A Fairy Out of Her Tale - Dear Diary - 21. Scene 21

10th January 1995

Dear Shabby Diary,

Looks like I survived the night. I don’t know how much I slept, but it can’t have been much. The demon guard was there every time I spied the door. At least this time they didn’t flirt with anyone.

I think this is the last time I’ll write from this hospital room. I’m not sure if I’m happy or scared to leave this place. I guess I’m both?

I don’t like the hospital. The nurses are still not nice to me (I can’t even tell if they’re the same nurses changing their appearance or different people altogether) and they don’t seem to care that fairies are not supposed to eat meat. I had another unidentifiable carcass cut in tiny cubes and mixed with an omelett for breakfast, and spent the next half hour attached to the toilet while everything propelled its disgusting way out. When I got back to the room, the tree police officers from before (finally shape-shifters who didn’t change their looks from one day to the next!) were already waiting for me.

You have no idea how embarrassing it was! They had already seen me as a sobbing mess of tears, and now I appeared wearing a gown smeared with vomit, stinking of putrefied food, and my hair was all over the place. They must think I don’t care for my apperance. That I’m not bothered by the substantial beard that sprouted under my chin over the last nine days (why can’t they give me razors?). That the sickly yellow gown with all its chunks is a fashion statement.

They were nothing but gentle and polite, but I’m sure they think I’m an ugly fairy who’s never going to make real friends. Never mind me being a murderer (they certainly don’t seem to), what’s going to make me a social outcast here is my haggard look.

I need to find a razor. Scissors. A blade of some kind. My beard hadn’t been bothering me so much until I saw it in the mirror this morning. I’ve never let it grow this much. I can’t even recognise myself anymore. I look in the mirror and I see baggy eyes, sickly skin, a frown instead of a smile, and all that disgusting body hair growing where it shouldn’t.

Then I remember that I’m not the same person anymore. My physical transformation seems so minor when I try to talk to the potted plant next to my bed and it doesn’t say anything back. Or when I try to feel what the outside world is like, understand the nature of this desert nation, and get nothing but the dry air-conditioned air blowing on my face. If I don’t touch my chin and don’t look in a mirror, I can live with a beard. But I don’t have anything to distract me from fairy things I can no longer do. Nothing to help me pretend I’m still a fairy like any other, and I’m just here on an impulse holiday.

As much as I don’t like this place, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to have to face a strange place, to get to know new people and new rules when I’m not even sure who I am anymore. How can I do it? How can anyone think I can do it?

Do you think I can? You know me better than anyone else here. Tell me what I should do! Pretend you’re not an innanimate bundle of dead trees!

Please?

I don’t know what I’m hoping for. I’m too old to believe in this kind of magic.