All My Tuesdays
Laura J Fitzwilson
A fairy will not lie. But that doesn’t mean they can’t.
I always thought of her as one of those old fairies. Not like Tinkerbell, the old fairies, the ones my grandmother had warned me away from over dozens of cryptic rules that she insisted were still relevant in Gnowee, about the furthest place from the Irish woodland I could imagine. I thought of her as a fairy long before I ever saw her garden, back when she was just one of the many strangers coming into the library next to the café I work in.
Gnowee is a slow and dusty town. Even when your car assures you that you’re travelling at the speed limit, the sparse scenery crawls so sluggishly outside your window that it almost feels faster to walk. It has a supermarket that only stocks Black & Gold; a pub that serves parma and chips, fish and chips, and chips, to the exclusion of all else; and a shop that sells only hats, for no reason anyone has ever been able to discern. The only reason it’s worthy of having a café is because of the library, the biggest in the district. Bookworms come from up to an hour away to borrow, though an hour’s drive means less out in the sticks.
My fairy was one of them. I was never fantastic with faces, but she came into town with astonishing regularity, every Tuesday morning, and exchanged her big bag of books for another. It was one of those wheely bags, the kind my mum was dithering over getting to make walking the groceries home easier but felt might make her look old. Sometimes the bag would be too full and the fairy would have to carry a book or two in her hands. She always looked like the burden pained her, but that she was determined to outmatch the strain.
She moved with slow, measured steps. It should have made her look old or awkward, but she had such proud posture it came off looking regal instead, like she didn’t care for the pace in which the rest of the world moved. I thought she must have been my age, maybe a couple of years older, but she had one of those faces that defied estimation. Her skin was smooth and healthy, but her eyes had the weight of hundreds of books pressing onto them.
It may be obvious that I loved her well before I ever spoke to her.
Never enter a circle of mushrooms you’d like to leave again.
The first time I saw her was different. I was in the library, under the naive hope that the internet would have a stronger signal than mine at home. I didn’t see her until she was looking at the shelf behind me, too caught up in the site I was browsing, but my attention flew to her like a sparrow to a princess’s hand the moment I glanced in her direction.
Her hair was brown and curled around her face, soft and natural. Her eyes were brown too, almost black, and they gave me the impression I could fall into them if she happened to make more than fleeting eye contact with me. I spent half an hour wondering how I could justify joining her at one of the shelves she was moving through. I watched as she floated down aisles, her head tilted just so to read the spines of the books, and fingers walking over them with a brightness of step I would never see on her feet.
I thought she was a fairy from the first—maybe because the bow of her lips looked like the drawings in my grandmother’s book, maybe because she was too beautiful to belong to this world, or maybe just because I wanted something unusual to be happening in a town where nothing happened. I think it was really because she made me remember what it was to be a girl with a first crush, and I wanted a supernatural explanation for my bewitchment.
My session timed out as I watched the easy cradle of her books, the graceful and deliberate movements of her legs and the way she led with her heels like a ballerina. My heart ached like it was breaking when she met my eyes and smiled at me as she left. I spent so much time at the library after that, waiting for her to return her books.
I’m not sure, looking back, if the pleasure of seeing her was what made me apply for the job at the café.
Neither eat nor drink from the fairy feast.
It was raining the day I spoke to her. Gnowee is a town of almost perpetual drought, and even when it broke for a few years here and there over my lifetime it wasn’t wet. Water, like most other supplies, was driven into town.
The café was empty and my boss wasn’t the kind of person to make me do busy-work when there wasn’t the need for it, so I was leaning against the weatherboards under the verandah, breathing in the smell of rain hitting dust. It was proper rain, the kind that makes you wonder about the structural integrity of your roof, the kind that always makes me forget I’m an atheist.
It was a Tuesday, and I watched with unreasonable excitement as her car pulled up. I only wanted to be able to wave to her, to have a small moment of connection where she was as aware of me as I was of her. I was hyper-conscious of the angle on which I was slouching, and rehearsed in my head exactly how lazily I would wave, an affectation of coolness that I never got to display. Her bag split as she hauled it out of the boot, and the books inside tumbled to the wet ground.
I ran over to help. Books were precious, our town’s lifeblood, but I ran because I knew that they were important to her specifically.
