by C.L. Bevill
* * *
When I woke up, wait, that wasn’t correct. I didn’t wake up. I came to. I came to what? I became aware again. I opened my eyes, but they weren’t really my eyes, and I don’t think they were really open. And the world was an explosion of colors, a stunning exhibition of luminosity on the senses. Every color of the rainbow was present. Every secondary color was about. There were a few colors I had never seen before. It was a meadow, but it wasn’t a meadow. I was sitting in grass that wasn’t grass. I was awake, but I wasn’t awake.
Call me Madam Mystified.
For one thing the sky was purple. Not a lovely violet that I would have imagined in a cogent dream, but a vivid, pulsating purple that bounced and danced. I mean, it was PURPLE! The trees beyond the meadows seemed like normal redwood trees except they were orange and yellow and blue. (The trees were ORANGE! YELLOW! And BLUE!) The grass upon which I was sitting was red, viciously scarlet red that seemed as though it would cut through the flesh. (RED! That’s the best way to get the idea across.)
And should I mention that my legs were green?
Oh, yes indeedy, I had long legs that didn’t look very human anymore. The color was an iridescent green, the shade of a pale green leaf. Long and thin. My feet didn’t have toes. They were solid, nearly clubbed in form. My arms were similar. No fingers. But I did have little sticky pads on what would have been my palms.
“Cool,” I said, but it came out high pitched and singsong.
As I sat up, I became aware of something fluttering at my back. I looked over a pale green shoulder and saw a vibrating, shimmering outline of an object. I twisted around to see it, but it twisted with me. I turned again, trying to figure out what was moving with me and moving independently at the same time.
Then it dawned on me. I had wings. I looked down and saw that I was glowing. I was a firefly pixie. “Well, that doesn’t happen every day,” I stated obviously. And the really weird part was that it didn’t feel weird. It felt perfectly normal.
“Certainly not,” said another singsong voice. I turned to see a pixie landing beside me. Captivated by her finely wrought features, I stared…and continued to stare.
She was the same pale green of my limbs, the color of a peridot glistening in the sunlight. Standing near me, her arms akimbo, her wings fluttering gently behind her, she watched me with a curious deportment. Her eyes dominated her face, the shape of almonds and much larger in proportion than a human eye to their face. The color of the eyes was like the iridescence of the wings, but the colors mixed, blended, and went on forever. There was a tiny nose with little holes and a large welcoming mouth that curved in a smile.
It wasn’t an expression the pixie was used to making, and I thought that perhaps she was attempting to smile for my benefit.
“Will the Standing-On-Two-Legs-Singing-Unhappy-Girl not speak to One-Who-Flies-Fastest-In-Spring-Showers?” she sang to me at last, probably because I hadn’t said anything else.
“I’m…I’m…what did you call me?” I asked and then finished for myself. “Standing-On-Two-Legs-Singing-Uhappy-Girl?”
“It’s what we call Standing-On-Two-Legs-Singing-Unhappy-Girl,” the pixie replied.
“And you’re One-Who-Flies-Fastest-In-Spring-Showers?” I asked politely.
The pixie nodded.
“Do you mind if I just call you, oh, Spring, for short?” I waited for her to nod. Then I added, “And my name is Sophie.”
“Soo-phee,” the pixie repeated. “Of course, we know your human name.”
I took another look around and then asked, “Am I really a pixie now?”
The pixie giggled like a little girl. “Of course not, Standing – uh, Soophee is still very large, wingless, and lumbers like the giant sisters of the islands.” She demurely covered her mouth with her hand. “But certainly more elegantly.” The last part sounded like a social lie.
“So what the heck is going on?”
“You’re walking in our dream world,” Spring answered as if I was insane. “There are important issues we needed to communicate with you.”
I would have smiled, but it seemed like an alien thing to do.
“Fly with us, Soophee,” she invited. “Come see your sisters. See our world as we see it. Understand us better.”
“I can fly?”
“Most definitely,” Spring said with another amused snigger. “How horrible it must be for one to be wingless, but here, Soophee is one of us.”
So I flew. It took a little concentration but the wings were the things that did all the work. And what do you know, I didn’t fall once.