The Night Fairy by Laura Amy Schlitz Page A

could hide.
    But the cherry was a young tree, and its bark was smooth. The nearby oak was riddled with holes, but they were big hollows that might be homes for bats. At the thought of bats, her blood ran cold.
    All at once, her eyes fixed on a strange shape. Dangling from the limb of the cherry tree was a little box made of wood. One side had a peg sticking out and a door hole the size of a small dandelion. Flory did not know giants well enough to know that they sometimes made houses for birds and hung them in the trees.
    Flory stared at the box, head cocked. She sensed that it was empty. It would make a good hiding place: not too small, but not too big. No bat would be able to fit its wings through the door. A twig grew close to the little box. She darted to the end of the twig, clasped her hands around it, and swung downward, feeling with her feet for the wooden peg. When her toes touched it, she stood, balancing like an acrobat.
    The box smelled of cedar, which was good — Flory was fussy about smells. The words A Souvenir from Niagara Falls were written in a half-moon over the door hole. Flory could not read, but she liked the picture underneath: a blue waterfall surrounded by rainbows. She climbed up, perching on the edge of the door hole. Then she hopped down.
    Inside it was pitch-dark, but Flory’s eyes were made for the night, and she had no trouble seeing. The floor was littered with twigs, left over from a time when the house held wrens. Flory shoved the twigs into one corner.
    All at once she was so tired that her knees felt weak. She knelt down and curled up on her side — fairies do not sleep on their backs because of their wings — and thought about warm things: the breast feathers of a bird, the softness of a mulberry leaf, the nubbins of pussy willow. As she thought of them, her tiny body stopped shivering, and she fell asleep.

F lory slept in the wren house all the next day. When night came, she was awakened by thirst. Her wings ached, and her stomach growled. Trembling, she got to her feet and went to the door.
    She stood by the door hole for a long time. Outside the cedar house, the creatures of the night searched for prey. The squeak of a faraway bat made her shiver. Hugging herself, she crept back to her place beside the twigs.
    When she woke again, it was morning. Just as a human person may wake in the middle of the night, a night fairy, if greatly troubled, may wake during the day. Flory blinked. She had never seen anything as blue as the sky outside her door hole.
    She staggered to the door. The morning light made her head throb.
    The cedar house overlooked a flower bed. A giant — from the smell, it was a giantess — had planted tulips there. They were vast balloons of color: butter yellow, blood red, pink with green stripes. The fountain was splashing in the sunlight, and the water was frothy with bubbles and alive with gaudy orange fish.
    The brilliance of the garden made Flory rub her eyes. All the same, the colors thrilled her, making her heart race and her skin tingle. For a moment she forgot the pain of her broken wings. She pulled herself up to sit in the doorway, feet dangling. The wind ruffled the cherry blossoms above her head. She pulled a cluster of petals nearer and drank the dew off them. Then she gorged herself on pollen, ripping handfuls from the blossoms.
    After she had eaten her fill, she sat and gazed at the garden. There were no bats in sight: only butterflies — but they were no danger — and birds. Flory had never seen such noisy and energetic birds. They swooped and lunged from branch to branch, twittering and caroling and swearing at the tops of their lungs. All of them looked huge to Flory, but she knew that most of them ate seeds or small insects, not fairies. She wished she were a day fairy and could live in a world with birds instead of bats.
    An idea flew into her head. Flory sat up straight and raised her chin.
    “From now on,” she said firmly, “I will be a