You’d think having a fairy godmother would be great. Everyone loves the scene where the fairy godmother takes a mouse and turns it into a man for an evening; or that bit where she turns a puppet into a real boy. No one talks about the other scenes. The one where she turns a man into a mouse for the evening, so your tea party can have a dormouse. Or when she turns your next door neighbour into a puppet because you mentioned you wanted one for your birthday.
Fairies are complicated creatures. In their hearts they want what’s best for their charges; but the rest of the world is nothing but scenery, vaguely understood and rarely considered. They’re a lot like a child in that way, which is why they so easily understand the whims and wishes of their chosen children. But as you grow up, and they don’t, you start to understand how terrifyingly absent morality is from their understanding of the world. And the fairytale turns sour.
When I was ten my fairy godmother gave me the voice of an angel for my birthday. Everyone had to obey my commands – even when I didn’t mean them. My sister and I got into a fight, and I told her to go and jump off a cliff. She broke a leg, an arm, and three ribs. I told her it was a metaphor and I hadn’t meant her to actually do it, but she was only seven and didn’t understand metaphors, and really neither did I. I asked my fairy godmother to take it back, and she did; but she was so offended she wouldn’t speak to me for seven months, so she wasn’t there when my mother died and my father remarried the Ugly Stepmother. Of course, I suppose every fairytale has to have a Stepmother, so she might not have stopped it even if she could have. And it turns out I like Anise – even if her daughter does constantly smell of baby powder. She’s a kind woman, and she makes me soup when I feel sick.
On my eleventh birthday my fairy godmother gave me a castle. It was still full of all the people, and despite how much my father insisted that we had nothing to do with it appearing in our yard and my face replacing the princess’ on all the tapestries, they still put him in jail for treason. We had to break him out and flee the country.
I was hoping our change of locale would distract my fairy godmother; maybe she wouldn’t find us here? But there was no such luck. A few weeks later she showed up to supper with a handful of strawberries that looked delicious but tasted like tears; we all hid them in our napkins and pretended we had scarfed them down. I’m still not sure what they were.
This year, a few weeks before my birthday, my fairy godmother noticed I was putting my old dollhouse into a box. It was beautiful – my mother made it for me when I was little, but I hadn’t played with it in years, and there was a little girl down the road whose mother had passed away last week. I had decided to give it to her, in the hopes that it might bring her the same comfort it brought me. My godmother saw what I was doing and asked why; when I explained, she scoffed “You haven’t outgrown the toy! You just need a better one!” I assured her quickly I didn’t, but I could see it was no good.
And sure enough, my birthday morning, I awoke to the sound of tiny screams and a child crying. I threw myself out of bed and there, on the floor, was a little village of houses. There were seven in all, each one a brilliant water-colour pastel: green and red, blue and brown, with tiny windows and perfect doors. They looked like real houses shrunk down to miniature – which, of course, they were. And when I opened the front door, I saw to my horror a perfect little interior, full of tiny beds, and tiny fruit, and tiny people who stared up at me in horror. The child’s crying hiccupped and stopped, and we stared at each other across the vast void.
“Oh God,” I said. “Not again.”
Image courtesy of April Milne. April is a fantastic illustrator and fine artist. See her work at her website, or check her out on Our Contributors Page.