She stood and stared down in wonder. When I arrived, it was as if she realised she was more than a spectator and she held her jacket open as a kind of umbrella as I saved the books.
‘This one’s a little muddy, but I’m sure it’ll be okay,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Her voice was low and musical and I felt myself get a little more lost. She looked at me with a vague detachment, as if she wasn’t sure I was real, but she might as well be polite.
‘I’ll help you in.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s no trouble, I was just watching the rain anyway.’
She looked up at the sky and sighed.
‘I hate the rain.’
Favours are worth more than gold to fairies; do not accept or offer them.
I helped her return her books and then hesitated. I wanted to follow her as she found new ones, to help her with those too, to spend as much time with her as I could, but despite the emptiness of the café at that moment I felt wrong abandoning it entirely.
‘I wonder if I might impose on you again,’ she said, just as I was trying to figure out how to say goodbye. I nodded helplessly.
‘My bag is broken and my bones …’ she trailed off, not clarifying what was wrong with her, but I was already nodding again. ‘Would you take my new books to my car?’
‘I can’t leave the café for too long,’ I said reluctantly. ‘But if you come and get me when you’re finished, I’ll carry them.’
‘That’s very kind,’ she said.
I went back to the cafe and couldn’t just watch the rain any longer. I begged my boss for something to keep my hands busy; she laughed and told me I could clean the oven. I threw myself into it; anything to help the time pass without watching every second.
When the bell tinkled with her arrival, the oven was sparkling and I’d even had time to wash my hands and face free of grease. I leaned against the counter, resisting the urge to twirl my hair around my finger like a cheerleader, and smiled at her.
‘Can I tempt you with a cuppa before you go?’
She seemed almost surprised to find herself inside a café. Her eyes had little freckles of lighter brown in them that reminded me of sunlight breaking through tree branches and her wet hair was a welcome sign of humanity in a woman who was too perfect to be attainable.
‘Okay,’ she said, looking back outside. ‘As it’s still raining. Do you know when it’s expected to stop?’
‘The ground needs it,’ my boss said instead of answering. There weren’t many people who looked forward to the end of rain in our town.
‘I’ve never known the weatherman to be right,’ I said with an apologetic shrug. ‘Do you have a preference for tea?’
‘Whatever you like,’ she’d said vaguely, and made her way with slow steps to a chair.
‘You good, tidda?’ my boss asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t burn your fingers staring at the pretty girl,’ she laughed, and went back to her accounts.
Your name is precious; do not give it away.
I took her a pot of rose tea and a fresh scone and tried not to look too grateful when she invited me to join her.
She introduced herself as Alice and told me about the books she had borrowed. I told her about the one I was reading, and she’d read that one too. It seemed she’d read every book I’d read, and many others besides. I went through my high school reading list as if I’d stumbled onto every one myself, movies I knew were adaptations, even risking it with authors I wished I’d read. Every thought she expressed made me want to read the books with her eyes. I was drowning in emulous rapture.
‘Sometimes I want to just go alphabetically through the library and read every single book,’ I told her. ‘I tried when I was a kid, until I realised how many lifetimes I’d have to sit in there doing nothing but read to get to the end. And there’re some pretty good authors in the tail end of the alphabet.’
‘Alphabetically isn’t the way to go,’ she agreed. ‘Though I do like to stay with one author for a while.’
‘Yeah, you get into their rhythm, right?’
‘There’s always another book. Every time I read one, I find myself needing to read four more.’
The rain started to ease off and she looked out the window with hope.
‘I have to get back to my garden,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Now?’ I asked. ‘I’m working.’
She looked at me with her calm eyes, and I realised that even if the café had been full I would have gone with her. Tuesdays were always slow, anyway.
Never allow yourself to enter into a fairy’s debt, nor a fairy to owe you. There’s nothing more dangerous than a fairy who feels trapped.
She lived just outside of town, in a house I’d never found reason to notice. I carried her books inside and she seemed to forget about me in her rush to make it to her garden. I walked even slower than her as I took in the artwork covering the walls, the flowers on almost every surface. It was a beautiful home, but it gave the curious impression that it wasn’t really lived in. There was just a taste to the air, like my house had had before I moved in.
She held open the door for me, and I stepped out into her garden.
