Abi / Yakima Washington, July 1970

She finds the fairy in a suitcase.

It’s the start of Abi’s weekend at the Bumping River cabin, and Nana tells her hurry up eat your breakfast while it’s hot. She should be home having cereal: Mama with Special K, Abi with Lucky Charms, the milk turning a sugary gray-pink as summer rain falls outside their Seattle window.

“I don’t like eggs with middles that show,” says Abi.

Nana sniffs. “A grandchild of mine must clean her plate.”

She doesn’t feel like Nana’s grandchild. She can’t remember her father who died but he’s the reason for Nana.

After breakfast she hauls out her suitcase. She loves unpacking little by little. The suitcase is Mama’s old one from Grandma Willa’s attic, and the lock’s tricky. When it snaps open, she plucks the red satin elastic, looking for crayons. Abi made sure to pack Casper the Friendly Ghost Coloring Book, but packing is confusing. For instance, sleeves—what do you do with them when you fold? She packed her green jumper, her stretchy blue headband, two blue plastic hair clip bunnies. It’s good having things when you can’t be home; there’s no Mama there. The police took her away. They said she was sick. They were stupid.

Abi didn’t pack underpants or toothbrush, but she swishes her hairbrush through her brown hair, once, twice, three times, the way Mama does. She sets it down and goes through a pocket. A sharp thing stabs her fingers.

She lifts out a square the size of her hand. It’s a framed fairy, wings shining like aluminum foil, but blue, blue, blue. The fairy sits naked on a blade of grass, touching a flower as big as her head. On the back, Abi reads the gold foil seal: Butterfly, and Made in E-something, and numbers 1, 9, 2, and 5.

The fairy’s face glows and her eyes . . . her eyes are following Abi. Do her wings twitch? Abi looks again, and the fairy bends a sunny yellow petal to her mouth. Eating what she wants when she wants.

At lunch, Nana says be a good girl for once and eat your trout Grandaddy caught you. Abi pushes the weird silvery skin with her fork into a wrinkly pile, then slides the frothy thing into her gingham napkin. She tilts the napkin onto an empty chair.

A faint mist of deep violet floats in her vision.

Spaj / Argonne France, September 1918

Tearing through burned skeletons of trees, choking on smoke, he staggers as a detonation sears his brain and slams his ears. Hot blood sprays his face and his hands stiffen; he drops his gun. Nell flashes in his mind and he grasps at the comfort as he crumples to the floor of the dark forest.

Catherine Gustavson / London, August 1946

Dear Marin:

Writing this at Trafalgar Square, where children are splashing in the fountains. Wish you were here! Warm and beautiful. Found you something at a shop—a fairy with real butterfly wings from South America. See you in September.

—Aunt Cath

Abi / Seattle Washington, May 1973

The best thing about living with Uncle Blake and Aunt Maggie is Ginny Banks next door. The best thing about Ginny Banks is her treehouse.

There’s a real bed and chair and fridge, and a chest of dress-up clothes. “I’ll be the mom,” says Ginny Banks, tying on a pink apron. Abi goes outside to look for squirrels. She wishes she could live in the treehouse instead of the big white house that never feels like home no matter how many nights she sleeps there. If Abi had a treehouse, birds would hop in her dark hair, like the creatures in Snow White. There is a knot of differentness in her. Only with Mama does she feel like herself. It’s been a long time since she felt like herself.

Abi peers into the pink-curtained window. Ginny Banks is scooping plastic potatoes, grapes, and a loaf of bread from the cupboard. She opens the pretend oven with the plastic turkey in it. “Dinner!”

What’s it like, having a mom making dinner and a dad coming home every night? She sticks her hand in her jacket pocket—quick breath, bite of sharp wooden corner—her heart gives a leap. How did the fairy picture get in her pocket?

She presses the smooth glass with her finger pads—the picture is a secret, hers only. A violet mist fills her mind. Maple leaves flutter around the treehouse, and a chickadee sings its name. Abi plays the dad, opening the treehouse door: “I’m home!”

Gentiana / Quinzième of the Chokecherry

They have always pranked humans. Orlinda the Phlox-Haired lured a boy from his village, kissing him, then abandoning him. He joined the crew of a ship and was drowned at sea. Belladonna the Green stole meat pies and milk jugs until she drove a young mother mad. Villagers took away that woman’s child to be raised by relatives.

Gentiana refuses to play tricks. Neither does she want to be foolish like cousin Damask, who teased a hungry tomcat too far and was eaten. She befriends the tomcat, leading him to a young mistress who serves him cream on her doorstep. She drops blackberries and walnuts into the pockets of wandering hobos. She sneaks into the manor at the edge of the forest to free purple finches from their cages. She leaves a note of apology.

