Fairy Stories & Other Tales

There was once a young witch who was terribly lonely. She lived in a cottage by the sea, and did her best to make friends with the gulls and the tide pools and the wind. And while she listened close, and was occasionally blessed with a few of their secrets, it was not the same as having another body near to whom one could simply chatter.             She had made the decision a few years before to steep herself in isolation. There was something about the ideal of a witch who lives in a remote fashion that appealed to her sense of prestige—for in all the lore that she had ever read, the most powerful of witches lived alone.             At first, she felt the strength in her decision, and was proud to have made her choice. But then she began to suffer from lack of company—though she made her peace by thinking that she had made a great sacrifice for her art.             But it did not take much longer than a year before she felt nothing more complex than sorrow.             It was

 There are the bells. The ones that ring on a string at the beck and pull of a ringer. They sound on the important days, the ones where we are forced to pay attention, sounding loudly like a solute that turns the head with a knowing — for one always knows for whom a bell tolls. But, dear friend, don't let it confuse you with the other ringing sound. The one that echoes through the trees and at the back of your mind. For the bells, they are not to be confused with chimes.      Perhaps, the chimes, they are more important. They are the ones that tinkle at the meeting of an old friend, at a laugh, at the gentle fall of twilight. They sound softly, easily missed. It matters, for if you miss their sound, you miss the beating of your own heart.      And then there are the subtlest of them all. The kind that are only heard with a straining ear and a desperate soul. The chimes that call you to fairyland.     Do they matter, these last ones? These chimes of another world?      That, my frie

 Once upon a time the earth cried out.     She cried out with a sound so tremulous that the universe paused.     It was the cry of bereavement, of trouble and sorrow.    She did so without agenda, only as one who bears witness to her own struggles.     And when the pause had ceased and all turned back into the natural rhythms of their motions, the trajectory of orbits and expansions and contractions all carried forth with infinitesimal difference, the change trickled down to the apex of the small planet who sighed and carried on.