The Changelings, By Aliza Faber

There once was a child with golden hair,

Who grew up strange and wild and free,

In the hands of the fairy queen's tender care,

Where reeds play tunes and secrets be.

She drank dew straight from petal's lips,

And spun and danced in the moon's bright beam,

flowers adorned her hair and hips,

Though she was troubled by a single dream.

On midsummer's day of her sixteenth year,

As the fires rose high in bundles of twine,

While the fay reveled with zest and cheer,

She turned and said; "mother of mine.

How can it be my ears are round,

My feet a pointed shape do lack,

Instead of green, my eyes are browned,

And wings don't lie upon my back."

The fairy queen then stroked her hair,

And told her; "child, let it bother you not,

After all I've done it would only be fair,

For you to abandon this train of thought.

I saved you from the clutches of,

A plain and dull and mundane life,

If still you do not believe me, love,

Tomorrow I'll show you the cause of this strife."

True to her word the vain queen took her,

To the land hidden behind the rift,

As midnight struck, humans she showed her,

Living their lives mundane and swift.

"If not for me you would share their fate,"

The queen explained to the changeling girl,

And she led her back through fairy's gate,

To dance and sing and laugh and twirl.

The queen thought she could now forget,

But the changeling girl would not be sated,

She dreamed of humans to be met,

Every day for midnight to come she waited.

Then she'd creep to where the lands did meet,

To search far and wide until she found,

A human with pointed ears and feet,

The one to which her fate was bound.

For near a year at midnight she rose,

To watch the changed one in plain clothes clad,

Hidden deep in mooncast shadows,

She gazed at the life she should have had.

After some time she decided she'd rather,

Stay where the fay played their merry tune,

Still she returned to watch other,

Who in a life not hers was strewn.

Midsummer came again with all its might,

And the girl once more crept through the veil,

But the midsummer midnight sun shone bright,

With no moon to hide her, her face turned pale.

For the changed one stood there and started at her other,

"You've been watching me," she said, her green eyes bright,

"You suffer," said the one raised by the fairy mother,

and told her the tale of their birth night.

The fairy told the girl to take her place,

To be accepted by the humans as she never was,

So she could live with the fairy race,

That had given her up without good cause.

But the human girl shook her head,

A sly fairy glint played in her eyes,

As she said; "Why should I go in your stead,

When we both can enjoy the faerie's cries?"

So changelings returned to the land of fey,

To dance around the fairy glen,

And there they live to this very day,

Never to return to the land of men. 

Aliza loves reading, writing and anything to do with fairy tales. She hopes one day she will have enough time to continue introducing less well known fairy tales on her blog taleaday.blogspot.com.

Image by John Anster Fitzgerald.

By the Light Of the Kumquat Tree, By Melissa Yuan-Innes

She lights upon the kumquat tree,

The deep green leaves glossy with promise;

The fruit dangle like fragrant orange pendants.

A hummingbird darts toward her

And his wings momentarily hum louder

Than the helicopter rumbling in the distance.

She can breathe here,

Six feet up from concrete,

Sheltered from the maddening glint of steel.

On the longest day of the year,

When her powers are strongest,

Perhaps she should fly further, to the ocean—

Befriend the seagulls

Baptize herself in the salty spray

Let her lungs and wings expand over the endless waves.

For now, she tiptoes

Into the twig cradle of an abandoned bird’s nest

And sleeps with a stray feather wisping her cheek.

Melissa says: "I've sold my award-winning stories to Nature, Writers of the Future, Tesseracts 7 & 16, and the Aurora-winning anthology called The Dragon and the Stars. Three of my stories earned honorable mentions in Gardner Dozois's year's best science fiction collections."

Altered image by John Anster Fitzgerald.

You Know My Name, By Andrea Mullaney

 

"Pipe Dreams," by John Anster Fitzgerald, artmagick.com

You know my name. Everyone does, now.

But you don’t know who I am. That’s alright. Neither do I anymore.

My old self is gone, torn in two, ripped up and thrown away; like a betting slip after the horse falls at the fence, like a lottery ticket when too many wrong numbers have rolled down the tube. I gambled my self on a long shot and it failed, that’s all. These things happen.

Names, you know, have power. People pretend they don’t: sticks and stones can break my bones, they say, but names can never hurt me. A rose by any other name could smell as sweet. What nonsense – our true names are deep magic, a false name can cling to you like a parasite.

The Jews, the old Jews, know this. They write ‘G-d’ and the blank letter is the most important part, even though everyone who reads it fills it in for themselves. That absent negative carries the weight of thousands of years of surviving the worst by keeping something back.

