Fairy

by JunoMagic
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives-ShareAlike license

Fairy

He was determined to hurry past it.

So what if it had disappeared? It wasn’t supposed to have been there in the first place!

But involuntarily the young lawyer slowed down as he strolled past the dilapidated, abandoned old farmhouse.

Although he tried to look only at the pavement in front of his feet, he couldn’t keep himself from glancing at the window.

The window on the left. The one with the cracked and broken pane. Where inexplicably blue lichens of colour still clung to a rotting frame.

His gaze froze on the snail shells. Three of them. One broken. All of them smooth like silk and white like bone, after decades of waiting for the child that left them there one May morning many years ago.

He swallowed convulsively.

Until he was nine years old, they had been as normal to him as the neighbour’s kittens, the swallows flitting about the eaves and his mother’s embraces.

Then, lying in the dirt of the school yard bony little boy-fists had taught him that you did not see fairies.

Or gnomes.
Or sprites.
Or elfs.

He stopped walking and drew a shuddering breath. Slowly he turned around to face the window.

It was empty.

No bright orange wings with splashes of red and dancing swirls of yellow. No blue-black curls and fluttering from the breeze of tiny wings. No sky-blue gossamer gown clinging to sweetly female figure the size of a Barbie doll. No saucy wink. No kiss blown into his direction.

Just a cracked window and long forgotten snail shells.

He tried to take another deep breath, but his chest was almost painfully tight.

Gone.

He should be relieved.

‘She’s gone,’ said a female voice next to him suddenly.

He jumped, gasped, a shaking hand flying to his forehead.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ a dumpy woman in a gipsy skirt with tumbling brown curls and laughing light brown eyes cried. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you; but she’s gone. I haven’t heard her for two weeks. Just like the others. There one day, where she’s supposed to be, going about her business, whatever that may be, singing her silly little ditty, merry as you please. And the next day, she’s gone. Just like that.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m worried, too.’

He took two steps back, then squared his shoulders and swallowed again. When he spoke, his voice sounded hoarse and like stranger’s to him. ‘You … you can hear them?’

He didn’t know what shocked him more: that there was another person who could perceive those creatures that his rational mind told him didn’t exist at all, or that she could hear them. To the best of his knowledge, they’d never uttered so much a single sound all his life.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ replied the woman. ‘Can’t you?’

Her eyes grew wide. ‘You can see them?’ her voice grew husky with awe. ‘Oh, how I wish I had your gift. You know, I’m an artist. And right awful musician. Their songs are wasted on my ears.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve always wanted to see them. Just once.’

Then she indicated the empty window sill with jerk of her chin. ‘So what do you think happened to her? And to the others? And even more important, what can we do to find out what has happened to them?’

‘I – I have no idea,’ he stuttered, still completely taken aback by the fact that he wasn’t the only one. ‘You can hear them?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. And she had such a sweet voice, this wee one.’

Not the only one. He was not the only one. Convulsively, his fingers clenched into fists. He was not the only one. They were real. They had always been real.

Suddenly his lawyer’s brain caught up with him.

They were real. The tiny winged female that had been flirting with him every day for the last five years was real. Real. She had disappeared. And she was not the only one, too.

That was a case.

And … He looked down at the curvy woman next to him, who still peered with a worried frown at the broken window.

… he was not alone to solve.

Song of the day:

Link(s) of the day:

Faerie Oracle at World of Froud | Fairies and Fantasy Art | Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book | SurLaLune Fairy Tales

…and my wish for you today is:

That you may always hear and see the beautiful secrets and mysteries of this world!

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