MIKEL J. WISLER

How could a place, once so magical, completely break her heart now? She swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing in her bones that this sorrow oozed from a wound other than her father’s passing. Grieving his loss happened long before his death. And yet, stepping out of her car to stand before the old New England cottage and gaze upon the place her late father called home for his entire life, an ancient ache swelled from within her like an old volcano threatening to burst open after ages.

 

Cynthia stared at the red brick house, its cracks and faded shutters peering back at her reproachfully. She took in a deep breath of the brisk fall air, hoping the air from these woods might fill not just her lungs, but her soul as well, pushing out the familiar ache she wished never to feel again. But the ache belonged to this place. Permanently. It lived in the scent of grass and pine needles.

 

“He never got a new roof,” Roland said as he stepped out of his pickup truck. “I kept telling him.”

 

Cynthia soaked in the sight of the moss-grown shingles on the two-story cottage. Something about the way the sunlight cut through the trees and lit the brick walls stirred a forgotten swirl of emotions in her chest. Something else lived beneath the pain and sorrow. Perhaps a little magic remained in this place, even if she was no longer the awed little girl who once ran through these woods. She glanced at her brother, who scratched his mostly white beard and frowned at the cottage as if catching a whiff of something foul. Ever the practical man, Roland seemed unable or unwilling to think of much else other than the work needed to place the property on the market.

 

He crossed the yard and walked up the creaking front porch steps. Cynthia hung back, knowing Roland would need time to unlock the house and disable the security system. The will included detailed instructions on how to shut down the alarm since it was not a commercial model anyone would have been familiar with. Because, of course, “Dr. Drone” couldn’t have a run-of-the-mill security system just like everyone else, though none of his truly sensitive work ever resided here.

 

Roland fidgeted with the touchscreen, swearing under his breath. While she waited, Cynthia turned her gaze to the window on the second floor, once her portal to a green world of wonder. Imagining her tiny, round, youthful face beyond the glass, she wondered what the little girl would think of the woman standing here now.

 

She recalled returning from the woods one evening. “I saw them again!” she excitedly reported at the dinner table. Her dad smiled as he served himself green beans. “That’s wonderful,” her mother said. “Did you both get all your homework done?”

 

An electronic beep jerked Cynthia out of her rare moment of revery.

 

“There we go,” Roland said as the front door swung open. “Shall we?” He stepped aside.

 

Now that the door hung open to the dark, silent innards of the cottage, Cynthia’s heart raced. She stood, staring.

 

“Look, we don’t have to stay long,” Roland said. “We need to pick up anything we want to keep. Dad would want us to—”

 

“He’d want us to keep this place, and we’re not. So, what does what he wanted matter now?”

 

Roland sighed. “If you don’t want anything, that’s fine. But you have to at least come in. Sign off that you wanted nothing before I have the crew come in to move things out. So, unless you want to have to visit a museum to see any of this stuff again, you better come in.” He turned and walked in.

 

Cynthia seriously considered returning to her car and telling the nav to take her home. But this was her last chance to try reconciling the unreconcilable. Her dad’s astonishing abilities that brought so much wonder to life ultimately unleashed so much destruction on the world. Now he was gone, and this place where the last echoes of her youth, a time when she’d loved her father with innocent abandon, were being erased.

 

She stepped forward, wishing she could still believe in the magic of these woods.

 

#

 

He’d been staring through his telescope the night she’d told him. Her dad paused, then nodded. Cynthia dropped her backpack on the porch, sank into a chair, and wept. Her dad, ignoring the meteor shower they’d meant to watch together, sunk into the chair next to her.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t always get what we want.”

 

Cynthia shook her head and tried to breathe between sobs. Her dad placed a hand on her shoulder and sat quietly with her until the tears slowed and the lump in her throat became a little smaller.

 

“I just wanted in so badly,” she finally managed.

 

“I know. But there are other schools, other programs.”

 

“They're not the same,” she protested.

 

“No. But at least eighty percent of anything is the effort we put into it. How you see the world and how disciplined you are go a very long way, kiddo.”

 

He sighed and gazed up at the stars.

 

“Look at these stars,” he said. “Long before people understood them, while they still believed they were spirits of their ancestors rather than giant balls of plasma billions of miles away, people still found ways to navigate this world and do great things.”

 

“I’m not trying to find my way across the ocean, dad.”

 

He turned to her, eyes wide. “Oh, but you are. That’s all any of us are trying to do. We’re just trying to figure out how to navigate this vast ocean called life. Sometimes the sun shines and the surface of this ocean is still as glass as far as the eye can see. But often, we find ourselves in dark waters, with towering waves above us, and the stars hidden from view.

