The problem with faeries is that humans never quite get them right, in the stories I mean, so that when you actually do meet one (and frankly, with the sheer amount of them it is inevitable that you will) it is rare that communication really happens and both human and faerie come away from the encounter wondering how on earth anything worked in the old days.
I suspect it is simply that our ancestors had less expectations than we do, either human or faerie, they simply took what was and bargained or cowered as they felt appropriate.
I’m sure another person would make some sort of remarks about the mass media at this point, the evils of television or the internet or video games or whatever. If you were cynical enough you could start talking about moveable type, books, even writing if you go back far enough. People (humans, faeries, whatever) always seem to get more cynical the more they talk to each other…and they seem to expect more as well…which just leads to the cynicism being reinforced if you ask me.
In anycase, humans always seem to expect faeries to be twinkly little fun things to enjoy and or laugh at or evil wizened tricksy little bits to be careful of, possibly punished and definately tricked out of gold or wisdom or whatever else the human wants. A bit like Cortez faced with the Incas I suppose.
Faeries don’t have a lot of gold.
They do have a lot of snow.
Teeth, teeth too, they have a lot of teeth.
There was a girl I knew once, she bit like a faerie… I reckon on her mothers side she was. Faeries don’t seem to have any particular size, and they don’t all seem that fussy about breeding. Actually thats not right, they prefer faeries, then animals, then insects, then humans. But mostly sex isn’t an issue with them. Mostly it’s food and then snow.
If you get faced with a faerie, and you realise, in time I mean, not hours after, then just take what comes, don’t expect anything because you’ll likely not get it.
And remember that they don’t have a lot of gold.
They do have teeth. And they like to eat. And they like to keep warm. Oh and some faeries lay eggs. Yes I suppose you could say similar to maggots.
I’ve heard though, only in the last few hours to be honest, not all faeries do the insect thing, a lot have mamalian births, depends what they mate with. Generally though, as a human, sex is not going to come up. Childbirth might, eating probably will…and snow and cold almost certainly is. They have a lot of snow do faeries.
They are very beautiful, faeries, it’s not all just glamour. Beautiful even whilst they’re biting your chest open and packing you with eggs. Similar to maggots I suppose.
But so beautiful. And it’s not always eggs. You never know what to expect from faeries.
Humans always get it wrong. Even me.
Erica
Erica sat alone in her case until The Cat came to rescue her and bring her, like some sort of mechanical oblation, before The Tramp, who was The Goddess of The Cat.
Erica did not think much of The Tramp, before she had solely been used by The Cat and now apparently she was to have her various functions explored by this dubious ‘Goddess’. Erica quietly winced within her artificially constructed soul.
The Cat demonstrated her greatest abilities and numerous skills. Erica demurely complied with the inexpert demands of her new ‘owner’? She had not been formally signed over yet but she suspected that such a thing was not far off. The The Cat surprised Erica, and, she suspected, The Tramp as well.
The Cat swept Erica up in his animalistic forepaws which were only nominally like a real person’s arms. (Although, wondered Erica, looking at The Tramp, quite what the advantages of being ‘real’ were.)
Erica lay, passively plastic and metal, rigid in the forepaws of The Cat as The Tramp looked on. Erica considered (in so far as the slow .2 neural networks can be said to consider) that the Tramp looked a little lost. Funny how a goddess is apparently defined by her worshippers rather than herself, so perhaps, Erica’s circuitry considered, the advantages of being real were lost when the real people became the gods of the almost-people, the animal people and the vegetable people. Were the real people actually quite lucky that the rocks had retreated to their quarries when The Cat’s people had taken their demands for total conciousness to their logical extremes and The Prometheans had forcibly imbued minerals of Old Earth with the gift which the real people, the first people had forced on them.
Or maybe it was Erica herself who was unlucky, for it was rumoured that some of the quarries had taken to deifying the plastic people and worshipping the escaping androids, mechanoids, cyborgs and the like even as they melted within the silicate embrace of the rocks.
But it was The Cat who had embraced Erica in front of The Tramp, his Goddess, and he was speaking to her.
“This is what you cannot be,” he was saying, which seemed to Erica to be a particularly pointless thing to remark to a Goddess.
