You've Got Another Thing Coming

I stood by the side of the river, staring into the clear water. Rose had found a stick that she found preferable and she was now poking around in the soft earth somewhere behind me, murmuring softly every now and then but it was too low for me to hear.
Suddenly, her voice rang out with a demand I could not recall ever being commanded to do in my entire life:

“Cal”, she called out. “Catch a fish!”

I gaped at her. “Excuse me?”

She stopped forcing the sharp end of her stick into the ground and looked up at me.
“Catch a fish”, she repeated, with the tone of her voice indicating that I was being quite slow.

My mind boggled.
“How?” I wondered. “Why, are you hungry?”

Rose sighed and threw the stick aside, mumbling something under her breath that sounded uncannily like ‘freaking troll-brain’. For her sake, I decided I’d been wrong. On the other hand, her annoyed look told me my hearing was exquisite as always.

She walked up to me and scanned me up and down. Then, without warning, she pushed me head-first into the freezing water.

My hands reached out to take the fall, but the bottom of the river steeped down and I sank like a stone. I didn’t have time to react. Just when I let all my air out in sudden surprise and all the bubbles rose before my eyes, I felt something grab a good hold of my head and pull me up.

I gasped like a fish on land as soon as my head surfaced. Oxygen filled my lungs and made my head swirl so badly I almost missed Rose’s frustrated ranting:
“A fish! All I ask of you to do is catch a fish, and what do you do? You drown, that’s what you do! Really, how hard can it be to scoop your hand down and grab a small herring or something?”

She dragged my body up on shore, and as I lay there panting she returned to the water and waited for a second or two before snatching something and tossing it up next to me.
As she waded back to shore she continued to grumble under her breath, ever so often shooting me nasty glances and pulling her ears.

I had got enough air in my lungs to manage to stutter out: “Why are you pulling your ears?”
She shot me another look and then tilted her head to the side, pulling her ears so furiously I was afraid they were going to come off.

“Fairies don’t do well in water”, she hissed and stopped tugging her ears. “It soaks up through our skin and messes with our bodies.”

I looked at her; the dress clinging to her wet thighs and chest and her blonde hair was a deep, damp gold where the sunrays caught some strands. She looked magnificent, and I was suddenly very glad there weren’t any boys around. They’d go insane just looking at her.

“How?” I asked, referring to her explanation.
I rolled over to the side, spitting out some water and saliva in the process. My large hand clung to a small tuft of grass that grew amidst the sand and the reddish brown hairs lay slicked against the skin. I shuddered.

Rose’s hands started wringing out her own thick hair, twisting it, making speckles of water rain towards her feet.
“Well”, she seemed deep in thought, “it’s like with plants.”

“Like what?” I choked on some left over water that had been hiding in a small pocket in my cheek.

It turned out that fairies were like flowers in the sense that they needed water to survive, like any living creature. They soaked up water through their roots, in the fairy’s case it would be her arms, legs and extended limbs, and stored it inside the body. If they had too much water, though, like any pot plant, the fairy would flood and the water would spill out.
Meanwhile, though, if the fairy contained too much water, but not enough to flood, then the copious fluid would mess with the senses, such as seeing and hearing. Right now, Rose was clearly suffering from water-in-the-ear syndrome.

During her explanation, which I listened to with only one ear, I had managed to stand up on my legs. They felt like they were about to cave in any second, but for the moment I was upright.

That is, until Rose walked up to be and grabbed the thing lying in the sand next to me: the fish which she had caught moments before.

She took a good hold of it, looking it sternly in the eye and squeezed harshly at its jaws.
“Get in”, she ordered and jerked her head towards the fish’s.

It was my turn to look at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Get in the fish?” I snorted in amazement. “You sure the water’s not messing with your brain as well?”

Rose gave me a look that I couldn’t quite describe as anything nice. One of her hands, the one not squeezing the fish jaw, shot out and grabbed another steady hold of my head and shoved it against the fish with remarkable strength.

