Every night, a woman named Emme, who lives in a condominium, dreams she is living in a combination of all the houses she lived in growing up. Emme remembers exploring the house her family lived in. Before her dad left when she was a toddler, he finds Emme in the basement sucking on the tail of a rat. Now that Emme has a kid, she chalks up the behavior to the idea that all children do crazy things.  Emme’s daughter was born with teeth, which made nursing painful, and six years later she still feels like she was never able to connect with her. Emme remembers crawling under her house as a child and finding a grave. She digs into the spot and pulls out the bones. At the bottom of the grave, she finds two huge dried oak leaves that she thinks are wings and that Tinkerbell has been killed. 

As she strokes the bones, they begin to light up and she thinks she hears a ringing noise. She recoils and her mother yells at her for being under the deck as she runs out. That night, she remembers not being able to sleep and grabbing a nail and going out into the hallway to see a shadow of the figure she had found in the grave, projected at twice its natural size. She passes out and her mother remembers hearing the thud of her hitting the floor and then finding her bruised and with a strange rash around her lips in the hallway. Emme is hospitalized and in the meantime her mother moves houses. 

Emme sometimes wakes up to her daughter in her room telling her she loves her and asking why fairies replace children in families sometimes to gain a mother who loves them. To herself, she thinks about how “they” have already killed all the fairies. Emme lies to her daughter and tells her the stories aren’t real. 

She remembers being in college when her mother asks her why she finds people so exhausting to be around and she replies that she feels like she has to watch what she says. When she graduates college, she works to be as average as possible, getting a job and working just enough to stay on but not enough to form any serious attachments. 

Everything changes one day when she is in the laundry room of her apartment and a man with a black beard and a flannel jacket enters and tells her she was rude for ignoring people. He tries to punch her but when he grabs her throat thin cold hands from within her work their way up through her mouth along with wings. When she throws up, the man jumps back and Tinkerbell’s ghost lunges through his mouth and cut him up from the inside. 

Emme passes out again and her neighbor discoveres her next to a pile of the man’s clothes. Two months later, she finds out she’s pregnant but is convinced it is not the man’s and lies to her mother that it was from a one-night stand. Emme thinks of how the fairy had refolded itself into her body and waited to be born again after the attack. 

Today, her daughter is well-liked and does well in school. Emme gives her all the freedom and money her daughter wants and waits for the day she doesn’t come home. She turns the nail from her childhood into a necklace and when she hugs her daughter that night, they both recoil at the pain of its touch on their skin. Later, her daughter shows her that the nail burnt her and asks her to throw it away. Emme hopes it’s enough to make her leave eventually. 

In high school, Emme falls in love with a boy who she feels comfortable with and she gets her heart broken. After her parents split up, she feels like love is a lie. Now, she feels bad for hurting her own daughter but she also doesn’t believe her daughter is fully human and wonders if she will search out her buried dead kin when she leaves Emme and teach them how to kill humans. 

As she wishes internally for her daughter to leave, she hears a reply in her head that tells her she is one of them too and thin cold hands squeeze around her heart and she hears a voice telling her she is home.