Short Stories
The Fairy’s Gamble
A Little Fantasy Everywhere
Dina Leacock 10/01/2024
Included in A Little Fantasy Everywhere!
An anthology of forty-eight mostly flash fantasy stories that range from fairies, to dragons to a menagerie of creatures of the imagination.
Stories of wonder that
will make you smile
and sometimes shiver.
Excerpt
Miriam took a deep breath and stepped off the cliff face.
If this failed, she was going to die.
Wind rushed past her as she gained momentum in her plunge to the distant water. Ten feet down and the lumps on her back stayed as they were. Inert, useless. Her brothers, sisters, all her family, jumped off this place a dozen times a week and never suffered consequences.
Fairies had wings for a reason.
She was falling fast, her hair and clothes streaming behind her. Her heart was hammering in her chest. This last, desperate attempt to get her body to behave meant she was going to be smashed to bits on the rocks below in a few short seconds. Her life was being measured in the strata of the land she was hurtling past, and soon would be no more.
Miriam plunged another ten feet. The waves were getting closer with every second. Even if her wings broke free and unfurled now, it wouldn’t be in time. She’d doomed herself with this stupid escapade. Her sister’s wings came out when she had almost been killed by a runaway car the last time they visited the mortal realm. The difference was, if Celia had been struck, doctors might have been able to save her. Miriam would not be saved after a fall like this. She was risking it all—and was going to lose.