Redundancy 1/8

Even more than most of the fairies who worked in the Wish Warehouse, Polly was having a wonderful time! Although she was the most junior of the workers, Lieutenant Moonshine was making sure she had her fair turn of flying practice. Her wing muscles had strengthened quite quickly and she was now able to attempt simple aerobatics, although she was not nearly as good as Fern. She’d been one of the workers at the Warehouse able to look out of a window and had seen at first hand the display Fern had given to her chief.

However, today was even more special than usual. Once every three months or so, fairies from all over the country would be flown to the Warehouse sitting behind a witch on her broomstick; each one carrying a large cloth bag full of children’s teeth that had been collected by the tooth fairy representing their particular area. All the bags were handed over to the Lieutenant, who was responsible for looking after the tooth collection for the whole country. Then each bag was labelled before they were all delivered in one trip to the Clerk of the Weather.

The load was far too large and heavy for the fairies to deliver without help, so Robert from the Witches’ Home would bring his flying carpet to collect them. One of the fairies had to go with him to make sure that none of the parcels fell off if his attention was distracted for any reason and Moonshine always let Polly go with him.

Polly thought Robert was ever so clever; he was responsible for the maintenance on all the cloud transport at the Witches’ Home and was able to use all sorts of complicated looking tools when he was at work. She enjoyed her occasional visits there, almost as much as she did when he came for the tooth collection. She was quite sure he liked her just as much, because when the flying was straightforward they would sit quietly on the carpet together holding hands.

Today everything had started off as usual until at one point during their flight, Robert had had to make the carpet swerve rather sharply to avoid a flock of swans. He’d put his arm round her waist to make sure she stayed safely on the carpet and kept it there for the rest of the flight. They were still snuggling up happily when they landed safely with their load outside the Clerk of the Weather’s office.

Rather unusually the Clerk of the Weather himself came out to meet them.

“I’m awfully sorry Robert, I should have let you know before now, but I’m afraid we already have far more teeth in stock than we know what to do with. Now that the dragons are all eating coal, there’s not a big demand for teeth any more. You’ll just have to take this lot back with you and try to find some other way of disposing of them. I suppose we should be grateful that the dragons eat pet food and coal, not peasants any more.”

Polly was horrified, if there were to be no more tooth deliveries then she wouldn’t be able to see Robert by himself nearly as often as she would like. If he was perfectly honest, Robert enjoyed his flights with Polly as much as she did with him, now it seemed there were going to be even fewer chances to meet her.

But there was nothing else for it, so the laden carpet turned round and slowly flew back towards the Wish Warehouse with two rather sad people sitting on it. Lieutenant Moonshine wasn’t any happier than they were when she received the news.

“What on earth are we going to do? All the fairies that go around collecting the teeth will be out of a job, so goodness only knows what they’ll be able to do in the future. But then on the other hand we can’t really stop collecting teeth, because that would disappoint all the humans whose baby teeth have been taken and paid for by tooth fairies for generations. However if we do carry on as we are, we soon won’t be able to find places to put them all and it seems a pity not to be able to find a use for them. I can’t think of any way to solve the problem, there’s only one thing for it to my mind, that’s to send for Jennifer Jane!”

Polly and Robert looked at each other and smiled. They were beginning to feel happier already, If any one could help then it had to be Jennifer Jane and hopefully one of her clever ideas would not only solve the problem, but also let them meet each other just as frequently.