The Monarch Wife
By Matt Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 34 Minutes
It was the summer and no one had seen the monarchs for fifty years. All around the city, interspersed among the skyscrapers, were patches of green where they had once been a common sight: the large parks all along the lake shore, the private gardens outside the apartment complexes, the landscaping along the roads. In what was otherwise a forest of glass and steel, thousands of these lush havens were tucked away.
Yet few now remembered the days when, every summer, these sanctuaries of vegetation became flooded with vibrant flashing wings. On warm and mischievous winds they would come racing in, like droplets of orange paint on a canvas of gray and green and blue. They came and they drank nectar and they made the city feel alive. Then the winds changed and they would hurry away again, the sound of laughter in their pinwheeling wings, until they returned the following summer.
Then, one summer, they did not come. Parents pushing strollers bemoaned the lonely flowers in the park. Tired office workers, glancing outside in hopes of spotting a splash of orange, saw nothing. Still the next year they did not return, nor the year after that. Year after year went by, yet the monarchs did not return, and at last they faded from the collective mind of the city and were forgotten.
Except, of course, by Werner Spoons.
Werner Spoons remembered everything.
✷
Every morning, when Werner Spoons woke up in his hard, old bed in his hard, old studio apartment, there would be the lingering honey-sweet smell of milkweed in his nostrils and he would think, for the briefest instant, that he was young again. But he was not. He was an old man, still living on that same seventh floor on Federal St. where he’d lived for forty-five years.
Nothing inside it had changed: there was still the well-worn alarm clock and the landline telephone on the end table next to his bed. There was still the same cracked coffee pot on the counter, smudged and tarnished from years of coffee grounds. The same faded carpet stretched across the floor, and the same overcoat hung on the same peg by the door. It was a room where time had no jurisdiction.
Yet, whenever Werner sat up in bed looked out the window, he was always surprised to find that the world outside was not how he remembered it.
Werner’s apartment overlooked a little park, with high rises on three sides. There were storefronts in two of them, a coffee shop and a dog grooming salon and a vegan restaurant. But when Werner looked outside, he still expected to see them as they had been when he’d moved into the apartment as a young man: a tavern, a tobacco store, and nonexistent. Back then, there was a haggard poet who would smoke two packs a day and scribble in his notebook on the balcony across from him, and at night in the park, women in stilettos and fake fur would stand under the trees in the park and call out to the drunks that staggered by. Now, on Saturdays, there was a farmer’s market.
In fact, the only thing that had not changed in forty-five years was the fountain in the center of the park. There was no water in it anymore, and yet it remained. At the top was the statue of a woman with no legs: her torso blended into the tangle of vines like she was growing from the stone, bursting out of the top of the fountain with her face tilted towards the sun. Her arms were thrown back, and at the end of them were not hands but leaves. No one knew why the statue was there. No one paid any attention to it. But Werner did. Every morning he would drink his coffee and look down at that stone face, with its chin tipped up towards the sky, and he would be very sad.
Then, every morning when his cup was empty, he would pick up his old leather briefcase held together by duct tape and walk half a mile to the Museum of Oddities & Enchantments.
The Museum of Oddities & Enchantments was set a little apart from the rest of the city, on top of a hill, by the lake. It was a very old building of beautiful white marble, and no one could recall a time when Werner Spoons had not worked there. New wings had been added, the administration had changed three times, funding had fallen off and come flooding in and had fallen off again. Werner had been there through it all, though he had scarcely been aware of it. He was an immovable stone in a river that rushed around him. Each morning, when the security guard—a young woman he did not recognize, who had replaced a young man he had not recognized, who had replaced another young woman he had not recognized—said “Good morning, Dr. Spoons,” he would only grunt. He would hurry as quickly as his shuffling old legs would carry him, down the back hall, through the fingerprint scans, and into the basement where the fairy collection was kept.
That was his speciality, the fairies. No one knew more about them than he. Few cared to: the younger researchers all clamored and fought and backstabbed to get postings on the Bizarre Trinkets and Treasures floor, or the Library of Peculiar Books, or the Gallery of Mythical Monsters. But for decades, the fairy collection had been the sole domain of Werner Spoons.
The room was big and quiet and unremarkable. It was lit by harsh fluorescent lights, and long rows of cream-colored cabinets flanked either wall. In the center of the room was a large glass table, big enough to sit twenty people, containing all manner of objects and specimens under the glass. There were two workbenches with their own racks of tools, on opposite sides of the room, containing two dozen different magnifying glasses, half a dozen pairs of strange-looking spectacles, butterfly nets, jars, display boxes and pins, and a whole myriad of other tools.
