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Now this our fairy with whom we are visiting on this day, at this hour, sitting hidden behind a big leaf near a pond in the shadow, crying many green and luminescent fairy tears, well, the thing was, this fairy's tail was not so great.
It wasn't very long, and it wasn't very elegant. It was kind of stubby and on top of all of that, it was also the wrong colour.
The fairy was green, and the tail was purple.
And that was deemed a very unfortunate and unlucky colour combination, and ever since the fairy had come from its pretty luminescent egg where many colours played and to which the elders sang through day and night, all the other fairies had shaken their pointy heads sadly, sighed, and proclaimed that this poor little fairy with its purple tail would know nothing but suffering, never find happiness, and lead a life of misery.
You must not think that any of the fairy people were unkind, or that the other fairy children made fun of our fairy with the purple stumpy tail, or anything like that; they are not like people in that way, and the fairy was never excluded from games, and did not lack for friends to play with. In fact, the other fairies, young and old alike, were over-kind and would forgive all manner of things which would normally have been frowned upon, or even punished in a way; but because our fairy was already so punished by life itself with having such an unfortunate tail, all the other fairies felt so sorry for it, they never said anything when Stumpy, as the fairy was known, made mistakes, broke things, or did or said things fairies really aren't supposed to say, or do.
The endless sighing and the sad looks, the shaking of the heads which caused bells on the fairy's hats to tinkle ominously, the pats on the head, and the pity in the big dichroic eyes of everyone made Stumpy feel sadder, and sadder as the years went on.
At one point, Stumpy got very angry with everyone and yelled and shouted, did many things to try and break the spell of pity and of misery, tried to get a different reaction, if it was only for one moment, but unfortunately all the other fairies, young and old alike, felt way too sorry for poor old Stumpy with the awful purple tail to ever lose their patience, or to ever let Stumpy forget for even a moment how different it was, and how terrible it was to be that different.
So after many seasons had passed in fairy land, the day it came where it became all too much for Stumpy, and it flew away as far as its wings could carry it, and that's why we find it sitting under the leaf by the pond, crying beautiful, magical fairy tears from the very bottom of its green and sparkling heart, and all the little fairy wanted to do was to die and make an end to it, once and for all, for living really wasn't worth living any longer.
But there was someone who heard the fine and silver crying, there was someone there who took notice, and there was someone who started to search the edge of the pond for the being that was crying there, to offer help and comfort.
And this someone was a child, for it is so that not only do children have fairies who come and care for them in a moment of need, but fairies have children too, and this child was the fairy's childmother, a special child that cared for and belonged to this one fairy amongst all the many fairies that exist in all the worlds and all the places known and unknown both.
The child was a little girl, perhaps five years of age; but to the fairy, she was not little at all, but in fact a towering giant with huge, huge feet that flattened whole fields of grass and tiny flowers, and her voice was booming, all around as bent down, as she brushed back the leaf and brought her huge head close up to the little fairy who had stopped sobbing with the sheer shock of it, and her blue eyes were like giant mountain lakes as she said, "Oh! Little fairy! Why are you crying!"
The fairy stared at her for it had never seen such a big nose on anyone at all; nor had it seen such enormous eye lashes that were like forests, or lips so big and pink, nor a mouth big enough to eat a whole fairy house and everyone who lived in it!
But the shock did stop the fairy crying, and it shook its head so the tiny bells on its hat tinkled, for it didn't know what to say, how to describe a whole lifetime of being born wrong and being pitied for something you can't do a thing about to a stranger, just like that.
The little girl too was entirely fascinated. She had never seen hands so delicate, so green; a tiny tiny face so beautiful; nor such a quite extraordinary purple tail on any creature ever.
To bend down like that became uncomfortable, and so the little girl lay down in the grass by the pond, never caring that her nice new dress got soaked and stained; she lay on her stomach, folded her hands beneath her chin and so now she could look at the fairy on a level, and the two of them could talk.
