TWICE-BORN
We had champagne tonight because
PETER HAS FINISHED THE FINAL DRAFT OF HIS NEWEST NOVEL*
Peter said, I suppose you want champagne? I said well of course. He seemed to think I was being feckless and amusing. Hey. There is nothing feckless or amusing about finishing a book.** I don’t see that there are any better reasons for champagne.
Meanwhile, I was up till four a.m. this morning reading SPINDLE proofs . . . and I still had to finish this morning***. I mean, later morning. And this afternoon. Sent the corrections through† tonight at about 6 pm—which is still only lunchtime in New York—and went (frantically) back to PEGASUS.
So (with Peter’s permission) tonight I’m going to give you a scrap of
TWICE-BORN
An Ex-Fairy Story
by Peter Dickinson
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Just to say thank you to Scotty Volmuncher for technical help and to Mr Peter Dickinson for letting me use his subconscious even if he doesn’t know that’s what’s happening.[1]
__________________
[1] It’s not his fault if he sometimes makes me say stuff his way. I was working in a rush, ’cause I’d got a deadline, and I had to leave a lot of stuff for him to sort out and tidy up. And he’s using Windows and I’m using Elf. That doesn’t help.
CHAPTER ONE
I was ticked off.
Truly, utterly, totally ticked off.
So ticked off I didn’t care if I lived or died.
Oh, make up your mind, girl!
I picked a handy dandelion and started to pull off the petals.
No, not He loves me. He loves me not. I knew the answer to that one. So . . .
Live. Die. Live . . . . . . Die. Live . . .
Three to go. I could see what was coming. I hesitated . . .
“Hello, there!”
I froze. I’d been seen by a biggie. I didn’t need to look – I could tell from the voice. Some biggies, the men mostly, talk too deep for us to hear, but I could hear this one OK. Rule number one is you don’t get seen by biggies. It comes way before things like not picking your nose in public and flying on the left. No one had told me what might happen if you do get yourself seen, and it’s a sort of academic question anyway, as there’s practically no biggies can see us in the first place, but there’s just a few can, or so they say. My ex-friend Oenothera says it’s to stop us playing silly tricks on the biggies, the way we used to long ago, because they’re really pretty bright, though they look so thick and slow. And they might start working out that we’re still here. And that might be trouble.
What kind of trouble? Trouble at the King’s High Court, for all I knew, and that’s TROUBLE. But I was really ticked off, wasn’t I? I didn’t care whether I lived or died, right?
I unfroze and looked over my shoulder.
It was a biggie, all right, but a small one as biggies go. (I’ve seen quite a few biggies. Me and my friends used to sneak into their houses in the evenings and watch a lot of TV. Horror movies were favourite.) A kid, in fact. Twelve? Thirteen? Something like that. Female. Nothing much to look at, except she was dressed a bit funny, like she’d grabbed everything out of the top of the drawer and slung it on, regardless of what went with what. Anyway, there she was, staring at me, pop-eyed. I’d been sitting on a twig of honeysuckle down by the stream, that being handy for drowning myself. It was making stream noises, so maybe that was how she crept up on me.
“I just knew you had butterfly wings!” she whispered.
“Come again,” I said, that not being what I’d have expected a biggie to say, seeing her first fairy.
“I can’t wait to tell Tracy,” she said. “She says you’ve got bird wings.”
“Well, she’s right too,” I said. Snarled. “There’s some of us have bird wings. Anyway, how come you can see me?”
“Awesome!” she said. “I just can. Can’t everyone?”
“No one, they told me. Well, almost.”
“Anyway, I can. But you mean there’s bird fairies and butterfly fairies?”
“Bug fairies,” I said. “My Mom’s a lace-wing.”
“But you’ve got butterfly wings. Pearl-bordered Fritillary, aren’t they?”
Smart kid, huh?
“That’s from eating dog-violet when I was a caterpillar,” I said.
“Weird,” she said. “Don’t the birds try and eat the bugs? We’ve got flycatchers on our lawn. They’re cute.”
“Yeah, you meet flycatcher types. They give me the creeps,” I said. “Not that they’d try anything, but there’ve been stories . . . And they’ve a way of looking at you. Even my boy-friend – he’s wren – said I looked good enough to eat. He said it was a joke. I told him it wasn’t funny.”
“Your boy-friend’s a bird?” she said.
“Was,” I muttered. She couldn’t have heard me, but she did. I could see her register “was”, but she didn’t mention it. She was hooked on the Difference. That’s what we call it.
“How do you . . . “ she began. Then, “I mean, we’re doing insects in biology this term . . . ’scuse my asking, but how do you . . . um . . . ?”
“Are you getting personal?” I said.
* * *
* KHANS is still looking for a home, unfortunately. Stupid publishers.
** I may need to have a champagne bath when I finish PEGASUS.
*** And I’m not sure I did such a great job on about twenty pages after Pernicia’s appearance at the princess’ birthday ball, when I was lying on the sofa with hellhounds last night and kept falling asleep. I think sleeping hellhounds put out Doze Pheromones. It’s much harder to stay awake on the sofa with them than it is in bed, but without them.
† How did we live before email? . . . Oh, my, there’s a rich lode for blog entries. . . .
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