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AN EPIC OF EGG-LIKE PROPORTIONS
It took all the fossils, finally, after the King's horses and King's men failed, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but he was a shambling, crumbling zombie of a thing, shedding blood and egg-tears with each step. Feared by the people for his hideous visage, he stepped over the lands until he reached the mountains, and from there to the stairway to the plate in the sky where he found a small girl whose white skin was marked with dark blue ink. She whispered to him of the winds and the routes they took, twisting upwards and downwards and sidewards until they reached the lady of the forest-top whose gnarled hands possessed a darker power he might find useful.
Still trailing parts of him, he took up the ink-girl's carpet and flew east, past deserts and rivers until finally he reached the forest. Atop it sat the lady, wood for her body and lichens for her hair, and her fingers like twigs sank into his seeping self and flickered, once, twice, like images on an old cinema reel, and suddenly he was whole, no longer a tap but a man.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is in her final year of undergraduate study at King's College London, where she tries to fit as much ancient history as possible into her War Studies and History degree. Her novelette "Statues" recently placed in the quarterfinals for the 4th quarter of the 2006 L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and she has a story in Crimson Highway webzine. You can find her lurking on Livejournal under the name of Alankria.
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