Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  I found the biggest boulder and patted it. I could almost reach the top now. It was cold and damp, covered in moss. I lay against it for a while, enjoying the coolness on my stomach. Then I turned and slid down until I was sitting on the ground, the boulder at my back.

  “Here,” I whispered to the night. “Here, I can sleep.”

  Suddenly, the boulder moved!

  “Sad,” it rumbled.

  I felt the word more than heard it. It was like ... It was like—like gravel rattling around in my skull.

  I jumped up and wheeled around. My breath sounded like a freight train coming through the fields. But there was no movement, no voices.

  The moon was a couple of hours further over in the sky than when I’d sat, so I must have fallen asleep and been dreaming. But it didn’t feel like a dream. The skin between my shoulder blades was still tingling where the rock had shivered against me.

  Then I laughed, remembering. Lydia and I, we used to pretend we could talk to the boulders here. I must have fallen asleep and dreamed about that.

  All day, my past had seemed particularly close and precious, as if it was rising up to give me a last look at a world that was disappearing.

  But, apparently, talking boulders had no respect for dreaming. Or girlhood fondly remembered. Or sanity, for that matter. Because now he shifted again, rattling his—his—what?

  It sounded like wind chimes in a light breeze, only with stones tied on the strings instead of metal tubes.

  I laughed again. It was a little strange, but delightful, too.

  “Not laugh. Not joy,” the boulder said in my head. “Sad.”

  It was a little less scary, now that I’d decided I was indeed dreaming. In fact, I could see how it would be fun, telling Gran and Lydia about my dream. Except ... Gran didn’t seem to have many smiles left.

  “Sad?” I asked the boulder.

  I had the impression that it nodded. And gestured. What the hell—if a boulder can talk, it’s not really such a stretch for it to gesture, is it?

  I understood perfectly what it wanted me to do. I bent down to peer into the place where Lydia and I had once tried to make a cave.

  The space looked much deeper than before. I shouldn’t have been able to see into it in the dark, but ... it was full to the brim of lightning bugs in all the colors of summer wildflowers. Rippling and flickering and wafting like a sigh.

  I sat with a thump.

  “Sad,” whispered the boulder again.

  I glanced back at the stone, then snapped back to the flickers. I would have sworn one of them jumped out at me.

  I finally said, “Who’s sad?”

  “The Sidhe Ones.”

  “She ones?”

  “Sidhe Ones,” the gravel in my brain rumbled.

  It didn’t make any sense. I had the feeling that I was misunderstanding what he was saying, but ... I leaned nearer the cave.

  The lightning bugs twinkled and danced, darting out, then dancing away again. They rippled like a piece of silk in a spring breeze. They blinked off and on like Christmas tree lights.

  Except ... lightning bugs didn’t come in colors. Their light was greeny orange, and it flicked on and off. On and off.

  Whatever filled the cave flitted from side to side, flickering, dancing. And then one of the lights came close.

  The purple lightning bug had arms and legs, and a face with large eyes and a tiny nose and purpley pink lips. And fluttering lilac colored wings.

  Another light danced close. It, too, was no larger than my hand. It was the pale orange/pink of a delicate sunrise. Like the first one, it looked fragile, almost transparent.

  There was a fish ... my brain, which felt like it was trying to swim through rock, struggled to remember the name. A tiny fish ... neon something. It was almost transparent, with an opalescent stripe down its body that changed colors with the light.

  That was what these creatures looked like. Transparent and delicate and flickering. And suddenly I realized what the rock was saying. Sidhe, not she. The Gaelic name for fairies.

  I smiled. “The Sidhe,” I said, daring to hold out a hand. “They’re sad? Why are they sad?”

  My first friend, the little lilac fairy, flitted close and touched my fingertips with a brush like rose petals. “Why are you sad?” I whispered.

  Flowers erupted in my head.

  I gasped, and the little fairy darted away.

  I held out my hand, murmuring apologies.

