Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

certain. I took off his ring and let it go, and it fell, fell through the blue sky onto the emerald-and-amber cushion of moss and lichen that sat so soft on the table of ancient rock.
    I felt unburdened. Lighter. I sat back with my head against the moss. The twittering of the birds died down and it seemed like all of the woods became silent. I might have fallen asleep. But even if I did, I woke up with a start when I heard someone coming through the woods toward me.
    It was a man on a pretty white horse making his achingly slow way along the bridle path. Strung on either side of the horse was a large straw pannier, each side looking loaded. I thought the man was talking to himself, or to the horse, but anyway, he had the laziest seat in the saddle you ever saw, and this horse was hardly moving. The man had a crop and he was twitching it at the horse, but not so the creature would feel it. He’d allowed the reins to fall slack at the horse’s withers and I almost thought he was riding this white horse in his sleep.
    I decided to keep quiet and lay with my head back on the mossy stone so that he wouldn’t see me and he would pass by, but then as he drew near I saw that his eye was fixed on me. He twitched at the horse and turned it off the bridle path and toward me, crushing bluebells under the hooves of the horse.
    And they were large hooves. The horse was an elegant creature but its sturdy legs were more like those of a shire, with huge hairy fetlocks. It moved slowly toward me, nodding as it came. Then it stopped right before me. The man sat up a little, smiling down, an amused look in his eye.
    I should have been a little afraid, but I wasn’t.
    I said, “That’s the whitest horse I’ve ever seen.”
    “It is,” he said. “It’s the whitest horse you’ve ever seen; and it’s the whitest horse you will ever see.” He had an unusual accent. I don’t know what it was, though I liked the sound of it well enough. “And that’s why he’s mine.”
    He sat there for an uncomfortable moment or two as we eyed each other. “What’s its name?” I said, just to break the silence.
    “Tssk,” he went, and he smirked at me like I was a bit simple. “You don’t give a horse a name. They don’t like to have names.”
    “I’ve never heard that,” I said, defiant.
    “I expect you haven’t heard a lot of things, you being a slip of a young girl.”
    He was very quick with his answers, but he softened them with a smile on his moist red lips. He wasn’t so old himself. Maybe about thirty, so I thought. Too old for me, but not so old.
    Then he said, “That looks like a very comfortable pillow you’ve found for yourself there. A very comfortable pillow.” And he swung down from his horse.
    He dropped the reins of his white horse and I thought he was going to come toward me but he stepped away from me, to the far end of the mossy rock. “Would you mind if I shared your pillow? Only over here, which is safe, and not too close, because I know what you young girls are like.”
    He certainly wasn’t close enough for me to be worried, so I said, “It’s a free country.”
    “It is and it isn’t,” he said, and he slumped down and laid his head back on the stone and I do believe he immediately went to sleep.
    Or maybe he was just pretending, but anyway, his eyes were closed and his breathing changed, and I could see the rise and fall of his chest. It was a hot afternoon, and his horse, untethered, plodded away to go and stand under a tree. I waited awhile, thinkingthe man would speak to me at any moment, but he didn’t. He lay there amid the bluebells, his eyes closed and his mouth very slightly open.
    I sat up and got a good look at him. At first I wondered if he was a gypsy. But he didn’t have the manner of a gypsy, and they are not so often seen alone. Then I took him for some kind of hippie, one of those crusty guys who get stuck in the fashion of their youth. His hair was down to his collar, a mass of dark