Short Fiction, Poems, and Essays

Emma’s quick TikTok search explained to her what in the hell she was looking at. There was a dark green ring of grass in the front lawn. There had been another before this one early in the spring before school had ended. It had started to form too close to the sidewalk, though, and when the deep-green ring grew in circumference and reached the concrete, the circle was broken. Then it had vanished like it had never been there.

But the new school year just started. It was almost fall now, and the blades of grass inside and outside of this new circle were a crunchy August-yellow. The ring itself was a soft lush green, the way the lawn looked in June after the last of the spring rains. This strange phenomenon had started in the center of the lawn between two maple trees. It had started small, as the first one had, but now, one could stand in the center of it, stretch their arms out wide, and still not reach the edge on either side. She remained on the outside of the circle, though. The stale grass was scratchy against her bare feet.

Emma squinted at her phone screen, darkened by the glare of the harsh sun. A TikTok witch with a scarf in her hair was explaining that these rings of green grass like the one before her, were traps—fairy rings. The witch continued in her twanged accent to say that traditionally, fairy rings were naturally occurring circles of mushrooms, but could also be other things such as grass, rocks, flowers—anything in nature that spontaneously created a perfect circle, organically on its own. Well, not entirely on its own, if fairies were actually the ones behind the phenomenon. And they made these rings for the purpose of enticing and ensnaring children, for once a mortal stepped inside a fairy ring, they were stolen away to Fairy World, never to return.

Emma knew a little about fairies. She had grown up with Tinkerbell cartoons, of course, but had also read Peter Pan when she had come down with the flu last year. She took a little bit of morbid pride in learning that Tinkerbell died at the end of the book, and that Peter had forgotten all about her. Peter forgot a lot, like Emma’s great grandmother in the nursing home. He was the only child who never grew up, after all, so he had lived a long time. The way Emma understood it, the longer you lived the more you forgot, including people you loved. And Peter—Any lost boy who showed signs of growing up, he sacrificed to Captain Hook, and then he promptly forgot all about them, just like he had Tink. Thus, any child Peter whisked away was doomed to die. Wendy and her crew were the exception.

According to TikTok, Fairy World was just like Neverland. Once inside the fairy realm, you could never return home. She turned off the screen and contemplated the ring before her. She wondered if entering this fairy ring was worth the risk, like an outdoors version of Bloody Mary. Mary probably won’t show up in the mirror, but what if she does? Will she eat you? Stepping into the ring most likely wouldn’t whisk her off to Fairy World or Neverland, but what if…? Never coming back wouldn’t be so bad, she thought.

The prickly grass poked at the arches of her bare feet. Emma knew she’d miss her friends, her dog, her phone (Fairy World probably wouldn’t have 5G), but it would have a lot of things this world didn’t, like adventures, bad guys, magic, wishes, and happy endings. She felt like Earth didn’t really have any of that, not really. She scrunched her toes, trying to push through the grass to the cool dirt, but the topsoil was dry and cracked.

Adventures in the real world were lackluster at best. Even “fun” was a supervised and structured thing. The airport, Disneyworld, Six Flags, anything “fun” reminded her of the halls of her middle school—all lines, metal detectors, police, and surveillance. Breaking the rules and going off the beaten path was too dangerous. Here there be monsters was, in reality, Here there be molesters with guns. Ghosts, dragons, and demons were not nearly as scary or prevalent in comparison.

She wished the bad guys were dragons she could slay, but here, they were just people who got away with everything and only got richer. If she did fall into another world, she could handle a dragon, she thought as the atmosphere of the late summer pressed down around her. Especially if the fairy prince she would inevitably meet would gift her with an Elven sword. But here, in the real world, enchanted swords didn’t exist.

Magic in general didn’t exist. Emma was seven when her mother had told her there was no Santa Claus after a certain toy he should have delivered hadn’t shown up under the tree that Christmas. The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy were also casualties of that truth. For her birthday this year, she had wished for her parents to stop fighting. Apparently, birthday wishes didn’t come true either, not to mention the countless other wishes she had made on shooting stars and dandelions. Not a one came true.

She looked up at the subdivision. The houses weren’t exactly cookie-cutter- identical, but close. Even though she stood with both feet firmly planted in reality; it didn’t look real. The manicured flower beds and front doors looked too perfect. It felt like AI, or maybe she shrunk to fit into a scale replica of a subdivision like the model town in Beetlejuice.

