“Ruth?” my father repeated.

Ruth ignored him, studying me. “You haven’t seen a fairy.”

“Be good,” my father said, and shut the door behind him.

I thought it made sense that fairies would be small things, that crept on spindled legs sometimes instead of flying—that they would have narrow, fragile bodies, and be beautiful in a way that was neither human nor comforting, sharp at all their angles, and equipped with mandibles to sever the heads of their mates. Nothing magical is safe, nothing safe is magical. I knew that from reading fairy tales. I sat down on the air mattress in front of Ruth, and gave her the orchid mantis. “They look like that, so when they sit on plants everybody only thinks they’re bugs. Nobody bothers bugs. Their houses are under rosebushes. They climb down the roots, and they make tunnels.” I knew that fairies lived underground. It made perfect sense to substitute green hills for the little hillocks of dirt that rise around the trunks of bushes. The ground can hold anything. “If you see a mantis on the ground, you should always put it back on the bush.”

Ruth considered this, putting her head at an angle. “What about the scientists?”

This had occurred to me, and so I was proud of Ruth for thinking to ask it. “Sometimes they let entomologists look at them, because they like to have pictures of themselves drawn, and they like to be given food. But if they don’t like it, and someone bothers them, they kill them.”

“Really?”

I took the mantis back from Ruth, and I set it on the flat back of my hand, the sheen of its body on my own skin. “They climb on people’s faces while they sleep, and they put a spell on their nose and their mouth, so they die.”

* * *

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” Ruth said that night. We lay curled around each other on the air mattress, so that her head was under my chin, her shoulders pressed tightly into my chest. I was thinking about the anatomy doll, about someone coming to my aunt Vera’s bed in the middle of the night and opening her body like a treasure chest, petting their finger over the red-purple lining of her organs, shifting them about, so they could reach in and wrench out her fetus.

“We don’t have to sleep.”

“I didn’t see Mom when it happened,” Ruth said. Sometimes I felt that Ruth and I could read each other’s minds. We’d spent afternoons trying, sitting in the bean bag chairs in the library, thinking of questions and trying to answer each other. “But I went into her room, and there was some blood on her bed.”

I tried to imagine, without asking Ruth, the size of the bloodstain. For science, that year, I had been shown a two-liter soda bottle and told that most people have about three times that much blood in their bodies. One of those soda bottles, maybe, tipped over the bed, flowing deep into the sheets and down the sides of the mattress. “Is she gonna be okay?” I asked.