Shadow Tales

Three weeks later she awoke. Her head suddenly split with the screams of approximately seventy-three fairies, all begging to be heard. She slowed her zombie-like steps to a total standstill, grinding to a halt somewhere in the middle of a busy city street (for what better way to begin rebirth but with a stop?). One would think that instead of an awakening, the cessation of movement would be attributed to a slip into slumber. Not so in her case. Instead, the sudden awareness of being asleep for such a long time, and now falling back into life had left her shocked and at a complete and total…stop. The fairy voices suddenly are strangled by the interrupting screeches of approximately two cars, slamming on brakes and horns, sending her fragile world into an explosion of sound. She looked up, startled, and in an instant was back on the sidewalk. She had only stopped for a second, but that second w as enough to irritate the drivers of the half dozen cars that were by now, more than halfway to nothing. Time seemed so irrelevant now. She had once wanted time to stop completely, the seconds could have dragged on forever and she would have been happy. But now he was gone…and time was her enemy because it wouldn’t kill her fast enough. She thought of how men and women have a nasty habit of being attracted to one another, and wished that she had never fallen into this cliché. Nasty…there must be a better word. Her trouble a month ago was coming up with words to push the envelope of the other end of the spectrum.
She was awake now, and the funny thing was that she just now realized she had been asleep. She thought she had escaped him unscathed…like one of those balloons that doesn’t pop because of the piece of Scotch tape conveniently located at the point where the needle tears through the skin.
Funny thing #2: she had succeeded for three weeks in deluding herself into thinking that he had not left a mark on her heart…or was it his heart? Love had complicated everything so much…
Her eyes, that had once danced with laughter and love, now ran on auto-pilot. They saw…but only as necessity, only as a means of not running into the buildings and strangers that happened to occupy the empty world that she walked through. She took in her surroundings, not registering the beauty of the clear blue sky that supported the traffic of the sheep-like clouds. It all seemed black and white, without the insecurely added preface of “glorious”…like the end of The Wizard of Oz, though she still felt the longing for home. Could this have been what Dorothy felt like? She quickly threw the thought away, knowing that the classic heroin had never been so securely tethered to the fairy land…love made for a strong difference.
She felt the pull to do something, to end her misery by reclaiming happiness…
The fairies began their buzzing again…
She wanted to know if he was alive. She wanted to stop caring about whether or not he was. She wanted to know what he was feeling.

He was feeling pain.

Pain like the stabbing from a million burning swords, all administered by approximately one force of evil…and yet thousands of forces. This was much more complicated that in appeared on the surface…life tended to be that way. And where do the fairies fit in?