Every morning, before he goes to work, Jonathan Blackthorne tends his garden. He waters the flower planters and pots, turns on the sprinklers, and checks the assorted fruit trees and vegetable patches. But for the past week he's found holes in leaves and nibbles in the edibles. Pests have been eating his garden.

On the 7th day, he'd had enough. He waited until after work, then went to the hardware store. He bought a a tank of environmentally safe(ish) outdoor bug spray and a dozen different bug zappers in different sizes and intensities and spent the entire afternoon spraying his plants and setting the lamps up around the yard. That night, he watched with satisfaction from the back porch as the lights went off, zapping whatever was dumb enough to fly into them.

It wasn't until the next morning that he went out and found that each of the lights had been entirely burned out, and that below every one was a pile of corpses. The corpses were small, winged, and human-like. Some were still smoldering. Some were still twitching, their dragonfly-like wings moving spasmodically.

He took a long draught from his coffee, then went back inside. When he came out again, he had a plastic grocery bag. One by one, he loaded the fairy bodies into the bag.

There was no sense in letting them go to waste.

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