I wrote the short story “Tooth Faerie” for a writing class I took my freshman year of college. It was dramatic and lilting and full of emotion, and it had the exact same tone as every other piece of writing submitted in that class. So naturally, instead of submitting it, I wrote “Who Doesn’t Love a Deadly Marble?” instead and only showed this story to my professor when we gave him our portfolios. He loved it, but he was glad I’d shared my other story instead. I am too.

I’m not much of a short story writer. I prefer long-form fiction, brevity having never been one of my strong suits. But I’m still fairly proud of “Tooth Faerie” for some reason. And as a standalone piece, it’s perfect to put up here. So I have.

Hope you enjoy.

Tooth Faerie

By Kodi Gonzaga

Ollie saw her first faerie at two years old while nestled in the backyard with a tube of yogurt in one hand.

She’d been brought out there by her mother, a beautiful young woman with a talent for gardening, who was planting a small bed of roses while her daughter entertained herself among the tulips. Ollie sucked on her yogurt and looked around, fascinated by the colors and sunlight and the smell of the garden. A few curious bees buzzed around her head. Her father often worried they would sting her, but her mother never seemed to think so. Bees didn’t bother people like her and Ollie.

It was close to noon, one of those pretty spring days you seldom find in reality, devoid of pollen clumps or the debris of growth, just blooming and sunlight and the promise of a rain shower later in the day. Ollie had squeezed out all but the last of her yogurt and was currently working on pushing out the rest, working her small, sausage-like fingers skillfully around the plastic. She loved yogurt at age four, and her parents loved giving it to her in excess. By age six, it disgusted her.

There was a rustle next to her, and Ollie looked up, and that’s when she saw the fairy. 

It was distinctly fairy-like, similar enough to Tinker Bell for baby Ollie to understand what it was, but it was different in a way she didn’t quite yet have words to describe. Sharper, slenderer, with a mischievous face and wings so thin and clear they looked like plastic wrap stretched over golden veins. They caught the light in a rainbow prism, drawing Ollie’s eyes immediately. Its skin was pale orange, the same color as the tulips, and its clothes were well-tailored leaves. Ollie couldn’t tell if the fairy was a boy or a girl or something else entirely.

“Hello,” Ollie said, more out of surprise than anything, and the fairy froze and stared right back, wings quivering. Scared, said something in Ollie’s mind, and then it glanced at the tube in her hands, and Ollie understood.

“Want some?” she asked, smiling a half-toothed smile, and Ollie held out the end of the yogurt tube, where she’d pushed the yogurt to the end, causing it to droop. The fairy, after a moment of deliberation, quickly fluttered over and caught the yogurt as the final glob fell out, almost landing on the dirt. Then it devoured it in a method most definitely inhuman.

The fairy licked its fingers and gave Ollie a grin of needle-like teeth. Then it flickered back to its flower, disappearing among the petals. Ollie sat there, staring, slowly pulling the plastic yogurt tube back towards her chest.

That didn’t look like Tinker Bell, she thought.

The next morning, Ollie awoke to a large crystal bead laying on her bedside table. When she blew through the hole, it made the most wonderful music.

~*~

After that, Ollie saw them everywhere.

She helped her mother in the garden a lot, and every once in a while, a fairy would come out, to observe or play or ask for a gift. Ollie learned quick that they liked sweet things and dairy products, shiny objects, things made of color and plastic gems. She’d give them drops of honey, sugar packets and cream cheese, the cheap plastic bracelets from a friend’s birthday goodie bag, the clip-on faux ruby earrings her grandmother had given her. In return she’d get performances, strings of music or dancing lights at twilight, a laugh like twinkling bells that’d make her happy for days. Once, she went to school, and anyone who made fun of her got a static shock so big it made them yelp and cry. No one bothered her for a week. Some kids thought she was a witch, but Ollie knew better.

