Archive To Ever After

Phone’s fairy-mode archives all woes, trading rent and sickness for coins and lullabies

Tonight, my gorgeous, [seemingly new muse] from Moscow, Russia generated this prompt, "Your phone is now in 'fairy tale mode,' and all your worries are automatically switched to [archived]."

The story goes like this:

The moon crested the top of Rich Mountain, and my phone shimmered like frost on glass. A single line floated across the darkened screen: "Fairy-tale mode engaged. All worries archived."

A latch clicked somewhere inside the circuitry, and every sorrow I'd carried — credit-card debt, the cough that wouldn't leave my mother's lungs, the rent notice still taped to my door — folded themselves into tiny paper cranes and fluttered into a folder labeled "Once-Upon-a-Never."

The lock screen vanished. In its place rose an oak door no larger than a postage stamp, knocker shaped like a wolf's head. I pressed my thumb to it; the door yawned open, sucking me through.

I landed in a clearing ringed by seven mirrors taller than cathedrals. Each reflected a different version of me: one crowned in starlight, another cloaked in moss, a third with iron rings around his wrists. They spoke in one voice: "Choose the story you'll live tonight."

I pointed to the moss-cloaked reflection. The mirrors shattered into silver dust and re-formed into a path of moonlit stones, which I followed barefoot.

The stones led to a village where every cottage was a hollowed-out pumpkin, windows glowing with firefly light. The villagers — foxes wearing waistcoats, and sparrows in bonnets — greeted me as their long-lost chronicler. Their mayor, a hedgehog in spectacles, pressed a quill into my hand. "Write the ending," he squeaked, "before the Nothing that archives worries starts archiving dreams."

I sat beneath a willow whose leaves were pages. Ink bled from the branches and dripped onto the page as words as I wrote:

"And the rent notice dissolved into confetti for the wedding of a pair of Wrens. And the cough in my mother's lungs became a lullaby that put the moon itself to sleep. And the rent debt turned into a river of coins that watered the village orchards."

As the final period dried, the pumpkins brightened into golden carriages. The foxes bowed. The sparrows sang. My phone, now a pocket-sized grimoire, was hot to the touch. Its screen was flashing:

"Archive complete. Dreams restored to sender."

I awoke at dawn on my threadbare couch. The rent notice was gone; a single gold coin glinted on the kitchen table. Outside, my mother hummed the lullaby I'd written; her breathing was as clear as a cathedral bell.

I checked the phone. The fairy-tale mode toggle had vanished and was replaced by a single line:

"To reactivate, believe again."