 

She wiped her eyes and said nothing. Her dad stared out at the woods.

 

“Do you ever go into the woods anymore?” He asked.

 

“It’s been a long time.”

 

“I remember when you would come back, face filled with wonder, and tell me about them.”

 

“Dad…”

 

“No, listen. Wonder matters. Wonder is our greatest magic. It helps us keep going even when the storms seem much bigger than us. Wonder is bigger still.”

 

She swallowed and nodded her head.

 

#

 

The workshop was chaos, as expected. Theodore Swinn organized his thoughts and projects his own way. Cynthia long ago concluded that he likely had undiagnosed ADHD. It would certainly explain why he seemed to need everything out in the open. If it wasn’t visible, it didn’t exist in his mind. A collection of cork boards with sticky notes and papers covered the walls. Hand-drawn sketches, blueprints, and other documents surrounded the cork boards. The workshop occupied the entire basement. A workbench ran along one wall, covered in tiny mechanical parts, small actuators, and circuit boards.

 

“He kept at it right up to the end,” Roland said.

 

Cynthia moved closer to the desk on the opposite side of the workshop. Her father’s computer and notebooks littered the desk’s surface. She stopped before it, looking down at the design development forms lying next to his notebooks. She didn’t know if it was new or old. Not that she cared. She stared at one design, its sharp edges meant to intimidate, it’s all-terrain triple-joined legs, its double swiveling guns.

 

Guns.

 

She wanted to scream, to shake him, but to what end now that only ashes remained?

 

Cynthia closed her eyes, wishing to be anywhere else other than this room where he summoned death and destruction through circuitry and coding. An invisible vice squeezed her lungs, and her heart raced. Even after all this time, her father’s work still shook her to her soul.

 

“These are great,” Roland said, holding up a set of sketches. “Can’t believe these aren’t classified.”

 

Cynthia glanced at the sketches he held up, identifying yet another iteration of little death machines.

 

“We should burn all of this,” she said.

 

Roland glared at her. “How can you say that?”

 

“How can you idolize this work? I’ve been there, Roland. I’ve cleaned their wounds  and held their hands as the light in their eyes fades.”

 

Roland pressed his lips together and looked away. “You choose to see only the dark side of it.”

 

“You choose to ignore the reality,” she spat back. “Human lives, people, snuffed out.”

 

“Would you rather they brought the fight to our shores? More terrorist attacks?”

 

Cynthia shook her head. “You can tell yourself whatever you need to so you can sleep at night. But that only means the blood is also on your hands.”

 

She turned from the desk and moved without thinking. 

 

“You done down here?” Roland called to her.

 

“I said burn it all. I don’t want any of it.”

 

Her feet took her back up the steps to the first floor. She paused at the top of the creaking stairs, looking around the nautical-themed interior of the house. Her mother’s decorative hand remained preserved, even though cancer stole her nearly thirty years ago.

 

It was hard not to slide back into being the little girl who had once dashed through the halls of this house. The aroma, the colors, the way the light glowed through the windows, took her back. The silence of this shell of a home transported her to her days of being young and alone while her father worked in the basement or was away.

 

Her eyes traveled to the sliding glass door, which overlooked the back porch and the woods beyond. The little girl inside her directed her feet out of the house, over the backyard, and into the woods. Would the old boulder still be there?

 

She found it, though it seemed to have shrunk over the years. She’d grown, of course, she reminded herself. The cold, rough surface still felt familiar to her hands, and she took a seat on it just as she used to.

 

Gazing up at the tops of the pine trees, Cynthia breathed in the cleansing air. The bit of sky visible through the canopy was a darker shade of blue now. If she just stared up at the heavens, maybe she could still be that little again, full of wonder and hope. Perhaps she still possessed some of the girl who believed in fairies and swore she saw them flying about in the woods, casting their beautiful glow here and there as they darted between branches.

 

For so long, she’d allowed herself the extravagance of belief. Her imagination, her dreams, her desire for something beautiful, something magical, something pure had been so strong back then. It filled her chest with a fluttering sense of expectation and possibility. But as she grew and visited the woods less, finding more reasons to get away from her family’s tiny home in central Massachusetts, it became harder to maintain the illusion of magic. Only dark enchantments lived here.

 

He claimed to be helping build a more peaceful world. But at what cost? The news footage of massive tank bots rolling through Middle Eastern cities or the tiny hornet bots, which rained sudden destruction in the form of poisonous stingers and small explosive charges, haunted her.

