The Eighth Chapter

From then on, Mikkel couldn't look at any living thing like he used to. When he saw a butterfly fly away when he came too close, he just nodded in agreement, thinking, "I would have done the same." The thought resonated in him, he was getting little sleep, and it was him who was distant. Lukas was much more content, though, and noticed that Mikkel wasn't smiling as much.

"What's wrong?" The fairy asked one day while Mikkel was outside washing clothes. He didn't look up from what he was doing, but his eyes darkened and he shook his head. Lukas sat on his shoulder and pulled on his ear gently. "Tell me."

He dropped the shirt into the soapy water and wiped his hands off on his pants. The sun was beating down, making him sweat. He glanced at the sky, squinting at the bright clouds as he stood up to go inside. "Mikkel!"

"You would not understand, Lukas," he murmured quietly. Lukas sighed, kicked him in the cheek, and grabbed his nose, not leaving his face. Mikkel stopped in the entrance and pulled him off. "You really want to know, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Fine. You'll have it then. If you're an animal, then I'm an animal as well, and of course humans are a type, but there is no true difference between myself and a mouse, is there?"

Lukas thought the question over, and after a short while he simply shrugged and said, "Why do you care?"

Mikkel scoffed and went into a rant, saying, "Mice are vile and they don't act on intelligence or emotion! They act on instinct!" The fairy didn't know what he could say to make Mikkel feel better. It seemed like a strange thing to be upset over.

"Are you going to cry?" Lukas asked. Mikkel could hear a negative tone in his voice. The words were almost harsh. It made him stand a little straighter.

"Of course I will not cry," he murmured. "I am not sad about this thought, just concerned."

The fairy sat on the table, simply watching the man while he poked at the fire in the stove with a metal prongs. He was doing this for minutes, and it was clear he was thinking again about his reason for his actions. After a while, he said, "How would someone describe the desire for knowledge?"

Lukas said nothing, but began to nibble on a cherry while he listened to Mikkel talk about things that he knew nothing about.

"Animals don't care for learning. Perhaps that is our difference! But maybe we are conditioned for knowledge." His face fell again, but his thoughts were rolling and he kept talking. "Although there must have been a moment for this conditioning. Someone, or some group who had the desire to learn! What do you think, Lukas?" He turned to stare at the fairy, who by now had finished a fourth of the cherry and was mid-bite.

Lukas wiped the red off his lips and put the cherry down on the table. "I don't know. I like to learn," he sighed.

Mikkel shut the door to the oven and sat down with the fairy, staring at him as he picked up the cherry again. He snacked on it some more, accidentally bit the pit, and turned it to the fresh side so he could continue to eat. By now, he was used to the man staring, but when he looked up at noticed how focused he was, the fairy set the cherry down again and huffed. "Stop looking when I eat."

The man didn't speak. He only smiled.

Lukas squinted, trying to reason with that sly smile, but there was nothing he could find that should make him think that Mikkel was up to something suspicious. He went back to eating the cherry. This time, he managed three bites before Mikkel scooped him up and patted his head with one finger. The gesture was confusing, but comforting.

"Why?" he asked, letting his head continue to be patted.

Mikkel was only smiling wider. It might have been how nice Lukas was. Or how amusing. Or how much he didn't care. For whatever reason, the man appreciated the little fairy for being the way he was, and he was in every way fantastic. "Lukas, I have another question for you."

Lukas sat in Mikkel's hand, looked up, and said, "Okay."

"What would you do if one of your kind were to d—"

The word was die, but he remembered the lie he'd told Lukas about death and realized that the question couldn't be efficiently answered. But maybe he could re-word it to make it similar.

"To what?"

"To… leave you forever. Perhaps they flew to another island very far away and you never saw them again. How would you feel about this?"

The fairy closed his eyes. He imagined having another fairy to be his friend. It would be a boy that he could treat like a brother and they would fly everywhere together and play games and sing. Then he imagined having the brother leave one day. There would be no more games or songs. It made him feel terrible to imagine. "I do not like it. I feel sad about that, Mikkel."

"But you had been alone for years, correct?"

Lukas had no concept of time and couldn't answer. It might have been that he was seven years old, but it easily could have been seven weeks, all the same. "Is a year longer than this time with you?"

Mikkel laughed and shook his head at the question. "Yes. Imagine this time that we've spent, but doing it nine more times. Then you would have one year. A day is from sunrise till the next sunrise, and there are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year."