These are not things fairies do. They may occasionally perform fickle kindnesses, but they do not apologize.

When war comes to the forest, the fairies pack their seeds and reeds and harps and gossamer looms; they dig up their cultivars of forget-me-not and lady’s slipper and sweet pea. Queen Marinda lifts her wand for them to march and fly and climb to a new home, deep in the forest and high in the canopy. They follow their queen. But Gentiana lurks on a pine branch, watching the humans, quivering at the shouts and explosions and panic. When the regent comes for her, she apologizes, tears brimming in her sapphire eyes. “I can’t leave the forest. It is in trouble.”

Absolute control is not the fairy way, so Queen Marinda lets her stay, despite getting into a snit about it (which is the fairy way), and bundling a curse into her future. “As you wish, Gentiana. Brigid knows the world needs your compassion.” The Queen raises her wand which smokes and smells like burnt cinnamon. “You’re barely out of fairy childhood, mind. If you stay on this course, one day you’ll be pierced. On a day human fates hang in the balance, you will lose your wings and be entrapped in glass.”

Gentiana, who hates traps, shudders. But what can she do? The humans trapped themselves in this war, and there are thundering weapons and ditches piled with bodies, pooling with blood. She bows her head, then watches as the fairy clan flutters in a murmuration across the sky.

She feels powerless. A warrior spirit like a Valkyrie would put an end to the fighting, but Gentiana could never pronounce death or cast curses. The goddess Brigid cares for this land, has guided mortals and immortals in the making of beautiful things—from torcs to wands to wells.

Gentiana hovers, watching the humans. There’s something so earnest in the movement of the man creeping out of a foxhole, gun over shoulder. An ear-splitting eruption spews metal bits and smoke; the blast picks him up and tosses him aside. Gentiana flies to him.

He gushes human blood, so red, with his face death-white, his legs crumpled like broken twigs. He is filthy, stinking. There is a daub of ink on his left hand as if he wrote a letter just today. She flutters to the torn uniform wet with blood and mud and rain, and presses her hands against the man’s chest to steady his heartbeat, slowing the bleeding. She doesn’t know any songs in English, so she sings a fairy lullaby: may the honey of the bees stream through your dreams, sweet one.

Spaj / Argonne France, September 1918

A thin voice, high and haunting in his mind, buzzes like a dragonfly and wobbles like a loon. He sees poppies blooming over mounded fields and butterflies sweeping through rusting shells and grenades while children fly on stubby wings. The strangest Heaven.

Abi / Seattle Washington, February 1973

Abi needs help with her Science Project. “Now?” asks Mama. “I’m sooo tired from my appointment.” It has only been a few months since Mama has been home and she goes to doctors a lot. Mama pushes a hand through frosty-brown hair, rubs her forehead, takes heavy steps into her bedroom, closes the door.

Abi looks at her fairy picture, the blue reflected in the dresser mirror. After lunch the next day, she goes into the school kitchen. “Hello? I need a box.” At free time she marches up to Mr. Rodriguez and asks for National Geographic. On Friday, she takes Mama’s cool hand and walks her into the classroom now strange with nighttime: dark windows and wall hooks smothered with parents’ coats. “Over here.” At the table of posters and popsicle-stick creations, there’s a shadow box, Life Cycle of the Butterfly, with Abi’s handwritten squares under glossy cutout illustrations, telling the story of egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to metamorphosis. Abi drew the final butterfly herself, seeing in her mind the purply blue wings delicately etched with veins.

Mr. Rodriguez strolls by, smiling, and taps the table. “Abi’s quite the scientist.”

Mama squeezes Abi’s hand.

Gentiana / Quinzième of the Chokecherry

She finds hollows in Spaj’s blankets as men carry him on stretchers into a jerky, noisy truck and then into a building crammed with moaning, dying soldiers. In the days that follow, she tucks into his pockets and burrows in the bedding until he’s carted yet again, across miles, into a place of white halls and starched linens. She watches over weeks as color returns to his face. That is something. She is waiting to see him smile.

Spaj / Paris France, September 1918

When it’s clear he isn’t in Heaven, he wakes and blinks and eats and tries to sleep despite the pounding headache and bandages and screaming pain. He’s beginning to think it might be all right to live. The nurse comes with the wicker basket of daily mail. He tears open the letter. I was afraid of the black-edged envelope, but it did not come. Still, I had no word for many months. At last I learned of your return, and only then did your letters reach me. I regret to inform you that I am now Mrs. Albert Peabody of Hanover Lane. Your Nell

Abi / Cascade Mountains, August 1976

Abi climbs the ladder to the top bunk, her stomach a thick wad as if a mildewy pillow has been stuffed into it. Why did Counselor Jack make her go into the supply shed? Why did he get so close? His breath was hot and sour as he unzipped her green pants and touched her thighs. “Fixing your zipper,” he said, but the zipper wasn’t broken. His voice was weird.

