Fairy Tale - Sara's Submission

Currently having the worst week of my life which I don't particularly want to talk about. So his isn't finished and I'm not sure when it will be.

Once, many years ago, a husband and wife lived in a small house at the edge of a deep forest. The man was a woodcutter who cut trees in the forest and sold the logs for firewood or built them into fine sturdy furniture. The woman made clothing and quilts that made you feel warm as the hearth of a roaring fire no matter how cold your home was. They had a little farm where they kept cows and chickens and sheep and grew food to feed all of them. They loved each other dearly and were very happy but for one thing: they had no children. The couple wanted a child with all of their hearts and they had tried everything, sensible or not. There were potions and charms and things to be avoided and every manner of trick, but nothing worked.

It was a chilly fall day when the woman set out to bring her husband a hot meal as he cut trees in the forest. The man had shown her all of his usual paths through the woods and always told her where he would be, so she found him quickly and was soon on her way back home. She was just a little ways from the edge of the wood when she heard a sad little chirp. Looking down, she saw a little brown sparrow hopping about awkwardly in the fallen leaves. The woman knelt down to get a better look and saw that the bird was dragging one wing on the ground. At first, the woman thought the little bird was just trying to coax her away from some hidden nest. But even as she followed and drew quite close, the sparrow did not take flight. She looked up at the woman with sad, dark eyes and let out another plaintive chirp. The woman cooed soothingly to the little bird. She knelt down by her and scooped her up in her cupped hand. The sparrow made no protest. Reaching into her pocket, the woman pulled out a small bottle. It was a healing ointment she kept with her always, in case her husband ever injured himself in the wood. The woman pulled out the cork and gently poured a few drops onto the bird’s wing.

Suddenly, the little bird began to glow, in brilliant green and golden hues. The woman was so startled that she nearly dropped the sparrow. There was a bright flash of light. When it faded and the woman could see again, the sparrow was gone. In the bird’s place was a tiny fairy. She was barely bigger than the woman’s hand. Her skin was a striking gold like autumn leaves, and her hair was a deep woody green. She had a delicate pair of wings, long and thin and translucent like a dragonfly’s. The fairy let out a cry of joy and looped about in the ar before the still startled woman.

“Thank you! Thank you!” the fairy said, hovering just in front of the woman’s face.
“You’re a fairy?” The woman had heard stories about fairies living in the wood, but in all her life she had never seen one.

“Yes! Yes! I had turned myself into a bird, but my wing caught on a thorn and I couldn’t turn back until it healed. And now you’ve healed it and I’m free again!”

“I’m happy to have helped,” the woman smiled. From every story she had heard since she was a little girl, helping a fairy brought good luck. Perhaps her husband would sell more of their wares this season, or the chickens would lay more eggs. The woman rose to her feet and started to leave.

“Wait! Wait!” The fairy zipped back in front of the woman’s face. “I must do something to thank you. You’ve done me a great favor you know. Let me grant you a wish.”

“A wish?” The woman had not expected this.

“A wish. Anything you want, I’ll do it.”

The woman didn’t even have to think about what she wanted, but still, she hesitated for a moment. It had been so long since she’d even let herself think about what she wanted most in the world. Could she dare to hope after all this time that her dearest wish might come true?

“Please,” the woman said slowly, “if you could, I would like to have a child.”

“A child!” The fairy’s eye sparkled with delight. “Oh, that’s a wonderful wish!”

“Then, you can do it?”

“Yes. It’s a difficult thing, but I can do it for you.”

The woman was so overcome with joy that she felt she might weep. After all these years of hoping and wishing and all the disappointments, she and her husband would finally have the child that would make their happiness complete. The woman put a hand to her chest and smiled.

“So,” said the fairy, “what kind of child is it that you want?”

What came next was something that the woman would go over in her mind again and again for years to come. She knew well from the stories and the warnings from her family when she was young that you must be very careful when you talk to a magical creature. Some of them were tricksters or even wicked creatures who would twist your words around into something different for their own amusement. And even the good creatures – which this fairy most certainly was – didn’t always understand people and how what they said was not always exactly what they meant. So the woman should have known to choose her words carefully. But she was so overcome by the happiness of getting her wish at last that she must have forgotten all of these wise thing she had been told. Because though she could have just said that it didn’t really matter to her what kind of child it was, what she said was this:

“Oh I don’t care at all what kind of child it is. It could even be prickly all over like a little hedgehog and I’d love it just the same.”

“All right then,” said the fairy. “I’ll just need a few days to work the spell, and then you’ll have your wish.”

“Thank you!” the woman said, her voice just above a whisper as she could barely speak for joy.

The fairy grinned at the woman, then darted off into the deep wood, leaving a sparkling trail in the air behind her that slowly sank to the earth and faded away. The woman stood for a moment, watching the last of the fairy dust disappear and thinking over the miracle that had just happened. Then she turned and hurried off to tell her husband the wonderful news.

The little fairy was flying straight back to her home deep in the wood to begin working on the woman’s wish. A child. Such a lovely wish. The few times she had seen people before, they had all wanted gold or jewels or something dull like that. But a child was such a wonderful thing. Wait, though. What else had the woman said? Something about a hedgehog, wasn’t it? A child and a hedgehog? No. She had only wanted one thing, the fairy was quite sure of that. What, then? A child who could talk to hedgehogs? A child that turned into a hedgehog? A child that looked like a hedgehog? Yes, that had to be it. The fairy distinctly remembered the woman saying she would love a child with prickles like a hedgehog’s. Relieved that she had remembered, the fairy returned home and set to work.


