It all began with corn fairies, I guess.
Titus Timson was fascinated by them, you see, would sit on the front porch every evening watching them in the fields, blue flashes in the moonlight, till his parents had to drag him inside. "Some day," he would say as they maneuvered him up the stairs, "I'm gonna catch me a corn fairy to be my very own and have right here in a jar beside my bed."
His parents would just nod and smile: Giles had worked the fields of the Timson farm outside St. Ives ever since he could walk, and Martine ran her family's shoe shop just off Water Street, so they both knew about corn fairies, had grown up with the same secret ambition--to catch one--without ever getting any closer than a cat gets to pond water.
One September night, though, a quarter of a harvest moon waxing outside, an hour after putting Titus to bed and considering dousing the lights, they heard a scratchy sort of knock at the front door. They looked at each other, Giles opened the door, and in hovered a band of corn fairies, straining over a bundle all wrapped in corn silk like a fly in a spider's web, a bundle they dropped onto the floor.
Martine found her voice first. "Forgive me, but may I ask what this, uhh, this thing is you've brought us?"
"Your son," came a surprisingly loud voice, and one corn fairy no bigger than a tall man's thumb whooshed up, overalls a bright blue, arms crossed, hammer and whisk broom hanging from its belt, its cap that of a corn fairy strawboss. "He snuck out into the fields with a mason jar, managed to capture one of my crew." The fairy shook its head. "You should have taught him better manners while you had the chance."
The Timsons stared a moment, then burst into frenzied questions, the strawboss answering quite calmly: no, Titus was not dead. He was merely wrapped. Yes, they could unwrap him, but no, they weren't about to. "This business is rough enough without peculiarly stealthy human kits. No, he stays wrapped. Maybe after the harvest--"
"But that'll be three months!" Giles couldn't keep from yelling. "How can he ... how will he live till then?"
"Not my concern." The corn fairy brushed at its overalls. "My concern is for this harvest and for my crew."
And then, well, I don't think I have to tell you that the Timsons pleaded with the corn fairies, got down on their knees begging and promising anything and everything till the strawboss held up a hand. "What you could do," it said, silver sparking at its wings, "and I doubt you can, but you could get us a cinnamon spiced pumpkin cake baked by Treel Shanda. Do that, and we could maybe consider letting bygones be bygones."
Martine could barely swallow. "But Treel Shanda's been dead for fifteen years! How are we supposed to--?"
"Yeah, I didn't think so." The sparks faded from the corn fairy's wings. "If we remember, we'll come back after the harvest." And the strawboss moved to join the other corn fairies buzzing over the corn silk wrapped bundle.
"No! Wait!" both Timsons shouted. The strawboss looked back, and Giles said, "We'll try, really! But if we do get one, how will you know? How can we contact--?"
"Believe me," the strawboss said, "we'll know. Nothing in this whole wide world ever smelled as sweet as a cinnamon spiced pumpkin cake from the hands of Treel Shanda. You find one, you'll see us around: count on it." The corn fairies all laughed, a sound like wind through corn tassels, and the swarm fluttered out through the open door and into the moonlight.
There wasn't much sleep in the Timson household that night, and the next morning, they headed into St. Ives carrying the bundle that was their son, Martine to open her shoe shop as usual, and Giles to head over to Shanda's Bakery.
Casheel Shanda runs the place now, and Giles told her everything. She brushed flour from her hands and frowned. "Well, I still use ma's recipe, but it's not like I have one of hers lying around from fifteen years ago."
Giles tapped his fingers on the display case. "Well, maybe a cinnamon spiced pumpkin cake from Treel Shanda's own recipe would be good enough. You think?"
"It couldn't hurt to try," Casheel Shanda offered.
But a voice behind them said, "It just might, though."
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