She closes her eyes, but her breath sticks, and she scrunches down in her sleeping bag. Something sharp digs her anklebone. It’s the fairy picture. The fairy on leaves of grass, narrow blue wings riding her shoulders. Her rosebud mouth frowns as her fists grasp a branch behind her, pointedly, as if to demonstrate. Her eyebrows slant, fierce. In a flash, so fast maybe it isn’t happening, the fairy kicks out hard with both legs.

Counselor Jack greets the troop at the river launch, and Counselor Elise hands out life jackets and paddles, pushing the campers in their kayaks onto water. “We’re a few paddles short,” says Counselor Jack. “Abi, help for a sec?”

She follows mutely, saltwater sandals squishing in the mud, the fairy picture in her shoulder bag. Counselor Jack opens the supply shed door and turns. Abi fills her lungs with air and feels a burst of energy, a violet mist rising in her vision. There’s a buzzing, like insects who have learned to sing. She swings her leg for the hardest kick she’s ever kicked in her life, with more force than kicking a kickball, and when Counselor Jack gasps and crumples around the hot pain of his groin, she brings her knee up to his chin, hears the teeth rattle in his face. She runs to join the troop.

Counselor Jack reports a hornet’s nest in the supply shed and takes the afternoon off. He doesn’t touch Abi again.

In her kayak, Abi watches the way circles expand on the dark, quiet river. Round and clean, like lines of cranberry sauce popped from a can. Thanksgiving was the last night with her mother before they put her back in the hospital.

Spaj / Spalding Lincolnshire, May 1919

“Yes, that is the way,” Nurse Fennel nods as Spaj sweeps his paintbrush across the linen paper. Broken soldiers sit around a table, and some, like Langston frowning next to him, are clumsy with the brush.

Spaj has a knack. It is as if a little voice whispers, make this petal like so. Add a pussywillow. Here—a stream. The world on paper pulls him in, gives him somewhere to live.

The laundress, Yasmine, watches the soldiers while fluffing the pillow of an empty bed—it belonged to Simmons, with his sardonic jokes and card tricks. He died yesterday.

“Damn!” Langston flings his paintbrush against the wall where red drops bloom. He seizes his crutch and stomps out on his one full-length leg.

Yasmine shakes her head, smiles at Spaj’s watercolor. “Now isn’t that a pretty ting?”

“I do believe,” says Nurse Fennel to Spaj, “society might enjoy your work. The orderlies found us new materials. There is a supplier of butterfly wings, if you can believe it.”

Spaj clamps his jaw. “Butterflies,” he says in a flat voice, “don’t deserve to lose their wings.”

Yasmine, folding a sheet, looks up, gives a sharp nod. “Dats right. You must show them butterflies respeck.”

Nurse Fennel holds up her hands, at a loss.

Abi / Steilacoom Hospital, Washington, February 1976

Abi rides in silence with Grandma Willa. She stares out the car at soggy fields, fallen fences, slouching barns. The fairy picture fills every inch of her coat pocket; she takes it with her when she feels nervous.

They climb concrete steps and enter through a series of cold steel doors with narrow halls in between until they reach a large sitting area. Through a glass window, Abi sees people wandering in and out of a TV room. Gunsmoke is on.

Grandma Willa speaks to the tall black man at the reception desk. A white middle-aged woman holds a baby doll. A skinny, toothless guy toddles back and forth with a creepy smile. He smiles at Grandma Willa, who looks away fast.

A young woman, eyes deadened with thick eyeliner, smokes and stares. An old man with leathery skin rests his head against the wall, drool trailing from his mouth.

Abi’s mother walks in slowly. Grandma Willa pulls out nicotine-stained chairs and they sit at a table. Grandma Willa dives in. “Do you like your doctors, Marin? Are you attending activities? What are they feeding you?” 

Abi’s mother looks rumpled and crooked, soft and far away. She reaches for Abi’s hand. Abi gives it a brush more than a squeeze, unable to find her voice.

Her mother pushes something across the fake wood, wrapped in paper towel. Abi doesn’t touch it.

Grandma Willa says isn’t that cheery and unwraps the cutout butterfly made of balsa.

