Fairy Tale in Baseball Country

Kids don’t play outside anymore, but when my brothers and I were kids it’s all we did. We built fairy houses under the trees, looked for fairy stones and fairy rings. Mapped the neighborhood as a fey realm. Piles of stones were mountains—the roads, rivers and streams. One day our neighbor in the mustard-yellow house called to my youngest brother, “Come over here, there’s something I want you to see.” My brother was halfway across that river when my mother saw and called him back. There was always news in those days of children being snatched from gas stations, playgrounds, on the way home from school—never to be seen again. The field where my brothers played Little League was named after one of these victims, a little girl who opened the door to the wrong person. Our parents coached us never to go anywhere with anyone except them. Even if they tell you they have a gun or a knife. Even if you see it. I think of my brother and wonder if he had crossed that river, would it have been Styx—if he hadn’t looked back—but that’s a different myth. From that day my parents feared that neighbor, and their fear infected my dreams. I had nightmares of him appearing in the hush of dusk, circling me. He always wore sunglasses around the neighborhood—I never saw his eyes—but in my dreams he took them off, revealing two mouths of sharp teeth. I didn’t tell my parents of my terror, afraid it would make the whole thing more real. But I was religious then, and I prayed every day that if he was a predator, like the ones we saw on the news, that he would die or move away. Only a few weeks later, the mustard-yellow house was empty. The nightmares stopped, morphed into a deeper unrest that has never left me. My prayer being answered was a kind of confirmation. We yearned to meet fairies. All fairy stories are about children being taken. I see my brother, how small his body, a buoy—I mean boy—bobbing along that stream—I mean street. His shirt striped like candy.

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Sophia Carroll (she/they) is an analytical chemist and writer. Her work appears in wildness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. She is also the co-founder of

M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird. Find her on Substack at Torpor Chamber and on Bluesky @torpor-chamber.bsky.social.