Club Hedgie (and Other Stories), page 1
Club Hedgie
(and Other Stories)
Tales Among the Mythos
Ruthanne Reid
4th Floor Publication
NEW YORK, NY
Copyright © 2016 by Ruthanne Reid
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Ruthanne Reid/4th Floor Publication
www.ruthannereid.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com
Club Hedgie (and Other Stories)/ Ruthanne Reid.—1st ed.
Contents
Club Hedgie
The Doctor Will See You Now
Dante’s Inferno
Need More? Read On!
● Chapter 1 ●
Club Hedgie
Once upon a time, there was a hedgehog who thought he was a fairy.
It didn’t really bother him that he lacked wings, or that he couldn’t produce light and sparkles on demand. Somebody had to balance out all that gauzy softness, and sparkles were overrated. He knew he was a fairy, and that was that.
He led a simple life, burrowing with diligent cheer at the base of the Blue Fairy Tree and sniffing out beetles under the soil. Occasionally, he found dropped shoes or forgotten jewelry made from crystallized dew-drops, which he hid in his burrow in case their owners came looking for them. At night, he’d sit up and comfort himself with the playful music and dancing lights of the fairy-fete glimmering in the branches. He couldn’t quite see what was going on, but as a fairy and member of the forest, he still felt like part of the dance.
Of course, none of this meant he wasn’t lonely.
He wanted to join them up there, in the Blue Fairy Tree. Wanted to join their dance, to live in their laughter, to float in their songs, at least just once. How could it ever happen? He couldn’t fly. He couldn’t climb. As a fairy, he felt his his needs had not been addressed by the community.
Then one day, a cloth like a dream fell from the sky.
He didn’t see it at first. Caught in the breeze, it wafted back and forth until it caught his attention, glimmering with a delicate, diaphanous purple so perfect he barely thought it was real. But it was real; fluttering and finely woven, the dream-cloth landed right in front of his questing little nose.
It was lighter than a sigh, prettier than morning sun. If he puffed at it, it moved, like it was alive. And it was magic. The moment he wriggled underneath it, he became beautiful.
He knew he was beautiful just like he knew he was a fairy: he could feel it in the shimmery, sparkly textile tickling the tops of his curving toes, in the way it tented in front of his face with every breath, in the way it shimmered in the light like special puddle-rainbows by the road. He couldn’t help the next thing he did: without thinking, he hopped into the air.
He decided at once not to come down again.
Flying up the Blue Fairy Tree only made sense for one as beautiful as he, and the dream-cloth seemed to agree because it started to sing in a tiny, whispery voice about the blooms in June and raining on the moon. Or something. He wasn’t paying attention because he’d discovered a problem:
Flying meant “up high,” and he hadn’t known until that very moment.
Everything looked strange. His nest disappeared against the foot of the Blue Fairy Tree, and the branches and leaves with fairy-houses on them suddenly looked frighteningly large. Purple cloth fluttering, he swooped through boughs, his little nose wriggling and his huffing-puffing growing louder with his nervousness.
He could fly, but he couldn’t control it very well.
Worse yet, there were fairies up here. He’d never met any before, not in so many words, and suddenly wondered—would they like him? What would they think of him? Did they know he had their shoes? He squeaked once, high-pitched and frightened, and zipped past their tiny poppy mallow tables and right into the dangling, jingling chimes that hung from higher branches to mimic stars.
Somehow, one of the chimes caught on his toe, and suddenly, he became a traveling orchestra.
Jingle-tingle went the chimes as he loop-de-looped, trying to unseat them without losing his cloth.
Jangle-tangle went the chimes he grunted and spun, managing only to take himself more.
The chimes increased his quills-to-feet ratio by quite a few inches, and now he hit everything. The chimes snagged a blue wig; the wig went through a honey-wine fountain, and thus be-gooped, hit a heaping platter of dried, finely-ground berries and went from blue to pink in an instant. He chirped, then clicked, huffing in distress, and tried looping back the way he came in the vague hope that these items would give themselves back to their proper owners.
