Enid Strange

by Meghan Rose Allen

  I unraveled the two ropes and compared sizes. I used the shorter to tie my right foot onto the plywood, taking the rope’s ends in hand so I could lift and lower my foot-attached-to-board like a marionette leg. Walking like this wasn’t too unwieldy, provided I didn’t accidentally step on the board with my left foot and trip or mash my left foot under the plywood when it was my right foot’s turn to step. After tying the long rope to the lawnmower’s handle, I stomped away from the lawnmower until the long rope was stretched out as far as it could go. I had my radius with the rope, my center with the lawnmower, and, keeping the long rope taut as I walked, I made the edge of my crop circle, flattening down the long grass with my plywood board until I got back to where I started.

  Boundary successfully trampled down, I moved on to mowing the grass inside the boundary. (Had I been making a true crop circle, I would, of course, have used my board to flatten all the grass, but that was more time-consuming than mowing and I simply didn’t have the time to spare.)

  No longer needing my stomping board, I whirled around like an Olympic discus champion and tossed the board away, deep into the still-grassy part of the field. Falling to the ground as the world spun around me, I became an island of Enid in a sea of crunched-down green. As tempting as it was to spend the waning light of the afternoon in grassy repose (creating a crop circle, even with a mowing shortcut, was much more time-consuming than anticipated), I still had to roll out the extension cord, hide it under grass clippings, and then set up the lamps.

  I forced myself back to standing and pulled the mower out of the circle and over to the fence. The extension cord was next. My plan contained multitudes.

  Once a faerie is in close proximity, catching it is simple enough: surround it with banishing powder so it can’t escape, then trap it with a net. The difficulty lies in getting the faerie close enough to capture.

  First, make use of faeries’ natural curiosity by doing something faeries have never seen you do before, e.g. why are you making crop circles? And why are you sitting calmly in your crop circle surrounded by mini-suns? (NB: this method may not work if you frequently make crop circles and/or surround yourself with lamps in your spare time.) Determined to solve this mystery, the faeries, like a penny spinning towards the center of a centripetal force funnel, will come closer and closer and closer until, espying the faerie shadow in your periphery, you follow the instructions of the previous paragraph: banishing powder, net, caught.

  Now, the crop circle and the mini-suns (which are actually Angelpoise lamps powered from a power bar run off an extension cord) aren’t just for attracting the faeries’ interest: they also serve another purpose. When sitting in the center of your crop circle surrounded by your mini-suns, the only shadow you want to see is your sneaky faerie’s shadow. You do not want to be distracted by shadows of grass rustling the wind, and you do not want to be distracted by your own shadow if you move to scratch your elbow or wiggle a foot that’s fallen asleep. The crop circle ensures the first: the grass around you is levelled so that it casts no shadow, and the circle is wide enough so that the shadows of the unflattened grass at the edges cannot reach you, even the long shadows at dusk. The Angelpoise lamps ensure the second, once you’ve positioned them in such a way that you cast no shadow.

  You should also make sure that the extension cord, which you are running to power your mini-suns, is well-hidden. You wouldn’t want the faeries to shut off your power, causing a mountain of yourself-made shadows to distract you. Grass clippings can hide your cord; make sure to get some while creating your crop circle.

  I can foresee absolutely no reason why such an attempt at capturing a faerie would not work.

  I’d had enough sense, before I started rolling out the extension cord, to make a trench in the road in order to disguise the cord from the faeries as it crossed the road. I made my trench by pulling a branch behind me and walking back and forth across the road as if pondering some intractable problem. I even spoke aloud a few times, saying, “Oh no, that couldn’t work” and “I suppose, if I must” and “That hardly makes sense under the given conditions.” Obviously, it would have been more efficient to cut through the dirt road with a shovel, but that seemed rather conspicuous, and, if the faeries had returned without me noticing, I didn’t need them to be too interested in what I was doing until all my prep work was completed.

  Night approached. I’d dragged too long a cord from the shed, but there was no time to get a shorter one. One end already coming out the front room’s broken bay window, I wrapped the excess around a sad-looking tree trunk just inside the driveway, then nestled the next few feet in the trench I’d just dug. Then I dashed across to the field to lay down the rest of the extension cord, plugged the power bar into it, dashed back to the fence for the grass clippings, dumped them over the orange rubber that snaked across the field, took a deep breath, and then surveyed. My subterfuge wouldn’t have fooled someone with a keen eye or a leaf blower, but, as they say, a horseman riding by could hardly tell the difference (unless no one says that and it was a genuinely certified Enid bon mot, though I probably would have said horseperson if I’d made it up, so it must have been a cliché I’d picked up somewhere.)

  The sun finally sank beneath the horizon, the indigo at the edges of the sky flooding in. A whole day of preparation had exhausted me. If only wireless electricity existed, the way wireless Internet did, I’d have been finished hours ago (and how can we have wireless Internet and not wireless electricity? Wasn’t everything electrons? Stupid, unhelpful electricity chapter from my mother’s physics textbook not explaining why wireless electricity didn’t exist when I wanted it to.) Even so, I couldn’t stop yet, so close to the end.

