[cw: Hallucinations, parental trauma, gaslighting, domestic partner violence, institutionalization, implied self-harm]

The fairies tugged at Angela’s hair, as they did every morning for the last few months. They were little pixies of some sort, or maybe brownies. Angela didn’t know. She didn’t think fairies were real before they began to show up. Of course, they still weren’t real.

She was just going crazy, she knew. It wasn’t the first time. It had first happened four years ago. Back then, Maggie had put her in a 72 hour hold. “It's for your own good, Ange.” That was her excuse. It didn’t make the demons go away. Angela had tried to get out.

Maggie didn’t like that. Maybe it really was for Angela's own good. Maybe she did need professional help. If she knew, Maggie would probably try it again. If Angela wanted her to sign the divorce papers, well, she had to be in her right mind. That meant that as far as the county and the lawyers were concerned, there were no fairies. At least they were better than her demons.

Her glasses smacked her in the face. Maybe the demons had been better after all. They did help her escape the hospital.

“Alright, alright…” she whined into her pillow, going through the laborious process of waking up. The little vespoid girl let out a cheer, but it got caught in Angela’s hair. She let out a wince, and felt the creature fall onto her shoulder blades, whining and thrashing. “Ah, ah!”

Another fairy helped untangle the first. The ones that usually stuck around her were little naked women with segmented limbs and antennae. They were cute and doll-like, if you ignored their big black eyes and curious, too-wide smiles. Each was about the size of a Barbie doll, and about half as smart. Somehow, none of the ones she recognized was ever gone for long. They might have had misadventures on their own, but nothing fatal, even though she had seen them do things like taunt a Rottweiler or dance around the road lines in traffic. Fortune favors fools, Angela assumed.

She rolled over and watched the two of them twirl around in a dance. She’d taken to naming the pixies. These were Pip and Starla. Pip had a little pattern of five dots on her shoulder. It looked like the pips of a die, a pattern she must have read somewhere was called a quincunx. A symbol of disunity and chaos, which certainly described Pip. Of course, it also described Starla.

She was simply named for a teacher Angela had as a kid. The two of them, along with maybe twelve others Ange had been able to pick out, weren’t the only fairies that Angela had been seeing, but they were the most common ones. The most troublesome, too.

“Shoo, shoo,” she murmured. She knocked the fairies to their asses as she tossed aside the covers—eliciting little disgruntled squeaks—and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her bed.

On some level, it was pathetic to think of it as ‘her bed’. But it was the place she’d been sleeping for the last ten weeks or so. Room Lucky Thirteen. It was the most rundown room in the illustrious Best Eastern, located at 23rd and Calhoun, a forty minute bus ride from the nearest convention center, zoo, or anything else meaningful, but close enough to the airport that you might get woken up at night by a landing. Thirteen’s heater didn't work half the time, it was the only room with no cable for inscrutable reasons, and the ice machine would whir and grind in the middle of the night. It was a shithole colored a mix of beige and that green everyone loved in the seventies, but it was Angela’s. For the first time in her life she had a room of her own, not under her mom’s roof or her wife’s. No roommates, either.

Another of the fairies—Duchess, because Angela had been running out of name ideas—was trying to fish a piece of toast out of the little toaster using a fork. Okay, maybe there were roommates. Angela let out a sigh as she crossed the room and stopped the childlike bug from electrocuting itself.

“No! Don’t do that, Dutch.” she spoke with the firm voice of someone talking to a child or animal as she took the fork away. Duchess put her hands on her hips and pouted, little antenna waggling. Ange was getting good at recognizing disapproval. With another sigh, she reached into the still open silverware drawer and pulled out a pair of bamboo tongs. She gave them a shook in front of Dutch’s little doll face. “Use this.”

Duchess snatched the tongs from Angela and her wings buzzed as she lifted it over the toaster… and then promptly just started whacking at the slot. She slipped and fell, hitting the hot metal. Immediately she let out a squeak of pain and fell to the floor, whining like a baby. She rolled around in clearly exaggerated agony, but Angela bent down to help her anyway.

As she did, she saw something sticking out beneath the fridge. A little bit of paper. She ignored Dutch for the moment, and pulled out a little bit of cardboard. It was a used scratch off card. Scooping Duchess up in one hand and reading with the other, her eyes lit up as she double-checked the revealed segments and did the math. Fifty dollars! She might be able to afford underwear and another blanket. One that actually kept her warm.

“We’re gonna eat well tonight, girls!” Angela said as she put Duchess in the sink and turned on the cold water. She held up the lottery ticket, and all the fairies in the room let out a cheer. Even Dutch, who seemed to have forgotten that she was hurt.

The toaster popped. It was so sudden that Angela jumped. She was always jumpy these days, ever since she started living on her own. Or, before then, really. She scared the fairies, and the golden ticket to a nice lunch and underwear without holes was tossed from her hand… and right into the water. There was another yelp of shock from her, and she did her best to fish it out, but it was ruined.

Angela held the ticket up and it split right in two. Duchess and Pip and Starla all buzzed close, landing on the counter and looking up at Angela. She could see herself reflected in their round, black eyes. She looked a mess. She looked like she’d just lost something of actual value, not something she could give the gas station for $50. She felt outside of herself as the Angela in the reflection numbly trembled and dropped to her knees. That Angela that wasn’t her lay on the floor and cried. Pip and Duchess and Starla fluttered down next to her, but all they could do was pat her side and face. Part of her wanted them to go away, but she wanted someone, anyone, to feel her pain.

A banging at the door put Angela back into her body. With an uncertainty of movement, she picked her glasses off the floor and put them on. She didn’t know how long she had felt distant, but when she climbed to her feet with the little room’s island, she could feel that the toaster was cold.

“Angela, you gonna get up or what?” came a grumpy old man’s voice. Mr Papadopoulos. Her boss, and landlord, and the only human being she ever really talked to these days.