Burger Fairy

“It was my bed before it was your food."

“Oh, hell.”

My girlfriend looks up from the styrofoam box placed neatly in her lap. There’s already a season-speckled fries pinched between her fingers, and another half-chewed behind her pursed lips.

“What?” She doesn’t bother swallowing before she speaks.

I don’t bother to critique her poor etiquette as I have larger concerns than the fact her hunger has seemingly deleted the concept of don’t speak before you swallow from her mental data banks. I sigh as I hold open the lid of my own styrofoam box open, glowering down at the contents inside. A generous portion of hot fries, gleaming fresh with oil and liberally seasoned in a light-brown dusting of various mystery seasonings, are piled in the largest compartment of the box, and in the smaller side-pocket sits the burger I ordered, nestled in the unfurled silver wrapping it came in and the bun peeled back by my free forefinger and thumb. It’s perfectly adequate. Agreeably sized. Hot. Fresh. Everything I want to see in a burger is present in the specimen before me. But it isn’t a matter of what isn’t there, so much as what is; an extra helping of protein I’m not going to eat.

“What is it?” my girlfriend asks again, her curiosity unsated.

My lips peel back in a seething grimace. “It’s one of those burger fairies.”

From behind the lenses of her glasses, her eyes go wide. Her chewing stops as her jaw freezes in place.

“Seriously?”

She doesn’t wait for confirmation; she’s on her feet and hurrying around the bench, lording over my shoulder with childish mix of curiosity and wonder.

The fairy is sitting up on the burger patty, but only barely - she’s slumped forward, swaying slightly from side to side as tiny lids with feathery white lashes flutter furiously in a futile attempt to remain conscious. Small legs dangle over the side of the burger and rest against the bottom bun. She uses one of her arms to prop herself up and while the other is wrapped firmly in a vice-like grip around the neck of a small, plush-filled bear. Despite having been curled up beneath a greasy, buttered bun, oozing melted cheese, her silver-spun hair is untouched by filth. It’s not even wet. Her creamsicle orange dress, with all of it’s ruffles and bows and lace, is similarly without stain or blemish, if not a bit wrinkled from being slept in.

It’s the magic that keeps her pristine. It doesn’t make sense, but nothing much about fairies does. Ask them to explain, and the most enlightening answer you can expect to get is, Don’t worry about it.

Behind me, my girlfriend makes a high, keening noise that sounds as if she’s transmitting it directly into my ear canal.

“O-o-oh my Go-o-od,” she trills in a soft voice. “She’s adorable!”

“And she’s also on my burger,” I grumble.

I let the lid of my box fall back, freeing my hand so that I can put it right up to the little fairy’s face. She jumps a little as I snap my fingers.

“Hey.”

I keep snapping my fingers for as long as it takes the fairy’s wits to catch up with her body. She sits up a bit straighter. Her rapid blinking slows. She stretches a little and her face scrunches up a distinctly annoyed expression as I continue the auditory assault on her small ear, each snap likely as loud as a gunshot to something her size. My girlfriend says something about not being rude that’s mostly lost on me. How am I being rude, I ask myself - I’m not the one taking an afternoon nap on someone’s lunch.

“Good morning, starshine,” I say to the fairy, decidedly unkind in my delivery. “The earth says hello.”

The fairy replied with a long, throaty groan, not unlike the sound one of the aggrieved human teenagers she resembles might make when roused from sleep at two in the afternoon by an irritated parent. She lets her head fall back and fixes me with a heavy-lidded glare from golden eyes.

“Wha-a-a-at?” Her voice is appropriately high and girlish, tinged with the clinging fuzz of the throat that comes from being woken prematurely. “What’s your -” She pauses to yawn. For something so small, she makes a disproportionate amount of noise. “What’s your problem? I’m trying to sleep, here.”

“Yeah, well, you’re trying to sleep on my food.”

The fairy glances back over her shoulder, as if to confirm hat she is, indeed, still where she was when she slipped off into dreamland.

“Yeah, well, it was my bed before it was your food.”

“Did you pay for it?”

The fairy slowly shakes her head.

“Okay, so I did paid for it - I paid way too much for it for you to be sleeping on it, so, ipso facto, it’s my food, now. Not your bed.”

My girlfriend speaks my name in an admonishing tone while the fairy continues to moan and groan like a creaky, antiquated car.

“Man - can’t you just let me sleep?” She rubs at her eyes as a melted drop of pepper-jack cheese drips onto her head. It slides down her hair, smoothly, slowly, running down like a raindrop on a window pane without leaving so much as a trace of its presence in its wake. “I had a long night.”

“Well, that’s - that’s very tragic. I feel deeply for you. Can’t you, like… go find another burger to sleep in?” I ask.

The fairy’s brows, several shades darker than her hair, furrow over her bleary eyes. “Can’t you go find another burger to eat?”

