Okay, I said I'd put this up... here it is, I hate it, but please say nice things about it because I need to lvoe myself.
(more seriously: concrit is really good, and I do prefer it to nice things.)
Roselyne
Roselyne
There are fairies at the bottom of my garden. They’ve been there forever, I suppose; at least I found them when I was eight and I’m sixteen now, which is near enough to forever and closer than most get. They’re not your ordinary fairies, oh no, delicate and flitterby, all gauze and tinsel and glamour. They’re not your gnomes, either, the not-really fairies. They’re certainly not faerys because they wouldn’t be caught dead in any old new-age book about eternal nature and cosmic balance.
No, my fairies bite.
They’re not, strictly speaking, “my” fairies at all. But I think of them that way, seeing as I’m the only one who found them, down at the bottom of the garden past the pond and ducking under the rose bush (my father told me it was Roselyne) that has the most enormous thorns. I was the one to wriggle under the fence and into the trees- we have a big garden, rambling like the rose bush and the House and the road to get there, and we’ve got an almost-forest down there- and walk around the biggest tree three times contrariwise and turn around and there they were, perched on branches watching me with little black eyes and absolutely still. And they were little people, with the wickedest grins on their faces. My mother would have spanked me for that grin alone, because it’s the grin that says you’ve just done something absolutely amazing…
Which I had, though I didn’t think so then because I was eight, and there’s very little that surprises you when you’re eight, even if you have been into the wood a dozen times in the week since you moved in and you never saw anything even once. But these were fairies, and hadn’t I just read about them? So all I said was “Who are you?”
-A word of warning: if you find fairies at the bottom of your garden, or in your pantry (stealing your bread) or milking your cows or reading your books (they love books) or taking your computer apart to find out what’s in it, don’t ask them who they are. Fairies love to talk and especially about themselves.
So when I asked
“Who are you?”
It was almost like opening a floodgate. On the Ark. They sprang forwards to introduce themselves (all at once) lying most outrageously (because fairies do) and when they’d finally stopped telling me their names (Whist and Coincidence and Tiffa, Black Jane and Spece and Tintinnabulation) and their history and I’d stopped staring at them (for they’re very easy to stare at: I said no tinsel and no gauze and no glamour, but only two of those were true. They do have a glamour to them, in a strange way. Thin and brown they were, and very, very little, with hair like a dandelion about to burst or a cornflower in full bloom, and the most amazing wings you could only see when they were still, which was hardly ever. Flies’ wings, black and impossibly fast but without the buzzing.) Well, just when I was getting used to the noise and the movement and their impossible looks, they stopped and all said at once, just as if they’d rehearsed it:
“And who are you, then?”
I felt relieved; this, I felt, I could answer. Even if you have just found fairies at the bottom of your garden, there are some things you just know when you’re eight.
“I’m Corrina Hathaway and I’m eight years old and I live in the House.”
A susurrus of conferral, exchange glances and whispers, and then out of the crowd a voice spoke.
“Is that all?”
”All?”
“Is that all there is to it?”
“Ye-es. I think so. Isn’t it?”
One of them flipped up to hover before me. It –or rather, he- had the dandelion-clock hair I’d noticed earlier, and the wicked grin they all wore was more mischievous on him, eyes dancing with his wings.
“What of your tales, your history? Your parentage, creature, and your deeds and derring-dos. Why are you not the same as every other Corrina Hathaway in the world, and where are your stories?”
Fairies never ask what everyone else asks, or maybe they never mean what everyone else means- and questions of existential uncertainty are, anyway, a little difficult for eight year olds.
“I- I don’t know. Do I need them?”
“Well, of course! Stories are the most important things in the world. If you don’t know any stories, you don’t know who you are- because stories are how we know what we are, where we’re going and how to get there.” He grew silent, and then added suddenly “Stories tell us what we believe to be true.”
I blinked.
“I don’t… know. How do you tell a story like that?”
“Don’t you even know how to tell stories?” The creature surveyed me with an expression of mixed bewilderment and concern. “How do you get along?”
I shrugged. “I don’t s’pose it matters all that much…”
“It does!” he affirmed. “But if you don’t know how- well, we’ll just have to teach you.” He winked and, taking a breath, began to orate.
“‘When I was born I was called Whist, for when my father picked me up by the hair and held me to the sun as every fairy must be, the wind went by with a rush and it stuck a dandelion seed to me, and the sound a dandelion makes is Whist, so Whist I am. And ever since then I’ve lived in the place where the dandelions grow, and I know their secrets, and there was never a Whist like me.’
