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Joel O'Flaherty
This City Is Built on Fairytales
For as long as the child could remember, night belonged to locked doors and solitude. The swelling suffocation of silence. A pillow damp with tears.
Evening was a tolling bell, chasing him home through the concrete jungle of their estate. Afraid of papa and his belt, and the warning beaten into him since first he toddled.
He was tucked in while sunset still enflamed distant rooftops. Each night a story: a hideous witch and her evil spell, turned more mantra than tale by the years. In the end, the witch was slain, and the curse broken. Papa uttered the words as a promise, then kissed his son’s forehead. He swept away before evening could bleed into night, the fading glow like a dying hearth, leaving only ashes and bitterness.
The window was a dirty knife cleaving two worlds: the tarred darkness of the child’s bedroom from the effervescence of London nights. The child knew the city by day, but never after dark. Each night, after it happened, and the tears of shame had dried, the child propped elbows on the windowsill and counted diamonds and garnets winking from towers and domes, dreaming one day she could hold those gems in her hands.
Often, the child fell asleep to the sound of papa shouting down the phone.
‘I don’t care what it takes,’ he would say. ‘Find her!’
Papa was full of hard lessons, like knuckles sharpened white by a fist.
Papa taught the child what it meant to be different, taught him shame.
He would say, ‘No one is to see you after dark. No one.’
But when silken nights fell, and the skyline twinkled the way papa’s eyes once did, the child was entranced. Papa taught that the night was dangerous and wrong, that what it brought should be feared, kept hidden.
Yet the child wondered how something so wrong could be so beautiful.
His burgeoning curiosity pained papa, stoked a sadness worn old and deep, like wind-hewn grooves carved into the walls of a valley. A sadness that intensified if ever he was late bidding goodnight, when the last of the pewter evening drained beyond the hills, and the child changed right before his eyes. Papa would stare at her as if at a stranger, faded eyes that couldn’t bore through changed flesh to the same heart aching beneath. Couldn’t recognise the same soul within, until morning came, and she was his son again.
The child wondered if perhaps he didn’t want to.
No one can remain a prisoner forever. Each finds their own means of escape, some darker than others. For the child, it was a feigned interest in fancy belts, sturdy Italian leather. A masculine interest, eagerly indulged.
Nine knotted, three storeys, and the child’s toes brushed the roof of the lockups, brushed freedom. Night after night beneath the moon’s jagged grin, drenched in silver, she was free.
And as child became teenager, she was swallowed by the magic of nights in the city; twirling and laughing amongst sweat and smiles, strobe lights and glittering waters, drag bars and underground clubs, she discovered all of herself.
While papa burned his nights hunting the witch, the teenager whispered a silent thanks to the wind, hoping her words would find her, somewhere, somehow. She wove a plan: one final nocturnal escape, never to return home. To be here eternally, amongst golden city lights and motley friends, those who also recognise it was not a curse, but a blessing.
A gift.
To be everything, all that the child ever was.
Joel O'Flaherty ( @byjoeloflaherty) is a young writer from Surrey, U.K. His fiction has been featured in Flash Fiction Magazine, Globe Soup and Fusilli Writing among others. He spends as much of his life as is financially responsible travelling the globe, which he writes about on his site, The Gossamer Traveller.
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