THE HYDRANGEA FAIRY
There’s a fairy in the hydrangea bush just outside my bedroom window. She’s been visiting me for the last few months every night, right in the watery soft moments between awake and asleep. I met her first during the illness—it was early spring when I lost my balance and the world slipped wet like sand through my fingers. I could only stand for a few moments before my ears buzzed and the creme-yellow walls of my apartment tilted as I melted into the liquid edges of my vision. For two weeks I laid in bed trembling with nausea, the hydrangea fairy nestling into the cup of my ear, whispering to me all the ways she saw me drowning, or dying, or dead. When I recovered, I had hoped the hydrangea fairy would move on in search of a better body to burrow into, but she sticks to the routine. She creeps into my ear every night.
The hydrangea fairy arrives in the shadows on my wall. She shivers, small enough to be a praying mantis, but sneaky enough, creepy enough to be some kind of rodent—sentient. Even in the shadow she has an almost human shape, with a skirt made of tulips and twitching wings so translucent and thin I can only see the faintest outline, like two little almonds shaved down to a perfect, snapping crunch.
She shuffles across my windowsill, drops down heavily onto my crisp white sheets beside my pillowcase, huffs and scrambles to keep from sliding down to splat messily onto the hard wooden floor. Her sharp spider hands grip the cartilage of my ear, dragging herself up like she might crawl right in. I feel terror, warm and thick, bubble just beneath my ribcage.
She nestles herself into the couch of my ear, her tiny heels thump-thumping against my lobe. Her warm breath rustles, craggled and husky, thick with ash.
“I see you first in water,” she says, “I see you drowning in a tub.”
The hydrangea fairy never says hello, never asks me about my evening or how work is or if I’m enjoying the warmer weather. But she always tells me about my death. She never leaves out a detail, she’s very precise. I’ll be wearing a shower cap with bright orange flowers, I’ll have eaten a dinner of deviled ham and black olive sandwiches but that won’t be the reason I drown. It is always something far less sinister—I’ll have fallen asleep in the moldy gloom and will slip under so slowly I won’t even notice all the water trickling down my nose and into my lungs, bloating my stomach up like a fish. I’ll wake but by then it’ll already be too late and no matter how hard I cough and cry, I won’t be able to get it all up.
“The whole time you struggle,” she says, “like you’re convinced you can keep yourself afloat.”
I tremble under the thin covers. I sweat and gulp big, wet phlegmy blobs down into the acid of my stomach. I never reply, I’m too scared and I don’t know what I would say if I could. I listen to her belled feet tap-tap against my ear and am lulled to sleep by her humming.
In the morning I wake with a cramp in my neck and a stitch in my stomach. I only remember her in the damp moistness of my cereal, in the condensation of my bathroom mirror. I walk to work at the factory early in the humid mornings just as the sun peaks its hairline over the horizon. At the puzzle factory, I work on the assembly line where I glue pictures onto rough cardboard. I hold a splintered wooden brush and make the blurry images glossy and perfect and whole before the machine down the line stamps them into a hundred pieces, a continual shattering of broken kittens, and horses, and flaking wheels of cheese.
I’ve worked at the factory for a long time, at least seven years. It’s hard to get a good job, so I am grateful. I was assigned a tiny ready-made apartment and I’m not allowed to change the furniture inside, but I moved it all just a few inches to the right so that it felt like mine, like a home. Before, I lived with Papa, but I had to leave when he said he was moving away from the city. He didn’t like how I clung to him, how my days stretched long before me like strips of undulating desert, buzzing and hollow and dry. He always said that I needed to be useful, and now all I want is to be useful, so I work enough to pay my rent and buy some canned foods and I never have any money left over. But that’s fine, I already have everything I should ever want.
At the factory, we don’t get sick time, or days off, or lunch breaks, and I was terminated during the two weeks of illness. But I was lucky—the day I came back to beg for my job, Boss had just lost my replacement. My line mate Belinda said she was a timid, mousey thing fresh out of secondary school, that she’d gotten her thin little fingers stuck in the conveyor belt, ruining a few dozen puzzles with all the hot sticky spray.
