Strawberry Moon

On sunny days like today, lying together on a red plaid blanket in a meadow pocketed with daisies and clover, they found it very easy to believe in fairies. But of course, that was a little girls’ dream—something pink and sweet and smelling of strawberry blood.

As they grew older, the grasses released their June smell, the hum of insects cradled the silence of the clouds rolling on by, and everyone around them stopped believing. It didn’t mean the fairies didn’t exist, but then, humans never did like anything that was different from them.

Hope became hopeless—existence an agenda—and they could no longer love innocently regardless of who or what the others were. The humans breathed peacefully in that, in those ignorant flowery pretenses, abandoning the ideas that were once vital to their virtues and convictions.

But the fairies and the rest of them—the ones who still believed—knew the truth. This reality, this gorgeous romantic life, was only the stuff of mown grass and bubbly dreams.

They curled on the red blanket next to their expensive wine and cheese as the sun dropped below the painterly sky, flooding the daisies in gold and rose rays and the glint of a sharp knife.

The beauty wouldn’t last. Night would always fall, and the little girls’ dream would always rot, and on the night of June’s strawberry moon, the taste of blood would be replaced with the fairies’ deaths.