Farewell, Fairy

This story has been edited a bit, but was originally written and submitted as an assignment for my MFA program.

My elm tree is dying. Some of my pines are already dead.

Three mushrooms sit primly—each cap sporting a dark reddish-brown center ringed by pretty yellow-cream further ringed by toasted-bread brown—in front of the elm’s darkened, twisted roots. A swath of sunlight catches on their dew-dropped tops as if they’ve gotten a bright stamp of approval to ruin my memories.

I danced in a fairy ring when I was five. In my aunt’s yard, green grass tickling up to my calves, I took my place in the middle and raised my hands up as I jumped and wiggled. Something about the soil made her patch of land perfect for mushrooms, but I had never seen the little white caps form a circle before. It was for me, I thought. Why else would they order themselves in such a neat design?

So I danced, imagining little fairies coming to clap along to my moves. They would be good fairies, I decided, and we would be friends. They would give me a wish once my dance was done because I was certain they had never seen such a wonderful routine. Twirling as my finale, I made my wish: This place will always be mine.

Then I stumbled. One of my Keds stomped right on a mushroom, the top flattening to the ground as a dusty plume burst out.

I expected the fairies to swarm me like bees, to turn me into a mushroom to replace the crushed one. I’d never get my wish and my aunt would never know what happened to me. She’d have to tell my mother that I got lost while I was trapped as a fungus. So I hid in the elm tree, my favorite tree in my aunt’s whole yard. It had a branch just low enough for my hands to reach, easy for five-year-old me to climb up a few feet into the air.

It took hours for Aunt Penny to get me out of the tree. I was distraught, wailed that the fairies were after me because I killed a mushroom.

“Oh, those fairies know me,” she said eventually. “We’re friends. They won’t hurt you.”

I clambered down and she took me inside her cabinlike house, cleaned up my snotty face at the sink in the little bathroom with the tub-less shower on the first floor.

“I didn’t mean to smash it,” I whispered. “It was an accident.”

“It’s okay. I pull up mushrooms all the time and the fairies don’t give me any problems.”

“But you’re friends.”

She smiled and tossed the daisy-patterned washcloth in the sink. “I don’t think they’ll give you any problems either. They know how sorry you are.”

“I am,” I said, nodding. “I’m really sorry. They know?”

“Of course, sweet girl. They’re fairies.” That was enough to calm me down and I was laughing by the time my mom came to pick me up after her shift at the Chevron.

Before my mom strapped me into my car seat, I whispered to Aunt Penny, “But maybe we should be nice to the mushrooms. Just to make sure.”

“Sure, baby. We’ll be nice to the mushrooms.” She kissed my forehead and shut the car door.

It’s been twenty years since that day and Aunt Penny’s house has been mine for three. She left it to me in her will. When my aunt bought this tiny two-story house just on the outskirts of the Malheur National Forest in the thick of the lovely trees, she expected to raise a family. Instead, I was the only child screaming as she chased after me on her speedy legs, eventually the only one who could convince her to join me in my elm tree. By the time I was eight, it had become a tradition for us to crawl into the branches of the tree at some point every time I came over. We’d sit close to each other and whisper anything that needed telling.

“Can I live with you?” I asked her once. I was thirteen then, already acne-scarred. Mom had the prettiest skin, but Aunt Penny’s cheeks looked just like mine.

“How about when you graduate? We’ll be roomies.” Then she squealed like a middle-schooler and we cackled.

She was sick when I moved in with her after high school spat me out into the real world. I’d climb the tree like a child and she would sit against its trunk, tired and too thin.

“Keep the place nice for me,” she said after losing faith in chemo, pneumonia snug in her lungs. The hospital bed was stiff where I sat on the edge. “Grass just so. Mind the mushrooms.” She smiled, coughed, then laughed a little.

Would she still want me to mind the mushrooms if she knew they are killing our tree? They aren’t the little white ones that still make fairy rings in the yard sometimes. These are honey mushrooms, thriving in Oregon’s damp October this year. The real monster is a mooch underground, playing with our tree’s roots and coming out the winner.

I nudge a mushroom with the toe of my sneaker. Water droplets slide into one another and slip off the edge.

I don’t wear Keds anymore and I don’t believe in fairies, but the dusty plume of the mushroom under my shoe is just the same.