Now I get to work early and relinquish my body to the repetition. Sunflowers, glue, press. Church, glue, press. The only difference is which picture I’m pressing, and even then, they’re given to their own repetition. I’ve never left the city, but at the puzzle factory, I’ve seen every major destination—every religious temple, every rolling hill, every private woodland knoll. At the puzzle factory, I forget the outside, I forget the hydrangea fairy. I focus on the glue, my trembling fingers, and the lulling voice of my line mate Belinda working across from me.
Belinda has worked at the factory longer than me, but only by a few months. She talks the whole time, a constant hum in tune with the thumping of the belt. I’m sure she’s told me everything she’s ever seen or thought or felt, and I keep it all tucked inside of me, I hold on to it like currency. I know her husband’s favorite television show, I know about her grandfather’s illegal dog racing business. I’ve been there for all of her root canals, every crowning. I can feel the sharp stinging prick in my finger every time she checks her sugars with that little beeping thing she keeps tucked inside her apron pocket.
Her hands pour, push, pull, press against the wet, sad eyes of a bear in a field of buzzing daisies. Her mouth gnaws, prances, empties—her orange curls, faded a sunset gray, spill out of her knotted hairnet, a claddagh ring on a rusting copper chain thump-thumping against her sun-spotted chest.
I listen and listen and she never looks up and sometimes I wonder if she’ll tell stories about me after I drown in the tub.
✺
The hydrangea fairy says she can see it, my corpse. Her little belled shoes thump-thump against my earlobe, a thurible swinging down the aisle of my wake, declaring mourners free of my ghost, my haunting. I focus on the tapping, the rustling of my earlobe but her voice is too close, itching my eardrum and crawling down my spine.
She says she can see me quite clearly, my head pulled forward at an unnatural level, chin receding into the deep, dark folds of my skin. She says she can see the tiny puckering on the corners of my mouth where they sewed my jaw closed on the inside to keep me from looking surprised, to keep all the mold and bathwater from leaking up from my belly and through my heavily painted lips.
She tells me how they bury me, and I try not to feel it, the lid closing comfortably over my face, my nose denting in with the weight of the earth. I think of the earth and of me in it, of my hands, silent and still, perfectly gnarled, unmoving, embalmed. I wonder if my hands will hold the memory, that if someone plugged me into a machine and charged me with electricity, if they could remember the movement, the push and the pull.
I try not to imagine the sound of the shovels, of being buried under layers and layers of dirt, so deep that nothing could swim up or swim out, that nothing hungry enough could dig and find something worth eating.
In the morning, I am not well-rested. I have goosebumps tripping along my arms and a chill in my neck. I get out of bed and splash rusting faucet water on my face. I eat, I change into my uniform compliant blouse and low beige heels. I walk to the factory. I pretend not to feel the way her sharp hands claw at my skin every night.
Before the hydrangea fairy, before the illness, I never thought about those things—dying or being dead. I was far too tired after my twelve hour shifts to think about my hands and how still they might become. Most nights I only had enough time to soak my aching feet in a warm pan of salt water and to reheat a can of beans before I felt the tug of a cold, numbing sleep pulling at my eyelids. In the factory, I focused on Belinda. It was a lot of work, listening and trying to make sure all my nods and uhhuhs were perfectly timed, that I kept all of her storylines straight. I didn’t have much time to think about my own things. I had no time to wonder what came after the factory, to worry about what came next.
I hadn’t seen Papa since I’d moved to the apartment. Some six years had slipped between my fingers like slime, slick and gelatinous. He’d moved to the country, I think, got a tiny cottage, tended strawberry plants, and lived with pygmy goats or maybe it was pygmy pigs, whichever one they judge for their heft and their prettiness. I didn’t have time to see him, I was too busy at the factory. When he died, the letter I received was very official—it had a seal stamped into it and softly smudged typewriter print. It said he’d been found slouched in front of the television in a straight backed wooden chair. It said he’d been quite dried up by then because of the high heating and he’d been gently nibbled by whatever animal it was that he’d kept. I didn’t get to see for myself though, I hadn’t earned enough PTO that year to get time off and I certainly didn’t have any rollover from the last.