One day, when she was six, her first baby tooth fell out, and her father told her that the Tooth Fairy would visit her tonight, and if she put her tooth under her pillow, it’d be replaced with money. Ollie didn’t quite see the point if she could just give her tooth to her fairy friends out in the back garden right away. So she went outside as the sun was setting and sat among the roses, holding a tooth in her hand. The flowers sat still, and the fireflies twinkled, but no fairies appeared.

Then the sun slipped behind the horizon, and Ollie heard a growl near the bushes.

A small creature made of shadow and fur slipped into the garden, with nubs on its head the color of bone and three eyes that glowed red in the darkness. It padded towards her and opened its mouth, extending its tongue, and Ollie, not quiet knowing what to do, placed her tooth into the small dip it made. Then the creature swallowed up its tongue and slipped back under the bush. A rustle, a blink, and it was gone.

It didn’t look like any fairy she’d seen before, but it felt like one. Magical, mystical, dangerous. Dancing fairies with pretty wings still had sharp teeth and fingers like sewing needles. They made Ollie laugh, but something inside her tugged, warning her, keeping her wary. The prettiest people were often the meanest–she figured the same could be said about fairies.

But the shadow monster looked like a monster, like it wasn’t afraid of being scary, and for some reason, that made Ollie like it all the more.

She went back inside, padded up to her room, and settled under the sheets. The next morning, there was a dollar under her pillow. On her bedside table was runestone made of bone.

~*~

She carried the runestone around for two days, and then she put it away, in a small tin box with her music bead and some pretty flowers and rocks. When she wore it to school, or the store, or the park, she saw things she didn’t want to see, heard things she wasn’t meant to hear. When she slept with it, she saw darkness and tentacles and teeth. She heard screams and songs not meant for human ears.

At six years old, Ollie didn’t understand why it was a gift.

Years later, she would.

~*~

Ollie didn’t give any more teeth to the shadow monster, instead electing to place a tooth under her bed and receive a dollar from her father, who she knew was the supposedly mythical Tooth Fairy, because no gifts she’d received from her fairy friends were anything as trivial as money. She didn’t spend so much time in the garden, stopped giving so many gifts, and eventually, the fairies began to disappear, melting back into petals and stems and branches and bark, no more music in the air. The blessings she’d been given faded away, and Ollie started making friends. No more shocking whoever she touched, no more scaring them away with fantastical babbles. No more bad dreams she couldn’t remember. No more whispers of being a witch.

She was right to be scared. She knew that. When she finally told her mother about her little friends, she frowned and hugged her close.

“They’re dangerous, Ollie,” she whispered. “Don’t trust them, or they’ll steal you away.”

Ollie nodded and hugged her back. Her mother had always known. The bees were kind to her, the flowers bloomed for her, there was always sunlight in her hair and music in her mind. Her mother was like her. She could see them too.

Two weeks later, her parents were killed in a car crash.

Ollie was nine.

She didn’t get to say goodbye.

~*~

She moved out of the house, away from the garden whose flowers had begun to wilt, from the familiarity of friends she had just begun to make. Halfway across the state, she stopped and settled, at least for a moment. Her new foster parents were strict and sharp. They yelled and snapped. Sometimes they hit.

One night, Ollie got a bad grade in school, and her foster mother’s wedding ring gave her a cut on her cheek that bled down her face. She slipped out of her window at two am and ran to the community garden in a park across the street. Then she sat, holding a handful of sugar packets and her tin full of gifts, and cried.

She didn’t expect them to come, but they did.

She wiped away the tears and blood on her face and pressed the hand into the dirt, and then the flowers and vegetables began to glow, and then small peals of laughter rippled through the air sounding for all the world like a collection of tiny bells. They always sounded like bells, always twinkled like stars, glowed every color imaginable and then some more. The pretty ones came first, snatching the sugar packets, dancing in front of her face and singing tunes sweet and soft and half-remembered. They cheered her up, got her to smile, then laugh, to hold out her hand and let them dance on her palm. And then they disappeared, taking the bells and light with them.

Then she heard a growl, and Ollie sat still, taut as a wire, the tin box cold in her hands.

