Eye Fairies

“Nurse Lola says the fairies in our eyes keep us safe—but I think they also see the secrets we’re not meant to know.”

"Gloria! Luke! Are you two alright?"

The voice cut through our laughter like scissors through paper. Sharp. Worried. The kind of voice that meant fun was over.

I knew that voice. Nurse Lola.

We both turned our heads at the same time, like puppets on the same string, and there she was—rushing down the corridor from the nurses' station, her white shoes squeaking against the tiles in that particular way that meant a nurse was moving faster than nurses were supposed to move. Her uniform was slightly crooked, like she'd stood up too quickly, and her face had that pinched look adults got when they were trying not to be angry but were definitely thinking about being angry.

The laughter died in my throat. Beside me, I heard Gloria swallow a giggle that turned into a hiccup.

Nurse Lola reached us in what felt like seconds, though the corridor was long enough that she must have been practically running. Her hands were already moving before she'd fully stopped—reaching down, checking, touching. Cool fingers on my forehead. Warm palm against my cheek. That quick, professional sweep of contact that all the nurses did, the one that could find a fever or a bump or a broken thing before you even knew it was there.

"Up you get," she said, and her voice was gentler now, the sharp edge softened. "Both of you. Let me have a look."

She helped us to our feet—Gloria first, then me. My legs felt wobbly, like they'd forgotten how to hold me up, and my shoulder throbbed where it had hit the floor. Gloria was limping slightly, favouring her left knee, but she was trying to hide it. She always tried to hide it when something hurt.

"Stand still," Nurse Lola instructed. "Don't move."

We stood. We didn't move. When Nurse Lola used that voice, you did what she said. Even Gloria, who never did what anyone said.

The penlight appeared from Nurse Lola's pocket like magic—one second her hand was empty, the next second there it was, small and silver, clicking on with a tiny snick. I knew what was coming. She did this every time something happened, every time we fell or bumped our heads or came back from somewhere we weren't supposed to be. The eye check.

"Look at me, Luke." She crouched down so her face was level with mine. This close, I could see the tiny lines around her eyes, the places where her skin folded when she smiled. She wasn't smiling now, but she wasn't frowning either. Her face was doing that careful neutral thing that nurses' faces did when they were thinking hard about something.

The light swept across my left eye, then my right. Bright enough to make me squint, to make my eyes water.

"Follow my finger," she said, and her finger moved slowly through the air in front of my face. Left. Right. Up. Down.

I followed it, trying not to blink too much.

She'd told me once what she was looking for. Not in doctor words—Nurse Lola never used doctor words with us, not the way some of the others did, throwing around big complicated terms like they forgot we were just kids. She'd said she was checking for the fairies.

"There are tiny fairies that live in your eyes," she'd explained, when I'd first come to the hospital and everything was scary and new. "They wave little lights to tell me you're okay. If the lights wave the same way in both eyes, the fairies are happy. If they wave different, the fairies are worried, and then I need to be worried too."

I'd believed her then. Part of me still believed her now, even though another part—the part that was getting older, that was learning how hospitals really worked—knew it was just a story. A nice story to make the checking less frightening. But I liked thinking about the fairies anyway. I liked imagining them in there, tiny glowing things behind my eyes, keeping watch.

"Good," Nurse Lola said, clicking off the penlight. "Fairies are waving just fine."

She turned to Gloria and did the same thing. Light in the eyes. Finger moving through the air. Gloria's face was patient, a little bored—she'd been through this hundreds of times, probably thousands. Five years of checks and tests and lights and fingers.

"Arms out," Nurse Lola said when she'd finished with Gloria's eyes.

We both stuck our arms out like scarecrows. She ran her hands down them, pressing gently, checking for the lumps and angles that meant something was broken underneath. Then our legs. Then she made us bend and twist and touch our toes, watching our faces for the tiny flinches that would tell her we were hiding something.

Her fingers found the bruise already forming on Gloria's knee—the skin was darkening, purple spreading under the surface like ink in water.

"You'll have a nice one there," she said, but her voice wasn't cross. There was something almost impressed in it, the way adults sometimes sounded when kids did something they weren't supposed to but did it well. "And you—" She touched the bump on the side of my head, and I winced. "You're going to have an egg. Ice pack for that, I think."

Only when she'd checked everything—every arm, every leg, every joint and bone and bump—did her face finally soften. The careful neutral melted away, and underneath it was something warmer. Something that looked almost like relief.

And then, like the sun coming out, she smiled.

That was enough to start the giggles again.

I tried to hold them in. I pressed my lips together so hard they hurt. But Gloria was already shaking beside me, her shoulders trembling, little squeaking sounds escaping through her nose. And once Gloria started, I couldn't stop myself. The laughter came bubbling up from somewhere deep in my chest, pushing past my clenched teeth, spilling out into the corridor.

Nurse Lola sighed, but it was the good kind of sigh. The kind that meant she wasn't really angry.

"Come here, you two," she said, and opened her arms.

