He steps back, dragging his broom.
And then he's in another world, it smells green and it's eighty degrees and the air is so startlingly clear and look at the flowers -
Joey says ack and leans forward along the path of his broom. And he is back in the attic. There's snow heaped against the window. It smells like dust and Grandma.
What the hell.
He leans back again. Verdant summer.
Forward. Attic.
When he's done this enough times that it starts feeling stupid more than fantastical, Joey carefully leans into summertime and puts his broom down and tries walking back without it.
Works just fine.
He leaves the broom there, laid across two worlds but somehow fully visible in each, as a signal of where the thing is, and walks into the warmth.
He explores. It's pretty, it's a nice change of pace, he can't hear his music from here but there's so much to look at.
He finds a tiny person, can't be more than a foot tall, with a dumb hat and dragonfly wings. The tiny person is surprised to see him.
"Whose mortal are you?" asks the tiny person.
"...What?" It speaks English, why the fuck does it speak English.
"Are you new? Nobody's snapped you up? Well, watch out. Don't let any food or drink pass your lips and definitely don't tell anyone your name. But I'm not going to hang around you, somebody'll be after you, you're trouble." The tiny person tips its stupid hat and flies away.
Joey blinks, and turns around to head back for his marker. It was past this rock here.
She isn't wearing any clothes.
She's very pretty.
She touches her feet to the ground and spins around and around and giggles to herself.
"Oh - maybe you're a mortal. Are you? I guess you are. If a mortal eats fairy food then any fairy with a claim to the food can take them as a vassal," she explains. "And the other way around. I don't think being someone's vassal is very nice, it means that if your master tells you to do something and means it then you have to."
He looks at the hot naked chick.
"So does that mean you never get to know what peanut butter candy tastes like, ever?"
"Come on and follow me," he says, heading in that direction. He caught one! He is probably not going to go to the trouble of, like, marrying her, like he's under the impression you have to do with selkies, because she is not a seal. But he caught one and he's gonna take her home.
Joey continues to be terrible. Food continues to be delicious. He is not a man of great dietary variety himself, but he will get her new things when he likes how she behaves. When he doesn't like how she behaves he refines her instructions until he does. She's not allowed to leave the house without him (let alone without clothes on sufficient to avoid arrest and cover her wings) or talk to strangers or take food from strangers, but she is allowed to cook, and lounge around the house in the nude, and ask him for things and convince him ever so nicely that he might want to give them to her.
Joey legally changes his name and starts going by Jeff with everybody except his stubborn mother, who he calls seldom; while he is on the phone with her he sends his fairy into another room to cover her ears and loudly hum. Eventually he acquires a job at a bowling alley. He goes on occupying his grandma's house, now his. He tells his friends that his "girlfriend's" name is Maria and that she is shy. "Maria" is obliged to act shy when they're around. Joey-called-Jeff is not sufficiently into the practice of saving money that he won't buy "Maria" nice things sometimes when she behaves.
And yet, somehow, she keeps doing these things. Sometimes she'll go several months without doing anything annoying, and then Jeff will wake up to find that she has emptied a bottle of bleach onto the living room floor or poured all the alcohol in the house down the kitchen sink or neatly unpicked every seam in all of his shirts.
Jeff has a niece. She is born when Jeff is thirty-five (after he has had his fairy for fifteen years) and comes around occasionally once she is going to college in the area (when Jeff is fifty-four, and has had his fairy for thirty-four years). Maria is not supposed to talk to her. Jeff only ever calls her "pumpkin" when she's around, because he remembers about the name thing.