At home, Grandma Willa drops the wooden butterfly into a box in the garage marked Acacia. Too much clutter in this house, she mutters, and goes to her room. Abi, still with coat on, reopens the box, examining the handicraft. She lifts it out, walking into the kitchen. Shaky blotches of purple cover the upper wings, and violet daubs the lower. One lobe is unpainted, the color of straw.

Other kids have proud mothers who display their artwork. It’s never the other way around.

Abi could smash this butterfly, pull each flimsy wood-wing apart.

Her belly vibrates. Inside her sweatshirt, where her fairy picture is. She takes a breath, and sets her mother’s butterfly craft on the highest shelf of the bookcase, above The Joy of Cooking and The Encyclopedia Britannica W-Z, out of reach of Grandma Willa.

The fairy picture bleeds blue silt onto Abi’s fingertips when she takes it from her pocket. She balances the frame against the bare spot of the wood butterfly. On tiptoes, she studies the effect. Her mother’s art gleams, struck with light.

The fairy’s wings aren’t hers, Abi knows. Faint veins ripple in the blue, iridescent and otherworldly, telling of living beings from far lands who had no protector. The fairy rests one tendril-thin arm on her knee and her hand cups her chin. She meets Abi’s gaze, and her eyes are full of sadness.

Gentiana / Londinium, Britania, Maplebright or Hollytime

She can’t even keep a proper fairy calendar.

She flits around the workshop, white wings whirring. She weaves among the collections that line the walls, the butterflies pinned behind glass, their shades ranging from dusty periwinkle to electric turquoise, from purple to white to yellow. They fill hundreds of small drawers, lie sheathed in parchment envelopes, and brim over the tops of crates like impossibly thin, perfect pastries. She knows something of the brutality of humans who drive other humans with whips and shouts and hunger, forcing them deep into the jungle to find the butterflies of their homeland. These hunted hunters slash long nets through the air, trapping the bluest of the blue, bluer than dreams. Gentiana shivers, a chill passing through her. Thoughts of captivity and carelessness overwhelm her. Human-measured years are weighing on her and she has forgotten her own language. She regrets following her human to this place. There is no one to whom she can make an apology.

Spaj / London, May 1921

Sketches, splints of wood, and silver tubes of paint strew his kitchen table. He dabs his brush in a saucer of red, pink, green, grey, white, yellow, orange—there is no blue. When Spaj came home from rehabilitation, his chums ignored him, said he’d gone soft. They wouldn’t join him for a pint or a cricket game. He had no job, no money, no sweetheart, no friends. But a strange voice, sweet and sad, kept telling him take heart.

Now there is a short stack of painting orders from the neighborhood church and a country teahouse. Surprisingly, there are three orders from the laundress at the hospital where he first learned to paint. Yasmine, now a shop owner, wrote in a letter, “Listened to the doctors go on abowt investing, and made sum money.” With a splash of luck, anybody could make it in this world, no matter how they started out.

Spaj has recovered from the concussion and the shell shock, and God-knows-what-else. His butterfly landscapes fit in a palm or a cathedral window. They give him someone to talk to.

He talks to Penny Mae as well. It takes all his courage, but he smiles shyly at his neighbor when turning the key in his brass mailbox as she crosses the hall to her flat. “I’m an artist,” he blurts. “I wonder if you’d let me paint your picture?” They spend an afternoon at the park as she tosses her bob, twirling in her white dress or reclining with hand on knee. She is warm and friendly and interested. In the work. Or dare he think . . . in him.

Abi / Seattle Washington, May 1977

“It’s because of Mother, isn’t it? You’re taking me to this psychiatrist, this shrink lady, because you think I’m like her.”

Grandma Willa pours coffee, not looking at her. “She might help with our differences.”

It turns out she isn’t a psychiatrist, but a psychologist. Whatever. The psychologist has short blond hair, a white silk blouse, a milky voice. Abi sits on the edge of the hard couch. Next to her sits Grandma Willa, a bright little mint in her green pantsuit. 

Words want to jump out Abi’s mouth. She calls me a spoiled brat. She’s always rounding up my stuff and putting it in donation boxes.

The woman at her desk is beautiful and calm, the queen of reason. She regards Abi with steady blue eyes, while Grandma Willa balances her beaded purse on her knees.

At night, Abi sleeps in the cold basement in a flat pencil-post bed. The orange cat, Braveheart, once belonged to her mother. He has tattered ears and a tough old soul. He will finally let Abi scratch his chin after all the months she’s lived at Grandma Willa’s.

