LODESTAR GAZETTE | LODESTAR PROMPT
But why do we have to dance?
Do you believe in fairies?
The bright lights woke me, as they woke us all. Another day was beginning. I stretched and felt the pangs of hunger. My stomach rumbled.
“Stop your rumblings, Danisk,” said my mother, waking beside me, “there will be no food until we have danced.”
Around me, the twenty or so members of our group were limbering up. Bending knees, shaking arms and flapping the sleep out of wings.
I looked around. To my rear, there were trees, with light shining between the leaf-filled branches. Above me, painted artificial flowers hung in a pattern, secured together on a thin wire that could hardly be seen but was fatal if you flew into it. It was our prison, a glass jar made to look like our home in the forests.
“Why do we have to dance?” I asked my mother. As if things had changed from when I had last asked, the answer would be the same as it always was, yet I asked it anyway. I think it was more rhetorical than a question. So did my mother, who must have tired of hearing it. Yet she answered patiently.
“If we don’t dance, we don’t get fed, the same as every day.”
“But how did it happen that we are here?” which was another rhetorical question.
“We were tricked,” said old Ruskin, an ancient fairy, his wings tattered. “You know how humans can only see fairies if they believe in them?”
“Yes, Ruskin,” I said politely. Ruskin had helped teach me to fly after my father vanished one night while we slept.
“Well, this human, our new master, believed and so he saw us. With clever words, he was able to capture us and put us in this cage. There used to be many more of us, hunger and accidents have reduced us to this number. Now we dance, or starve.”
“But what of our magik?”
Ruskin shook his head and his curls danced. “Once we were in the glass jar, it didn’t work. Unless we can find a way to smash the enclosure, this will be our life and death.”
I peered out. Beyond the glass, I could see humans, their large faces and thick woollen clothes. They were arranged in a group around our prison. A sign behind their heads proclaimed that those who believed in fairies should come closer, pay six pence and be amazed. There was a rumble of indistinct yet excited words as they conversed among themselves. We heard the clink of coins, then hushed silence as a clock struck the hour.
“Get ready,” said mother.
At some unseen sign, our world, all that was in the jar began to shake. The trees, painted as they were on the inside of the glass did not move, nor did the flowers in the grip of the wire. The stones, grass and moss that formed the base of our prison gyrated, and we were jolted off our feet. We took to the air and flew, frantically trying to keep from dashing ourselves against the glass, the flowers and the wickedly sharp wires.
Around and around we flew, as the jar was set down we hovered and formed ourselves into patterns, like we did every time. Those of the watchers who believed in fairies gasped at our beauty. Everyone else saw only a glass jar, filled with the makings of a woodland scene.
I’m Richard Dee and I write all sorts of stories. Find out more, join my mailing list and claim your free novella at https://richarddeescifi.co.uk/
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