Excerpt:

Torn Halloween banners hung limply from somebodys front gate, a reminder of a party that no one who attended was likely to remember much of, without the exception of a blonde fairy, holding stubbornly onto her wings and an empty bottle of something blue and sour tasting in one hand while she fumbled with the tiara which had become fastened to her head, wound between scalp, hair and bleach blonde hair extensions and knotted tightly. The bottle slid from between her fingers and smashed half heartedly into three pieces, lying there almost unnoticed. A heavy gust of wind, the first that evening, ripped the banners from the gate and the wings from her hands at the same moment the girl let out a triumhant cry, holding the tiara and several strands of long plastic hair up into the air. Noticing, the wings, she swore.

Two girls had followed her out of the house, and called her name: I think it could have been Abby, or Gabby. "Leave them", they called to her, watching the wings as they crashed down beside me, shut out from sight by the gates of the graveyard as I cowered behind a familiar tombstone. "Be careful- the ghosties will get ya..." the taller girl, the ghostly nurse, shouted, behaving in a manner which I took to be uncharacteristic of her, although her friends played along with the game. "Aaaaargh! Aaaargh! No..." Gabby or Abby screamed, miming somebody pulling her by her leg away from the reaches of the streetlights and into the darkness. I couldn't resist, and I reached for a leg in black tights and a pink stilletto as it came towards me and pulled hard. "Oh Jesus, Oh God, Oh My God GET OFF!" She yelled collapsing beside me and her friends laughed along. I laughed too, enjoying the joke. She scrambled to her feet searching the ground around her for the phantom who had pulled her to the floor. I laughed again and this time she heard. She shouted their names, and they heard the panic in her voice, came running. She met them at the gate and I watched them leave, the witch looking around nervously while the nurse just laughed at her companians. The place in my bones where my heart once was strained against it's phantom beating, and I almost believed that there was something inside. The fairy's wings lay nearby, discarded on the floor and I knew that a fairy without wings (or a tiara) was nothing. I lay them onto my tombstone, and pulled off a glove. The darkness picked out the pattern on them, and a ghostly glowing skeleton hand held them in place. I returned to the ground and waited.

The sky looks the same tonight as it does any other evening in Autumn, but the only days I know now are Halloween nights in the near darkness as these are the only days that I know I won't be alone. Other phantoms leave their graveyards and houses and roam the streets where I don't dare tread as though they belong there, among the living. Witches and vampires and ghosts and girls wearing short skirts with bunny ears and pirates and of course, fairies, come outside into the fresh living air and I long to join them and belong with them.

Today, I am alone. People walk by the gates of the graveyard, which sits towards the fringes of a small town I barely know. On such an ordinary day as this, will my fairy return for the wings she must be missing desperatly by now? And as I turn this thought over in my head, she's there.