  As the purple fairy and one the delicate ivory and yellow of honeysuckle dared to flit nearer, the boulder rumbled, “Their shadows burn.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The wings of the old ones, gone. Green gone.”

  An image opened in my mind, like a morning glory unfolding with the sun, of the bare branches of the trees, the brown plants, the dry grass. “The trees and the plants are dying?”

  Who’d have thought a boulder could nod?

  Another couple of Sidhe drifted close.

  “And it hurts them?” I guessed. I knew it hurt me.

  “Shadows burn.”

  I tried to quiet my mind, to let the words open into a picture. I opened my palm and extended my arm carefully toward the flitting fairies. “What a wonderful dream!” was the thought that ran through my mind.

  It seemed to be the opening they’d been waiting for. Several of them flitted even closer. Pink and blue and silver, and one whose colors were like a ballet of opals. My purple friend flitted in front of my face. I could feel the air moving from her wings, just the barest hint of lavender breeze against my cheek.

  The flowers opened in my mind again, but this time, it was more like a wave of color than an explosion. And beneath the shifting colors, I could hear their voices, like the touch of the softest flower petals, like green.

  Sadness. My breath caught in my throat. Sadness as old as the oaks, as deep as tree roots. The land they loved was dying. Being stripped and poisoned and killed. With the trees, and plants, and the brambles went the animals and the shade.

  Understanding like the bright yellow of a daffodil surged through me.

  Without shade, their shadows burned. Without protection from bright hot light of the sun and the bright cold light of the moon, they couldn’t move about the fields and the garden and the trees. Without the flower light of the fairies, the land died. Their tears soaked into the land and gave life, but with the creek dammed up, their tears had no place to go. So Gran’s yard died of drought, and the fields drowned in the tears of the Sidhe. Without shade, they could only go out into the green glowing places in the dark of the new moon. Not enough time to keep things green and growing. Without fairies, the land died. Without the land....

  The flowers twirled and trilled in my head, winding in on each other, looping, twisting, but always coming round again to the same thing. Without shade, the fairies wept and cried.

  The trills of the Sidhe grew louder in my head until all I could see or think or breathe was flowers and grass and thorn and tree. In my timeless dream, the moon had set, leaving the patch of forest dark. But my arms, my legs, my hands, my thoughts, were a rainbow of fairies.

  I woke. My head, which had been bobbing, chin on chest, banged into the rock behind me as I gasped and sat up. My neck felt like I’d bent it in half. One foot was asleep. And I’d drooled on my collar.

  Morning light was filtering through the trees, twinkling on the dew that clung to the grass. I looked around wildly for the flickering fairies, but all I saw were pale beams of early-morning sunlight.

  I wheeled around. The cave was empty and again small. It was nowhere near big enough to hold dozens of fairies.

  I got up and brushed at the seat of my jeans as I limped toward the house, cursing softly as pins and needles shot through the soles of my feet.

  Gran would be wondering where I was. Maybe.

  She was up and already in the kitchen, shuffling around with her three-legged cane. The scent of brewing coffee filled the room.
She still used an old battered aluminum coffeepot, the kind with a glass knob on top. It was probably brewing aluminum poison right along with the coffee, but I didn’t turn down a cup when she poured it.

  I scraped butter onto toast. Store-bought butter, not the wonderful stuff Gran used to make from scratch.

  “Why did you say Dennehy dammed up the creek?”

  This time, she answered promptly. “He said his crops were too wet. They were rotting in the field. Crazy if you ask me. A body can see that our yard’s a dyin’ for lack of water.”

  As if the rock was whispering in my ear, I heard a gravelly voice say, “Sidhe weep.”

  “—don’t think it helped much, though,” Gran was saying. “Cotton rotted in the field last year, before it were even ready. Peanuts never growed a’tall.”

  G-Pop came shuffling out of the hallway. He accepted the cup of coffee Gran held out to him. Without a word, he kissed her cheek, and then shuffled out the back door.

  “Doesn’t he talk any more?”

  “Sometimes,” Gran said, and she smiled sadly.

