by Charlotte Anderson

Created on: August 16, 2007

Excerpt of "Faerychilde, with an E!"

"What'cha doin' kiddo?" The rumbling bass of my father's voice hung in the air and broke my reverie, dragging me down to the real world in one sharp tug. Closing the book, I looked at him as he stood in the doorway to my bedroom. A wide, muscular, imposing figure of a man, my father stood a bit over six foot tall. Barrel-chested and frog-legged, the intimidating cut of his body was superimposed almost comically by a black pocket t-shirt and boxers. Yes, my dad was one of those,' the kind of man who wandered the house in his underwear and would run down the hall to get pants on when folks knocked on the door.

For all that he'd scared me growing up, my father managed to balance that fear with an easy attitude, and a patience I wouldn't recognize as such until much later. At the bristling age of twelve, I thought he was treating me like a child, or worse, like I was stupid. Then there would come the times when I ignored him, daydreaming or pretending to listen. It was usually as a result of my daydreaming that when he'd bring up whatever it was I missed, he'd wind up frustrated with me because I didn't remember what he'd said. He always explained it again; any topic he had spoken to me about would be repeated hundreds of times before I came to realize in my later years that he knew a thing or fifty. The way he looked at me there in the doorway, though, told me that he wasn't about to ramble on and on, he was experiencing a rare moment of curiosity over his daughter. I thought it was a rare thing at the time, of course I learned as an adult that I was wrong.

One hand smoothed out my straight, dishwater blonde hair. Shoving my thumb in the crevice of the book to mark my page, I let it shut over that delicate digit before lifting the book for him to see. He looked across the room at the book's cover, then back at me with a little glimmer in his deep blue-green eyes. "Reading about the fae again, eh?" Inquisitive and yet leaving the question wide open, my father posed it gently, as if asking me about my reading was going to frustrate me. It did, slightly. There were many times when my subjects of choice were not what he regarded as adult' or mature.' I'd taken great pains to choose books that he wouldn't make fun of me over, especially during a time when my little brother Mark was quite thoroughly obsessed with the latest pre-teen 50 page "kid horror" books.

"Dad, do you think we have spirits and stuff in our yards?" I asked it in all seriousness, and something about my tone must have suggested as much, since his reply came without any acidic wit or any of the usual scientific reasoning which he applied to a great deal of life. "Well between you and your mother, and the way you and your brother let the grass get overrun before you finally mow it, anything is possible in our yard." I groaned, trust my dad to let me know he wanted the grass cut without actually giving a direct order to mow the yard. The phone rang, and it gave me the reprieve from him I wanted, my pants less father moving down the hall to go pick it up. Saved by the ringer, I shuffled through my desk for a scrap of paper to serve as a bookmark, and then shoved the book in my backpack.

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