Illusion

When I was six, my mother tried to convince me that faeries weren’t real. Of course I didn’t believe her.

After all, why would I have believed her? Not a lot went well in my life, but the things that did were down to the faeries. If I asked the faeries for something, and if I asked hard enough, then sometimes, just sometimes, it would come true. And for me, sometimes was enough. Sometimes was often enough to confirm my belief in their existence.

Mother had always been very strongly religious. I could see that my strong belief in faeries threatened her. Though she dragged me to church every Sunday without fail and made sure I said Grace before dinner, she still knew that all her efforts were not enough for me to change my mind.

Eventually, I grew old enough to realise my beliefs upset her, so I tried to keep quiet as much as possible. As time went by, her constant criticisms of me died down. For all she knew, I had given up on my innocent, yet pathetic, childhood fantasies.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

As years went by, I began to shut myself away from the world more and more. My bedroom was my one and only safe house on the entire planet. My mother didn’t seem to resent me quite as much as when I was eight years old and never stopped talking about the faeries, but we didn’t exactly get along, either. She dearly hoped that I didn’t still believe in them, but she never knew for sure. And I did still believe. Of course I did. But, unlike when I was a young girl, I had no one to talk to anymore. When you’re five and talk about faeries, people think it’s sweet. When you’re sixteen and talk about them, people turn away. They think it’s strange.

Maybe it was. Maybe I was strange. But I was also somewhat proud of it. Shutting myself away, writing poetry and painting pictures and collecting strange, occult artefacts was what I did with my spare time. It never once had bothered me that everyone from school spent their weekends shopping and going to the cinema and playing sport; that was never my thing. I had a few friends at school, but, seeing as I never saw them outside of the classroom, I was always very much an outsider. Even then, though, I didn’t mind.

It was only the second day of the summer holidays when I returned home in the evening from the shops—I had been out alone, of course—to find the door to my bedroom open. This sent hot blood pumping too quickly through my veins. The night was hot and stuffy; we were in the middle of a heat wave right now, and I pulled the frizzy hair off the back of my neck.

Mother and I had always agreed one thing: she would never enter my room without my permission. Not ever; not even when I wasn’t in there. She worried for me, she resented me, she may have even been scared of me, but she had never once broken that promise.

Until tonight.

A sliver of orange light came through the crack of the door that was open. Delicately, with a trembling hand, I pushed against the wood. Maybe I was wrong...maybe I’d left the door open and the light on by accident.

She was standing in there. The main light was off in the late twilight, but my bedside light was on. And, silhouetted against it, her head bent forward and her hands holding something flat, was my mother.

When she heard the door open, she looked up, a rabbit caught in headlights, and the light in her eyes shimmered iridescently with fear and...hatred? Could it be? Was that really what I could see in her face?

‘Mother,’ I whispered, my voice cracking with anxiety, ‘what are you doing in here? You know—‘

‘I know I made a grave mistake by adhering to our promise,’ she replied in a low, frail voice. It trembled as much as mine did.

‘What do you mean?’ I gasped, hesitantly stepping further forward to see what was in her hand.

Now that I looked, I saw more similar flat objects—paper they were; all different pieces of paper, discarded on the floor.

My paper. With my pictures on. All my drawings and paintings of faeries and other mythical creatures.

And they were torn to little pieces.

With violently shaking hands, my mother ripped the piece of paper in her hands neatly in half, letting go of it to let it drift peacefully to the floor.

‘Mother!’ I shrieked, running forward, catching the pieces of paper before they touched the floor. It was my favourite picture; one that I had worked on for weeks. All torn up. ‘How could you?’

‘You’re sixteen years old, Sofia,’ mother whispered, trembling. ‘And this is the devil’s work!’ Her voice rose, tears leaking from her eyes.

‘How could you?’ I shrieked.

‘It’s abnormal!’ she screamed back. ‘It’s hideous! It’s sick! How dare you disobey me like this after everything I’ve done for you?’

I felt faint. All my work...gone. I sank back onto the bed.

‘Stay in here,’ she hissed, terrified and furious at the same time. ‘I don’t want to see you again. I thought I could trust you!’

I was crying so hard, drowning in the depths of delirium, so I scarcely noticed her leave and slam the door, until I heard the key turn in the lock outside. I hated her...how could she? But I was also paralysed with fear. She had never done anything like this before. She had locked me in here!

I screamed into the floor for hours, hoping she could hear me below. I didn’t care that my window was open. I stomped and banged on the carpet, throwing things at it, taking the beautifully twisted ornaments from my window sill and throwing them at the ground so that they smashed. Staggering back to the sill again, a sharp pain cut into my foot. Looking down, I saw blood trickling from a gash in my flesh—I must have stepped on a fragment of the shattered glass—but I scarcely cared anymore. The pain was almost a relief.

I had expected her to come back up at some point; to unlock the door and say sorry. But there was nothing. I shuddered and sobbed and convulsed, my head buried deep in my pillow, until well into the night. It seemed that I eventually fell asleep, because when I woke up the landing light was off and, despite the stuffy, humid weather, the house was as cold and as silent as death.

And then a voice spoke to me.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

All of a sudden, the room was bathed in a delicate, golden glow shining through the translucent blind in the window. Looking up through puffy, tear-stained eyes, I saw a silhouette standing on the window sill outside. She was the height of a child, with flowing hair and a long dress.

And she had wings.

I knew beyond doubt that this was no dream and no illusion. It was my faerie; come to me stronger than she had ever come before. I had always believed in her; in them; but I had never seen them. I’d never had any proof that they existed. Faith was all that I had.

And now she had come. She had come to save me.

‘Come, Sofia,’ she continued to whisper, her voice too loud in the silence, almost as if she was not merely talking but projecting her words deep into my mind. ‘Come with me.’

I stood up, eyes wide as I looked at the silhouette that stood just beyond the veil over the window, enthralled by this miracle. She really was here.

‘Where?’ I asked, my voice soprano and wavering, but unafraid. The dull pain in my foot dissipated into insignificance as I took two steps towards the window.

‘Where no one can hurt you anymore,’ she replied.

I was at the window by now, held completely rapt, spellbound by her presence. I took the corner of the blind in two fingers, ready to leave. I was going to risk it all for her. I was ready to move on.

‘What will happen?’ I asked, never removing my eyes from her face, even though, in silhouette form, her individual features could not be made out.

‘It will all be over so quickly,’ she promised, ‘one brief moment of pain, and then an eternity of happiness.’

It sounded beautiful. I could have asked for nothing more.

I closed my eyes and took a sharp intake of breath.

‘I’m ready,’ I gasped, my heart hammering so loudly I could scarcely hear my voice. All the hatred inside me burned away, leaving nothing but this beautiful, pure sense of hope. ‘I’m coming.’

‘Come,’ she agreed, her voice dreamy. She moved a little further back from the window sill so that I could, instead, stand on it. Still with the blind down, I stared out into the golden glow coming in from outside.

‘I’m coming,’ I agreed once again, taking one final breath.

In one swift movement, I pulled the translucent veil back and stepped forwards into the darkness of the night outside, feeling the air rush through my body, pulling me into the black abyss below, transporting me to another world and another life. It was all I wanted...

I was already falling by the time I realised that the faerie was not there. In actual fact, she never had been.