A to Z Challenge: E is for Elflock

I wake with tangles in my hair. My grandmother would blame the fairies who sneak into young girls' rooms at night. My grandmother with the small, strong hands and the lilting accent of the old world. My grandmother who set a bowl of milk out every night for the elvish folk. I think they followed her to this land of skyscrapers and nine-to-fives. They wove themselves into her long silver braids and slipped over the waves to this land of opportunity and shallow roots.

Women like my grandmother bring her roots with her. She held the stories of generations in her breast and whispered them to me for bed time stories. Her father, my great grandfather, was the seventh son of a seventh son. Tall and brilliantly blonde, he slayed monstrous beasts and bested unjust kings. Her mother was a changeling, a fae child small and dark. She worked magic in the between spaces and the earth flowered at her touch. My ancestors. My mythology.

These little secrets were whispered to me as I fell asleep and in that between space - between awake and dreaming - the fairies took root. They grew through my limbs and mind and now my lips whisper their stories. My pen draws their faces and wings and tangled hair. And I see them, from the corner of my eye. From the edge of a shadow or in the glare of a bright light. I see them as I fall asleep and I hear their whispers before I wake to find their knots in my hair.

Each morning I brush my hair gently, undoing their night's work. My hair has started to silver now, like my grandmother's. And like my grandmother, I brush and brush, then plait my hair in a thick rope down my back. The hair has an ombre effect now, silver shimmering down into dark black, the color my youth. Dark and fae like my mother and her mother before her and her mother before her. On and on and back to an elvish woman who chose death and love over eternal life.

And forward onto my own granddaughter who sleeps and is visited by the fairy folk. At night, I sit beside her and whisper the roots into her ears. I see the stories grow as her eyes grow bigger and she falls asleep with the whispers of her ancestors and their magic. She wakes, her dark hair tangled around her face. And the roots live on. Across oceans and time. Despite routines and grocery stores and electricity bills. Magic lives in the blood and feeds on stories and I am a gentle gardener.

Writing Prompt: My Mother Broke Every Plate

From page 260 in "642 Things to Write About:"

Prompt: Start a story with the line "My mother broke every plate in the house that day."

My mother broke every plate in the house that day. Shards of blue and white porcelain sparkled across the kitchen tile like fragments of her life. She'd collected each piece meticulously. A saucer here, a plate, a teacup.

I held the only survivor behind my back. A sugar bowl. I wanted to place it gently in a basket and send it down a river to keep it safe from my mother's wrath. From her grief.

The violence of her act shocked even her. She stood quivering, surrounded by the shattered remnants of her collection. For the first time, the willow print made me feel like weeping. 

I sat silently for my own protection, and for that of the refugee that I clutched. The small bowl felt cold against my skin.

She'd been washing the dishes when the phone rang. I was supposed to be drying them.

The first plate dropped from her hands by accident. The second she let go, releasing her grip slowly. Intentionally. The third she threw.

Then the next. And the next. Harder and harder, building herself up like a tsunami. A ceramic wave crashed through her. The result of some far off earthquake. 

The last plate slipped through her fingers like sand. It landed atop its ruined family, a single chip in its oriental edge.

The wave collapsed, leaving my mother alone in the rubble.

Check out Claudia Bookwright's response to the same prompt here.