1st 5 Pages October Workshop - Everett Rev 1

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.

Fairies had many different jobs, and a shrug fairy’s was to make her human happy in any small way she could. She 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. If Ben made a hundred and one years out of his life, Mona knew he must have been one of the happiest humans to ever have lived.

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

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 so liked to sleep that she struggled to get him out of bed in time for work each morning. His job was being 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.)

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, because it was Mona’s job to keep her human happy, she received constant training in gadgets, the things that made humans happiest and the things humans understood the least. And so she 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 take time off. And especially not shrug fairies, whose humans always needed their happiness looked after.

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 the fairy province called Evergood, the café most closely resembled a fairy’s natural forest habitat.

It was not without its own danger, however. A flabby cat colored black and grey and orange and white lay under an empty bench outside the front door. Though humans did not believe in fairies, cats did, and took a wicked pleasure in swatting them out of the air. Thankfully this cat, appearing old and in poor shape, could be avoided by a fairy flying only a few feet away from him. But Mona could never be too safe, and so she put fifteen feet between him and herself on her way into the café, and never took her eyes off him making sure he never laid eyes on her.

Once she 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? And, better, what wonderful things would Maw say about her work with Ben?

When she touched down outside 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!” the filing fairy said. One fairy never greeted another without a compliment.

“You are a lovely filing fairy, and I like your mustache,” Mona replied. 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. “I’m here to turn this in and discuss my next assignment with Maw.”

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? I’ve seen fewer years in far larger books.” Then her warmth returned. “I’m sure it’s just that you have small handwriting, no doubt.”

“Don’t we all?”

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

Mona was obligated to return a compliment: “You have the most contagious laugh.”

The filing fairy pointed behind Mona, where a covered tray sat lonely on a table. “Did you help yourself to some angel food?”

Her stomach already full of butterflies, Mona declined. “I think I’d rather just go ahead and get to my meeting with Maw now, thank you. If I’m going to get my next human to a hundred and two, I’d better get started.”

“In that case, I’ll take this book directly to Maw for review,” the filing fairy said, “and you should hear back from us in a couple of days.”

“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?

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