 

This was her father’s legacy.

 

He was lord of mechanical death, governed by algorithms that gave them disturbing levels of apparent intelligence. But what algorithm could give them any sense of right and wrong? Recalling the last argument with her dad, the deep sting of it still burned in her heart all these years later.

 

The tears gather in her eyes against her will and she wiped them away quickly. Looking up at the darkening sky, she let out a long sigh.

 

Something flitted between the branches above her. It glowed and darted back and forth. At first, Cynthia thought it was a firefly, but the chilled fall air reminded her it was the wrong season. She stared up at the canopy of pine needles and tried to spot the glow and movement again. She must have imagined it.

 

There it was again, flitting about between branches!

 

Then it darted into the open, hung just out of reach for a brief instant, and fluttered away. When it came back a moment later, two more joined it. They stopped and hovered over her. Another one appeared, then another. They danced around, circling and diving and fluttering.

 

The fairies floated before her.

 

Cynthia’s jaw fell open. She blinked to clear her eyes. Was she imagining this? The flitting, glowing fairies darted about like mere embers from a great fire imbued with a will of their own. Forgetting to breathe, Cynthia soaked in the mesmerizing spectacle. Years of doubt and it-was-just-my-active-imagination rationalizations evaporated.

 

She reached out, watching the tiny glowing bodies and their rapidly fluttering wings as they danced above her. One fairy floated down and circled her hand.

 

It faltered in the air, its glowing fading for an instant. Cynthia tried to reach for it, but it backed away. She withdrew her hand and observed as the fairy struggled to remain in the air. It turned to fly away, but before it could go more than a few feet, its light dimmed, and it dropped to the mossy ground.

 

Cynthia gasped and stared up at the other fairies dancing overhead. None moved to help their fallen sister.

 

She took a tentative step closer to the tiny sprite whose wings now glowed only faintly and moved with slow longing to fly, but no strength to lift it.

 

#

 

 “Is it true?”

 

Her father stood in the messy kitchen, holding a plate with suds. Cynthia glared at him.

 

“It’s nice to see you,” he said. “You don’t come by anymore.”

 

“I’ve been traveling,” Cynthia shook her head. “Don’t change the subject. Is it true? I wanna hear you say it.”

 

“What does hearing me say it accomplish?”

 

“Is it true?”

 

He swallowed and nodded. “It’s the work I do, honey. Not all of it. But yeah.”

 

An unwelcome, rage-filled tear slipped down Cynthia’s cheek. “Was it the money?”

 

“No,” he shot back. “I’m helping protect our country. I’m helping save the lives of soldiers.”

 

“By killing civilians.”

 

“I don’t make the tactical decisions on how any of this is used.”

 

“When I saw the leaked documents,” Cynthia said, her voice shaking. “I recognized your work right away. Mechanical death curses for the military-industrial complex. I’ve been protesting your work this whole time, and I didn’t even know it. I traveled there. I held a dying child in my arms that was stung by one of your drones.”

 

“I don’t make the decisions,” he shook his head.

 

“Yes, you do. You decided to create these things in the first place.”

 

“To save the lives of soldiers.”

 

“By taking other lives.”

 

“That’s how war works,” he said, setting the soapy plate down and crossing his arms.

 

She shook her head, and more tears came. Her throat tightened, and she feared she wouldn’t be able to get the next words out. “You were the one who taught me to question how things work. Do they have to work this way? You taught me to look for wonder and beauty. But this whole time, you’ve been crafting death machines. Who are you?”

 

“I’m the same person I’ve always been,” he threw his hands up. “I’m just in touch with how the world works and trying to do what I can to make it safer for us.”

 

Cynthia’s jaw dropped open. So many things ran through her head, but she couldn’t pull any of them out to speak to him at that moment. And would it have mattered? Would it have changed anything? Would he have listened after decades dedicated to creating stealthy killing machines?

 

Tears flowing freely now, Cynthia turned and walked out of the house.

 

#

 

Gently, Cynthia picked up the fallen fairy. Its cyan glow pulsed slowly as its wings flexed. The tiny eyes considered her. A blue dress covered the slender body of the fairy. Cynthia stared in shock, unable to believe what she held. It hardly weighed anything at all—a mere insect.

 

She blinked, sure she would wake up from this dream at any moment. But the fairy tilted its head and seemed to scrutinize her from her hand.

 

Awestruck, she dared not breathe for fear of blowing the weightless sprite away. Carefully, she brought her hand closer to her face and squinted at the fairy.

