A Chocolate Box Town

By the time the sun had set on a new day, the Bed Fairy had taken up residence in Whistlegap, a chocolate box town crouched on the edge of a cliff.  She had scoped the town and after a brief false start, she was back at the drawing board.  Now she sat on a garden swing and stared at the sea as it raged and beat the rock face below.

It was winter time and the wind bit through her dressing gown, into her skin .  The swing was nestled into a nook on the porch, but even out of the path of each gust, it reached out with sharp teeth to snap at her.  Only her lap remained warm, as Winslow, like a rug across her knee, sat purring.

The first ‘mark’ selected was father to six children.  

Six!  She thought.  Obviously there wasn’t a great deal of entertainment in Whistlegap.  Anyone that would continue to breed so relentlessly was an obvious fool.  The father seemed rather plain and dull, if not a little down trodden.  His wife had run off with a circus clown the year before.

Fairy’s first thought was that she would run off with anyone to be rid of six children; she had to admit, albeit begrudgingly, that selecting the lesser of those two evils would be a hard task.   She was coulrophobic, there wasn’t anything on the planet that would make her run off with a clown.  Ugly, scary things they were; with their faces hidden.

She knew that her fear was abnormal and she suspected; irrational.  Many people liked clowns; laughed with abandon at their antics.  But she had once been tortured by one and no doubt, this was the root cause of her dislike. 

She had attended a circus with the children of family she was ‘teaching’ when she was young.  The clown, a brutish, pock faced man that no amount of makeup could hide, had yelled “let’s find the ugliest person at the circus…”  He then looked about the tent, his spiteful eyes locked as he crossed the ring and proceeded to hand her a flower.  

His piggy eyes had glowed with cruelty and his mouth, smeared in red, was no more than two slivers of liver.  The tent of people had laughed and laughed.

The push of her foot escalated with her anger until the swing knocked against the weatherboards of the house.  Winslow hissed.  She hated clowns.

By day three, ‘kid two’ had developed an allergic reaction to Winslow.  The Bed Fairy would have gladly roasted ‘kid two’ alive before she would send Winslow away.

To be continued…