I stared wide-eyed as the round gape came closer and closer, but the thing that made me believe that this very clearly was a dream, was the fact that a warm light streamed out of the fish’s mouth. Not only that, but the sound of brisk harp-play and violins striking up into a hearty waltz soared out and reached my ears.
Rose gave my head one last push, and soon enough I was falling helpless towards the warm light, the music growing stronger by the second. I could hear the fish’s heartbeat, but it transformed almost unnoticeable into a steady drum beat.

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Soon enough, perhaps sooner than I wanted, I landed on my knees in a grandly lit hallway. I felt something coming through the air, and as I looked up I could see Rose floating down from the high ceiling to land gracefully at my side.
She gazed to her sides, sighing in awe as she began to walk forward along a deep blue carpet that stretched on forever at both ends.

I could not help but agree at her amazed sounds; this was the most beautiful hallway I had ever seen. The walls were made out of solid rock, built as the medieval European castles, only with more taste, and they were covered with wonderful paintings portraying fairy tale landscapes and magical creatures from every single folk lore known to man.

The soft light shone from high up above, the ceiling so far off I had to squint to even make out the arches that held it up.

“Whoa”, I stated. “Rose, where are we?”

She turned from a picture of a young, gorgeous man with bronze hair, topaz eyes and marble skin that glistened in the sunlight, to face me.
“In the King’s castle, of course.”

“Oh”, I said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I waited for a couple of seconds. “And what are we doing in the king’s castle?”

Rose shot one last admiring glace at the painting - he looked like he had a strong set of teeth – and skipped over to where I was and helped my to my feet.

“We’re here to get you sorted out”, she answered me as she tucked her arm under mine. “If you haven’t forgotten it; you’re a boy.”

I looked down at myself, frowning at the strategic tear in my most beloved black-and-white dress. There was little doubt that I was currently male, yes.
She began leading me along, momentarily stopping and explaining something about some of the paintings, statues or rooms that we passed.

“That’s the first ever painting of the Neckan”, she told me as we passed an old colouring in green and blue, dark colours. It sported a naked man with seaweed as hair, webbing between fingers and toes and a sour look on his face that spoke out to me.

“He looks constipated”, I stated. It made Rose stifle a laugh, or a snort, and she pulled me further.

“The King and Queen used to entertain in here”, she said and pushed open a large set of doors that led into a dark room of which I saw nothing. “And in that room 15,000 courtiers were at constant service day and night”, she pointed into a distant nothingness, “and in this room Tutankhamen played banjo and nineteen elephants danced tango in tutu’s when Eros Ramazzotti got drunk and tried to have sex with a park bench.”

My eyes almost popped out of my skull and I could barely stutter out comprehensible sounds. Rose’s cheeks turned a bright red and she refused to meet my staggering gaze.

“It’s not my fault that weird shit goes on around here”, she mumbled and tugged at my arm.

She closed the doors behind us and pulled me farther down the hallway, and we soon reached a grand arch. There hung enormous silk curtains that were the same colour as the carpet and it effectively sealed off both sounds and curious gazes.
Rose halted and took a deep breath, steadying herself and straightening out her clothing.

“This dress really is hideous”, she sighed and turned to me, ordering: “Make yourself presentable.”

I glared at her. “I’m a boy in a torn dress that’s five sizes too small and conceals nothing that needs to be so. I have no shoes, no make-up, my hair’s a mess and I’m covered in mud. I’m not a presentable person!”

Rose tilted her head and with a nod she gave me right. “We’re going to do this”, she told me, but it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.

Again, she tucked her arm under my own and lifted her chin up high. I straightened my back and made my best at looking dignified. I suspect I failed miserably.
Rose tugged at a rope that appeared from out of nowhere, or it had just been hidden somewhere strategically, and the curtains fell apart and revealed a room that was so completely mind-blowing that I lost my breath. It was too magnificent to even comprehend, and before I had a time to collect myself, a voice called out, announcing:

“Rose Rubiginosa, fairy, and Callie Johnson, human.”

For a few heartbeats the hall was completely silent. Then, a deep voice called out:

“Enter.”