Mimi's Guide to Definitely Not Being Kidnapped by Faeries

Chapter One

A/N: This short story is based on the prompt linked below.  The credit for the prompt does not belong to me.

Go away, go away, go away.

That's what I keep silently praying as I squeeze behind the trash cans lined up along our garden fence. If it weren't there, I wouldn't have to take the pungent, much less scenic route to the back of the garden.

If I just ignore it, make sure not to step in it, they'll have to get bored with me eventually. Hopefully move it somewhere not in my backyard? Yeah, that would be ideal.

It wasn't there yesterday morning. I clearly remember walking through the very middle of the yard to go water my newly-planted carnations. And I know it wasn't there early last night, when I walked through the yard yet again to check on the tulips.

So you see, I had no reason to believe anything out of the ordinary would happen this morning. I woke up at the crack of dawn (ugh, med school), stumbled downstairs, and practically sleepwalked into the kitchen. After quickly making a cup of black coffee, I mumbled a "hello" in response to my atrociously cheery mother. She was always more of a morning bird than my father - guess whose genes I got in that regard.

After the coffee restored me to partial functionality, I stepped outside into the warm morning mist to greet my plants - yes, I am a plant nerd. Make fun of me all you want.

And that was when I froze in my tracks - one footstep away from trampling through it.

A faerie ring.

And I don't mean a couple of cute mushrooms. I mean a six-foot diameter, freakishly symmetrical ring of small mushroom, so small most people probably wouldn't notice one if it were alone; all together, however, they were a sight to behold.

It was at that moment that Grandma Lucy's voice echoed in my mind:

"Stay away from those ancient faerie circles. One step inside, and you'll be enthralled, never to see your home again. Or at least, not for several hundred years."

Yeah. I think you can forgive me for being a bit wary.

Lucy isn't my real grandmother, of course. My biological grandmother passed away when I was eleven, and is still missing from the recesses of my memory. I had only met her twice before my parents and I left South Sudan, and I had been far too young to remember anything. She never failed to write me a birthday letter though, and sometimes I feel the pull of a life, of a family, that I've never known. What would my life be like if we had never left South Sudan? If we hadn't moved to the monotonous suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa? Sometimes I find it difficult to reconcile these two pieces of my life, the past and the present clumsily intertwining like clasped hands that don't quite fit each other.

I do know that I wouldn't trade Lucy for any other life. She's a sweet older lady who works at the local library that I occasionally visit. I was never much of a reader, but I do enjoy checking out new cookbooks or gardening tips once in a while. I think Lucy recognized a bit of a lost soul in me, because, from the first time I set foot in the library at age ten, she was there to help. She talked to me about my passions and my dreams, those far-off ambitions that only little kids dare to express. She helped me with schoolwork, talked me through my problems, and helped me realize when I had made mistakes - something I do quite often, but acknowledge far less. It was her support that pushed me to reach for my goals, and culminated in my scholarship to medical school. If I hadn't had her for the past 16 years, who knows where I'd be.

And, incidentally, she's where I get my basic knowledge of faerie tales from.

So when I walk into the yard and discover a full-blown faerie ring, I do what any rational adult would do: I go out of my way to step carefully around it. Which involves nearly falling into the garbage.