A Badger and a Fairy
It’s not every day that you are lucky enough to catch a fairy. At least, I had thought so.
When I snatched the tiny being between my hands, she wasn’t anything at all like I expected. She looked up at me from the cracks between my cupped hands with large brown eyes. Her wings looked like those of a little moth. She even had fuzzy antennae. They prodded my skin gently through my gloves as if trying to scent my intentions.
I had intended to tail the badger that was tormenting my chickens night after night, but this was so much better. I couldn’t wait to tell my colleagues that I’d found one. Now I could justify renting a little cottage up on the lonely moors of northern England far away from the laboratory in California.
I brought the fairy inside my house. Very carefully, I dropped her into a little enclosure on the desk in my living room. I used it for a variety of little critters I studied, but it would do for now. I set the video camera up on the desk to catch both the little fairy and me in the frame.
“This is Dr. Shane Yeoman, and this is day forty-seven of my studies about fairies from England. Today may be the most important day because as you can see,” I pointed a gloved blue finger at the little humanoid figure huddled on the mossy bottom, “I have finally captured one.”
The fairy bared little fangs at me, with her back to the camera.
“Sharp little teeth,” I chuckled a little, jotting it down. “Similar to that of a mink or a ferret. Fingers are long and spindly ending in bluish fingernails, but it doesn’t appear to be from oxygen deprivation.”
Her antennae began to wilt as she crept behind one of the ferns in the enclosure. She had the presence of a predator.
I finished my visual examination and shut off the camera. “I’m off to grab a cup of joe, but you stick right there, eh?” I left the fair alone in the living room and walked over to the old coffee pot that had come with the cottage. It might have been older than me. But the coffee was fresh.
I didn’t have more than a few sips before a crash followed by shrieks and squawks sounded in the back of the house. I stepped into my rubber boots and flew through the back door. I was only just in time to see a badger, dash off into the woods with one of the adolescent chicks in its fangs. It wasn’t even dusk. What was that nocturnal creep doing out in the afternoon? Did they never tire of my torment?
I needed to get a dog.
I trudged back to the living room and suppressed a heavy exhale of frustration. At least I had the little fairy. I walked over to the desk. The top of the enclosure was crooked as if she’d pushed it off with ease.
The front door creaked. It was open. I ran towards the door, not caring about the mud I tracked across the faded rug. It wasn’t the fairy I saw, but my video camera laying on the front porch. The memory card was gone.
A jolt of movement caught my attention. At the far end of the English garden, a badger, shrieking in laughter. I looked back down at the camera. There were bite marks on it in the shape of the badger's.
I looked back at the fiend in time to see it disappear. No. Not disappear. It turned back into the fairy. She waved with the memory card in her hand and flew off as fast as a hummingbird, taking all of my research with her.
A silly little story that I wrote for my niece.