The sunlight winked upon the water’s surface, sending secret messages to the bottom of the sea. There the mermaids scooped them up in long lost buckets and relayed them to whom they belonged. Who that is, I cannot say, but I’ve always dreamt of hidden sea beasts, impossible and mythical, whose deep sea movements become the waves that greet us on the shore.
She fell from her branch and faded to gold from the forgotten bits of sunshine she’d eaten once upon a tree. Insects came and chewed at her flesh, styling her into a delicate filigree for the finest of fairies to wear to their moonlit balls and midnight masquerades. The day came when she was forgotten in the grass, and a little girl found her and pressed her in a book, little suspecting the wonders the tattered old leaf had seen.
We went away last weekend and our daughter was very concerned about what hotels were like. She must have asked us thirty times on the way to our hotel where she would be sleeping. Getting a bit frustrated with explaining that there are beds in hotels over and over again, we told her she would have to sleep in the bathtub. She was silent the rest of the drive as she thought that over. But we had forgotten that it was a four-year-old we were dealing with. She insisted upon sleeping in the bathtub when we got there.
The old cliff croaked and groaned, but at last he spoke, his voice garbled with seaweed. “Its been a long time since anyone’s asked me for a story. I’ve seen a thing or two, that’s for sure. Where shall we begin? Is it sea dragons and ghost ships you want, or the romantic preenings of a mollusk in the Bay?”
She looked out at the world with her good eye, the one that could see past illusions to all the things unsaid and unseen, and it made her sad to see that people hid the best of themselves deep inside where no one could ever harm them, and no one ever saw.
“Mummy, does that frog look like a dill pickle to you? Do you think it tastes like one?”
Clusters of youthful brownies milled about the moss, shaking hands and learning names. The first days of fae college were always so tricky.
“I’ve been hit!” he cried. Yet he didn’t fall. He just kept on stretching for the sunlight while his tree-blood clotted up the hole and kept the worst of the bugs out. A few years later only the tiniest of scars were visible, and he had acres of sunlight to himself.
“This is a place of DANGER, a place where the rules don’t apply. Even the sunlight is filtered through leaves and can you trust them? They’re half-fae, you know.”
Jennifer Shelby 