It's hard not to think, to focus only on my work. I used to feel safe at the factory. I was good at my job, I knew what to do. It was easy to stand for twelve hours, to count the number of puzzles I processed and to feel pride, hot and buzzing bloom in my face after a good day’s shift, to listen to Belinda and the heavy thump-thumping of the conveyor belts. But now I itch. My fingers cramp and I bite my cheek and I feel a buzzing inside of me, threatening to crawl up my throat. I want to relinquish my body to the repetition, I want to feel pleased with my work. But I keep feeling the hydrangea fairy, her little claws digging into my ear, reminding me how all of this is a monumental waste of time.
I focus on the puzzles. Glue, push, pull. I want to feel safe again. I want to feel happiness blossom inside me when I recognize one of the puzzles, when I see a kitten I’ve glued before, its soft, blue eyes flat and unseeing, startlingly small. I want to feel pride, round and glowing amber in my chest when my name appears above Belinda’s on the productivity chart, instead of warm, slick dread in the back of my neck at the thought of having to do it all over again.
Belinda rarely looks up from her work, but when she does, she never says anything nice.
“You look just awful,” Belinda says. “You really should try to get some more sleep.”
I am trying, I want to say. But Belinda has already moved on to a story about this one time her son sleepwalked and she woke to him leaning over her, his skinny seven-year-old self looming with a three-tined fork in his fist, his eyes open and reflecting the shine of her nightlight like he really might have done it if she hadn’t screamed.
So I smile and listen and lift my aching ankles up one at a time to relieve some of the pressure. I stare, press, glue into those little wooden windmills and sparkling fields of Germany or maybe it’s Holland. But really how would I know the difference.
✺
The hydrangea fairy is earlier than usual, crawling up the side of my face and into my ear before the shadows have grown long and crooked across my bedroom wall. She rustles as she settles into my ear and I imagine her a socialite fluffing out the heavy crisp folds of her skirt.
“Belinda sees it,” she says. Her voice has smoothed to a soft wave, she must’ve coughed up some of the dirt and dust inside her lungs. “She sees how tired you are, how much you’re falling behind.”
I remember Belinda’s face, her soft cheeks dimpling with a rosy warmth. How she looked pleased, almost happy when she said how tired I looked. I’ve always outperformed Belinda, I’m a few places above her on the productivity charts that Boss hangs up on the bulletin board beside the clock; I’m not first, but I process a lot of puzzles with no mistakes. I glue the pictures down perfectly. I never have wonky edges or bubbling images. I am useful, I have pride in my work. I do not fall behind.
“You know how Belinda talks,” she says. “She’ll tell Boss how tired you look, how much you’re not keeping up. Boss only took you back because it was convenient.”
I grit my teeth, I want to be useful again but it’s so hard with all the noise, with having to pay so much attention to what Belinda says. I just want to go back to how it was before the illness, before the hydrangea fairy told me all about dying and how sad it will be to have nothing after all the time in the factory, all the hours spent staring at beautiful places I’ll never know and warm, soft bodies I’ll never hold between my hands.
I’d been taught the importance of work since I was young. It was a necessary thing—our teachers taught us about work, about jobs, about having pride in our output, never consider the input. It helps the economy, we had to do our part. And look what I’d become without the factory. It only took two weeks to become a shivering, trembling, sweaty thing worrying about water and drowning and death. I should know better than to listen to the hydrangea fairy—I was weak and feeble. Belinda wouldn’t stand for it, she’d swat the fairy away and roll into a soundless sleep.
I tremble and the sweat on the small of my back goes cold with guilt. What a waste of a life, what a waste of a perfectly good body, of a perfectly good pair of hands.
The hydrangea fairy rustles the tiny hairs in my ear. She says no more, but I can tell she’s pleased. I imagine her face, small and rounded and soft, her thick eyebrows wiggling, a satisfied smile dimpling her cheeks.
✺
In the morning I feel heavy like concrete has been poured into my veins and left to harden in my joints. I wobble on unsteady feet, struggle to open the cabinets with aching fingers. I leave my porridge on the stove too long and burn it. I eat it cold and coagulated, dribbling down my chin.
