![]() | ![]() Storyteller
Her eyes were emerald green, set big in an elfin face, topped by a mop of brown hair.
"Stories", she said. She wanted to hear stories.
He obliged, imagining himself a teller of tales as of old; a bard spinning words around the crackling of a fire in a hall on a cold snowy night.
They walked through Indian summer. He told her a ghost tale, then an old sea fantasy.
She listened.
Emboldened, he wove bigger fantasies. The Moonwreck of the Nancy D, The Computer that Loved a Lady, The Romance of theSun and Moon.
Stories.
One time, lacking inspiration, he asked her for one. She demurred, claiming no imagination, claiming rule number forty three (whatever that was), claiming the pressure of time.
Elves never tell stories. Stories always reveal something of the storyteller, if only a little. Only a little is still too much for a being made of magic to leave in this world.
In the tales humans tell, elves do tell stories, but next time listen closely. What you may think is a story will turn out sure to be the wind or the rippling of a brook.
He told more stories. Little stories. The Owl and the Opossum, The Happy Tree, The Little Butterfly. Stories reveal something of the teller; all his stories had happy endings.
It was as if summer itself hung on his words. They walked past houses, through grassy fields and into the trees. Deeper into a forest they wandered; aimlessly it seemed to him, led by his hand carelessly outflung in the course of tale telling.
Only when he had finished the tale of The Never Changing Stream, did he look around himself in wonder, "I've never seen this park before."
"It's not a park," she said as she led him to a clearing, "Come; now I will tell you a story."
He lay his head in her lap and she began (but maybe it was just the wind) a story longer, more fantastic and lovelier than any he had ever heard or told.
They are there still: in a clearing, in the forest, in eternal, magical, summer.
21 Apr 1992
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