Werner looked very small in that enormous room, and yet every year the Museum asked if he would like an assistant, and every year he turned them down. By himself, Werner would move with a slow, steady determination around the room, shuffling here and there in a way that appeared methodical and yet which anyone watching would have been completely unable to predict or understand. He opened drawers and cabinets, put on and took off spectacles, mounted specimens on pins, and wandered up and down the table with a magnifying glass and his notebook. As he worked, his old briefcase sat on the workbench on the far end of the room, next to his coat. He did not open it.
Yet, every night after he left the Museum and came back into that little park below his apartment building, he stopped. Lifting his head, he smelled the air. Then he sat on a bench and carefully opened that tattered old briefcase.
Inside were specimens, some of the old eggs that the Museum did not need, each the size of a mothball. He ground them between his fingers until they were powder. Then, lovingly, he sprinkled them on the flowers. He walked up and down, scattering the chalky dust, until at last he came to the fountain. He looked up at that statue of the woman, but she was watching the sky and did not meet his eyes. Then he scattered the last bit of powder in the empty basin.
The sun went down, and Werner Spoons went home.
✷
Amita’s family was moving again, and she was not happy about it at all.
At only ten years of age, Amita had already lived four different places: first there was the little apartment with the turtle wallpaper. Then came the basement with the stained carpet that they had rented from the old widow who smelled like ham. Then there was her grandparents’ house. Finally, when her father finished his PhD, they’d moved into the wonderful little house on Forest Place.
Amita loved it. She had loved having a backyard and riding her bicycle on the sidewalk. She had loved going next door to play with her neighbor Kimmie, who was in her class at elementary school. She loved her big bed in her own room with the stars on the ceiling. On that first night, when they had arrived at the house on Forest Place, Amita had lain in bed with the blankets tucked up under her chin and the stars on the ceiling, and with a thrill she had thought, This is my home.
But now they were moving again. They were leaving that wonderful house behind. To make matters worse, they were moving back into an apartment, down in the city, because her father had gotten a job at the Museum of Oddities & Enchantments. It was a very good museum, he said. Her parents were very excited.
“You will love the city, Amita,” they said. “There are many interesting things to see there.”
But Amita did not think so. She just wanted to ride her bicycle down the sidewalk and smell the lilac bushes and play with the whirlybirds that fell from the neighbor’s big maple tree. She just wanted to fall asleep in her room, the first room that had truly belonged to her, the room she had thought would be hers forever. And under the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, she cried late into the night.
Their new apartment was a garden apartment, and when they descended into it with their boxes and furniture it felt like they were burrowing into the earth. The rooms were very small and very dark. The only windows were in the living room, and they faced out into the bushes. Only if Amita stood on the end table and rested her chin on the sill could she see outside, past the bushes, to the feet of strangers as they walked by. It was like being a rabbit or a squirrel, she thought, only seeing people’s feet.
Because it was summertime, Amita did not have school. Sometimes she’d ride her bicycle down the sidewalk with her mother, but she wasn’t allowed to go out on her own anymore, so most days Amita sat by those windows in the living room, watching the shoes and feeling glum. During the daylight hours, she would watch people walking their dogs or playing frisbee in the park. But at night, when there was no one walking back and forth, the moon would come up and she could see that, in the center of the park, there was an old stone fountain. It had moss and rust climbing up the side, and there was no water in it, but at the very top was the sculpture of a woman. The woman was very beautiful, with her arms thrown back and chin tilted up at the moon. On some nights, Amita thought the woman was alive.
Amita spent her first two weeks in the new apartment like this, holed up like a gopher. Then, on Monday of the third week, her father sat on the edge of her bed and gently shook her awake.
“Get dressed, Amita. Today I’m going to take you to see the Museum.”
✷
It was a beautiful summer day when the people in administration beckoned Werner Spoons up from the basement and informed him that they had hired another researcher. His name was Dr. Akaash Patel, and he was a rising star in the field of Oddities & Enchantments. Several universities had offered him prestigious roles, they said, and the Museum was lucky to have him.
Werner only stared. Most of the administrators were at least twenty years his junior, and even the older ones he didn’t recognize. Besides, he had seen many prominent young researchers come and go in his time. He wasn’t sure why they had disturbed him from his routine and forced him to come sit in this creaky office chair that hurt his back.
“That’s fine,” he said. He began to stand.
They cleared their throats. “Dr. Spoons, I’m not sure you understand. Dr. Patel is a fairy expert. He’ll be joining you in your work.”
Werner Spoons froze. He was sure he hadn’t heard them right. He had been having a lot of difficulty hearing people lately, in fact, and he often found himself asking the check-out girl at the grocery store to repeat herself. “What was that?”
They smiled. “Dr. Spoons, you have been with the Museum for forty-four years this July, is that right?”
“Forty-five,” he said.
“Your knowledge of fairy specimens is unmatched. But surely you have read Dr. Patel’s numerous scholarly articles in Apothecary Quarterly and Applied Magic?”