The beast slunk out of the shadows, bigger now, the size of a great dane. It folded itself from shadow and smoke, forming a snout she couldn’t recognize, four legs, shaggy fur. The bone-colored nubs on its head were now branching, small antlers about half the size of Ollie’s arm. It still had three eyes, all glowing red, one in the center of its forehead. Ollie wondered if it was angry, if she should be scared, if it wanted its runestone back.

But the beast simply padded up to her, sniffed her face, and then licked it clean with its tongue. Rough like a cat’s, not too moist. Her skin tingled where it passed, wiping away the blood and tears. When it finally moved away, Ollie brought her hand up to her cheek and found her cut had been replaced with a scar.

She stared at the beast, not sure what to find in its eyes. They glowed, just like the fairies in the flowers, as if that was the only place it could glow, and for some reason, that made her sad. The beast stared back, blinking slowly, all three eyes closing and opening at once. Ollie reached out her hand, and the beast moved in.

Soft fur, she realized first. Warm, was second.

She rubbed the beast’s side for a moment more.

And then it went taut and bounded away, blending into the shadow of a tree.

~*~

She was moved out of her foster home a few weeks later, placed into another a few towns away. There were other kids this time, other orphans. Four other orphans. They’d all been there for much longer than she had. The older ones were mean. The younger ones followed their lead.

They said she was a loser, that her parents didn’t love her, that they’d abandoned her because she was worthless, and soon she’d get kicked out of here too. She knew they were wrong about her parents. That didn’t bother her. But she didn’t quite fit in, and she wondered if moving away would be her fate here too.

It wasn’t until they saw her outside one day, sitting in the branches of a tree and talking to a creature they couldn’t perceive, that they began calling her a witch.

They’d push her around and threaten to burn her, pull up any flowers she tried to plant, break her toys and steal from her room, and Ollie tried her best to fight back. But there were four of them and only one of her, and they were clever, clever enough that the parents never found out. When Ollie tried to tell them, they said she was being bad, that she was lying for attention, that these kids were angels, they’d never do anything like that. They sent her to her room without dinner, and Ollie learned not to trust them. She learned not to trust anyone.

One day, her foster siblings stole her mother’s piano books, tore them up and scattered the pages to the wind, and they made Ollie watch. She screamed and cried, and all they did was laugh. Your mommy is gone, witch girl, they said. Gone and never coming back.

 That night, Ollie took out her little tin box and plucked out the runestone made of bone. She pricked her finger with a pushpin and rubbed the blood into the engraving.

A familiar growl came from the shadows behind her.

“Hurt them,” she hissed.

And then all she heard was screaming.

~*~

They moved Ollie to a different home, claiming she “didn’t fit in” with the established family group, that she was a “troublemaker,” that her presence had disrupted peace in the family and brought back traumatic memories for the other children.

She never got her mother’s piano books back, but the runestone stayed in her pocket.

~*~

Ollie never stayed in one home for very long after that. A month or two in, and something strange would happen, something scary, something that convinced the adults or children that she “wasn’t a good fit for the family,” and then she’d be moved again, to another foster home or group home, another place with new kids and adults to hurt her, belittle her, contain her. The runestone would spark in her pocket, and she’d catch glimpses of their thoughts, move shadows and objects with her mind, dream of a screaming void or endless rows teeth. At first, she only pushed away those who hurt her. Then she pushed away everyone else.

She visited gardens and parks and small spots of nature, bringing packets of cream cheese and stolen bottles of honey, and the fairies would dance for her, laugh and sing and chatter, flutter about like the most beautiful beings alive. At night, when she awoke with nightmares of crashing cars or glinting rings or piano music slipping away on the wind, there’d be a presence behind her, soft and warm and made of shadow, and there’d be a familiar growl, deeper than it’d been before, and Ollie would calm down and fall asleep.

She never gave it a name. It didn’t seem right to. If it wanted to tell her its name, it would.

