Fairyland
“It wasn’t a total loss,” Trina thought, releasing a sigh.
After all, she had had her fun, caught his eye looking at inappropriate places on her body, caught him blushing, and had laughed mercilessly. So what if he hadn’t been free to love her, to take her, to be hers in entirety? She had had his mind, and perhaps his heart, if only for a moment, and that, that was what she loved.
He hadn’t been Trina’s type, anyway. After all, he might have seen that dark inner part of her, that creative black-light that glowed blue and purple beneath the full moon, but that wasn’t what all of who she was. After all, Trina was made to live in the sunshine, to take it in like water to thirst. And now, as the spring crept up, just about ready to drink all the snow into the tree roots and soil, Trina longed not for the pale light of the howling moon, but for the blazing heat of the summer sun.
She watched him from afar, the pale man, skinny and feverish in his endeavors. His mind worked so quickly, but his body had all but atrophied. (Trina had to admit that with men it often seemed either one or the other: a quick mind and a feeble body, or a quick body and a feeble mind. Who was to say which was preferred?) He stared feverishly into the pages of a worn out paperback. It was some science fiction classic, she was certain. Trina would have to try to see the spine from a far distance; she didn’t want him to know she was watching. All he was good for now was book recommendations, really, and even that was fading into a past she could barely recall.
Sometimes Trina thought of herself as a modern-day Persephone. She could so easily understand the old myth now that she was older. New England seasons were so vibrantly a mixture of Hell and pure Heaven. The dark cold winter sent her into the arms of a different Hades each year. The Lords of Hell, they were not powerful and fearful people. Instead they were those who preferred the dark to the light, the ones who stayed dismal all the year. And the sunlight, well, the summer Lords, the ones who stayed above, she had yet to find one who would discuss the intellectual with her when there was a hike to be had or a camping trip to plan.
Indeed, she was often six months with one lover, and then six months with another. It was a gloomy existence, she feared, and wondered how she had been suckered into this dismal situation. Trina gazed again over at her taken lover, the one with a girl who would stick with him all through the year, and again, she sighed.
He wouldn’t recognize her now, would barely look up when she passed him. She had come to him in his dreams, she had, but now, walking the earth as she did, the young man would not even see her. Was she doomed to all eternity this way? After all, in waking hours he belonged to the equally pale and fragile looking Ann.
Ann didn’t even bother to add an “e” to the end of her name to make it slightly more exotic.
Trina furrowed her brow at the very thought of her lover’s mouse of a girlfriend. She watched the child walk from the front door of the café toward her young man’s table. Trina grudgingly noted some of the girl’s appeal. She was lithe, coltish almost in her awkward slenderness. Though certainly past the age of twenty, she had retained some of that adolescent gawk. Most men were put off by such angles on a girl, particularly with those black-rimmed glasses that Ann had insisted on wearing. Yet Trina’s love, he saw the merit in that look.
Trina shook her head a bit, clearing the cobwebs.
“No,” she thought, “It’s not that at all!”
Looking closer, Trina could see that Ann was not what she seemed on the surface. Ann had great potential, the magic, the Glow. Her pallid face was Ethereal, not ethereal, as the Romantics would have known it, but truly Fae.
Suddenly Trina lost all interest in her lost love. He was nothing next to this revelation. Lovers be damned; Trina would find another in turn. It was time to learn more about this Ann-girl, who Trina had never met in the flesh. She could be foe or friend, ally or enemy, and the boy would be thrown to the side in one way or another.
Straightening the folds of her multicolored skirts, tucking a tendril of her moonlight-pale hair behind her ear, Trina composed her glamour. Footsteps silent as a butterfly’s wings, she stepped toward the lovers’ table.
“Ben! You never mentioned how lovely your young lady is! Why don’t you introduce us?”
Trina smiled as the boy stammered, evidently and appropriately nervous, but she had little interest in his reaction. Instead, Trina cast her gaze on Ann, who retained perfect composure behind her owl-like rims. Ann ignored Ben, and raised a hand to shake in formal greeting. Her rose-petal mouth curved into a smile that did not match the awkwardness of her frame.
“You must be Trina,” said Ann, her voice honeyed and amber, like mead. “Ben has told me so much about you.”
And Trina startled for a moment, her glamour shaking almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t Ann’s words, but her eyes. In a glint of a moment, Trina had noted Ann’s grey eyes flicker to a remarkably inhuman shade of violet. In an instant, Ann’s eyes were grey again, and in any other moment, Trina would have questioned what she had seen.