Werner adjusted his glasses. The titles were unfamiliar to him. “I, er, believe I have them in my office somewhere. I’ve been meaning to peruse…”
“Let me assure you, Dr. Spoons, Dr. Patel has some incredible new ideas about how we can learn from fairy behavior. The strides he’s made have already made quite an impact on the field of civil engineering.”
“I see,” said Werner. He didn’t.
“Naturally, however, he has much to learn. He doesn’t have your…extensive knowledge of the subject, particularly in the field. We were hoping that you could shift your focus over this next year, make it your main task to pass down all that you’ve learned.”
“I see,” said Werner. And this time he did.
Back in the basement, Werner sat at his workbench and stared at the wall. In his left hand he held one of his magnifying glasses, and he squeezed the handle intermittently until his knuckles turned white. In his chest, he felt a white heat like heartburn: after all these years, they were making plans to replace him.
“Oh, Magdalene,” he whispered, “If I lose this, what will I have left?”
Dr. Patel started the following week. He was a bright, chipper young man with a well-kept goatee and thick glasses, and when he came through the door of the fairy collection he came with a big smile and an extended hand. Werner only looked at him, then told him he could take the workbench on the far side of the room.
Those first two weeks were very tense. Dr. Patel tried in vain to strike up friendly conversation, going on about his passion for fairy migration patterns, which he believed was a long-neglected area of study. But Werner never responded. He never even looked up from his work. He refused to sharpen the knife the Museum planned to stab him with.
But even Werner could not keep himself from crying out in alarm when Dr. Patel let slip, in the midst of his unceasing chatter, that he and his family had moved into the building across from Werner.
“What?” said Werner, turning around despite himself. “On Dearborn? With the tobacco shop?”
Dr. Patel blinked in surprise. He had grown used to talking with no response. “I don’t think so, Dr. Spoons. There is a dog grooming salon, though.”
Then Werner thought about his briefcase and his precious flowers and the fountain in the park and his jaw clenched. But all he said was, “It used to be a tobacco shop.”
Then he turned around and refused to open his mouth again.
In fact, he did not speak another word until the third week, when Dr. Patel arrived at the Museum with his daughter.
✷
Amita thought the Museum of Oddities & Enchantments looked like a palace but smelled like a bathtub. There was a stale lemon smell in the air, like the cleaner her mother used to scrub the shower. It made her nose itch. The main hall was breathtaking, of course: there were great maps of uncharted lands hung on the walls, and a pair of enchanted swords, and in the center, surrounded by tourists, the enormous mounted skeleton of a dragon. But Amita was very distracted by the lemon smell and she complained very loudly about it.
“Look, Amita,” said her father. “Do you see the Pegasus?”
Up on the ceiling were drawn an amazing series of glowing constellations, white stars glowing on a deep blue, and hanging from a chain as if it were flying through the night sky was a large taxidermied horse with wings. The whole sight made Amita think of her ceiling at the house on Forest Place, and a lump came to her throat.
“It looks stupid,” she said. “The smell in here is making my eyes hurt.”
Her father sighed and took her hand. Together they walked away from the crowds and into a back hall, where her father had to scan his fingerprints. Then they went down a set of stairs until they came to a big door.
“This is where I work, Amita.”
The room was very big, with many microscopes and magnifying glasses, and she saw the jars and glass boxes filled with little green balls that looked like eggs. But the thing that struck her most was the smell: in contrast to the lemon cleaner upstairs, this room was filled with a pleasant, honey-sweet scent. She sniffed.
“What is that?” she said. “It smells good.”
“It’s milkweed,” came a voice.
On the far side of the room was a man she had not noticed at first. He was very old, with bushy white eyebrows and thinning white hair, and his shoulders were hunched as if weighed down by an invisible backpack full of bricks. He was wearing a very funny set of spectacles with three sets of lenses, each one suspended in front of the other by a little metal arm, like something she would wear at the eye doctor. They made his eyes look like a bug, and as he turned he tipped them up onto his forehead and his eyes became beady and blue. He squinted at them.
Amita’s father was shocked that the old man had spoken. He hurried Amita over to the elder researcher’s workbench. “Dr. Spoons, this is my daughter Amita. Say hello, Amita.”
“Hello,” she said.
He nodded at her. “Hello.”
He said nothing more, just adjusted his glasses and shifted in his chair. But her father had found an opening and he refused to let the moment pass.
“Amita is incredibly bright. She will be going into fifth grade this fall. Amita, why don’t you tell Dr. Spoons something you learned in school last year?”
“I learned to play soccer.”
Her father blinked. “I meant something about science or mathematics…”
“Those are boring. I like soccer.”
Her father was flustered, but Amita thought she saw, for just a moment, the tiniest smile sneak onto the face of Dr. Spoons. Then it was gone, and he frowned, as if to compensate.
“Excuse me, I’m very busy.”
He lowered the funny spectacles back onto his nose and bent back over his workbench. Disappointed, her father took her by the hand and walked her over to his own workbench on the other side of the room.
