Fairy Stories & Other Tales

       They came for her in the night.   Dancing, darting, a response to the dreamer’s pleas, the faeries came, and spirited her away. But let us start at the beginning, for faeries do not often come at anyone’s call.   Only the downtrodden, those who are at a breaking point; the ones who might give them what they want.   And Clara had something they wanted very much indeed. She had woken that morning, slipping silently out of her bed to see out her window.   Frost had come during the night, biting every leaf, twig, and blade of grass.   The world was painted over with milky ice.   Clara thought it achingly beautiful.   She put her little chin on her hands and sighed, her warm breath making a cloud on the window until she had to wipe it with the edge of her nightgown. Descending from the window’s ledge slowly, and tiptoeing to the door, she twisted the brass handle with her hand in her nightgown’s sleeve to keep her hand from getting cold.   Clara willed her feet to silence as

     If you look high up into the corner of the sky, just on the outer edge of the horizon, you might see a snow-topped peak pushing up, up and out of the clouds.   It only ever appears with the barest hint of its thick white cap—and so is often mistaken for a cloud.     This is all to the advantage of the old woman who lives there. Hard bitten and ugly she looks to those lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the crone.   It’s the luckier still who climb the tall peak and find themselves invited in for a cup of tea.   The tea is very good.   But its not the tea that makes the climber lucky—the luck is all in the conversation.   For she happens to be a woman who tells the truth. Naturally, our story unfolds with a climber, one of the luckiest, who upon reaching her summit, found herself invited in for a cup of tea. The hut atop the crest was small and came as a surprise.   Smoke curled from a tiny chimney.   A plain wooden door, crooked from swelling and shrinking in the on and off

         Once, when I was very young, I snuck into the forest by moonlight.                   By chance, perhaps, a fairy landed on a branch so close to my face I could see the glimmering of her pale eyes, alight with the glow of a thriving moonlit night.   Her hair of spun silver, and delicate wings, her pale skin, and graceful movement inspired a thrill of joy that sang in my body from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair.   She was the most beautiful creature my child-eyes had seen—or so I had thought in that moment.   For I would come to learn that I was quite mistaken.                 “Oh, you are so very beautiful!” I exclaimed, holding my fingertips back though they longed to touch, to make certain with another sense the truth of what my eyes saw.                 The fairy raised her delicate silver eyebrows, her eyes wide with surprise.                 “Do you really think so?”                 “Indeed, fairy, I think you are the most beautiful of all I have eve