To Catch A Fairy

Note: this little spate of creative writing was inspired by a blog post by my friend Jenny over at LifeLoveandLandslides.com.  It's an awesome post.  That said, it contains strong adult language.  My own writing, below, also contains strong adult language, so if such a thing offends you then you should probably stop reading now.

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Okay, so you said fuck it and continued on.  Excellent.

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It was a dark and stormy night, or at least so I imagined.  I was stuck in my office for another late night of work.  I know, "I was sitting at my desk working late into the night" is second only in bad story beginnings to "it was a dark and stormy night," but hey, it is what it is, man.  I gotta begin at the beginning, and hey, at least I'm not boring you with the crappy details of my craptastic week that, to that point, was just completely fucked up.  I'm serious; everything that could've gone wrong had, and those piss-ant circumstances had been joined in their downslide by several things that really couldn't have gone wrong, but did anyway.

Just--crap.  Fuck. Damn.  Shit.

Yep, it was that kind of week.

I was almost done with the report that was the reason for my burning the midnight oil, though.  As soon as I transcribed the pencil-scrawled crap from the worksheets to my computer, to be sent to the boss first thing in the morning, I was headed home, and to hell with reorganizing all the paperwork. I didn't care; I was buzzing.  Two--no, three--maybe six?--coffs of cuppee in me, and I could hear the numbers speaking to me.  I was Flash Gordon and the pencil was my baton.

I was moving so blindingly fast, in fact, that my fuck-up played itself out in painfully slow motion.  My hand clipped the coffee cup on its way past, and somehow the damn thing tipped over.  I watched in both horror and disbelief as the vessel of tepid black liquid flipped itself through a gravitationally impossible maneuver and sprayed said black liquid all over the papers spread so carefully across my desk.

Well, fuck.  One minute I was the prophet of profit margins, and the next I was the janitor of doom, blotting up the ruined spreadsheets with other ruined, wadded up spreadsheets.  Finally I stopped, looking helplessly over my dampened intellectual domain--it was gone, with a capital G.  All of it.  Every single minute of work, lost.

The jacked up state I was in let me see her, though.  I heard, just over my shoulder, a high pitched sniggering sound.  With nearly inhuman speed I whipped my chin up and around, catching the motion of tiny wings out of the corner of my eye.

What the hell?

My exhausted brain struggled to catch up to my caffeine-turbocharged senses as the particulars of the creature I'd caught a glimpse of each came into mental focus, one at a time, like bubbles coming up out of a pot of oatmeal.  I'd seen a female, human-like body.  It had glistening wings that were beating a thousand times faster than should've been possible.  It was--she was--she looked like Tinkerbell, for fuck's sake.  A goddamn fairy, man.  Only, she didn't look exactly like Tinkerbell.  This one had red, spiky hair and fully tattooed arms.  It--she--whatever the hell it was--wore stiletto heels, fishnet stockings, and a black lace teddy.

And it--she--whatever--had just blown me a damn kiss.

I stumbled out of my office, barely managing to hit the light switch on the way out.  Fairy, my ass.  I needed sleep, and profit margins would just have to wait.  I start seeing fairies, it's all over.  It's time to go home, over-medicate myself on alcohol, and watch old episodes of Doctor Who till I pass out and then my alarm clock rings.

I have to admit, I weirded myself out entering my office that next morning.  I stopped at the door and did this hundred and eighty degree eye-flick thing as I flipped the light switch back to "fluorescent overload." 

Nothing.

I cleaned the now-dried coffee up, and printed more spreadsheets.  A quick e-mail to my boss to explain, in the most professional and contrite language possible, that I'd fucked up the night before and wouldn't have his report till a little later, and I was off and running.  Oh, and I also took a moment to thank whatever goddamn deity was listening that it was Friday. 

The day was pretty normal, but that night, as I tried to clean up all the little loose ends so I'd get at least a snipping of a weekend for whatever the fuck I wanted to do for that little slice of time, I saw her again.

This time she turned my computer off.

That's not easy to do, by the way.  My system is corrupted, just like ninety percent of all the computers I've ever seen are.  Sometimes I can't get my computer to shut down properly.  Sometimes I press and hold the power button like I'm supposed to, and the damn thing just sits there and gives me a gaping Windows grin for my ignorance.  Sometimes I have to reach around and pull out the damn power plug--it's that fucked up. 

