Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce Read Free Book Online Page B

with branches, and then I went walking amid the bluebells. This time the scent came up on me in a rush, a cloud, and I was drawn deeper into the woods, following an old bridle path. There were few people around that afternoon, it being a working day. Someone trotted a pony along the bridle path, and that’s the only person who passed me.
    The scent from the bluebells was overwhelming, but it was also giving me a kind of peace, a serenity. I stopped thinking about Richie. I stopped thinking about what was happening inside me. I walked among the bluebells again and I must have known that by treading them underfoot I was releasing more of that strange perfume into the air. After a while I found a rock covered in brilliant green moss and orange lichen. I sat among the bluebells and put my head back on the mossy pillow of the rock.
    The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor; and I didn’t know if the sky was earth or the earth was water. I had been turned upside down. I had to hold the rock with my fingernails to stop me from falling into the sky of the earth or the water of the sky. But I couldn’t hold on, and I know I went soaring.
    I was wearing a ring that Richie had bought me the day after we first had sex together. My first time. It had been at this very place and at that moment in my life I felt that I wanted Richie to hold me forever. Now I wasn’t so certain. I took off his ring and let it go, and it fell, fell through the blue sky onto the emerald-and-amber cushion of moss and lichen that sat so soft on the table of ancient rock.
    I felt unburdened. Lighter. I sat back with my head against the moss. The twittering of the birds died down and it seemed like all of the woods became silent. I might have fallen asleep. But even if I did, I woke up with a start when I heard someone coming through the woods toward me.
    It was a man on a pretty white horse making his achingly slow way along the bridle path. Strung on either side of the horse was a large straw pannier, each side looking loaded. I thought the man was talking to himself, or to the horse, but anyway, he had the laziest seat in the saddle you ever saw, and this horse was hardly moving. The man had a crop and he was twitching it at the horse, but not so the creature would feel it. He’d allowed the reins to fall slack at the horse’s withers and I almost thought he was riding this white horse in his sleep.
    I decided to keep quiet and lay with my head back on the mossy stone so that he wouldn’t see me and he would pass by, but then as he drew near I saw that his eye was fixed on me. He twitched at the horse and turned it off the bridle path and toward me, crushing bluebells under the hooves of the horse.
    And they were large hooves. The horse was an elegant creature but its sturdy legs were more like those of a shire, with huge hairy fetlocks. It moved slowly toward me, nodding as it came. Then it stopped right before me. The man sat up a little, smiling down, an amused look in his eye.
    I should have been a little afraid, but I wasn’t.
    I said, “That’s the whitest horse I’ve ever seen.”
    “It is,” he said. “It’s the whitest horse you’ve ever seen; and it’s the whitest horse you will ever see.” He had an unusual accent. I don’t know what it was, though I liked the sound of it well enough. “And that’s why he’s mine.”
    He sat there for an uncomfortable moment or two as we eyed each other. “What’s its name?” I said, just to break the silence.
    “Tssk,” he went, and he smirked at me like I was a bit simple. “You don’t give a horse a name. They don’t like to have names.”
    “I’ve never heard that,” I said, defiant.
    “I expect you haven’t heard a lot of things, you being a slip of a young girl.”
    He was very quick with his answers, but he softened