One morning she wakes up and there is a full vine creeping across the floor. It reminds her drowsily of the philodendron she grew in a water glass at her old job. The close, buzzing cubicle, the noise of the air-conditioning system seem to belong to a different universe than this where nature is grooming her like a child.

The dirt is a carpet and the seedlings a pattern that she can’t keep combing out. She gives up and the sprouts grow hardy and rustle as she walks by, from the bed to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the fire, from the fire to the bed. Her brown bare feet never seem to come clean.

Another month and she is watering the floor. She pours a glass over her own head, her hair dirty enough to sprout seedlings. The vines that grow up over her arms and legs at night retreat in the morning, and leave her with grooved skin like sleep marks, her calves and forearms imprinted with phantom corduroy. The oak tree rustles, looming, its branches bending to caress the roof of the cabin.

And one morning Shelly wakes to see that her blue eyes have turned a vibrant green, that there are seedlings growing out of her hair, that her feet are brown and peeling like young birch, that her arms have had dead vines wrapped and clinging to them for who-knows-how-long, and that her brain has derailed from its lopsided Shelly-track and begun ticking solidly with the seasons and the weather. She sways before the mirror, the wind whistling around her limbs.

No.

She screeches, she gets the push broom and the shovel and the hoe, and she sweeps all the dirt out of the house. She spends hours in the bathtub, refilling the water and turning it brown, scrubbing at her matted hair and her peeling feet. She heats up a can of vegetables and bites into the artichokes with vengeance, glaring at the oak outside the window. “I am not you,” she hisses at the forsythia bush.

When they drew near the front door, it opened, and a woman who could only be the fairy queen appeared. Her skin was a pale shade of lavender, and she was wearing a translucent gown made of what appeared to be spiderwebs. Her hair was wild, and her eyes, rather than having color at the irises, were iridescent, with colors always shifting beneath.

“You must be Naromin,” she said. “I see you have met my daughter, Miranda.”

“Met and fallen in love with,” Naromin said. “You must help me to convince Miranda to marry me.”

The fairy’s face changed, and Naromin caught a glimpse of her enormous wings as they shifted behind her. “I do not convince my daughter to do anything,” she said with a trace of venom. “She has a mind of her own, and she can make it up as she chooses.”

Naromin had used his wit as well as his sword to defeat his enemies, and he changed tack immediately. “Of course,” he said. “I only meant that I wish she would make her mind up to marry me. She would gain so much by having me as her husband. She would be married to the bravest and most handsome man in the world.”

“And certainly the least modest,” sniffed the fairy. “What does she have to say about you?”

Miranda raised her hands, and dust from the air, the floor, and the nearby surfaces raised itself to form words. “I politely refused him, Mother,” she said.

“Well, then, that’s the end of it,” the fairy said.

She started with the feet, placing them apart from each other and facing the same way. She took the right leg out of her closet, and then she stopped short, wondering how she was going to get all the pieces to stick to each other. Would she need glue? Would the heavy body be supported by these stacked pieces?

She decided to try to put them together without glue first, because after all this was not a mere sculpture. (Although her concern about what the yellow man would be when she had finished constructing him was buried, forcefully, in the back of her mind, Lynnie still understood that she could not expect an inanimate result from this project.) She knelt to join the leg to the foot. The edges skeetered against each other for a few moments before there was a low “click” and the foot was connected to the leg, seamlessly. When Lynnie picked up the leg, the foot came with it, as if they had never been apart.

Ten minutes later, she had assembled the body, and it stood there headless, a statue. She had the head in her hands, and she looked at it for a long time before she stood on her tiptoes and affixed it to the body. The yellow man was about eight inches taller than she was.

Nothing happened for a moment, and then the air in the room changed and a shiver passed over the yellow man’s body. His skin began to glow, and the bump at his legs’ apex began to dissolve into something more human. He cracked open his eyes and shook his head, and then he looked at Lynnie.

“What is this?” he asked, in a smooth, lovely voice.