1st 5 Pages October Workshop - Everett Rev 2

Name: Sam Everett

Genre: Middle Grade fantasy

Title: THE BELIEVABLE MONA O'NAUGHTON

200 Word Pitch:

Mona O’Naughton is the sort of fairy who sees to your happiness in the small ways she can, hoping to earn your belief in her so that fairies and humans might coexist as they did long ago. And though no fairy truly expects to make contact with her human, Mona’s wings would buzz forever if she at least achieved the success of her best friend, Kyna.

However, Mona is the cautious type who sees the carpet stain as soon as the juice glass is set at the edge of the table, leaving her cursed with the reputation of a fairy more concerned with her human’s safety than his happiness.

When she is assigned to thirteen year-old human Holly, it would seem a perfect pairing, for the girl has only barely survived an attack by a wild animal--an attack which took her hands, and much more. Mona is charged with keeping the girl safe, a task natural to her.

But she wants more. To shed her reputation, she vows not simply to protect Holly, but to fulfill her dream.

Of course, that’s before she learns Holly’s dream is to find the animal who took her hands, and to fight him.

Pages:

Chapter 1

101

Ben Stiglitz died at a hundred and one, a noteworthy age. There was no real reason for him 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.

From his pillow, his tiny shrug fairy Mona O’Naughton 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 boy 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. This one was nothing like the model he’d owned for years. Fortunately, Mona received constant training in gadgets, for they were 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.

“Then he watched the television and shut his eyes and went to sleep.”

With these final words penned, Mona closed her logbook and tucked it into her pouch. Sad as she was, a fairy never thought to take even a moment off. After all, there was so much work to do, and with the fairy shortage, so few fairies to do it.

Besides, if she was going to get her next human to a hundred and two, she had better get started. And so she flew immediately to her godmother’s office for her next assignment.

Her godmother, Maw Nora, conducted business from a human coffee shop called the Seaside Café. It was decorated in oak wood, and its ground coffee made for an earthy aroma. In all the fairy province of 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, would have been lucky to graze a fairy only five feet from him. Mona could never be too safe, and so she put twenty feet between him and herself on her way into the café.

Once she entered through the keyhole of the front door, the buzz of fairy wings 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.

Her godmother’s office sat under an upturned mug on a high shelf. Mona flew toward it with all the bubbling energy of a child before the first day of school, eager for her next assignment.

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 greeted a filing fairy on the other side of the glass. “I’m here to receive my next human,” she said, and her feet had to dance to it.

The filing fairy pointed Mona down a spiral hall, at the end of which she would find Maw’s office. Most days, Mona would have noticed on one side of the hall the wood-framed portrait paintings of all the province’s godmothers throughout history. And she would have noticed on the other side the paintings of all the province’s most celebrated fairies, from its first shrug Elva O’Farrell all the way to the world’s preeminent fairy, Aurnia O’Dowd. But this triumphant day, she could not resist letting her thoughts play in her dreams. The ones in which she herself was a celebrated shrug. The ones in which she earned a portrait of her own. And so she noticed neither the paintings nor the dead end of the hallway before she smacked into the wall.

Maw’s office door recognized she was there, and it creaked open for her. Inside, a swift and whispery shuffle carried Maw from a waist-high stack of paper on one end of the room to another towering stack on the other end. The old fairy appeared as Mona remembered her when she was first assigned to Ben. Rosy cheeks, a round body and, under her silver crown, white hair no doubt brushed that morning but wild and shapeless by her second cup of honey.

The one difference was this morning her handlebar mustache wavered in her busy breeze. It was no more real than Mona’s neat and clean chevron, but every fairy day was some holiday, and this day was Mustache Day.

Maw swept a string of bangs from her face and made a smile for Mona. “Come in, shrug. I won’t bite, sweet as you might look!”

Mona entered and felt herself blush, which she hoped masked the mark the wall left on her forehead.

Maw’s voice turned soft. “My deepest sorrows for your loss.”

“Thank you,” Mona said, and set her logbook down in one of the few empty spots on Maw’s desk. “At least Ben made it to a hundred and one.”

The godmother gave a quizzical look. “All of a hundred and one years in just that one book?” Then her warmth returned. “Maybe you just have small handwriting!”

“Don’t we all?” Mona joked. But in fact she felt suddenly prodded by the worry that strikes every student who has ever been first to finish a test. Could she have, somehow, written more?