“You see? Simple!”
“I haven’t got any stories like that.” I paused. “I know the story about Little Red Riding hood. I can tell you that one.”
Whist glared at me. “You think that’s a story? We’ve got a lot of work to do!”
They did, too. I’d always been an avid reader, and especially of fairy stories. They were a pleasant escape, a diversion, things that excited my mind into daydreaming. But fairies- well, they look at stories differently. Fairies don’t see stories as just stories. They know that every story has a truth tucked away inside, and for every story you tell and every truth you share, you gain another one- a little bit more of yourself. When you hear or read a story, you find someone else’s truth- and then it’s yours.
And if you haven’t got any stories, maybe you haven’t got any truths; this is why fairies steer clear of people nowadays. Not many people tell stories any more.
Talking to fairies, I learned to hear and tell stories that really meant something; to listen for the meaning and direction in a tale. I began to love them desperately, dredge them for meaning and try to come up with my own; I learnt to tell stories in the fairy way. The first story I ever told anyone was my own: why I’m the only Corrina Hathaway in the world, to Tintinnabulation, Black Jane and Whist on a chilly autumn day, crosslegged on a heap of leaves. When I’d finished I took a deep breath and let it out; crisp silvery air slivered between my lips, and I said
“I can tell a story now.”
Whist whistled up from where he was sitting with a shout of glee, and Tintinnabulation laughed like only fairies can laugh, and her in particular- gloriously, like bells. Black Jane just glanced up, and said grudgingly,
“I would never have believed it when I first saw you.”
I ignored her.
“What do I do next?”
I kept coming back to them, that year and the years after. Every day I’d run down over the field, squirming past the Roselyne blooming great pink sunset roses, and into to wood, to collapse on the moss in the clearing and pester whoever was there at the time. Sometimes we’d lie on our stomachs and look into the stream; or read my books. Sometimes we’d have a story, and together we’d poke and prod it until it took shape, plum-round and purple and truth dribbling onto my tongue so I could taste it in my mind, the flavour and texture of it. It was impossible to stay still when that happened. I’d race down through the woods with a scream or a shout, chasing Coi out of her hidey-hole in the oak and playing catch-as-catch-can until I dropped back down and looked up at the sky laughing, because there’s nothing quite like a story to live with, and fairies give you stories like nothing else.
“Black Jane?” I asked when I was ten, and dragging a beat-up copy of The Hobbit down to the clearing for the eighteenth time.
“What now?” Black Jane never pretended to have patience with me; she hated to be disturbed but when you could get her to answer a question it would be a good one, because she didn’t waste her time on details.
“Stories are truths. The good ones, anyway, they’re truths. Right?”
She ignored me; I hadn’t really expected an answer, so I pressed on. “And truths can change with the story; it depends on how you tell them, because sometimes the story you have when you’re done isn’t the story you started out with and nor is the truth- or it wasn’t the truth you thought it was. But books tell the same story with the same words every time. Their truths should be the same.”
“But they’re not. You get a different truth each time.”
“No. Why?”
Black Jane lifted her eyes from the page she was studying. “Because stories aren’t just about the way you tell them.”
Sometimes I’d go visiting and I’d just do nothing; Spece would and me a rosebud or a walnut and I’d examine it carefully and then go home, and come back the next day with a story, and idea, a truth. I got used to stories, to telling them every day after school. I grew up on fairy stories, and when I say that I don’t mean the Brothers Grim. I mean the real fairy stories. Once you’ve had them you don’t settle for any old thing. My parents used to wonder why I never brought friends home; but they were solitary themselves, and like me took their pleasure in the accomplishment of a skill- my father in cultivating yet another type of rose; my mother in the clean lines of a Maths problem lined up on her page.
Really, though, I just had enough friends.
Last week, my mother came and told me that we’d decided to move house. Dad wants to be in a more temperate climate for his roses; personally I just think he’d run out of room in the garden, and Mother doesn’t mind where we are. She didn’t understand why I burst into tears- me, a big girl of sixteen- and sprinted out the door, down the lawn and under Roselyne, climbing the fence and brushing through the wood till I got to the big oak.
There are fairies at the bottom of my garden; they were there before I was, and they’ll still be there when I move in two months’ time. I’m taking the stories with me, though; and a Roselyne cutting. I think I’ll plant it at the bottom of our garden, and see what happens. | 
