They say to never drink the faerie’s wine. The berries are cursed, the vintage enchanted. The taste is caldron stained. Why, even the bottle is a trap! For every sip taken, it must take one back. Or so they say.
The best thing one can do with a bottle of faerie wine is accept it graciously and, when the giver has left your life forever, bury it in the back yard, underneath the oldest tree. If there are no trees, a bush will suffice. If there are no bushes, then the bottle is to be regifted with a firm warning to never, ever drink it. A bush should then be planted, not because a bushless lawn is cursed but rather, it is a sad patch of grass to look upon. Bushes attract squirrels in their branches, moths in their leaves, and mushrooms in their shade. Life begets life, and kindness more kindness.
Or so they say.
Or rather, so Abigail’s grandmother used to say. But now Nana is dead. The shortest teller of tall tales—for Nana barely hit 5’0 on a good day—can no longer tell Abigail what they say; or what I say; or what you say; or what anyone, anywhere says, for that matter. Her last message to the world, her last story, resides on a small gravestone wedged into fresh earth, the letters carved in Gaelic. It’s not a message for Abigail but the fairies and the witches and the trees. No one in Abigail’s immediate family knows what it says, and the few aunts and uncles learned enough to read the dead talk refuse to.
It is not a message for them.
“Or so they say,” Abigail mutters. She can still say things too, but she doesn’t want to. She’s too sad for that.
But let us return to the bottle: It is made of glass, as all good wine bottles are. It has a cork, blackened with berries and night sky, and a label with writing much too small to read. When Abigail squints, the letters swim. The color is both pink like the sky at sunset and purple like the sky at sunrise. It is heavy, heavier than a bottle of wine should be.
At the bottom of the bottle, molded into the glass, is a small door. When flipped upside-down, there are few details, just a frame and a little grains in the wood, but from the front, when tilted at an odd angle, Abigail can see a doorknob.
It looks twistable.
They had buried the bottle together, two years ago and underneath a full moon. Abigail was 12 then. It was a bright, sunny day. The two were playing in the back yard when Nana received a package from someone called, “The Acquaintance,” a mystery person long dead with a grudge not forgotten. He put them both to work. Nana had not been happy about her gift, but Abigail had been more than eager to help bury it. They made a game out of it, one with many strange rules like, “No you can’t use a shovel. The bottle will know. It must be your fingers and your palms, and you must get dirt underneath your nails.”
That had been an easy one to follow.
They also needed both a cat and a squirrel to watch. This proved harder, but Nana had a way with animals. They found a squirrel named Tag willing to munch on a nut and bark between bites and a snooty black cat that would not give up her name at all. Her tail swished throughout the entire ceremony.
Spells were cast, or so Nana had said, and by 2:00 in the morning, the bottle was gone, buried like a coffin with a promise that it would be forgotten. The squirrel barked, the cat nodded, and Abigail’s parents yelled loud enough to wake the village once they realized their daughter was not in her bed. It was way passed her bedtime. It was passed Nana’s bedtime, too.
Abigail uncorks the bottle. She thinks, that should have been harder, but then, she thought digging it up would be harder, too. Nana had wanted the bottle buried deep those few years ago, unfindably so, yet Abigail hadn’t even dirtied her new black dress in the excavating. A few pawfuls of dirt and there the neck was. A quick tug, and up the rest of the bottle came. The dirt fell off it like rain, happy to be away from the strange glass with its strange writing and its strange weight.
“I miss you, Nana,” Abigail says to the empty room. It’s what all the adults are saying one floor below. And this is what all the adults are doing, too.
She brings the bottle to her lips. She takes a drink.
She feels the effects immediately, though they aren’t what the TV said they should be. Instead of becoming woozy or silly, Abigail feels like she is shrinking. She isn’t actually shrinking of course, but her body argues that it is smaller, her limbs tiny and brittle, like the smallest push might snap them in two. She sits on the floor. She watches the room watching her. Nothing else happens, and this gives her the courage to take another drink.
The taste is like her favorite juice mixed with fire and iron. It makes her eyes go wide and her tongue try to dance away, yet Abigail enjoys it. It reminds her of those sour candies the bullies like to bring to school and trick everyone into trying. They are gross at first, but only at first. They end sweet.
Abigail takes another drink, and her body continues to shrink in spirit. Her emotions and mind do as well. Everything is smaller. In a way, it’s nice to be small. Small sorrow is easier to handle than big sorrow, and Abigail is sick of big sorrow.
A breeze blows through the closed window, rustling the curtains and the little trinkets collecting dust in the little room. Nana called it her study on Monday and Wednesday and Friday and her junk room the rest of the days of the week. Wooden shelves with ornate, rusted-out metal bookends dot every wall, many holding moldy diaries or wooden dolls. A few carry empty jars. A cluttered desk hugs one corner and a rocking chair that squeaks too loudly to make it good for napping lives in the other. The breeze sends the chair into a fit, and Abigail gets up to steady it.
Walking is hard after two glasses of faerie wine. The legs tend to fight each other, and the knees become too scared to do anything more than wobble. Thus, Abigail doesn’t so much as walk to the chair as fall into it. She lands hard, bruising her arms, but the wine does not spill. Faerie wine is good for that. She does not cry, and faerie wine is good for that, too.
Still small, but now rocking comfortably to the squeak-toy moans of what is a haunted chair, Abigail brings the bottle to her lips. She readies herself for another drink and, curious, bored, sad, and lonely, looks inside. The glass door jiggles against its hinge. The knob twists back and forth, like it is locked but only barely.