At first he tried to get her interested in what he was working on—something about migration and highways—but it was very dull and she lost interest, so instead he sat her on a stool at the enormous glass table, which turned out not to be a table at all but rather an entire habitat of sticks, logs, flowers, and mushrooms. It appeared as though there was nothing else inside, like an empty cage at the zoo. Her father made her sit there and review her math workbook. She was nodding off over the integers when a flash of movement beneath her caught her eye.
Under the glass, something flying over the flowers. Pushing her math book out of the way, she looked and saw the orange wings of a monarch butterfly, flitting over the petals.
“Why do you have butterflies in here?” she asked.
Her father was too absorbed to hear her. She frowned, and then, in a moment of childish impulse, climbed up onto the table. She scooted across it, then lay down on the cold surface and pressed her nose to the glass. Down in the habitat, she could see the butterfly as it drifted lazily between leaves. It pinwheeled around a few times, then landed on a branch right below her face. Entranced, she watched its wings open and shut.
Then, suddenly, the body of the insect tilted back and she saw, looking up at her, a human face. Amita shrieked in surprise.
“Get down from there!”
It was the old man, Dr. Spoons. He was shuffling over and looked very cross. Amita scrambled back down off of the table and into her seat, then peered over the glass at him in embarrassment and shame. The commotion had startled her father, and he turned in his chair.
“Amita? What happened?”
Amita thought Dr. Spoons was going to be very angry, but he simply placed a hand on the glass and his demeanor softened. “You mustn’t startle them,” was all he said.
From the other side of the table, Amita watched him. He was looking down into the habitat of sticks and flowers, and he seemed almost sad. Emboldened by the lack of scolding, Amita risked indulging her curiosity. “What was that?” she said. “That butterfly had a face!”
“The monarchs are not butterflies,” said Dr. Spoons. “They are fairies. This is a common misconception.”
“I’ve never seen one before,” she said.
“That is not surprising,” said the old man. “There hasn’t been a single monarch in this city for fifty years.”
“Ah, yes!” said her father, seizing the opportunity. “That is the greatest mystery of fairy migration in the last century. How could an entire species of fairy, once common, so entirely shift its migration patterns so as to disappear altogether in the matter of a single year? The cause must have been something quite unusual.”
“It was,” said the old man. He said nothing more.
Down in the display case, the fairy that looked like a butterfly was fanning its wings and sipping nectar from a flower. “If they don’t come here anymore,” asked Amita, “then where did you get this one?”
Her father chuckled. “Dr. Spoons is the greatest living collector of fairies in the world, Amita. He used to travel all over the world on the Museum’s behalf, finding the rarest specimens on high mountains and in deep forests. He has three species named after him, and has discovered an additional eight.”
But Dr. Spoons shook his head. “That was a long time ago. I haven’t left the city for twenty years.”
“Do all fairies look like bugs?” Amita asked.
It was this that finally succeeded in getting a reaction from Dr. Spoons. Lifting his eyes from the display case, he studied her in surprise. “Your father is a fairy researcher. Haven’t you seen one before?”
She shrugged. “Dad just reads books.”
“Er, yes,” her father said, adjusting his glasses. “My work is more theoretical—”
This was appalling enough, and Dr. Spoons emerged like a turtle from a shell. “My good man! You mean to tell me in all these years of research you have not mastered basic field techniques? What do they even teach in PhD programs these days?”
Her father smiled sheepishly, but Amita recognized it: it was the same smile he used with her mother when he wanted her to make his favorite curry. “I had been hoping to learn from you.”
The old man scowled, but Amita’s boundless curiosity came to the rescue. “Do you have more fairies in here? Can I see them?”
And that was that. It was a transformation that was almost startling: Dr. Spoons began opening cupboards and drawers in a flurry, pulling out mounting boxes and jars and piling them up on the glass table. He talked only a little at first, and haltingly, but eventually he picked up speed as the teacher in him, long dormant, took over. It had been a long time since anyone had been interested in his work, and after years of brooding silence, the old man’s tongue was loosened and words began spilling out while Amita and her father watched in rapt attention.
“These are the eggs of pixilus fantasticus,” he said. “They lay them in the spring and mix them up with the pollen. And this is the husk of a puckerus impishius. They make their homes from lost keys and misplaced wristwatches, all taken apart and strung together like a beehive up in the crooks of branches. Ah, and look here! These are a rare treasure. These are the tiny flutes of the oberonim, who only come out in the summer when the moon is blue every one hundred years. On those nights they dance a dance of fate and blow their breath on two young lovers who are destined thereafter to suffer tragedy yet have their story recorded and retold for the next hundred years until the oberonim dance their dance again.”
This went on for almost two hours. Then, in a maneuver that was far better than her father could have dared hope for, Amita asked: “Are there fairies that live here in the city?”
