hasty leap of a step Elena stumbled into Harriet and, still holding the box, wrapped her arms around her. "I love you, Mom," she said. "I'm sorry for scaring you."

"Please don't let this be drugs," Harriet whispered into Elena's shoulder.

"What?"

"I said," said Harriet, stepping back, "I miss you giving me hugs." She nodded at the plain white box. "What do you got there? Leftovers?"

Elena glanced down as if the box had just appeared in her hands, the way she had appeared in the kitchen moments before. "Oh," she said. "Yeah, I guess. In a way. Just something from where we went." With a resolute nod, she smiled and held the box outward. "I want you to have it, Mom."

"Oh, honey, we just ate dinner not too long ago."

"No, not like that," Elena said. "Just--whenever you need something different." She passed the box to Harriet, who raised an eyebrow and placed it on the counter. Elena smiled at her again. "I'm going to go take a shower," she said.

"Just let me know if you need anything," Harriet said. She watched Elena climb the stairs. She knew she wouldn't have many more chances to watch where Elena went. The box on the counter was small and simple and begging for Harriet to open it. So she did. And her eyes went wide. She could barely begin to imagine how far her daughter had gone.

"Safe from Dragons"

This is our dragon, a.k.a. our furnace. Lately it hasn't been behaving the way we'd expect a furnace to behave.

Oh, how the villagers hated that fire-breathing dragon. Loud it was, and smelly--its stink seeped from deep within its mountaintop cave and flowed all the way to the valley below like a river of vaporous sulfur. The villagers gathered in the inn to discuss the dragon and often were joined by foreign mercenaries and quest-bound knights, all of whom asked the same question: "What should be done?" The mountain was the tallest in the land, and the mouth of the cave poured forth dragonfire almost constantly, great geyser plumes of flame that could be seen in the village day and night. Danger lay in wait on the mountaintop. Surely that danger was waiting to invade the village.

The people assumed their time had come the day the dragon left its cave and flew over the valley. They ran inside their homes, not knowing what else to do, except for one small boy who stayed outside while the dragon, so close to them all, neither roared nor breathed fire but simply glided overhead on its thin wings like a parchment kite. The boy was confused, amazed, and humbled. He was also, however, deeply human. "Go away, dragon!" he screamed. "We don't want you here!" He never told anyone that the dragon looked at him.

Not once in all the days after did any of the villagers catch the torturous odor of dragon flesh on the wind or hear a wild, clawing bellow tumble out from the high-up cave, and it was for the better, they said. Who knew what that dragon had been up to? And now they were safe. The inn began to close early. The mercenaries and knights who still passed that way left town with a quick nod, there being nothing else for them to do. And the villagers, instead of gathering to talk, went to bed every night not long after supper. They slept in a place that was dark all around, as any place without a dragon is bound to be.

"Glue Skin"

 

"Teacher, look, I'm peeling my skin off!"

"Jenny, you have until I'm done writing this problem on the board to clean up your art supplies."

"Teacher, why am I all red and squishy underneath? Is that where blood comes from? I think I see my bones. I'm a skeleton! Raaaa! I'm dropping my skin on all of you!"

Lessons put into practice during arts and crafts that day: using fine motor skills. Following a sequence of events. Walking, not running, on the way to the principal's office.

"The Witch"

 

Someone had placed a hat on top of her head. It tipped forward like a downed horse and covered most of her face, but it wasn't enough to ward off the vultures, which the boys knew waited low in the trees just some distance from this one, their hunger drawing them long and lean, like shadows, as the sun fell.

A few of the boys could just reach the hat's brim. "Go on, lift it," said Bryon.

"No way," said Louis.

"Chicken. You're chicken."

"I sure am," Louis announced. "Go ahead and show us how it's done, since you're so brave."

Bryon drew circles in the dust with the tips of his toes. "It's disrespectful," he said finally. "I just wanted to see if the body was still here."

"Disrespectful, nothing. She was a witch."

"That's just a story. She murdered someone is all. Ain't no such thing as witches."

"Then take off the hat."

"You do it."

"You."

While the others squabbled, a boy named Henry, tall and quiet, approached the hanged corpse. He raised his hand toward the hat, and everyone stopped. His fingers were so close.

Then the wind gusted. The vultures' shapes grew in the trees. And the boys turned and ran, each one of them suddenly believing in magic. 

"Use a Napkin"

Napkin sketch courtesy of Wesley Wong

"Oh, come on," Davey's father said. He tugged on the boy's sleeve to try to pull his forearm away from his mouth. "You're too old to be wiping your face on your shirt. Use a napkin already."

"You know why he doesn't want to do that," said Davey's mother. "Let him use the back of his hand. He can wash it off later. There's no harm."

"No harm? Next he'll be seeing the Virgin Mary on the front of a tortilla. You're indulging the boy. Making him too soft to deal with reality."

"And you're crushing his imagination."

It didn't matter to Davey what either of them said. He was watching the low red light from the candle in the jar pulse like a heartbeat over the napkin's folds. With each quick shift in the light, the demon's face changed expression, exposing more or less of its sawblade teeth. "Go on, bring me close, boy," the demon begged. "Let me tell you what to do." Davey didn't want to. But maybe, he thought for a moment, while his parents' voices rose above him like shadows, maybe if he did just wipe his face, everything would finally be all right.