When the Fairy King Lost his Tongue-Beth Avery
ebook-yes
In the fairy king’s final days, he stopped speaking
human. None of the fairies noticed. Why would they? I was the only one shut out by
my single human language. I sat and
held his hand when he gestured for me, and I smiled encouragingly as he
struggled to give his last sweet messages to me. I tried to be a good daughter-in-law, but the
sorrow I felt at not hearing what he was saying was twofold. It had never occurred to me before that fairies
could lose a whole language. I watched
my almost-husband gently rest his fingers on his father’s failing pulse, and worried
that someday he might also forget his human words.
It was so long ago that the fairy king had heard our
petition to stay together and yet not marry.
He had not warned us that there would be a price. Instead, he had praised us for forging a new
path. If we married, one of us would
have to give up who we were. There were
no part human/part fairy marriages. The
magic didn’t work that way. Every fairy
and human couple had to choose whether one partner became wholly human or one
partner became wholly fairy.
My almost-husband had been the child of a no longer human
mother who often went blank with her longing for lost places, lost people, lost
selves. It had wounded him when she
could not see or hear him because she was wandering a home she could no longer
touch. Eventually his fairy father gave
up on her, unable to love the distant fairy wife who had replaced his vivacious
human lover. “We are in love with who we
are now,” my almost-husband explained when he said he would not marry me, and I
agreed that I did not want to risk becoming blank or watching him become
blank.
There is always a part of us that is separate from the
other, and we appreciate that. We know
that humans and fairies do not usually stay together like this, but we navigate
each other’s worlds with great grace and fluidity. All the fairies are kind to me. All the humans love my almost-husband. There are no problems.
Except I don’t speak fairy.
I don’t speak blue heron or spring peeper or red squirrel. I only speak one human language. Although I speak very well in that human
language, I sometimes get tired of politely waiting for my almost-husband to
remember that I can’t understand the robin’s wonderful news or the brownie’s
hilarious joke or the troll’s grumbled warning.
He always smiles and apologizes and carefully reconstructs the
conversation for my pitiful one language brain.
It’s not reasonable to blame him for the parts of his world that I have
chosen not to share. Just as he
patiently waits while I do some completely incomprehensible human activity like
shop for garden plants or program the microwave for dinner, I must patiently
wait when fairy life dominates his attention.
That is the agreement we made.
Still, I cannot help but ask my almost-husband if he’ll age
and lose his human tongue. He smiles
reassuringly. “No, no. I don’t even think in fairy any more. I only think in human since we’ve been
together.” I nod, but it isn’t
true. I know at night he dreams in
fairy, because his whispers are never in human.
