The River

When I was young, the fairies across the river were real, without a doubt. They were the kind matrons of the forest, cultivating the trees that grew tall enough to compete with human skyscrapers reaching towards the heavens. When people vanished, I assumed they were gone on a quest, soon to return and pave our roads with gold. My parents would share a sad smile and agree, with an endlessly infuriating look saying they were keeping something from me.

Our roads remained cracked stone, and no one returned.

My once unshakeable faith fizzled out as I grew, until I was certain fairies never had been and never would be real. There were bears in the woods, and maybe people who had given up our cities for a free and feral life, but no magic resided there. Occasionally, a parent would try to change my mind, but I wouldn't budge. Everyone knew about how adults loved to lie. This was no different from the number of saints and spirits who were rumored to bring us oranges and candies on the solstice.

I refused to change my mind.

Until.

Walking home from school one day, I glanced across the river out of habit, and did a double take. A man and a woman sat on the banks, laughing to each other, but they were like no man or woman I'd ever seen before.

He had blue-tinted skin, and great birdlike wings arching from his back, and feathers growing from his arms. She had skin like a birch tree, white and marked with lines, and a set of antlers -- or sticks? -- growing from her head, along with leaves and sticks dotting the rest of her body. Neither of them wore any clothes, but they were so inhuman that I didn't remember to be bothered -- they seemed more like parts of the forest than people.

When I got home and told my family, my parents took a deep sigh of relief -- I finally believed.

"Don't ever cross the river," my mother said. "You'll never return."

"They take people," my father said. "They'll steal you away."

"They eat people," my older brother said, with a wicked grin. "They'll eat you up."

I had nightmares for weeks, twisting my vision of the happy couple until the man was blue like he'd been drowned, with skeletal wings, and the woman looked like death, a rotting tree, and both of them had eyes darker than night and claws sharp enough to cut clean to the bone with a scratch.

I got older, and I kept hearing stories.

About sisters who were taken in the night, brothers who ran away, never to be seen again. Tales of best friends who tripped into the river one day and were pulled under by a bony hand, classmates dared to cross that dilapidated bridge and turned to fairies by the time they stepped onto the far bank. The remains of baby siblings turning up in a beautiful basket on your doorstep one morning.

They weren't all bad, of course. There were wives who had always been miserable, seen happy for the first time laughing on the riverbank with a fairy woman, and the same brothers who had run away spotted joyfully racing across the night sky. But the bad far outnumbered the good, and the bad was what stuck with me. Who would want to run away, anyway? We had everything.

Three days before she was set to marry, my best friend vanished. I'd known people who were taken before, of course -- you couldn't live here and not know someone. But it had never happened to someone I was close to. All my friends and family had stayed safe, all these years, and I'd somehow convinced myself we were safe.

A week after, I saw her through the trees, with skin like tree bark and leaves in her hair, laughing with a gorgeous horned woman with wings made of sticks and a stunning man with green skin and a tail.

She was happy.

That incident sent me into a hard reset, and I stayed in my room for three days, ignoring meals and my family's pleas to see me. I thought back to all the stories I'd heard throughout the years, finally focusing on the good ones. The wives who were finally happy, the brothers joyful with friends, the secret lovers in the woods finally brought together. Out of all the fairies I'd seen on the riverbank and through the woods, nearly all of them seemed happy in a way I realized I hadn't been for a long time. They were laughing and talking and holding each other with a joy I wasn't sure I'd ever seen in our human city.

When I finally opened my door again, my heart weighing heavier than ever, my mother wept.

I was thrown back into real life, which, after those three days, felt like more than ever before. I realized how much work my mother had shunted onto me -- my baby sister was completely my responsibility. Each time my newlywed brother brought his wife over, I felt my parents' stares like daggers, eyes and hearts set on me walking down the aisle before the next spring. When I went out into town, my friend's old fiance inserted himself into my business whenever he could, carrying bags I could handle on my own and futilely trying to grab my hand.

I kept seeing a fairy across the river, with branchlike wings and hair like leaves, and I knew she saw me. Sometimes she slipped into my dreams, whispering my innermost thoughts I couldn't even confess to myself.

My mother took note of my constant gazes across the river, of my distant mind, of how it always took two calls to catch my attention. When my friend's ex-fiance showed up at my house to propose, my mother said yes before I could say no, completely disregarding the fact that I'd never once had a full conversation with this man that didn't end with "Leave me alone." Ensuring that I wouldn't be her problem when I ran away, that the scandal wouldn't weigh on her shoulders.

I had a month left to myself, a month to escape. And I used it well.

I slipped away in the night, following a party of teenagers to the bridge across the river, the one rumored to turn you into one of them. A fairy. I crossed the bridge before any of them were drunk -- they didn't notice me until I pushed through the last of them, taking the step that they were afraid to.

The fairy from my dreams met me across the river, a huge grin on her face. On that final step of the bridge, I felt myself change, antlers growing from my head and vines pushing their way out of my veins, popping through my skin and spiraling down my arms as I became one of them. She took my hands and pulled me off the bridge, a little excited and a little terrified. "I'm so glad you're here."