Changeling

by SaraG

The changeling girl held a bazooka out of the window of the house and waited for the leprechaun to try to steal her stash. Leprechauns were the only beings in magical creation too dense to understand that fairy gold wasn’t real, just glamorized bits of leaves and dust, and they spent half their time trying to steal it and then wondering why it disappeared the next day.

Last night the leprechaun had made a dash for her gold Barbie doll. Sharon bit her lip. She’d had it. It might not be a real gold gold Barbie, but it was her gold Barbie and nobody was going to take it away from her. Just let them try.

Her arms hurt from pulling back the string of the sling that she’d glamorized to look like a bazooka. She wondered if the stones would hurt more if she changed it into a missile, but realized that they probably wouldn’t. Her only hope was that the sight would scare the leprechaun off and that he wouldn’t dare come back. Keeping this farce up was too stressful and Sharon had nobody to help her.

Nobody understood her. Life was hard on a changeling fairy trying to fit in among humans. She wondered how her human mother would react if she ever found out, and the bazooka trembled in her hand.

“Mom, Dad, you guys don’t know it, but I’m adopted. Your real child is in fairyland being forced to work for their bread or something.” Didn’t sound right.

Frustration welled inside and she wanted to cry. Why me? She thought. Why my Barbie doll?

“Sharon? Come down to dinner, darling. Now.” The girl hesitated. Nobody cared about her. Why should she even bother going down to dinner? Why should she bother eating? Why not just waste away and leave a pretty corpse? She bit back her tears.

“Honey?” her mother was climbing the stairs. “Honey, I want you downstairs right now. Don’t make me come up and get you.”

The changeling dropped the bazooka, grabbed the Barbie and hid it under her clothes. Then she put on her best slouch, opened the door and went downstairs to join Humanity

Proust¹: A Primer, which the Author Painstakingly Annotated to Allow How Not to Read about a Lout Whose Crimes Spouted against Humanity Are Not in Doubt²

by Trent Walters

Squatting on the bottom library step, the mousy, elfin-framed man named Arthur⁴ dusted his snake⁵-skin suit, glanced at his watch⁶, then adjusted his horned¹-rims to watch an old woman⁶ wheeze and labor⁷ up the steps with a dolly that held his titanic⁸ stack of manuscript pages. She paused to catch her breath and pushed long tresses of gray hair out of her face.

“Cease wool-gathering, Miss Mykoytress.” His eyelids hooded to slits. “We haven’t words enough and time⁹ before I present my doctoral thesis.”

“Did you reproduce this thesis and read three-thousand pages of Remembrances?”

Art raised himself, as if slowly uncoiling his legs. “That facsimile records the achievements of the all-time greatest novel.”

“I read the first fifty before I realized I hadn’t read the first.”

He hissed, ready to strike.

“I reread it, realizing he taught himself to write on my time. I don’t have much left.”

Scenting the proverbial lost sheep’s weakness, Art flicked his forked-tongue⁷ and slithered⁷ up the steps to make the intellectual kill. “He had strapping male companions, one of whom Proust bought an airplane which the companion promptly crashed into the ocean. Proust never regained the time lost from the loss.”

“I prefer Of Mice and Men.” The tresses of her hair writhed and turned him to stone.

_____

1 Pronounce Proust like Faust² jousting it out with the metamorphosing Mephistopheles, whose elfin frame housed a Machiavellian mind that deluded the most casually espoused Marlowean/Goethean readers of Chairman Mao’s social policies.

2 The author uses assonance³ to demonstrate artfully⁴ the proper pronunciation.

3 The auctorial³ terms “ass-onance” and “pomp-ass” resonate like pans⁹ of Teflon-coated Freudian slips for the propensity to use overly erudite³ and pompous³ terms like “auctorial” in a flagrant flaunt of critical authority.¹⁰

4 The “author” impishly misdirects the reader with “Arthur” to obfuscate his identity slipping a devilishly deceptive “author” into the title.

5 The wise old woman archetype tempted into servitude by the wise old serpent male archetype.

6 Sly injection of the symbol of time.

7 Scathing indictment of the bourgeois laissez faire.

8 Double entendre alluding to the recyclable Greek myths and the ship that lost a thousand faces⁹. Note the juxtaposed conflation of a child’s and a man’s play toys: a doll-y and a ship (with phallic suggestion)–let alone the bio-ethical reproductive dilemma of cloning inherent in a “dolly.”

9 Marvel at the coy allusion to Andrew Marvell’s poem.

10 Never trust auctorial³ critical authority.