"What's your name?" asked the little girl. "Can you talk? Can you understand me?"
There was so much wind from her voice and such a noise that the fairy was nearly blown away; but that was quite funny, and certainly new, and it was quite wonderful, the fairy thought, that here was someone who didn't know a thing about them, and who didn't look at them as though there were a lowly worm, and a wrong worm, at that.
"Yes, I understand you," the fairy said but its voice was too thin and light and it could tell the girl hadn't heard this over the general rustling of the grasses, reeds and ripplings in the water, so it shouted again, as loud as it could this time, "Yes, I can understand you. Hello there giant being!"
The little girl heard the wondrous voice like tiny silver ripples in a lake and thought it was wonderful and answered right away, "Hello, teensy fairy! But I'm not a giant being, I'm only a little girl."
The fairy was astonished and shouted back, "Are there giant beings even greater than you?"
The little girl giggled which caused somewhat of a storm so the fairy had to hold on to some blades of grass to avoid being blown away.
"Oh yes, I'm the smallest in my whole village. Everyone else is much, much bigger than me!"
They looked at each other for a time, then the little girl said, "My name is Katie. What's yours?"
The fairy sighed. It had a lovely name which had been reserved for it from when it was still in the egg, but this name had never been used; the name had been quietly laid aside and it had been called Stumpy ever since its emergence.
But Katie the giant didn't know anything about that so the fairy took the chance and so for the first time in its life, it yelled out, "My name is Ellialle. It means Happy Flight. What does your name mean?"
"I don't know," little Katie said, surprised but she was much too delighted to have found this new friend to worry too much about the fact that she had been named after a queen who died in a foreign land a very long time ago.
And so the two made friends, and Katie held out a careful finger tip, and Ellialle put both her tiny green hands with the teensy tiny orange finger nails against it, and it was a strange tingly feeling for them both, and both smiled and were happier than either had been for a very long time.
They started to find out things about each other and each other's lives.
Katie was amazed at how well Ellialle could fly and was quite jealous; and Ellialle was amazed how Katie could stride across the land and in a few moments, travel further than a fairy could fly by flapping hard the whole day long from dawn till dusk.
Ellialle rode on Katie's shoulder, near her ear so it could talk to her without screaming; and Katie could talk back without blowing Ellialle away with the wind of her voice, and both were happy, truly happy and no longer alone, each one.
When there were shouts for Katie to come in from the garden for her dinner, Ellialle hid under her curly hair and made a nest there so it could stay and didn't have to leave, and later, Katie made a teensy plate of teensy pieces of food on a leaf, and a single drop of lemonade that Ellialle drank by making its lips long like a trunk and that made Katie laugh.
And as the night came, Katie made a bed for Ellialle from a matchbox filled with finest cotton wool, and placed it in the drawer of her bedside table, so that her mother wouldn't see; but she left the drawer open just a little so that there would be light, and Ellialle could come and go as she pleased.
The girl and the fairy stayed together then, through all the days, and all the nights, best friends they were and when there was no-one else around, they would talk, and dream together, and tell each other everything, and it was wonderful, and it was the best of times as winters came and went, and summers came and went, and they played together in the autumn leaves, and in the spring pastures.
But then there came another time, and it was that Katie had grown up to become a young woman, and her thoughts now often turned to other things than playing with fairies in the woods and in the fields; she would talk of boys now often, and often too she would leave Ellialle behind to talk with other young women about boys, and womanly things of which a fairy knows nothing at all.
And so it was that Ellialle began to realise that its time with Katie had come to an end; that Katie had other things to do, other worlds to explore and that they could no longer share every moment of every day, and every night.
And it also true that Ellialle too had begun to dream a different dream, of nests and eggs and dancing with another, and they talked about this, and decided that the time had come for Ellialle to go home.
It had been many years since Ellialle had been back to her home; and when at first she could not find the tall and stately lilies by the silver pond in which her parents and brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins had played and slept through the warm summer days, she thought she had remembered wrong how to get there.