Maybe I should write my name like that: R-mpl-st-ltsk-n. It looks like a half-completed crossword clue: Disarrange dwarf raised to lofty height (15). I know, hardly cryptic. But here’s the thing: secrecy was never the point. It was always hidden in plain sight.

What? Surely not! Yeah, come on: who goes around singing their own name? I’m not a hip hop artist, compelled to rhyme my status. I could get offended by the implication that I’m as stupid as to give myself away like that, but what does it matter. Like I said, you don’t know me.

But I would have thought that she’d get it. I would have thought a lot of things.

I told her, you see. Of course I told her. I heard her behind me, following, I felt her crouching low, watching. I wanted to tell her, to trust her with my name, my self, to gamble everything on her response, so I chose to speak.

For isn’t that what we do, when we love? We reveal ourselves, we open up and say: here, look, this is who I am, in all my blurry contradictions. Pleased to meet you, hope you’ll guess my name. Here are my fears and my petty jealousies, here are the parts I’m most ashamed of. Here, too, is my silliness; my blind spots, my vulnerabilities.  You could destroy me now, if you would. Here is my anger, the worst of me – look at how bad I am – will you see it and want me anyway? I’m Samson, I’m Heathcliff, I’m Quasimodo: this is what we do.

And if you’re lucky, you make a world together. A unique, unrepeatable, private world, which no one else could ever, ever understand, with its own secret language – think of how embarrassing it is when held up to the light, in old love letters of the historical hero or leaked celebrity texts, or in cringe-making Valentine’s Day personal ad columns.

These secret names have their own power, binding people in their private worlds, making it – just about – possible to maintain that necessary illusion that you two, and you two only, are meant for each other. It’s a lie, but it’s a true lie. And that’s the jackpot: that’s why you gamble.

But if you’re unlucky, then you know what happens. In my case, I’d misjudged the situation, horribly. I thought we had something, something more real and valuable than her con trick courtship. They’re married now and it would be a bigger man than I who could wish them well. He doesn’t know her, he’ll never know her, but maybe that’s the point; she didn’t want to be known. She was content to fool him, with my help, into buying her gilded image.

And she didn’t really want to know me, either. All those questions, all that flirtation, those admiring smiles when I brought her what she needed to please him. Oh! You’re an artist, really you are. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, I can’t think how you do it … where did you learn? And … can anyone else in your family do it? What are their names? All just fishing, trying to catch me out.

We had a deal, she and I, but it wasn’t the one I thought. I should have seen it – she was a girl with ambition, cleverly disguised: nothing but an alpha male for her, not a stumpy schlump like me. I thought I had a shot at being the hero of this movie, but I was only the comic sidekick, all along.

Or the villain. I’ve heard what they’re saying about me; each version filters down, making me shorter and uglier and more subhuman. I understand: it’s propaganda. You can’t justify reneging on a deal with an equal, you have to make me the bad guy so everyone can cheer when the heroine cleverly tricks me out of what she promised. I’m Shylock too, all the Shylocks who provided gold when no one else would and were condemned for it: this is what they do.

But I would never have hurt her. Not then; now, perhaps, I would take revenge if I could. It’s the memory of her face as she toyed with me – making obviously false guesses, teasing me with the “I know that you know that I know” routine.

A game, I thought, an edgy lovers’ game. Tie me up, blindfold me, let me thrill to the glint of wildness in your eyes, but all the while, aware of the safe word – another secret name – weighting the balance so it doesn’t tip too far.

But there was no safety for me there. She waited for her moment and lashed out, triumphantly, with the whip-sting of her power over me. I was named and shamed. The pain was indescribable.

For isn’t that what we do, at the end of love? We hurt each other as efficiently as we can, using all the intel so freely given to guide those smart bombs directly to the weakest spots. It is friendly fire, targeted where we know it will most burn.

I say ‘we,’ because I can’t say I was innocent. You’ve even heard me do it, snidely referring to her as if all the things I now profess to hate her for were not just a different label for the qualities I loved. Now, I imply she’s ambitious and shallow; then, I thought her passionate and pure. If I am honest, I will admit that I no longer know which is true, but now these are the necessary lies I must tell myself.

So perhaps it is best that my power is gone, along with my name and the man I thought I was: I am someone new. What will I do? I’ll go on. These things happen.  But I will never trust so freely again, never gamble. I will tell you my name, for it means nothing now: I am Rumplestiltskin. I lost. 

Bio: Andrea Mullaney is a writer, journalist and tutor based in Glasgow, Scotland. She blogs at www.andreamullaney.com.