Kid's Story

Here's a story I wrote this week along with my precocious 6 year old niece, Allegra, who provided the lead characters' names (no idea where she got "Heliotrope Fairy" from) and two key plot points (they had to have a swimming pool and hot tub, and had to learn their real real names). I've never before written fiction, and haven't written longhand in ages, and this was composed in a feverish sprint with my cramped hand clutching a crayon.


The Heliotrope Fairy (who got her name from the hairy purple flowers her father, The Hyperkinetic Sorcerer, planted in the garden under her bedroom window) lived in a microwave oven with her sister the Fuchsia Fairy. The Fuchsia Fairy was named for the color of those same heliotrope flowers. The Hyperkinetic Sorcerer had a very limited imagination and named everything for these flowers. He had a son, The Purple Else, and another son, The Purple Flower Elf, and he called his car, which was fuchsia with purple stripes, the Flowermobile.

When the two fairies were living with their parents they had a big house and a big garden (did I mention there were flowers growing there?). But when they went out on their own they found a job market with few opportunities for fairies, and the only place they could afford to live in was the microwave oven. It sounds terrible, but they were happy because 1. they were only two inches tall, and 2. they liked spinning around on the turntable, and 3. it was always nice and warm, and 4. they could eat baked potatoes whenever they wanted to. When they wanted to go swimming, they had an orange juice glass full of water to swim in.

They were happy. They worked a little bit whenever people needed fuchsia-colored fairy magic. For example, one time when a kid walked down the street with his lollipop, crying because it was cherry and he loved grape, the two fairies snapped their fingers and changed the lollipop. This sort of work was very satisfying, but didn't pay well (first, not so many kids love grape lollipops, and second, little kids don't have a lot of money).

Then, one day, a lady named Alice Walker wrote a very famous and popular book called "The Color Purple", which was produced as a major motion picture by Amblin Entertainment, grossing in the high eight figures. Suddenly, purple was everybody's favorite color. People bought purple shirts, purple iPhones, purple swimming pools, purple houses, and purple helicopters. The Fuchsia Fairy and the Heliotrope Fairy were suddenly the most important people in the world. People lined up outside of the microwave, waiting patiently for the two fairies to give them purpleness. They didn't even have time to swim in the orange juice glass.

But even though they were very busy, they were very kind. Anytime kids asked them to turn their lollipops purple, they never said no. They spent all morning, all afternoon, all twilight, all early-evening, and all late-night turning things purple (the fairies still called it "fuchsia", but of course it's the same color).

One day their father, The Hyperkinetic Sorcerer, came to talk to them. He was very excited. The most beautiful fuchsia color in the world was to be found in the flowers he had planted. People were starting to offer to buy the flowers, and everybody was so crazy for purple stuff that one very very very rich guy offered him 100 quillion dollars for the single nicest flower – the most perfectly purple thing in the world. So he sold the flower, and he and his wife, the fairies' mother, The Narcissistic Sorceress Queen, were going to move into a giant castle, and the two sisters would be allowed to move into their old house, with the flowers! And there was enough money left over to put in a hot tub and a pool they could go swimming in.

Very very happy, the two sisters moved out of the microwave and into the house, and with all the new room, they started to grow into normal height for young ladies. One day, while they were swimming in the pool, they figured out their real real names: Susun and Scarlet. Fairies no longer, they couldn't change lollipops. But they let anyone come over and swim in the pool, which made lots of people happy. And as people stopped talking about the book and the movie, nobody was interested in fuchsia, anyway. But still sometimes Susun and Scarlet would take their favorite people to see the magical flowers, which still grew beneath their windows. And those people would forever love purple as much as they did.