  “So ... the dam ... it wasn’t in the contract you signed with Dennehy?”

  Gran shook her head, and then took her coffee off to the living room. I heard her old rocker squeak as she sat in it.

  I went into the dining room. The contract was still lying on the table where I’d left it after she gave it to me yesterday. Through the smudged windows, I could see the dead brown garden.

  An idea was forming in my head. It was just a dream, but still....

  I found what I needed in the barn. A sledgehammer that was almost too heavy for me to carry and a shovel that was only a bit lighter.

  The sun was warm on my shoulders as I strode down the dry creek bed.

  As I got closer to the dam, I could see a sharp change in color in the ground. The dry ground and rocks beneath my feet were dusty tan. The earth behind the dam was dark and damp. The darkness fanned out on either side of the stream as if something was being held back.

  “Fairy tears.” I twitched a little when I heard myself say it out loud. Was I really going to knock down a dam because of a dream?

  I stood there and looked at it while I decided. The water right up against the dam was dank and stagnant. No, I decided. I wasn’t going to knock down a dam because of a dream. I was going to knock it down because it felt like the right thing to do. Because it felt like it would bring the green back to the grass, the joy back into my grandfather’s voice and the laughter back in my grandmother’s eyes.

  This was the woman who had chased Lydia and me around the house in the autumn sunshine. Who played hide and seek in the wisteria and taught us how to lick the dainty sweetness off honeysuckle flowers. Who had read us stories in bed and taught us not to fear the lightning and thunder. I didn’t know that other woman, the one who sat all day in a darkened room and stared out through clouded eyes. But this one, I knew.

  I took off my shoes and joined her in the creek.

  G-Pop never came out of his workshop, though I called for him.

  When Gran headed back to the house, walking with the slowness of age, but on her own, I went to the workshop to find him.

  The day before, I’d barely opened the door to talk to him. Today ... today, what I saw took my breath away, the same way the dream fairies had.

  On the walls and the posts of the old carriage shed hung the birdhouses G-Pop had been making. There were dozens of them. Maybe a hundred.

  I’d never seen anything like them except in my dreams, because they were all the colors of summer wildflowers. And the shapes! There was one like a New England saltbox. A Creole cottage with a gabled roof. And a castle, complete with turrets and a drawbridge. And one looked like a tree house. Not the tree house he had built for Lydia and me, but a house made out of a tree. The branches and leaves curved down to make the walls and roof.

  And the colors! Pale, glistening pastels and deep, rich earth tones. One spire glittered like gold, and one roof was made with tiny overlapping tiles that looked like dragon scales. They were like snowflakes, delicate and no two just exactly alike.

  They were art. Exquisite, amazing art.

  “These are so beautiful, G-Pop.”

  He glanced up from the tiny detail he was painting and watched me rub my finger over delicate scrollwork on a porch railing.

  He didn’t say anything, but he bobbed his head slightly, acknowledging the compliment.

  “You know, even with money as tight as it is, I bet you could sell these at the market in New Orleans. I’ve never seen birdhouses like them. They’d fly right off the table!”

  My grandfather interrupted me. “Mumble, mumble, mumble—house.”

  He had a paintbrush in his mouth and he was leaning close over what he was working on, so all I heard was the last word. “Sir?”

  He straightened up, took the brush out of his mouth. “They’re not birdhouses,” he said.

  “They’re not? Then what are they?”

  Rosy little dots of color warmed up on his cheeks, and he hesitated, like he was gathering the courage to tell me. “They’re fairy houses.”

  My mouth dropped open. If there’d been any fairies in the room, they could have flown in and landed on my tongue.

  “Ruby’s been so sad since the fairies went away. I thought maybe if I built them some pretty houses for shade, they’d come back and stay.”

