The Orphan and the Golden Trail
A fairy tale: Trapped in a flooding cave with a dying fairy, a girl begins to have visions of a strange guide.
Thanks for stopping by! Below you’ll find “The Orphan and the Golden Trail”, a fairy tale short story written for the NYC Midnight Short Story Contest. You can find more information about the contest and the prompts at the bottom of the post.
Alongside the lovely S.E. Reid, I was recently invited to participate in a video interview with John Ward here on Substack, which was very exciting and so much fun! If you’re interested in checking it out, at the end of the story you’ll find a link to the interview!
The darkness pressed against her like a living thing, yet still the girl could hear the gurgle of rising water as it crept up the rock where she huddled. The rains were relentless, and the caves were narrow. There was nowhere else to hide.
A strange, sudden pinprick of light, golden as sunshine, flashed in the cave, then vanished. Squinting through the blackness, the girl leaned forward as far as she dared, but the light did not reappear.
A trick of the eyes, that’s all. She couldn’t trust her own eyes in this oil-thick darkness.
Then it came again, a dash of brightness, a tiny patter like an injured bird, then blackness closed in once more.
The girl strained her ears against the torrential rush of rising rainwater, but she heard nothing else.
A faint yellow glow flickered on the rock beside her, and the girl gasped. Crawling forward, she leaned down toward the slick stone. There, small and delicate as a hummingbird, lay a fairy.
The girl reached down to stroke the tiny, withering creature, its light feeble as a guttering candle.
For days, water had siphoned into the caves, gushing and hungry, grasping for the girl.
How the fairy, her unexpected companion, came to be trapped, the girl did not know. But without the sun, the creature’s body wilted like a shriveling flower.
The girl’s belly clawed with hunger and bitterness. Panic long since suffocated, numbness now stole over her, evaporating even grief.
Her eyes craved the dim light of the little fairy, the only reprieve from the darkness. The creature would not live to see the water cover the stabbing tips of the stalactites, or taste its metallic tang as it closed over their heads.
Fitful memories crowded the girl’s thoughts. The bright fabric of the caravan soaked with rain – the meaty hands of a man, touted as the strongest in the world, leaving sausage-shaped bruises on her arms.
She brought only ill fortune. The image of the gentle brown horse, its body still and its leg at an angle, flashed in her eyes, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the dark.
Orphan. Foundling. Dogsbody. Trying and failing, trying and failing. Watching the lithe limbs of the circus acrobats twisting, soaring, grasping the rope in a hair-raising dance, while her own imitation was clumsy, unworthy.
She brought no money, no attention, no applause.
She brought only strife, wherever she went. Rain. Mud. Sudden, gaping sinkholes. Dead horses and stranded caravans. The tide of the troupe’s weariness and blame had turned so quickly, spilling over onto her.
Orphan. Foundling. Dogsbody.
Dragged through the mud, hurled into the sinkhole that had cost the horse its life. Left behind as a sacrifice, the banishment of ill-fortune.
Now she had only this rock, this cavern with its rising tide, this dying creature with its sun-starved wings.
Suddenly, golden light shimmered just beyond the reach of her eyes.
The girl turned to the fairy again, still collapsed on the rock. It was not the creature’s feeble light. Her imagination, surely. A trick of the eyes.
The light came again, lacing the blackness with gold –
A woman spinning in a wide suspended ring, her body long, flexible. A woman of the circus. With her hand, she beckoned to the girl, then dipped below the dark water.
The girl’s numbness fractured, and a shock of fear racked her body.
Cold water touched the girl’s toe, and she jerked backward, scuttling onto the last dry corner of stone.
Drowning or starvation. Huddle on this rock until she wasted away or the water stole the last dregs of air, whichever came first. Or follow a hallucination into black, watery caves.
The strange golden woman rose again, her smiling face peeking above the black surface of the water, casting a golden glow around the cavern.
Or, perhaps, there was another choice.
To die searching, bringing the sun-starved creature a faint hope of survival.
The girl cupped her hands and scooped up the tiny fairy, fragile as the downy white fuzz of a dandelion.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice raspy in the still darkness. “It won’t work, but I have to try.”
The girl slipped into the stinging cold water, black as pitch. Taking one last gasping breath, she dove down to follow the golden light.
The fairy’s weak glimmer peeked through the cracks between the girl’s fingers, and the gleaming circus woman, undimmed by the murky water, swam ahead, spinning in her ring.
It was strange – the golden woman’s light seemed real, somehow, illuminating the claustrophobic cave walls.
Rocks encompassed the girl, too narrow for her to squeeze through. Her heartbeat thudded, filling her chest and her head.
She kicked and flailed at the dark water.
The golden light shifted, and the woman changed. With slow, practiced movements, she bent her body, twisting first her neck, then shoulders and torso, in a wave down to her feet, slithering through the maze of underwater stone.
The girl’s chest pressed inward, straining for air.
The little fairy fluttered – rapid, panicked – against the girl’s fingers.
Turning her head, the girl quieted her thrashing. She eased first her head through the crack, then her shoulders. Pulling her arms free, she bent and twisted, a contortionist winding her way through the passage.
Her chest roared with stabbing, throbbing pain.
Then, suddenly, the cave wall ended, and her arms reached into open blackness.
Floundering, the girl followed her bubbles upward and broke the surface of the water, gasping and coughing.
She grabbed at the cave wall and clung to it.
Shivers of dread racked her body as she opened her clenched fist.
The fairy was still alive, its wings harboring a thin shred of light. The girl gasped in relief.
A beam of sunlight filtered into the jagged cavern. This was the cavern. The cavern where she’d landed, bruised and bloodied but somehow alive, after the agonizing fall from the land above. The cavern whose walls had torn her hands when she’d tried, again and again, to scramble for escape, whose light had taunted her, freedom just beyond her fingertips.