Abi’s fairy picture sits on her dresser. She hasn’t picked it up in a long time. She plays her clock radio, making tape recordings, clunking the big black buttons of the cassette recorder while Casey Casum counts down the songs of the Top 40. Her favorite: “Dancing Queen,” by Abba. She takes to the small square of linoleum in front of the cherrywood mirror. No—a marble dance floor, with a crowd sighing all around.

After dinner with Grandma Willa’s friends, who have names like the Muppets—Kermit and Stella—Grandma Willa announces her upcoming cruise to Panama. Her friends will babysit Abi. There are no camps during that time, and Uncle Blake and Aunt Maggie aren’t available. “When I come home,” Grandma Willa says, “we’ll see about a new arrangement.”

As if Abi is a flower in Willa’s vase. Abi’s stomach tightens. She shuffles around the basement, talking to Braveheart, trying not to think about the future.

Gentiana / Londinium, Britania, Quinzième of the Lilac, Mensum of the Primrose?

It’s the biggest smile she’s ever seen on his face. He throws arms out, like someone walking into a surprise party (although humans can’t beat the meadow-wide revels of a fairy clan popping out of flowers and striking their lutes).

“Can you believe this? What a beauty!” says Spaj. The wooden crate sits open on his desk.

She grins and silently claps her hands and alights on the back of his white work coat collar where he won’t see or feel her presence, but of course he does; she’s sure of that now; she’s always the one he’s talking to.

“We’ll catch those critters trying to destroy our wings.” The book lice, the carpet beetles, they creep and nibble and threaten and destroy. Gentiana shakes her head at Spaj’s recent losses, sixty-three boxes of infested collections.

He lifts the German-made instrument out of the crate. Gentiana flies to the ceiling, thrilling at the nip of spring and the golden sunshine streaming through the open window. Spaj peels away the brown paper as dust motes travel up and down a shaft of light. He lowers the microscope onto his desk, running his hands over the brass, inspecting the sleek dials, the lenses. “We’re in business now!”

Abi / Seattle Washington, May 1977

It’s the morning of the class swimming party, and Abi can’t find her fairy picture. She begs Grandma Willa to let her stay home, but no chance. She feels fat and clumsy in her swimsuit. She sits on the edge of the pool, dangling her legs in the water next to Jenny Fontanilla. But then Jenny gets up and Abi doesn’t talk to anyone the rest of the day.

The next time they see the psychologist, Grandma Willa makes fists with her gray-gloved hands. “Abi manipulates me.” A ball of spit flecks her pink blouse.

The queen of reason raises her eyebrow.

What does it mean, manipulate?

“She won’t lift a finger, she makes messes everywhere.”

As if Abi is a mischief maker, a poltergeist on that TV show, In Search Of, where Spock is narrator. People believe in those things.

She used to believe in her fairy, but she’s too old for that now.

The queen nods, leans back, taps a pencil against her palm. “Willamina, tell me about your daughter.”

Abi has heard only snatches of her mother’s problems. Marin was fifteen when she had her first “episode.” Her Aunt Catherine took her in, but then Marin started hearing and seeing things. Her parents took her to doctors who gave her shock treatments. She never finished high school.

Grandma Willa clears her throat and straightens her purse handles.  

Abi has never thought of it: maybe there are things Grandma Willa needs to answer for. Things she, too, never got to say.

Willa blinks. “Marin was a wonderful little girl. Before—.” She pulls her purse close to her stomach. She puts her arms around it like a doll.

Grandma Willa doesn’t take her anymore to see the queen. And now there is no one to listen to reason.      

Spaj / London, October 1924

The workshop doorbell jingles and in walks Penny Mae. “Lovely!” She purrs at a row of cheery orange butterflies on the table.

“Small coppers. Caught them myself at Brent Reservoir,” says Spaj.

She strolls up to the ballerina he is painting on glass. “Gorgeous!” She bends to the microscope, marvels at the wings mounted for inspection. “What a blue!”

“Morphos from the Americas. I was once averse to using butterflies, but now I hope to honor their beauty and sacrifice. Thank you, dear winged friends!”

The day brought a cold snap, piping out an unexpected snow shower at midday, and she is still in her coat and hat. Her eyes twinkle in that way he loves, set off by her dimples.

He grins at her, puts down his paintbrush, and clasps her head, cloche and all, pulling her down to him for a kiss.

Willamina Patterson / Seattle Washington, June 1977

She can never get this place ship-shape, never has time for herself or her friends anymore, that grandchild is so demanding. Spoiled. Cracker crumbs on the four-poster bed, socks on the floor. She sighs and bends to pick up papers and candy wrappers. Her heart wrenches. Among the papers, there’s that picture Marin loved so much, carried around, her fay-wee. It hurts to remember her daughter, sweet, clear-minded.

