Episode the Eighth: Little Dot and the Buck-Toothed Fairy

By: Mr. E. S. Stranger

Little Dot was very bored one day. She was tired of working puzzles, and she had counted all seventy thousand, one hundred beads she owned more times than she could count. She sat in her room and stared at the faces in the ceiling until even they got bored and asked her to stop staring.

Toona and Funny Bunny sat with her. She sighed. Toona heaved a deep sigh. Funny Bunny heaved a whining sigh. Suddenly Funny Bunny had a thought, which nearly caused him to fall over.

"I know!" he said.

Toona brightened up. "Great!"

Funny Bunny said nothing more for a bit. Toona waited expectantly. At last Funny Bunny shot him an irritated look.

"What?" said Funny Bunny.

"Um...you said you knew."

"Knew what?"

"I don't know."

"If you don't even know, why are you asking me?" Funny Bunny demanded.

"I thought you knew."

"Why?"

"Because you said you knew."

"Oh."

They fell silent again. Toona waited. He began to fidget. Funny Bunny spoke.

"Let's go exploring."

Dot looked over. "Where?"

"The forest."

"What forest?"

"I don't know. Maybe there's a forest out there."

"Out where?"

"There," Funny Bunny replied. "Past the door."

Dot rolled her eyes. "That's the house out there."

"How do you know?" Funny Bunny challenged.

"Because it was the house yesterday and all the days before that, and it was the house when I came in here."

"But how do you know it's the house now?"

Dot shrugged. She was curious. She crept to the door. Toona and Funny Bunny watched, breaths held. She touched the doorknob. She pulled the door open. The house lay on the other side.

Dot sighed and walked out. She heard a deep sigh and a whining sigh behind her. She went to the couch and turned on the TV, and no sooner had she sat down than Toona, Funny Bunny, and Jimi joined her.

They watched TV for a while. It was boring. Dot sat and petted Jimi and sighed. Funny Bunny sighed. Toona sighed. Jimi sighed. A commercial came on that featured a dog, and Jimi became interested. The dog ran off-screen. Jimi had to see where the dog had gone and ran behind the wall unit to investigate. Dot sighed and got up.

"Where are you going?" asked Funny Bunny.

"Outside," Dot said.

"Oh."

Funny Bunny joined her. Dot looked back. Toona was not with her. He had seen a stuffed bear on a commercial for fabric softener and wanted to know where it had gone.

"Toona!" Dot snapped. Toona looked at her guiltily and followed her out the door.

They walked and walked until at last Dot was in the distant, less-charted reaches of her neighborhood. As they were passing by a tree, an anvil fell on the ground near them, and they heard a giggle. Dot looked up. Sitting in a branch of the tree was a long-haired girl with big, bright eyes, buck teeth, and wings. The girl stared at Dot without blinking.

"Did you just try to drop an anvil on me?" asked Dot.

The girl shrugged. "Wanna play?"

Dot looked from her to the anvil. "But you just-"

"Name's Zoyla," said the girl.

Dot looked at her wings. "Are you a fairy?"

"Of course," said Zoyla.

"You're a buck-toothed fairy. That's weird," said Dot.

"You have a shoestring bunny rabbit," Zoyla replied.

Dot nodded. "What did you want to play?"

"I don't know," said Zoyla. "You brought it up."

"No, I didn't."

"Well, you did the second time."

As Dot thought about this, she noticed the bag next to Zoyla.

"What's in the bag?"

Zoyla glanced at the bag, and a gleeful spark illuminated her eyes. She shrugged and grinned.

"Whatever."

Dot stared at the bag with curiosity. Before she could ask the question again, Zoyla reached inside and pulled out a fighter jet. She set it down on the street.

"Play with me," Zoyla said.

Dot, Funny Bunny, and Toona were staring at the plane wide-eyed.

"Wow," said Toona.

"Cool," said Funny Bunny.

"How did you do that?" Dot asked.

Zoyla grinned. "I can put anything in there. Fighter jets, gum, pencils, tornadoes, the state of Missouri...you name it."

"The state of Missouri?" Dot questioned.

"Yeah. You never know when you'll need it. Get in the plane. Now."

Dot, Toona, and Funny Bunny got in the plane. Zoyla got in the pilot's seat and took them all into the air. Funny Bunny leaned forward.

"If you have wings, why do you need a pla-"

Just then the plane dove, twirled, flipped, and straightened again. Funny Bunny and Toona felt sick.

"Don't ask rude questions," said Zoyla.

From behind her came a whimpering "Okay."

They zoomed far and wide. They saw people and places all over the globe, much to the befuddlement of the people, to whom they got rather close so that Zoyla could snap a photograph. After several minutes of this, Zoyla began to drum her fingers on the consol.

