Monday, July 6, 2009

I can't resist.... maybe Faerie Part I?

Yeah, I just posted a little while ago. But I'm like an excited child when it comes to new writing opportunities. Blogs, profiles, websites, you name it.
What follows here is going straight from my head onto the page, so I apologize for the extreme lack of organization its likely to hold...

A faerie. I prefer it spelled that way. I don't know why. She has no name. I can't see her, but I don't need to to know what she looks like. No more than 2 cm high and dressed not as fairies are normally pictured but in denim shorts that go nearly to her knee and a little fitted tee shirt. It might be green, but I don't know for sure. Her body looks delicate but her demeanor is strong. Her hair doesn't seem to have any specific color or cut, but it's switching between auburn and chocolate in my thoughts. I think it's pulled back in a low pony tail. That or its cropped short. She glows with an ethereal light that signifies her very life force. Perhaps this is because her body is so small that her soul shines through, whereas the human soul gets lost in our big bodies. Her shoes are like ballet slippers; with no sole and laced on. However they are made instead of brown leather, making them reminiscent of Irish Step gillies. I'd like to note that this particular faerie wears no makeup.
She likes to navigate the dense forest of tiger lilies that grows wild near her home (an abandoned beaver dam, by the way. It has a lovely view of the perilous river and the humans don't bother her family there.) . She is mature in age, about the human equivalent of 25 years old, and she loves to adventure. Yesterday she met a cat who, after unsuccessfully batting at her with its paw, allowed her to ride upon its mighty back for several yards.
Today, though, she's out on an even bigger journey. She wishes to find the end of the river. She watched one of the boats that the humans ride upon, and is reasonably sure there's a way she could make the same thing. Being the resourceful little thing she is, she manages to find a pea pod, whose outer edge she sews up with grass, all except for the very end, where she can slip in and out. She pushes her creation to the edge of the river and, leaving a note attached to a twig as a monument to stand in the event that she perishes, she scrambles into the pea pod and pushes off the shore with her hands before pulling herself all the way in.
The journey seems perilous right from the very beginning. Waves and miniature waterfalls assault her vessel as she struggles to keep from rolling around its interior. The pod nearly fills with water on several occasions before our little faerie is able to release the water to the river. Just as she's sure that it can't possibly get any worse, and that she will probably never see her home again, she discovers that it can, in fact, become much more unpleasant. A seagull dips down and snatches up the traveling pea pod, and in an attempt to avoid being crushed by monstrous beaks, the faerie falls out of the pod and into the churning water below. Only by the sheerest of luck, she finds a maple leaf floating near the place where she struggles for her very life. Only seconds after this discovery, she pulls herself onto nature's thin raft and holds onto both the edge of the leaf and a hope so strong it could only be born of a hopeless situation.
As it turns out, either hope is a friend worth keeping or the faerie stumbled upon a very fortunate coincidence, for no more than two hundred feet further the waters, though swift, lack any significant obstacles and the faerie finds the phrase "smooth sailing" resounding in her mind. Soon after that, the waters calm even more and the faerie's rate of travel diminishes until her leaf is floating still as stone on what could be either a pond or a lake, as far as she can tell. Beginning to panic, she tries desperately to paddle her way forward, but her small hands lack the surface area necessary to move the leaf. Finally, sighing, she leaps off and begins to swim, hoping that she's nearing some sort of a shore.
"What's that?" The voice is of the high pitch unique to young children, and this particular boy is pulling impatiently at his mother's hand and pointing at the tiny body struggling through the still water near the edge of the dock.
Humans! The faeries all know that human presence mean death. Terrified, the little faerie ducks below the water's surface, struggling to get low enough to be invisible. And how far can humans see into the water? No one has ever told her. She suspects that no one knows.
The child's mother, glancing sidelong towards the patch of water that had so excited her toddler, sees nothing but circular ripples. "It's just a fish, Dearie. Come on, let's go get lunch ready so we can go on Daddy's new boat."
When the faerie is quite sure the humans have left, she breaks the surface, gasping for air. As she pulls herself into thick mud of the bank, her eyes widen practically to the size of peppercorns. For there in front of her, where she'd expected to see grass or trees or perhaps even a cottage, are buildings higher than the tallest trees she's ever seen, very nearly beyond her comprehension. And scarier yet, there are humans. Not a family, which is quite scary enough to begin with, but enough to be many families; many big terrifying lethal families. And somewhere beyond the numbing shock and paralytic terror, the little faerie feels the smallest spark of excitement, the thrill of her biggest challenge yet.


Lol..... I've had too much fun with this. It was originally intended to be a quick paragraph. But I'm growing rather fond of this little faerie; perhaps I'll turn her into a series. Maybe even name her. We'll see.

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