Pieces of fairy tales

Phrases and sentences from fairy tales have been dancing through my head like the Aurora Borealis dances across the sky. Tales of magical lands and fairies and elves and spells and monsters.

But they refuse to make themselves more than just that – sentences. Bits of stories, here and there. That’s all. So I write down the pieces that have come, and I wait until the next page in one of the stories makes itself clear.

And at once, she realized that the lily pads did, indeed, make a path from one side of the pond to another. All those years that she had tried to solve the quest of finding the path – and it had been right there, the whole time. It had been that easy.

When she was but a girl, a witch had handed her a stack of bricks. “Take these,” the witch said. “You must carry them with you, but you must not let anyone see them, or your family will be cursed.” The girl quickly opened up her skin, stuck the bricks inside, and sewed herself back up.

She had practiced and trained for the Final Fight. She had memorized moves and tactics and combinations. On the day of the Final Fight, she was calm. She was ready. Right before she entered the battle arena, her coach came running up to her. “It’s the monster,” her coach said. “You won’t be able to fight it, after all. It’s dead.”

She stepped outside and was encased in fog. She didn’t mind. In fact, she rather liked this type of fog. For it was not the scary kind, where she felt lost and disoriented and couldn’t find her way back to the castle. No, this fog was like a blanket. Gently wrapping itself around her, making the world a bit dimmer so that her eyes wouldn’t hurt.

But the little nymph was afraid of setting the dragon free from its cell. What if something even worse took its place? she feared. But she did it. She released the dragon. It didn’t come back. Nothing took its place. And she turned the cell into a blooming garden.