Dr. Spoons, who had been showing them the plucked wings of the pulvis yumbonim of Senegal, peered at her over the rims of his glasses. “There are a few species, yes.”
Her eyes lit up. “Oh please, Dr. Spoons, can you teach me how to catch them?”
Her father held his breath. The elder researcher studied both of them, as if recognizing at last the trap he had fallen into. Amita sensed the sudden tension. She did not understand this grown-up world of jockeying; she only knew she had discovered something new and exciting, and that for the first time since moving down to the city she was happy. She looked back and forth between them and frowned.
“Well?”
The old man relented. “Yes, of course. We can go this weekend.”
✷
The following weekend, Dr. Spoons took them to a park in the old part of the city. Though it was warm outside, he was wearing a jacket when they met him and carrying his beat-up old briefcase. He gave Amita a small smile, one that did not show any teeth, and when he shook her father’s hand it seemed that his old stiffness had returned. Her father suggested they get a taxi, but Dr. Spoons shook his head.
“I prefer to walk,” he said. “It is only twenty minutes.”
But Dr. Spoons was old and walked slowly, so it was forty minutes later when they arrived at the park. It was nestled between two streets of old, historical homes that were so big they looked like mansions, behind a row of trees and a gated fence. Secluded in the center of the park were sculptures covered in moss, as well as another fountain, this one with running water. Dr. Spoons puttered around for a long time, peering under bushes, sniffing at leaves, dipping his fingers into the fountain and tasting the water. Finally, he said, “This is a good spot.”
Then he opened up his briefcase and went to work. He set up little paper lanterns on sticks, in a circle around the park. He removed a little bag of small, powdery balls and began crushing them in his fingers, sprinkling them on the bushes, the pavement, and in the fountain. Her father offered to help several times, but Dr. Spoons waved him off, each time with increasing annoyance.
Finally, Dr. Spoons tossed a few handfuls of flower petals around the area and settled onto a bench. They came to sit next to him.
“Now what?” asked Amita.
“Now we wait,” he said. He pulled a small butterfly net out of his briefcase and handed it to her. “When the fairies come, it will be your job to catch one.”
They waited for a long time. The sun began to sink low in the sky. Amita could hear the sounds of traffic and barking dogs in the distance, but they were muffled by the trees. The park was quiet, an oasis in a sea of noise.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “When—”
Dr. Spoons made a quick gesture, motioning for her to be silent. She looked up and gasped.
In the soft yellow light of the paper lanterns, little winged shapes were drifting. At first she thought they were only moths, or dragonflies, but when she looked again she saw that they had shapes like tiny little people, hands and feet and arms and legs, and emitted a dim blue glow. As she watched, some alighted onto the flowers and began drinking the nectar, while others washed into the fountain and shook their wings, sending little shivers of water spraying into the air.
Her father gave her a gentle push. “Go ahead, Amita.”
With a little thrill, Amita tiptoed onto the pavement with her net and over to the bushes. Then she swung it, and heard the flutter of many tiny wings around her as the fairies scattered. But when she looked she saw that there was something trapped in the mesh of the net.
“I got one!” she shouted.
Indeed, there was a fairy struggling in the net, its wings flapping madly. When she peered closer at it, she saw a scared little face looking back at her. She felt a sudden pang of sadness.
Then her father and Dr. Spoons were at her side. With quick, practiced movements, Dr. Spoons took the net from her and transferred the fairy to a jar. He sealed the lid, which had holes carefully poked into the top, and lifted it up for her to see. The little creature was fluttering inside, its gossamer wings reflected by the light of the rising moon.
“Magicae lux,” he said. “A very common species, but a good catch all the same.”
He was beaming at her now, as if he could not keep himself from the happiness that was systematically overthrowing his heart. “Very good, Amita,” he said.
And he gave her the jar.
✷
The sun had set by the time they made it back, and her mother was waiting for them on the sidewalk. Before Dr. Spoons could say a word, she had invited him for dinner, practically pushing the flustered old man through the door. There was a delicious garlic smell wafting through the apartment, and with the practiced effortlessness of a person who knows how to make others comfortable, Amita’s mother took Dr. Spoons’ briefcase and coat and shepherded him into the dining room. The old man did not have time to resist, and as Amita watched him look around the apartment with mystified curiosity she saw his expression slowly melt from begrudging compliance to genuine ease. In one attack of unyielding hospitality, her mother succeeded in knocking down walls that her father had found unbreachable for two whole weeks. The first cracks had come by Amita’s doing, and now the final assault was complete.
Thus, Dr. Spoons sat at their table all through dinner, talking and even laughing. Every time he did he seemed to startle himself, as if he had grown unaccustomed to the sensation. Amita peered at him from the corner of her eyes while she ate in wondering curiosity. He had many wrinkles, so she knew he was very old, but he seemed so different from her only living grandfather back in India, who was always laughing and joking with her uncles and chatting with people in the marketplace. Her grandfather was always surrounded by people. But Dr. Spoons had so spent many years alone. It was an aloneness her young mind could not fathom.