~*~

On her fourteenth birthday, Ollie was told by her foster family that she’d be moved again in the morning. She wasn’t a right fit, weird things were happening, she was too strange and scary and spent too much time talking to her imaginary friends. You need help, said the father. And you won’t get it from us.

That didn’t come as much of a surprise to Ollie. These people weren’t exactly the helping type.

That night, she packed her things and ran away, slipping out through the kitchen door and running into the woods. It was summer, warm and a little humid, the way the air felt just before a storm. The stars were bright in the sky, and there was no moon, and Ollie felt more at peace than she had in a long time.

After a while, she stopped running, leaning against a tree to steady herself, and from the shadows next to her came a familiar, low growl.

“Hello,” she said, chest heaving.

The beast growled again, and then it walked into view.

It was the size of a moose, twice as tall as Ollie herself, with antlers that reached far into the leaves of the trees. Its three eyes still burned red. Its fur was as soft as feathers.

She stared up at it, comforted and unafraid, and then her heart sank.

“I don’t know where to go,” she whispered.

Her beast huffed, and then it lifted its head, looking off into the distance, and Ollie heard music. The sound of a piano, drifting through the air. A tune she remembered from years ago that she’d long forgotten the name of.

Mom, she thought.

A peal of laughter, human laughter, that she remembered from her childhood. Sunlight in her hair and music in her mind. The smell of roses and dirt. Fingers across a piano.

Something in her broke.

“Mom?” Ollie whispered.

The beast grunted, and then the feeling disappeared as fast as it came, leaving a void in her chest more painful than if she’d been stabbed through the heart. Something inside her was shaking. It took her a moment to realize she was crying.

Ollie looked up at the beast. It stared back, with three red eyes.

“How do I get to her?” she asked.

Its eyes stayed fixed on hers, imploring her with something forceful that she couldn’t quite describe, and then it looked away and faded into mist, and then the mist melted into shadow.

Her beast left Ollie alone in the forest, empty and cold, with no gifts and no answers.

The runestone in her pocket burned.

~*~

She slept on park benches and in homeless shelters, kept to herself, scrounged or stole or took the occasional job. People steered clear of her, wary and afraid, like they could feel something about her was wrong, was scary, was off in some indescribable way. That was the way she liked it. It was better for them if they did. She wandered the streets, vising spots of nature, leaving drops of cream and honey and cleaning up trash. Sometimes, when she felt lonely, she hitchhiked to a forest and slept on the dirt, and it was always soft and warm, better than any bed in any shelter, better than a park bench or a concrete sidewalk or a cardboard box. She’d bring gifts, if she had them, and if she didn’t have them, she’d bring her knife and leave a drop of blood.

She never felt hungry, never got sick or dirty. Those who did bother her met worse and worse fates as the years went on. Sometimes they’d lose their boots, sometimes their clothes, sometimes a cop would walk by and arrest them for loitering. Sometimes what little they had would be stolen. Sometimes they’d get hit by a car. Or a train. Sometimes they’d get addicted to heroin. When she was sixteen, a boy that tried to rape her in an alley got kidnapped by a gang and was beaten until his brain bled out of his ears. She had started to wonder if she was an omen of death, a cause of pain and suffering, if this was her way of returning unto the world what it had reaped in her.

She didn’t dream of car crashes and bloody rings anymore. She dreamt of something worse, a yawning maw she couldn’t describe.

Her friend never visited anymore, never came when she called. The fairies always came though; she’d leave an offering in a mushroom circle she found in the park, sit and wait patiently at two in the morning, and then they’d come, crawling out of flowers and bushes and bark and soil, different forms for different places. Some they looked like their homes, with dresses made of autumn leaves and skin the color of petals. Some looked more humanoid, with human skin and delicate clothes, wings like butterflies, or dragonflies, or ladybugs. Some seemed to be made of light, so small and bright that from far away, they looked like stars on Earth. Some were small enough to ride on fireflies. Some were small enough to ride on ravens.

They were beautiful and clever and mischievous and kind, and they helped her play and laugh and enjoy herself, if only for a moment. But they could never give her more than that. Pretty lights, joyful music, a dance and a twinkle, and then they were gone.

