by Bill Tiepelman
Lullaby in a Leafdrop
It’s a little-known fact—scrupulously left out of most fairy tales because of its messiness and alarming wetness—that fairies are not born in the traditional sense. They are brewed. Yes, brewed. Like tea or poor decisions. At precisely 4:42 a.m., before the first robin even thinks about coughing out a chirp, the dew collects on the tip of a heart-shaped leaf deep within the forests of Slumbrook Hollow. If the temperature is just cold enough to make a spider wear socks, but warm enough that a squirrel can scratch itself lazily without shivering, the brewing begins. The recipe? Simple: one drop of moonlight that missed its target, two specks of laughter from a sleeping child, a dash of forest gossip (usually about raccoons behaving inappropriately), and one blade of grass that’s been kissed by lightning at least once. Stir gently with the breeze of a forgotten wish, and voilà—you have the beginning of a fairy. Now, these aren’t fairies as you might imagine them. They don’t pop out fluttering with tiaras and purpose. No, the first stage of fairy development is embryonic sass in a gelatinous mood sac. They’re mostly wing, attitude, and napping. Their first instinct upon "waking" is to sigh dramatically and roll over, which often causes the entire dewdrop to tilt dangerously, sending everyone into a panic except the fairy, who mutters “Five more minutes,” and promptly passes out again. The fairy in question this particular morning was named **Plink**. Not because anyone named her, but because that’s the sound her dewdrop made when it formed, and the forest takes naming conventions quite literally. Plink was already a bit of a diva, her wings shimmering with the subtle arrogance of someone who knows she was born glittery. She curled up inside her liquid leaf hammock, tiny hands tucked beneath a chin that had never known the touch of responsibility. Outside the dewdrop, however, chaos brewed. A beetle patrol was out on morning rounds and had spotted Plink’s nursery hanging precariously from a twig targeted by a particularly aggressive blue jay. The forest had rules: no jay traffic before dawn, no unnecessary loud flapping, and absolutely no pooping near the dew nurseries. Unfortunately, the blue jay had a reputation for violating all three. Enter Sir Grumblethorpe, a retired mole-knight in tweed armor, wearing a monocle that didn’t improve his vision so much as his self-esteem. He’d taken it upon himself to ensure Plink’s survival. “No fairy’s going to get scrambled on my watch,” he declared, thumping the ground with his walking acorn staff, which was mostly ceremonial and partially rotten. What no one had realized yet—not even Plink in her blissfully gelatinous snooze—was that today was the last viable dew-day of the season. If she didn’t hatch before sundown, the drop would evaporate, and she'd become a memory, drifting off into the realm of nearly-made-things, like diets and honest politicians. But right now? Right now, Plink drooled a little, one wing flopping gently against the inside curve of the drop, dreaming of sugar plums, existential dread, and an itch on her foot she didn’t yet know how to scratch. And the blue jay? Oh, he was circling. Sir Grumblethorpe adjusted his monocle with the dramatic flair of someone who felt very important and, frankly, wasn’t going to let a little thing like scale stop him from acting like it. After all, it took tremendous courage to be one-nineteenth of the size of the threat and still shout orders like you owned the shrub. “Battle stations!” he declared, though precisely what that meant in a forest that had never seen a battle was left vague. A centipede scurried by with two pencils and a wine cork for armor, shouting, “Where’s the fire?!” and tripped over a snail who’d been asleep for most of the decade. Meanwhile, Plink dreamt she was the Queen of Marmalade Kingdom, riding a honeybee into battle against a horde of breakfast crumbs. She had no idea her leafdrop was now the central focus of a multi-species emergency council convening beneath her on a mossy stump. “Let’s be rational,” said Professor Thistlehump, a weasel with spectacles thick enough to burn ants in winter. “If we just ask the jay politely—” “You want to negotiate with an airborne