Category: Fairy Tale

Guild of the Sleeping Thieves

“Do you know why they call it ‘falling asleep?’” the grandmother asked, as she lay the bedcover over her grandchild’s shoulders.

The girl, of course, shook her head.

The grandmother smiled and cast her eyes down. “Because the realm of sleep lies below our feet.” She raised her eyes up and met her grandchild’s wide open gaze. “And because our minds still have not learned how to control our descent into sleep. We begin to drift, and then, we fall.”

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Storyfeather Year Ten

Happy Birthday, Storyfeather! Year Ten has concluded. As always, thank you to everyone who read even a single story. Thank you to everyone who liked or commented. Thank you for your time and interest, and for being a part of Storyfeather, especially Year Ten.

This was the Year of Fusion. I assigned a theme to every month, like ships to September and creatures to January. And came up with matching nicknames for my own amusement (e.g., Shiptember and Beastuary). This theme served as the base element for that month’s stories. I combined this base element with a fusion element, some randomly chosen object, concept, character, or so on. And I put it all into the Fiction Fusion Reactor to see what kind of exotic fictional particles would fly forth.

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The Hydrozoan BonBons

It started with the pink fairy armadillo. That was the first of his confectionary creations that I ever laid eyes on. He confessed to me later that he had never seen the creature himself. It was not truly a fairy. But it lived in a distant land. He had read a traveler’s account, and this traveler had painted the loveliest watercolors of the little creature.

Delmar was drawn to the creature, because he too came from a distant realm. Although, in his case, this realm was not upon the land.

But I did not know that when first we met.

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The Potion of Pomeline

The troupe was led by a girl who was barely older than the girls she led.

Pomeline was her name.

They twirled and they tumbled. They leapt and they tapped. Skip and glissade. Skip and glissade. They were charming, and fairly skilled.

But they were not the best.

Pomeline wanted them to be the best.

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Portrait of an Evil Sparkling Skull

Everyone was excited about my upcoming vacation, until I told them what I’d be doing.

When I said I’d stay home and paint, some people thought I was talking about painting the walls of my apartment. When I clarified that I’d be painting pictures, a good number of people were polite enough to pretend that sounded like fun. A few people’s eyes sincerely brightened, and they asked a few more questions. The kind that restore my faith in humanity just a little.

One of my co-workers had a weird but fun reaction. She pointed to the wall of our shared office and said, “Can you paint us a magic portal to get us out of here?”

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The Ghost of the Fairy Prince

“If fairies don’t have souls, then what happens to them when they die?”

My nephew asked the question, and I turned to him to answer. But I stopped in the midst of taking a breath, for I saw that he was turned away from me, toward his grandfather, the storyteller.

I studied fairies for my profession. My nephew knew this. But he also knew that I had no spellbinding stories tell.

Except that this time, I did. For I had seen a fairy die once. A prince, he was. He glittered like a star.

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The Parasitic Fairy Worm

Two neighboring towns. One human. One fairy. An experiment in living openly and peaceably with each other after generations of legend and lore had taught caution and suspicion as well as curiosity and wonder. But something had gone wrong.

And it started with a paper cut in the human town.

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