Velvetleaf

It was love at first sight, as it is with faeries. Velvetleaf told me later she saw me looking out the window of the cottage my first day there. Humans are terrifying and grotesque to faeries―the way Gulliver felt about the giants of Brobdingnag. However, distance and the distortion of glass somehow revealed my “true beauty,” she said. Not only could she imagine me as a tiny person of her own height, Velvetleaf could imagine a whole life together in the hidden realm of the woods.

I envy Velvetleaf that first glimpse of love, although my own was but days later. She watched me from afar, skipping away from her magical duties to hide behind a branch or peer out from under a dry oak leaf. I ventured beyond the cottage grounds and hiked through the underbrush unaware, listening to the rustling and bubbling as my very name melted into memory. My lungs expanded with the smell of moss. I sat on a boulder and wondered if I should kill myself before the dream slipped away, dreading the moment when the world of smog and plastic pulled me back. I could submerge my face in the brook and never look back.

That was when I saw something in the bramble bush.

My brain told me it was a beetle, something shimmery and impossible like a desert scarab. My eyes knew it was something else. During my city life, I would have called them oil slick wings. Now, surrendered to the natural world, I could only think of abalone shells. Gradually, I saw her clearly: tiny hands, pointed ears, and eyes like burning coals in a sharp face. As I watched, she moved out from her hiding place so slowly I hardly realized the brambles had fallen behind and she stood exposed on a stone. It was a person! A small one.

Velvetleaf introduced herself in a voice so tiny I could hear it only after living among the trees and rocks and soil for days. No human voice sounds like a faery’s, and my own grated against my eardrums as I spoke my name. She was startled by it too, but did not fly away. She stood her ground. She looked into my eyes. She came close and touched my hand, rubbed her cheek against my skin…

As the sun set, I could no longer go back to the cottage. What had begun to feel like home was now something else: a crossroads. Velvetleaf moved to my shoulder, where she whispered sweet nothings in my ear. I murmured softly back in return, speaking in a gentle rumble, but we fell into silence as darkness took first the woods, then the sky. In the space between trees, I saw small lights and floating shapes, and whispers filled the air. Their voices were exhilarating, like fingertips up my spine. Looking up through the tangled branches and leaves, paying no mind to the gathering, Velvetleaf gazed at the stars.

“Would you stay here with me?” she asked, and the words filled every crevice of my being. Could she feel the love radiating out of me? Perhaps she could, because she shivered and leapt off my shoulder, caught in midair by wings of opal and mica.

Dozens of shining entities swarmed around her, abandoning their birch and maple perches in one great gust. Velvetleaf was a jewel in a sea of glass beads to my dazzled eyes. The whispering intensified until the forest rang with faery shouts. Then, as suddenly as my journey began, there was utter quiet, broken only by a breeze, or perhaps the stifled breathing of the faery folk. A glowing figure, taller than the others despite her doll-like shape, fluttered through the crowd. She took Velvetleaf’s hands into her own.

“This human wishes to join with me,” Velvetleaf said, so quietly I could have imagined it.

The eyes of the queen burned with compassion and judgment, encased in a rose gold face. They fell on me like the summer sun. “Does this human understand the meaning?” she asked, lifting a wand to my face, dainty as a dandelion seed. “Velvetleaf, you have spent many hours with this human. You have watched this human for many days. I know because I, too, watch. To you, this love is swift. To the human, this love is but a feather on the wind, a passing fancy, a remarkable moment in a long, long lifetime. What is a long, tender moment to you is but a whim to a human, a single fanciful thought, and yet human love falters faster than ours. Are you prepared for this betrayal?”

Velvetleaf bowed her head, then looked at me with the joy of a thousand wedding vows. My heart had been sinking into my stomach, but now soared out of my chest. I was overcome by the bursting seedpod within me. I wanted to lunge forward and hold her close, yet my monstrous size held me back. The way I stood like a boulder in the mud while these magical beings hovered on the air filled me with feelings of ugliness. I was hideous! As though she could see the storm in my heart, Velvetleaf fluttered away from the queen, reaching her tiny hands out. I lifted my own, each as large as she, and the faery maiden took me by the fingertip to pull me towards the swarm. Focused only on the handhold and the delicate breath of her wings, I followed.

We passed the queen, whose wand touched many places on my body with tiny zaps of static electricity. We passed the crowds of faeries whose chattering and gossip cocooned me. My shoes broke the surface of the creek and cold water poured in. Velvetleaf’s grip seemed a little stronger, her hand wrapping around my finger. We went into the trees, passing motionless deer and badgers. Birds watched us quietly. The rough trunks rose high above my head, each one more massive than any tree I had ever seen. And Velvetleaf’s hand felt bigger and bigger. The fit of my clothes became worse and worse until I was stumbling in the folds, my shoes long lost to the chill night grasping my bones.

Finally, I seemed to slip out of my very skin and found myself standing at the center of a ring of red toadstools. The creek lay behind us, replaced by grass and towering pines. The toadstools were enormous as bouncy houses, though the longer I looked the less I could remember what a bouncy house was. Velvetleaf held both my hands in hers now that we were of a size, our eyes able to see without strain. Hers shone with the blazing light of fireflies, forest fires, and starlight. As I gazed into them, I could feel the slick, hard shell of my naked body. I could flex my fragile wings to and fro. I could lean forward to wrap my arms around Velvetleaf, pull her close to me, and press my lips to her shining green mouth.

