Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast (4 page)

Besides, it pleased Aunt Marilyn, who didn't like Harlyn reading books like The Hobbit. She thought fantasy stories were trashy, even dangerous, and said so often. “Empty make-believe” was one of her favorite phrases.

Harlyn checked through the section on hummingbirds with special care. They were certainly the right size, and their wings beat as quickly as fairies' might. So it was just possible that...

“Nuts!” Harlyn said aloud. “It was a fairy. It spoke to me and it was carrying a bag.” Besides, her mother's delusions were about people trying to kill her and UFO aliens kidnapping her. Crazy stuff. Harlyn put the book down. She knew what she'd seen.

 

Harlyn dreamed all night of hummingbirds who called her name, and of eagles the size of roses quarreling with the hummers. When she awoke, the sky was gray and rain was slanting down so hard that the rose arbor looked as if it were behind a very dirty curtain.

“House cleaning,” Aunt Marilyn said in a cheery voice. “That's all you can do on a day like this.”

Harlyn thought wistfully of her book. She was at the riddles pan, which she loved. But it wouldn't do to make a fuss. That would mean a well-intentioned lecture from Aunt Marilyn with unsubtle references to living in fantasy worlds. So Harlyn helped dean.

It was while she was working on the windows over the kitchen sink, the ones usually kept open for the robin who had adopted Aunt Marilyn, that she found a pink rubber band and three red berries, dried and shrivded, set side-by-side. Harlyn didn't want to climb off the counter just to throw them away, so she shoved them into her pocket, meaning to dump them when she was finished with the windows.

“And what,” she said to herself as she scrubbed at one particular spot on the windowpane, “have I got in my pocketses, my precious?” She hissed with gusto, like Gollum, or like an overworked kettle. But by the time she'd finished the windows, she'd forgotten to throw out the berries.

 

In the afternoon the rain ended and a glorious rainbow settled over the arbor. The lawn was so damp, Harlyn went out barefooted, but she couldn't find the fairy anywhere. Not even a trace of it.

Though what could be considered a trace of a fairy? she wondered. Torn rose petals? There were plenty of those. A second rose, a yellow one on a different bush, had opened, and the wind accompanying the rain had beaten off some of its petals, scattering them like a miser's treasure onto the lawn.

It was just when she had decided there was no fairy to be found and her imagination had indeed gotten the best of her that Harlyn heard a strange, tiny, thin wail, a meager thread of sound. It was not like anything, or at least not like anything she had heard before. She followed it, rather as if winding it up around her finger, until she came to an old and shaggy birch tree at the edge of the garden, in the untidy “natural” part she liked best, which ran down to a little stream.

The sound was louder now, but not any more robust, and Harlyn cast about for whatever was making that sound. For a moment the sound seemed high, then it was low, then somewhat oddly in between.

And then she saw a line of ants—rather large ants, about the size of her knuckle, the stinging kind, dark and purposeful—marching around the tree's trunk. They had been disguised at first by the birch's dark patches, but soon she could distinguish them against the white. They were heading toward the thicket on the right, where there were mean and wicked-looking thorns. When Harlyn squinched her eyes, she could see that the ants in front were carrying something tiny and light colored. She bent over and stared and, at last, realized that what they were carrying was a teeny-tiny baby—no bigger than her pinkie nail—wrapped in a yellow rose petal. The baby was waving its little arms and crying. It was that crying that Harlyn had heard.

Suddenly the grown-up fairy simply materialized above the marching ants, dithering at them and swooping and swerving overhead, shaking its tiny fist and screaming. It tried several times to snatch the baby, but the ants fought it off fiercely each time, hardly pausing in their march toward the thicket.

For a moment Harlyn watched, fascinated. They were all so small—ants and fairy and baby—that she could hardly feel anything but amusement at first. But then the fairy saw her and broke off its chittering attack on the ants to fly her way, waving its tiny arms and haranguing her again in its high-speed language. Without thinking, Harlyn put her hand out and the fairy alighted on her thumb.

When Harlyn brought her hand to her eyes, she could see that the fairy was unmistakably female—probably the baby's mother. And she was crying and yelling at the same time.