fart with feathers?” snapped Madame Spritzy, a disgraced hummingbird opera singer turned tactical screecher. “This is war, darling. War with feathers, guano, and beady-eyed doom.” Sir Grumblethorpe agreed. Or rather, he didn’t disagree fast enough, which was close enough. “We need air support,” he muttered, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Spritzy, can you still fly the Pattern of Mirthful Panic?” “Please,” she scoffed, fluffing her feathers. “I invented it. Watch the skies.” Above them, the blue jay—named **Kevin** (because of course his name was Kevin)—began his final descent. Kevin had a simple mind, mostly composed of shiny objects, food, and a belief that screaming as loud as possible was a form of communication. He spotted the glint of the dewdrop and squawked with what could only be described as delight or rage, or perhaps both simultaneously. Spritzy launched like a caffeinated firework. She zig-zagged wildly, shrieking an aria from “Pond Pirates: The Musical” at a pitch that made several worms explode from stress alone. Kevin flapped midair, confused and mildly aroused, then backpedaled with surprising grace for something that once ate a frog for fun. Meanwhile, deep inside the dewdrop, Plink finally stirred. Her dreams had turned into gentle nudges—stirrings from the realm of waking. Her translucent wings began to twitch like radio signals tuning into the frequency of reality. The warmth of the day was starting to tickle the base of the dewdrop, and somewhere, instinct began to whisper: Hatch now. Or don’t. Your call. But hatch now if you’d prefer not to be steam. But Plink was groggy. And let’s be honest, if you’ve never tried waking up from a dream where you were being serenaded by a choir of marshmallows, you don’t know how hard it is to give that up. She rolled over, pressed her face to the dewdrop’s inner surface, and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Shhh. Five more eternities.” Sir Grumblethorpe stomped his foot. “She’s not hatching! Why isn’t she hatching?!” He looked up toward the treetop, where Kevin had now found a shiny gum wrapper and was momentarily distracted. The emergency council reconvened in a panic. “We need something powerful! Something symbolic!” hissed Madame Spritzy as she divebombed into the meeting. “I have an old kazoo,” offered a squirrel who had never been invited to anything before and was just thrilled to be included. “Use it!” barked Grumblethorpe. “Wake her up! Play the Song of the First Flight!” “No one knows the tune!” cried Thistlehump. “Well then,” Grumblethorpe said grimly, “we wing it.” And so they did. The kazoo howled. The forest cringed. Even Kevin stopped mid-flap, beak agape, unsure if he was under attack or witnessing interpretive art. Inside the dewdrop, Plink twitched violently. Her eyes snapped open. The air trembled. Her wings exploded into light, catching the sun like a disco ball made of dreams and backtalk. The dewdrop shimmered, vibrated, and with a sound like a bubble giggling, it popped. And there she was—hovering. Tiny, wet, blinking at the world, and already looking unimpressed by the fact that she was awake at all. “You’re all very loud,” she said with the kind of disdain only a newborn fairy could muster while dripping with celestial goo. Kevin tried one last dive, but was immediately hit in the face by an angry badger with a slingshot. He retreated into the sky with a squawk of defeat and one of Madame Spritzy’s feathers stuck to his tail. Below, the forest held its breath. Plink looked around. She slowly raised one eyebrow. “So… where’s my welcome brunch?” Sir Grumblethorpe fell to his knees. “She speaks!” “No,” Plink corrected with a shrug, “I sass.” And that was the first moment anyone in Slumbrook Hollow realized what kind of fairy she was going to be. Next up? Flight school. Possibly sabotage. And definitely brunch. If you're expecting a tale of rapid character development, noble quests, and tidy emotional closure, I regret to inform you: Plink was not that kind of fairy. The first hour of her conscious existence was spent trying to eat the petals off a daisy, attempting to seduce a bumblebee (“Call me when you’re done pollinating”), and announcing, loudly, that she would never be doing chores unless those