August 12, 1919
I am in trouble again. To tell the truth, I am beginning to sense a pattern, a pattern that starts all light and pretty and ends up in twisted knots with me stuck in the middle of it. It appears that a prank I and a couple of other girls pulled two summers ago might have come back to bite me somewhere soft and painful. Now, I need to get the facts right here.
So, I graduated with top Fairy Grades a couple of years ago, though I did not achieve the prized apple stick wand. That went to the somewhat odorous Pixie Lee. To be honest, those fruit stick wands are a bit of a let-down. They are meant to be all natural, straight from the tree, but, in reality, they have ugly little knobbly bits that are forever catching in the gossamer and get mistaken as potential nesting material by pie-escapee blackbirds.
Anyway, back in 1917, according to my notes, we went on a countryside rampage and found a couple of home-counties babes prancing around a river and playing spot the fairy; an interesting game since the only thing mythical around the area was a small, piker of a field dragon, but he was curled up dead asleep in a tree hollow twenty feet off the ground, so they were not going to spot him any time soon.
As fairies, we are not really meant to go off on unsanctioned (and unpaid) teasing jaunts, but you have to have your fun! So, we flew down and started striking poses and peaking round bushes and dive bombing the girls, that sort of thing. Anyway, they ran off in fright, and that was the end of that. It was a nice little river, so, since none of us had any work yet, we decided to hang around for a few days. The river had a quite gorgeous and fertile mixture of light and shade and there were loads of mosses, herbs and some pretty amazing mushrooms hidden between rocks and trees, enough for some serious brew ups. Well, come the weekend and with the help of a great full moon shining down on our cauldron (fired up by the unwilling dragon), we were pretty much legless and wingless and ready for just about anything. Esme, my best friend for the week, had spent a day and a half trying to flirt with the dragon (not that he was interested in something as flammable as a fairy) and was now going through drunken rejection episodes that were getting a touch leery, to be honest.
So, who shows up in the middle of this party? The two young home-counties babes, brimming with bravado. Now, if any one of us had been even slightly close to sober, we would have flapped out of there smartish and that would have been that. But no, we were a right naughty bunch of Shebas, and so we played. We flew round their heads, did little routines on the grass and generally put on a right show. It didn’t last very long, for as the evening drew in, the older of the girls took the younger one home. And that was all of it. We sobered up and got back to our lives, end of story. Until this morning when the fairy agency sent me a note with three words written in very large letters:
“You were photographed.”
Oh, horsefeathers!
Next: December 20, 1920 »