“All right. All right,” Harlyn said. At her voice the fairy was silent. “I'll see what I can do.” She waved her hand gently, which sent the fairy sailing back into the air.

Harlyn snapped off a dead branch of the birch and, using it as a kind of a whisk broom, tried to brush the closest ants away. But as if they had some dark magic binding them together, they scattered for a moment and then re-formed their line, marching on and on with the fairy child toward the thicket of prickers and humming an evil-sounding ant chant.

Harlyn tried a second and a third time with her stick broom, then angrily tried stomping on some of the ants. But each time she did, the rest of them scattered and returned.

The fairy flew up by her ear and chittered loudly at her.

“Well, I don't know what else to do!” Harlyn shouted back, loudly enough to make the fairy shove her tiny hands over her tiny ears. “I mean, it's like they have magic or something. And I don't. You know—magic! Ugga-bugga-abracadabra-zam-booie! ' ' She waggled her fingers.

The fairy went “Oh-ah!” in a high-pitched voice and suddenly fluttered around her three times at a speed that made Harlyn's eyes cross. And at each turning, the fairy sprinkled Harlyn with some kind of powder that must have been mainly ragweed because it made Harlyn sneeze and sneeze and sneeze until her nose dripped and her eyes filled up.

“Enough already!” Harlyn cried, wiping a hand across her eyes. When she could see again, everything around her seemed awfully green.

And awfully big.

But that was wrong. What she meant was, she seemed suddenly and awfully small. And she hadn't felt anything, except—well—the sneezing. Of course she wasn't as small as the fairy, who was still raging at her and flinging the powder this way and that, but she was small enough so that the grass was suddenly like a high fence all about her and the marching ants In front of her were as large as motorcycles—and looked as dangerous.

“Oh, great, you stupid fairy!” Harlyn shouted. “I might have done some good at my regular size. But what am I going to be able to do when I'm this small?” She grabbed up a nearby stick—it would have been a twig if she were at her regular height—for protection. Then she swung it wildly at the ants. They scattered again, all but the front three. Of course they would be the biggest and meanest looking. And they were the ones taking turns carrying the baby.

“Oh, great!” Harlyn said again, for the three were heading purposefully and unrelentingly toward the thicket and she could hear the rest of the ants starting to re-form behind her. Pretty soon she would be in an ant sandwich. It was not a pleasant thought.

And then she remembered ... and flung the stick aside.

“What have I got in my pocketses, my precious?” The rubber band had gotten proportionally smaller with her, but it still had its stretch. She pulled on it to test its bounce, then reached back into her pocket for the three hard dried berries. Planting her feet firmly, she pulled out one of the berries, dropped it into the rubber-band sling, and let fly toward the three ants carrying the fairy's child, screaming out all the movie war cries she could think of: “Geronimo! Cowabunga! Heigh-ho, Silver, ants, and away...”

She wasn't quite as accurate with the slingshot as she was with spitballs, the berries being both larger and heavier than the rolled-paper wads she was used to. But the berry dropped like a bomb on top of the middle ant's head, startling it so it dropped its hold on the baby and ran off to sulk in the grass. The other two ants, though, grabbed up the little bundle and, as if of one mind, marched on urgently toward the thorns.

Harlyn bit her lip. “OK, you suckers,” she whispered, putting the second berry in the sling. She let fly. It caught the left-hand ant on the leg.

The ant dropped its hold on the blanket and began to walk in circles.

Harlyn dived forward, shouting, “Say unde, you ant!” and laughing at the same time, mostly because she was scared stiff.

The lead ant was now inches from the thicket, and from this dose the thorny entrance looked sharp as doom. Harlyn put the last berry in the sling and was about to let it rip when something bit down on her ankle from behind. It stung like stink.

“Ow!” she cried, reaching down. The last berry dropped out of the sling and rolled away. Harlyn kicked back with her injured leg, connecting with the ant's head. Then, hobbling forward, she grabbed up her stick again and jammed it between the lead ant's jaws and the yellow rose-petal blanket. Surprised, the ant opened its mouth and the baby dropped out.

There was a swoosh of wings and the mother fairy slipped down startlingly fast on a quiver of air, grabbed the child before it hit the ground, and winged back up without a by-your-leave. And there was Harlyn, left all alone to face a line of large, angry ants.