“Do you have any kids?” she asked suddenly.
The grown-ups looked at her. Dr. Spoons, who was chewing a mouthful of curry, paused and cleared his throat. “No.”
“What about a wife? Do you have a wife?”
“Amita, hush,” said her mother.
“I was married,” said Dr. Spoons. “A long time ago.”
“What happened?”
“Amita!” scolded her mother. “That’s not polite.”
Dr. Spoons put down his fork. He was silent for so long that Amita became afraid. She did not want Dr. Spoons to be angry with her.
But then, very slowly and quietly, words came from between those dry old lips. “We were very young,” he said. “I was about to start my PhD program. She was visiting the city with her family, and was only supposed to stay for the summer. We met in the park, on a warm evening. I was collecting specimens, kneeling down in the dirt with the flowers, and when I looked up…” his throat caught. He stopped, coughed, and continued. “We were married after only a month. Her family did not approve, but we were in love, madly in love. It was more love than either of us had ever known to be possible.”
Amita’s parents were sitting like children. Amita risked another question.
“So,” she said, “what happened?”
She wasn’t sure if Dr. Spoons even heard her. He was looking far away. “Her family left,” he said, “and the summer ended. I started my PhD program. We were happy at first, but then the winter came and she became very lonely. She knew no one else in the city, and I…I was caught up in my work. I traveled a lot in those days. And when the summer came again, she told me that her family was coming back to get her. She did not want to leave with them, but she also did not want to stay cooped up in that apartment, waiting for a husband who was never there. She begged me to go with her, to leave together with her and her family. But I refused. When her family arrived in the city to retrieve her, they were furious, and they promised me that I would never lay eyes on her again as long as I lived. That was the last time I ever saw her.”
The table was very quiet. Even Amita’s mother did not know what to say. Finally, Dr. Spoons wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood. “I’m afraid I must be going.”
Amita’s mother tried another series of tactics to extend the evening, but the spell had been broken. Dr. Spoons declined over and over until he had made his way to the front door and slipped on his coat and picked up his briefcase. But he paused in the doorway.
“Roma, Akaash, thank you for a pleasant evening,” he said. “I have not done anything like this for…well, I can’t remember. Amita, make sure to put flowers in the fairy jar every day so it can drink the nectar. Goodnight.”
And he was gone.
But while her parents sat at the dinner table, talking in low tones, Amita stood on the end table in the living room and peered out the big window. Out in the darkness, she could see the old man shuffling across the street. He did not return to his apartment. Instead he made his way to a bench in the park, where he sat and opened his tattered old briefcase. Just as he had that evening in the old city, he took the bag of powder from within and began sprinkling it around the garden, on the flowers and in the grass.
Finally, he came to the fountain. He paused there, sprinkled the rest of the powder, then closed his briefcase and stepped back, staring up at the statue of the woman on top. The moon reflected down on his glasses. Amita watched him, but he did not move for a long time; he simply stood there, staring in silence up at the woman who was not looking at him. Then, at last, he turned and went inside.
Amita went to her room. On her nightstand was the jar with the fairy. It was sitting on the glass floor, its arms around its legs and its chin on its knees. Its wings were beating very tired and slow. Amita felt her throat tighten. Making sure her parents weren’t watching, she took the jar back out to the living room, cracked open the big window, and took off the lid. Then she watched the little fairy flutter away free into the night.
✷
In the end, despite the way the evening had ended, the Patels had won the war. What Amita had interpreted as anger had actually been the first cracks of catharsis, the first leg of a butterfly breaking free of its chrysalis at last. Werner began to smile again.
Amita visited the Museum with her father every Monday, and Werner found himself waking up at the start of each week with a rush of happiness. He bought her chocolate bars, and though he knew Akaash did not approve of the amount of sugar his daughter was consuming, the younger researcher remained silent. They began to spend Saturdays together, going all around the city as Werner showed Akaash and his daughter how to set up the fairy lights, how to crumble and mix the sweet-smelling powder from old eggs that attracted them, how to swing the net with a light flick of the wrist. He would always give the fairies they caught to Amita.
As for Amita, she still liked to catch them. It was fun to wait in the bushes like a hunter, to pounce with the net, to feel the thrill of a successful catch. She was always happy when Dr. Spoons would give her the jar. But she would always let them go.
When the summer was over she started school. It was very close to the Museum, and she began walking over afterward every day. The security guards would smile when they saw her, and she would go down to the basement where her father and Dr. Spoons were waiting. They would be deep in conversation together, pouring over some charts or a box of specimens, but they would always stop to beam at her when she came in, and Dr. Spoons would give her a chocolate bar.
