GODMOTHER

She comes to me with ash in her hair, dress in tatters, lips chapped, and a scar slicing through her right eyebrow.

            “Fairy Godmother,” she says. “I have been looking for you.”

            My cabin is deep in the woods, hidden away, or so I thought. I am surrounded by evergreen and moss and all things dark and deep. How has this girl found me? I am alone with my wand on the mantle and big, billowing dresses hidden in the cellar. There is tea steeping on the stove, a pile of scones and honey butter waiting for my attention. The lie bubbles up quickly, escapes my lips.

            “I’m retired,” I tell her. “No more magic here. Dried up. Old crone and all that.”

            The truth is I am hiding from these girls looking for wishes. When the wand passed to me all those years ago, I was a greedy thing, thinking only of the power, the extended life, and never considering the burden magic brings. My wand, ever critical, twitches on the mantle, silver sparks spitting into the room. Shut up, you, I hiss under my breath.

            I eye the girl warily. “What do you want?” I ask.

            She doesn’t answer and instead wanders my cabin, runs her hand along the window sill, picks up a tiny glass bluebird, and sets it down again. Her fingernails are jagged, bitten and worn with worry and work, blackened with dirt. She is not pretty—no blonde tresses flow beneath the soot and ash. Her hair is brown and hangs in stringy strips down her back. She is short and broad with flat, bare feet and thick ankles. The scar through her eyebrow pinches the right eye into a squint. I squirm as she sinks a dirty finger into the honey-butter and licks it clean while watching me. My wand slaps against the mantle; if it let me, I would snap the damnable thing in half.

            Still, she has come all this way, and I am not so old as to have forgotten etiquette.

            “Would you like some tea?” I ask and force a smile.

***

            We sit across from one another with our cups, steam from the hot liquid rising and twisting in the air between us. She tilts her head to the side, her black eyes pinning me with a stare I feel through my skin. Her gaze is a cold burn, and behind me, my wand thumps. I curse the thing silently. The wand’s angry with me for hiding us away, and we live with what has become mutual hate. What does that damnable stick know about the weight of the world’s sorrow?

            She wants to know what the other girls did to earn glass slippers, kind princes, and dresses made of silver and gold. She demands an answer for gifts bestowed on girls born with enough food, warm beds, loving parents, and beauty to spare.

            “Where were you when I was starving? Where were you when my father sold me for a penny?”

            I tell her there isn’t enough magic for everyone. I tell her that a Fairy Godmother must prioritize her gifts and that she didn’t need me.

            “Look at how strong you are,” I say. “Not all of you are born strong enough to carve a path through thorns.”

            The girl raises the cup to her mouth, presses it to her lips, and gives me a thin smile. “We cannot all be born in castles.”

            The truth is I do remember this girl. A screeching, sickly thing, ugly from the start, born in a shed behind the castle on the same day as the princess I had come to bestow with gifts.

            I sip my tea, and the silence stretches like vines twisting along the walls of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, tangled and thick. Tricky spell to break, that one. The girl heaps butter onto her scone, waiting.

            My bones protest as I push myself away from the table. I hobble to the fireplace and stoke the flames. I am so weary, so tired of carrying the weight of magic.

            “Girl,” I say, “there isn’t enough magic to fix all those who arrive in the world already shattered.”             

            She rises and comes up behind me. I feel her hot honey-scented breath on my neck.

            “Who are you to wield this magic?” she demands.

            I turn. “We Fairy Godmothers place our bets on the ones who only need a little here and there, who already have a chance to be happy in this broken, bitter world.”

            “I needed you, not her. There are lots of us who need you.”

            “You think you can do better? You can’t help them all!” I yell.

            The girl presses her dirty hand to my cheek and whispers in my ear, “I can try.”

            She closes her hand around my wand, and it sparks and shakes from her touch.

            I stand in the open doorway, watching her walk away with my wand, my magic, all I am. I slump against the sun-warmed wood of my cottage. I cry out, but she never turns, and the last thing I see is the trees bending their heads in reverence as the light of my magic wand guides her through the dark and lonely wood.