Nothing lasts forever. She knew that. She’d forgotten who’d told her first.

It was easier with the fairies.

~*~

When she was seventeen, she lost the runestone, and for the first time in her memory, it stayed lost.

She had tried to lose the runestone before. The dreams would wake her in a cold sweat, jerk her into sitting, teeth chattering no matter how warm. There were songs that made her ears bleed and her mind sting, visions her eyes refused to comprehend, and so she tried to leave the runestone behind on multiple occasions. In the trash, buried in the park, tossed into the rapids of a polluted river. Every time, it came back to her pocket. Every time, the dreams grew worse.

And then one day it was gone, a hole singed through her pocket, a weight on her lifted that she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying.

It was almost a blessing.

~*~

A few months later came the headlines.

Girl, Age 12, Destroys Home and Public School.

Ava Kane Escapes Police Custody, Now At Large.

Cult of Kane Burns Office Buildings, 28 Confirmed Dead.

Kane Survivors Claim Mysterious Visions.

It seemed impossible, improbable, fantastical and strange. Whatever it was, it was deadly. Whoever she was, she was unstoppable.

Ollie knew exactly what it was.

And she couldn’t help but feel guilty.

~*~

It was raining in the alleyway.

“I can’t stop her,” Ollie said, to the wall, to no one, to the voices in her head. She’d been arguing with herself for the better portion of a week. There was a feeling inside her she couldn’t shake.

“It’s impossible,” she said again, kicking the wall. Stupid wall. “She knows how to use it. She let them in. I couldn’t get close enough, I’d just die like everyone else.”

The wall argued back. Your fault, your fault, your fault.

“Shut up!” she yelled, slapping the wall, because she’d learned the hard way several years ago that punching bricks hurt more than it helped. “Shut up, shut up, I can’t, I won’t!”

Your fault, your fault.

“Shut up!”

Ollie screamed, so loud it reverberated up and down the alley, drowning out the rain and the thunder and the cars driving past on the street, until all that was left was emptiness and cold and a ringing in her head. She slumped down onto the concrete, sinking into a puddle. The sobs broke out of her chest before she had a chance to stifle them.

A tear fell into the puddle at her knees, and at once, there was a familiar presence behind her.

She sniffed. “Hello.”

The beast growled, and so she turned, and there was the friend she’d last seen in the forest, the only friend she’d ever had, larger and more terrifying than ever before. Antlers as big as trees, teeth as sharp as knives, taller than the buildings that flanked the alley, wider than the alley itself. Reality seemed to bend behind the beast, warping around its form, succumbing to its will like all things in this world did.

Powerful, said something in Ollie’s mind.

“You can help me,” she said quietly, hopefully.

The beast blinked its three red eyes, and in them Ollie saw the runestone, the blood, the creatures that dwelt in the void and the screaming they wrought when their own wasn’t enough. She saw tentacles and teeth and blood red eyes and growing antlers. They were the same, they were all the same. Her heart sank, and the beast lowered its head.

“You can’t,” she whispered, and suddenly she could hear the rain. Thunder boomed in the distance.

The beast stared at her, waited until she lifted her head and met his eyes, and then it lifted its snout to the sky and howled, softly, so softly it sounded less like a howl and more like music. Beautiful, twinkling music. She wondered if it was lamenting, and then a familiar chord struck her ears.

A static shock ricocheted up from her fingers, and the tin box in her pocket went cold.

She understood. She could do something. Something for the world, even if it didn’t deserve it.

Ollie steeled her gaze and met the creature’s eyes.

“Take me to her,” she said.

The beast enveloped her, and then they were gone.

~*~

There was not a mighty battle, or a fantastical duel, or a fight to the death resulting in millions of casualties and the destruction of public property. There were no minions, no sidekicks, no theme music. Ollie’s friend took her where she needed to be, and then she went in.