Now that Lukas had a better understanding of time, he thought back to the moment of his creation to today. There hadn't been many sunrises before Mikkel. There certainly wasn't enough to make up a year. "I haven't been alone too long," Lukas admitted. "I'm new."

"How new?"

"Less than three hundred and sixty-five days."

Mikkel looked down at the paper, writing in more notes slowly. It was unbelievable that Lukas could be so young. It was easiest to believe that he didn't fully grasp the concept of time yet. It made Mikkel think of a child, but a child couldn't have learned so quickly. The fairy developed rapidly, in fact.

"What did you do during those days when you were alone, Lukas?"

The fairy rubbed his head, apparently becoming annoyed with another question. He leaned back, picked up the cherry again, and peeled off some of the skin. He let a leg dangle off the side of Mikkel's hand as he sucked some of the juice out of the fruit and thought back to the days before coming to Mikkel. "I looked around at the flowers and trees. I tried to find food. I tried to fly around the sea but I was too tired. Then I saw your window."

"So you decided to stop at my house? Why did you want to?"

Lukas shrugged and said, "I had only seen one other house and I could not see inside."

Mikkel turned the page, wrote down the quote, and drew a little picture beside it. "You wanted to explore the house, then? Interesting." He wrote down a little note that said, "Adventurous." The fairy looked at the word, but thought nothing of it.

"I am very, very glad that you came into my house that day."

"Why?"

"Why? Well, I… I simply think you're a good guest! And you're fascinating."

Lukas was silent for a moment. His eyes wandered over to the window. The sun was behind the clouds, but it was still bright and Lukas was squinting. "Mikkel, I like—"

He stopped talking, his eyes widened, and he dropped onto the table. Immediately he clutched onto the back of Mikkel's hand and tried to hide, murmuring, "Get it outside. Get it out, get it out."

"Get what out?"

He pointed at an insect that was buzzing around the window sill. It stopped on the wall, crawled around, and then buzzed over to the side of an unlit candle. Lukas flew to the opposite side of the room and yelled, "Take it away!"

Mikkel stood up and walked over to the bug. It was a large wasp, not a bee as he expected. Normally, he would have tried to capture it, but this one was larger than usual and he didn't want to risk a sting. He grabbed a book off of the table to hit the wasp, but he couldn't hit it when it was on the candle. He hesitantly poked it with the edge of the book and it flew towards him, landing on his shirt.

"Oh, damn! Hell, hell," he muttered worse profanities under his breath as he brushed the wasp off. Without a second thought he opened the book and slapped it closed around the wasp. It was probably crushed flat. He walked over to the window, scraped it off into the grass, and shut the window, laughing nervously. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

Lukas wasn't by the wall anymore. Mikkel looked around until he heard a tapping noise coming from a vase. He looked down inside it and saw Lukas sitting at the bottom with a panicked look on his face.

"The wasp is gone. You can come out!"

"Wasp?" Lukas murmured the name under his breath again. "I hate wasp. They try to hurt me when I go near them. They are NOT butterflies."

"Of course not. Wasps sting."

The fairy came out of the vase and sat on the edge. His breathing was still quick, but he was calming down from the run-in with the wasp. "How did you get it to go?"

Mikkel fidgeted and flashed a slight grin. "Ah, I captured it and released it," he lied. Lukas looked over at the closed window in relief, then flew over to it and looked out as if there might be an entire swarm of stingers ready to attack him, but of course, there was nothing.

Lukas looked back over his shoulder at Mikkel, who was sitting down at the table and opening up a book. He flew back over to him, perched on his shoulder, and patted his cheek. "Thank you for helping me," he said. The words were shy, but also thoughtful. Mikkel glanced over at him, smiled warmly, and set his book down.

"I could never let one of the wasps get to you! I am invested in this," he remarked in an oddly worded sentences that made Lukas think that there was more for him to say after the word "this", but he said nothing more and looked down at the table again. The fairy grabbed onto his glasses, looking into them from the outside.

"Mikkel, I am invested in this, also," he chimed in. The comment made the man chuckle weakly and want to give the fairy a hug, but of course, he was so small, and Mikkel only lightly tapped the top of his hand. The gesture should have been more comforting to the fairy, but it was dissatisfying and he latched onto Mikkel's fingers when they were close enough, hugging his hand for just a moment before letting go and pretending like it never happened, and although it was a short lived show of affection, the man was beaming.