Short Stories Of Curiosty

Fairy Cakes

The fairies come in the night, leaving tiny footprints in the sugar and the flour. The townspeople are always too tired after the day of baking to tidy up properly, sweep the floors, and wipe the countertops with a rag. A mess can wait.

But the fairies won't.

Everyone knows what happened the first time the fairies didn't get their cakes. It is, coincidentally, also the  last  time the fairies didn't get their cakes, and the stories are still told in shaking whispers , in lead-lined rooms, the only places the people can be sure they wont be overheard.

They come on a Tuesday, which is an odd sort of day all around, really, but most Tuesdays are not so very odd as the first Tuesday of February.  For as long as anyone can remember, and far longer than that, the fairies have come on this day, and the snow always melt just in time to clear the pass through the mountains.

In the morning, the townspeople line the streets to wait for the deliveries. Fresh milk, and flour, sugar, and eggs wrapped n cotton,and honey from warm, distant lands where the bees are hard at work. The honey is especially important. No one speaks. No one even looks up. Eye's closed, they listen for the rumble of wheels over the broken road.

And on this morning, the sound never comes.
An hour passes , then another. Higher, higher, the sun creeps.

"They're not coming," says a voice. Quietly, but the whisper carries down the line, passed form neighbor to neighbor.

"Have to," says another. "Have too."

Everyone is thinking the same thing. Angry teeth and unbreakable, fluttering wings. The light fades and the shivers start, and the suggestion comes to check all the cupboards. At once the street is empty, the kitchens full of searching hands, thin and bony from winter. Little children are sent to bed, but they do not sleep, their fingertips caught by the dust on windowsills as they watch their mothers and fathers scurry to and from the town hall.

"It'll be all right" says a young girl to her younger sister. Their noses press against the glass, tips growing clod and red, until they have to wipe breath mist away with the sleeves of their nightgowns.

"Promise?"

"I Promise" says the older one, fingers crossed behind her back.

On the wide countertop in the town hall, too much wood shows between the meager gatherings, certainly not enough to bake a cake for each of the fairies, and no honey at all.

Outside, the moon rises. The clock on the wall, hammered into the lead with a heavy spike, chimes the truth-there isn't enough time to get away.

There is no choice but to make do with what they have. When all is said and done, a few dozen tiny cakes sit, cooling, where they should be hundreds.

One by one, the townspeople slip back to their homes. They pull the little children from the windows and tuck them into their beds, planting kisses on their foreheads. The girl and her younger sister curl on their beds huddling together for warmth, and they are asleep when the humming begins.

Thousands upon thousands of wings bloc out the moon and the mountains, the noise growing louder and sharper as the fairies descend. Smiling, teeth bared, ready for the feast that is their due. The town hall door stands open; some fly inside, others land on the ground to run, cackling, over the floor.

And the cackles turn into screeching, inhuman cries.

Years later, the stories are told of what happened the second  time the fairies didn't get their cakes. The girl is old, wrinkled, her sister only a little less so. In lead-lined rooms,  they tell their children and grandchildren of the night the fairies went hungry. Of the sound that woke them up from their beds and sent them back to the windows to watch as feathers flew and bloodcurdling screams tore the night apart.

They covered their eyes, and then their ears, and then tried to cover both at once. Crouched down, they waited, safe, for the fairies never harm little children. The screams finally stopped, and the humming grew distant, disappearing over the mountains into the dawn.

In the morning, feathers littered the broken road where the grown-ups had tried to protect themselves, even while knowing it was no use.

There was no blood. There was no bones. There was only silence, and then, slowly, whispers as the children met outside their houses. Older ones took smaller hands, promising, again, that it would be all right. They had watched their parents, and knew what to do on the next first Tuesday of February, and the one after that.

It would be all right.

Bravely, the children crept into the town hall. Crumbs littered the countertop, spat out by the fairies the moment they tasted the cakes, baked without honey. Splintered wood spoons lay strewn on the floor; mixing bowls sat dented because fairies had used them for war drums.

In the last of sugar and flour were tiny footprints, no bigger than a fingernail, from when the fairies had come in the night.