market value

It was Penny who saw the fairy first. A disturbance in the overgrowth. A wake of dandelion spires bobbing over a carpet of mallow and clover. 

Ivy sprang to her feet, abandoning her cattail wand in their pile of collected treasures: robin eggshells, Queen Anne’s lace doilies, worm corpses, a jawbone. Lulu followed. Naturally, Nathan was last. Fat still clung to the insides of his thighs in delicious rolls, and his bowed legs wobbled before finding equilibrium. (In truth, he was more frolicking lamb than human child. To their credit, the girls had never once lost him.)

Rank order, they bounded towards the cottonwood tree. 

*

No one came to the HOA meeting intending to lose control. Nor could they say for certain who threw the first punch. 

At first, great care was taken to balance their grievances with courtesies: a smile, a handshake, a cold drink for every mention of marauding weed spores or the annual late-May blizzard or property devaluation. 

Gradually, the scales tipped. 

The owner of the lot, who someone had tracked down at the tax assessor’s office, listened graciously, but when finally given the floor to speak said he’d never signed any agreement. That he wasn’t legally bound to down the tree, to dig a hole, to put up a single truss. 

Someone offered to buy it from him on the spot. Fifty-thousand over the market value. 

The owner shook his head, eyes drifting from face to face until, as if bored of human subjects, they settled on a flight of starlings swarming over the lot in question. 

“This is a subdivision, Mr. Jones.” The speaker had a fleshy face, patches of rosacea on his cheeks and forehead. His starched dress shirt was on the verge of popping buttons. “For the love of God, what else are you going to do with it?” 

*

The cottonwood was prehistoric. The Tree of Life, speaking to them in riddle and song, alive as the birds chirping in her branches, alive as the disease seeping through her fissured trunk, dripping like vomit. The girls often laid offerings near her surfaced roots, pressed raspberries into the cracked bark so she could taste the juice. 

As soon as they entered the tree’s shade, Penny brought a finger to her lips. The four of them tiptoed over sticks and decomposing leaves, following Penny’s lead as she dropped to her stomach, eye level with garden snakes and field mice. Not even Nathan moved.

Slowly, she lifted her finger towards a cluster of bluestem. The others traced its trajectory, patient, anguished, resolute until the wind finally breathed sunlight through the branches. 

Hidden beneath the grassy canopy was a banquet, a grand fête, not just of gustatory delicacies—tiered cakes and berry tarts and lemon wine—but of color. The children feasted on undiscovered shades of vermilion and periwinkle, enraptured by the rare miracle of ripened hope. Penny dreaded the moment it would end, and when Nathan finally squealed, dragging his plump legs through the dirt for a closer look, her heart grew cold in her chest. 

But as the fairies turned their obsidian eyes—oh, their eyes, mere pinpricks but somehow containing worlds and eons—Penny knew they felt no threat or fear, that all was as it was meant to be. And when her own translucent wings began to sprout, when she too sampled the ambrosian morsels as Ivy and Lu were fitted for rose petal gowns and Nathan reveled, tittering, in apple blossom kisses, she was struck by the moment’s familiarity. Its logic. 

All around them, mothers danced, cradling suckling babies to their bare chests, but their faces held no shame. 

It was the first time Penny ever cried for the sake of beauty. 

*

The sun had set long before they were summoned inside. The wind tried to carry their names away, beyond the grasp of geometric shapes and angles, far from entropic blood splatters and glass shards on the warm cement, from the postpartum silence pocked by the sounds of barking dogs and restless cars on the interstate. But the faint voice snagged in Penny’s ears. There was an urgency, a labored strain, in its familiar pitch.