The building was abandoned, musty, filled with whispers and darkness, but she met no one, saw nothing, drifted in and out of the shadows as something showed her the way. She heard shuffling footsteps, people laughing, a few screaming. Some nearly saw her, nearly sounded the alarm and ruined it all, but they missed her by a breadth of an inch, a slight miss of a glance as she slipped into shadows, the turn of a corner as they stepped into view. It was timed perfectly, like a dance or a song. Ollie knew better than to think it only was her.

 There was no throne room, no final dungeon, just a closed door that hadn’t been locked and a small room with very little inside. On the bed sat Ava Kane, staring at the runestone in her hands. Her arms and fingers were bandaged and bloody. She was crying.

There was a burn on her face in the shape of a hand iron. It had been there a long time.  

“Hello,” Ollie said.

Ava looked up, eyes red, and in her eyes, there was a burning ember, fanned and blazing and ready to flame. Her skin looked pale, too pale, blue veins tracing a sickly network across her body. She was wearing a pretty floral dress and no shoes. Her hair was in pigtails.

“Hello,” she replied.

They stared at each other for a moment, silent. Ollie didn’t know what to say.

“You’ve come to take it away,” Ava said. It wasn’t a question, and Ollie nodded, not quite sure what to do.

“You can’t,” Ava said. Her eyes burned. “They deserve it.”

Ollie thought back to the headlines, the stories, the people killed in horrible ways. She leveled buildings and destroyed lives. They deserve it. The first place Ava had touched was her home.

Ollie didn’t know what it was like, to grow up unloved from the moment you were born. But she understood how it felt. She knew better than most.

“Hurting them won’t make you feel better,” Ollie said quietly. “It won’t fix anything. It won’t make people love you.”

Ava stared at her, and then she stared down at her hands, rubbing the runestone between her fingers.

“They love me,” she said.

Ollie shook her head and pulled out her crystal song bead. In her fingers, it felt like ice.

“You know they don’t,” she said.

Ollie blew on the bead, and out of it came the most beautiful music, and from the darkest recesses of her mind came the screaming. She could hear screaming from Ava, from the people in the building, from the monsters trapped in Ava’s mind, but all Ollie could remember was the screaming of her friend, howling in pain and pride.

I’m sorry, she thought, and suddenly she was crying too. I’m so, so sorry.

And then the runestone in Ava’s hands shattered, and the world went quiet.

~*~

Ollie never found out what happened to Ava, to the Cult of Kane, to the world after what she did. She walked out of the building and didn’t look back. She found a forest many miles away, kept walking until her knees crumpled beneath her. And then she cried.

Her friend didn’t come, but she knew it wouldn’t.

It didn’t hurt any less.

Eventually, the tears stopped, and Ollie sniffed, and she took out the bead and looked at it in the starlight. There was no moon in the sky, and what little light there was had filtered through leaves and branches and scattered on the forest floor. Every time it caught a hint of light, the bead glinted every color imaginable, like a rainbow prism, like the wings of a fairy in her mother’s garden.

Ollie felt something bubble up in her chest, and she blew on the bead again to push it away.

The song that rippled through it sounded like her mother’s piano.

There was a soft light and breath of air, and when Ollie opened her eyes, there was a rip in the world before her, a tear in the fabric of space and time. Beyond it was a land of glowing fauna and beautiful, flickering lights, of music and laughter and the smell of a rose garden, a world with three moons in the sky, each a different color, and though Ollie had never seen this place before, it seemed almost familiar, like she’d been close to this world many times before.

Through this rip in the worlds came a fluttering sheet, and on it was her mother’s piano music.

For the first time in many years, Ollie felt herself smile.  

She stood up, walked into the ripple of space before her, and the world she knew fell away, slipping into nothingness in Ollie’s mind. Before her stretched a world of magic, of beauty and music and lights and delight. Her last gift to the fae had been her friend, and they’d rewarded her with a home.

In the forest outside of Sunshine, Montana, the rip between worlds stitched itself shut.

The fairies’ song bead fell to the ground, and all trace of the girl who’d held it was gone.