Lipstick on a Fairy Tale

Grace set her paintbrush aside and pinched the bridge of her nose, her fingers rough with drying paint. Her head ached, and her eyes were tired, tired of crying, tired of exhausting her tear reservoirs so that she could focus on doing something else for a little while. Her bun of blond curls sagged. It was nearing defeat in its task of keeping her hair clear of the mess. Unfortunately, the paint on her hands meant that it would have to go on losing, tragedy that it was; there would be no outside help coming to its aid.

A hum like a hummingbird drew her gaze to her apartment’s window as a pixie flew past. Wind billowed her burgundy curtains and rustled the plastic covering her sitting room’s furniture.

The sun’s waning light indicated a transition. She had worked all night again. Or had it been all day? She had done so much of the former that both seemed to have lost all meaning. Sleep... It just meant more lost time and another chance for dreams-turned-nightmare to follow her into the waking world. She couldn’t even recall the date, everything so backwards and upside down that the calendar seemed to be counting down as much as it was going the other way.

‘It never went away, did it?’ said Daniel’s voice. It drifted in from the next room. He wasn’t in there, she knew, the voice just a product of her chamber of echoes—a memory, a not-Daniel. There were many of these not-Daniels, always speaking from just beyond an open door or just outside an open window. They stayed just out of sight—his voice like a television left playing in an empty room. The phrases were nonsense. They didn’t mean anything. And yet, they were Daniel, so they meant everything.

She pushed her hair behind her ear with the wrist of her sweatshirt, avoiding the paint on her hands and fingers. She succeeded only in smearing the green of grass across her cheek, her ear, and into her hair. There was paint on her sleeve, too. Apparently, her arm had brushed the wall she had been painting.

The city’s theme song flowed in from the open window—car horns blaring and people shouting over injured egos. But she forced her hearing towards her painting, listening for birds and rustling leaves, for the moment her spell-laced paints took effect, for the moment the magic activated, the moment the veil faded, where still life unstilled.

From her hardwood floor, the plain extended out as a field of flowers, the sun nestling beyond its horizon. The setting was framed by the wall’s trim and a pair of trees that stood at either end, their canopies reaching out across her ceiling. As birds began to sing overhead, the window’s wind moved out across the field, the leaves rustling and shifting shadows across her floor as lilies and daffodils lapped like waves, the field filled with wild, colorful life.

A pixie was nearing the window again, its hum growing louder. Oh, no, Grace thought, racing to close it. She really didn’t need one of them trying to fly out across her painting. She reached for it but hesitated with her hand on the sash.

Four stories down and across the street, Superintendent Gladstone stood outside his tenement with his arms crossed. Before him, a dark-haired girl named Sonorae scrubbed graffiti from a bench—punished for someone else’s crime, no doubt.

Behind Gladstone, a pair of gnomes peeked out from an alley—the culprits, most likely. She would have cheered them on if not for their collateral damage. They were hurting their own more than anyone else. For Sonorae was a selkie whom Gladstone had seen removing her sealskin. And now that he had it, she completed his never-ending series of tasks for the promise that he would one day return it. More like Grumpystone. Poor Sonorae.

The pixie’s hum approached from below, and Grace forced the window closed just in time for it to kick the glass and then stick out its tongue. The presence of fae always meant trouble for someone.

Before going to get cleaned up, she took a last appraising look at her completed labor. A brown-haired boy stood in the foreground and observed the horizon. Further out, a curious bunny toppled a pail of picked flowers. And further still was a girl, one who had set down the pail and now walked towards the sunshine. The girl wasn’t sure if she was seeing a sunrise or a sunset. For one was a promise; the other a farewell. And so she had set down her pail so that she could go see which it was. In case it was the latter, at least she had left flowers behind.

Constraints:

Defining Features:

• Genre - Urban Fantasy

• A veil is broken.

Word List:

• Fae

• Superintendent

• Alley

• Magic

Sentence Block:

• They stayed just out of sight.

• It never went away.

Wordcount:

• 798/800