When the Fairy King Lost his Tongue

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.