She flew here and there, and near and far; and when the evening came she had to admit to herself that the place she thought of as home had vanished.
There was no pond, and there were no lilies. There was no grass, no trees either with their hollows where the fairies slept in winter times; there were only giant square buildings made from grey stuff that wasn’t even stone, and lots of people everywhere.
A shopping center had been build on the meadow where the lake had been; and when the machines came, all the fairy people left – of course.
Ellialle had spent enough time around human beings to know full well what had happened; and as the first stars of night tried to twinkle through the haze of orange streetlamps and the glow of neon lights, the little fairy with the short and stumpy purple tail sighed sadly and went back to the only place she knew to go now – she went back to Katie’s house.
By the time she flew in through the open bedroom window, exhausted, hungry and bedraggled, it was already very late at night but Katie was not at home. Her bedroom was strewn with a hundred dresses everywhere, and shoes and make up and brushes and all sorts – Katie had gone out to a party, that was her new life now, and not a thought for Ellialle remained.
A great sadness fell then on the little fairy and she squeezed herself into her drawer which was stuffed full with bad smelling bottles of lotions and nail polish, found her old nest in the matchbox, crawled inside and cried herself to sleep.
Now fairies aren’t designed for sadness; it is in their nature to be light and bright, that is who they are, and when a fairy gets really sad, as sad as Ellialle was on that night, and when they really cry tears, these tears make little tiny holes in reality itself.
Through those tiny holes the tears fall like shiny pearls, and as they fall unhindered through all those many realities they pass as they go, they become refracted and there is more and more of them.
By the time they have fallen through a hundred dimensions, there is a million of these little pearls and they are now like a thunderstorm; and by the time they have fallen through another million dimensions, the little pearls of tears become like an extraordinary hurricane, a blizzard of enormous proportions, and that’s how Ellialle’s sadness arrived in the dimension of the angels themselves, and there it caused their everlasting spring to turn into the most dire of winters’ fury all in an instant they arrived.
The angels fluttered and shrieked; they were thrown about by the blizzard and their fine wings hurt by the infinity of teary pearls that were scattering and bouncing all around and everywhere. The largest, wisest angels overcame their shock the first and gathered all the other angels and the tiny little ones beneath their giant wings of light, and they raised their voices like they hadn’t raised their voices for eternity, so they could sing above the blizzard’s howling and communicate.
So the great angels looked up and they tracked the trail of pearly tears through all the levels, all the layers, all the dimensions, right back to the tiny fairy in her matchbox in the drawer by the side of Katie’s bed, who was so sad, she was still crying, even in her dream.
Now it is said that fairies are in fact just tiny angels; the babies of angels, brand new and freshly born to light; and we can’t know if this is true but what we do know is that angels love the fairies with all their heart and feel a great connection to them, small though they may be; for angels too are of the light and suffering is not a thing that they can either understand, nor stand in any way.
And therefore, a great hue and cry went up amongst the angels, first amongst the great and old ones and then amongst all the others who were sheltering beneath their giant wings, until all the angels cried at once, and when that happens, things must change; the angel’s cry shakes the very foundations of reality to the core, creates a quake of all the earths and all the heavens, and everyone feels it, everyone knows it, even the infrared demons in their far away dimensions lift their great heads and thrash their massive tails in their disturbance.
Even on Planet Earth, on this very night, a great many people dreamed such dreams that they woke up the next morning and even though they didn’t know what had happened, they stood up and said, “Enough is enough! We must take more care of our world, and all the beings within it! Too many tears have been cried for too long by too many!”
Amongst the people who woke up like that was Katie.
This morning, she awoke and the sun was streaming through her bedroom window and it was throwing a shaft of golden light in which many little dustmotes were dancing, right onto her bedside table; and she immediately thought of her friend Ellialle, and how much she missed her, how much she missed the magic, and all the clothes and all the nailpolish in the world, and even all the boys in the world, couldn’t make up for such a loss of magic.
