Fairies and Dragons

- Story by Emily Christian, Grade 8

The wind howled outside of the house like a wounded animal, longing for comfort. Oak branches were tossed to and fro. Tomorrow morning, the snow would be two feet deep, blanketing the broken tree limbs.

Inside the warm house, I burrowed further under my warm covers. A wide smile crept across my face because I knew that tomorrow the old kitchen radio would announce that school would be canceled. I would spend the day talking to friends on the phone, reading in front of the fire, and sipping chicken noodle soup. 

My sister's loud snoring interrupted my warm fantasies. Last year, things would have been different.  Kate, my sister, would not be able to sleep at all on a night like this. She would be telling me about her made-up magical world.  Laying right next to me, she'd enthusiastically be explaining that what we were hearing outside was not a late fall storm, but a battle between the fairy Queen and the evil goblins of the north. Her stories would have flown out of her like water out of a fountain. Last year, she would be jumping all over the room because her make-believe friend, "Dewy-Dragon", would have foretold this battle and that is why she had to put up the Fairy Fort.

Dewy Dragon no longer existed, and fairies, in her opinion, belonged only in Fairy Tales. Invisible people no longer hid in the shadows behind doors. And staying up late at night retelling her adventures to her older sister was no longer a priority.

It wasn't as if I missed the old Kate entirely. That Kate was not always a sweet little angel, innocent in all her intentions. I could never shake the feeling that the real reason for the loss of my best jacket was not because Dewy was cold, but rather that I had left some of my stuff in her side of the room for the one hundredth time.  Then there was the time when she drew a picture of the goblin and named it Sissy-loser.  Kate was a brat in every sense of the word. No amount of sweet imagination could change that.

Yet, deep down I missed the old Kate. Part of me wondered where that Kate had gone and who was this new one. And although that part of me was rather small, it was enough that I spent a lot of time thinking about what had happened. 

At this rate I would never get to sleep, so I wandered downstairs to the kitchen. I thought back to the first time I had noticed the change in Kate. It was this summer, Kate had just finished her first year in middle school, and I had just finished my first year in high school. I guessed that the change must have happened over the year, I was just to preoccupied to notice it, much less do anything about it. But what had driven the stories out, I wondered. Was it the pressure of being at a new school, in new classrooms, and believing that you had to impress new peers? That couldn't be all. I searched for an answer, and it stubbed me on the toe. Kate’s shoes were now bigger then mine, she was growing so quickly these days. Kate would have a hard time fitting into the corners that once served as her cramped hideouts.

I flicked on the kitchen lights. The sudden brightness startled me and I had the sensation of being blind. I sat down. The kitchen was cluttered. A black umbrella lay on the counter next to a pair of brown mittens and a car key. The far end of the table had been conquered by Kate's homework.  What is little sis doing these days, I mused as I went over to peep at her science notes. The margins of the handout were filled with doodles of magical creatures. Other things popped out as well, such as stories and paintings. That moment it came to me.  Kate's childhood wasn't lost, it was still here, in her doodles and the stories that she wrote for English class.  Dewy-Dragon wasn't dead; he was the little voice that told Kate right from wrong, and the fairy queen still ruled in the fictional lands in Kate's paintings and tales. The old Kate wasn't gone, she was just hiding beneath this new one.

Trying to stop growing up was as useless as trying to teach an elephant to fly, but that didn't mean you had to forget your childhood.  Smiling to myself I made hot chocolate as the wind howled outside the house.