Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family
rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to
write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration
(quote, website, podcast, etc) and then a thought or two that came to mind.
These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat,
irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if
anything comes of them. Regarding
Fantasy, this insight was startling: “I see the fantasy genre as an
ever-shifting metaphor for life in this world, an innocuous medium that allows
the author to examine difficult, even controversial, subjects with impunity.
Honor, religion, politics, nobility, integrity, greed—we’ve an endless list of
ideals to be dissected and explored. And maybe learned from.” – Melissa
McPhail.
F Trope: Fairy
Tale
"Fairy
tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the
child already because it is in the world already. What fairy tales give the
child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has
known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy
tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon."
—GK Chesterton
Leyla Manghirmalani wrinkled her
nose at the overpowering smell of onions and called out, “Jie? What are you
doing?”
Jie Busiri leaned back from his dorm room desk, holding a chopping knife
and said, “What’s it look like?”
“That you’re stinking up the whole dorm floor on purpose?”
“No, not stinking up anything. I’m calling the onion fairies,” he said it
like he was a little kid.
Leyla shook her head, “Another one of your lame attempts at recreating
ancient fairy magic?”
“Hey! That’s not
fair! Didn’t I make it rain last week after I did that Lakota rain dance?”
She snorted,
“After checking the weather report for three weeks straight and then picking a
day even the weather divas all agreed had a greater than ninety percent chance
of rain.” She waved her hand in front of her face and backed up, “I don’t want
to weep over spilled onion juice. I’ll come back...”
“No! Wait!” Jie
grabbed something from his desk and strode across the room, chopping knife in
one hand.
Leyla laughed, “If
I hadn’t known you since pre-school, I’d have just gone running down the hall
dialing 911 and telling them a freshman U of M student had just gone crazy.”
Jie shook his
head, handing her a piece of pink gum. “Chew this, it’ll keep your eyes from
watering.”
“Why didn’t you
just soak them in cold salty water?”
He looked at her
like she was crazy and said, “They won’t be magic then, stupid.”
“Hey! Don’t call
me stupid! You’re the one they’d throw in the loony bin if they asked why you
were chopping onions!” She chewed and stepped into the room and her eyes didn’t
tear up automatically. “Hey, it works.”
He blew a bubble
and said, “Why do you think I’m doing it?”
“I thought you
wanted to be struck by your onion magic?”
He sniffed in
disdain and went back to his chopping board. “I’m not interested in helping
myself. I’m going to place the slices of onions with a slice of mushroom on
top...”
Leyla cut in, “If
I get a pain hamburger from Mac’s, can I just put them on and make a Whopper?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” he
said, chopping again. “Just wait and see how well our floor does on finals –
then we’ll see who has the last laugh!”
They hung out the
rest of the night and Leyla helped him place the mushroom and onion slices in
the rooms of the people willing to go with his craziness. By the time they were
done studying and onion-placing, it was past two in the morning. “I gotta get
some sleep,” she said, “I have a chem final first thing.”
Jie gave her a
hug, saying, “I made sure I put the biggest onion slice in your room and I
piled the rest of the mushrooms on top of it.”
“Oh, thank you so
much,” she dead-panned. “Thank you so, so much for your fairly wonderful
generosity.”
He smirked then
said, “Just you wait, Leyla Higgins, just you wait.”
She smiled at the
MY FAIR LADY jab and headed for bed.
Names: ♀Iran,
India, ; ♂ China, Egypt
Image: http://www.skyscrapernews.com/images/pics/6255CaernarfonCastle_pic1.jpg
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