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“What?” Every stares back at her, confused. A sliver of his harder-than-granite abs peek from beneath the too-tight Nirvana shirt, just another reminder of how big and buff he is, in case the readers ever forget.

“Let’s go down on who?”

“I meant the village, you dirty girl.”

Hand in hand, they trot down to a lower altitude.



“Shit,” Lily Lena Lileeva, all green eyes and flaming red hair, exclaims as they reach the valley and enter the town.

Why?

She slipped on a red candy cobblestone and fell smack right on her ass.

All three hundred and ninety-four busybody fairies in the distance turn, their sparkling eyes flickering towards her. A certain child-fairy, one with seemingly pink glitter in her wide eyes, screams “yuck” while pointing her middle finger right at the awkward girl.

No, she’s in an even worse state than the word awkward would cover.

It is like that time she had explosive food poisoning at prom, right in the middle of a dancing session with herself, all over again.

It is graceless.

It is a disgrace.

A graceless disgrace.

“Ouch,” Every then says instead of helping her to her feet, his tone pretty sarcastic.

Lily flicks her gaze around, her innocent doe eyes as wide as saucers. “This gotta be some Hansel and Gretel type shit,” she mutters, suddenly aware of how out of place and different from the others she is in her tattered brown sneakers and red lace bra she thrifted from a closing secondhand shop.

And her man too, in only a band shirt and swim shorts, like a convict who ran from jail time and is now in some random guy’s stolen clothes.

And the fairies around them, unlike what she had expected, are not minuscule, fun-sized, or short in any way. In fact, many are taller than Lily-girl, who is a small, tiny girl, just four feet eleven on a bad day.

A dog woofs.

Anyway.

And they have fucking wings. Wings, like butterfly wings, but much larger, of course, maybe roughly a meter or so in height. A pair of two for each person (or each fairy, in this case), transparent like a cathedral’s stained glass windows, fluttering quickly like a hummingbird, magnificent like the Niagara Falls, and vividly colorful like Lily’s mind.

Ha.

Skipping through the town, now careful not to slip on any of the slippery, sugar cobblestones again (what a horrid design choice), Lily finds out that the exterior walls of the houses here, like the roof, are also made from gingerbread crackers. But rather than using whole slabs, the fairies were a little smarter this time and compressed the cracker bits into bricks.

Bits and bricks.

Bricked Bits.

Like, what is that even supposed to mean?

And how would she know?

Well, she swipes a finger and tries it, of course, with no care for the health of her stomach’s biome and no concern for the evil E.coli.

Unlike Lily’s unlit, poverty-stricken hometown, Fairyland, though a little unsanitary and behind in the field of hygiene, is dotted with candy cane lamp posts all over town. Every single one of them is maintained and glowing with dancing green embers.

Like a generic evil witch’s magic fire, but not.