A flash of gold drew the girl’s eyes upward.
Far above, a narrow stretch of boulder arched. Along it, the golden woman slipped in a fluid dance and beckoned to the girl.
Orphan. Foundling. Dogsbody.
She couldn’t climb those water-slick rocks.
A faint tinkling sound – the girl looked again at her palm, at the fairy’s light, dim as the final orange blush of sunset.
The girl had tried to escape days ago, before she’d been weakened by hunger and despair.
But –
But the water was higher now, covering the steepest portions of the rock. And a new strength, of desperation or recklessness, thrummed in her bones.
Grasping the nearest handhold of the arching boulder, the girl held the fairy close to her face. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need both my hands.”
She slipped the frail, weightless creature into her breast pocket.
Holding tight to the stone, the girl pulled herself from the water and climbed.
With flecks of gold that winked and danced in the air, the golden woman led the girl upward.
At last, arms and legs shaking, the girl summited the boulder and collapsed.
Standing where the boulder reached closest to the hole, to sunlight and grass and firm ground, the golden woman smiled at the girl.
Then, turning away, she ran with quick, easy steps and leapt, her body reaching as if for the trapeze.
Her fingers brushed the grassy edge of the hole –
And she vanished.
“No!” The girl couldn’t make that leap. She would die here in this cave, with the bones of this tiny creature moldering in her pocket.
Starvation. Drowning. Bashing her head against the rocks that lurked beneath the water’s surface. What did it matter which death took her?
But the fairy, withering without the sunlight.
She could try. Try to get the tiny fairy to sunlight.
However hopeless, she could be a lifeline.
The girl slid her feet along the slender stone. Scooping the fairy from her pocket, she held it in her hands and reached for the faint beam of daylight that broke through the hole. Gushes of rainwater spewed through the sinkhole, falling in a noisy waterfall and filling the cave higher and higher.
Stretching her arms as far as she could over the dizzying drop below, the girl pressed the little fairy toward the light.
Too far, it was too far. She couldn’t reach.
She couldn’t do it, couldn’t do anything.
A glimmer of golden light shot from the fairy, lying limp in her hand. Trailing upward toward the hole, the golden light seemed to beckon her, calling her to leap.
The girl peered at the fairy, its dying glow the same beautiful shimmer as the strange, golden woman. The woman, whether mirage or magic or daydream, who had saved her in the claustrophobic caves.
Leap - could she leap, now, weakened by days of hunger?
How many times had she stepped on the tightrope or swung for the trapeze, only to tumble to the nets below amid a tableau of sneers, her face flushing with shame and uselessness.
Orphan. Foundling. Dogsbody.
Stop.
She drew in a breath and shed the sandpaper words that clung like ink to her skin, blowing them away in dried flakes of black.
Here, teetering on the edge of one last chance, there was no space for those words.
The girl slipped the fairy back into her pocket, then laid her hand over the fabric and the little life within. The jump was impossibly long, over black water and dagger-sharp rocks.
She took a breath and ran.
With all the strength in her sinews and weary muscles, she leapt, arms outstretched.
Below her, blackness –
Her fingers skimmed grass and squelched into mud.
The girl hung, suspended over the cave. Fighting through the slippery muck, she hauled herself up and through.
She rolled onto the new green spikes of grass and breathed in the air, the daffodils, the clover, the wind and rain that swept fresh through the heather and washed the world clean.
With a jolt, the girl sat up and lifted the fairy from her pocket.
A faint pulse in the center of the creature’s delicate body was the last remnant of the light.
No – not now.
A thin ray of sunlight sliced through the clouds and fell on the girl’s palm, lighting the creature’s face, and it sighed.
With a bruise-purple shimmer, the fairy’s light snuffed out.
The girl’s breath hitched.
Then, in a burst, the fairy shattered into sunlight. Gold glimmering like stardust rushed on the wind, caressing the girl’s face, and suddenly she realized –
It was not she who was the lifeline.
Orphan. Foundling. Dogsbody. The words faded to silence, trapped in the deep darkness of the cave.
The girl stood on shaking legs and looked around the rainy meadow, springing with new life. The ruts of the caravan’s wheels were buried in clover, the dead horse’s bones picked clean to feed the soil.
She stood facing the wind, letting the rain wash the grit and mud from her face and hands, until at last the dregs of the monsoon slowed to a trickle and the thin ray of sunlight spread, breaking through the gloom.
Brushing her hands along the gentle golden petals of the wild daffodils, the girl moved forward into the dappled sunlight of the meadow.
Thank you so much for reading! I wrote “The Orphan and the Golden Trail” for the NYC Midnight Short Story Contest, a prompt-based competition in which writers are assigned a genre, location, and object and have a stringent word count1 and time limit in which to create an original story.
For this story, I had to write a fairy tale about a circus performer, and I had to include the word “lifeline”. Finding a way to work a circus performer into a fairy tale was a bit of a hurdle for me, but it was a very fun challenge!
The version that appears here is slightly different than the one I submitted to the competition. Since no one on Substack is counting my words to disqualify me if I go over an arbitrary wordcount, I used that freedom to add a few small, clarifying details to the story.
You already had me thinking about the meaning of caves the other day and so here's my analysis now that I've read this story:
This cave is reminiscint of Plato's cave. The cave itself is her own mind. This is very much a story of self-actualization and shedding the lies we believe about ourselves. Your protagonist is stuck, literally drowning in her own negative self concept and she can't interact properly with the outside world until she confronts the darkness within herself.
Beautifully written and deeply philosophical! I'm gonna be thinking about this one for a long time.
Thrilling and poignant and thought-provoking. Brava, Bridget!