Fern became a seasoned traveler.
She learned to put up with a lot of crap, as long as she got the manic contact high and psychic relief that comes with being far from home.
And as she moved around the world, she collected more news.
Fern brought back this news in physical formats.
At first it was books, which eventually turned into other forms of media. Newsbooks, broadsides, wire recordings, shellac and vinyl records, audio cassettes, magazines, newspapers, reel-to-reel recordings, LaserDiscs, CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, HD DVDs, Blu-ray Discs.
This is how Celia learned about Richard Johnson and Tom a Lincoln.
Unlike the sojourns of the island’s other women, Fern’s trips abroad were embraced by the residents of Fairy Land.
There was a simple reason.
As soon as Fern left the island, her mood stopped influencing their lives.
During Fern’s seventh trip abroad, which was supposed to be for six months, but lasted about two years, the residents of Fairy Land revised their previous opinion on Fern’s forays away from the island.
They had noticed a material change in the quality of their life.
It wasn’t anything that anyone could explain.
It wasn’t anything that had a definite beginning or end.
But there was a difference in the air, in the very luster of the trees, in the smell of things, in the crispness of life.
It was as if the island had entered into a long, flat period of depression.
People went through the motions, people did what they always did, but something was off. There was a pointlessness that made a mockery of the simplest actions.
Without Fern, the women of Fairy Land had been stripped of magical charm.
They were seeing life as it was.
They were witnessing existence with a dead honest clarity.
And life was brutal.
When Fern returned to the island, the depression lifted.
The magical charm returned.
Here then was Fern’s version of the bitter twist in the faery stories and folk tales that mortals used to tell each other before the world anesthetized itself with prescription opioids, anal gangbang pornography, and the illusion of individual freedom in the pyramid of global order.
Without Fern, the taste of the Queen’s honey was neither sweet nor bitter.
The sacred oak groves went unkempt.
The birdsong rang hollow.
The lamps burned less bright.
The lesbianism evoked orgasms that offered all the dull-eyed joy of being frigged off inside a stripmall swingers’ club.
A deal was struck.
Fern would still leave Fairy Land, but for no period longer than it took for Fairy Land to be stripped of its magical charm.
Which was roughly a year.
All of which brings us to the Year of the Froward Worm, which roughly corresponded to 2017 AD, 1438 AH, and 5777 AM.
Fern had left Fairy Land about eighteen months earlier, during the Year of the Misplaced Butter.
She’d told everyone that she was going to Los Angeles, which was a city on the west coast of the United States of America, the warrior nation that had made a cottage industry of transforming illiterate Muslim peasants into char and bone.
Los Angeles was responsible for a disproportionate amount of the media produced in the United States of America.
The women of Fairy Land were well versed in this media.
They had magicked up an Internet connection and used it to pirate television shows and films produced in Los Angeles, which they then watched on a television they’d magicked up out of some old twigs and a bit of wool.
Fern had visited Los Angeles on several occasions. None of the other women from the island had visited Los Angeles.
In the Year of the Misplaced Butter, Fern announced that she was returning to the city.
It’d been about five years since her last visit.
“You will leave us for the full year?” asked Celia.
“Yes,” said Fern. “But worry not, Mother, I shall return as ever.”
Fern did not return. She was gone well into the Year of the Froward Worm, which roughly corresponded to 2017 AD, 1438 AH, and 5777 AM.
Flatness settled on Fairy Land.
Celia looked out at her kingdom. All she saw was the citizenry’s empty faces and the graying of the flora and fauna. The lesbianism was mega-fallow.
“How long has my daughter been gone?” Celia asked her court advisors.
“By our counts,” said the Chieftess of Celia’s High Council, “One year, seven months, and six days.”
“Have efforts been made to contact her?” asked Celia. “There has been no response, my queen,” said the Chieftess. “We must go and find her.”
Chapter Three
How Fairy Land Escaped the Clutches of Global Capitalism
The Twenty-First Century AD was full of people who had filthy hands.
In some places, like rural Bangladesh, the filthy-handed people were no different than Orson, the imaginative man who’d used early medieval hygiene to assassinate the Red-Rose Knight.
Their hands were covered with shit.
The exploitive global hierarchy of capitalism had denied them the basic mechanisms of modern life.
They had no plumbing.
The people who exploited the global hierarchy also had filthy hands.
But their hands weren’t covered with shit.
Their hands were stained with the blood of the poor, which, like climate change and Islamic-themed terrorism, was a semi-accidental byproduct of exploiting the global hierarchy.
There were a lot of explanations as to why capitalists liked exploiting the global hierarchy.
Some of these explanations were purely psychological.
Some of the explanations were entirely about money.
Some explanations attributed an innate evil to the global capitalists.
But the most logical explanation, really, was that people became global capitalists only after they’d entered a secret contest to see who could own the ugliest house.
Reader, look into your heart.
Pore through your memories.
When was the last time you went to a really rich person’s house and found it anything but hideous?
Another reason why global capitalists kept rural Bangladeshis covered in shit is that keeping rural Bangladeshis covered in shit ensured an unequal distribution of the world’s wealth and resources, with a disproportionate amount of that wealth going to the global capitalists.
And it was an open secret that the acquisition of vast wealth was the quickest way for a human to become a supranatural being.
It was a documented scientific fact that, after an individual had accumulated vast wealth, then they reached what was called the Cash Horizon.
Beyond the Cash Horizon, the wealth-accumulating individual was transformed into a supranatural being.
In other words: the rich were not human.
If you’re wondering why the rich felt the need to become supranatural creatures, then good for you!
It’s the obvious question.
And here’s the answer: there was a sense that by becoming supranatural creatures, the rich could conquer death and thus avoid their certain destination of Hell.
But even with the Cash Horizon, the rich still died.
Death remained unconquered.
And Hell was filled with the rich.
So don’t say that this book lacks a happy ending.