“Huh,” Abigail says. Huh, she thinks.
“Drink me” the bottle says, but not out loud. Faerie wine cannot actually talk.
Abigail drinks, and the ghost possessing the rocking chair speaks a riddle in the language of ghosts: What howls at the moon when it is not full?
The knob twists and turns, and the glass tumblers give way. The door opens. Abigail peers into a world very much like own yet different, off in a way that is both pretty yet upsetting. She is looking at the tiniest sliver of garden, at a shaggy willow tree buzzing with insects. The sky is slate blue and the tree is fluffy, yellow-green. She tilts the bottle, and the door moves with it, scanning over the garden. There are flowers and bushes, red-bricked walkways and statues of scary monsters. Bugs infest everything. Abigail can’t hear them, yet her mind conjures the noise, and it does a very fine job of it. They buzz like a thousand flies examining a corpse, the sound swelling in time with the stench.
Flies talk to each other through their wings, and so it is true of these faerie insects. Whispers hover through their swarm, each bug remarking on the little girl looking down from the heavens.
“The door is open!” one fly flies. “We are free!”
“To the door!”
“To the door!”
“To the door!”
Abigail does not hear the bugs, and as she moves her spyglass around, she doesn’t notice them. Oh they are there, and they are gross, but one bug is the same as another to a sad girl from another world. She is more curious about the strangeness in the garden, the reason it doesn’t look right. It’s not the statues of monsters, with their drooping tentacles and howling faces, nor is it the plants she doesn’t recognize. It’s the sky and the grass. It’s the horizon.
The answer, of course, is in the subtleties. In faerie, the horizon is darker than the foreground. Abigail moves the spyglass back up and watches slate-blue fade into ocean-blue. In our world, where magic knows how to behave itself, it is the opposite.
A bug appears in the bottom of the wine bottle. Abigail flinches. It swims in a strange circle, its wings fluttering like propellers, its body glistening when it shouldn’t. Up close it is beetleish with fly wings, thick and round and dopey. It reminds Abigail of the snitch from Harry Potter, only black instead of gold. And with a face, of course. The faerie beetle has eight, spider eyes.
It should be noted that faerie beetles are extremely poisonous when they swarm.
It should also be noted that Nana did not like Harry Potter or his wizarding adventures, which were wrong in literally every way they could be wrong about.
“Yuck,” Abigail says. Her voice is tiny. The beetle is not.
Abigail stands. Her legs prefer to sit and do their best to fight back, but she succeeds in balancing on her feet. The haunted chair offers another thankful riddle: What is the thing I stole when you were looking right at it?
Abigail cannot find the cork.
“Where?” She asks, but the word tastes slurred in her mouth. She doesn’t like the feeling. It’s gross.
The bottle vibrates as two more beetles worm their way through the glass door. They swim in circles, chasing each other like a merry-go-round. How come they don’t drown? Abigail wonders. Wondering in her head is easier than talking out loud.
The cork is not on the ground or the shelves or even the chair. Panic rumbles in Abigail’s stomach, because faerie wine has many rules to it, but Nana only told her a few. She doesn’t know what to do now that it’s been opened. She doesn’t know how to stop feeling small. Another beetle crawls through the door. Abigail looks inside, and all she can see are a cloud of buzzing, black insects.
Where is it? thinks. She sets the bottle down to search the floor on her hands and knees, but it immediately threatens to tip.
“Oh no!”
Abigail grabs the bottle and shakes it. This succeeds in upsetting the beetles but not stopping them.
One leaves the confines of her swimming pool and begins to march up the side of the glass. “I want to bite!” she whispers with her wings. “I want to eat!” Poison leaks from her eyes.
Abigail screams, but no one comes to rescue her. The adults are downstairs, being sad and drunk, and she is upstairs. Her companions are a ghost and the wind. The ghost does nothing; the wind blows. The bottle continues to fill with beetles.
There are, of course, plenty of ways to plug a bottle of faerie wine, assuming you have a bit of magic about you. Abigail does, though she doesn’t know it. Nana also has plenty of enchanted items in her study, odds and ends that would work nicely as wine corks, at least temporarily. Abigail knows none of this though. The ghost does but it is unhelpful.
The wind also does, but wind has poor eyesight. It makes to nudge an ink pot and hits the frilly curtains protecting the windows instead.
Still screaming, Abigail rushes to the curtains and yanks one down. The plastic curtain rod falls with a crash that goes unnoticed below, and Abigail wads up the parchment-yellow fabric and shoves it into the bottle. The first beetle reaches the fabric and stops. She pokes at it with her hands, and she looks at it with her eyes, and finally she spits on it with her poison, but the fabric holds. It isn’t that it’s magic—it’s not—but that the beetle is small.
Abigail sets the bottle on the ground and sits beside it, cross-legged. Slowly, over the course of an hour, it fills with beetles until all the wine is gone. They squeeze against the glass, their wings buzzing and breaking against the weight of their brothers and sisters. The bugs curse and howl in their bug language, but Abigail cannot understand them.
Huh, she thinks. I guess more than just water can be bottled up.
This thought makes her feel better, and as she forces herself to her feet, she puts on a blank smile. It looks convincing. Faerie wine is good for that, too.
Abigail returns downstairs. It is more socially acceptable to be sad and alone and drunk around people. The beetles can wait until tomorrow.
Nonsense 