Like Fairies Do

My sister says she doesn’t go to school because she has fairy blood.

“Fairies aren’t supposed to be seen by too many humans,” she tells me inside our treehouse, where sunlight drips through the wooden walls like melted gold. “If they find out who I am, they’ll trap me in a glass jar forever.”

I believe her, of course. She’s older. She knows things. She speaks with a certainty that makes everything sound true — even the parts that feel strange, even the parts that make our mother’s forehead crease when she overhears.

Sometimes my sister shows me her hands — thin scars crossing over her skin like pale threads.

“These are from battling the evil elves,” she whispers dramatically, lifting her chin like a hero in a storybook. “They wanted to take my wings.”

I gasp every time. “Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

Then she smiles, small and tired, but trying. “But I won.”

I tell her she’s the bravest fairy ever. She laughs softly and taps my forehead with her knuckle.

“I wish I could fly,” she says. “Then no one could ever reach me.”

And I tell her she will. Because fairies always learn to fly. Because in my mind, wings are something that come eventually — like birthdays, or summer, or growing tall enough to see out the kitchen window without tiptoes.

We spend afternoons in the treehouse, away from the noise of the house and the sharp edges of the world she never fully explains to me. She tells me fairy stories, but sometimes her voice wavers, and the stories become shadows. She says she feels “watched,” even here. She says even trees have ears. I don’t understand what she means, but I pretend I do, because I don’t want to lose the way she looks at me when she thinks I’m on her side.

One afternoon, I ran to the treehouse with a drawing I made. I want her to see it. I want her to smile the way she used to before she became quieter, before she started staring at windows like something waited outside.

I climb the ladder the way she taught me, careful with each step.

“Sis?” I called.

She’s already inside. Floating.

Her feet aren’t touching the floor. Her hair hangs strangely still. A rope circles her neck like a necklace she didn’t want.

But I don’t understand that yet.

Not the meaning. Not the finality. Not the silence.

My heart blooms with excitement.

“Mom!” I shout, scrambling down the ladder so fast my foot slips. “Mom, sis learned how to fly! She’s floating!”

Our mother drops the plate she’s holding. It shatters. Ceramic pieces scatter across the floor like broken teeth. She doesn’t ask questions. She just runs.

I chase after her, still smiling, still too young to understand that some kinds of floating aren’t magic at all.

But when she climbs into the treehouse, she screams — a sound that doesn’t sound human. A sound that splits something inside me. A sound that tells me, suddenly, sharply, that nothing is okay.

I don’t know why she falls to her knees. I don’t know why she grabs my sister’s legs, shaking and shaking and shaking. I don’t know why she won’t let me in, why she blocks the entrance with her whole body, why she keeps saying “no, no, no” like the word itself is the only thing holding the world together.

I don’t understand any of it.

I just stand there on the ladder.

Later, they take my sister away. Not the way she said fairies are taken. Not in jars.  But by silent men carrying a stretcher, and my mother’s sobs following behind them like a ghost.

I don’t go inside the treehouse again. Not for years.

Our mother keeps the door nailed shut. She says it’s “dangerous.” She says “stay away.” She says a lot of things that don’t match the stories my sister used to tell.

But I believe my sister.  I always have.

When I am older — older enough to ignore the rules, old enough to stop pretending I don’t remember — I climb the treehouse again.

The wood groans under my weight. Dust drifts around me like tiny wings. The air smells like old summers and something sadder. The rope mark on the beam is still there.

My breath stutters. My chest tightens.

In that tiny room, everything feels frozen — the last place she stood alive, the last place we shared stories, the last place she tried to fly.

I crouch in the corner where she used to sit. I press my fingers against the floor where her nails once scratched little shapes when she was thinking. I try to feel her there, even just a whisper.

But the treehouse is quiet. Too quiet.

My sister never learned to fly. She never sprouted wings. She wasn’t taken because she was magical.

She… left, because she couldn’t stay.

My throat burns. My eyes sting. 

I look down at my own hands. My own thin scars. Not from “evil elves.”

From the same sharp shadows she lived with, from the same monsters no one could see.

I trace one scar with my thumb, and suddenly her stories don’t feel like fantasies anymore, they feel like warnings.

I curl my fingers, the scars pale under the pressure, glowing faintly in the dim light like secrets trying to surface. 

And as the wind moves through the treehouse, brushing against my skin the way it used to brush hers, a thought rises.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to fly too, like fairies do.