Robots vs. Fairies(55)
She shot an arrow into the northern wall just above the middle of where the painting hung. She leaned forward, and Sopso climbed upon her back. With the line from the arrow tight in her hands, she inched toward the edge of the bookcase. She jumped and they swung toward the painting, Sopso screaming, and crashed into the image where Ashcroft’s ascot met his second chin. Once they’d stopped bouncing against the canvas, she told her passenger to tighten his grip. He did, and she began hauling both of them to the top of the picture frame. Her climbing looked like magic.
For some reason, right here, I recalled the strange sound I’d heard behind the garage the last few nights. A wheezing growl that reverberated through the night. I pictured the devil crouching back there in the shadows, but our neighbor told us it was a fox in heat. It sounded like a cry from another world. My interest in it faded, and in a heartbeat my focus was back on the painting. They had achieved the top of the frame and were resting. I wondered where the expedition was headed next. There was another painting on that wall about four feet away from the ghost on the staircase. It was a painting of Garuda by my younger son. The distance between the paintings was vast in fairy feet. I couldn’t believe they would attempt to cross to it. Aspethia showed it no interest, but instead pointed straight up.
She took her bow, nocked an arrow with a thread line in place, and aimed it at the ceiling. My glance followed the path of the potential shot, and only then did I notice that her arrow was aimed precisely into a prodigious spiderweb that stretched from directly above the painting all the way to the corner of the north wall. She released the arrow, and I tried to follow it but caught only a blur. It hit its mark, and that drew my attention to the fact that right next to where it hit, that fly, big as a grape, was trapped in webbing and buzzing to beat the band. I looked along the web to the corner of the ceiling and saw the spider, skinny legs with a fat white pearl of an abdomen. I could see it drooling as it moved forward to finally claim its catch.
It surprised me when, without hesitation, Sopso alone climbed the line toward the ceiling. He shimmied up at a pace that lapped the spider’s progress, the rose thorn clenched in his teeth. The fly was well wrapped in spider silk, unable to use its wings, its cries muffled. The pale spider danced along the vibrating strands. Sopso reached the fly and cut away enough web to get his legs around the insect’s back. Too bad he was upside down. The spider advanced while the fairy continued to hack away. I was able to hear every strand he cut—the noise of a spring sprung, like an effect from a cartoon. The way Sopso worked, with such courage and cool, completely reversed my estimation of him. Till then, I’d thought of him as a burden to the expedition, but after all, he had his place.
I was at the edge of my seat, my neck craned and my head tilted back. My heart was pounding. The spider reared back, poised to strike, and Sopso never flinched but worked methodically in the looming shadow of death. Fangs shut and four piercing-sharp leg points struck at nothing. The fairy had cut the last strand and he, legs around the back of the fly, fell upside down toward the floor. At the last second the fly’s wings started to work, and they managed to pull out of the death plunge. They shot up past my left ear toward the ceiling. Aspethia, the spider, and I followed their erratic course. They zigzagged with great buzzing all around the room, but when they passed over the bookcase near the window of the west wall, the fairy, afraid the dizzy fly would crash, jumped off and landed safely on a copy of Albahari’s Leeches.
Sopso was stranded. He and Aspethia waved to each other across the incredible expanse of my office. They might as well have been on different worlds. Each cried out, but neither was able to hear the other. Her arrows could not reach him. He had with him no thread bandoliers, nor even a pin-tip knife. Without them, there was no way he could climb down from that height, and by the time Aspethia returned to the fairy village and could mount a rescue party, he would most likely die of starvation. Still, she set out quickly to get back home on the slim chance he might survive long enough. He watched her go, and I could see the sadness come over him. The sight of it left me with a terrible chill.
What was I to do? My heart went out to the lost climber who was willing to give his life to save an insignificant fly, not to mention brave Aspethia. I thought how easily I could change everything for them. I stood up and stepped over to the bookcase by the window on the west wall. I reached out to gently lift Sopso in order to place him down on the floor across the room near where the expedition had begun. My fingers closed, and for no good reason, he suddenly disappeared. A moment of silence passed, and then I heard a chorus well up from beneath the bookcases, each voice not but a pinprick of laughter.
Later that evening, as Lynn and I sat on the porch in the last pink glow of sunset, she reached across the glass-topped table that held our wine and said, “Look here.” She was holding something between her thumb and forefinger. Whatever she was showing me was very delicate, and what with the failing light, I needed to lean in close to see. To my shock, it was a cat whisker with a postage stamp affixed to the end, like a tiny flag.
The mischievous expression on her face made me ask, “How long have you known?”
She laughed quietly. “Way back,” she said, and her words cut away the webbing that had trapped me.
TEAM FAIRY
* * *
BY JEFFREY FORD
All the fairy stories I write, this being my third, have been influenced by the Teenie Weenies, which was a weekly installment in the color comics section of the Sunday Daily News when I was a kid. I don’t think the Weenies were fairies. Instead they were just some diminutive race of people who lived under the rosebush. Among them there was a cop, a baker, a Chinese fellow, a sailor, a clown, a cowboy, an Indian, and a beautiful woman known as the Lady of Fashion. They lived out their small lives below our line of sight and helped each other out. They rode mice and battled cats. I distinctly remember one comic for autumn in which a Weenie rode a wild turkey with a saddle and bit while the others harvested acorns, carrying them in slings on their backs. What enchanted me as a kid about the Teenie Weenies is what I like about the potential for fairy stories—diminutive lives lived large, a sense of community, the adventure and challenge in things we giants take for granted, a different viewpoint of the world we live in. “The Bookcase Expedition” comes from a game I played with plastic army men years and years ago. My soldiers weren’t about war; they took on grand expeditionary challenges, like scaling the heights of the bookcase, sailing the turbulent blue braided rug, delving deeper and deeper into the vast wilderness of my bedroom.