Jack was silent as I left the kitchen. I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over my head, waiting for him to make a move. I retched, but nothing came up. I swallowed and retched again. My throat felt like it was filled with cuts, raw and inflamed from all the vomiting. Rage was surging in synchronicity with the nausea, intensifying with each passing second. I clutched the bedsheets between my fists and squeezed. “Jack?” I called.

“Yeah,” he snapped, the chair legs scraping against the kitchen floor as he stood. “I’m going.”

When Jack returned from the store, I found the blueberries weren’t the same as the ones I’d had when I was a child. They were much larger than the wild ones we had foraged, and pale and tasteless in comparison.

Sitting at the table, I told Jack how each August my family would hike deep into the headlands of our hometown to pick blueberries and partridgeberries.

“Everyone needs to fill one bucket before we go home,” my father instructed, passing each of us an empty ice cream container.

“Why can’t we just buy berries at the supermarket?” I whined.

“Because I said so,” my father replied.

Walking along the gravel path toward the headlands, I was careful not to venture too close to the edge. The landscape was vibrantly green, peppered with wildflowers of orange, white, and yellow. I plucked a dandelion and held it close to my mouth, and with one large exhale the fluffy white seeds dispersed, gliding gently through the air like feathers.

The land dipped and hollowed in unexpected places, and I stumbled into a groove at one point, rolling my ankle before catching myself. Piles of flat rocks in asymmetrical squares—foundations of former houses—lay throughout the open space, overgrown and forgotten.

I picked a partridgeberry and squeezed it between my thumb and forefinger, watching as the deep red juice trickled down my hand like blood.

My grandmother had told me stories about the faeries. “They’re fallen angels that were kicked out of heaven by God,” she explained as I sat on her knee.

“Why were they kicked out?”

“Because they were too bad for heaven, but not bad enough for hell,” she said. “So they are stuck on earth, and they play tricks on humans to entertain themselves.”

My grandmother warned me that the faeries would lead you astray when you were picking berries. They sang beautiful melodies to entrance you, and you would become hypnotized by it. Carrying bread was supposed to protect you from the faeries because it was blessed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the bakers.

In the community where my grandmother grew up, a baby went missing from his stroller. The entire town converged to try and find him. They organized search parties and sent people into the forest to systematically scour the land.

After searching all day without any luck, the parents returned home to find a deformed creature lying in the baby’s stroller. The faeries had taken their baby, and replaced it with a changeling.