The Meadow
Annabelle strolls to the meadow at precisely 9:05 every morning. A sun hat covers two messily done braids, and she carries a picnic basket filled with whatever offerings from nature she happens to stumble upon. The walk to the meadow is five minutes from the cottage where she lives with her mother and father. They do not know where she disappears to every day, and they do not care to ask. The sun is strong, making her small eyes squint and her pale cheeks freckle. She passes neighbors who wave and wish her luck on her adventures. All they see is a harmless child wandering around with a basket of flowers, nothing more.
Annabelle reaches the meadow and assesses the state she had left it in the previous evening: small houses decorated with now-wilted flowers; stolen jars with hard, sunburnt candy; cardboard boxes held up by sticks, old fruit placed delicately underneath them; all left as untouched as they were the previous day. And the day before that. And the week before that. She groans in frustration, kicking over a box, then stomping on one of the little houses. Among the houses she built are compilations of trinkets she collected — misplaced hair clips, shards of glass left in tufts of grass, and rocks discarded on the banks of the river. Annabelle scowls. She’s read every book and studied all the tactics for catching them, but here she stands, alone in the meadow with a deserted village of her own creation.
Annabelle learned about them from stories her grandmother told her one night before bed. They were small, winged creatures who lived amongst the giants, playing tricks, singing, and granting wishes. She decided that night, on the cusp of dreams, that she must find one. If she could capture one, just one, its wings delicate and body fragile, her life would be worth living. Prior to this discovery, Annabelle led a rather lonely existence. She would spend hours waiting for her mother to finish work, only for her to go to bed and promise she would play tomorrow. She would spend summers waiting for the neighborhood children to invite her to play hide and seek. In the end, she would always end up alone on the porch, waiting far past sundown for something, somebody, that would never come. Annabelle decided that if nobody wanted to be her friend, she must capture her own. Something, somebody, that could never leave her.
On the first day of summer, Annabelle began the series of traps. At first, they were scrappy little things: cottages of tree bark, stained with the blackening juice of raspberries or decorated with sparse dandelions. Then, they turned the slightest bit more intricate: boxes with trip wire, mousetraps, and jars with no exit among them. Today, Annabelle’s brow is creased with sweat, and her ideas are running out like the rusted water of a broken faucet. She’s considering glue. She wonders if maybe she coats a tree in glue, the unknowing being would fly straight into it, trapping itself until the next morning, when she could arrive and peel its lithe body from the bark. She could then take it home as her forever friend and eternal personified wishing well.
When her grandmother told her the stories that night many moons ago, she warned Annabelle not to play nasty tricks on them, that deceiving the beings was dangerous, and offerings meant as tricks would only release a dreadful rage from within them. Looking at the deserted meadow now, Annabelle discards the warning. She stands in the tall grass, weighing her options. She looks to the jars, all five lined up in the sun, offerings cemented to the glass, sticky with age and decay. Then at the houses, kicked over in her daily fits of rage, their structures of bark and glass strewn throughout the grass. Then the boxes, sticks knocked over, and cardboard molded with rain that has come and gone. She decides that none of this will suffice. None of it will get her where she needs to go. She will fail, again and again. The beings will outsmart her until the end of time, until her bones are weak, her hair is thin and gray, and her hearing is reduced to faint whispers. She must be nasty. She must deceive. She must trick. With this, Annabelle kicks over the remaining cottages she created, smashes a jar on a boulder, bloodying her left hand, and runs into the forest under the power of a rage that could be likened to large men in battle.
In her tales of the fae, Annabelle’s grandmother spoke of their rings — rare and treasured circles of fungi in which the beings would play. Annabelle could picture it vividly, the beings sipping the fermented juice of wildberries until their heads spun, removing their miniscule shoes when their feet tired from dancing. Her grandmother told her that she should never, under any circumstances, enter a ring, as it would grant the beings permission to thrust eternal misery on the perpetrator. Annabelle cowered under her covers while her grandmother laughed, assuring her that her chances of ever even encountering a ring were tiny and distant, like chasing down the end of a rainbow. Now, as she tears through the forest, Annabelle crosses her fingers that the rings are not as rare as her grandmother claimed.
She looks for signs of life whilst she runs through the forest, her small lungs on the verge of giving out, sweat slicking back wispy strands of blonde hair. She comes to a halt and leans over to catch her breath. Blood smears on her delicate white dress. Trees douse her in shadows. A breeze wafts against her cheek like hot breath while she studies her surroundings. She trudges forward, eyes devouring every inch of the forest. Suddenly, she spots it. A ring of mushrooms, white as snow, cloaked beneath an oak tree.
She creeps towards it, entranced, her eyes wide. There are no tiny shoes, or inklings of glitter. There is only fungus. Her grandmother's voice echoes in her head as she stares: “Annabelle, if you ever encounter a ring, you must walk away, leaving it just as you found it. If you fail to abide by this rule, well … there's no way of knowing in which ways your fate shall become compromised.” Annabelle swats the voice away like a swarm of fruit flies, steps inside the ring, and squeezes her eyes closed.
Terror spreads through her body like a virus while she awaits an instantaneous punishment: her teeth dropping out one by one; her body being ravished by an army of hives; her bones melting and rendering her to nothing but a pool of liquified flesh and blood, slowly spreading throughout the ring until she is absorbed by the soil. None of that happens. She is still standing there, breathing and covered in sweat, breeze carrying the scent of bitter soil throughout the air like a warning. Annabelle ignores the omen, overcome with rage rather than relief.
She screams as if in battle. She kicks all of the mushrooms over, one by one, bludgeoning them to the ground. The scent of fresh fungus fills the air as the ring is reduced to nothing but a pile of white and brown mush. Satisfied with her destruction, and finding it a fitting punishment for the absence of the beings, Annabelle steps out of the ring. Her work for the day is complete. She will now go home and stay awake as long as she can, waiting for the beings to track her down and attempt to get their revenge, just as her grandmother had warned her they would. Little would they know she would be sitting awake, awaiting their arrival.
Annabelle climbs into bed, eager for battle and with a plethora of traps on her nightstand: an old pickle jar, a shoebox, and if need be, a butter knife and a fork. She watches the sun fade and listens as her mother and father’s whispering voices dwindle into silence. She looks out the open window with ravenous, sinister eyes. With each glimpse of a lightning bug she tightens her grip on the butter knife. She bites her lip until she tastes blood at the mere sound of fluttering wings. She writes a list of things she will demand once she acquires the being: new parents, a castle, a prince. She writes in the big-lettered scrawls of a 10-year-old girl and dreams of the ways the beings will serve her for eternity, of the things they will be forced to do for her with their magical, dainty hands. Somehow despite her excitement, her eyelids betray her. Slowly she slumps against the window, deep in slumber.
When Annabelle awakes, she rubs the sleep from her eyes. She rises in her bed, only for her back to scream in the kind of pain reserved for those far older than her. Her eyes widen, as she realizes that this is not her bed. The floor is glass, the walls are glass, and for a moment, Annabelle fears she herself may be glass. The ceiling, however, is gold. The walls are almost circular, as though they are caving in on her. She looks through the glass. The grass is tall, taller than any grass she has seen before. She doubts her own eyes — until she sees it: the ruins of her tree bark village, rotted and crawling with insects. The discarded traps, the spoiled fruit, the rocks and trinkets, all surrounding her.
She screams and pounds her tiny fists against the glass. She hears a knock behind her. Her cheeks bloom with color and her bones go stiff. When she turns, she sees nothing but a pile of glitter and something winged vanishing into the distance, leaving her there, eternally discarded, alone.
