A Dream, A Bee, A Storytree
by Wendy Nikel
The Storykeeper has lived many lifetimes when he begins to long for rest.
When he wakes cradled in a silk-spun hammock in the arms of the Great Storytree, it takes him a moment to remember who he is. While he slept, its stories floated like pollen into his unguarded dreams, and for those first moments, as his eyes beheld the new day, he thought himself the hero of one of those long-forgotten tales. He had vanquished Evil and preserved the kingdom’s peace and was upon the cusp of “happily ever after” when the buzzing of a bee in his ear reminded him where — and who — he was.
Awake now, he slowly navigates the Tree’s twisted branches, his aching fingers unraveling wisps of stories that have drifted in from around the world and entangled themselves in the leaves overnight. He kneads them gently until they solidify enough to be grafted into the Storytree itself. There, their forgotten pieces will be cross-pollinated until one day, they’ll blossom into something new.
But the Storykeeper’s mind is not on his work today. Today, it is on that hero and on that strange, new longing.
He’s felt the anticipation of a new adventure with the return of buds each spring. He’s felt the thrill of battle when fending off an aphid army. He’s felt the satisfaction of hard labor and experienced the joy of rain on dry soil. But only in stories has he felt such finality, such repose, for his life has been long and even in the sleep of winter, his work is never truly complete.
The Storykeeper remembers with fondness the old, weary-eyed man who’d first shown him the Storytree. He’d gazed up at it in awe, and his tiny hands had gathered a handful of stories — all bright and shiny and magical — and he’d been so overwhelmed that all he could do was exclaim, “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Wiping his forehead, he sets down his pruners and — for the first time in many years — he walks toward the village.
The Storykeeper sits on a stump and watches the young men file out of the university classrooms, envisioning a successor like himself: Studious. Orderly. Composed. A story like his deserves a proper sequel, after all.
“Did you know you have a fairytale in your hair?”
He looks up. Above him in the tree branches, a small girl dangles upside-down. When he runs a hand across his thinning scalp, the sugary story tumbles from it.
“You could see that?” he asks needlessly.
The girl flips over and lands before him. She looks even smaller now, standing before him in a red pinafore. Even younger. Sillier. More girlish. She reaches into a pocket and when she opens her palm, there’s another captured story there, all crunched up and sticky and speckled with dirt. Before the Storykeeper can protest, she scoops up the fallen fairytale and presses the two together.
The tangled mess in her open hand is like nothing he’s seen before. It’s nothing like the delicate tendrils he gathers from his tree and lovingly arranges. It’s the most peculiar thing he’s seen.
He flinches as she tosses the garbled story skyward and blows it away toward a group of young scholars. When it reaches them, the tallest of them shouts, “Hey! I’ve got an idea!” and gathers the others in a game of noisy make-believe quite unbefitting young men of their age, with imaginary dragons and swords made of sticks.
“I’ve never met anyone else who could see them,” the girl says shortly. “We must be alike.”
The Storykeeper watches the youths laugh and jostle one another as the story bounces between them, ballooning ever larger and more absurd. If this is how the next generation treats his precious stories, perhaps this is a foolish idea. Perhaps it’s not his time after all.
“No,” he says somberly, turning away. “We’re nothing alike at all.”
The Storykeeper returns to his Tree, but his mind is more restless than ever, and when he lies down in his hammock, sleep won’t come.
At first, he thinks the giggle is a dream, but when his eyes open, there she is, swinging from a branch as if the Storytree is nothing more than a playground.
“Get down from there!”
There’s a tangle of stories in her hands, which she’s plucked haphazardly from here and there and meshed together like some technicolor cat’s cradle. He springs to his feet, horrified at the abomination. “What have you done? You followed me here, didn’t you?”
“I followed the stories.” She holds one out. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Her words halt him in his tracks. He remembers the moment he first breathed those very words. He remembers his mentor’s weary eyes.
Had he looked the same way to that old man all those years ago, with his own sticky fingers and grass-stained knees?
He peers again at the girl’s odd and unconventional creation, and something bright and dreamlike glints from within it, and he has to admit that, though not something he’d deem beautiful, it certainly is unique. Strange. Intriguing. And maybe — with a bit of polish and careful reshaping — it could be marvelous, indeed.
She’s not like him at all. The stories she tends won’t be the same. And yet… Maybe that’s just what is needed.
He clears his throat. “Would you like to tend them?”
Her shining eyes say it all, and as the moonlight stretches across the leaves, he points out each tiny bud and shows her how to identify the first signs of rot, and guides the tools in her hands until the night grows old and he no longer can hold his body upright.
The hammock enfolds him, and he closes his eyes and listens to the bees humming and the wind blowing new stories in and the Great Storytree creaking beneath the girl’s nimble limbs. And for the first time, he realizes he’s found it…
Happily ever after.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com