The wig knocked over a goldfish bowl, delivering the tiny glowing sprites inside to chaotic freedom; the bowl (why had it stuck to the wig, why?) hit somebody on the back of the head, who fell over, who toppled a table and sent the jello mold in its center into the air.
It splatted the face of the head chef fairy, who’d come out of the Blue Fairy Tree to see what in the world was going on. He shouted; the platter of singing cakes he carried went flipping over the side, and the sad little songs of falling yeast-and-honey pastries piped and toodled all the way down like musical rain.
The hedgehog had had enough, and fled back over the branch to hide in his hole. Shouts and laughter and I demand an answer followed him down, but he couldn’t give them an answer (not all fairies could talk, okay?), and he swooped back down the Blue Fairy Tree, past all the branches, and back into his burrow. Then, with dream-cloth, wig, chimes, and all, he curled up in a poky, spiny ball to hide.
There was no way they’d like him now.
The wig smelled really good. Sadly, it did not prove to be edible.
When Fairies came to visit, they weren’t mean or mad.
They ducked into his burrow, glimmering wings tucked tight, and made soothing sounds as they petted his quills and offered him pastries made from pillbugs and honey, and he grew brave enough to peek out.
He didn’t really understood what they were saying—not all fairies talked; just look at him—but they were very nice, and petted his cheeks, and finally took back their shoes. That was good. He’d been running out of room to keep them.
“This is sweet. Like... totally underground,” said one fairy, the labrets in his blue lips sparkling.
“Club Hedgie?” suggested another with bright orange hair spikes.
Blue-lips nodded. “Club Hedgie.”
One of them disentangled the purple cloth, wig, and chimes from his quills. Another tossed sparkles in the air with the grace of a dancer, and the hedgehog’s burrow suddenly twinkled like the dark starry sky. He squealed for joy.
That night, fairies came to visit with food and music and dancing, raucous music that somehow didn’t compete with the more refined strains from the Blue Fairy Tree. He shared their snacks and accepted their caresses. He danced and wriggled and didn’t even mind when somebody tied pink ribbons on each of his quills.
At last exhausted, contented and befriended, he slept at the back of his den. For the first time, he was truly part of the celebration. As he dreamed in time to the music all around, he smiled, for he knew a wonderful thing: he was without a doubt the luckiest fairy in the world.
● ●
● Chapter 2 ●
The Doctor Will See You Now
“I have to do physical what?”
“Therapy. Physical therapy. It’s a human concept.” Doctor Moore scribbled on his yellow pad and tore off the page. “The details.”
Grey took it with an expression that suggested he didn’t understand his own behavior. His long ears quirked back like a puzzled cat’s. “Physical therapy? Can you do that? Therapy is mental, isn’t it?”
Moore smiled. “I think you’ll find this sufficiently stimulating in all areas of life.”
“I’ll kill him!” Grey wrenched the spear back and forth to no effect; it stayed lodged in the cow-sized spider, making squelching sounds. “Kill him with his own pencil!”
Robin landed beside him on fours, awash with gore and happiness. “A little drastic, don’t you think?” And he laughed like a fool and sprang away to continue the stabbing.
Grey snarled, his long ears angled back and down like a furious horse’s. Robin’s spear didn’t stick. That was because Robin belonged in this savage place, stabbing things and facing fears-turned-goofy-flesh. Clearing out nightmare-weed from the Field of Dreams tended to be as self-revelatory as it was gory.
Physical therapy, indeed. The doctor was a dead Fey and just didn’t know it yet. “Dead shrink walking,” Grey muttered, shimmying the shaft.
“Did somebody call for a clooooown?” boomed some unseen monstrosity behind him.
Grey’s response surpassed the scope of written language.
“So, how did it go?” said Doctor Moore.
“I’m never doing it again,” said Grey, studying the nails on his left hand; the bruising was almost gone.
“And?”
