Space Fairy Blurb

         Everyone thought that when the Earth died, so went the fairies.  That their being was woven into the growth of the trees and plantlife, their purpose only greening the world and sleeping in the winter.  When the last of the Earth’s great forests burned, the people were certain their tiny friends had perished, unable to live among the steel and plastic of the new world order.  Perhaps a few last souls gasped for breath among the oxygen farms, they thought, but when they, too, fell, there was nowhere left for fairies. 

         There was a day of mourning when the people said goodbye, flying off to a hope of lands unknown on colossal metal wings, the shell of what once was home shrinking smaller and smaller until it left their sight forever.  They cried and gave their eulogies, tales of love for Earth long past and of the wee folk now extinct.

         The hopeful still searched for them among the tiny plants that served the ship, but it was to no avail.  Behind the plastic walls of the greenhouse boxes, nothing moved amidst the leaves, no tiny feet danced on flower petals, and the plants themselves grew no larger than the smallest of their kind had ever been. 

         But deep within the ship, inside the walls and behind the ventilation panels, a deeper truth was known.  Only the spiders and the cockroaches that made their homes in hidden crevices could see them now, could hear the flutter of their wings as they made their daily rounds.  Up and down they flew, or climbed if space did not allow for flight, checking every inch of cable and fixture for wear.  It was here that human eyes and fingers could not reach, so here the fairies lived and worked, filling in the thin, worn areas of rubber insulation, twisting frayed ends of wire.  In the walls they made their cities, creating rubber walkways and suspending fairy lights in their steel-encased homes.

         It was not for the people that they made repairs and kept their narrow spaces free of dust and cobwebs, though of course the people benefited from their work as they always had in the days when their fruits grew larger and their flowers bloomed for longer seasons.  The fairies did not serve the people, not had they ever done so, though they mostly lived in harmony.  Nor did they serve the Earth, though for a time they lived by Her needs.  No, the fairies served only themselves, for their being relied not on the creation of nature or the maintenance of technology, but on purpose.  As long as they had purpose, they would continue being, and they found that purpose wherever they could -- in the roots of trees and morning dew, or in the need for perfection in a deep black void.  And when the ship is long dead, and they are forced to make their homes on other worlds or even in the vacuum of space itself, they will go on to meet new friends again.  The people had no need to mourn, for there will always be something that needs doing, and there they’ll find their dear old friends, working through the night.