Fairy Tales

Sometimes reality eludes us.....

My wife, the tiny Amanda, and I, were fleeing through the dark woods, our wings encased in our wink aces, for fear of the dreaded contamination, the noxious virality that plagued our footsteps.

We had travelled long and soft, and were nearing the brinkling of exhaustion when we lighted on an enchanted grove, where trees seemed to be free to embrace doorways and rope ladders evaded the wired barbs....

We was done in, true, and the need was for restoration and recoups.  But it was unnervingly quietish.  I feared an entrapment, and wonted to stay away, but there was a dreary muse issuing from an hole in an house affronting me.....

No bode introduced theyselfs, and I beginned to wander.  There was signs.....

And the drear muzak revealed its Elf for some reason (don't ask) to be Townes van Zandt warbling Forever, For Always, For Certain :

Foresaken must sometimes befall us

For sorrow sometimes will call

Four seasons go around on a pinwheel

And tomorrow ain't nothin' at all

But no fairies flitted dancingly in the shards of the dying lights.

Instead, as a variation of uncertain pleasantry, an elderly Pixie presented himself, rattling two silver spoons in thyme.  Hi Ho! he cried, welcome I think!

I tiredly smiled and asked if he loved Townes van Zandt as much as we;

And if he had refreshing powers.

In a dialect that betrayed his distance from my homeland he offered the following, which I craved instanta:

Mine Ost enquired, in his tripped tongue, of our quest, and our story, and as I felt the golden liquor slip sliding into my necklace, I told him all I knowed, little that it was.  Rising from hell to high walter was where we were and we needed shelters.  Where are they that should live here being?  I asked.  

They have fleed, he cried, his anguish a little above normal.  

Flewed?  I suggesterised.  

No, fleed, for sure.  There was no winging.

But why?  No winging?  And fleed they are?

The monster Goblin Boris is their problem, sire.

Ahh, I sighed.  But do you have anything to eat?

Most assuredly, sire.  (and, in parenthesis, I have no fear of the Goblin Monster Boris as I am pixelated).  Please dine from my pictomenu:

I have whole roast shrew (what I shot myself yesterday)

And wild plum

Or two

Nuts from the hazel tree

Delicious flowers of the nettled stinger

Prickly blackflowers

And bitter sloughs....

For me, I cried, I'll have it all, and share we will the platter. Then bed we must as the tomorrow way is heavily uncertain and we know not where we are bound.

And so, dear reader, we dined, we wined, we semi-caroused in this enchanted glade, with our pixie host, and then we fell to sleep at our post, our heads filled with sweet cuttings.  

Then in the dead of night, as cool dew was beginning to settle on our eyelids, a sudden fright arose and shuddered me.  Our host was shaking and shivering us and saying we had to get right away as the Great Goblin Boris Monster was afoot.

I scrambled to my foots but too late as I felt the grasp of a leathery paw, the outer skin haired as a dog, the nails as harsh as a bear. It clasped around me, squeezing my supper and popping mine eyes, lifting me to its vast moon face. Spinning towards the broken yellow teeth, I was gassed by an exhalation of lying halitosis, the spiteful virality of a monster given to selfish disconcert, the air of conceit and unconcern.....

I knowed my time was up and the last thing I remember was thinking the shrew had died in vain....

And that was it.  End of.

But mirrorcules do hippen.  

I woke, with my wife, the tiny Amanda, at my side, at the bus stop.  There had been an intervention.  The Boris Monster Goblin  had been tripped and slashed and his mophead had been scoured and scored and his floppy headdress lifted and we been spared.  Weasels and Kites, Jackdaws and Squirrels and butterflies and moths and stinging beasts in their multitudes had arisen from Ultima Thule to put the Goblin back in its bogs.

So.

We are now....

Awaiting the tin-thirsty bus to elsewhere.....

(Don't ask!)

And the moral of the story is.....

Don't believe a word they tell you.  

Nothing is what it seems.....

xxx

R

The first time that I came by lovin' 

Forever was all on my mind 

And I never got used to the hurting 

Or the searchin' for some love in kind 

And it seems like I'm still chasing rainbows 

It seems like I'm still on the run 

Forever don't mean much in passing 

Forgotten don't mean that it's done 

Forever, for always, for certain' 

For someone forsaken for sure 

For any old plan you got workin' 

For any old pain you can cure 

Forever, for always, for certain

Guy Clark