tuesday afternoon

[deepest_magic]

Elizabeth's house is within walking distance. Bella goes over to it the following day, after lunch, carrying two extra clumsily-frosted but perfectly baked cupcakes in her hands and notebooks in her backpack.

Comments

[deepest_magic]

"You don't wanna find out, either?" asks Bella, puzzled but not pushy. "A round is when everybody sings the same thing but offset - if you were going to sing you would have started with the rowing line when I started the gently line."

[neverbeatme]

"Well, now I know what a round is."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. Most of them are nursery rhyme type things like Row Row Row Your Boat."

[neverbeatme]

"Aha."

[deepest_magic]

"You can stack them up a few people deep depending on the song, but if there are more people than lines then they start to group, obviously."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah, I can see that."

[deepest_magic]

"If you had a country to run," says Bella, circling back, "what would you do with it?"

[neverbeatme]

"Depends on the country, of course. And what the rest of the world's doing. I mean, I'd run it well, obviously, but there are a lot of different ways 'well' can go. And a lot of different ways to be able to run a country. The President of the United States has a very different job from the Queen of Fairyland."

[deepest_magic]

"I would rather be the Queen of Fairyland, I think," says Bella. "The Queen of Fairyland probably gets to learn fairy magic."

[neverbeatme]

"Not necessarily a plus. Some of those fairies are pretty nasty, I mean, in the pre-Disney versions."

[deepest_magic]

"I read old books sometimes but not usually old fairytales," muses Bella, "what d'you mean?"

[neverbeatme]

"I don't know, I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head except Hansel and Gretel and there weren't actually any fairies in that one, just lots of cannibalism."

[deepest_magic]

"There's still that in the kids' versions I've seen," muses Bella. "Or at least threats of cannibalism."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. But I mean... 'fairy' used to mean 'terrifying otherworldly creature who will steal your baby and replace it with an enchanted log'."

[deepest_magic]

"What is the log enchanted to do?"

[neverbeatme]

"Act like a baby for a week until the magic wears off."

[deepest_magic]

"Why bother?"

[neverbeatme]

"To throw off suspicion? I don't know. Fairies also don't traditionally make a lot of sense."

[deepest_magic]

"Huh. I wonder if that's just lazy writing or if there's a way to interpret them that does make sense."

[neverbeatme]

"Want to look up some fairy tales and sensify them?"

[deepest_magic]

"Do you have a good collection of the kind of fairy tales with actual fairies in them?"

[neverbeatme]

"We can check!"

[deepest_magic]

Bella hops up and starts hunting for books.

[neverbeatme]

There are some books of fairy tales available, although it is not always easy to tell which ones contain fairies.

[deepest_magic]

Bella divides up the books and starts hunting.

"Fairy tales," she pronounces after a while, "are really, really weird. I wonder if stories that get written now will seem weird in three hundred years."