A Fairy Tale
In the bowels of the valleys where I live the smell of anger comes in bouts. The smell rides down from the mountain sides on great horses wearing heavy armor and large blades; the smell drives at us with the sound of hooves pounding on soft valley soil. My father could scent this smell twenty-four hours before it came, but when he was hungry for something angry, to him the smell of war was everywhere. The day he left to find the source of the scent was the day he left me all alone.I forget sometimes what people tell me to do or not do. What they tell me slips away into the backwaters of my memory where it drowns in all other memories forgotten.
"I can go anywhere I want to with a turn of this ring," I boasted to the group of asinine country men.
"Sugar and spice," the old woman beckoned as she held out palms filled with cinnamon falling between her fingers like sand. As she sprinkled it across the floor my head swum up in a dizzy spell of hunger. I could no longer control my feet moving towards the cheap gimmicks of an old woman.
"What weighs you down will make you drown," he said with a loud crescent shaped grin. I believed him. I may have been a fool but with my head thrown asunder by the crashing tides of water I took off my shoes and bag and threw them across the stream on the other bank.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the man from the mountain open his razored jaw and draw a poisoned needle from underneath his tongue. I watched the needle fly from his finger through my father's ear and out the other, turning all his fluids into ones of pure jade and stone. Then the foreigner strapped my jaded father to his back and continued to ride into forbidding wastelands.
"Let me go to find what I seek," I said.
After I took the needle from its place, I pryed my father's bones from the floor and put them in my satchel.
The fairy placed a single seed in my palm which I immediately planted and tended to for months. For days, I watered the seed, showered it with words of encouragement as it grew into a young sprout, and gave it proper space and care as it blossomed fully into a magnificent red rose that granted any wish that I whispered lovingly into its soft petals.
As I approached the top of the mountain a white spectacle blinded me for an instant. When I blinked again I saw a white dragon shifting over the mountain like a layer of foam riding ocean waves. I could tell by its movement that it was a territorial creature; I could tell that it would fight me before allowing me to press further.
Forms circulated around my body on all sides and I could no longer breathe. Lungs tight and waist constricted I watched as my skin turned into the color of soil. I could no longer distinguish my body from the mountain's.
When he placed his hand upon me he let out a great cry and then vanished into the earth.
The handsome man presented a room full of gold, silver, and precious jewels. "All of this is yours," he said. My mind was in a whirl: there wasn’t a dream in the world I could not obtain with these riches. Heaven was as close as the sparkling gems I beheld all around me.
With each step I took, the people of soil tried to clench my feet harder and began to pull me down.
As I felt the creature take me into her jaws I saw my father come, from behind a tree. From thirty feet away he shot the creature and the jaws fell lose, emptying me onto the floor. The skin on my chest had impressions of teeth marks, but no blood appeared.
Mother could not recognize the sound of my footsteps at the door.
"This man," he pointed at me, "this man killed our father. See the blood on his shirt Mother? See it? The smell is like one of our own."
"As a child, my son could dance along the soil so quickly that the men who died and live in the ground could not catch him. Prove this to me now,"
Everyone then stared through the guise of the false man beside me. The person, who acted as a substitute for my accomplishments, began to bite his nails in a rampant manner.
My mother's embrace rendered the burns and boils on my skin pristine.
A girl with snow white hair came to the house later that day, looking for the man with the leather-bottomed shoes and coat of dragon scales. She told me she was betrothed to that man who had taken her creature form and made her human. She reminded me of the mountain. She was beautiful.
http://www.brown.edu/Courses/FR0133/Fairytale_Generator/gen.html
blabbered by Aditi @ 8:30 AM
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