Then it became too cold to catch fairies. During that first week when they could not go out on their weekend excursion, Amita looked at Dr. Spoons, sitting at their dinner table, and could tell that he was sad.
“What are you thinking about?” Amita asked.
He looked up and smiled. “I was thinking about when I caught my first fairy,” he said, though Amita did not think it was true. “How exciting it was. Now I have caught nearly all of them, and examined them underneath my magnifying glass.”
“Aren’t there any species you haven’t caught?”
“A few in Ireland and in the mountains of southern China. But those I have had shipped to me and have examined at the Museum. There is only one great undertaking in my research I have never dared to take.”
“What’s that?”
But he would not answer that. “What species do they have in India?” he asked instead.
She shrugged. “I dunno. We’re from the suburbs.”
✷
The years went by. Werner had dinner with them every night, and one day Amita began calling him Grandpa. The first time she used the word, he was very startled, and then he cried. It was the only time she’d ever seen him cry. The next day, he brought her a gift: a little stuffed bear holding a heart that said “With love, from Grandpa.” She was too old for it, but she loved it just the same.
Those were warm days, satisfying days spent around that table, under the ground in that little garden apartment on Dearborn Street. As Amita grew she found that she loved playing in the park, and making new friends at school, and going out for ice cream. She loved the lake and the big garden and the whoosh of taxis and the busy streets. And most of all she began to love the feeling of descending those stairs into that safe, snug hole in the ground. Each night after school she would return from the wonderful rush of that busy city into her quiet underground, tuck her blanket around her toes, and think, This is my home.
Werner, on the other hand, began to look around his apartment, with its settled dust and its frozen furniture, and feel not comfort but emptiness. What had once been a haven of stability in the midst of churning uncertainty now felt cold. Compared to the life and heat of the Patel’s apartment, with its animation and unpredictability, his apartment felt like a mausoleum. He began to dread the faded carpet and the landline, and in the mornings, he hurried out without turning on the cracked coffee pot. Something was catching up to him, and he felt it move restless about his feet. Time had finally been allowed inside. It reclaimed that seventh-floor apartment on Federal St., and with it its owner. Werner’s eyesight began to grow weaker and weaker, and his walking became slower. His back and knees pained him. One night the Patels gave him a gift, though it was not his birthday or a holiday. When he opened it, he saw it was a cane.
“For your walk to the Museum every day,” said Akaash. “I know you love to walk.”
Werner ran his hand along the fine polished wood. Akaash was smiling, but Roma was looking at him with some embarrassment, and he could see instantly that she was hoping he was not insulted. So he smiled.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “You do take care of me.”
But at the Museum, he began to be aware that people were whispering about him. The security guards were treating him with even more patience than before, and the people in administration skirted their eyes whenever they crossed his path. His fiftieth year at the Museum was fast approaching, and it felt to him like a bell was ringing somewhere far off.
Then came the unexpected crisis: Amita had just finished junior high when her parents announced that her mother’s brother had gotten a job in the city and were coming from India to live with them, along with his wife and daughter. The garden apartment was too small for all of them: they were moving. Again.
Amita shouted and stomped her feet and cried angry tears, but there was nothing to be done.
That night, she refused to leave her room when Grandpa Spoons came over for dinner. After a while, there was a soft knock.
“Go away,” she said.
The door cracked open. “Amita,” came Grandpa Spoons’s voice, “can we talk?”
She said nothing, and he stood in the doorway. Then, after a while, he cleared his throat. “I think this is a good night for catching fairies.”
They went together, all four of them, down to the lake. Grandpa Spoons brought his old duct-tape briefcase and set up the little lights around the garden. Then they all sat on picnic blankets and looked out at the water, and Amita’s parents moved to the side, just out of earshot of Amita and Grandpa Spoons. There were boats out on the horizon with lights twinkling like stars.
Finally, Amita said, “I don’t want things to change.”
Grandpa Spoons only nodded and did not look at her. “But change still comes,” he said. “Even if you stay in one place, holding fast to your little rituals, your habits, your memories, you’ll still wake up one day and find that everything is different all around you.”
Amita looked up at him. “Then what is safe?”
“Safe,” he repeated. “Yes, that’s the right word.” He paused, deep in thought, and she could see the stars reflected in his glasses. “For my whole life, I have clung to safety. I have fought against risk and change at every turn. I certainly fought it five years ago, when your father started working at the Museum. But things did change, and look at what it brought us. It brought us warmth. It brought us safety.”
“But sometimes it doesn’t,” said Amita. “Sometimes things just get worse.”
“That’s true. But, sometimes, perhaps it takes risking our safety altogether to find it again.”
There were tears coming to her eyes again, and she swiped at them in anger. “Well, it still hurts.”
He only nodded at that. “Yes.”
They sat in silence. Out on the lake, a mother duck was leading her children across the dark water, and far away the boats were sitting idle. After a while, Grandpa Spoons pursed his lips and said, “Home, I think. Home is safe.”
