The day my father left home, the wind blew hard through the mountains and trees surrounding our village, filling our ears with its harsh whispers and our lungs with the breath of faraway places. There are legends among my people of deceitful creatures in the mountains who blow winds of temptation over the surrounding lands when they are hungry and crave another victim. The day my father left us, I stood in the doorway and watched him walk away, his leather-bottomed shoes carrying him farther and farther away. I called to my father, hoping he would turn around and come back, but the wind swelled at that moment, snatching his name from my lips and whisking my hope away in one blow.
My father warned me never to enter the woods alone.
I could not stay like I promised, so I took father’s satchel hidden underneath his bed and followed the smell of him. If I could not smell anger, I could at least smell my father, wandering the valley bloodthirsty and violent. In the search for my father, I found someone else. Another man, smelling for something angry, with only one eye and a tangling beard. He was distinctly foreign.
She stood tall and menacing in her fire-infused robes. “Where are you from,” her tongue flickered when she spoke, “and where do you think you are going?”
I told him I got them from my father.
“Sugar and spice,” the old woman beckoned as she held out palms filled with cinnamon falling between her fingers like sand. As she sprinkled it across the floor my head swum up in a dizzy spell of hunger. I could no longer control my feet moving towards the cheap gimmicks of an old woman.
Under my feet I felt the rhythm of aches and sighs breathe with each step I took. I felt like I was walking on quicksand. And indeed, when I tried to move my feet I could not feel my toes but only the inability to move them on the surface of palpable danger. When I turned to ask for his help he only laughed. Then I began to think it was he who was making my feet turn to stone.
The man beside me glanced at me with his only eye. “You boy, you go. I can see inside of you with this eye of mine and you are good. Listen to me. Leave the mountain far behind you because those who killed your father want to hurt you too.”
“Let me go then,” I said.
I fled, I fled so fast that my feet did not feel the ground. Instead they chafed the cold breeze as my heels vibrated like wings of locusts and dragonflies.
The white bird in the sky asked me if I could pull out the needle that rendered its foot into a half-crescent shape.
After I took the needle from its place, I pryed my father’s bones from the floor and put them in my satchel.
The fairy placed a single seed in my palm which I immediately planted and tended to for months. For days, I watered the seed, showered it with words of encouragement as it grew into a young sprout, and gave it proper space and care as it blossomed fully into a magnificent red rose that granted any wish that I whispered lovingly into its soft petals.
When the people of the soil touched my feet they fell back into the ground with shrieks and cries. Now I could reach the top of the mountain without fear of falling down.
A foreigner stopped me on my rise toward the mountaintop. He had one eye and loose skin that folded around his body like paper cloth. Laid before him was a set of colored tablets and sticks. “Stay for a game,” he said to me. “After you win your game with me I’ll let you go on your way.”
The blade struck me against my face and left a blood spot in the shape of a star.
But since I had been given my gift I did not fear what stood in front of me. As his body touched mine if fell to the floor covered in a carpet of needles.
From within the bowels of the creature I found my leather bottomed shoes and ring that father left to me. There at the top of the mountain I decided to bury my father’s bones.
So I began my journey home.
In my path stood a young pear tree, that, on first appearance looked wretched and covered with soil. But the second time I looked at it the sapling had already blossomed into a maturity. It grew pears the size of my mother’s hands. It waved to me with its branches, beckoning me towards the sweet fruit. As I attempted to climb the three, the leaves enclosed me and stung my skin with nectar.
In an attempt to lose my pursuer I took hold of the tall silver needle in my pocket and threw it to the ground, watching it form a wall of iron thread and knots.
Before I could tell my mother anything the boys spoke for me. “We’ve found father,” they cried. She burst into tears and hugged them both, ignoring my stinking presence.
“As a child, my son could dance along the soil so quickly that the men who died and live in the ground could not catch him. Prove this to me now,”
Without hesitance I lifted my pant legs began to dance in father’s leather bottomed shoes. The soles breezed across the floor, cutting the mist with rhythmic motions. I then turned the ring on my finger and watched my father rise, soil shedding from his skin. His shaved face and clean hands stood against the paling crowd. This impressed the people who stood before me, as did the fact that my tongue did not bleed from the needle it held.
As mother embraced me, she looked at my brothers with great disdain and hurt.
My mother’s embrace rendered the burns and boils on my skin pristine.
Suddenly a swarm of angry vultures swooped upon the ogre and began to peck at every pore and crevice of his body. Together, a mass of flapping and buzzing around a core of struggling flesh, they danced a violent dance. His pitiful screams were drowned in a sea of hundreds of angry screeches and the sounds of countless beaks piercing flesh. I ran from this bloody scene as quickly as I could.
I was offered a place in the palace, but I could not accept. I wanted to be with the mountain; I felt it move under my skin as I knew part of me was in the mountain too.
Based on ideas input by myself. Isn’t that something?
This short story generated by computer at
