A Morbid Little Fairy Tale

Today you are made of bones, sound of muted clicks, smell of chalky death and taste of mystique. I follow in your wake, as always - placing one foot in front of the other, making sure that my feet fit into the hollow traces of your presence. You do not notice me today, as you deign to sometimes. We walk, my fleshy feet shh-ing softly on the dirt, until you decide to stop. Tonight we will sleep as you bleed and blur into your next shape.

Yesterday, you were a river, cavalcade of water, keeping a constant velocity and thundering an angry cacophany down our path. My feet did not have to be careful yesterday, and all of my traveling callouses were for naught as I floundered in the sticky, squishy mud. By the time I caught up to you, midnight was streaking into dawn and you had already washed yourself up as a skeleton on the salt flats.

When I wake, you are an apple, unable to move, and for half the day I sit, staring as you sun yourself and thankful for the rest. Today, if I wanted, I could keep you forever. I could eat you right now, teeth cutting into your delicious crisp crunch, swallowing even the core and the seeds and the stem. And there you would stay, cradled in the womb of my stomach. Or I could crush you into apple sauce, discard your red skin and your heart-flesh, spice you with cinnamon, and gulp you down. I could roast you into apple pies, I could stew you into apple jelly, I could spice you and bake you into baked apple slices. I stare at you, thinking of this, and eventually I stand and tuck you in my pocket, walking on.

At sunset, when I stop, you are a tiny boy, one inch high, and as I set you on the ground you grow taller, taller, til you top me by half a foot. You are sun-blond and ever so grateful, happy for rescue, and you take me in your arms and kiss me like you want to suck every breath I have ever taken from my lungs. It makes me melt, and we lie on the soft plains grass, fluttering as the wind makes it snicker, and make love. It is to be one of those nights, then.

Yet when the tip of the sun's golden disc touches the horizon, you do not change. You are still only a boy, young and beautiful as when I first met you, though I show the difference of ten years' hard living. And when you wake you tell me you are a prince, and you love me, and so things have changed after all.