After the illness, I wanted so badly to be useful. When I was healthy again, I returned to work with a fresh fervor. I would have the best numbers, I would have pride in my work. But I couldn’t return to the safety, I couldn’t wrap myself up in the repetition. The shifts that used to speed by dragged, pulling me down to the painful earth so that I hunched, I crouched. I couldn’t find the comforting numbness, not when every night the hydrangea fairy returned to remind me of what was waiting, that no matter how many puzzles I processed, no matter how many numbers I counted, I would still drown alone in the tub.
I walk the three miles to work in my low heels, the first frost lapping at my toes. I punch in late and I stand across from Belinda who is midway through a story about the Sunday roast she made for supper. Either she burnt it, or it burnt her, I’m not sure.
Stamp, push, pull. My bicep twitches, flicking a thick glob of glue across the doey face of a puppy in a basket of toys. I feel anger hot and swift, and I have the urge to break it, crumble the cardboard in my fists before it gets crunched to perfect pieces down the line. But it fizzles and I focus, try to remember the watery ease of it. Wizard, glue, push. Mountain, glue, pull. The glue is uneven and thick and I can barely smooth it out. My ankles ache from the walk and I tremble, I wither under the weight. I try to listen to Belinda but I can’t hear what she’s saying. The belt moves by unfocused, louder than before, thump-thumping faster and faster beneath my hands. I want to press my palms hard into it, I want to make it stop.
I glue, I press, I pull towards the routine.
My day is medieval villages, and Caribbean beaches, and baskets full of stock image kittens, and the Mona Lisa, and still-life fruit, and dragons, and dinosaurs, and warm fields of wheat, and daisies, and shipwrecked beaches, and little Dutch villages, and Starry Night, and the fairy from the hydrangea bush just outside my bedroom window.
She’s here in the puzzle beneath my hand. Small enough to squish, flat, one dimensional. More than just a voice in the night. She perches on a glistening stone beside a pond glowing green with moss. She holds a leaf dripping with dew like a teacup, a single pointed pinky flared. I know it’s her because she’s got a skirt made of tulips, fresh and purple and vibrant with sunlight. My brush, heavy with glue, drips onto her shoulder. She turns her tiny, perfectly round head and winks, swallowing dew from the cup.
She passes me on the belt. I miss my chance to glue her, to embalm her so she can’t follow me home again tonight. I stare down the line and blank cardboard passes beneath my hands. I need to see the machine shatter her into a thousand pieces. I want to see her flake into dust.
Belinda clucks, tells me I need to be careful. She once missed two puzzles in a row and they took the damages out of her pay. I wouldn’t believe what her husband said when she got home.
I dip my brush into the glue. I focus on a mouse in a teacup. I will not miss another puzzle. I will be useful again.
✺
I walk home in the glowing afternoon light. I sweat through my uniform compliant blouse, my stockinged feet squeaking in my heels. My legs are filled with jelly; I bounce on every step. I need to get more sleep. I need to get rid of the fairy in my hydrangea bush.
I eat a dinner of ham sandwiches and pickled onions in my darkening kitchen. I wash my hands and face in the rusting sink, I do not take a bath. I haven’t taken a bath since the hydrangea fairy appeared and I’m almost tempted to challenge her, to sink beneath the warm bubbles, to open my clenched jaw and let the warm water wander through my mouth and my nose.
The hydrangea fairy arrives on time, she sticks to our routine. She rustles, settles, cozies up, digs her little claws into my cartilage, almost sharper, tighter than usual. I wince, hold still, but I don’t wait for her to speak. I speak first.
“What’s the point of this?” I ask before she has a chance to tell me how I’m dead next, how much it will hurt. My voice is quick, nervous, high-pitched. Impertinent.
The hydrangea fairy is silent for so long that I worry she’s forgotten me, or that my question has horrified her so much she can’t begin to speak. If it wasn’t for the itch of her in the cup of my ear, I would’ve assumed she vanished—that she’d stumbled off in search of a better body to warm herself against.
“There isn’t a point,” she says. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? That there’s never really been a point.”
A fresh anger swirls through my body, hot and violent. Indignant. I should’ve known that she wouldn’t tell me the truth. Everything has a point. The factory, the puzzles, Belinda—it’s all to be useful, we’re all doing our part.
