Written by RowanCarver

She woke up at noon with a pool of spit drying under her cheek. The hangover was miserable but she was happy to be somewhat sober again. Her stomach was killing her. She thumbed through the battalion of orange pill bottles by her bed and grabbed an aspirin and Greyson's nausea prescription that she wasn't supposed to take. She didn't care to crawl to the kitchen for a glass of water to chase down the pills.

 Her phone buzzed with messages and voicemail reminders. How the constant humming didn't wake her earlier, she wasn't sure. She groped for the phone, knocking over the picture of herself and Greyson in the process. She hung her arm over the bedside and watched the picture flutter to rest on a pile of house moss, face-down. The photo had the date written on the back in sparkly red ink: Christmas, 2016. Greyson's handwriting. 

She turned onto her back and closed her eyes, resting the phone on her chest, and thought that she was never going to get better. The idea of waking up like this: hungover and aching for Greyson to be lying next to her, didn't seem so much like a temporary thing anymore. This is just how things were going to be. 

She couldn't ignore the messages this time; the phone was buzzing so much that it was vibrating through her chest. She wiped her eyes with the edge of her blanket and sniffed, then mustered the courage necessary to face the "Where are you?" texts from Allison and the disappointed voicemails from Stephen explaining that he left Dottie's once her coffee went cold. That voicemail was from Saturday. Had it been two days already?

She composed a sloppy message to Allison stating she'd caught a bug and had been battling a fever all morning which, she realized, worked with the narrative she gave Stephen about her fictional doctor's visit. Satisfied with her storytelling, she shut off her phone and closed her eyes again, listening to the birds outside.

The valley came back to her. The lightning bugs, fairy circles, Greyson's arm around her waist. The little people watching them dance from the bushes. She hummed the fairy's tune: Lu, la la, Lu la la...She smelled pine needles and Greyson's lingering cologne. 

She wanted to go back there more than anything. No, the fairies couldn't actually be real, but there was no harm in finding out for sure, right? Besides, hiking was much healthier than rotting in bed all day. 

She propped up her pillows and dragged herself to a sitting position. Stars popped in her eyesight. She made a fist against her mouth and mumbled into her knuckles a vow to never take anything Allison gave her again. 

The book from Mike's library was on the bed table among the expired antidepressants and piles of stretched-out hair ties. She held it against her knees and outlined the painting on the cover with her fingertips. There were small people dancing through the watercolors, their black hair brushing the dirt. She flipped through the photographs of Cherokee figurines of Nunnehi spirits, searching for figures that matched the ones she saw in the woods, then stopped at the chapter about Chimney Rock. There was a picture of a slab teetering on the edge of a stone face, and below it, drawings of golden-haired children in white dresses. Some had white feathered wings like angels, others had the webbed wings of blue lightning bugs. The caption said images of the fairies encountered by the Chimney Rock settlers. The villagers reported sightings of the small people floating in the trees.

 Charlotte checked the page to see if it was taped into the binding somehow. Maybe Mike was playing a trick on her; she wouldn't put it past him. Printing a fake page about the fairies she'd seen was unlikely, especially since she checked out the book before discovering the valley in the first place.

She turned to the next chapter with cold hands. A folded piece of yellow paper was stuck in the binding of a chapter titled Fairy Sightings in Rural Georgia. She gingerly unglued it from the seam where the heat had fused it to the book. It was a map of Helen and the surrounding mountains with black marks scattered throughout the wilderness, dotted lines marking the trails between them. The marks were nowhere near the tourist areas aside from one located a few miles from the Anna Ruby Falls. The map was older than the attractions themselves. Charlotte couldn't see the Alpine Village where it was supposed to be between the highways. She was sure many of the backroads weren't there anymore. 

She set the map on her pillow and scanned the chapter's text. Fairies in the blue ridge mountains of Georgia tend to enjoy dancing in valleys scattered throughout the mountains. Visitors have reported sightings of fairy circles in the meadows. The fairies travel from one valley to another. Visitors can, at times, catch the fairies dancing during significant natural events such as full moons, solstices, and eclipses. Some visitors have reported findings of fairy crosses in valleys where development has encroached on the land.

She grabbed the map again, traced the highway to the spot where her house should be, and found one of the markings east of her cabin. There were two more markings further into the mountain wilderness, about ten miles away from each other. 

A childish sense of excitement set her heart beating. She folded up the map, grabbed her phone and the book, and then stuffed it in a backpack along with some mildly expired granola bars. She grabbed her hiking boots and headed to the woods.

WC: 954