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Our third place High School winning entry was written by Emma Martin, a homeschooled student who lives in Southsea, England. |
I’m sure we’ve all heard of the tooth faerie, that adorable little sprite that floats down into the rooms of children and collects their unwanted teeth. But have you heard of it’s older, more sinister kin? A malevolent, spiteful, wicked creation that can’t be satisfied on teeth alone? Well friend, consider yourself lucky, for you have never encountered the bone faeries.
They are short and stocky, brutish and saggy. Their sickly swamp skin can barely cling to their drooping frames. Within each wrinkle, beneath each fold lies a colony of fungi, an armada of mushrooms and worms. Beetles and bugs from weenie to woeful crawl and coil around their crimson tipped ears like flies to a corpse. As if crowned, poison nettles form circlets of their heads, ensnaring and entangling their wiry, murky-black hair. Dingy, dank and dirty, grime laces itself through the battered weaves in the ropes and scraps they clad themselves in. Mud cakes their pores; mould grows in their skin. Breath like the plague, lingers forever, the stench of a million deaths dances gleeful on their sandpaper tongues. The bone faerie will not be kind, will not be caring or compassionate. It will not take pity. It wants what it desires, and it will conquer.
The bone faerie doesn’t crave teeth. They’re too small, too insignificant. To a baneful beast such as this, it would be like a bear chasing a mouse. No, no, no! The Bone faerie wants something richer, tastier. With more delicious marrow to suck out and slurp greedily down into their gullets, tickling the walls of the throat. Hot blood against their lips, the ecstasy of fondling it between their jagged yellowed teeth. They yearn to behold the delectable cracks, snaps and screams, to be devastatingly intoxicated by the heavenly choirs of pleading and pain. Yet unlike teeth, bones don’t simply fall out, the bone faeries must collect them.
Savagely, they slice into their meals, ignorant to whether they are awake or not. From floods and gushes, spews of red, they gingerly claim their prize. Sweet bones.
Be lucky and stay lucky friends. Do not find yourself face to face with the fae.
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