Obsolescence

Monkey got a writing prompt to start a story with “Life continues to amaze me with every breath I take.” and use the word obsolescence three times. That doesn’t sound like an invitation to blink tears away while finishing your coffee, but it is, unless you are made of stronger stuff than me.

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Obsolescence

Life continues to amaze me with every breath I take. The thought runs through her mind as she whorls round in her dance. Though breath burns like fire, though she wheezes like a bellow a hundred years old, still she smiles joyfully. Though each step is pain, an ancient grace runs through her.

Why should she not be amazed? She traded all she could have been for this. This dance, this night, this moment. Twenty years dreaming, watching swallows learn to fly. I should like to learn to fly. The hour strikes five, and the dance ends. She feels each passing moment like a clock within her heart. This party has run its course for her.

She steps out upon the cobblestones, starts towards the square where she will die. The light has not yet begun to break upon this city, but still the bright lights of its joy illuminate her way. She sits upon the root of the youthful tree that stands in the square.

A night of wonder, she has had. One night, he said. One night, young one, and you’ll lose all those future years. Still, she thought it a fair trade. What use is dying if you have not lived? She spoke with many, through those hours. Spoke with them of stories, and far off places. Fairy tales? One scoffed. We don’t need them any longer. What use have children for fairy tales when they can have steam engines? They’re obsolete. How the words had burned. But that was just one man. Others had not been so cruel. Had told her of a place far off, where water rose in a great plain to meet the horizon. Places where trees like this stood thick and deep, and drowned noise in their embrace. An old man had told her tales she had never heard, of princesses and sunbeams. And she had made reality of all her oft-thought dreams.

A light begins to break upon the square now, and she knows dawn draws near. She thinks now of earlier days, when she listened to the old priest tell his stories in the churchyard, when she begged tales of wonder from the birds that perched upon the tree, the earliest of days, when her head had not risen above the bushes around her, and she had hidden herself deep, and dreamed.

Perhaps the fairy tales truly were obsolete. All man’s creations of old had been outpaced. Who had use for a cart when a train raced across the land? Who needed a letter when lightning stole across a line halfway across the world, carrying news in hours that once took weeks? Who wanted a storyteller, who forgot and stumbled on his words, when one can record the words of a thousand stories, and hear them time and again? Who needs a tree, when one has houses, flowers gardens, city streets?

He had promised her no one would impede her. She might have all her dreams tonight, for she would have no more tomorrows. His promise had been true, no one had questioned her. She had walked among the glittering folk of the city, so much brighter than any fairy of old, and been thought one of them. How will I die? She wonders, Perhaps I will turn to sea’s foam, as my sisters sometimes do, or to dust, like so many old things. Perhaps I will die as a human does, leave a body to be buried. Perhaps I will just fade away, like moonlight.

The clock within her strikes six, and light sweeps across the streets. Ah, none of those. She thinks, as flames begin to lick at her feet, and at the roots of the tree upon which she sits. She feels no pain, only the warmth. This, she knows, would have been her death regardless. Perhaps it would have been a hundred years, but still she would have perished in the flames. The fire surrounds her, tinting all around her with its light. The fire and the dawn are sisters of a sort. The fire licks at her hair, wisps at the leaves of the tree, and she leans back and closes her eyes.

A whorl of golden light leaps up, and in that moment all is gone. The ash upon the streets does not tell whence it came, from girl or tree. In that moment, they were one again, oak and dryad. The early risers tisk at the soot upon their houses. Where once a tree stood, pavement goes. And the dryad, who for an evening burned so brightly, is forgotten. Obsolete, like all her fairy tales.

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Dryad