Stuff I have written for school.

Ooooh fairies

(This was supposed to be basd off of a Midsummer Night's dream.)

Dear Heather,

You wrote to me recently, asking what it was like to assist Titania. You might think us fairies would have to accompany her all the time, but in reality, she lets us go where we please so long as we come when she calls and sing her to sleep. And a final rule, we may never, under any circumstances, leave the forest. But why would we want to? The forest is beautiful in the daytime; the sun’s golden gleam filters through ancient oak branches and scatters sunlight on the ground. At night, the pale moon glints, pearlescent in the ebony sky.

Personally, I think the forest is the loveliest at dawn, in the golden hour before twilight, and at dusk. In the mornings in late autumn, eerie coils of mist rise from the damp ground, they cling to gnarled trees with whorls like wrinkled faces, the haze in the cold air is only disrupted by the occasional moth unfurling wet wings and the wind whispering.

In the forest the wind is almost alive, with a breath, dislodging amber leaves, to send them spiralling to the ground. The wind stirs up a tempest of copper and rust, is a blur, a shadow, a ghost of a glimmer, a ripple in the swaying grass, ensnaring ochre. Wind warps the fallen leaves, and they crinkle and crease, swirl around the dappled light. Maybe they are pretending to be smoke, curling and snaking, twisting and writhing. The ground is strewn with ashes.

Sometimes when sunlight drenches the world in faded shades of sepia, Titania cloaks herself in spider silk, and walks through her forest (for it is her forest), and her hair is like spun gold. Titania once told me that sometimes she thinks that autumn is following her. She finds crinkled, faded leaves the colour of rust everywhere. She showed me one she found inside a hollow tree. It was paper-thin, and the crinkled fibres resembled veins. Titania took the fragile leaf between her hands and crushed it into fine cadmium and crimson dust, then let it fall from her hands to lie scattered amid the ferns. It was as frail as a cobweb.

At dusk, Titania dances in the lavender light, and where her quick footsteps touch the ground; mushrooms tinted the colour of the sky spring from the earth and create fairy circles, to whisk unwary visitors to Titania’s kingdom away.

But sometimes in summer, I feel as if I am hemmed in by the forest, the branches of the trees are trapping me in a cage of brambles. I want to run, shout, crash through the wizened trees, leap over open space with no regard for the flowers I trample, for the forest can be stuffy, dusty, a relic of a bygone era. When the forest is suffocating me I sit by the stream that runs through it and listen to the water and I think of the sea and my wildness slows, diminished, stops. I want to see the sea one day, but we can never leave the forest. The closest I can come to it would be holding the shell you gave me once to my ear and hearing the waves crash down on the shore, the tinkling of the stream, the frothing bubbles as it races over rocks, setting an upturned leaf adrift and watching it tumble down a waterfall. For a time I am content at letting the water be a wild, crazy, unkempt creature.

Oh, what did I write! Sorry about that, I got a little carried away with myself! I hope you will come visiting again soon, and that I didn’t scare you off with my crazed ramblings!

Your friend, Hyacinth.