There was a stretch of the long winding river in the park where it had a nice looking curve to it. That was the place where Charles thought that he might set up his easel and perhaps paint or nap.
Mostly though, he wanted to ponder Cecily and wonder where they’d gone wrong together.
So he did so. He took the painting implements from his wicker basket and started to dab at the canvas. He was trying to capture the expanse of green field and gray river in two dimensions, but he wasn’t a very good painter to start with. Worse, he found his mind too distracted by other things to concentrate on the task at hand.
So he tried to nap. He gave up his seat at the easel to lie in the grass beneath a tree. He even pushed his cap down over his eyes to keep out the sunlight and other natural distractions. But even that did not settle his mind.
And so he just laid there with his cap down over his eyes and thought about Cecily and what he was ever going to do about her.
She was to be wed off to the much older Hubert and not to Charles as they’d both discussed. Her father even told Charles that he was an aimless dreamer who would never amount to anything.
Charles thought the wealthy Hubert was a terrible match, and it wasn’t even because he was spiteful or jealous. Cecily’s husband-to-be was moralistic and stern. His bleak principals would make her old and worn before her time. Charles had even suggested a love affair, but that had only earned him a lashing from her sharp tongue.
So there he laid pondering ways to disrupt their marriage or stealing her away. He was half-asleep but not fully so. Awake enough to feel a light brushing across the exposed part of his throat. The sensation was not unlike that of being tickled by a feather. It wasn’t unpleasant, merely disruptive.
So he opened his eyes and lifted his cap. There, lightly brushing at his neck with a pair of fluttery and Technicolor wings, was a petit girl-like creature. She was nude, and perhaps as tall as his forearm was long. But her body was so perfectly sculpted and exquisite, that he’d almost completely forgotten about Cecily and those troubles the moment that he saw her.
He reached out, but before he could touch her with his fingers, she gave a slight giggle and disappeared with a melodious twang. In her leaving, his senses filled with vertigo briefly. It was like being tossed at sea. The smell of burning poppies lingered in her vanishing wake.
Bewildered by the encounter, he got himself up off the grass, gathered up his things, and made his way out of the park to head home.
She came back to him again at night while he slept restlessly. Their encounter in the park had been too fleeting to make him forget about Cecily longer than the afternoon. But when he felt the tickling of wings upon his bare feet, he knew that she’d returned.
His eyes snapped open with excitement and he scrambled to the foot of the bed, grabbing blindly in the dark for her. There was the fleeting sound of her singsong laughter and he was let holding something. He could tell though… it certainly wasn’t her.
It felt like a large grub, alternately bristling like a hedgehog and then soft like the underbelly of a toad. It was warm and squirming in his hands, so he dropped whatever it was and then lit a candle.
It was a large grub, pale and yellow-white and squirming atop his bed sheets. Because its appearance was hideous, his initial reaction was to throw it on the floor and smash it underfoot. He wanted to tilt the candle to burn the sheets and the bed and the terrible thing she’d left with him.
But he paused before he did anything destructive. Perhaps she’d left it as a gift to him. Maybe, because she was clearly otherworldly, he was meant to take care of the worm to declare his love and trust to her.
True or otherwise, it certainly calmed his mind to think in that manner. The idea most certainly helped him to further forget about Cecily and Hubert the stern prick and all of that business.
So he swaddled up the maggot in the top sheet as if it were a baby. Then he emptied his artist’s basket and placed the worm inside as if it was a cradle.
For nine days he cared for it, hoping that she might return. But she never did. His reward was a second birthing. It was a birth of a different kind. It came at night and woke him from a pleasant dream in which they were marrying inside the gazebo at the park.
What woke him was the pleasant tickle of wings again. He was excited, but calm enough to keep his wits and not grab for her in a panic this time.
Instead, he moved slowly and carefully. He rolled to the nightstand beside his bed to light a candle.
In the soft glow, he saw once again that it was not her. Instead, some kind of moth or insect hovered in the bedroom air above him.
It had her wings, he had the time to note. Then it vomited something green and foul from its anus and he could see nothing but burning.
It was eating him soon after. Occasionally, it arched its thorax to sting him and add a poison to his blood to keep him still and compliant as it feasted.
Still, he could think of nothing but his elusive fairy maiden, and what they had created in those fleeting moments that they’d known one another.
——————
©2011 Michael Colangelo
Tags: Michael Colangelo
February 19th, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Nicely done. Nice, unexpected twist.