So it was that Katie too started to cry and wished with all her heart that Ellialle would come back to her, would forgive her, would be her friend again and talk to her of flowers and of flying, of making rainbows with a drop of water and of blue, and gold, and green.
And so it was that Ellialle awoke, and she heard her best friend crying. She clambered out of her matchbox, squeezed herself out of the narrow opening in the drawer and flew right up in front of Katie’s nose which was rather red and swollen and looked like a giant turnip to the little fairy. She waved her hands and buzzed around in spirals and in figures of eight until finally Katie opened her eyes and saw her, and the light of joy really went on in Katie’s face and in her heart the same.
“Oh Ellialle, you’ve come back! Oh my dearest, dearest friend of all, how glad I am to see you here, and I’m so sorry …”
She held out her hand and Ellialle landed on it carefully, put her little fairy arms around Katie’s index finger and embraced it and squeezed it for all she was worth so that Katie should really feel it; and Katie breathed a very careful kiss as light as air towards Ellialle. When the kiss reached the little fairy, her heart was full of joy and all the crying stopped; it stopped in all the dimensions, it stopped everywhere, and gentle silence and then beautiful sunrise light filtered through the holes in the dimensions, right down into the dimension of the angels themselves.
The elder angels bowed their heads and folded up their wings; and the smaller angels flew out and upward to play with the shafts of light they’d never seen before; this was a different light from that they knew of any of their home dimensions, and it is true, it came from far away.
The oldest and wisest of all the angels then took a different shape and it travelled trough the dimensions, following the beams of light that led the way, all the way to Katie’s bedroom where the young woman and the fairy, who was a young fairy woman too, were still loving each other with all their hearts.
And so it was that the light in Katie’s room brightened and brightened more; and a shining angel stepped into room, slid over all the many coloured dresses and shoes that were still all over the floor and joined the human and the fairy on the bed.
Katie and Ellialle said nothing; when an angel comes to you, there is nothing you can think to say, not even anything you can think to think; they are so amazing and so other than anything you’ve ever seen or scented, tasted, heard or touched, it blows your mind, and that’s still nothing compared to how an angel makes you feel inside.
The angel came, and it told them many things. Of course, it didn’t speak in words, and it didn’t sing; it spoke in gently drifting waves of soft and subtle light and the girl and the fairy breathed in the light and knew.
The angel came to thank them both because they had done something together which was extremely rare and precious; they had made a love between human and fairy. But more, the tears that Ellialle cried had made connections between the levels and the layers that used to be so separate, but now they were no longer; and beings everywhere could know a different kind of light, a new light, and they could use this light to travel and make new friends in many different dimensions.
The angel told them that it had been so arranged that Ellialle would be born with her stumpy purple tail to set in motion these events; and now that these events had come to pass, the tail was no longer needed and the angel offered to fix it so that Ellialle would have a lovely, normal fairy tail instead from this day forth.
But even as the angel spoke in softly weaving mists of light, both Katie and Ellialle shook their heads and Ellialle spoke in her crystal clear fairy voice that on this day could be heard clearly and perfectly across the layers and the levels, and she said, “I wouldn’t trade my darling tail for anything – it is mine, it is of me, it has everything to do with who I am, and who I am is who I want to be.”
Katie cried, “Oh I’m so glad! And I agree – you’re perfect, you’re my Ellialle, and to me, you’re the best and most beautiful fairy in the whole wide world – oh, and any other world as well!”
The shining angel bowed its head and we can’t know if it was sad or glad; it simply accepted Ellialle’s decision and with a softly whispered gift of love and gratitude that sparkled both the human and the fairy inside and out, it silently left the room, and this dimension.
In the days that followed, there were changes everywhere – in the lands of men, in the lands of nature, in the lands of the fairies and changes rippled through all the manifold dimensions too.
And what of Ellialle’s family and her people?
Well …
That’s a story for another day … :-)
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