Freda the Fat Faery
by Mark Heeney
It was a long time since Freda had first unfolded her damp wings. She remembered how nice it was to fly about the woodland glades and dingles; to swoop with the swallows and to circle with the curlews. She remembered when all the faeries had been just that, Fair Eiyes. And she remembered with a shiver when the Others had come up from beneath the soil and driven her and her folk from the forest. How she hated the Others, the little imps from below, the Darkies, or Dark Eiyes. She also remembered how she and the rest of the Faery colony had been forced to split up and flee to that most detested of habitats, the human world. All the Eiyes, Dark or Fair, were meant to live with Nature, with the flowers and animals in the forest. It was sad to realize that nearly everyday her first thoughts after waking were those of despair and dislike. Afterall, she thought, finally getting a grip on her mind, it really was dislike rather than hatred when she thought of the Others -- Faeries were not allowed to hate anything, they simply weren't designed for it.
"That's what comes of mixing in circles too close to humans," she thought. "You pick up sorts of feelings and stuff that you really shouldn't have."
As she moved about, stretching her arms and legs, she wandered into the small circle of light that filtered through the hole in the bottom of the upturned flowerpot that was now her home.
"Shit!" she muttered....
"Shit!" she muttered under her breath, as the early morning light illuminated the rest of her body. "Faeries are meant to be thin and pretty, almost like small version of female humans." She had once glimpsed some of these with no clothes on, when she peeked through the window of the house which was next to the garden where she, and half a dozen other woodland refugees, now lived. At least, she thought they were female human they weren't exactly real, weren't really there.
They were in a box on legs which shone, and when they walked to the edge of the box they didn't just fall off, they disappeared! Sometimes they were only there from the waist up. But she was no longer like one of them, whether they were real or not. She knew what the rest of the outcasts called her, and she DID NOT LIKE IT.
She blamed the others deep down, but it did not make her feel any better when she heard a snigger followed by "Look, there's Freda the fat Faery.".
What made matters worse, of course, was that as her weight increased to the almost unheard of elephantine amount of nearly an ounce, her wings had started to shrink. For each increased finger's width about her waist, her wings would get smaller by a similar amount.
Now, after almost three hundred years' worth of fatty human scraps, her wings had disappeared completely. In fact, there were only, as far as she knew, two Faeries left who did still have a full set of wings, Edna and Daphne. If any of the Faeries deserved to still have wings it was Edna. She was kind, sweet, and ever so occasionally she would show herself to one of the sad human cubs who had lived in the house over the years. She explained this strange behaviour by saying that whilst humans were still immature and underdeveloped, they could remember in a strange way, without ever having experienced the memory, the time very many years ago when Faeries and humans communicated. But now when they get to be fully grown, this memory not only disappears, but they feel the necessity to berate their young by telling them that Faeries don't exist. In fact, when one of the humans lied to another they even had the cheek to refer to the lie as a "Faery Story". This is why Edna, who saw good in nearly all things, would take pity on certain of the young who had been punished for talking about Faeries, and would secretly show herself flying from flower to flower, much to the obvious joy and wonderment of the cubs.
Daphne, on the other hand, was what the humans, if they had known about her, would call a "Right Little Sod!". All she did was to push baby blackbirds out of their nests, and to defaecate on the long lines of cloth that humans seemed to want to hang in their gardens.
As she squeezed her pocine body through the small gap in the broken side of the flowerpot, like a gaily dressed morsel of sausage meat being pushed into a skin, Freda slipped on a slug trail and landed with a dull wooomph! on the soil. At least she thought it was soil until she inhaled.
"Oh no!" she wailed. "That's all I need, the perfect bloody start to another perfect bloody day!"
She held her nose with one hand as she brushed and picked off the slime and cat's mess that now bespattered her dress.
"This never happened in the woods," she muttered. "If I had my powers back, I'd turn that damn cat into something awful!"
Faeries, of course, don't normally swear, but living so close, albeit unnoticed, to humans for so many years had expanded the woodland folk's vocabulary. No one knew what these words meant, but they seemed sort of apt on certain occasions; especially occasions that weren't going as they might.
And so it was with the thoughts and attitudes that one would normally associate with an axe-weilding maniac just out for a stroll to see what he could hack and bag, that Freda began to stomp along the garden path to begin another day of doing what Faeries do.
At least that was what her intention had been, and had she been looking where she was going, that is what she would have done, and this adventure would never had happened. But as with all creatures, bad moods and feelings tend to give rise to none too pleasant happenings. And it was while she was preoccupied, pondering on the niceties of pulling all of the cat's whiskers out one by one, that she failed to notice the unsightly blob of chewing gum which lay on the path in front of her. She did, however, notice it when she trod in it, failed to lift her right foot, which was now stuck to the path, and due to the momentum of her pace, fell flat upon her face in the middle of the path. To make matters worse, the first thing she saw as she lifted herself up was William the cat sitting on the fence, grinning at her.
"That does it. That really does it."
To be continued....
Copyright The Bentilean 1999
Mark Heeney was a part-time tutor at the Willfield Open Learning Centre, Bentilee,and commuted from Wolverhampton where he lived (lives?) with his wife and young daughter (for whom the story was written). This first installment appeared in issue 5 of "The Bentilean", July 1992, and the second one in the following issue. Unfortunately, I lost contact with him when he found a more conveniently located job so no further installments were forthcoming.Back to: The Contents Page | The Archive | The Bentilean Main Page