HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2026
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY ROBERT ISAACS

My daughter came barreling into the living room, all out of breath, and squealed something about a fairy in her bedroom and could I please remove it? So I got a juice glass and a piece of thin, stiff cardboard and headed upstairs.

“Where is it?” I called down to Tiffany, who was hovering nervously at the bottom of the steps.

“Down low in the corner. By the beanbag. I won’t be able to sleep, Daddy!”

“I’ll find it.”

“Don’t squish it!”

“Of course not.” Despite her fears, she’s a tender-hearted kid, which I love. Fairies, no matter how malevolent, must be caught and released off the back porch. Somehow this became Dad’s job, not Mom’s. Her mom was away at a conference anyway.

The fairy had moved by now, so I stood in the center of the room and rotated, trying to tune into my peripheral vision. Their glow is faint, a couple watts at most; it’s easier to perceive at the edge of your gaze. Nothing so far. Halfway through the second revolution I thought I glimpsed a flicker above the closet door, near where the wall meets the ceiling. Looking directly, I saw nothing, but when I averted my eyes the hint was back. I tiptoed closer.

There she was, a juvenile female fairy, iridescent, motionless but for her trembling wings. They are, in a weird way, beautiful—this one wore some kind of flowing jade-green sari, and had woven minuscule rosebuds into the plaits which framed her delicate face. Her wings were translucent. Her eyes were downcast, as if by not seeing me she could ensure the reverse as well. She held still as I approached: five feet . . .four . . . three. Slowly I lifted my hand with the cup above my head, stretching my arm toward the ceiling and gauging her height on the wall. Within reach, I figured. I kept approaching steadily.

I have never understood why there’s a whole wall of books celebrating fairies at the children’s bookstore. Fairy Wonderland, Fairies In Gondolas, Felicity Fairy and the Fabulous Fortune, Fairy cookbooks, Fairy journals—all of them illustrated lavishly with embossed glitter, their titles in tall, curlicued script. Have none of those authors ever had a fairy chew through their electrical wiring, trying to boost their sparkle? We have a cat but she’s useless, too slow for old fat mice, much less young nimble fairies. And my wife won’t let me use any sprays—not out of sympathy for the fairies, but because she hates keeping poison anywhere in the house.

We did try one of those humane traps once. Laughable.

So it was an endless, a la carte battle: me armed with a juice glass or whatever else was at hand, the fairies armed with patience and innumerable numbers. And wands.

Tonight’s visitor finally stirred and pointed her tiny, quarter-inch wand toward my face. The determination which flashed in her pinprick eyes would have been daunting if it weren’t so pitiful: the protective shield which emerged from the tip of the wand was as insubstantial as a soap bubble, and nowhere near as strong. She seemed dumbfounded when my glass popped through it and clanged onto the wall, trapping her. Immediately she flew into a frenzy, bouncing from one side to the other, heedless of whatever damage she was inflicting on her gossamer wings. It’s always this way. I dutifully release every intercepted fairy back into the wild, but not before their own desperate panic injures them to the point of no recovery. By the time I get them outside and across the lawn to the edge of the woods and tap them out of the glass, they’ve lost any power of flight or self-defense and simply cling to whichever twig or blade of grass they fall upon. I assume, though I don’t stick around to watch, that they’re now easy prey for whichever night predator finds them first—bat? owl? centipede? The whole thing is a charade to ease the conscience of my daughter.

This one, though, as I shook her feathery weightlessness out of the glass and she drifted down . . . began to sing.

It was the tiniest sound you can imagine, yet perfect and clear, like fine-point calligraphy inscribed in the air. The melody—even the set of pitches, the scale itself—was unfamiliar, and there didn’t seem to be any words: it was simply pure lament, the sorrow of a creature which has known beauty and understands it will know no more. I stopped, halfway across the lawn, and listened. I didn’t turn around.

When the song abruptly cut off, I felt the loss in every cell. I am monstrous. But I love my child, with a fierce protectiveness whose intensity startled me the moment she was born, and any love as sharp as this must cleave the world into those we cherish, and those who might threaten them. To love expansively—to love all—is impossible; love is a narrow beam, a laser, not a floodlight. Nothing hardens a man as much as love.

“Did you get it, Daddy?”

I did. For you.