Didn’t she give away that knick-knack years ago? Nevermind. She has her system. In the garage, second shelf, next to the cat door: three boxes. One for Goodwill, one for Marin, and one for the Acacia Lutheran Church rummage sale. The picture is rummage.

Abi / Brier Washington, December 1978

Abi ladles cranberry 7-Up punch at the Children’s Agency party. Some toddlers play with a dollhouse in the corner, two deaf girls talk animatedly with their hands by the window, and a high schooler bocs a ping pong ball with an old couple. The Little Drummer Boy spins on a record player.

“It would be good for you to make friends,” says Roz, Abi’s social worker, scooping pretzel mix onto a paper plate. Abi doesn’t answer. This year she has felt abandoned like never before. Roz introduces her to Jerry, who is in a wheelchair, and Sierra, in a fluffy fake fur hood, who has the tired eyes of a fifty-year old. Anjali, with glossy black hair and chipped nail polish, looks about her age, and nervous. Anjali carries an Ursula K. LeGuin novel in her sweatshirt pocket.

Marin Patterson / Seattle Washington, May 1955

“Adorable, isn’t he?” Aunt Catherine kneels at the braided wool rug in Marin’s room, pushing aside socks, clothes, textbooks, and an upended suitcase cracked open like an expressionless mouth. From her bed, Marin blinks and shudders at the afternoon daylight pouring through the window.

She has been in a stupor since her birthday. “When are you going to grow up?” Mother had asked, lowering the glass dome on the half-eaten strawberry cake. Marin left the table to clean her room. She took her childhood fairy picture off her wall—though it always seemed to whisper happy things. She stuffed it in her overflowing closet. At the end of the afternoon, she had a splitting headache.

Now Aunt Catherine’s chunky, ringed fingers lightly trail the kitten as it pounces on a piece of lint. “Fifteen is never too old for a pet,” she says, rocking back on her heels to study her niece, as if Marin has sprouted her own pair of cat ears. Marin heaves a sigh, swings around and places bare feet on the cold linoleum. “Nevermind that folderol from your parents about doctors and treatments,” continues Aunt Catherine. “You just need a better reason than school to get up in the morning.”

Why is it so hard to hear words, to think? Marin drops onto the rug and reaches for the kitten, stroking its candy-corn fur.

Gentiana / Londinium, Britania, Only Brigid Knows The Day

The woman is giggling. For no reason. Except that her head is empty. “Now look what you’ve done to my hair!” She takes off her hat, pats her hair, swirls coquettishly. He stands and kisses her again.

It goes on.

Gentiana has been invisibly supervising today’s work, smoothing the bristles of his brushes after he swishes them in water, replacing the lids on bottles of chemical solution. She removes creases in canvases and smudges from glass. She is so happy taking care of her human. But this, this—bushel bubby—has made it so he hardly talks to her anymore.

He is either ringing the woman on the phone, singing love songs, or prancing around like a lovesick puppy. Gentiana cringes at Penny Mae’s perfume—stiff, dead flowers from human factories. 

Gentiana sits on a stack of books and drums her fingers on a tin can full of pencils; it sounds like a metallic bird, but neither Spaj nor Penny Mae notice. He has his arms around her; they murmur to each other. He won’t get any more work done today. Gentiana scoots behind a framed butterfly collection, stomping a little, crossing her arms. She’s ready to yank that feather out of Penny Mae’s hat.

Abi / Brier, Washington, December 1978

It’s the morning after Christmas, and Abi goes downstairs while her four foster siblings sleep late. The worn green shag carpet exhales beer and baby formula and pine needles and mac-and-cheese. She pauses on the other side of the kitchen wall.

“She can’t stay,” says Sharyn into the phone. “She’s a sweet girl, too sensitive for us. Hoping the agency can find a better fit.”

Her mind is a broken kaleidoscope showing nothing but a black hole swallowing her life. She walks to her room, trembling. She crawls under the covers of her brown calico canopy bed, technically unqualified to be an orphan: her mother is alive, but living in a halfway house that smells like rotten meat.

A little box boasts a rumpled red bow at the foot of her bed. A present still to open. A note: This was at the bottom of a box of clothes from your grandmother. It was mine as a little girl.  —Mama

She slides her fingers under the scotch-taped corners, and peels off the wrap. The fairy is lying on her stomach on her grass blade, perfectly still. She is posed kicking bare heels in the air. Her fingers trail the pond below, and with the other hand, she holds a leaf to her ear, like a teenager talking on the phone to her best friend. Abi smiles, laughs a little.

