She collapsed in the garden, her arms on a stone bench with her head buried in them and wept. And then—a flash of light! She lifted her head to see—
“Ahem,” I said.
“Who are you?” she said.
I looked down at myself. Yep, poofy blue dress, wand, even the darned little wings were all in place. How hard was this to figure out? “Your fairy godmother,” I explained, wondering—not for the first time—how I had ended up with this particular assignment. Oh, I know, I told Maggie I’d cover for her, but I thought she meant the little stuff, morning dew or frost or something like that. There’s a reason Management pulled me off regular human-contact cases, not that I didn’t relish the chance to show them what I could do.
Why was it always something like “Oh!” never “Bless you, kind lady,” never “Thank you so very much I hope you didn’t have plans tonight.”
but this wasn’t the right time of year for them, and probably not even the right hemisphere.
and put a little extra effort into making the wheels fancy, just because it was her.
(dogs are seldom useful for much else, even when you make them human) and the skinny old nag in the barn for a coachman (who better than a horse to know how to handle a coach?)[s].[/s]
I bustled her into the coach—I was right, the orange did look deliciously disgusting surrounding her sparkly, beaming self—rattled off the rules (back by last stroke of midnight, everything will revert, blah blah blah,)[s],[/s] and gave one of the horses a slap on the rump to get the whole thing moving.
None of them ever figured it out. It took so much more than a pretty dress and some magic to make something like that work out.
*is a little shell-shocked*
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