Grey sighed. “You were right. The nightmares stopped. But next time you decide to test borrowed theor
Moore nodded and made a check-mark on his notepad. “There is a reason they don’t live long.”
Grey took his spear with him and stormed out, grudgingly prepared to admit the Yelp reviews were right: one did not simply walk into Moore’s door and come out unchanged.
● ●
● Chapter 3 ●
Dante’s Inferno
Dante was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to be looking down at the princess right now. Sure, the heteronormative pattern dictated he’d be a little taller, but not like this. This was wrong. About two stories’ worth of wrong.
“Eek!” screamed the princess.
“Wait a minute,” Dante said, startled to find his voice transformed from croaky to sonorous. “Wait! It’s me!”
“Eek!” screamed the princess, and then she passed out.
At least his new claws (Claws? Really?) were nimble enough to catch her before she hit the floor.
Claws weren’t heteronormative. Neither were red scales. Neither was the bizarre yet pertinent understanding that he needed to lay an egg really soon or things were going to go terribly wrong.
An egg?
Oh.
“So it turns out I’m female,” Dante said to the slumped princess, and laid her gently on a desk. It figured; frogs were known to change gender in adverse environments, and heaven knew being trapped as University’s psychology department mascot for forty amphibian years was stressful. They hadn’t even been willing to accept his (her?) application for a grant.
Dante eyed the comatose co-ed; she’d sworn herself possessed of royal blood, but that didn’t seem to have panned out. For one thing, Lindsay didn’t smell royal.
Weird.
And the egg thing was becoming an issue.
First things first: he had to get out of this classroom. It was large enough for his suddenly-inconvenient (though beautifully red) bulk, but the door was nowhere near big enough to allow egress, and the windows, of course, were right out. Nothing for it: he’d have to take down the entire wall.
He crashed through, glass and wood and stone scattered like some horrible snowfall, only to find flying wasn’t nearly as easy as it looked in the movies. “Whoa!” he bellowed (which was probably every bit as frightening as the sight of him) and careened into the ground, knocking over two founders’ statues and one hot dog cart that sat permanently on the route between classes.
This would have been mortifying if done in front of actual students. Thank heavens it was night.
Dante stood, shook snow off his bright red scales, and realized with horror that the egg was coming, was not waiting, was coming right now, and he had nowhere warm to put the thing for incubation.
Oh, dear. This was going to be bad.
The Green was a mess the next day, and somehow, security cameras failed to capture the cause. “Tampered with,” security murmured ominously, writing up reports about electro-magnetic disturbances and potential student pranks-turned-terrorism.
No one thought to wonder about the hot dog cart. Everything around it was knocked over, but the cart sat neat and tidy in the middle of the pathway, undisturbed apart from a slightly bent umbrella, as if it had been run into.
It chugged away, propane tanks not quite run dry, and no one really noticed steam escaping around its slightly bent lid.
Police walked by, jabbering into their radios and sweeping for more clues. No one was listening for the distinctive sound of eggshell cracking open.
● ●
● Extras ●
Need More? Read On!
There is more to come.
For other stories with runaway Fey princes, alien Earths and parallel worlds, ancient warriors, and magical mayhem, visit RuthanneReid.com, where you can sign up for free books and sneak-peeks in your inbox, peruse the wiki for trivia, and bug the author via email.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Story-herder, plot-bunny curator, and weird humor connoisseur, Ruthanne is a woman of mystery because most of her hobbies are done in the dark. She’s ventured out to teach classes on world-building and writer’s-voice, and she’s taken some nifty pictures, which she posts on Instagram when no one is looking. She also has a popular Twitter feed which is the epitome of random.
Ruthanne is simply herself, and herself is a professional dealer of cat pictures. Currently, she lives in Long Island City, happily married to the IT programmer of her dreams.
To learn more (or begin an ordinary conversation), subscribe to her free email newsletter or send her an email.
Ruthanne Reid, Club Hedgie (and Other Stories)
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