She tiptoes into the wood, around bats, the dormice, the moles, and holes and holes and holes. Wild weeds cover her toes, bare and cool in the castle yard. She is looking for faeries with their honey wine. She dines on dew and bowls of red, red berries, she looks by moonlight. Her lips are sticky wet, her feet turn blue and cold, but she cannot forget–in some hole, faeries await, gibbering in their sleep some delight.
She knows that she cannot go home with a heart desolate and two hands empty. Overhead, the white moon is waning and warning, soon, sunlight will appear, first with a languid mist, but then with a yellowed hiss. She fears she will perish with the bursting day, but her thirst for faeries and their honey wine drive her on and on and on into the wood. She is desperate for some memory. She cannot see ahead and back, back, back, the wood is black, but she is not afraid of the dark .
The dormice move, her feet sink into the mole-holes of discontent. Bats wing in her ears, there are tears on her cheeks, formed from the passion and work of ten tired fingers. She looks down at her hands, palms up and wonders for a moment about what they have touched in half a century’s time. For a moment, she trips on a vine, then catches herself before the fall. Someone calls her name...
...and she is off again. Leaves rain down, words soon tangled in her hair, her feet and fingers work in the dark She can almost see her faeries.
copyright (c) 2014 by Madly Jane, All Rights Reserved.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.
from Middlemarch by George Eliot
