DISCOVERING FAIRYLAND (2)

Part 2 (and the last part), of a little story involving fairies and sleeping queens....

Jeremy Cumming was confused. There’s no other way to express the melee of odd thoughts that were suddenly turning his mind upside down and inside out.

And, worst of all, his feet weren’t on the ground! Indeed, far from being on the ground they were rising every higher into the sky until the country road he’d been walking along, the fields that bordered it, the meadow that nudged itself against a winding stream in the distance, even the pretty little village of Briddleton where he had his expensive house, all were like images on a complex and very accurate map.

And he was holding the hand of a man-(or woman)-sized fairy in a beautiful white dress and sporting the most delicate set of wings imaginable. And it was those wings that were fluttering, bearing him ever higher through an azure blue sky.

So he said the only thing that came into his mind when the fairy smiled sweetly at him and asked him how he felt.

“I can see your knickers,” he said.

“It’s the breeze and there’s precious little I can do about that,” she replied.

“Where…?” He wanted to ask where they were going, but he knew that if he did so the chances that he would understand the answer were slimmer than zero. But she understood the question anyway.

“I told you. To the birthing house,” she said, and suddenly he felt a twinge of something a little bit more distressing than uncertainty creep into his mind.

After all, she had said that all fairies were female and if they wanted to have young they had to use human males in order to get them.

“It’s all right,” she cooed at him, “it won’t hurt!”

Of course it wouldn’t hurt! He knew all about human reproduction because he’d personally reproduced, and as far as the male side of the proceedings were concerned they’d been more delightful than anything else he had experienced in his entire life.

He looked back at the fairy in whose firm grip he was suspended goodness-knows how high above the terrain below. He loved the look of her, and he was a married man who loved his wife with a depth and certainty that sometimes made him weep and incited him to even buy her flowers on the odd occasion. But this fairy, this creature with wings, was perfect, physically, in every possible respect.

And he could still, quite plainly, see up that pristine white skirt or dress or whatever it was at her knickers as the breeze caught it by the gossamer hem and stirred it and swirled it around almost mischievously.

“We’re going there,” she pointed, ignoring the direction his bulging eyes were gazing, “to the birthing house...”

The scary part of that was that she’d pointed with the forefinger of the hand that had been holding his, the hand that was his only support, that prevented him from plunging to break his neck and as many other parts of him that were breakable on the ground below.

It seemed that he’d reached a point beyond which he would start tumbling back down when she grasped his hand again and, with a tinkling laugh, said “did you see it?”

“I can’t see any house,” he said, once he’d decided that he wasn’t falling to his death after all.

“It’s not exactly a house as you’d understand the word house,” tinkled his guide, “but it’s still a house with a resident.”

“A resident?” he asked, aware that they had started descending through the blue and summer skies back towards terra firma.

“Our queen,” she replied in the sort of voice that suggested that he might be about to meet the mightiest and most precious soul on the entire planet, and that he should be fully aware of the huge privilege and honour being bestowed upon him.

“I’ll explain,” she tinkled, “it’s our queen who has the babies and I do believe that the barest memory of her long sleep has become entrenched in some of your children’s stories. But the truth is, the queen needs huge strength if she is to lay enough eggs, so she sleeps a lot...”

“Lay eggs?” asked Jeremy, “you cannot be serious!”

She landed on a gravel drive-way that curved away from the country road he had been walking down and vanished out of sight in front of them. He found landing to be absurdly unsteadying and found himself lying on the gravel, face down and with a grazed knee and with blood seeping through his fine summer trousers.

“Don’t worry about that,” she giggled. “Blood soon dries up, and skin heals,” she added. “Now let me explain. Ahead of us and just round the corner you will see the birthing house. As I said, it doesn’t really look much like a house at all. It’s in there that our queen lies sleeping and has been for quite a long time, until her eggs were needed.”

“I don’t know anything about...” began Jeremy.

“You don’t have to know anything, silly!” tinkled the fairy, “except that if you approach her where she lies, her breath coming gently and her eyes closed, and kiss her fully on the mouth, then she will be able to lay her eggs, fertilised by the warmth of your kiss, and any fairies who sadly pass away because thoughtless people say they don’t believe in them will be replaced, and our future will be secure.”

“I need powerful psychotropic drugs myself, engaging in this kind of conversation with a flying woman,” grunted Jeremy, his old grumpy personality slowly returning to cast the shadow of his perceived reality on events.

“When you see her you will kiss her,” vowed his fairy, “You won’t be able not to! For whereas I am accounted as plain and almost ugly, she is accounted as truly and spectacularly beautiful.”

“You’re nothing like plain or ugly,” grunted Jeremy, rubbing his knee. “Actually, I think you’re spectacularly beautiful myself, though I’ve never been much a judge of such things.”

“You sweet little man!” tinkled the fairy, “so come along! Let’s go to the birthing house and see what we shall see.

She took him by one hand again and the two of them drifted about half a foot above the ground, just above the gravel driveway and round the bend at the far end.

Jeremy gasped when he saw it.

Before him and on a luxurious lawn with borders of flowers of every colour under the sun was a glass casket, or what looked like a glass casket.

“It’s not glass, but diamond,” the fairy corrected his thoughts.

But it wasn’t the crystal casket that made him gasp.

Inside it, and lying on a bed of pure white feathers, slept the most ravishingly beautiful creature he had ever seen. She, too, was dressed in the purest white with folds and pleats of a silky cloth that must surely be even whiter than the whitest snow. Yet her face, with closed eyes and lips that were the most perfect pink he had ever seen, was the softest, smoothest, most perfect face he had ever seen. And the hair … he’d always had what his wife at home called a fetish for long, curling golden hair, and that’s what it was: long and curling and golden.

“Come,” said his fairy, “that’s enough gawping!”

He shook his head, unable to comprehend the absurd mixture of confusion and absolute beauty that his mind was trying to cope with.

Then, with the least of sounds, a door in the crystal casket opened, and he knew that he was as close to the ravishingly magnificent female as he was to the ground beneath his feet. He couldn’t help it. Nothing could have stopped him.

He entered the birthing house and took the gorgeous lady by one hand. Then, shaking as if a powerful electric shock had been administered to his entire body, he bent forwards and, totally out of control and knowing with a strange certainty that he was doing the right thing, he kissed her on the lips. And not a nonsense, brief sort of throw-away kiss, the sort favoured by nerdy lads on their first date, either, but something he needed to do, something that seemed to last for an eternity of its own.

“My, you’re good at that!” gasped the queen. And at the sound of her perfect voice he swayed away from her. Her eyes were open, bluer than the sky, and her breath was sweeter than the sweetest honey, and, totally out of control, he kissed her again.

And then in a kind of dream he found himself flying through the air again, holding the precious hand of the fairy he’d met by the road signs, WELCOME TO FAIRYLAND and FAIRYLAND WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS.

“Goodbye,” she whispered, “and thank you so very much.”

“What for?” he asked, still more confused than a snake that’s accidentally tied itself in a reef knot.

“For the future. Our future, the future of our race,” tinkled the fairy, and that was that. “So thank you, thank you, thank you, and if, in the future, you should ever chance to hear a little voice saying thank you daddy you might remember your gift to us...”

And off she flew, swiftly becoming a vanishing dot in the blue.

And Jeremy Cumming sat on the grass verge, held his head in his hands, and wept. It’s not, he told himself severely, not everyone who goes to Heaven and back in a single day…

And when his eyes were almost dry he stood back up and looked at the sign on the road.

BRIDDLETON WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS it read.

“And home,” he mumbled to himself.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 29.11.17