We tumbled into her—Gloria from one side, me from the other. Her arms wrapped around us both, pulling us in close, and for a moment I couldn't smell anything except the smell of her. Hand sanitiser and something else, something faint and floral that I'd never been able to name. She always smelled like that. Safe. Clean. Like someone who would catch you if you fell.

"You need to be more careful," she said, her voice muffled against the top of my head. "Both of you. You're not like other children—your bones don't heal as quickly, your bodies don't bounce back the same way. Gloria, you know your platelets are low. You bruise if someone looks at you wrong. And Luke—" She pulled back enough to look at me, her eyes serious. "Your system is still figuring itself out. We can't have you banging your head on floors, alright?"

I nodded, even though I was still smiling. It was hard to feel properly told off when you were wrapped in a hug that smelled like flowers.

"What if you'd needed stitches?" she continued. "Do you have any idea how complicated that would be? The paperwork alone would take me the rest of the day."

"Sorry, Nurse Lola," Gloria said, in the voice she used when she wasn't sorry at all but knew she was supposed to be.

"Sorry," I echoed.

Nurse Lola's monologue continued—something about responsibility, about setting a good example, about how the younger children on the ward looked up to us—but my mind was already drifting. I found myself thinking about the fairies again. The eye fairies.

I wondered what they looked like. Were they like the fairies in picture books—tiny ladies with wings and sparkly dresses? Or were they something different, something stranger? Maybe they didn't look like people at all. Maybe they were just little balls of light, floating around behind my eyes, watching everything I saw.

Did they have jobs? Did they take turns, working in shifts like the nurses did? I could imagine them changing over at midnight—the day fairies going home to their tiny fairy houses, the night fairies arriving fresh with their little fairy lunchboxes.

What did eye fairies eat, anyway? Probably something small. Crumbs. Specks of dust. The tiny floaty things I sometimes saw when I looked at bright lights.

Did they get bored? Being stuck inside someone's eyeball all day, watching the same hospital corridors, the same white walls, the same ceiling tiles? I hoped they at least got to see my dreams. That would be more interesting. My dreams were always strange—full of colours and shapes and things I couldn't explain when I woke up. The fairies would probably like those.

Maybe they were the ones who made the dreams. Maybe that was their other job, when they weren't busy waving their little lights for Nurse Lola.

"—are you even listening to me, Luke?"

I blinked. "Yes."

"What did I just say?"

"Um." I searched for something, anything. "Be careful?"

Nurse Lola's mouth twitched. "Close enough."

Her eyes moved past us, toward the wheelchair lying on its side against the wall. The sight of it seemed to drain whatever was left of her lecture. The chair looked sad somehow, broken and abandoned, its one remaining back wheel pointing up at the ceiling like a question mark. The snapped wheel had rolled away and was leaning against the wall, like it had given up.

"My goodness," Nurse Lola said. "What on earth did you two do to it?"

"It wasn't our fault," Gloria said quickly. "The wheel was already loose. We just... tested it."

"Tested it."

"To see if it would hold."

"And it didn't."

"No." Gloria's face was perfectly innocent. "It didn't."

Nurse Lola stared at her for a long moment. I could see her trying to decide whether to laugh or sigh or launch into another lecture. Finally, she just shook her head.

"I'm going to need help with this one," she said, more to herself than to us. She reached for the two-way radio clipped to her belt, unclipping it with a smooth motion. Her thumb found the button. Her mouth opened—

"Do you need some help there, Nurse Lola?"

The voice came from behind us. Deep. Smooth. The kind of voice that made you turn around to see who it belonged to.

We all turned.

It was Dr Schofield.

He stood at the far end of the corridor, near the corner we'd just raced around. I didn't know how long he'd been there—watching us, listening, waiting. He had that way about him, Dr Schofield. He appeared in places. You'd think a corridor was empty and then suddenly he was there, like he'd stepped out of the wall itself.

He was tall. I always forgot how tall until I saw him again. Over six feet, with shoulders that seemed too broad for his white coat, arms that stretched the fabric when he moved. His shirt was blue today, short-sleeved, and I could see the muscles in his forearms as he walked toward us. His belt buckle caught the fluorescent light and flashed silver.

"Dr Schofield." Nurse Lola's voice did something strange. It went higher and softer at the same time, like a different person was speaking through her mouth. "I—we—the children had an accident. With the wheelchair."

"So I see." He was closer now, close enough that I could see his face properly. Square jaw. Straight nose. Hair the colour of sand, swept back from his forehead in a way that looked both messy and perfect. And his eyes—

His eyes were blue. Not regular blue, not sky blue or crayon blue or the pale blue of the veins on the back of Gloria's hands. This was deep blue, ocean blue, the kind of blue that travel brochures promised when they said things like escape to paradise. I'd seen those brochures in the waiting room, full of beaches and palm trees and happy people who weren't sick. Cruel things to put in a hospital, really. Dreams you couldn't have.

Gloria leaned over and grabbed my arm. Her fingers dug in hard enough to hurt.

"Look at him," she whispered, her voice tight and strange. "Look at his arms."