  I plugged my first lamp into the power bar.

  I turned the switch of the power bar on.

  I took a deep breath.

  I reached for the on/off knob of the lamp.

  I put my fingers on the knob and turned, eyes closed to give the lamp some privacy. There was a slight click. I cracked open my left eyelid, then the right.

  Cool, energy-efficient LED light was spilling into my hands.

  I grinned madly.

  It had worked.

  “Enid?” a voice cried, jagged and dipping as if the act of talking to me was as fraught as climbing a mountain. “Enid? Why are you in the middle of the field? And why is there a light on? You’re so —” The voice fell into a hiccup and then a burst of laughter. “Enid, you’re so weird.”

  I stood up and looked over to the road.

  And there was Amber Holden. Her hair stuck out at angles that had yet to be invented, and her clothes looked like they wouldn’t have even made it as far as the Fill A Box for $1 bin at the thrift store, with her gait suggesting that her shoes were on the wrong feet. The bottle in her hand, which I’d initially thought to be juice, was clearly something much stronger.

  “Enid, I’m coming over,” Amber called. She ambled to the fence, took six tries to haul herself over (apparently, for Amber, drunkenness did not translate into fleetness of foot), and continued to lurch towards me. I realized then that maybe this was not a safe thing for Amber to do at twilight, when she was distracted and drunk and shuffling through the overgrown part of the field where I’d hidden a long, very trip-inducing cord.

  I ran to the edge of my clearing and started to kick through the knee-deep grass outside of my mowing radius.

  “Just stay there, Amber,” I shouted. “Wait, I’ll come to you.”

  But Amber kept coming towards me, and then, in slow motion, she toppled forward.

  “Hold on,” I called out. “I’m coming.”

  “No, I’m good. See?” Amber popped back up. “See?” But the extension cord had wrapped around Amber’s legs, and almost as soon as she stood up she tripped again.

  Optimal Scenario

  Swishing through the grass like a sidewinder, Amber’s fall yanked the exten
sion cord towards her from my side, i.e. the power bar and its one attached lamp zoomed towards Amber. Bound in the extension cord and turtled, Amber waited until I untangled her and helped her inside the farmhouse, where I distracted her (drunk people enjoyed reading physics textbooks, right?) while I dealt with the faeries and made everything go back to normal.

  Slightly Less Optimal Scenario

  Amber was not distracted by the physics textbook. I had to wait until she fell into a drunken stupor-sleep to continue my faerie-catching business.

  Actual Scenario, i.e. Disaster

  Amber hit the ground with a crack.

  “Oh my goodness, Amber,” I cried. “Are you okay?” The crack had had an ominous, broken-bone sound to it. “Amber?” I shouted again when she didn’t rally.

  Another crack. Louder. More portentous. Not at all com-ing from Amber Holden’s bones splintering into pieces: the cracking culprit was the ailing tree I’d used as a spool for my extension cord. Amber’s tripping had pulled on the extension cord behind her, which I’d wrapped around the dying tree. That sharp jerk had been all the tree needed to separate from its roots (the cracking sounds), and it was now doing its best Leaning Tower of Pisa impression, resting on the power lines that crossed over the road.

  Okay. No problem. The power lines would hold the tree up. I still had power. Amber’s bones were (hopefully) all still intact. It was all good.

  One by one, each with a sizzle, the power lines snapped.

  And then, with a wallop that rivalled a meteor impact, the tree smashed into the ground. Two live wires danced high above the crash site, sparking off, before they too fell, rocking back and forth in the wind with the halves of the For Sale sign.

  Less good.

  I turned to check on the lamp behind me. It was off. Of course it was off, and no amount of fiddling with any on/off buttons or breaker switches would yield any other result. There was no more power to the farmhouse. Amber had made certain of that.

  I flicked the switch, just in case. The light stayed off. Amber gave a moan from down in the grass.

  Again, why did we not have wireless electricity? Physicists wasting all that time to research the dual nature of light but can’t give me power wherever and whenever I want it? How’s that fair?

  Amber gave a louder moan, more like a gargle than a moan, really. I was going to have to check on her. Making my way over to her, a whimper escaped me as I surveyed my failed attempt to capture a faerie.

  “Enid?” Amber shouted. “I’m a first-aider. Do you need my help?”

  “No,” I replied. “But you need mine. Let’s get you into the house.”

  My whole day’s work butchered, I scuffled across the field to collect Amber Holden.

  nside the farmhouse, I gave Amber the last of my precious juice boxes in the hopes of sobering her up.

  “Ever since I saw you at the fish tank,” she said with a slurp, “I keep seeing these little movements out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn to look there’s nothing there.”

  “It’s the faeries,” I told her.

  “It’s not the faeries,” she snapped back. “It’s some sort of psychological manifestation of stress because I’m stressed.”

  “Like you have anything to be stressed about, Ms. Perfect,” I muttered.

  “Um, hello?” And hello teenage attitude. “I’m stressed because my dad should not be with your mom, Enid. Your mom’s nice and all, but she’s —” Amber snorted, and I knew what was coming “— strange.”

  “Clever,” I lied.

