I was a kid, about nine, and I always heard this scritching under the floor. I assumed it was mice. But we used to find glitter on our counters. Mice don't shit glitter.
And there was the piping, like a tiny fife under the floorboards of my room. And that would be accompanied by clapping and stomping, in rhythm. I swear to god I heard a tiny fiddle.
I told my parents. They looked nervous, nodding, gritting their teeth and laughing. Their laugh was skittery, like a nervous clown's. They had been irritable and had both lost their wedding rings. The TV had gone missing, too. They had stopped brushing their teeth. They told me to go to a friend's house for the night, which was weird, because it was a school night. I told them it was a school night and my dad cracked me across the face with the back of his hand. They both looked at one another, mouths like o's. I couldn't even think to cry. He pulled out his wallet and gave me forty bucks. I backed out the door, holding my cheek and sat in the Waffle Barn all night, reading comic books.
When I got back home, the floorboards had been pulled up and nailed back down, sloppily. At breakfast, I asked my parents (who had more color and seemed more relaxed), what had happened and my mother said "There were rats. But we pulled up your floorboards and got 'em. They're dead now."
I asked my father if rats had ghosts and he just sighed as if he was relaxing in a hot tub or something and fell on the floor. My mother looked at me and said that Dad was fine and that I should go outside. She leaned back in her chair and started singing a soul song. Her voice was so warm but far away.
I didn't hear the tiny music again for some time, but I did hear tiny shuffling and tiny sobbing. And then nothing. One night I heard a baby crying, like it was under a thimble, or that it was a long way away. It was inconsolable and coming from my crooked floorboards. I crept out of bed and heard noises like shifting and silencing. The baby's crying was muffled. I grabbed one floorboard and pried it up. It came up in my hand. A saw gray little shapes crouching, going still.
I heard "Please no."
I said "What?"
I saw them slightly shivering. One stuck their face up. It looked like a walnut with a floppy hat. It was an elf. There were elves under my floor.
"We can't make more," it was a teeny female voice. "The faeries are onto us and they use their magic on us when we take it."
There were five of them. Their faces turned up like weird flowers.
I whispered "I don't know what you're talking about."
"We can't make anymore pixie dust," the woman said. "Every time we go to the faeries for dew drops, they catch us and use magic on us. One of ours was turned into a bat."
I saw the baby in her arms. It was smaller than a pink eraser.
They told me that my parents were demanding pixie dust. It was meant to confuse travelers in the woods and lead them away from elven hollows and gnome villages. My parents were drugged while camping and had found an elven house in a tree's trunk. They had kidnapped the occupants and were were using pixie dust to get high. They had forced the elves to make it. The elves said that my parents were holding their beloved princess in their room. They had conducted recon missions and determined that she was in their room. I nodded.
I went down the hall. I opened the door slowly and crept in. They were both on the floor. My father was snoring. There was that smell of their old sheets, their bodies times a million. A high, smoky smell like talcum and bad sweat. Bits of tin foil, little squares with burnt centers all over the floor and bendy fast food straws. I looked down at my mother and her eyes were wide open. She was still and looked absolutely dead.
She opened her mouth, whispered, her eyes jigged and dilated. She was talking about a deer near a brook at night, eating apples. She repeated it, tried to focus on me. "We will pipe to them, forest creatures..." she whispered. Her voice slid. My father's head looked like a big block of wood. His eyes pressed shut tight. His hands twitched.
I saw a candle on the night table. I turned and it was a faintly growing mason jar with a can of fish food next to it and an eyedropper. There was some yellow grass inside and an elf in a filthy pink tulle dress. She looked like a tiny rotting apple. I grabbed the jar and walked it back to my room. The elves took back their princess. They all climbed in my backpack and I took them on my bike to the old railroad tracks that were now a jogging path. I set my backpack down and they disappeared into the darkness. One came back with some powder in an envelope and a stone, like a white-jeweled jeweled brooch.
"This is the only thing that can counteract a prolonged exposure to pixie dust," the elf said. He didn't even come up to the high-top of my sneaker. "Put this in their breakfast, a pinch a day, for a week. They will be angry when they find you are away, but the powder should calm them. We are very grateful to you."
The jewel, he told me, would allow me free passage into the hidden realms of the elves and would glow intensely when I was near it. He darted back into the woods.
I wrote my parents a note, telling them what to do and slipped it through the mail slot with the powder. I stayed with the elves for a week, where I danced and ate tiny cakes. When I went back, my father was washing the car and drinking beer. He just glared at me when I walked by and mouthed something terrible at me. My mother was making lunch.
"Don't go near your father, dear," she said. "He's having a tough time of this."
She kissed me on the top of the head, squeezing my shoulder a little too hard near my neck, smiling wide. Her eyes went to the knife on the cutting board. I got away and went up to my room.
I had received a charm that I kept in my pocket. If they came at me with malice, they would be burned alive. Two days later my father caught fire while sneaking into my room at night and the whole house burned down. I had been sleeping out in a pup tent and slipped away down the creek while my mother, in her smoking nightgown, called and called my name.
