It Wasn't Meant To Turn Out Like This

It had proved to be a more difficult task than Mayza first assumed to leave her second home behind. When she first came to Earth, the planet had been freakishly foreign and odd. She had been unable to make sense of anything; nothing was the same as it had been back in her homeland. She soon learned that Earth was knitted with equal strands of benevolence and cruelty. Fortunately, she had been placed somewhere where benevolence was simply in more abundance.

The Haner family had treated Mayza well. She acknowledged this and would be eternally grateful to them for treating her as an equal in their home. And now, she was once again leaving familiarity and kindness behind, and in its stead she would find herself in a place once again completely strange and unfamiliar. But she felt assured that there would be other fairies there to greet and help her, and she would not be alone. She would be among her own people, people who would understand her in ways humans never could.

It would be a good thing, moving to this fairy settlement, but she found it very difficult to say goodbye nonetheless. She would miss the Haner family and her friends. But she knew moving to the fairy settlement would be the best thing for her. She needed that reminder of her real home. She needed to be around fellow fairies.

Mayza’s gaze, upon entering the terminal from the airplane, instantly fell upon the male fairy hovering above the rest of the airport crowd. His leathery, almost bat-like wings beat gently in the air to keep him afloat. As she neared him, carrying only a small carry-on bag with some personal items inside, the fairy landed gently on the floor in front of her. Male fairies, on average, towered at least a foot above their female counterparts. This man was no different. Mayza had to look nearly straight up to look him in the eyes. She’d grown used to this, however, being accustomed to being friends to fiendishly tall human men.

“The quickest route to the settlement is through the air,” the fairy explained as they waded through the crowd towards the exit. “My name is Haron. There are no paths leading to the settlement for privacy and security. It is nestled deep within the forest surrounding this city. I am glad you traveled light.”

“I did not have many things that I would have any use for in the settlement,” Mayza explained as they stepped from the airport. Haron led the way down the sidewalk a ways before turning and nodding to Mayza. The two of them lifted off into the air, ascending rapidly for a couple hundred feet before Haron set off towards the forest now visible on the outermost edges of the city.

“Your name is Mayza, correct?” Haron asked over the wind.

“Yes,” Mayza answered.

“Where have you come from?”

“A middle-sized town in California,” Mayza said. “I had many friends there. The family who owned me exhibited endless amounts of kindness and respect towards me.”

“You are fortunate,” Haron replied. “The family who owned me treated their dog better than they did me. You will find that most fairies in the settlement were treated the same way.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” Mayza said sincerely. “I am well aware that there are many human beings on this planet who are cruel and malevolent.”

“As long as you are not naïve enough to think that all human beings are saints as your owners were,” Haron yelled back. Both fairies fell silent and within a few minutes, Haron began descending towards an opening in the canopy of the forest.

They landed in the center of the settlement. Mayza was surprised to see how alike it looked to her own dimension. The huts grouped around the “town square” had been built the same way as they were in Mayza’s homeland. The fairies passing by them wore traditional fairy garb. Mayza felt that this would prove a very promising place for her to get back in touch with her homeland.

“Here is an empty dwelling,” Haron said, leading her down a small path branching off from the town square to a hut second from the last. He pushed open the simple door made of vines woven across a wooden frame and stepped inside the simple hut. Mayza followed, setting her bag on the floor and looking around.

“It looks remarkably like our own dimension,” Mayza commented in awe, looking around the hut. It was extremely simple, made of mud and clay packed over a simple wooden frame. A thatched roof tapered to a point above Mayza’s head, with a hole in the top for smoke from any fires Mayza might make for warmth to escape. The inside of the hut consisted of two rooms. The two of them stood in a main room that made up the bedroom and living room, and a smaller room blocked off by another simple vine door was the bathroom. The entire community ate together in a mess hall-type hut for meals.

“Well, it is yours, and you may decorate it as you wish,” Haron said. “Supper will be served when the sun is three quarters of the way down the sky.”

“Thank you,” Mayza answered, nodding her head to acknowledge the fairy’s way of telling time: they focused on the position of the sun in the sky, telling the general time from that.

Once Haron left, Mayza sat down on the bed stuffed with what felt like straw and opened the zipper on her bag. With a sigh, she pulled out one of the picture frames sitting inside. It was a picture from her time on Warped Tour with the band; they all stood in front of the van, arms around each other and looking as though they were having a great time. She leaned over and set the picture frame on the ground beside her bed.

Oh, how Mayza would miss her friends.