Fairy Stories & Other Tales

 There was once a witch who left her house for an evening party. They had said it would be 'fun.'     As she walked down the path, she thought about it. She paused. No, that couldn't possibly be right. She turned around and walked back to her house.     She reached her cottage door, made a cup of tea and sat in her favorite chair with a book.     They had made a mistake. She'd tell them tomorrow. They had got the notion of fun all wrong.     

 There are three things a wealthy person thinks to fear: poverty, degradation, pity.      There are three things an impoverished person lives in fear: injustice, abandonment, the weather.      There are three things a kind person wishes to change: society, systems, the minds of the wealthy.      There is one thing a wise person knows to change: herself. 

 When a man from a Faerie court, and thus 'man' in name only, came to power, it did come as a shock. Not coming to power. If men aren't coming to power, they're leaving power, and if their not leaving power, their being executed. Thus is the way of men. Even in Faerie.       No, the surprising thing about all that power was the particular other thing that came with it. Not the privileges - those were anticipated favorably - nor the pomp - an expectation devoutly to be wished. And it was not the meetings, as such. Surely he must have known, he told himself over breakfast and again after teatime, that there would be meetings. It couldn't all be waging wars and making profound statements designed to appear clever at first glance before the second thoughts of the public, those intelligent little moments that, like bindweed, could not be eradicated. But surely there didn't have to be so many meetings. There were the regular meetings to make decisions, the meetings to...

 I set sail once, aboard a ship, bound for unknown waters, as many had done before me. Perhaps they too expected mermaid lagoons and the caves of water dragons. Monsters with all number of heads. I expected, as well, an island run by the spells of sorcerers and a fruit, maybe, that surpassed all my prior tastes. I anticipated storms and calm and to meet several mad people. I wondered when we would come upon islands sodden with the victims of witches, where we would, of course, make a clever escape. Surely it was not too bold nor too strange to expect an island haven where heaven might have come to lay its head. Nor to expect sun-drenched sands bordering a haunted forest, nor chilling winds that carried nightmares. Naturally the ship would break, wreaked by storm and magic and its own hubris in thinking it could plunge through a tempest. Not long after, almost certainly, we would be thrown upon an island with the necessary timber for repairs, where I expected such repairs would make...