She, though--and by she, I mean the little fucking flitting fairy thing--zipped by, touched the power button, and the whole thing restarted.  Right in the middle, of course, of my writing the e-mail that I'd been dreading writing all day long--the one about how fucked up my profit margins were heading toward being.

Apparently a fairy that knows it's been spotted doesn't care about more sightings.  She flew out plain as day and, as the computer restarted, held up two of the shapeliest middle fingers I'd ever seen, stuck out her tongue, and then blew me a raspberry.

I grabbed for her in anger, and she tittered as she darted away.  Damn it!

I left.  I was done.  The fucked up week I'd had was so totally screwed that there was nothing I could do to un-fuck it before Monday.  Fuck it.  That's why the good lord above gave us alcohol, right?

Saturday morning I was at my home office computer as usual, and an inspiration washed over me.  Hey, every creature has a weakness, right?  And if a fairy has a weakness, and I can find it and use it, then I can get rid of her, right?

So I--no, don't laugh at me--I Googled "how do I catch a fairy."  I know what you're thinking, and the answer is hell, I don't know.  Sometimes the solution is a simple one, though, and so I took the simplest approach.

Yes, as you probably already figured, I got some of the dumbest responses.  "Don't try to catch them," one site implored, and to that I replied, out loud, "Fuck you."  That little beast was causing me to fail at my job, and I was hell-bent on catching her.  It.  Whatever.

Of course, I read all of the gay jokes.  You can't be serious about catching a fairy without reading about gay bars, and I can't fucking believe I just said that.  Sadly, though, it's true. 

"Just make a trap with fairy food," somebody suggested, and it made me want to strangle the little shazbat.  Fairy food?  What the hell do fairies eat?

Most of the serious--um, I think, anyway--responses had to do with natural environments, but my little fairy wasn't in nature at all.  At least, I don't consider my office to be nature, or natural, or anything else vaguely resembling that word.  It's just an office.

Finally I found one that made sense, in a fantastically fucked-up fairy tale sort of way.  It involved a white and a pink lily, both made super-sticky by a syrup of honey and sugar, and both laid out side by side.  I wanted to punch the florist in the face when he grinned and winked at me over the two lilies, but I eventually got what I wanted from him and drove away, telling myself as I did that some day I'd have to look up what white and pink lilies meant.

Then again, fuck it, I don't really care.  I wanted that damn fairy gone, is all.

That night--Saturday night, it was--I blew off my poker circle and went in to work.  Quietly I turned my computer on and set everything out like I was working.  Then I put the two lilies in the middle of all of it and poured the sweetened honey mixture over them.  Leaving everything exactly the way I'd set it, I walked out and locked the door with the lights still on.

Sunday morning I flew into my office, looking forward to what I'd find.

It was better than I'd hoped.  I was ecstatic to see that right there, in the middle of my desk, was the fairy, stuck to the lilies.

She looked up at me, anger evident in her tiny features.  I looked back down at her, realizing suddenly that I had no idea what the fuck I was gonna do with a fairy.

"Hi," I said.  Okay, that was dorky, but it was the best I had to offer.

"Hi," she replied, her glare still smoldering.

"You're a fairy," I offered.

"No fucking shit, asshole," she said, and then added a whole string of colorful epithets meant for me.

"Hey, now, look, you're the shithead who's been fucking with me and my ability to do my job."

"No shit.  You do know who I am, right?"

"Hmm, no.  The tooth fairy?"

"Fuck you, asshole.  I'm the Fuck-up Fairy.  It's my job to visit people who have a lot of promise and put obstacles in their way to promote positive thinking and creativity.  You, right up to the point where you thought you captured me, showed a lot of promise."

"Thought I captured you?  But the site I read seemed so sure of the white and the pink lilies."

"Of course it did," she said, shaking off her apparent imprisonment and giggling.  "I wrote it.  I love these colors.  But now my job here is done, and it's time for me to leave."

"Wait!" I called, and nearlyl cheered as she stopped.  "Since you're the fuck-up fairy, why don't you go pay a visit to Jones, down the hall?"

She giggled, pulling the two large lily flowers through the air.  She called as she flew out of sight, "I said that I visited people of promise.  That's not Jones, silly." 

The next week, and the weeks following, were much better.