When Anjali answers the phone, Abi hears the smile in her voice. Abi’s fingers make faint prints of blue dust on the receiver.

Spaj / London, October 1924

Spaj grins as Penny Mae grabs him by the collar and pulls him toward her, walking backward to the couch. So good to feel passion for her, for life. There are his paintings, his girl, the change of seasons, yesterday’s election.

The election! “Hold on,” he says, laughing. “I must know how the Labour party fared. Heard anything?”

She shakes her head. “My first time voting, hurrah, hurrah, but I don’t talk about it. Politics should never come between a man and woman.”

“Oh, you,” he says, and binks her nose. “I’ll be right back.” He grabs his overcoat and rushes out the door, heading for the news stand. Thin snowflakes have dissolved into fog and bluster. Double decker buses circle like enormous, clunky caterpillars bearing banners of candidates: Stanley Baldwin snakes along in bold red letters. A cloudburst cuts loose. Leaves skid across the slick street, and Spaj, too much in a hurry to get back to Penny Mae, doesn’t put on his coat but drapes it over his head with one arm. He steps across the curb not seeing the oncoming motorcar. There’s a screech of tires, a curse, somewhere a scream, and a yawning blackness. For the second time in his life, his heart rattles out terror and he falls, quavering between life and death.

Gentiana / Londinium, Britania, “Fall,” as the humans say.

Penny Mae sits on the couch, legs crossed, holding a teacup. She idly glances out the window, sipping her tea. Gentiana smolders at the way this woman makes herself at home in Spaj’s workshop.

With a burst of purpose, Gentiana sprints for the hat on the worktable, attacking the red feather, yanking it out of the hatband with all her strength. She flings the feather toward the floor. A teacup crashes. Penny Mae is standing up. Gentiana lifts the thick, felt hat brim, and tunnels underneath. Ow! Oh dear! Sharp pain against her skin.

There are footsteps, a cry from Penny Mae, and the slamming of a door, but it has nothing to do with Gentiana. She struggles, only to drag the back of her neck across the sharp tip of a hatpin. She feels her own hot blood as a candy-pink trail falls, drop by drop, onto the table.

There’s a birdlike shriek. She has never heard her own scream. As of its own accord, it peals out into the room, for the first time and the last.

Abi / Shoreline Washington, September 1979

Abi stands in the warm kitchen while Anita cooks at the stove. “We are so lucky to have you!” says Anita, tossing the egg rolls one by one into the hot hissing oil.

Abi finds places on the flowered vinyl tablecloth for the platter of lumpia, the pancit, and the sweet bowls of chili sauce. Adam bursts into the dining room with Hot Wheels car in hand. “I get to sit by Abi!” He climbs into the chair next to her place. Elvis is playing on the stereo and fall leaves are winking on the maple tree framed by the second story window. Her 100% science quiz is stuck to the fridge with a smiling hamburger magnet.

Her heart races with happy feelings for her new family. In the next instant she leans against the kitchen door frame, crossing her arms. It’s not going to last. She doesn’t think so.

“I notice you always keep your book bag close,” says Anita, reaching for the bag resting against the dining chair leg.

Abi instinctively blocks her, grabbing the bag. “I—it’s personal stuff.” She wonders what the fairy is doing, saying, in her silent way. But she can’t look.

Spaj / London, February 1925

They are returning to the workshop after long months. Penny Mae opens the door, wheels Spaj into the room, squints at the dust and abandoned paintbrushes and spilled, dried tea. She watches his face for the sadness she fears will shut him down. It’s a precarious dance, and she hopes he will feel good about living. 

“We’re here, darling.” She is careful to say it over his right shoulder, into his good ear. He looks at everything off-center, crooked, with the eye that retains sight. He smiles a very small smile as they look around the room.

“Oh, here’s my hat,” says Penny Mae, and picks up the cloche, giving it a slap to release the dust. She gasps as something pale like a limbed mushroom tumbles from it. “A doll! Did you make that, Spaj? So lifelike! It’s wonderful!”

On the worktable lies a tiny body, soft, cold. There’s something familiar about the form that Spaj can’t explain, but it feels infinitely precious.

“What a beaut—!” breathes Penny Mae.

He turns to Penny Mae. Reaches to grasp her hand in his, the grip and strength returning. “You’ve given me an idea,” he tells her. “You’re my muse.” He picks up the tiny, naked body in shaky hands. There’s a sound, like a minute cough, but he must have been imagining it. Something falls to the floor: two black cinders between the fairy’s shoulder blades, flaking away like ashes.

“I will paint this fairy and give her butterfly wings.”