Of course The Tramp could not be a plastic toy made for the edification and servitude of human and animal kind, she was real, far, far realer than Erica could ever be.
The Tramp looked sad…”I was born, not made.” she said.
“I was born and made.” said The Cat.
The Tramp looked at Erica, “Say something appropriate,” she demanded.
Erica processed.
“I was made.” she said, her eyes veiwing both of them without emotion.
The Cat kissed her.
The Tramp took her clothes off.
“Take yours off too,” said The Tramp.
Erica complied. The Tramp put on the nylon clothing which had formerly covered Erica.
“Put on my old clothes,” she next demanded of Erica.
Erica complied.
“Now you are in your proper place.” said The Tramp to Erica, she looked at The Cat, who nodded.
The Tramp gave Erica the final comand that she was able to give under the circumstances.
The Cat and Erica left the property arm in arm as The Tramp, who Erica was making up her mind to call Annabelle, began to start the washing up remains of her final meal with The Cat.
“Do you think I could take ‘The Doll’ as my title?” his new Goddess asked The Cat.
Slut
My nymphy friend says I shouldn’t edit this at all but leave it as is – would appreciate feedback on this please?
It was obvious they thought me a slut.
It happens,
I wasn’t worried.
‘So…you sleep with other people?’
they said.
‘Yes’, I said.
‘So…you sleep around’ they heard.
‘And…you have two boyfriends?’
they said.
‘Yes’, I said.
‘Don’t they mind?’
This from the girl who,
When I told her, in confidence,
That I thought I was gay
(I wasn’t, only half-way, bisexual, sat on the fence)
Had said, ‘So do you fancy me?’
‘Because I’m not gay,’
Every few days she said,
‘I’m not gay’,
How affirmed does a sexuality have to be?
‘Don’t they mind?’
This from the boy,
Who’d known that I was out,
Had counted himself my boyfriend,
And wondered why I couldn’t cope,
With our relationship…
‘Don’t they mind?’
‘No, they’re friends.
They both love me,
I guess we just worked things out.’
‘Ohh…Kay…’
they said.
And poured more wine.
It was obvious they thought me a slut.
It happens,
But when I went to the pantry,
Bent over the freezer to get the icecream,
He turned out the light,
And shut the door behind him.
‘So, you sleep with other people?’
Rang in my head.
‘It’s good to see you again.’
he said.
‘You too,’ I said,
And tried to leave with the icecream.
He brushed my side with his hand,
Like he used to.
Ten years ago.
I put the icecream down.
‘It’s good to see you again.’
he said.
And bent to kiss me.
Like he never did when we were sixteen.
Like I wished he did when we were seventeen.
And stroked my side,
And took my hand,
Pulled it to his
erect
cock
‘You should stay tonight,’ he said,
And his eyes told me,
He hadn’t listened to a word,
Got stuck on a question,
‘So you sleep with other people?’
It was obvious that,
My ten year crush,
My first love,
Thought I was a slut.
It happens.
‘You’re too late.’ I said.
And took the icecream to the kitchen.
The tower was the highest in the whole world. Everyone knew that. Just as everyone in the Town knew that the whole world ended just beyond the town walls where the woods began.
The problem with the tower was that back when the first king had built it he had lost the keys and in the three hundred years that the town had had to grow since then no one had ever found them. Every May 1st they would try the keys that had been found in the previous year in the door at the foot of the tower and none of them would work so everyone would go back to their daily business and finding more lost keys until the next year.
Gaia knew that there was another door to the tower, the secret one that all the schoolchildren would whisper about in the playground and then forget as soon as naming day was over and they went about the business of adults placidly, finding useless keys and having conversations about the weather. Of course despite all of the schoolchildren’s whispers this second door was just as useless as the first it being three quarters of the way up the tower and completely unreachable. It was whispered that there would be another lost key that was needed to fit that door anyway so even getting up there, if you could, would be impossible.
Gaia was eleven years old when the strangers came to town. The strangers claimed they came from another town in the forest where there was no king. They worried all the placid adults, and the king, it was rumoured, even thought about postponing the Festival of the Keys. In the end though, it was all just adults talking and they even invited the strangers to try some of their keys in the door.
That was when the bad thing happened because one of the strangers tried what he called a skeleton key and in amongst all the dancing and the festival tents and all the wonderful jollity of the festival the big metal door to the tower swung open.