Above us, the trees went on forever, and beyond them the night sky twinkled with a million billion worlds. Smaller than ever, I could feel them all and my place in the space between. My feet against the earth, my thighs tickled by the grass… I could feel roots below me growing in the planet’s mantle. My humanness was fading away into the great spider’s web of the world, every insect and arachnid my brother; every bird and squirrel my companion. The rest of the faeries gazed at me in wonder.

I quickly joined Velvetleaf in the cadence of faery life, experiencing the forest through her as she returned to her duties as a blight healer. She saw the beauty in every tree, even those sick, withered, old, and dying. While many faeries cultivated life, she healed sickness and touched death. She was not afraid to face the vines that choke life out. We discussed how all things come to an end. I had felt that way as a human. I could feel it deep inside me as a faery, natural and warm as decay under a log.

I asked Velvetleaf about her impression of me as a human being, and she told me a little, but she begged me not to. She pleaded with me to leave it behind. She made me promise never to drift near the cottage again. My time in that world was done. To see humans would only distress me and make the other faeries uneasy. My home was with Velvetleaf now, sleeping in tree hollows wrapped in each other’s arms.

Yet now and then I listened to human voices in the distance, jarring and enticing in their drumming. I even followed them once until Velvetleaf pulled me away.

“Your clothes are that way,” she warned. “They search there for you.”

Late spring turned to summer. As Velvetleaf patiently nursed her trees, I spent time with other faeries to learn their ways. I quickly began spending much of my time with the soothers — those who cared for the sick and dying faeries. My presence seemed to surprise them, for humans were always repelled by death. To me, however, this was the deep-rooted truth of life that joined my past self to my new existence. It reminded me that every moment was wonderful. So, I became a soother myself. At the end of each day, I would return to Velvetleaf smiling and aching after seeing someone off to sleep.

Little did I know that it would soon be Velvetleaf I held in my arms. As summer turned to autumn, then snow began to coat the world, I noticed a change in my love. She flew a little slower…then much slower. Her carapace creaked as she moved. Her shine dulled, though her smile never did, and at last I had to hold her close and ask what was wrong.

“Faeries live for one turning of the seasons,” she said, touching my face. “I am to you as the mayfly is to me: here for a passing day before fading away.”

Throughout winter, I watched Velvetleaf age, reaching a time in life when faeries began making their way to the soothers. She never sought anyone else’s company. Day by day, she said farewell to the trees she cared for, passing her duties on to another healer. She spent her old age watching the stars and the falling snow.

The searches had finally stopped, so we visited the place where we met. My pile of clothes was long gone. We danced a faery waltz on the rock where she asked me to go away with her. She talked about her discovery of me in the cottage one sunny spring day. In turn, I told her I had never seen anything more wonderful than her. Our first moment together was outdone only by every other morning I woke up to her face. We listened to the bubbling creek as the moon shone overhead.

Eventually, Velvetleaf could not fly at all. She lay in bed, and I beside her. When I left to soothe others, she had many visitors. Insects, birds, and beasts of the forest walked by, sometimes dropping nuts and berries. A bear scratched at the tree. A stag dropped its antlers on the ground below. A bobcat climbed up to purr on a nearby branch. Birds sang and worms hummed. Many faeries journeyed to share last words and touches. Even the queen came to visit, fresh and golden and aged as the trees. I wondered if she, too, watched many faeries come and go.

“Share your love with more faeries,” Velvetleaf said to me when we were alone. “You will live a long, long time. Enjoy it even more than you would as a human. You will be beautiful for years and years to come. I can see them all from here.”

I shook my head and kissed her withering face all over. “I will enjoy my life like no human has before,” I promised, “for I am more than human now. You gave me this gift when you stepped out from that bramble bush so long ago, and you will take most of it away with you.”

Velvetleaf’s eyes laughed. “Silly human,” she whispered. “I would give you my whole being if I could. Alas, I am only a passing fancy tucked into the long years of your life, a bur on your wing. Shake it off, my love, and fly on!”

She was one of countless faeries I have held in my arms as their breath gushed out and joined the wind, carrying their essence into the aether. She was the only one whose passing I selfishly mourn to this very moment.

Nowadays, the faeries marvel at my age. I am called Elder or Guardian of Memory or some other honorable title that gets more elaborate with each passing turn of the seasons. Only the queen still uses my ancient name. Someday she, too, will begin to fade and will pass on her role to a son or daughter. She says I am likely to live until the end of that child’s reign. In the meantime, she watches over the faeries, much as I do, soothing the old and frail as an integral part of the natural way of faery life.

When I am alone, I go to the rock where I sat as a human and where I danced with Velvetleaf. I think about my one love and watch the human world from afar. Their voices grate, their homes dominate and encroach, and their waste chokes the air, yet I know that they are as much a part of this world as I am. Their influence is too suffocating to deny that. I watch them from behind the veil, longing for them to know the sweetness of nature’s embrace that they might stop tearing at it with their metal thorns and claws.

Maybe one day I, too, will step out of the bramble bushes.