It was not long after that the man and the woman knew for certain that the fairy had kept her promise. The months passed and woman’s belly grew larger. Friends came by more and more often, with congratulations and offers of help and advice. The woman sewed more and more as she became less and less able to do much else. She crafted little blankets and baby-sized clothes as she had many times before, but now with the new joy of knowing that a child of her own would soon be wearing what she made. The man too kept busy tending to his wife and making a new crib. For the first time, he carved wooden toys; little animals and people and carts. And in the evening, when they were at last too tired to do anything more, they lay together in bed and talked about the way it would be when the baby finally arrived.

“I think ‘Klara’, if it’s a girl,” the woman said one night. “But I can’t think of one for a boy.”

The man considered this for a moment.

“Perhaps ‘Hans’, after my father,” he answered. His wife smiled.

“’Hans’, then,” she agreed.


At last, one hot summer night, the time came for the baby to be born. The woodcutter raced down to the village and back with the midwife. The midwife disappeared into the bedroom and the man was left to wait. He picked up a little wooden horse he had made, turning over and over nervously in his hands. The minutes seemed to stretch out longer than all the months that had passed since they first knew the child was coming. The man waited.

It was just as the man was wondering if he should try to ask the midwife what was happening when he heard it. The long silence was broken at last by his baby’s first cry. The man dropped the toy horse and let out a sigh of relief and joy. Perhaps he did notice a little as the child’s wails continued that there was something odd about the sound, something unlike the cries he had heard from other babies in the past. But if he did notice at all, he paid it no mind.

The midwife burst suddenly from the bedroom. The man stood to thank her and ask the many questions that were suddenly coming to him now that the wait was over. But he stopped when he saw the midwife’s face. She looked at him with such an odd expression, not at all what the woodcutter expected from a midwife congratulating him on his first child’s birth. She eyed him with suspicion, mixed with just the slightest hint of fear.

“What is it?” the woodcutter asked. The midwife did not answer. Fear grabbed at the woodcutter’s stomach.

“Are they all right?” he asked, not sure if he wanted to know the answer.

The midwife was heading towards the door. She stopped just before leaving and turned to the woodcutter.

“I think you’d best go see for yourself,” she said very quietly.

The woodcutter did not even wait for the midwife to go. He dashed into the bedroom, terrified of what he might find.

What he did find only left the woodcutter more confused. His wife sat in their bed, clearly exhausted from the effort of giving birth, but happy as well. She was cradling something in her arms. It was swaddled in one of the blankets the woman had sewn, so the man couldn’t see it. But the woman was rocking the little bundle and cooing to it softly. There seemed to be nothing here different from any other birth. So why had the midwife left so suddenly and without explanation.

His wife looked up and saw him. Her smile didn’t quite fade, but she didn’t look as completely happy as she had a moment ago. There was a question in her eyes, something she seemed almost hesitant to ask. The man took a step forward and she started to say something. But just then, the man saw exactly what his wife was holding and everything made sense.

What he saw was not the soft skin and round face of a newborn baby. Looking back at him from within the folds of the blanket was a small pointed face with dark, glistening eyes. Where there should have been rosy skin, bristly little spines surrounded the little face. The man could see a little clawed hand grasping the edge of the blanket. This was no human child. This was a little hedgehog baby.

The man fell back against the wall, only able to stay standing by leaning hard against it. So that was why the midwife had behaved so strangely, rushing to leave what should have been a joyous occasion. His wife had somehow given birth to a half-human, half-hedgehog monster. How could it have happened? Had they somehow offended the fairy who had given his wife their wish? Had there been some mistake? Had the creature his wife helped actually been malicious rather than kind?

“It’s a boy,” his wife said.

The woodcutter looked up at her and the realization slowly sank in. His wife hadn’t been upset when he came in. She had been over the thing as if it was a perfectly ordinary infant. She didn’t care. As far as she was concerned – hedgehog or not – this was their baby.

The man sighed. He walked over to the bed and knelt down next to his wife. He stared down at the blankets, twisting the edges between his fingers. He had to tell her that they couldn’t keep it. There was no guarantee that it would be anything like a normal child. And even if it was, none of them would ever have a normal life again. People would talk and gossip and speculate about what the two of them had done to have such a baby. It could never work.

The man felt something touch his hand. He looked up. The hedgehog had reached out with its tiny clawed fingers and touched him. The man watched as the strange little hand moved along his own larger one and came to rest on his little finger, grasping it with a baby’s feather-light grip. The woodcutter looked up at his wife, her eyes wide with both hope and worry, then back down at the little hedgehog’s inquisitive face. He sighed very softly.

“Hello, Hans,” he said.

His wife beamed at him. She set the baby down gently, then threw her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him. He held her close to him and kissed the top of her head. Hans let out an irritated gurgle, apparently annoyed at no longer being the center of attention. His mother laughed and scooped him up in her arms, rocking him gently back and forth. Her husband sat down on the bed beside her and the two of them remained their for the rest of the night, admiring their newborn son.