"Let's drop anvils on people," she said.

"Let's not," said Dot. "You could have hurt me with the one you tried to hit me with."

Zoyla was silent for a bit. She flew over someone walking on the ground and slowed to match his speed. She pressed the trigger button, and an anvil dropped from a hatch in the plane. As the anvil fell, it got smaller and smaller until it was more the size of a large grain of sand. It bounced off the fellow's head. He looked up in surprise, saw nothing, and kept walking.

"Does he see the plane?" asked Dot.

"Only if I want him to."

Zoyla dropped tiny anvils on him again and again. At last the man, no longer sure of his sanity, fled for cover. Zoyla giggled. Dot let out a laugh. Zoyla looked at Dot with sparkling eyes.

"Let's get ice cream," she said.

Before Dot could agree, they were off. Despite Dot's assurance that there was ice cream where she lived, they flew to Delaware. Dot asked what was so special about the ice cream in Delaware. Zoyla looked at her with unbelieving eyes.

"It's Delaware," she said.

Zoyla rapidly parked on the lot, and they went inside. The woman behind the counter stared at Zoyla. Zoyla stopped.

"What? What are you staring at? It's my brown hair, isn't it? What's wrong with brown hair? Can't I just get some ice cream without being persecuted?"

The woman stopped staring. Zoyla, Dot, Toona and Funny Bunny sat at the counter. The woman asked what they would like.

"Two banana splits, please," said Zoyla, "with extra cherries." She turned to Dot. "What would you like?"

"Oreo sundae," Dot replied. She turned to ask Toona and Funny Bunny, but they had gone exploring in the bag. As the woman got the ice cream, there was a muffled explosion inside the bag, followed by the sound of Funny Bunny coughing. The woman looked over. Zoyla covered her hair as though ashamed of it, and the woman looked away.

Their ice cream came. Zoyla took the spoons out and asked for different ones.

"Not those," she said of the first two replacements. "Or those," she said of the next two. Finally, acceptable ones were found. The woman smiled.

"Those are beautiful costume wings," she said.

"They're real," replied Zoyla, turning back to Dot and the ice cream.

After a few minutes, Funny Bunny wandered out of the bag, much the worse for wear. He coughed some more. Zoyla told him to be careful what he touched. Dot asked if Toona was okay, so Zoyla reached into the bag and pulled him out. He was covered in finery and held a staff.

"There's a whole civilization of stuffed bears in there," he said.

Zoyla nodded. "You never know when you'll need a whole civilization of stuffed bears."

This made sense to Toona. He waited patiently while the two girls finished eating. Zoyla pocketed many of the cherries, waving off questions of why. Finally, she pulled some money out of the bag and paid, and they all left. A red truck had pulled up alongside the plane and hit it with the driver's side door, leaving a red dent. Zoyla dropped an anvil on the truck before they left.

"Have you been people fishing?" Zoyla asked.

Dot said no. Zoyla parked the plane in midair and beckoned the others onto the roof. She pulled two fishing rods out of the bag. To the end of one line she attached a cherry, and to the other she fastened a dollar bill.

"To catch different kinds, you need different bait," she said.

She pulled a couple of lawn chairs out of the bag, and they took turns using the two different lines. Sometimes they let their prey grab onto the line, at which point they would haul the startled person into the air, but mostly they merely toyed with the people, moving the bait around in circles while the hapless people tried to catch it. Once a particularly stubborn banker held onto the dollar bill during its entire trip back to the plane. Zoyla sighed and cut the line, and the banker fell, smiling at having won a dollar.

As they fished, the sun began to set. It was a beautiful orange-red at the end.

"Wow," said Dot.

"Wanna see it again?" Zoyla asked, and before Dot could answer, Zoyla had moved the plane to the west so that the sun was setting again.

"Would you rather see the sunrise?" Zoyla continued. She flipped the plane over. Somehow, they did not fall. As they were upside down, it appeared as though the earth were above them and the sun rising to meet it.

Zoyla oohed and ahed. It grew dark again. Dot spoke.

"I should go home."

Zoyla was disappointed, but she agreed to take Dot back. On the way back, they listened to news about mysterious falling anvils and the unexplained total disappearance of Missouri. Zoyla switched the news off, and Dot was home.

"Remember," said Zoyla, "call me anytime you need an anvil dropped on someone.

She left. Dot, Toona, and Funny Bunny went inside. Jimi and another dog were there. Jimi introduced the other dog as Colin, adding that Colin did commercials on TV. Dot nodded and went into the kitchen. Her mother was there. "So," said Dot's mother, "did you do anything interesting today?"

Dot shrugged. "Not really."