1st Place Short Story

Magdalena and the Creatures of the Otherwhere

They began to appear for her when she was nine, faint, velvet creatures at the edges of her vision, like the myriad of shadows in between the needles of a pine tree. She called them Fuzzles, although you'd think that, old as she was, she could have come up with something a bit more creative.

She began to see the Faeries when she reached the age of twelve. They were just soft glimmers of light at first, but they gradually - as she told me, for I could see none of the creatures of Otherwhere - matured in her sight to tiny, winged beings. They lived in the flowers, she said, miniature humanoids with blue- and purple-tinted skin who clothed themselves in pansy leaves and strawberry blossoms. The Gnomes came to her then, as well. Short, stout, like six-inch Santa Clauses, the Gnomes darted in and out of her vision at first, but then, they too, allowed her to view them fully.

Last to emerge, when she turned fifteen, were the Dragons. She was quite taken with the reptilian creatures, and often painted them for me. I still have all the masterpieces hanging in my little cottage, beautifully crafted by her talented hand. Long and serpentine, with wings of stained glass, the Dragons gaze upon the quiet halls and rooms of my humble home, grinning or blowing puffs of rainbow air.

Maggie - Magdalena Juarez, the bright, bronze-skinned, exotic gypsy-enigma of a Vietnamese mother and Puerto Rican father - had always been my friend. We lived next to each other since the day she was born, myself being the elder, although our mothers had been only two weeks apart in their pregnancies. We played together every day, even when one - or both - of us contracted some illness.

Maggie always smiled. There wasn't a time when her soft dimples didn't show, nor a moment when her brilliant, almond eyes didn't shimmer. Bouncy and "drunk on life" (as she would describe herself in our teens), Maggie just could not stop having fun. She was adventurous, a true sweetheart, and my dearest companion, more a sister than a friend, and told me everything.

She told me of the Fuzzles right away, then the Faeries and the Gnomes, and finally the Dragons; she never could stop talking about the Dragons. And I believed her. Every word. Maggie never lied, especially not to me. She tried to show them to me once, and I almost saw them: a flickering shadow she said was a Fuzzle, a shimmer among the four-o-clocks and a shifting in the grass she claimed were Faeries and a Gnome, and a slight rippling in the air I took to be a Dragon.

"I love them so much," she confided in me one quiet, spring afternoon, after I had found her squeaking to the air, asked her with a laugh what she was doing, and she replied indignantly that she was simply "talking to the Faeries."

She did love them. "Insanely," I told her once, laughing, and she had only grinned her perpetual grin, eyes sparkling, and skipped off to build one of her "Faerie cottages" that so often dotted her backyard, made from twigs and leaves and flowers.

Maggie was nearing seventeen when I first noticed that she had begun to fade. I'm sure the phenomenon had been occurring for a while longer, but I never took note of it, or never chose to. At first she just dropped weight, drastically, and was sent briefly to a treatment center for help with an eating disorder. I knew better though; Maggie was almost always with me in those days, and ate twice as much as I did, even during the basketball and track seasons.

Her skin began to shrink next, growing smaller and tighter on her already tiny frame, until it clung to her like a young child to its mother, hugging her limbs and body with a fierceness that caused her bones to show through. She hid her appearance then, with baggy pants and sweatshirts, and she often experienced fainting spells, but she still smiled.

I asked her once, why she was "doing this to herself", whatever "this" was, and she simply replied, "They need me."

Finally Maggie began to disappear altogether. If I happened to look at her from the corner of my eye, she seemed almost transparent, and once or twice I swear I could see the scenery behind her. It was almost as if I was looking through her.

And then Maggie died.

Her mother found her. Maggie was nestled in her backyard, a pale wraith amongst the Faerie cottages and strawberry blossoms, smiling even then. It was three days after her eighteenth birthday, and she was wearing the Tinkerbelle sweatshirt I had given her. She was buried with pansy blossoms on her grave.

The doctors said she died of anorexia, and weighing just over seventy pounds at a height of five-four, it sure seemed like a plausible cause of death.

But I suspected then, and I know now.

It took me years to figure everything out, from Maggie's paintings, a small collection of poems and short stories she wrote, and my own intellect. My conclusion is still shaky, but I believe it is rather close to the facts:

The creatures of Otherwhere - a place Maggie mentioned a couple times in her poems - used to thrive in their own world, separate from the one we humans know today. Somewhere along the line, during a time I do not know, for a cause I could not decipher, the creatures of Otherwhere were forced from their own world and trapped in ours. In order to survive and remain in existence, they feed off of the vitality of purely happy children, until their victims are all used up in health, if not in happiness. Magdalena Juarez, whom I loved as my own sister, was one such child.

I have my own child now, a daughter of eight years. We live together with my husband in a small cottage I fondly call the "Faerie cottage." I keep only a small vegetable garden in the backyard, and I refuse to grow strawberries. Any flowers I own are potted and inside my house. I still have all of the Dragon, Faerie, Gnome, and Fuzzle paintings Maggie crafted for me, but I have strongly ground into my daughter - though it causes me some guilt and pain - that those creatures, the creatures of Otherwhere, are not real. I have to, you see, because my daughter will be nine next year, and is always smiling.

And because they took Maggie.

But mostly because she let them.