  SIREN TEARS

  John Lambshead

  John Lambshead was born in North Cornwall and educated at Newquay Grammar School. He read biology and biochemistry at Brunel University in London and worked as a British Museum research scientist for more than three decades. He designed some of the earliest computer games, and has written popular history and war game books. He is married with two grown-up daughters. Now semi-retired, he writes fiction. He is the Saturday on the Mad Genius writers’ blog: www.madgeniusclub.blogspot.com and is a host at Baen’s Bar. He twitters as johnlambshead.

  “What potions have I drunk of siren tears, Distilled from limbecks foul as hell”

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 119.

  Atlantic rollers roared in to hit the land with a crash that sprayed froth high into the air. The water poured back like a retreating army, gurgling and sucking over the rocks like a living organism.

  The sea called to me.

  The wind was so strong that I had to lean forward to keep my balance. It whipped my black leather overcoat against my legs. It buffeted my ears, causing a low throbbing that harmonized with the sea. I moved closer to the edge of the cliff to get a better view.

  Water surged in and out below me. The repetitive pattern was hypnotic. I felt like DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic but my Kate Winslet was three hundred miles away in London.

  “I’m sick of you whining about your work!. Are you not a Master of the Universe?” Jemima had said. “The bank gave you a two million pound bonus last year, city-boy, just for betting the right way on the futures market. If you want fulfillment, then get a job in the East End teaching poor people, but you’ll get a pittance of a salary. Don’t expect me to come and don a hair shirt with you. Maybe you should take a few days off and think about it. Why don’t you try some of that simple life you are always banging on about lately?”

  “Maybe I should,” I had replied, more loudly than was necessary.

  I grabbed an overnight bag and stormed out of our Little Venice apartment. I had a decent stab at taking the front door off its hinges. There were things Jemima did not know. Things I did not want to discuss with her. I was heavily exposed on the copper market after an unauthorized trade. I had bet on a price rise, but the market had fallen faster than a politician’s credibility. I had to hide the situation by juggling the debt into an anonymous account last year so I could show a paper profit and get my bonus. Fortunately, nobody in the bank’s senior management understood banking or I would have already been rumbled.

  I had gone over the only three options a thousand times. I could res
ign, do a runner and let my replacement clear up the mess, or I could come clean and throw myself on the bank’s mercy. Like they had any. I could take a bigger unauthorized punt in the hope of winning big and clearing the debt. Jemima would not worry too much about the morality of my decision. She was a corporate tax lawyer, after all; they don’t do morality. But it would concern her if I got caught. She despised failure. She might despise me. I discovered, rather to my surprise, that I cared about that. The realization was disquieting.

  I pointed the Aston Martin’s nose west along the Cromwell Road. It crawled down the A4 in first gear, sandwiched between a plumber’s van and four youths in an old Ford hatchback. They were vastly amused to see one hundred and forty thousand pounds worth of sports car stuck in the same traffic jam as their rustbucket.

  On a whim, I turned southwest into Richmond to avoid the jam and took the M3 motorway into the English West Country. Motorway turned into A road, A into B, until six hours later I eased the Aston down single-track lanes that had high hedges and grass growing in the middle. I ran out of road at a village called Morwenstowe, on the north Cornish coast. I hoped that some time among the lives of simple, honest, working rural folk might clear my mind. Then I could make a decision.

  Morwenstowe huddled along a narrow valley with sides so steep that they might have been cut by a giant axe. A stream tumbled down the valley into the harbor. It looked too small to have carved out all that rock, but I suppose water can wear away anything, given time. Two massive granite-block quays projected from steep cliffs to protect the anchorage. I could see my car parked outside the Sailor’s Arms, Morwenstowe’s solitary pub, where I had taken a room before walking up to the cliffs. The metallic blue paint stood out among the grays, browns, and dark greens of the village like a sapphire in a cowpat.

  The sea called to me.

  A gray seal popped its head out of the water. It swam under the cliffs, unfazed by the choppy water. I leaned over to get a better look. I had never seen a seal in the wild. The wind dropped abruptly and I stumbled forward. My foot slipped on the wet grass and I only just checked myself. I threw myself back from the cliff edge. The wind gusted in stronger than ever, as if angered to be cheated of a death.