Everything Will Be Just Fine

By Alison Wassell

Photo by Jeroen Bosch on Unsplash

Listen to Alison reading her story:

“Everything will be just fine,” I tell my daughter, when The Big Bad Wolf serves us with an eviction notice and gives us two months to find somewhere new to live.

Instead of a bedtime story we scroll through Rightmove, searching for our next rental property.

“That one,” she says, pointing at The Gingerbread House. Her head is nestled on my shoulder and, wanting to send her to sleep on good thoughts, I make a promise I don’t know how to keep. In Fairyland, we are minor characters in other people’s tales, and the rent is way beyond our means.

What’s called for is magical thinking. I max out my credit card ordering a shed load of ingredients and paying extra for express delivery. Within an hour a courier arrives, staggering under the weight of flour and brown sugar, ginger, molasses, cinnamon, eggs and butter.

All night long I beat and blend and knead and beat and blend and knead then roll and cut and bake and roll and cut and bake. When worries about structural integrity and problems with pests and insects creep into my head I remind myself that my daughter believes in me, and that all things are possible. I go to bed as the sun is rising, hoping that elves will arrive as I sleep to help me out.

I wake to find the pieces of our new abode as I left them, except that some of them have cracked and crumbled as they cooled. Undaunted, I promise my daughter it will be ready by the time she gets home.

Returning from the school run I make buckets of royal icing, then mortar and ice and embellish and mortar and ice and embellish. The house I have promised looks like something constructed by a ham-fisted five year old in the dark. Telling myself to be my own fairy godmother I wave a wooden spoon over my construction, make a wish, and go to collect my little girl in the knowledge that, somehow, everything will be just fine.

She scampers eagerly into the kitchen without taking off her coat, and the ensuing silence tells me all I need to know. I rush in to see that the whole thing has collapsed and that not all things are possible, no matter how much she believes in me. When I look at her I can tell that she sees it too. I hear the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing at our door and there’s nothing I can do about it, no spell I can cast, no magic mantra I can chant, no frog I can kiss. This is Fairyland after all, where bad things happen to good people, grandmas get swallowed whole and small children are left to take their chances in the woods.

My little girl takes my hand and squeezes it.

“Everything will be just fine,” she says.

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Alison Wassell is a micro, flash and short story writer from North West England. She has been published by Fictive Dream, Bath Flash Fiction Award, FlashFlood Journal, Does It Have Pockets, Gooseberry Pie and elsewhere. She was Highly Commended in the 2024 Bridport Prize for flash fiction.