“I used to live with humans, can’t say I recommend it.”
He was standing waiting for the same train as me. It was already 57 minutes late which meant that I would miss my job interview even if it arrived right now. I was trying to get a phone signal to let the business know.
I pretended not to have heard but glanced sideways. He looked like any other sales person with a Monday morning face, cheap suit, and tired eyes. I cleared my throat and stared fixedly at a one legged pigeon bumbling hopefully in front of a child who was eating a sausage roll.
“Poor thing,” he continued, unabashed by my polite lack of interest. “It’s discarded human hair that did that. Humans are just all round trash.”
“What?”
The word slipped out rudely, before I could stop myself.
He continued as though I had not spoken, explaining that human hair had wrapped around the bird’s leg, tightening, cutting off the blood supply until the leg beneath the tourniquet died and fell off.
I was upset at the delay to my travel plans, ready to argue. I turned to face the traveller saying that he was ridiculous. The bird had probably been attacked by another creature, escaping with its life, but only one leg. Why would he think otherwise?
“Because she’s my friend and told me.”
I rolled my eyes as he continued his tales of human malice, ignorance, and both wilful and accidental destruction of the world upon which every living being depended. Every human, he explained, was as culpable as the next.
“Even you then,” I told him, adding that I did everything possible to neither pollute nor harm anything. It was his turn to roll his eyes.
He told me that the train I was waiting for was made from metals and other minerals torn from the earth. The track upon which it ran, the buildings which serviced it, destroyed incomparable swathes of land. He told me I should think of how oil was both mined and used. He pointed to an older woman, with her sausage roll eating grandchild.
“She won’t see the boy’s next birthday,” he told me. “Her lungs are full of filthy air, and for what?”
“You don’t even want to be here, but nonetheless are wasting your short life in a dirty station trying to get a crappy, corporate non-job, which will eat away your precious time. Wouldn’t you rather be planting sweetpeas and carrots?”
He shook his head, sadly.
“And what makes you so different? You’re waiting for the same train.” I almost shouted, tears stinging my eyes.
“I’m Fae, a fairy. I’m here to let you know that only you can change the world. Change your world and the whole world changes with you.”
The small boy was carefully putting the crumbs from his sausage roll into a small pile on the platform after which he stepped back to give the pigeon space to eat. I smiled, as did the self professed Fairy.
“Here.”
He handed me something small and told me to heal myself, to heal the world. I blinked and he popped out of existence. A small brown and white pigeon, head bobbing, walked over to the grey, one legged bird.
A screech of brakes as the train slowed to a stop in front of me. The two pigeons flew up to the roof, and I looked at the packet of sweetpea seeds in my hand as the door opened with a whoosh in front of me.
maggiex 