New Flash Fiction: The Fairies Were Dying

As we head towards the Equinox and start of the season of falling leaves, today's flash fiction story The Fairies Were Dying has an appropriate autumnal/end of the summer feel to it. Our author is Lisamarie Lamb who says of herself

The Fairies Were Dying
by Lisamarie Lamb

The fairies were dying. Delicate little bodies littered the streets, their wings fluttering in the slight breeze before turning to dust. The ones who had died first were skeletons now, and soon they would crumble to nothing, and, for all it mattered, never would have been. 

Only the children could see them. The children and those called special by the adults who didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t understand. The young ones and the chosen ones picked up the once beautiful corpses, held them gently, gave them burials whenever they could, but there were too many of them, and the number was growing by the hour. There were so many of them that on some days those who could see were afraid to go outside for fear of getting caught in a downpour of death. 

But the adults saw only what they wanted to see, saw only what was obvious. At first, they believed it was simply a make believe game, but as it went on they grew curious. They asked the children why they were burying stones and pebbles that they had found along the path or in the garden. They wondered why their sons and daughters were afraid to go out amongst the swirling, twirling leaves that tumbled from autumn caught trees. They questioned the tenderness with which each child would kneel and hold fallen feathers, weeping over them with such grief-filled, heart broken cries that it scared their parents. 

Over time the tiny bodies began to rot and began to stink. As they decayed, as muscle melted from miniscule bones and the worms came to feast, the air was choked with the mouldy sweet smell of decomposing flesh. The children and the special ones gagged when they stepped outside, and held gloved hands across their noses and mouths to dilute the stench. It had a way of seeping through, through, a way of trickling down their young throats and filling them with the scent of eternity.

It gave them an early taste of what death was like.

The adults said it was the change of the season. Bonfire remnants and composting leaves. The threat of rain or snow. Winter on its way. It was normal, it was quite all right.  

But the children knew what it was. They could see what it was. 

Walks that once might have been exhilarating, fun in an outdoors sort of way, were now terrifying, each step forward another body broken, bones crunching underfoot. Parents and teachers and all the rest of them said it was the leaves on the ground, brittle and fragile. It was nature’s way of starting again. 

It was, they explained, always like this. Every year the same. Things died. And in the spring they would come back again, resurrected, living once more. 

This scared the children even more. What about the buried ones? The shattered ones? The ones eaten by foxes or left to turn to dust on their own in a ditch?

What about them? They wouldn’t come back. They couldn’t. They were lost forever now. Or, worse, they could come back, and they would, screaming, reaching up through the earth, bones rattling as they shook toward one another trying to gain purchase, to knit together again. And some others would rip themselves out of the stomachs of the creatures that had devoured their corpses so readily, spewing forth amongst blood and guts, wings unfolding even as their skin sloughed away.   

The adults saw the concern scarred across the little faces that looked up at them, beseeching, asking for a different answer to the one given to their silent question, asking for the earth to stop turning and the winter to remain here always.  

Those clever grown ups who new best, who always did, told the children not to worry. 

But the children had to worry. 

The fairies were dying.  

"I'm a horror writer mostly, but I can turn my hand to anything; I've written blog posts on education and marketing, stories about romance and high adventure, books about ghosts and drug lords, descriptions for Christmas hampers and Harrods' gift boxes... Writing is my escape from the 'real world' with its corporate greyness and dull news.

"Regarding my writing experience, I have had over thirty short stories published in recent (2011 onwards) anthologies (including books from Angelic Knight Press, Cruentus Libri Press, and Sirens Call Publications), with more to be published throughout the rest of 2014 and into 2015. 

"In November 2012, my short story collection, Over The Bridge, was published by Dark Hall Press. My second collection of short stories (Fairy Lights) was published by J. Ellington Ashton Press. I have two children's novels scheduled to be published this year (one from J. Ellington Ashton, and one from Visionary Press). I have a blog at www.themoonlitdoor.blogspot.co.uk