Bluebells

A Story by Leah Fay

I entered a short story competition with this, its the first piece of writing I ever put on the internet- which is very scary!

Gone were the days when I would play in the garden, and find fairies in jam pots. Now the only time I go into the garden is to tell stories to my grandchildren. Not that I’m complaining of course- I love telling them fairytales. Oh and they do love my stories. They are recalled from when I was just a young girl myself. There were all sorts of magical things happening to me when I was young. I remember those times well. I would often play alone; back when I was eleven it wasn’t too hard to find my own fun. Sometimes, Arthur, the little boy from next door would call round to play. But being a girl, I liked princesses and magic, I didn’t really appreciate his snotty nose and worm-filled pockets. I liked to read fairytales, and would let myself dissolve in the fantasy.

Sometimes I felt I was completely alone, I had no friends to play with. Until I met Scampy that is. It was funny that I would stumble into a new friend when I needed one most.
*

‘Maybe she’s a fairy?’ Scampy wondered.
‘Don’t be silly Scamp; she’s too big to be a fairy.’ Fay told him.
‘Maybe she’s a human?’ Scampy tried once more.
Fay was quick to diminish the idea again- ‘There’s no such thing as humans.’

I don’t know if it had been my highly anticipated wonder of the fairies that brought such great disappointment to my meeting of them, but it wasn’t going the way I had imagined it. While they tried to figure out what exactly I was, I tried to figure out why they hadn’t asked me to be their new queen. For the 7 minutes that I’d known Fay, Nix and Scampy, they had done nothing but quarrel.
Scampy had flown out of one of the bluebells in the flowerbed and landed in my jam pot. Accidental, I thought. I had presumed he was a fly. It turned out he had spotted my jam a mile off and was eager to try a bit; Greedy so-n-so. I agreed to share it with him if he told me stories of the fairyland. 7 minutes later I’m still waiting to hear them and he is stuffing his chubby fairy face with gooseberry jam. We had been interrupted by his two sisters, Fay and Nix, who came buzzing out of the same bluebell he did. As soon as they got here they started yelling at him.
‘You were told not to go near the bluebells!’ Fay cried. Concernedly more than anything else, but anything in her tone of voice came out bossy and know-it-all.
‘How was I meant to know that I was going to land on the master bluebell?’ Scampy argued back, though it was hard to take him seriously with sticky jam all over his face. ‘They all look the same.’
‘You aren’t meant to go near the bluebells at all.’ Fay put her hands on her hips.
‘You’re already in trouble for eating the last sugar cube.’ Nix pitched in, placing her tiny hands on her hips mimicking her elder sister, though a little troubled that she was in for a telling off herself when she returned home. They had always been warned away from the human land; not to my surprise. They hadn’t had much luck here in the past.

‘Maybe we should take her back with us? Mother will know what she is and what to do with her.’ Scampy suggested, after a long discussion of what to do with my witnessing tattle-tale eyes.
‘Scampy, if we take her back with us, then mother will know that we were here, and we will be in a lot of trouble.’ Fay took the moral high ground once again. As the older sibling, she was of course always right.
I wasn’t sure whether I should contribute to the discussion, after all, they had already considered cursing my mouth stay forever shut so that I couldn’t speak of them. Maybe it’s best to stay quiet, I thought.
After being considered greatly, we came to a compromise- they would live in my jewellery box and tell me stories until they figured out which bluebell they had come from.
Luckily for me, our garden was full of them.