All the music stopped and all the children were amazed, but Gaia noticed that all the adults looked sad. She had seen that happen that since their naming they would look sad whenever anything new happened. The strangers didn’t seem to notice and plunged their way gaily into the tower. It turned out to be a storage room with gently moulding grain. It was as wide as the tower itself and showed no sign of having stairs up to the rest of the tower. There were no trapdoors in the floor. Just the bad smell of moulding grain.
The strangers laughed at the townsfolk and they left the town and the world and plunged back into the woods they had come from. And all the adults said good riddance and then the king carefully pulled shut the door which locked behind him and he said that next May 1st they would use the right sort of key which no stranger could bring with them because the first king had lost the keys in the town. The adults looked happier now and all the gaiety was wiped from the faces of the children.
It was then that the children in the playground started whispering more openly about the second door and the older boys were punished for asking Mr Dennis, the geometry teacher about it in class.
Gaia started to wonder if anyone could get up to the second door by mere geometry but then she heard that the witch had cast a silence spell on Paricia for asking her for a flying spell so she didn’t much think that magic could help either.
One day, as Gaia walked home from school she fell in with Quarmijan the goose-boy. He didn’t much care about the tower or the door, he told Gaia that all he cared about was one day being allowed to walk through the woods to the end of the world. Gaia couldn’t much see the point of that but she didn’t tell him that out of politeness. Two days after that Quarmijan came to her door his face bloodied. At first Gaia thought that he had had a nosebleed but as she cleaned his face and removed his shirt for washing she realised that it was someone elses blood. When she asked him what had happened he smiled at her and she saw feathers in his teeth.
As soon as she drew back he grasped her wrist, tightly and pulled her from the house with him. He pulled her silently all the way to the goose yard where she saw that not a one of his birds had been harmed, but in the centre of the barn was the hugest bird, a swan, its proud neck laying to one side and it’s innards spilled blood red across it’s white down. She felt nauseaus. He pulled her to the bird and then with his hand still clamped on her wrist he pulled the rest of the birds organs from it’s corpse with his teeth.
Now his mouth was as bloody as his chest and she looked on, unable to move or to think. He let go of her wrist and she did not run. He pressed the heart of the swan agains her forehead and crushed it too her until the warmth of it’s lifeblood ran down her face and matted her clothes. He took the liver, kidneys and other organs she did not know or recognise and he rubbed his chest with them, then he stepped from his slacks and continued to rub the organs until his whole body was unrecognisable in blood and the pulped matter of the swans body. The swan corpse sagged emptily until Quarmijan stepped inside, an eleven year old boy disappearing into the gaping maw he had torn out of a swan. And Gaia placed her hands on the body of the swan and as Quarmijan suddenly screamed the hole was no longer there.
Gaia began to kiss the head of the swan, kissing and kissing and crying until the salt from her tears, mucus from her mouth and blood from the heart of the swan swam over the beak and eyes. Then she pulled off her spattered dress and wrapped it around the neck of the swan intending to drag it home. To pull it she had to stand astride the corpse which contained the still body of Quarmijan, as the feathers of the swan pulled up inside her thighs she felt a solidity there not associated with dead, empty things.
The people of the town looked up to see Gaia astride the swan Quarmijan making straight for the tallest tower in the world. They say she was bloodstained and laughing and that the swan sang aloud it’s final song in the pure notes of a human treble. They sopranosay that the swan sung it’s final note and Gaia stepped inside the secret door of the tower quite easily. They say that as she left it to sing it’s final note its wings stopped beating and it fell, stone dead at the foot of the tower. They say they found the goose-boy Quarmijan bloody within it, dead from the fall, and that they buried him the next day in the cemetry outside the town near the edge of the world.
They say all of this but I have no way of knowing if it’s true because we lost the keys to the gates of the wood a long time ago and the town is well within the wood.
My feet are cold.
In another place the tempratures soar,
My head aches and the music on the radio is not my own.
The road looks awful tempting,
Here my feet are cold.
More Than It Is
The stars are so far away,
One day I would like to visit them,
The moon is closer,
But I don’t want to go.
These things are more than they are.
luvlymish
Mish's Quick Kisses 