Some old lady with a corgi was power walking down the sidewalk towards her. The lady smiled as she passed, saying something witty about how nice it was to see a child her age playing outside, and then the old woman and her dog waddled on their way.

Being human was too hard. People expected so much and so little at the same time. They expected you to make good grades so you can go to college to get a good job. To be a good girl so you can grow up to meet a good man who also has a good job to pay for the houses, cars, and children you are supposed to have. They expect all that from you, yet they are amazed to see you merely look up from your phone.

If that was what happily ever after was supposed to look like, she wasn’t interested. Mom cried about money a lot, and Dad was always mad when he got home from work. He’d break things when he got angry. Last week it was the glass oven door. When she could get away with it, she would hide in her room and pretend to be asleep before he got home. Hiding under the blankets in the dark, listening to the crying, screaming, slamming through the walls—that was the part in the story when Peter Pan was supposed to tap on your bedroom window. That was Hagrid’s moment to burst, umbrella first, into your room from the closet door. That was the chapter when some talking animal sidekick was meant to appear. But so far, no one had come.

Emma’s breath hitched in her throat at this thought, and her chin quivered. Her chest began to ache as she fought back the feelings manifesting in her body. She felt in her bones that there had to be more to life than this unhappiness she knew. This could not be it. If the fairy ring was able to transport her to another world, she could prove to everyone, but mostly to herself, that she could be someone or something more than their expectations of her.

The problem, though, with fairy tales, fables, fantasy stories, she thought, from 1001 Arabian Nights all the way to the newest Disney Princess was that no matter what, they break your heart. You fall in love with a boy who can never grow old. Or you give up your voice and walk on razor blades for a Chad who ends up marrying someone else. Or someone you truly love (usually the quirky yet morally-sound side-character who serves as your emotional support animal) dies tragically in your line-of-sight, if not directly in your arms. The trouble is, after your heart is broken, you (the main character) either die, or live happily ever after with nothing interesting ever happening ever again, or you return home. Usually the latter. The main character returns home just like Wendy, Alice, and Frodo did.

In the fantasy world you might suffer love and loss throughout the adventure and epic fight scenes, but if you make it home alive, you’ll see it in a way you never saw it before. Home will be exactly how you left it, but it won’t look the same, because you’re all the more different from having left. That, she thought, was what made jumping worth the risk, even if jumping meant having to grow up no matter the outcome.

Emma crouched and placed her phone down by her feet, a breadcrumb for them to follow if this worked, and she wouldn’t need her phone where she was going anyway. With eyes fixed upon the center of the dark green fairy ring, she jumped over the edge, excessively so, in order to get the propulsion for what should have been a never-ending fall down a rabbit hole. But she landed on her heels with a thud in the prickly, dry grass. The air was still, heavy with the scent of hot pavement and dead summer. There was a pause, a stillness, a frozen moment of heartbreak. She stood up straight and turned around inside the ring to face where she had stood a moment before. A car glided by on the street, and she could hear some neighborhood kids bouncing on a trampoline and laughing at the house catty corner from theirs.

With a shaking, disappointed breath, Emma stepped back over the ring of plush green grass. She did, in fact, feel a little different. She had grown up a lot in that moment when nothing had happened, in that moment when the world inside her head had refused to swallow her up. She felt older, wiser.

Emma’s chest aching, she glanced over her shoulder at the fairy ring. It had refused her. Closed up shop. Access denied. She thought about trying it again. Maybe she hadn’t done it right. Maybe she didn’t want it bad enough and needed to try harder.

Her phone vibrated in the grass, and she retrieved it. The screen lit up with a new video from someone she followed—a kitty accidentally jumping into a fish tank. She laughed, but the sound felt hollow and a little sharp in her ears as she swallowed. She scrolled to the next video—a news report about a school shooting in Nevada. The images flashed by—police tape, ambulances, a blurred figure of a distraught parent. She scrolled again, and the next video was about Appalachian cryptids and mysterious staircases in the woods.

She looked up from her phone at her perfectly manicured subdivision. Her house, her street. It did look different, a bit darker now. She noticed the small cracks in the sidewalk, the tiny weeds pushing through the concrete covered forest. With her face tilted down, she turned her back on the grass ring and returned home.