A Short Story about Stories
Once upon a time, a moderately long time ago, a young woman who was doggedly trying to rid herself of the nickname Carrots fell painfully, desperately in love.
The object of Carrots’s passion was a young man named Gareth who lived at the other end of the lane.
He was a nice-looking boy, with big, sure hands that he used to milk his family’s cows in the morning (he did this well but resentfully) and to strum his great-grandfather’s lute in the evenings (he did this terribly but enthusiastically).
He was a popular boy—not like Carrots—and so the first time he called out to her as she walked past his cottage, she looked behind her for the girl he was looking for.
He wasn’t looking for another girl, though, and she loved him for that like a sheepdog loves the shepherd.
Gareth would often walk down the lane to the cottage that Carrots lived in with her parents, lean against the garden fence, and talk to her about how he was going to leave home as soon as he turned sixteen and head straight to the city to seek his fortune.
He and Carrots were both hazy about the details of how, exactly, a fortune was sought, let alone what one was supposed to do with it after it had been found, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that he wanted to leave, wanted to go to faraway places and talk to fascinating people, possibly while drinking red wine and wearing a shirt with the buttons undone just past the point of masculine modesty.
Listening to him talk made Carrots feel as if the world stood in front of her with its gates flung wide open.
So she’d lean on one side of the garden fence, and he’d lean on the other, and once in a while they would kiss.
Carrots was a girl who read books. This was, most of the time, a wonderful thing.
They broadened her perspective. They gave her things to think about other than herself.
She loved stories, and she had faith in them in the way other people had faith in their own domestic gods.
To a girl who believed in what she’d learned from stories, it felt lovely and gratifying but not particularly shocking that a handsome, popular young man could one day look at the girl who lived down the lane and suddenly, truly see her for the first time.
This was what she thought had happened between her and Gareth, so she didn’t hesitate for a moment to smile and wave and call out his name when he and three of his friends walked past her cottage one sunny afternoon.
He didn’t smile back. He didn’t wave. He looked at her with no expression at all, then looked away and said something to his friends. They all laughed. They didn’t even stop walking.
Two things changed in Carrots that day.
The first change was that, somewhere deep in her appendix (the appendix being, in the folk tradition of Evermore, the organ said to excrete magic), a metaphorical gear ground into action.
The second was that, from then on, she had a certain amount of contempt for people who believed in silly romantic stories.