Morpethroad

……Today’s prompt has to do with a book. Let’s say you stumbled upon a book and all of it’s pages are empty. You decide to write in it and magically everything you write comes true…

When I visited my grandmothers house as a child she was always at pains to advise me not to go in the attic. She said the floor up there was unsafe.

Staying at Grandmothers was always an experience and one year when for the tenth time I’d said I was bored she gave me a book to look at.

No ordinary book she stated looking me fair in the eye.

‘This book she said will take you places, if you believe in what you write in it.’

I was not interested in writing in those days so I put the book aside and did what most kids my age did, went outside to explore her yard and to plan how I might sneak a look in the attic.

A year ago grandmother died. The book was still where I had last left it. By now as an adult the idea of writing had become a much more pleasurable pastime. I did dabble a little and this time remembering her words about the book opened it to begin to write.

The book’s cover was inscribed with the words: An Open Door. To me that was a mystery as I could never make head nor tail of that meaning. However the moment I began to write I quickly realised what the title meant.

My first sentence was: In the land of the fairy tale anything was possible. There was a glow about me as I wrote those words onto the first page.

My story then read:

John had been once again sent into the garden while his parents entertained in the living room of their home. He hated those times when being the only child meant he was sent outside, or to his room. Being alone was not something he enjoyed. He liked it when his parents were home alone with him and they could give him their full attention.

He sat in his favourite spot in the garden; at the bottom of his yard where the ferns grew over the rockery his father had built some time ago.

He wished for a friend, he wished for companions, someone to play with for being an only child did give you lots of parental attention but they weren’t the same as a play mate.

To his left there was movement and looking down he spied a small man in a blue suit sitting beside him.

The little man looked at him smiled and said: Hello I’m the lonely fairy.

The boy was aghast that there was someone beside him and secondly that he was being spoken to.

Looking around he saw no one else in the yard. Looking back he saw that the little man had unbuttoned his jacket and was leaning back against a rock looking at him as if curious about the boys situation.

A lonely fairy?

Yes indeed.

What’s a lonely fairy?

Ah well you see I am here to help the lonely deal with their loneliness.

And how do you do that?

Well I can chat to you for a while, give you a few tips on being lonely and finding ways to cope with the feelings of desolation you will feel from time to time.

I am lonely.

I know but you can do something about it.

I can?

Oh yes but you have to make an effort, it wont happen of its own accord.

It won’t?

I don’t know why I wrote the story the way I did. I guess it was a way of dealing with my own sense of being alone. The Lonely Fairy I came to realise was in fact talking to me. The more I wrote and the more I wrote about my own predicament. The more I wrote about my own predicament the more I began to feel that it was all a bit presumptuous of me to expect or believe that the Lonely Fairy might help me deal with life as I saw it.

I began to think that the fairy was in fact sitting beside me as I wrote, whispering in my ear, imparting advice, explaining to me that the fears I had were well founded but not insurmountable.

With my head buried in the book, the pen working furiously at the end of my wrist I continued writing until I saw that the sun had gone down and it was time to put on the kitchen light.

In doing so the room was flooded by the brightest of lights. There at the end of the table, opposite to me was a man in a blue suit. He smiled at me and said: ‘Hello, I’m the Lonely Fairy.’

Written for: http://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/01/02/fairytale-prompt-41/