I’m a bit under it right now (the gun, not the virus), so I’m posting another piece of flash fiction. When I posted this part to the flash group, several people demanded I tell them what happened next, so next week I’ll post part 2. I like to keep my readers happy. Even if it sometimes takes a while.

The Changeling

I’m a changeling. I always suspected.

The odd thing is I wasn’t supposed to live at all. Exchange a sickly fairy child for a healthy human baby, isn’t that the story? The changeling tragically dies, the human is raised under the hill and no one the wiser.

If all that’s true—and I have no way of knowing—my people have a lot to learn about empathy. I know, human concept, but I digress. Needless to say, I fooled them and got stronger instead. Something in formulae, maybe. I wouldn’t know about human milk.

It started when I was about seven and my grandfather died. I looked it up online and the folklore says a fairy laughs at funerals and cries at births. Well, I didn’t laugh. Even at seven I could read the room better than that. But I couldn’t stop smiling the whole time. Why? Because all through the service there was the old man himself, standing beside his coffin, grinning, enjoying the show. I liked the guy, he’d been in a lot of pain, and now he wasn’t. It didn’t take long to realize I was the only one who saw him. My mother, on the other hand, saw me.

After that she kept watching me when she thought I didn’t notice, all through High School. The people I knew in school were a little quicker on the uptake. Most boys were all over me—or at least wanted to be. Most girls hated my guts. My mother? For a long time she was merely suspicious, maybe in denial, but I knew by then. Mother loved to sew, and I didn’t. Took me a while, but I figured it out. It was an antique scissors in her sewing basket that belonged to her great-grandmother. It made me sick anytime I came near it.

Cold iron.

She tried to love me, despite that, despite the suspicions, despite her worries. I wonder what would have happened if things had turned out differently, but there’s no point. Mother was sewing masks on the kitchen table, part of a community project to ease the pandemic supply problem. On her way back to her sewing room she dropped those damn scissors.

”Get those for me, will you Dear? Got my hands full.”

I don’t know if she did it on purpose. Maybe, maybe not. I’ll never know. What I do know is I looked at her and said, “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

And that was it, over. We both knew.

I’d read the stories of what happens next, but I never thought it would. I flew out the window of my room. I don’t know how I did that. All I know is, at the moment, I couldn’t do anything else.

I was raised human, but I don’t belong there. It occurs to me that somewhere, under some fairy hill, I have an adopted sister who doesn’t belong either. Maybe I can find her.

Maybe we can not belong together.

-The End-

©2020 by Richard Parks. All Rights Reserved.