Abi / Seattle Washington, March 1984  

Social worker Roz slouches over the crumbs and coffee rings at the McDonalds table, blowing on her coffee. “Maybe trade school, but I can’t see college. Can you even remember how many high schools you’ve gone to?”

Abi searches the green-scribbled cover of her spiral notebook as if to find the answer. Roz’s gaze is steady.

“Five,” says Abi. “Anita and Romeo move a lot.”

“You’ve got a D in English and you’re failing Economics,” continues Roz. “We’re all glad things are working out at the Camaquins, but do you realize, eighty-five percent of fosters don’t graduate high school?”

Abi puts the notebook on her lap, but in her mind touches her fairy picture sitting in her school locker. She stretches out her hands. Ever so faintly, her fingertips glow blue.

“I am going to college,” says Abi. “For biology.”

Gentiana / Londinium, Britania, An Ending

So this is her curse. She sings softly, too softly for human ears, lips barely moving in a song to accompany Spaj’s paintbrush—the delicate, sure strokes on the glass of his most inspired piece. The reverse watercolor scene will be completed by its glorious underlayer. She lies like a doll on the table, turned one quarter on her side, ignoring the arm that tingles, begging to uncoil. He fashions a pond, etches a lily pad soft as butter, drops three creamy yellow-orange blossoms onto long stems, like friends for Gentiana to gossip with.

In a flash, Brigid possesses her, and she casts the wobbly buzzing blue of her glamour across the painting.

Spaj picks her up, his fingers warm, his betrothal ring cool. He sets her against the black paper background. When he affixes the shimmering morpho butterfly wings, she sees visions of a broken jungle, feels the brevity of short, winged lives, and her heart aches.

She was wrong about Brigid and the glamour; she has never had powers.

She shivers, swallows, determines to be brave.

The glass seals her in; the workshop goes dark. She turns on her back, hands behind her head, and looks up at a black paper sky.

Braveheart / Seattle Washington, May 1960

The cat basks in his sunny spot on the attic stair and looks around for something interesting. Mew. There’s that bug-human, on top of a quilt. He slinks up to it, gives it a nudge. The creature inside the little square is frilly like a whisker he can’t get to, impossible like an itch he can’t scratch. He takes in his jaw the wood that tastes like the mushroom patch at the back doorstep. He pads away to the open suitcase in the corner. He drops it in the shining red satin pouch.

Gentiana / The New World, A Beginning

She shivers. In the darkness of her suitcase, her blue wings cast a glow on red walls until her world throbs a deep violet.

She remembers. Human years and changing hands. She lost one queen, long ago, but she is always encountering others. When the Queen of Britania toured the Atkinson show at Prenderstreet Gallery, Gentiana pulsed. “Magnificent,” breathed the Queen. “It looks three-dimensional, but cannot be. I must meet the artist.” Newspaper men interviewed Spaj, and word of his art spread around the world.

As it turns out, she is magic. There was never a trap, only the chance to find what was hers all along. Her powers lie in the folds of fairy time, like vintage satin. Her magic needed loss, and sorrow, and spinning, just as a strand of silk requires three-hundred-thousand rotations of a single silkworm before it is complete.

She smiles, hearing the rattle of a plastic handle and the click and twang of a lock springing open. The sky widens and fills with light, and young hands lift her up. Filling her vision is the face of a child she has scried in the dark.

Abi / Quito Ecuador, June 1991

She catches her breath at a waterfall flashing far below her feet. Her hands slide along the metal rail of the cable car as it skims the rainforest canopy. She has her field notebook in her right vest pocket, her fairy picture in her left. She folds back the pocket flap and tucks a crinkled Power Bar wrapper underneath the facing-out frame, offering height. She’s not certain, but it seems the fairy is higher in her square, having climbed the tallest frond to see the view. Mists pad the air, soft and heavy, weaving and winding through velvet trees, slender trunks. The cable car descends lower, lower, flanked by a clump of trees, and there it is: a morpho on a branch, still and ethereal. Abi lifts to her face the binoculars her brother Adam gave her for her birthday. Could it be? The specimen looks like morpho adonis, with its rosy costal margin and hindwings of aquamarine. She is studying, protecting, caring for these creatures with a kindness that has touched her life unexpectedly. An airy hum rises like a laugh, or a lullaby. It might be Abi’s voice, or not. It’s the same delight either way: the sound of someone sure of her own wings.

Author’s Note: Spaj Atkinson was a disabled Londoner who created butterfly wing artwork in the 1920s. It was celebrated by Queen Mary of Teck. With no two pieces alike, it can be found on auction to this day.

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Copyright 2025 Christi Krug