The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.)

“You’re going to have to stop that sort of backward, old-fashioned thinking, you know. Conservatism is not an attractive trait.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly.

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it is brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

“When you are born,” the golem said softly, “your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living. So

“For the wishes of one’s old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in its changing and change with it.”

Go to sleep, little skylark, Fly up to the moon In a biplane of paper and ink. Your wings creak and croon, borne aloft by balloons, And your engine is singing for you. Go to sleep, little skylark, do. Go to sleep, little skylark, Fly up past the stars In a biplane of sunshine and ice, Past comets and cars, past Neptune and Mars Still your engine is singing for you. Go to sleep, little skylark, do. Go to sleep, little skylark, Drift down through the night In your biplane of silver and sighs, Slip under the light, come down from the heights For your mother is singing for you. Go to sleep, little skylark, do.

That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home—someday, somehow.

Did you choose me to do that? Am I a chosen one, like all those heroes whose legs were never broken?” The Green Wind stroked her hair. She could not see his face, but she knew it was grave. “Of course not. No one is chosen. Not ever. Not in the real world.

When I was quite little, maybe four or five, my mom woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to put my bathing suit on. We went outside, and laid in lawn chairs under the full moon. She made me a cup of juice with an umbrella in it. She said we were going to get a moon tan, and in the morning, she told me my skin looked silver. It was such a magical moment, I completely believed her, and thought I could see myself turning silver for weeks afterward.

No one ever grows up—where growing up means you have it all figured out and are in control of your life and no one can tell you what to do. Everyone, to greater or lesser extents, is faking adulthood, bumbling through as best they can, imitating the adults they grew up with and the also-faking-it adults around them, going through huge shifts in life and perception every few years. There is no magic age at which you have suddenly “come of age.” There is no finish line you cross where WHAMO! you’re home free.