I feel my face flush with color as I hear my girlfriend give an unflattering snort of laughter from behind.

“Y’know, you are - you’re awfully mouthy for someone big enough for me to step on.”

“Don’t,” my girlfriend says, her tone now grave.

The fairy remains nonplussed. She sniffs loudly and pulls the small bear to her chest.

“I don’t wanna find another burger,” the fairy says in a petulant, grating whine. “I like this one. It’s so warm… so nice.” A dopey little grin spreads across her thin lips. “Smells so-o-o good…”

“Yeah, I bet it is, which is why I wanna eat it,” I tell her. “So, please.” Rather than say what I want to say, I make a shooing gesture.

The fairy makes no attempt to move. In fact, when she does move, she draws her legs back up onto the patty and leans back down, closing her eyes and completely apathetic to my protests.

“Don’t you do that,” I tell her. “Seriously. You’d better get up.”

She replies to my threats by pulling her legs in closer and readjusting her posture for more comfort. “Five more minutes,” she groans.

“It’ll be cold by then,” I spit.

“Hey.” I feel a hand on my shoulder. I shoot my girlfriend a glare, fully expecting to find her annoyed or upset or generally sympathizing with the fairy in any way. She gives me a small, ameliorative smile. “Just… just let her have it.”

I let the bun slip from my fingers. It falls over the fairy, hiding her from sight.

“No?”

“You can have my burger instead,” she says, sounding for all the world like a mother trying to placate a child in the midst of a tantrum.

“I don’t want yours,” I tell her. “You got ketchup on yours. And even if you didn’t, I still wouldn’t eat it. I want my burger.”

My girlfriend seems puzzled by what I’m sure she thinks is typical male obstinance. “Why? It’s just a burger.”

“It’s a matter of principle,” I growl through clenched teeth. She doesn’t seem to understand that there’s an element of ego at play here; though I’m far from the most proud person in the world, I have enough dignity to not allow myself have the lunch that I paid for (which makes it legally my possession) commandeered as a bed by an impudent magical jack-off who’s total height comes out to six inches.

“Can you keep it down?” comes a droning voice from beneath the bun.

The growl I make was fit to come from the mouth of an incensed pitbull. I raise a fist, ready to bring it down on top of the bun with the fury of a spurned god, lunch be damned, when the same hand that stilled my tongue before takes me gently by the wrist.

“Fairy Statute 638.4,” my girlfriend says flatly.

I can feel the veins on my forehead pulling my temples taut as my nails dig into my palms.

“Harming a fairy is -”

“A misdemeanor,” I spit. “I know. I know. But - Christ almighty, what gives these little assholes the right t-”

“I can hear you,” the fairy says, her voice muffled from under her bun-cum-duvet.

“Good.”

Before I can tell her what I really think about her and all her diminutive pissant friends that decide people’s food is the ideal place to snooze, my girlfriend pulls away from my shoulder and stands up to her full, rather unimpressive height.

“Look,” she says, her tone leaving no room for argument. At least, no room for argument, unless I want to be on her shit-list for the next week. “Give me five minutes. I’ll fix this.”

The only fix I’m interested in at this point is chucking the stupid styrofoam box into the trash, fairy and burger both. If the fairy wants it that badly, she can take her nap surrounded by plastic-bagged dog turds and God knows what else people throw in a public park’s trashcan.

Ten minutes - not five - my girlfriend returns. She has another sytrofoam box in her hand. She hands it to me, politely, cordially.

“You wouldn’t really want to eat a burger a fairy’s been sleeping on… would you?”

After a moment’s thought, I realize that she was right about that much. I don’t admit it. I simply accept the new box and the burger inside with a word of thanks.

I unwrap my second burger to find that, thankfully, there’s no small, winged pixie using it as a mattress. I peel away the silver wrapping. My teeth sink through the bun and into the meat. I chew it pensively.

Across the bench, my girlfriend’s brows arch above the black rims of her glasses. “Like it?”

I swallow, because I hadn’t forgotten my manners. “Not as much as I thought I would.”

From inside the styrofoam box, now sitting in between us in the middle of the bench, I hear a tittering laugh.

My girlfriend gives me the side-eye.

“Don’t.”

I take another bite of my burger.

"This really wasn’t worth fourteen bucks.”

---

Have you ever seen a picture and just have a story pop into your head? I usually don’t. But, for whatever reason, when my friend sent me this image with the caption, aah hell nah boi not a fuckin anime girl sleepin in my got damn burger again, I felt the muse begin to sing of cheeseburgers and fairies.

They really will just make any old shit in Japan.

You can also extrapolate some greater meaning out of this - I can see some potential ways of reading this being some sort of small statement of the crisis of masculinity or something, if you squint your eyes - but honestly I just wanted to write a small piece on how annoying it would be if there was a fairy sleeping on your mediocre, over-priced, food-truck burger.

I’d still eat it.