New story up at the Hanging Garden Stories Tumblr!

The prompt for this story, titled “So Sweet a Changeling,” was “Shakespeare with a sci-fi twist.” Enjoy!

When Titania took the boy away, it wasn’t so bad, not really.

A stolen child, a changeling. The faeries had told him stories like that. It was fun to fall inside one. To pretend.

She wore gowns of gossamer and a flower crown; it smelled like lavender and roses. She gave him his own bright garden to play in and told him he was the child of a raja, a father who was too busy to spend time with him. She put wings on his back and glitter on his cheeks and kept him close. They wove daisy chains and napped in her butterfly-sprinkled bower.

It wasn’t so bad, not really. In fact, sometimes the boy had fun. Most of the time, even. But sometimes he remembered shiny steel objects and white spaces, even a cage with a rat in it. Sometimes he dreamed he was in the cage, and then everything got cloudy.