“I’ve had five homes,” she said. “I’m about to have another one.”
“That’s not the home I mean.” Then he pointed. “Ah, look! There are fairies in the lights.”
And there were. They were floating very calmly, going from flower to flower with their paper-thin wings. But no one rose and no one picked up a net. They only watched, until at last they gathered their blankets and left the park behind.
✷
The next day, Werner went up unannounced to the offices of the administrators and insisted that it was time they made Dr. Patel head of the Fairy Department. They were so shocked that they did not know how to respond. But as Werner addressed them from that creaky chair that hurt his back, his voice did not waver.
“I have taught him everything I know, and he has learned much more besides. He has outpaced me. Under his leadership, the study of fairies will no longer be confined to a dusty basement but will begin to make a real impact on people’s lives.”
They accepted, of course. They had been prepared for a fight until the end; they had been prepared for anything but this. They felt guilty at his resolve to give them exactly what they wanted, and they vowed to name the fairy wing after him and throw him a giant anniversary celebration to mark his fiftieth year of employment. But he only smiled.
“Don’t trouble yourselves,” he said. “I won’t be here much longer.”
✷
It was a warm summer night, their last night in the garden apartment, when Amita woke up with a start. Her room was bare, and only a few extra hangers dangled in her open closet. But the air felt full, a crackly electric feel as if before a pleasant summer storm. She got out of bed.
Out in the living room, their boxes were all packed. Her mother had labeled them with sharpie: kitchen appliances, cleaning supplies, Amita’s stuffed animals. The walls were blank. Amita walked as if in a dream through the little castles of boxes with their turrets and spires over to the window. She could rest her chin on the sill just by standing on her tiptoes now. Opening the drapes, she peered into the night.
Grandpa Spoons was standing in the park, under the light of the full moon. There was a lightness about him, and Amita realized that, for the first time since she had met him, he was standing up straight. She wasn’t sure why, but this filled her with alarm. Beside him on the ground lay his briefcase, but now it was open and empty, and there was a powdery haze covering the bushes, the grass, the fountain. She cracked open the window to call out his name. But before she could, she tasted the night air: that old, familiar honey-scent of milkweed.
And suddenly, like a storm of orange, the monarchs returned.
They came from every direction, a brilliant streak, a splash of color under the dark sky. They wheeled and danced, tumbling through the park like leaves blown by the wind, their little wings beating in rapid flurry. They formed a circle around Grandpa Spoons and the fountain, flying faster and faster, spinning around and around.
As they did, water returned to the fountain. It flowed from the mouth of the statue, the woman with her face turned upward, and came down clear and bright and began to fill the basin. When it was full, a single monarch detached itself from the flock and landed in the center of the pool.
And then the most marvelous thing of all happened: as soon as the little butterfly touched the water, it began to change. It grew, sprouting long legs and thin, long arms. Its body stretched upward and Amita saw a flowing waterfall of orange-gold hair, and there, standing in the center of the fountain, was a woman. She was tall and beautiful and elegant, though Amita could not possibly guess her age: there was a youthful glow about her, and yet she seemed very old all at the same time, old and ancient and wise like an oak tree. Her face was kind and her eyes were full of stars.
All at once, the monarchs stopped spinning. They hovered, beating their wings in silent expectation. Through the open window, Amita could just make out the words.
“I have missed you, Magdalene,” said Grandpa Spoons.
The woman smiled, and despite her young glow, Amita saw the wrinkles crease her face. “I have missed you too, Werner.”
“I was a fool, my love,” Grandpa Spoons said. “I invited you into my world but I was too afraid to enter yours. Forgive me.”
“Oh, Werner, I forgave you years ago. And I have never stopped loving you.”
They shifted in nervous embarrassment, not like an old man and an old woman but like two young sweethearts after a summer apart. Then he raised his eyes to her again, imploring.
“For decades I have been calling you back to this place. I wanted you to return, to stay.”
She smiled again, a coy smile. “But no more?”
“No more,” he said, shaking his head. “Take me with you, Magdalene. I am ready now. I am not afraid anymore.”
“I know. That is why we’ve come.” She laughed a warm, lovely laugh. “Oh Werner, how I’ve missed you so!”
Then the monarchs were moving again. As Amita watched, breathless, they landed on Grandpa Spoons. They settled onto his arms, onto his shoulders, played with his wispy hair, and perched on his nose. He raised his arms slowly, letting them wash over him. The woman stepped out of the fountain and into his open arms. They embraced, and the orange wings beat and beat and beat all around them, covering them, submerging them. The monarchs enfolded them, and there they were: husband and wife.
Amita felt her heart in her throat and tears coming to her eyes, but she was happy, deliriously happy and she did not know why.
And when the swarm departed, vanishing into the night and back into the far world, Werner Spoons and Magdalene were gone.
✷
Story by Matt Mills
