Once Upon a Time, Part 1

This is a story that popped into my head sideways. I'll be posting what I have a little at a time in the hopes that I'll decide where to take it next.

We were twelve, my sister Emily and I. It was early August, and the heat draped on our skin with beads of sweat and mud. We were too young to go to the cotillions with Mother and too old to throw dirt clods with the neighborhood kids, so we stuck together for company. This was okay, since Mother taught us that we’d been born together, so we might as well stick together. The neighborhood kids also couldn’t get over that we were two girls that looked exactly alike, so they tended to be a little distant with us.

I could never understand how anyone could mistake the two of us. As far as I was concerned, Emily was the pretty one. She had a pretty that came from deep inside her and radiated across her face. Mother said that she was graceful, but to me, that was what made Emily pretty. I was the one with my nose in a volume of Grimm Brothers or Hans Christian Andersen. It didn’t make me “the smart one”, just the one who looked for mermaids in the lake and fairies in the trees. Emily didn’t laugh for making her search with me, but maybe that’s because there was nothing in our reality that was as much fun as my fantasies. Mother never questioned my attachment to these stories because she knew Daddy used to read them to us. Emily would fall asleep after the first page, but I would stay awake, begging for the next chapter. Daddy left one night while we were sleeping, but he gave me his books and Emily his watch and wedding band before he closed our door for the last time.

Emily sat underneath the tree I was trying to climb. She had picked Black-Eyed Susans on our walk to the lake and was braiding their stems into a wreath. She barely needed to touch the flowers; they arranged themselves because Emily wanted them that way. That was part of her grace making everything pretty like her. My hands were quickly blistered from the effort of the climb up the sharp bark, and I was thankful I’d worn jeans instead of short, or my knees would have bled into the wood.

The image of giving my blood to the tree suddenly caught in my mind. “Hey, if I pricked my finger and fed three drops to the tree, do you think the dryad in it would wake up?”

“Dryad? I can’t remember, what’s that?” Emily looked up at me, but her fingers continued to lure the flowers into place.

“Dryads are forest nymphs, kind of like fairies. I read about them in Daddy’s Bullfinch’s Mythology.” I scrambled to a thick branch to catch my breath. “They can turn into trees when they want to hide from satyrs chasing them. Satyrs are half man, half goat, I think.”

I watched her turn this thought in her head. “Wow, I’d run from them too, I’d bet.” Her hands slowed. “Do they have goat’s heads or legs?”

“They have human heads and chests, but from the waist down is all goat, so they run really fast. Nymphs can run too, but dryads can turn themselves into trees so they don’t have to run.”

“That’s clever of them.” She held the completed wreath between her slender fingers. “This would be a perfect crown for a dryad, wouldn’t it?”

I nodded, “It would, but only as long as you didn’t pick the flowers from the trees they’re hiding in. It would be like pulling off one of their fingers.”

“Eeew, Sarah!”

“It’s true.” I tried to bring the exact story to the front of my head. “A woman picked a flower from a tree that was really a dryad in hiding. The dryad was so mad that she turned the woman into a tree and wouldn’t turn her back.”

Emily’s forehead creased in a frown. “That isn’t fair. Did the tree have a sign that said, ‘Warning: Dryad’? I’m sure the woman didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

I shrugged and ran my hands along the bark. “I didn’t make up the story. It’s the way things were. It just doesn’t happen as often now that it isn’t ‘once upon a time’.”

“Is that why people don’t believe the stories as much as they used to? Because ‘once upon a time’ was so long ago?” She looked up at me while placing the wreath on her own head.

“Once upon a time was probably a much better time for the dryads, the satyrs and everyone else.”