Small Persons With Wings (5 page)

There was a teeny-tiny hiccup, a despairing little cry. Something fell out of the chandelier and landed
splat
on the floor. I jumped up, freaked out because it might be a bat. A very sick bat, a baby, maybe an albino, pinkish beige. It lay there quivering. I tiptoed over, trying not to make noise.

It wasn't a bat. I thought it might be a huge moth, because of the wings. They were open but limp-looking, as if whatever they belonged to had forgotten how to use them.

Then I noticed that the thing had a dress on, which seemed strange for a moth. So I figured it was a doll. A tiny wind-up doll with wings.

I crouched down for a closer look.

The little thing sat up, tears running down her cheeks, let out a scream that managed to be both tiny and quite ear-splitting. She squealed something that sounded like “Salty May!”

She wasn't a doll. She was a living lady, three inches tall. With wings.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't hear. The whole world disappeared except for that little lady. My brain, my muscles, my whole body froze into the silence, except for this one faint voice screaming,
No, no, no, not again not again notagainnotagainnotagain . . .

I squeezed my eyes shut.
Fairy Fat, Fairy Fat, Fairy Fat.

The little lady was gibbering in some foreign language, maybe French.

But I was smelling all that mildew. I've never had a dream with smells in it. I don't think you smell things in a dream. I had to admit, the mildew was real.

I opened my eyes. The little lady was still there, still gibbering.

There's never a school counselor around when you need one.

BLINKING DIDN'T HELP. Neither did deep breaths. This wasn't like the Pigs at the Playground Incident. This one didn't go away.

But there she was, and there I was, and I couldn't just crouch there waiting for somebody to haul me off to the loony bin.

I stood up. The little lady saw me towering over her like that and her shrieks went all high and squeaky like an old swing. She got up and flapped away toward the bar, but you could tell something was wrong. She'd get airborne, six inches off the nasty wooden floor, and fly about a foot before going
splat
. It was pathetic. After the fourth try she stayed down. She crawled under a barstool and collapsed on her stomach, sobbing.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” I said in the singsong voice you use for kittens. I was on my hands and knees now.
What am I doing?

The little lady/bat went absolutely still, listening. She sat up, said something I couldn't hear. She gulped in air, calming herself down. “
Turpina es
?” Her voice sounded as if she were in a tin can in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Uh, hello. My name is Mellie Turpin.”
You're talking to her? She's not real. Fairy Fat, Fairy Fat.

The lady flung her arms open wide. “Turpina!”

The lady pulled herself together. She tucked her bare feet under her skirt and straightened her back. Her nose went up in the air. Like Fidius, she looked almost human, quite pretty, but her face was pale and pointy and unusually blank. Her light brown hair was pinned up in what probably had been a fancy hairdo but now looked like a squirrel's nest.

Don't panic. Fairy Fat.
The little lady said something else I couldn't understand.

I couldn't help myself. “Do you speak English?”

“
Lingua Latina
better is. You speak
lingua Latina
?”

“Sorry.”

“Ogier did speak Latin.” Ogier was Grand-père's first name. He pronounced it Oh-shee-yay. So did the little lady.

She was dressed in something out of Cinderella, like a painting by this guy Watteau.
Facts. Think facts. Jean-Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721.

She was still there.

“I speak English well,” she said. “I am educated.” She reached over her shoulder to grab the top part of a wing and pull it through her hands, grooming herself the way Fidius used to. She was calmer. Her wings began to look more like wings, not so limp and pale.

I leaned in to watch the oily puddle effect, but she flinched and squeaked, so I backed right off. “It's okay,” I said. “I really won't hurt you.”

“I am jumpish,” she said. “And sickish. It is this nectar you drink here, this bourbon, named for
nos anciens amis
.”

“For nose what?” I asked. She pronounced “bourbon” almost the way Grand-père said “Turpin.” As if she were about to throw up: “Boorghh-boh.”

She said, “Ai-yi-yi-yi!” Or something like that. Anyway, she was horrified. “
Nos anciens amis!
Our old friends! You are not speaking
la langue des Bourbons
?”

“Lah long day boorghh-boh?”

“
Français
, you warm dolt! The language of our favored kings, the Bourbons.”

“I only started French this year,” I said, although I didn't see why I should justify myself to a figment. “And I had a lousy teacher.”

“Ogier spoke French.”

“Oh yeah? Well, instead of speaking French and Latin all the time maybe he should have cleaned out the refrigerator.”

I decided not to worry. A bit of sunshine and fresh air, and she'd turn out to be an albino bat. Easy-peasy.
Fact: Vincent van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his entire life, and now he's sold nine hundred and they're worth millions.

“I desire food and drink, warm dolt.”

“My name is Mellie.”

“Mellie, Mellie,” she said, making my name sound like a swear word. “It is having no dignity. Is this all the name you have?”

“Melissa Angelica, if you must know.”

“Ah! Better. This is a name of lineage.”

That's what Fidius used to say
. Fact: Édouard Manet was born in 1832 and died in 1883. Fact: The Museum of Modern Art in New York hung a Matisse painting upside down for forty-six days.

“My name is Durindana, also of lineage. I desire food and drink. The great seeds are no more.” She gestured toward the top of the bar.

I stood up and found a bazillion empty nip bottles of bourbon, plus a million-bazillion empty packets of salted peanuts. Which reminded me. “Hey, who's Salty May?”

“I do not understand your words.”

“When you saw me you yelled ‘Salty May.' Is that a person?”

She snorted. “
Servate me
. This means ‘save me.' A natural reaction to a great warm dolt advancing when one is infirm. And in dreadful need of food, as I have said before.”