chores involved dramatic exits or glitter-based warfare. Still, for all her sass and damp sparkles, Plink was, in a deeply peculiar way, hopeful. Not the gentle, passive sort of hope. No, her hope had teeth. It snarled. It strutted. It demanded brunch before diplomacy. The kind of hope that said: “The world is probably terrible, but I will look fabulous while surviving it.” Madame Spritzy took her under-wing (literally), beginning an unlicensed and highly irregular crash course in flying. “Flap like your enemies are watching,” she barked, circling Plink who spun midair, spiraled downward, and crash-landed in a patch of moss with all the grace of a fallen blueberry. “You said I was born to fly!” Plink wheezed, spitting out a beetle. “I said you were born in a droplet. The rest is up to you.” Flight school continued for three chaotic days, during which Plink broke two twigs, dive-bombed a fungus, and accidentally invented a new type of aerial swear gesture. Her wings grew stronger. Her sarcasm sharpened. By the fourth morning, she could hover in place long enough to sneer convincingly, which was considered a graduation requirement. But the forest was changing. The dew was thinning. The weather warming. Plink’s own birth had been the season’s final droplet—meaning she wasn’t just the last fairy of spring. She was the only fairy of this bloom cycle. The last tiny miracle before the long, dry season ahead. No pressure. Naturally, when she found out, her first response was to fall dramatically onto a mushroom and yell, “Why meeeeeee?” which startled a hedgehog into fainting. But after several exasperated lectures from Professor Thistlehump and one extremely caffeinated pep talk from Sir Grumblethorpe involving the phrase “legacy of luminous lineage,” she relented. Sort of. Plink decided to become the kind of fairy who didn’t wait for fate. She would build her own kind. Not in a creepy lab way. In a fairy godmother-meets-contractor kind of way. She would whisper magic into seedpods. She’d bottle dreams and tuck them into acorns. She’d snatch laughter from moonlit lovers and tuck it into pinecones. She didn’t need to be the last. She could be the first of the next wave. “I’m going to teach squirrels to make hope bombs,” she announced one morning, inexplicably wearing a cape made of moss and attitude. “Hope bombs?” asked Grumblethorpe, adjusting his monocle. “Little spells wrapped in berries. If you bite one, you get five seconds of unreasonable optimism. Like thinking your ex was a good idea. Or that you can fit back into your pre-winter leggings.” And so it began: Plink’s odd campaign of mischief, magic, and emotional disruption. She buzzed from leaf to leaf, whispering weirdness into the world. Lonely mushrooms woke up giggling. Wilted flowers perked up and requested dance music. Even Kevin the blue jay started carrying shiny twigs to other birds, no longer dive-bombing hatchlings but (awkwardly) babysitting them. The forest adapted to her chaos. Grew brighter in places. Stranger in others. Where Plink had passed, you could always tell. A leaf might glitter for no reason. A puddle might hum. A tree might tell a joke that made no sense but made you laugh anyway. And Plink? Well, she grew. Not bigger—she was still the size of a hiccup. But deeper. Wiser. And somehow, more Plink than ever. One twilight, many seasons later, a tiny dewdrop formed on a new leaf. Inside it, curled in soft sleep, a fairy fluttered its brand-new wings. Around the drop, the forest held its breath again, waiting, wondering. From above, a streak of mischievous light circled the branch. Plink peered down, smiled, and whispered: “You’ve got this, sparklebutt.” Then she zipped away into the stars, leaving behind a single echo of laughter, a speck of glitter, and a world forever changed by one loud, brilliant drop of hope. Bring the magic home. If Plink's tale stirred your imagination or made you laugh-snort tea, you can carry a piece of that enchantment into your own space. "Lullaby in a Leafdrop" is available as a canvas print, metal print, acrylic print, and even a dreamy tapestry to turn your wall into a window to Slumbrook Hollow. Perfect for lovers of fantasy decor, fairy tale fans, and anyone who believes a little glitter and grit can change the world.
