Marcelle Thiébaux
FLUELLA THE FIERCE: A FAIRY TALE
I was swinging back and forth under the sweetgum tree, dreaming up fairyland adventures for myself where I’d flit on gauzy wings among the coral bells and slay dragons, when I was kidnapped by the guy who came to sweep our chimneys.
He dragged me to his truck and tied me to a crummy plastic lawn chair wedged between the two front bucket seats. I looked into his red eyes.
“What am I doing here?”
“Adventure.” His voice was sharp, pointy like his teeth. It sank into my brain. “You’re a nice, skinny girl, just right for squeezing up the flues. Chimney sweep is a fantastic career move for a girl.”
“How’s that?” I pondered his bunch of tattooed biceps. His smudgy T-shirt said Tommy’s Hellefire Chimneys. Recalcitrant Fireplaces a Specialty. Venomous Falls, L.I.
“You can be a climber,” he said. “Right to the top of your profession.”
My Sis who’d run away from home said she was climbing out of our humdrum town.
“You heard about Jack and the Beanstalk?” Tommy added. His grizzled eyebrows shot up. “The chimney is the beanstalk of today.”
That made a lot of sense. “I want to catch a monster or a gargoyle or a dragon. Win a trophy.” I shivered and giggled. “A town, a talisman, a treasure!”
“You’ll do swell. There’s adventure and treasure up a chimney.” He jumped his tattooed muscles up and down to make me giggle some more. “Don’t forget. You need to be a climber.”
“Okay.” I gave a little shrug that meant I’d give it a whirl.
He clapped an Abe Lincoln top hat on me, put me in a black sweatshirt and tights. No shoes. I scampered up flues that were like corkscrews and hunched around corners that pinched my lungs. I got grimy and grim.
Tommy promised me five baths a year, which meant getting a hose-down in somebody’s backyard, darting under a cold sprinkler. Cinders took root under my skin and put forth little gray flowers all over me so I wasn’t hardly human but more like a scrofulous gray bug.
Whenever I got jammed up a sticky flue and stopped breathing, Tommy tied a rope around my ankles to pull me down. My freckles disappeared, my pigtails were stringy licorice twists, my elbows scabby, my knees skinned raw. My feet grew tough as shoe leather. I couldn’t remember who I was, and so my new name was Fluella.
I shimmied up the tightest flues, often squirming into cramped, L-shaped angles.
Tommy said, “They mostly don’t build no straight chimneys. That quirky bend, that’s the witches’ crook. Keeps the witch-girls from flying down the chimney.”
“Witches?”
“It ain’t well understood.” He chuckled, greasy and ragged through his whiskers.
I scooped pails of soot for Tommy, who made big bucks selling it for hair dye and eyelash mascara. But when was I going to find my treasure?
In the stories I read under the sweetgum, champions slew dragons and gargoyles and giants. I had to be Fluella the Fierce. I needed a sword, when all I had was a brush.
Cramming myself into the next chimney crook, I touched a thing like a silken head of hair. I scrubbed hard. A cry rang out.
“Spare me, Fluella. Don’t tear my house down!”
In a fright I clutched at a jutting brick to keep from falling.
“Who said that?” I squeaked.
“It was I,” cried the voice. “Let me spit in your eyes to unstick them so you can see me.”
My eyes were hot, dry, clogged with ashes, but when I blinked away her magic tears, I saw the prettiest silvery-white spider scrambling from the dark. Her dainty legs and body gleamed with sequined scales that lit up the chimney cave.
I tucked my brush in my pigtail. “Who are you?”
“I’m the Fairy Peacock Spider.” She spread her lovely peacock’s tail like the rainbow colors of my magic markers back home. She danced and pranced on her web, a flowery trampoline like Queen Anne’s Lace.
“We spiders are magic,” said she. “From our viscera we pull out dream threads. Right out of our own bodies we spin wishes and fantasies that become true. You saved me and I will grant your heart-most desire.”
“Oh, Fairy Spider, I wish to go home. But first I want to slay the ogre and find adventure and win my treasure.”
“Dive down the chimney’s throat and there you’ll discover your sword.”
I skidded and tumbled headlong and wriggled from the fireplace below. A plate of cookies on the coffee table tempted me. I was always hungry since Tommy made me stay skinny, but I couldn’t stop to guzzle. I sprinted back to the fireplace and seized my sword. Perfect. It was the fireplace poker.
It wasn’t easy clambering up with a sword, but I’d learned to scuttle like a spider. At the top I crawled out on the roof. Tommy Hellefire loomed over me. He’d climbed up his splintered ladder.
“Oho, I been looking for you.” He wrenched my poker from me. “I’m gonna spank you with that, you little sneak!”
My Spider Fairy appeared, spinning her glittery funnel-web to tangle his feet, and he stumbled, dropped my weapon, and I grabbed it. I beaned him with the poker. His head split open like a pink watermelon with glossy little seeds for brains.
The two halves sang to each other, “Let’s get together, you and me.”
They joined into a whole, turning Tommy Hellefire into a green-striped melon who rolled off the roof to loll among the chattering vineleaves below.
In his ogre’s hatband I found a key to unlock the lawn chair where he tied me every night. It became an airborne rocking chair. My Fairy Spider spread her rainbow tail feathers and jumped to my shoulder, where she perched and sparkled.
Up, up through the roof of the truck we soared. The sun sank, night bloomed, and starry points of light pierced the dark blue heavens. We flew, surfing the ocean waves of the night sky.
It was a jolting ride. We got bumped and tossed around the empyrean until we alighted by dawn in my backyard under the sweetgum.
My Fairy Spider whispered, “Hi, Victoria, it’s me, Samantha.”
Magically she grew tall, and she was my big Sis who’d run away. We both screamed for joy. She was more beautiful than ever with her peacock sundress and her rippling Botticelli-yellow hair.
She told me all about what happened. “While I was studying how to be a witch, I found a chimney mouth to roost in and stay warm. But when I got trapped in the witches’ crook I had to transform myself into an enchanted spider so I could spin my gossamer trampoline.”
We were gleeful. We’d each had an adventure and I had found my Sis, my treasure. Swinging under the sweetgum tree, we had so much to talk about, so many stories to tell.
My Sis laughed her new silver spidery laugh. Said she, “Shouldn’t we be spinning our next adventures together?”
Marcelle Thiébaux’s stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, decomP, Delmarva Review, Dogzplot, Forge, Mount Hope Review, Good Works Review, Grand Central Noir, The Ignatian, Mondays Are Murder, Louisiana Literature, DASH, El Portal, Perceptions, and elsewhere. Her fiction has received a Pen & Brush Club Award, a Writer’s Digest Competition Award, and nomination for a Pushcart Prize.