My alarm clock rings at 6:15 on the dot every morning. I shuffle out of bed, brush my teeth, wash my face and get my scrubs on. Today is another day at the hospital. I hurry to make my glitter juice topped with my family’s secret fairy dust, pack my mushrooms and flowers for lunch, and rush out the door. But today, November 1, I got a call from another nurse before I could flutter my wings and fly over there. This time, a skull piñata was wounded.
Oh yeah, I work at a hospital for piñatas.
You might be wondering why I work at a hospital for piñatas, but in reality, they need it. Every year, and I mean it, every year, millions of piñatas get hit with a stick and must part ways with the candy they held onto for months. Now, this hospital isn’t like any other. We do not treat their wounds or fix up the cones that they have used as limbs to get around. We fix their hearts and cure them of the heartbreak caused when their candy flies all over the floor and those tiny monsters with sticky hands run all over the place snatching and taking away the candy and putting them into an odd sack labeled “ Happy Birthday” with a new theme and characters on it at every party.
Almost every day we get a new piñata. They sit in bed and look out the window with melancholy plastered on the bits of face they have left. They seem to have no care that their purpose as a piñata is over, but what they do care about are the candies.
“ So what are we going to do about Mr. Calavera? Dia de Los Muertos hasn’t even commenced and he has already lost some candy,” recalled Lumina, lead fairy nurse at the hospital.
“ We can use some fairy dust and get him fixed up and send him back to the store quickly” suggested Faye.
“ No, we need to go through the healing process,” cut in Lumina. “ We can’t use our magic whenever. Those ‘humans’ will rip him up in no time. I guess he will just have to skip out on Dia de Lo-”.
“ Skip Dia de Los Muertos?!” exclaimed Faye shockingly, “ That’s his thing! Our thing is healing and magic. His thing is Dia de Los Muertos. He can’t just skip out on that, Lumina. We need to use our magic!”
As they argued I focused all of my attention towards the patients in the healing room. Those poor piñatas. Sometimes I wish I could use all of my fairy dust to heal them. But, back in 2007, when all nurse fairies gathered around to discuss a new method of healing, Selene, now the doctor of our hospital, saw how her intern tried to use magic but the piñatas turned into cardboard and paper. How funny. Cardboard and paper. Why that of all things?
Since the incident, we fairies can not use any magic in the hospital. Lumina enforces it, but many of us wish we could. The piñatas are so helpless and they just cry over and over for their “ hijos”, whatever that may mean.
Sometimes I wish I could have been a piñata and not a fairy. They are all born in a tree called Mexico. Well, so I heard from the other fairies. I was born in a tree called Magic Pearl Clemency. I have lived there my whole life and since I was a child, I saw how my entire family was dedicated to healing and magic, I knew I would have to do the same. Piñatas get sent out from their tree. They go to another magical tree called the store where humans take them. I would not want to be taken. That’s how they end up here. Every aspect of my life leads back here to the hospital at the Aurelia tree.
To be continued…..