‘Are you a fairy?’ I asked, unable to keep my childish suspicion to myself any longer.
‘I don’t think so,’ she answered.
She fell with practiced grace into a sunlounger and sighed as if her soul were finally home. A large umbrella protected her from the sun that was slowly winning its battle with the clouds. I kneeled on the thick grass in wonder.
‘We’re in water restrictions,’ I said, trying not to sound accusatory.
‘The stream never runs dry,’ she said, pointing.
I explored the garden slowly and thoroughly. Only the hardiest of Australian plants grew in Gnowee, but there I was standing on a lawn of clover and staring at the first strawberry plant I’d ever seen. I suddenly understood how the victims in fairy stories might foolishly eat in a realm they didn’t want to be trapped in.
‘Am I trapped?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I won’t leave for a while now. I’d like you to stay.’
‘You’d stay out here for a whole week?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It’ll take me a year or so to get through my books. There are just so many distractions.’
Always carry honey. Never carry iron.
The garden was somehow unstuck from time. The same sun shone down and seemed to pass over the sky at the same rate as it should, but it didn’t stick. I spent hours there that first afternoon and when I decided that it wasn’t worth the small-town gossip to stay any later, I stepped from the sunset of the garden into the same mid-afternoon sun I’d left hours earlier.
I froze out the front of her house, looking back at the strange space. I still had dirt under my fingernails from investigating her garden, but the day had stopped while I was in there. I couldn’t figure it out, and out of a lack of other ideas, I just went home. I couldn’t stop myself from frowning in confusion for the whole walk, and when I arrived I picked up items at random just to feel the reassuring weight of the real world, unreplicable in dreams.
I scrubbed my nails clean and called my boss.
‘You strike out that quickly, tidda?’ she teased.
‘Can I have next Tuesday off?’
‘What and leave me alone? You don’t love me properly.’
‘I do!’ I protested. ‘Nobody comes in on Tuesdays.’
‘And I pay you anyway, how’s this for gratitude!’
It took another ten minutes of wheedling to get her to agree to give me the first day off I’d asked for in over a year. She teased me mercilessly, laughing loudly at her own jokes and tempting me easily into her joy. It was more than worth a bit of stick to get another shot at my fairy.
Nothing in Faerie is black or white; everything is grey.
I got to the library as soon as it opened the following Tuesday. I took a book on poetry she’d recommended off the shelf and sat myself in a chair facing the door.
Every time the heavy doors opened, my head snapped up. Hell, every time I saw movement in the corner of my eye I abandoned the poems and looked for Alice. Though the book was good, I read at a pace much slower than usual and found myself thinking more about what she might see in the stanzas than feeling my own way through.
Finally, she walked in, as unhurried as the dustmotes she stirred with her entrance. I waved to her.
‘I remember you,’ she said, smiling. ‘You came into my garden.’
‘I have the day off, if you wanted company again?’
‘Please.’
To name a thing is to own it, and there is magic in all words.
She took me to the garden again, and this time I didn’t linger in her house. When she fell into her sunlounger, I kneeled next to it.
‘Can I get you anything?’ I asked.
‘A kiss,’ she said, quiet mischief in her eyes.
I obliged.
We left the garden to cook dinner and she kissed my wrists when I started to prepare things with an efficiency that was beyond her. I asked her as tactfully as I could what it was she had; if there wasn’t medicine or something I could get her. She just smiled wryly. Midday sun shone through the windows as I cooked, and we walked back out into the twilight garden to eat.
I stayed the night. We slept under the stars, and I could see why she hated the rain. Her umbrella protected her from the sun, but the garden was open to the elements.
‘I have to work when it’s Wednesday outside,’ I told her.
‘Okay,’ she said, but gave me no indication that she knew when that would happen.
My phone didn’t work in the garden. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have reception (which was spotty in Gnowee): it didn’t work. I left it in her kitchen to try to reduce the harm I was probably doing to both it and the garden.
Every time we went inside, time continued a little longer. I spent weeks inside one Tuesday. Even considering the magic at play, the time I spent there wasn’t the time of a Tuesday. It was the time of a holiday, where even though you’re not doing much of anything it still takes you a week to read an unchallenging novel, and you sleep ten hours a night with an afternoon nap besides. It felt wrong to leave the house when we needed groceries, and she thanked me again and again for the capability of my young bones.