I looked. His arms were arms. Big arms, yes. Arms that looked like they could lift things, carry things, push wheelchairs up hills without getting tired. But they were still just arms.

"And his eyes," Gloria continued, her whisper getting higher. "Have you ever seen eyes that blue? It's not fair. It's like he's from a movie or something."

I didn't know what to say. Gloria was looking at Dr Schofield the way she looked at the pop star posters beside her bed—those glossy pictures of boys with floppy hair and perfect smiles that she kissed goodnight sometimes when she thought no one was watching.

"His teeth are so white," she breathed. "And his hair. Luke, look at his hair."

"I'm looking."

"Have you ever seen such perfect hair?"

I hadn't really thought about hair being perfect or not perfect before. Hair was just hair. It grew on your head and sometimes you had to wash it and sometimes mum cut it when it got too long. Dr Schofield's hair was yellow and it stayed where it was supposed to stay. That was all I could say about it.

But Gloria was acting like she'd seen an angel descend from heaven. Her cheeks were pink. Her eyes were wide. Her fingers were still digging into my arm like she'd forgotten she had hands.

Dr Schofield crouched down beside the wheelchair, examining the damage. His movements were smooth and easy, like everything he did was effortless. He turned the chair over, looked at the place where the wheel had snapped off, ran his fingers along the broken metal.

"Clean break," he said. "Should be fixable."

Then he stood—just lifted himself up in one fluid motion—and picked up the wheelchair like it weighed nothing. He held it one-handed, tilted against his hip, the way Mum would carry the laundry basket.

"I can take this down to maintenance," he said. "Save you the call, Nurse Lola."

Nurse Lola's face did something complicated. Her cheeks went red—not pink like Gloria's, but a deeper red, a red that spread down her neck and up to her ears. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. For a moment, no words came out at all.

I stared at her. Nurse Lola always had words. She had more words than anyone I knew, whole speeches worth of words about safety and bedtime and eating your vegetables and taking your medicine. But now she was standing there like someone had pressed her pause button, her radio still in her hand, her mouth working silently.

"That's—that would be—yes," she finally managed. "Thank you, Doctor."

Something was happening that I didn't understand. Something in the air between them, in the way Nurse Lola wasn't quite looking at Dr Schofield, in the way her voice had gone all wrong. It felt like standing at the edge of something, like when you walked into a room and knew immediately that the grown-ups had been talking about something they didn't want you to hear.

Gloria was still staring at Dr Schofield like he was made of chocolate and gold. I pulled my arm free from her grip, rubbing the place where her fingers had left marks.

"You're going to break my arm off," I muttered.

She didn't seem to hear me.

Dr Schofield's eyes found me. They were sharp, those eyes—sharp and bright and noticing. I always felt like he could see more than other people could see, like he was reading something written on my skin that I couldn't read myself.

"Luke," he said, and my name sounded different in his voice. Important, somehow. "Would you like to help me carry this down? You could bring the wheel."

He nodded toward the broken wheel, still leaning against the wall.

I looked at it. Then I looked at him. Then I looked at Gloria, whose face was cycling through emotions like a slot machine—surprise, envy, outrage.

"Me?" I said.

"If you'd like." His voice was gentle, the way adults' voices got when they were offering you a choice that wasn't really a choice. "It might be good to have some company. The basement corridors are long."

The basement. I felt something spark in my chest—excitement, curiosity, the particular thrill of being invited somewhere you weren't supposed to go. Patients weren't allowed in the basement. That was where maintenance lived, where they kept the old equipment and the broken things and the stuff they didn't want us to see.

But Dr Schofield was offering. Dr Schofield could take me.

"Okay," I said.

I walked over to the broken wheel and picked it up. It was heavier than I expected—solid metal, the rubber tyre still attached—and I had to hold it with both hands, clutching it against my chest like a shield.

When I turned back, Gloria's face had settled into a pout. Her bottom lip stuck out, her eyes narrowed, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked like a storm cloud shaped like a person.

I knew that look. It meant she was angry at being left out. Gloria was always the one who got to do the special things—she was older, she'd been here longer, she knew all the secrets. She was the queen of the third floor, and queens didn't get left behind while their knights went on adventures.

But this time, Dr Schofield had chosen me.

Something warm spread through my chest. It felt like winning, like being picked first for a team, like having someone see you—really see you—and decide you were worth something.

I raised my hand and waved at Gloria. Not a normal wave. A slow, deliberate wiggle of my fingers, the kind of wave designed specifically to annoy.

Her pout deepened. I could practically see steam coming out of her ears.

Behind me, I heard Nurse Lola make a sound—a laugh that she tried to turn into a cough, not quite successfully. And Dr Schofield—when I glanced up at him—was smiling. A small smile, just a curve at the corner of his mouth, but real. His eyes had that twinkle in them, the one that meant he found something funny, the one that made him look younger and less serious and almost like a normal person instead of a doctor.

"Come on then," he said, shifting the wheelchair to his other hip. "Let's go see if we can't get this fixed."

We turned to leave. Gloria's glare burned into my back like sunlight through a magnifying glass. I didn't look back.