What will Aunt Marilyn say? Harlyn wondered briefly. Even more briefly she wondered, Will Mother think the space aliens got me? Then she hefted the stick as if it were Robin Hood's staff and prepared for her final fight.

Just as the line of ants closed in, chanting and snuffling and breathing out some kind of dark, thick smell, a fine mist began to fall and Harlyn started sneezing and sneezing, again and again and again.

Blinded by the tears in her eyes, she felt her way backward, somehow eluding the line of ants, until she reached the trunk of a tree. Quickly she crawled around the back. Then she managed to creep into a corner of a crevice between the roots.

 

She must have fallen asleep, exhausted from the fight or the allergy attack, because she could only faintly hear the fairy shouting at her, “Harlyn ... Harlyn...” When she opened her eyes, she realized the voice was really Aunt Marilyn, calling from the door. Harlyn's leg ached and she was unaccountably dirty and...

“There you are,” Aunt Marilyn said. “I've been frantic. I couldn't find you anywhere, and then there was this enormous infestation of horrible gigantic ants that seemed absolutely immune to my spray, and...” She paused and ran a hand through her thick gray hair. “And now, sweetie, a call from the hospital saying your mom won't be released anytime soon.”

“Not coming home,” Harlyn whispered. She was surprised she did not feel worse.

“And look at your leg! That's some bite. Did those ants get you? We need to put something on it at once. Their bites can trigger allergic reactions, you know.”

Aunt Marilyn took Harlyn inside and soaked the bite in peroxide, which hurt, but not exactly, and then put antibiotic cream on it, which felt good, but not exactly.

“I could just kill those ants, sweetie,” Aunt Marilyn said.

“I know you could,” Harlyn said. She gave Aunt Marilyn a hug; then, as there was still some time before dinner, she went back out into the garden.

By the tree was a twig, and twined around its top in a complicated knot was the rubber band. At the base of the twig were red rose petals. The whole thing looked very much like some sort of memorial. A line of very large ants were carefully avoiding the site. Of the fairies—mother and child—there was no other sign.

“Empty make-believe?” Harlyn whispered aloud. “Space aliens?” Then she shook her head. She knew better. But she wouldn't tell her mother or Aunt Marilyn. Especially Aunt Marilyn. After all, Harlyn expected she would be living here for a good long time, and it would be better to protect her aunt from anything as real as a fairy.

WE MOVED INTO GRANDMA'S farm right after our apartment house burned down along with most of the neighborhood. Even without the fire, it had not been a good California summer, dry as popcorn and twice as salty, what with all the sweat running down our faces.

I didn't mind so much—the fire, I mean. I had hated that apartment, with its pockmarked walls and the gang names scribbled on the stoop. Under my bedroom window someone had painted the words “Someday, sugar, you gonna find no one in this world gonna give you sweet.” The grammar bothered me more than what it said.

Mama cried, though. About the photos, mostly. And about all her shoes having burned up. She has real tiny feet and her one vanity is shoes. She can buy the model stuff for really cheap. But it's not just the photos and the shoes. She cries about everything these days. It's been that way since Daddy died.

Ran off. That's what Nicky says. A week before the fire. Couldn't take it. The recession and all. No Job. No hope.

Mama says it won't be forever, but I say he died. I can deal with it that way.

And besides, we don't want him back.

So we got ready to head for Grandma's farm up in the valley, with only the clothes we'd been wearing; our cat, Tambourine; and Mama's track medals, all fused together. She found them when the firefighters let us go back upstairs to sort through things. Nicky grabbed a souvenir, too. His old basketball. It was flat and blackened, like a pancake someone left on the stove too long.

I looked around and there was nothing I wanted to take. Nothing. All that I cared about had made it through the fire: Mama, Nicky, and Tam. It was as if we could start afresh and all the rest of it had been burned away. But as we were going down the stairs—the iron stairs, not the wooden ones inside, which were all gone—I saw the most surprising thing. On the thirteenth step up from the bottom, tucked against the riser, was a nest. It was unburnt, unmarked, the straw that held it the rubbed-off gold of a wheat field. A piece of red string ran through it, almost as if it had been woven on a loom. In the nest was a single egg.