Storytellersunplugged

Because autumn stories don’t necessarily have to be about Halloween.

Enjoy the season…

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For The Autumn Queen, Where She Rests Among The Fallen

To Tommy, it was a leaf.

Oh, it was a beautiful leaf, to be certain, five-tined, like a maple, and blood-red at the edges with lines like yellow and orange flames in the center. And when he saw it on the sidewalk on his way home from school, resting among the dead and withered brown husks, he knew he had to take it home. He’d press it in wax paper, he thought. He’d preserve it.

He’d save it.

Behind him, the dead dry leaves rattled and rustled and made sounds like bony hands shaking a pair of dice as they skittered across the sidewalk. There was no breeze to move them, not on that sunny fall day, but that was not Tommy’s concern, not when in his hands he held the most beautiful leaf in the world.

Tommy, you must understand, was six at the time. What he knew of magic was what all six year olds know, if they are allowed to. He knew that there was magic in the world, though he couldn’t tell you where it was. He knew that strange and wonderful and special things could happen, and that Dracula and Bigfoot went out for cheeseburgers together when the moon was right, and that there really were dragons off the edge of the map and monsters under the bed.

What he did not know, what he could not know, was that in his hand he held the Autumn Queen, born best beloved every spring and adored through the dying time in the fall, most royal and exalted of the leaf-spirits whose existence is a secret even to six year old boys who know something about the way the world really works.

And so even as he hurried home, the better to preserve his find before any of her glory faded, word spread from leaf to leaf and branch to branch, limb to limb and tree to tree. Winds picked up leaves in ranks and blew them down the street after one small boy. Thousands upon thousands of leaves let go their last, painful grip on the branches that had given them life, and let themselves be carried away after the kidnapper, the defiler, the one who even now held the Autumn Queen between two fat and indelicate fingers.

He reached home ahead of the swirling winds, slamming the door behind him the face of a cloud of pursuers. They slammed themselves against the door and walls of his house, dashing themselves against it again and again until they battered themselves to pieces, and a thin smoke born of their passing filled the air. And even as one fell, another arrived on the breeze, or skittered along the sidewalk when it thought no one was looking, or dropped out of the clear blue sky to continue the assault.

Tommy, for his part, did not notice this, or if he did he ignored it, for he had better things to do. There was a leaf to preserve, after all, Fall’s finest colors to save so that they might be cherished all through the winter. Carefully he made his preparations, studious and careful in the way of small boys intent on a task that they know in their bones to be the most important thing in the world.

At least, it’s the most important thing in the world, until another thing comes along, such as your mother telling you to play outside. It was, she told him, a beautiful day, and he ought not to be inside.

“Just a minute,” he told her. “I just have one more thing to take care of.”

#

They found Tommy in the back yard, his mouth stuffed impossibly full of leaves and his face blue. On his hands and arms and round little-boy face were a thousand tiny cuts, the sort that might have been paper cuts, or scrapes from falling down on too-rough concrete, or a thousand other things, but weren’t. His mother cried and his father stood stoically while the ambulance took him away, at least until the nice policeman suggested that they go inside and get out of the wind that was whipping the unraked leaves in their backyard every which way. And so they went inside, and poured out their grief, and told the policeman what they knew, which, in the grand scheme of things, was nothing at all.

Outside, the leaves still beat at the windows and at the doors, at the walls and at the roof, for while they had achieved vengeance, that was all that they had done, and it was not enough.

And inside, the Autumn Queen sobbed unheard where she lay, alone and imprisoned, in the silence and desolation between pages 234 and 235.