Once upon a time there was a girl born with a fairy’s heart and soul beneath her skin. She was kind and loving and always used kind words to help whenever she could. Yet, the pure soul inside her was covered by thick hair and bubbling moles all over her body. She was trapped inside the body of a horrifying creature. Her teeth were so large and sharp that she never smile and her laugh was so thunderous and booming that she refused to laugh. Encasing her pure soul was a solid flesh that left her heavy and tied down not to mention bulbous to the eye.
She never understood why she wasn’t like all the other children in her village, why her parents never let her leave the confines of her near broken home and why her sister wouldn’t speak to her.
On a cold day in the middle of the night, she stole away to the village to look at the world under the night’s shadow.
“The world is so beautiful…” she wondered as she walked across the gravel road beneath her black boots. She longed to fit in and be a part of the world everyone shut her out of.
It wasn’t until the sun rose just enough that she could see her reflection in the water of the brick well in the center of the village.
“Hellish fiend!”
“Such a vile creature!”
“A demon!”
“Kill it! Kill it!” yelled the townspeople as they caught eye of the girl while she tried to plea for forgiveness for entering their unchanged village she clearly didn’t belong in.
“Please,” she cried, “I will hurt no one!”
But they continued to yell their words towards her heart that was so big and so fragile it nearly burst.
“How cruel can you all be? I’m just like you! I’m a person, too!” she shouted until a familiar voice rang louder and high above the townspeople’s cries.
“Let’s be rid of this monster!” the voice yelped.
The girl’s eyes widened with shock and then flooded with hot salty tears.
“Mother…?” she mumbled as her mother’s recognizable blonde hair bobbed towards her from the crowd of shouting villagers.
“She isn’t one of us!” her mother said as she tore off the sleeve of her daughter’s milky white dress. After a bark of applause and yips of joy, the girl’s sister stepped forth and a sigh of relief escaped the girl’s lips.
“Ahh… sister…”
But her sister only smiled a wicked smile and tore off the other of the sleeves.
“Different.” She stated as a plague of agreements swarmed the air.
“Father!” the girl cried out begging for someone, anyone to bring an end to this madness.
As if her prayer had been answered, her father stepped forward to the head of the crowd standing proudly in front of her. For a long moment he stood still as stone and overlooked the silent stricken mass of bodies before him. In one quick pivot, he twisted to face his daughter with a hurt and lost expression in his eyes; his look near distant and unattached.
All it took was one swift movement to rip off the remainder of her clothes that had been the only thing keeping the girl as human as possible, despite her shocking looks.
“A… a monster.” Her father whispered faintly as he left her to face the village as bare as a baby; her every flaw visible to the wide eyes that surrounded her and looked over every detail that she had grown to accept.
The girl had become numb. Her body, flawed and broken stood still as the townspeople swarmed her with pitchforks, rocks, knives and axes. She felt nothing but air hit her skin as they beat her until the hair on her body was sticky and thick with her crimson blood.
Instead, it was her father who took in her pain. As he watched the townspeople beat his kin until her last breath escaped her lips, he absorbed each fatal blow they threw. His eyes poured thick tears that his daughter no longer could shed and he fell to his knees, but the world never noticed.
For the world, though beautiful and flawed, doesn’t stop turning for all those who are the same- no –the world only notices those who are different and thus, takes its action.
The world left the girl’s father to cry over his unrecognizable daughter he had let down. The world left him to live his life until he died of old age and a broken heart.
But the world absorbed his daughter’s body as it rotted in the center of the village and for the first time in all her thirteen years, the girl felt like she finally belonged somewhere.
The End.