She still looked like she was thirty, not much older than me. But when I left her alone, she would spend hours and hours in one position, not even rolling over or holding her book differently. She watched me do yoga with interest, but couldn’t find it in herself to move. This was both because of her stiff and aching bones, and the cause of them. Despite having all the time in the world, she was like I was as a child, desperate to finish reading the library and sure she’d never accomplish it.
I left when the sky started to darken inside the house. I had work on Wednesday and I missed the outside world. I missed the dusty streets and the way the gum trees looked silhouetted against the sunset. I missed my boss and my mum. I missed the satisfaction of having a café full of people and knowing that I was up to the challenge of serving all of them.
Alice didn’t seem to know why I was leaving, but she didn’t fight me on it.
A fairy might like to own some shiny things, but physical objects aren’t worth much to them. Be careful not to offer them the intangible, even though their gratitude is pretty.
By Friday, I missed her so much that it hurt. I couldn’t stand to think of her alone in her garden, beautiful as it was. My boss called it lovesickness and told me to go back to her, for goodness’ sake, she couldn’t keep catching the plates before my clumsy hands dropped them. I tried that night, but I couldn’t find her house without her.
I asked for Tuesday off again, and my boss didn’t put up a fuss. I felt ridiculous tears prick my eyes when I saw Alice’s car pull into the library parking lot.
I helped her with her books and drove her home. She was glad to see me, but she’d had a year to get over me. It wasn’t as fresh for her as it was for me.
‘Stay this time,’ she told me.
‘I can’t,’ I told her.
She didn’t understand. I don’t even know if she was sad. I stayed with her until my Tuesday was nearly up.
‘I have to go,’ I said.
‘I like having you here.’
A fairy is not made of ash or dust.
I was there when she died.
The chance involved in that, when I was only there a seventh of the days that she had. The horror involved because I have no idea how long she was dead before I realised.
She’d been getting slower for a while. She’d stopped coming outside, except to wait on the sidewalk of her house on a Tuesday morning so that I could find my way back to her with a carful of books and groceries. She developed a small frown between her eyebrows that rarely eased, even when she slept. And it was the absence of that sign of her pain that drew my attention to the fact that she wasn’t simply sleeping.
I put my book down and stared at her peaceful face—I don’t know for how long. My heart beat loud and heavy in my head, as if taunting me with the possibility of hers being stopped. A gentle breeze caught the pages of the book her still hands still held.
I inched my way towards her. Her chest was not moved by the motion of healthy lungs, and my breath froze in my throat too. My hand hovered over her arm for eternity. It ached when I let it settle over her wrist. She was cold.
I gripped my knees to my chest and sobbed. When that started to make my chest ache with constriction, I fell onto my back and gasped for some kind of composure. The salt of my tears hurt. I hated myself for caring about something so trivial when my fairy was gone.
I ran away rather than deal with it, assuming that the house would be lost to me and the garden would take her back to where she’d come from. But that night I found I could return. I’d promised her once that I’d give her all my Tuesdays.
Her body was gone, with no trace that it had ever existed, and I was selfishly grateful that I didn’t have to deal with the mundane rituals of the dead.
I still have no idea if she loved me. But she wanted me to be with her and I loved her too much to ask if that was enough reason to stay. I couldn’t give up the outside world; I didn’t want to see my eyes grow old and my joints stiffen as the rest of my life stayed still. But I couldn’t give up on her, not even when she was gone.
Solitude is easier than it was. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done, and even started writing again, a habit I put away when I started living in my adult world. I borrowed a book on Japanese characters and spent months drawing hiragana in the soft ground next to the stream. I’d always wanted to learn another language.
I don’t think there’s any limit on the things I might learn now that I have these Tuesdays. I’m careful—I don’t want to wither away like she did—but sometimes I find myself wondering if maybe I couldn’t have Mondays as well. Nobody comes into the café on Mondays.
Laura J Fitzwilson graduated with distinction from a Bachelor of Arts (Literature & Creative Writing) in 2020 and currently works as a content writer for Paperform. She has self-published two picture books and a short text-based adventure video game. She predominately writes speculative fiction with a focus on people.