1st 5 Pages October Workshop- Everett

Name: Sam Everett
Genre: Middle Grade fantasy
Title: THE BELIEVABLE MONA O’NAUGHTON

CHAPTER 1

101

Ben Stiglitz died at a hundred and one, a noteworthy age. He was surrounded by the hospital’s head nurse on duty, a janitor fond of the nurse, and a nun who happened to be asking for directions to another patient’s room. There was no real reason for Ben to have died. He wasn’t sick, and he didn’t fall down stairs or eat a microwaveable Salisbury steak too fast. That morning, he simply locked his front door, took a bus to the hospital, and crawled into a bed to doze off. If he’d had family, they would have heard his nurse say he died from having lived so long.

His tiny shrug fairy Mona O’Naughton was there, too, and she heard it, and it made her smile.

She was certainly sad to lose Ben. He was her first human. She had seen him every day of his life, even if he had never once seen her.* But--a hundred and one! Her human! Her first human!
(*This was the way it was with fairies and humans, regrettably.)

She didn’t know another fairy whose human had lived so long, because getting a human to a hundred and one was a lot of work. When Ben was a baby he put everything into his mouth, and so Mona often found herself in his gullet deflecting pennies and marbles like a horsetail brushing away flies. When he grew to walk, Mona held his shoelaces tight so he wouldn’t fall and cry.

When he became an adult, he didn’t need her magic so much. Some years, all she did in an entire day was wake him up in time to go to work. He did like to sleep, after all. When he was awake, he worked as a counter of some sort at a small desk in a big building. It was the only job he ever had, though Mona never quite understood what exactly he did.*
(*This was the way it was with fairies and counting, regrettably.)

Once Ben was an old man, more and more he tried to eat old food. It seemed every two weeks Mona had to use all her magic dust and all her fairy might to tip a bowl of green muck out of his hands and onto the kitchen floor.* A shrug’s job was to make her human happy, and Mona knew humans were happiest when they weren’t deathly ill.
(*Two weeks being beyond the typical shelf life of cottage cheese, of course.)

The last help Mona would ever be for Ben was making the remote control to the hospital room television work. He didn’t understand this one. It was nothing like the model he’d owned for years. Fortunately, shrug fairies received constant training in gadgets because they were the things that made humans happiest and the things humans understood the least. And so Mona burrowed into the remote control through the button marked 8 and sprinkled her dust in all the right places until she heard Ben’s favorite channel crackle on.

And he watched the television and shut his eyes and went to sleep.

With these final words penned, Mona closed Ben’s book, tucked it into her pouch, and flew immediately to her godmother’s office for her next assignment. Sad as she was, fairies never thought to slow down.

Her godmother, Maw Nora, conducted business from a human coffee shop called the Seaside Café. The old building was decorated in oak wood, and its ground coffee made for an earthy aroma. In all of the fairy province called Evergood, the café most closely resembled a fairy’s natural forest habitat. It had the added benefit of housing no cats.*
(*Though humans did not generally believe in fairies, cats did, and took a wicked pleasure in swatting them out of the air.)

Once Mona entered through the keyhole of the café’s front door, the buzz of fairy wings working washed over her. Hundreds of fairy wings belonging to hundreds of fairies up to provincial business, zig-zagging from countertop to tabletop, from pantry to pastry rack, careful not to fly through a waterfall of steamed milk or between the pages of a closing book.

Maw’s office sat under an upturned mug on a high shelf. Mona approached it with all the bubbling energy of a child before the first day of school. Who, she wondered, would her next human be?

When she touched down outside of the mug, she removed her flight goggles, put on her glasses, and combed the wind out of her dark hair with her fingers. At the mug’s reception window, she was greeted by a filing fairy on the other side of the glass.

“What an adorable shrug fairy!” the filing fairy smiled. Fairies had many different jobs, and a shrug fairy was so named because her magical feats--moving a lost book to a table where a human has already looked, vanishing a jelly stain from a poor girl’s church dress--were the sort to make humans rejoice, mutter I-don’t-know-how-that-happened, and give their shoulders a shrug. “I like your skirt,” was the clerk’s compliment.

“You are a lovely filing fairy, and I like your mustache,” Mona said. The filing fairy’s blond handlebar was no more real than Mona’s neat and clean chevron, but every fairy day was some holiday, and this day was Mustache Day. While the filing fairy proudly fingered one end of her smiling whiskers, Mona dug Ben’s book from her pouch to slide it through the window. “May I turn this in and receive my next assignment?”

The filing fairy patted Mona’s hand. “My deepest sorrows for your loss.”

“Thank you. But at least Ben made it to a hundred and one.”

The filing fairy gave a quizzical look. “A hundred and one years in just this one book you say?” Then her warmth returned. “You have small handwriting, no doubt.”

“Don’t we all?”

The filing fairy threw her head back and laughed. “You should be a chuckle fairy, not a shrug fairy! You should go on tour!”

Mona returned a compliment: “You have the most contagious laugh.”

“Did you help yourself to some cake?” the filing fairy asked. “Please do.”

She pointed behind Mona, where a covered tray sat lonely on a table. On a normal day, Mona would not have hesitated to give that cake some company. But this morning her stomach was otherwise filled with butterflies excited to meet her next human, so she declined.

“I’ll get your human’s book directly to Maw,” the filing fairy said, “and you should hear back from us in a couple of days for your review.”

“A couple of days?” Mona had ironed her best skirt and washed her best cardigan believing she would meet with Maw this morning. What would she do for a couple of days? Fairies never took time off, and especially not shrug fairies, whose humans always needed their happiness looked after.

“This was your first assignment, wasn’t it?” the filing fairy said, amused. “A couple of days is normal, yes. Maw is quite busy, as you know.” She did look after all the fairies in the province. Not to mention there was the fairy shortage needing constant attention.