Name

I once followed a faerie into the woods. Her wings were bright leafs of gold. A smile teased the corners of her lips. She carried a feathered quill.

She’d found me crying by the river. She asked me why my eyes were so wet, and I told her: Papa was unkind to me again. She dried my tears with her delicate wings and said, I can make the tears stop.

So, I followed her. I followed her across the river and down an old deer path and under a crumbling bridge until we reached her home.

The trees themselves had grown and twisted to accomodate her. I asked her how she convinced them, but all she said was, there is power in a name.

She asked me for my name. I was scared at first. I didn’t want to become like the trees. But she soothed me and I wrote my name on a maple leaf with that quill she carried everywhere. All at once, the tears stopped. I thanked her and she led me back home.

Papa still got mad. If I forgot to do my chores or stay out too late, he would take a switch to my backside until I learned my lesson. I never cried, though. It bothered him. Stuck in his mind like a splinter.

One day I spilled syrup all over his good shoes. He started screeching and hollering about what shoes he’d wear to church and what the other men would say, and I just stared at him. I don’t know what my eyes looked like, but they must have been some kind of stormy because he never yelled at me like that again.

I came to marrying age, but none of the men in town seemed a good fit. They all looked just a bit too much like Papa in the wrong light. There was a girl, though, just down the road. Lily. We’d played in the brooks and dales when we were young, and when we got older we’d stay up long past dark and talk about the world’s turning.

On the day Papa died, Lily asked why I hadn’t cried. For that matter, why hadn’t I laughed or smiled or balled my fist since I was a child. I told her the truth, that I hadn’t cried even a drop since that faerie took my name. And she said, that’s fine, we’ll just get you a new one.

We picked a new name as delicately as a wreath of daisies. Its weight took a long time to settle on my head. Bit by bit, pieces of myself returned. Anger’s frostbite, joy’s glow.

My old name still has a kind of power over me, of course. When I hear it, I begin to retreat into that familiar hollowness. But then the moment passes and I remember that I go by something different now. I remember that I can allow myself to cry.