  “And my parents are meant to be together,” Amber continued. “They have this amazing, overarching love story.”

  “You told me they’re always breaking up. You said you were living with your mom and her boyfriend before you moved here.”

  “Exactly.” Amber threw her arms in the air as if I’d made her point for her. “Every love story has obstacles that seem insurmountable, but that’s an illusion. For true love, all obstacles can be mounted. Just like Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Who die at the end of their play?” Amber didn’t have the monopoly on teenage attitude.

  “You’re right, Enid,” Amber gasped. “That could happen to them.”

  “Which them?”

  “My father and Margery! Keep up, Enid. They could be so happy together,” Amber wailed. “Significantly happy together. Meaningfully happy.”

  “But dead?” Amber’s inebriated thought processes were proving rather opaque.

  “Happiness,” Amber continued without choosing to acknowledge me, “isn’t the act of being happy. It’s the act of doing happy, it’s the act of acting on happy versus acting from happy.”

  I had no response to this, mainly because it sounded like nonsense similar to the self-help books patients’ relatives were always giving my mother (You deserve happiness. Put it out to the universe. Etc.) Amber hadn’t seemed the type to fall prey to such banalities, but here she was, spouting them off.

  “And what is most important,” Amber went on, “is that I am not happy. I have a very intense sixteen-year plan with no room for not happiness. I have to go to school to get all the degrees and medical school and graduate school and clinical placements and fellowships and all the papers I have to write to make sure everyone is paying attention to me because I am so smart about all this —” she flapped her hands “— psychiatric brain psychology stuff.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work.” There was no way to say that without a teeny bit of sarcasm creeping in, which, thankfully, Amber did not notice.

  “It is, and see, you saw, right.” Amber wagged a finger at me. “No room for not being happy.” She then flinched as if she’d spotted something moving in her periphery.

  “You don’t have to worry,” I told her. “There are no faeries in here.” I’d brought Amber to the farmhouse for that reason. “It’s probably only a mouse,” I said, forcibly suppressing all that I knew about hantaviruses.

  But Amber had switched from detailing her n-step plan to full-on sobbing. “See,” she cried. “Psychological manifestations of stress. I’m having a psychotic break.”

  I was fairly certain that all Amber had was a case of alcohol mixed with having spent too much time flipping through the pages of her father’s DSM-5, but that seemed far too snarky, even for me, to say to someone so clearly distressed. I attempted conciliatory tones instead.

  “It isn’t like I want our parents to be together, either,” I reiterated. “I mean, my mother and your dad.”

  “You don’t?” Amber looked up at me, wiping tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “No, I don’t. I want them to break up.”

  “Why would you want that?” Amber demanded. “My father not good enough for your mother?”

  Trust Amber to get offended about me having the same aversion to our parents being together as she had; now I had to placate her to get us out of this spat. “Everyone is good enough for everyone,” I said, hoping that would be enough to mollify her. “But I don’t want them to be together, just like you don’t want them to be together. I’ve said so at least fifty times since you got here.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes, I have.” I’d end this toddler-style debate. “I was even working on a plan to break them up when you tripped over my cord.” And ruined my beautiful plan by uprooting the tree at the edge of the road, I added to myself.

  Uprooted the tree.

  Like the trees outside our house in town.

  Hmmm. If I wanted my mother and Dr. Holden broken up, I could only assume that the faeries wanted the opposite and were willing to do whatever they could to ensure that their lovebirds’ canoodling was not interrupted. Like destroying my set-up. Like getting Amber Holden out of the way, since she oppo
sed their coupledom as much as I did. And while faeries couldn’t uproot trees themselves, they could manipulate events and overstressed teenagers so that trees got uprooted.

  “I’m tired,” Amber announced suddenly, rolling onto her back. “Maybe I’ll take a nap.”

  “No, you don’t.” I shoved her onto her side and positioned her arms and legs in the recovery position, familiar with this trick from pamphlets I’d read during my many stays on the bench outside of Mrs. Estabrooks’s office.

  “Everything is ruined,” Amber moaned. “Enid, help me.”

  “I don’t need to help you. You’ll be fine once you sober up.”

  “You think so?” She tossed her hand around in my general direction, as if trying to locate me precisely. “You’re all right, Enid. I’m going to tell Thomas that.”

  “Who?”

  “Our father.” Amber laughed. “Maybe you can call him Tom to be different. Margery’s not bad either,” she non-sequitured. “I’m sorry I called her stupid to her face yesterday.”

  I would have expected a more sesquipedalian critique than stupid from Amber, but no matter. “When did you see my mother?” I asked.

  “I went over to your house after the power came back on.”

  “How was my mother?” I asked. “Did she seem frazzled? Was the house overflowing with the Missing Child posters she’d printed out at the copy shop?” My mother’s state of mind had nothing to do with whether Amber had drawn the faeries here or had been drawn here by them, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

  “She was like she always is,” Amber said, not at all the answer I wanted. Why hadn’t my mother realized I was missing by now? We were so in sync that I’d noticed right away that she’d been acting strange even before she dragged Dr. Holden into our lives. Shouldn’t familial concern be reflexive? Shouldn’t she be worried about me?