I’ve joined a new website, Wattpad.com, where you can post and share stories. So I’ll be putting up some novelllas that I’ve written, which tie into the full-length novels that I’m always talking about working on. Check out this free preview, and read the whole story on Wattpad (link below).
“This story didn’t happen once upon a time, in a faraway land. This story takes place in this very town, in that very forest you see through the window. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking nothing could ever happen in Marion. A tiny farming village like ours, where nobody is anybody and we don’t hear about a thing until it’s a hundred years past. But this story is more than a hundred years past, and it didn’t happen to some stranger no one’s ever heard of. Oh no. It happened to my Gran’s very best friend.
“In those days, Marion was even smaller than it is today, if you can image such a thing! It was a town of windswept streets and blowing fields of corn; small wooden houses, a general store, one church and one hotel. Gran’s best friend was named Rebecca, and she lived in a farm house off what’s now Beckerly Road, but in those days was just another little patch of nowhere in a quilt of isolated families. Now, Rebecca was a real smart girl. She could both read and write, and in those days it was rare for boys to know those things, let alone girls. Her family saw good things in her future – her ma even dared to hope she might marry into one of the rich families in the area. But the problem was, that family was poorer than dirt. So when Rebecca was sixteen years old, she made up her mind. She didn’t want to, but she knew she had to go and get herself a job with one of those rich families her ma so envied. Now, her pa was right against the idea, from the first. He didn’t want no girl child of his working for a living. The boys were to help with the farm and the girls were to get married and start families of their own, and that was it. No two ways about it. Well, those two were stubborn as all get-out, and they had a row you could hear clean across three fields, and Rebecca told him she’d do what she was planning with or without his say-so, and then she up and ran off into the woods to get a breather.
“She walked in the woods all the time, this girl here. She felt at home there, more so than with her own folk sometimes. You know that big old hollow tree up by the Smith’s house?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Well, she was right up there, sitting on a downed log and feeling sorry for herself. So she’s sitting there, and she hears noises behind her in the woods – sounds like a person, only much too small. You and I, we might think raccoon. We might think squirrel. If we were in a funk and maybe it was stormy and cold, and our minds went to a fearful place, we’d think wolf. But Rebecca, she lived in a different time, and her mind naturally goes to the Fair Ones – faerie stories were more common back then, most everyone round here knew to put out a pan of milk and keep cold iron by the door. So she turns, real slow like, but all she saw was a pile of leaves, and she had to laugh at herself.
“Until she heard the voice. Well, you can imagine how far out of her skin she must have jumped when that big ol’ pile of leaves shook itself like a dog shakin’ water from its coat, stood up into a little man-like shape and said, clear as day, ‘Good afternoon, Rebecca.”
“I thought you said this was a true story,” I interrupt.
“It is,” Gran says. She sounds cross. I glance around, but Mom is safely tucked away in the kitchen. She’d probably tell me to humour her – it’s all about making sure Gran doesn’t get herself worked up since the heart attack – but give me a break.
“Fairies aren’t real, Gran.”
“Just because you ain’t seen a thing don’t make it not real.”
“Yeah, but the fact that no one has ever seen a thing does make it not real.”
“Someone has seen it. Rebecca.” We’re sitting in the living room of what she calls a house and I call a cottage (when I’m in a good mood – it’s a shack when I’m not). I can hear the sound of dishes clinking in the kitchen, and smell marinating chicken. I’m under strict instructions to keep Gran distracted for at least half an hour, because she keeps trying to ‘help’ Mom in the kitchen. So I sigh and slump back in my chair.
“Fine. What’s the rest of the story?”
http://www.wattpad.com/story/2015770-the-faerie-queen%27s-daughter-a-new-legends-novella