At the age of eleven, without warning, I had the responsibilities of adulthood thrust upon me. Every summer before, I had roamed freely about the farm, riding my Shetland pony, swimming in the pond with my brothers, reading fairy tales in my tree house. But due to unforeseen events, I was suddenly required to cook, clean, and care for my two rowdy brothers and my frail, four-year-old sister.
               Early that summer my father had been kicked in the head by one of his big workhorses and lain unconscious in the barn for hours, until my eldest brother, Michael, discovered him. He ran screaming to the house for my mother, who was in the kitchen kneading dough for bread. We had no telephone, then, to call for help, so he and my mother managed to drag him, bleeding profusely, into our old, paneled station wagon. We’d watched in horror as Mommy, her hands still white with flour, drove off, heading to the hospital in town, twenty miles away.
              Daddy was slow to recover. An infection set in, and he languished week after week. Without insurance or any income, my mother was forced to take a job at the local silk mill, working amid the clatter of machinery and whirling cones.
              Her face grew haggard and, all that summer, she wore a distracted frown. She returned home exhausted at the end of each day, trudged through the kitchen, where I was preparing hash or cheese sandwiches for supper, straight through to the parlor where she collapsed onto the sofa for a brief rest. At seven she rose, put on her Sunday dress, applied fresh lipstick, and hauled herself off to the hospital to cheer up my father.
              I was left to get my brothers and little sister off to bed. Unlike the rest us--dark-haired, robust, and rowdy-- Violet was a delicate blossom. She had wispy blonde tendrils and skin so translucent that you could see purplish veins at her temples. Her blue eyes, large and dreamy, with long sweet corners, seemed to gaze off into another world. Her soft, full lips were exactly the shade and texture of rose petals. She was my special charge, my favorite among my siblings.
              Since Daddy’s accident and the onset of Mommy’s grueling job, I noticed that my little sister was steadily retreating from the real world. She refused to eat. She grew paler, slighter, and more ethereal day by day. I feared that Mommy was too distracted by her long days and late nights to note her youngest daughter’s decline.
             My own days that summer were long and dreary. I dutifully cared for my siblings, worrying all the while about Violet’s sadness and listless demeanor.
I remembered that chicken soup was a tonic, so I sent Michael out to catch and kill a chicken. I forced myself to handle the bleeding carcass, to gut it, scald it, and pluck the feathers from it, as I had often seen Mommy do.
             I hacked it into pieces with a butcher knife, and, from one of my mother’s recipes made a passable soup. The aroma of broth and dumplings filled the kitchen and fetched my brothers in to sniff and taste. I had to coax Violet to eat, allowing her to flip through the pages of my thick tome of illustrated fairy tales as she took a few sips.
             The elegant sprites, with gossamer wings and silvery costumes, floating on the breeze or perched on red-spotted toadstools, drew her in, and with a small finger she traced their colorful outlines.
              “Are fairies real?” I saw a tiny sparkle flickering in her eyes.

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Flight of the Fairies

Joanne Weck

Issue #1 (March 2008)