Before

Abstract

Before Joy Baglio (bio) Let’s talk about the fairy godmother, before. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice, fairy-status undiscovered, role of godmother yet realized. It doesn’t matter how all that will come to be, only that right now she works at a diner, spends the day penciling people’s orders on a notepad and running back and forth from the kitchen to her tables, carrying plates of eggs and buttered toast, a practiced smile on her face. On her breaks, she smokes outside on the picnic table by the road, or calls her children, who are with her ex-husband this week, and at night she watches TV with her mother, who lives with her and is slowly forgetting most things, including the plots of her favorite movies, which they now watch over and over. That weekend the fairy godmother takes her sister’s children to the water park so her sister (who is going through a divorce of her own) can have a break from it all. The water park is in a strip mall surrounded by desert. It is full of screaming children and depleted mothers and overpriced junk food. The fairy godmother thinks it might be the closest place to Hell she’s ever been. Tomorrow after work, she’ll help a friend pick out a dress for the friend’s wedding, then she’ll make dinner for her mother and watch Moonstruck for the third time that week, and she has to schedule an appointment with the dermatologist at some point because a strange rash has emerged across her shoulder blades and back like something is trying to crawl out of her skin. She doesn’t know yet that she has wings, or fairy blood, and what is magic anyway except wishful thinking, a dream that is not really her own? She has not met the girl she will save yet, who at this point is still only a baby, still loved and happy, but perhaps the two are already merged, connected across time and space, opposite sides of the same coin. Perhaps every fairy godmother who crystalizes carriages from garden vegetables, who breaks open the sealed shutters of someone else’s dead-end life, first sits on the ledge of her own transformation, a starved hope inside her, a dream of [End Page 19] her own, and wonders what she needs to become herself, wonders when she’ll have the courage to leap. [End Page 20] Joy Baglio JOY BAGLIO is a fiction writer and the founder of the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Yaddo, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is working on a collection of fabulist short stories and a novel about ghosts. The first book I was obsessed with was a book of Russian fairy tales by renowned folklorist Alexander Afanasyev, collected in the mid 19th century and accompanied by striking Bilibin illustrations: Baba Yaga, Ivan Tsarevitch and the Firebird, Koschei the Deathless. But it was Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” that helped me realize the kind of stories I loved most: stories where the longing leaps off the page, where defiance and striving in the face of the impossible somehow—through pure determination—lead to transformation. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press, Leonard N. Simons Building