Fairy Stories & Other Tales

 Once upon a time there was a fairy queen who lived in a fairy castle and did fairy royalty kind of things. She cut the ribbons, and said the speeches, and did the wave, and visited the places. After half a lifetime of this, she was bored out of her mind.      So she moved to the countryside, planted an herb garden, and became a witch. She lived the rest of her days as content as a fairy who was once royalty could be.      As to the crown, it fell to someone else. They always do. 

 What I wanted to know was this: was I wasting time? Or did I hold perfection in my hand because I had all the choices? To choose to sit and stare at the green leaves all around me, as though I was about to be swallowed by a mouth of trees. To have time to pick up a hurt child, without rushing, time the care itself instead of forcing my mind around a solution that is twisted all the different ways until Thursday. Time, a gift?       But I was taught that this is not so. Time is a curse that flies only too swiftly. Tempus fugit . One must do everything in what little time one has so as not to waste it.       But, I found, this made time fly faster.      So, I went to the forest and stepped into the mushroom ring.       When I escaped from Faerie, the world was a hundred years older. Surely it would let me live with time as it is in itself. But no, the world was no slower. If anything, it had hurried. I left ...

 There are some people to whom badness clings like stink to that one pair of socks that won't stop smelling no matter how many times you wash them. These are the kinds of people that aren't the ringleaders of fault, but are just close enough to try and get whatever apples get dropped on the ground. That's, of course,  when they find out that the dropped apples were themselves stolen and if the ringleader gets arrested or doesn't, you can bet everything on red that the people rooting around on the ground will be.       The problem comes when that kind of person has been arrested, gets set free, goes back to rooting around the apples with the vague notion that they're probably still stolen, but, hey, maybe not.    I know the type. More often than not, they still come out ahead in the same way that a politician has all that stuff that makes him a politician and still gets to keep his job. It's not justice, to my way of thinking.      I...

 There are rivers and there are rivers of blood. The witch thought both dangerous. The one was too hard to cross, the other too hard to squelch.      In a sense, she'd prefer neither. If she had the choice, if she could make her own destiny, there would be nothing that soaked through. But that presupposed she had not chosen her lot in life. And that was something with which she would not hold. She had chosen to be a witch, and she would have to take the lot that came with it. One didn't often have the luxury of choice. She had. It was exhausting to think that choice could just keep going.      Thus, she plunged into the river and waded across to the other side where she staunched the wounds on several fallen men, and then went home, soaked on both fronts.      The cottage that awaited her was small, but clean and mostly empty.       She changed into her other set of clothes, and boiled the kettle over the fire. ...