I wonder if Papa agreed, I wonder if Papa thought there was a point when he saved all his pennies and moved to a cottage, to do nothing but tend bitter strawberries until some pygmy goats nibbled him to bits when he died.
“I want to return to how it was before the illness,” I say. “I used to be content with the puzzles, I used to have pride in my work.”
She rustles, burrows, breathes deeply. I imagine her face a concentrated scowl, deepening red at the cheeks. “I can’t help how you feel. You should be grateful. You still have your job, your work.”
“But it hurt less before,” I say. “And I just want to be content with the work again.”
“How could you be content with your work?” she says. “You remember how eagerly they replaced you. They will replace you again and again. You’re just another body on the line.”
I don’t know how to tell her that’s all that I want, to be content with being just another body on the line. To be faceless, nameless, unknowing. Empty. I don’t want to know any different, I want to return to the ease of not worrying. I want to think of death as only a faraway embarrassment because it meant that I would no longer be able to give anything else.
The room is nearly dark now and the air is sticky against my eyelids. And I can feel it, her little belled shoes thumping and her continual humming like little ants marching around inside me, itching beneath my skin, wiggling around in the soft, wet spaces between my organs.
I want her to stop talking, I want to go back to the quiet. To the numbing swift coldness of sleep, to feel only the greasy heat of beans in my stomach at night, not the trembling gnawing of future earthworms burrowing into my gut.
I reach up and snatch her in one fluid movement from the cusp of my ear. She weighs nothing and if it weren’t for the soft petals of her skin wiggling, grasping at the inside of my fingers I might have thought I missed her, that she ducked just out of my reach. I want to crush her in my palm but she’s too small and I’m not strong enough, my hand weak from the years grasping the splintered brush thick with glue.
I push her struggling body into my mouth. I bite down hard, feel the crunch, the snap, the squish of her skin, so soft and almost furry like an unwashed peach. She dusts under my tongue like a moth, like powdered sugar. She tastes faintly of almond.
I swallow, feel the sugary liquid drip down my throat, puddle hot in my stomach. I wait for her to huff, to reappear somewhere behind me, crawl up through the floorboards and reclaim her spot on my ear. But it’s quiet, and triumph zips through my spine and down to the tips of my toes. I could almost scream with the satisfaction. It is quiet again. I will get a good night’s sleep.
I can return back to the factory, back to the old ways before the illness, before the hydrangea fairy crawled in and made me wonder about matter and mattering. I watch the shadows of the hydrangeas wilt, elongate into unrecognizable blobs of purple darkness. I feel a soft, warbling nausea creep in my stomach, like oil mixing in a clear puddle. But I don’t worry about it, I don’t need to worry. I can be useful again, I can get some sleep.
✺
In the morning, I am well-rested. I stretch in the warm morning glow, push my shoulders back so they crack. I stand tall. I toast an English muffin a perfect, golden brown and eat it with bittersweet marmalade. I button my blouse and not a single button is twisted or out of place.
At the factory, I punch in early and take time to look at the charts. I am two spaces below Belinda—I’ve been slipping. But no longer. I will get back in my place.
Belinda arrives a few minutes after me, tucking her sunset gray hair into her knotted hairnet. I want her to look at me, I want her to tell me I look fresh, reborn. But she tells me about the fight her son got into at school and how pitiful he looks with a split lip and a bruised eye.
The faceless cardboard comes thumping down the line in swaying waves, rolling over the dented curves in the metal. It looks like the ocean, a stormy gray sea of shipwrecked wood threatening to push us under the waves. I’ve never seen the ocean, I’ve never been out of the city, but I’ve seen it in the puzzles. I’ve seen it in the bathtub, those beautiful, tiny, isolated curls sloshing toward me as I settle my body, lay my head down so just my eyes are level with the surface—the water gray and purple from the lavender soap, stinging and trickling down my nose.
The blank cardboard reaches us, and Belinda and I begin, we lay down the images. We line them up perfectly, we glue, we push, we pull. And Belinda is talking about her son and his eye and I’m pressing, I’m gluing, I’m delicate and precise. I pull toward the nothing, I slip under the waves.