I never had to feed Fidius. He helped himself from what I had on my plate. How was I going to get food for this little lady without tipping off my parents?

Will you
please
stop pretending she's real?

“Help me back to my bed, warm dolt.” She pointed to the chandelier, where a fluffy pink slipper nestled among the dirty crystals.

I hesitated.
If you put your hand down, a baby bat will scuttle away. If she's not a bat, she'll get on your hand. And you'll know you're nuts.

I put my hand down. Durindana clambered aboard and sat down.

COLD!! I almost dropped her. Her dress protected me some, but her bare feet were right on my skin. You know how an ice cube starts to burn if you hold it in your hand? That's what it was like. I surged to my feet, flung my hand up as high as I could. “Go! You're freezing me!”

She lunged for the chandelier, almost didn't make it. She climbed the rest of the way to the fluffy pink slipper, toppled over the side, and disappeared.

I'm nuts.
I bolted for the door.

By the time I got back upstairs, though, my hand had stopped tingling. A store-bought chicken pie was in the oven. My mom was putting groceries away and Dad was pouring frozen green peas into one of Grand-père's fancy cooking pots. “Never been allowed to touch these before,” he said, as if it were Christmas morning.

“Frozen green peas probably never touched them either,” my mom said. “Definitely not up to his standards.” They were being so normal.

I tried to open a box of cereal without attracting attention. Being a great warm dolt, however, I ripped the liner open and a geyser of oat flakes spewed all over the floor.

“Nice one, Mellie,” Dad said. “We don't have enough mice, so let's throw cereal everywhere.”

“Sorry. Where's the broom?” This was all right. I'd sneak cereal into my sweatshirt pouch while sweeping.

Mom saw my last handful going into the pouch. “What's this, a snack for later?”

I put the broom away. “There's an albino baby bat in the pub.” I kept my head in the closet, making a big deal of putting the broom back exactly where it had been. I don't lie well, at least not to my parents—they look at me, they know what I'm thinking.
But I'm not lying, am I? It's a baby bat, right?

My hand hit the broom handle just the right way, and it stung. “Ow,” I said, and there they were on my palm: two tiny red prints from two freezing little bare feet.

She was not a bat. She was real, with freezing feet.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no . . .

“You're feeding a bat?” my dad said. “Mellie, there's an army of mice in this place. Start scattering food around and . . . Ohhh.” I emerged from the closet and he got a look at my face.

“What is it, Roly?” my mom said. Then she looked at me and said, “Oh. Dang it.”

“We've got a Small Person with Wings,” Dad said.

“IN LATIN, THEY CALL THEMSELVES PARVI PENNATI, Mellie,” Mom said. “Parvi for short. A female is a Parva, a male a Parvus.”

“What are you two talking about?” I said. But they're not the only ones who can read faces. I looked at them and my brain opened up like a sea anemone in a plankton storm.

Fidius was real. And my parents knew it.

I wasn't nuts. I had a frostbite handprint on the end of my nose. Squash
did
turn into candy corn. I had a friend who tried to mend my jeans. He left me a present. I was fine, thank you.

Fidius was real.

Fidius was real! I wanted to sing, sing, sing!

But...

My.

Parents.

All the time I'd been counting stuff and organizing stuff and keeping King Kong under control, I could have been reading Roald Dahl.

“You KNEW!” I slammed the broom closet door as hard as I could. “You let that woman smile like a horse at me and everybody called me Fairy Fat and I thought I was a freak and they threw slush balls at me. And you . . . KNEW!”

I flopped to the floor and buried my face in my hands. The clock was bonging its head off upstairs. What kind of people would lie like that to their own daughter? Mom sat down in the toasted oats, tried to put her arm around me. I shrugged it off.

“Mellie.” Dad pulled up a chair. “Honey, look at me. Look at ... Okay, don't. Honey, what could we do? If we told her, she'd have thought
we
were nuts, they'd take you away from us.”

“We didn't know what to do, sweetie.” Mom's voice wobbled. “You were so young when he was here, we thought maybe you'd forgotten him. We didn't know what you'd been saying at school until that Appleby woman called us.”

“Oh god, Mellie, I wanted so much to talk to you about it,” Dad said.

“We were protecting you,” Mom said.

That got my head up. “Nice work, Mom. You protected me right into freakhood.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve, even though I was not, not, not crying.

Mom managed to give me a squeeze. “We were definitely going to tell you when you got older, sweetie.”

Dad pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I didn't know they called you Fairy Fat. Why didn't you tell us?”

“Oh, Roly,” Mom said. “They threw slush balls at her, horrible,
horrible
kids. Now I see why you didn't have any frien . . . Well, not that you didn't have
any
. . . I mean, there was Girl Scouts and . . . Oh, dang it.” She gave me another squeeze. “This is the curse of the blasted Turpins. Excuse me, the blasted
Tooghh-pehs
.”

“There's a curse of the Turpins?” I wasn't sure how much more I could take.

“Oh, now.” Dad surged to his feet with an air of putting the bad times behind him. He stuck a hand down to haul Mom off the floor. “Calling it a curse is a bit strong. It's more of a legacy, really. A lineage.”

That word again. I sniffed, hoping I wouldn't smell anything and therefore would know I was dreaming. I smelled chicken pie and bleach.

The peas came to a boil. “Let's eat,” Mom said. They were pretending everything was normal, but neither of them would look at me.

“Hang on though,” Dad said. “I gather our little guy needs fodder?”

“It's a little lady,” I said. “She's been drinking bourbon because she can't get nectar. And eating bar peanuts.”
Oh my god she's real.