 

Sure enough, she recognized the pattern of nano-mesh material, which gave the wings their strength while remaining light. These were an older design, but the tech was effectively the same as the tiny drones which recently ripped through the air over Aleppo, diving like lightning to deliver a targeted explosive charge to the side of someone’s head or a poisonous sting to the neck.

 

The body was humanoid with the basic feminine hourglass shape one would expect for a fairy. But instead of feet, they stood on a flexible mesh able to grip various surfaces. The mechanical sprite had no arms. The face resembled a bug’s, with two large compound eyes composed of optical sensors.

 

Her throat tightened as she stared at the tiny mechanical sprite. Its light faded as it apparently struggled with a low battery charge. The little girl she had once been, who gazed in awe at a formerly much larger cloud of dancing fairies, now breathed out the last of her faith as the truth of this false magic rested in her hand.

 

Cynthia blinked back tears as she stared at the fairy. The flexing of the wings slowed enough that she discerned a spot on the left wing where the pattern didn’t match. Was that a patch? Had her dad actually come out and fixed this unit at some point?

 

The struggling fairy flexed its wings and then falter in her hand. Its light faded to nothing, and became still. Through tears, Cynthia watched the fallen fairy’s sisters dart about, flowing in and out of each other’s paths, creating a glowing, pulsing little cloud in the increasing gloom of the coming night.

 

Cynthia knew that should she rummage through the papers, computer files, folders, and books in her father’s workshop, she would eventually find the plans he’d made for these machines whirling before her. She might even find spare parts. But she didn’t need to. They were his, part of the illusion he invoked.

 

Had he made them for her?

 

Had this been a loving father’s way of giving his little girl some small dose of magic in a bleak world?

 

Wanting to believe that, she smiled at the glowing, swirling swarm, feeling for the briefest moment like she had when she was much younger, back when anything was possible and the world was essentially good and magic was real. But even now, the knowledge of how her father exploited this “magic” poisoned this moment and all her once innocent memories.

 

Against her better judgment, she stared at the swarm, hoping that the fairies would coordinate and do something—anything—which might be seen as one last gesture from her dad. Would they form a heart? Would they spell a message? Would they communicate anything to her? Or were they just dumb little flying machines that came out each night for a brief pre-programmed show until they drained their aging batteries, retiring to some hidden charging station to await the next day’s sunlight?

 

The little girl in her screamed. The grown woman broke. Tears flowed out faster than she could wipe them away, and she gasped as if drowning, her lung burning and chest tight. Rage washed over her, and she closed her hand around the fallen fairy. Were all things once pure and beautiful destined to be twisted by men bent on peace achieved through violence?

 

She squeezed the fairy, sure she could crush it. But she stopped. Opening her fingers, she scrutinized the lost drone that would never make it home to its charging station.

 

Over the next hour, one by one, the fairies darted off. They abandoned the one that had fallen and remained in Cynthia’s hand. The forest grew dark, and the cold air finally matched Cynthia’s fading hope. She exhaled a final cloud of disappointment and rose from the frigid rock lighter than when she first sat on it. Wiping a few remaining tears, she made her way down the gloomy path through the trees.

 

As she approached the house, her brother stepped out of the back door.

 

“There you are,” he called out. “Where have you been?”

 

“Saying goodbye,” she said.

 

Reaching him, she held out the now lifeless robotic sprite for him to examine.

 

“Holy shit,” he gasped. “That’s…”

 

He looked up at her and then back at the fairy.

 

“My magical fairies,” she said. “Still out there. Well, some of them. And they’re still filling the evening with wonder even if no one is watching.”

 

“That’s remarkable,” Roland said, taking the tiny drone in his hands. “They must have way outlived their projected lifespan. Dad put some serious craftsmanship into these. Can I see them?”

 

“They’re gone for the night,” Cynthia shook her head. “But come back tomorrow at dusk. Or any evening.”

 

He turned the fairy over and squinted at it. “Simple, elegant. None of the attachments of the military grade ones. I doubt it could maneuver with the same agility and these optical sensors are ancient. It wouldn’t be able to pick out a target—”

 

“It was made for something else,” Cynthia cut him off. “She was meant for wonder, not death,” Cynthia interrupted. “He had that ability, too. Maybe that’s the part of dad we should have been learning from all along.”

 

Roland looked up at her but said nothing. He offered the fairy back to her, but she gently pushed his hand away.

 

“Keep it,” she said. “I have the memories. You could learn from this about creating something just because it inspires wonder and awe and makes a little girl believe in magic.”

 

She walked past the house without looking back and climbed into her car.