A Horror Story

I hear a strange noise coming from the bathroom adjacent to my office. It sounds like pipes clanking softly. Or small chains dragging gently, but frenetically.

Brigid O’Donnell

“She is SO beautiful and SO cool,” my daughter says of the fairy doll, moments before it whips into flight. Unbidden, it shoots from my daughter’s hands directly into a wall with such force that its body splits into three parts. The kids and I scream in horror. The legs lie in one place; the decapitated torso and wings in another; the head, eyes staring, alone. It’s grotesque but fixable. I screw the pieces back together and we try again for controlled flight. 

I’m relieved my daughter likes the doll even though it’s clearly defective. But I’m a little nervous, too. My daughter is only seven. Her knowledge of fairy lore is appropriately limited to the side of the Good Fairy: Tinkerbell; The Tooth Fairy; her grandparents’ fairy garden where silly notes appear, requesting cookies.  

What my daughter thinks fairies are like

My understanding is more nuanced.  I know about the fae. I have read ye olde fairy tales. Celtic stories about dark magic and mischief and punishment run in my veins. 

What I suspect fairies are like

I don’t trust this doll.

“I don’t really trust this one,” I told my daughter as we looked at the online description. I had gleaned this skill with age and experience: knowing in my gut that the image online wouldn’t match reality. The provider name was off, somehow. The price was too good. But my little girl wasn’t—isn’t—retail internet-literate yet. 

To her, Amazon is magical in a cotton candy and fairy dust kind of way. You enter a few words and whatever you dream of appears on the screen! You enter a few numbers and the thing from the screen comes to your home!! 

I agree with her that Amazon is magical but, as with fairies, I know more about magic. I know it’s braided with darkness. I know that Amazon is not just a fairyland, but Faerie; a fantastic, eerie place to navigate with watchful care.

“Please, oh please!” she begged. “It’s only eleven dollars!” I wavered. It was her money. She had been gifted an Amazon gift card and knew just what she wanted: “A fairy that you control with your hand! It flies wherever you go!”

The fae aren’t pets, though they may act the part when it suits. But I didn’t tell her this. After all, it was just a doll. And anyway, if it came broken or different than she expected it would be a good lesson about online shopping.  

“Ok,” I acquiesced. “If that’s the one you want.”


I showed her how to enter the numbers that would bring her dreams to life.

A tiny On switch brings the fairy to life. It is a remote-controlled aircraft shaped like a woman with wings and slender arms. Small red and blue lights flash in its tulle skirts. A hum of energy presses into its wings. Ostensibly, once switched on, the doll will hover over a controller’s palm. In reality, it flies wherever the hell it wants in short, violent bursts while the kids shriek and laugh. It takes a few flights to avoid having to reassemble the pieces of its shattered body. The kids are all in on the action, out of breath from laughing and chasing it over couches and across tables, trying to stop it from knocking over the TV or scratching the window. 

“I don’t think,” my daughter wheezes through giggles, “that she’s very good at flying!”

But she doesn’t seem disappointed in her purchase. 

The day after the fairy arrives, my daughter tucks it back into the box (“her bed,” she insists), for safekeeping while she spends the day at school. She leaves the box on the kitchen counter so she can see it right away when she gets home. 

I forget all about the doll in the morning rush. When the house is finally quiet, I refill my coffee. It’s a dark morning, stormy gray fall approaching, so the flashing lights that appear in my periphery are especially bright. I’m surprised to see the doll blinking red and blue from within its box on the counter. 

“Huh,” I think. “They must have forgotten to turn its switch off.”  I pull it out of the box and hunt for the teeny tiny switch. 

It is firmly, decidedly, “Off.”  

My brow furrows. The doll looks at me with wide eyes and flickers the tiniest bit, a quick tug of its wings.  

I flip the switch to “On,” thinking a reset might do the trick. The fairy explodes into action, spinning from my hand into the wall. It clatters to the floor and lays there twitching, flashing. I pick it up and turn the switch back to “Off.” It continues twitching and flashing. It continues to stare at me.

I put it back in the box. I put the box in the bathroom. I close the door.

It’s not as easy to close the Pandora’s box of Amazon. My daughter asks that evening if we can go online again and “just look.” She wants to get ideas about what she might like to buy with her remaining money.  Her young mind imagines that it’s like the Toys R Us of my own youth: like she can look at a limited number of shelves and get a few good ideas. She doesn’t understand the endlessness of Faerie, nor the traps it sets. 

I do. I know that it’s a labyrinth. I know that the labyrinth of Amazon connects with the wider internet labyrinth beyond. I know that within this labyrinth are many centers, each with its own minotaur. Some monsters are small—brands that sell knockoffs and broken items—fairy mischief, really. But many are darker. 

Sweatshops, child labor, fulfillment centers, server farms. 

Addiction, debt, landfills filled entirely with fast-fashion and broken toys. 

Pornography and online gambling.  Social media and trolls. 

Faerie.

It’s incumbent on me to teach my seven year old about this, but I don’t know how. How do we educate our children about internet safety? How do we talk about Faerie when we barely understand it ourselves?  They’ll be pulled in whether we like it or not. How will they navigate? How will they avoid the worst parts of it?

“Maybe,” I tell my daughter, “You should wait until there’s something you really need. Then you can look just for that thing. Amazon is really big. If you look for ideas you’ll buy stuff you don’t need, and then when you really, really want something, you won’t have that money anymore.”

“Oh, but I already know something I want!” She tells me happily. “Our babysitter was looking at stuff the other day and I saw these really pretty jewels.”

My stomach flips with the realization that sometimes my husband and I are not even the ones walking her to the internet’s gates. We might not see her off the first time she encounters the minotaurs. We may never know the monsters she faces.

When our kids have a nightmare, we can pull them into bed with us. We can protect them.

When our kids enter the dream of the internet, we could lose them.

There is no manual, no one who knows how to do this, although Faerie abounds with Instagrammers and TikTokkers who tell us they do. They invite us inside the castle with promises to help us parent.

All we can do is walk our kids to the gates and stand with them there. We can show our daughter the horizons and warn her about what we’ve heard.  She’s already sneaking through the fence. Someday, she’ll wander further in. I hope when that day comes, we’ll have done enough. 

It’s late at night. The kids and my husband have gone to sleep. I hear a strange noise coming from the bathroom adjacent to my office. It sounds like pipes clanking softly. Or small chains dragging gently, but frenetically.  

“The cats,” I tell myself.  “It’s just the cats. They’re in there pawing at something.”

The noise stops and starts. Short bursts, like something clawing against the door. Just then, I notice both cats curled feet away from me at the edge of the couch. 

I know I shouldn’t look. I know how horror stories go. But I’m a pragmatic homeowner and better make sure there isn’t a pipe on the edge.

I get up, cross the office, and slide open the door.

There, on the floor, lies the fairy. It twitches and buzzes its wings, flashes red and blue, and watches me through dead eyes.