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Own Time

 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 again, for mushroom rings were still the same.

    Back and forth I went, yet the world hurried on. As if it wanted its doom.

    It took me some time to learn my lesson.

    Eventually I stayed in the world, but I did time on my own. Time was happier that way.

A Kind of Justice

 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...
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Choosing

 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. ...
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The Little Girl who Breathed Properly

 Once upon a time there was a little girl who read fairy tales as though she was breathing.      She loved them so much, she began to believe that fairy tales would happen to her.      And so they did. 
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Go Forth the Witch

 There was once a woman weighed down. She felt the weight of her cares as strong as if she were Atlas himself, though perhaps her sky was a different one. Atlas' heavens might carry the fear of wars, chaos and the troubles of the gods, but his purpose was decided and though his shoulder might wrench, he would carry on. The woman, on the other hand, did not carry the cares of a purpose, for she was lost in crowds, and little did anyone care if either she had a purpose or if she did not.      Her responsibilities, what little of them that were allowed her, were filled with small decisions that ate away at her until she herself grew quite small.      Then came a day when she wandered the woods and met a witch.       The witch had, quite naturally, a cottage. It was filled with potions and poultices and remedies of all sorts. Her scrubbed oak table was laden with tinctures that were passed off to various people throughout the day. Thoug...
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