Maze of Trees: A Dark Fairy Tale Romance Short Story by O'Keefe Claudia

Author:O'Keefe, Claudia [O'Keefe, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Magic, Fantasy, Fantasy fiction, short story, paranormal, dark fantasy, literary, Science Fiction, magic realism, supernatural, forest, novelette, year's best, love, fairy, novella, paranormal romance
Published: 2011-07-31T18:30:00+00:00

I made certain every moment of that season with Landry was as perfect as it could be. During his days on, business flowed into Frost Knob from all points of the compass and ended up at his restaurant. I didn’t have any power over the tables he got or how much he was tipped, of course, but on the nights he worked the place was packed. On his days off, however, every highway leading to the mountaintop playground took on forbidding, unwelcome shadows and skiers who lingered too close to the treeline felt something watching them, a natural menace they couldn’t explain, but which sent them hurrying to their condos to pack up and head back for the city. I didn’t want it to be a ghost town, that would have been bizarre and upsetting to Landry, but I needed him to myself and didn’t want him called in to wait tables because Gearhead got too busy. I’d also spent too much time in the village and the migraines I suffered at exposure to the development there worsened each time I visited. It was like an allergy on overdrive, like a poison taken in gradually larger doses until a lethal toxicity is nearly reached.

I begged off from staying in those free hotel rooms, but never once suggested that we go to my place. Landry didn’t question me about it outright, but I could tell he thought this strange and he had every right.

“I live in a shack,” I told him. “An honest to God hillbilly shack.”

“Don’t tell me. With an outhouse?”

“Three.” I neglected to mention that they were no longer used and that my farmhouse had two perfectly usable bathrooms.

“What’s the third one for?”

“The third one?”

“One for boys, one for girls. What’s the third one for?”

“Around here? Lord only knows,” I said.

And the topic was dropped, at least momentarily. I can’t say why I didn’t want to bring Landry home. Instinctively, I sensed there was danger for us there. From what, I couldn’t say, but I knew it the way I knew where to find the missing boy who wandered off in early February, leaving the safety of his parent’s condominium before the sun came up.

One afternoon I observed Landry scribble furiously on napkin after napkin he yanked from the dispenser on the window bar at Starbucks. Our seats looked out on the heart of the village. It was one of our favorite spots. That day, however, Landry was deep into his own head, inspired in a way I had never seen him before.

“What is that stuff?” I asked about his writings.

“When they let me go, after I was forced to train my Pindladoor replacement that was, they took away my whole life in the name of profit,” he said. “I’ve been searching for a way to take that profit away from them, and this,” he stabbed violently at the latest in his series of napkins with a happy, mad-computer-programmer gleam in his eye, “just may be the way to do it.

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