Mirabelle's Boots - Chapter 7 (Patreon)

It is the middle of the night, three days later and Mirabelle sits outside of the window of the shoemaker’s store, staring at the vision of her gaunt, pale reflection which sits only inches from her own face.

She’s always been a little bony, but this lack of real food is getting to her. She’s losing the meager amount of weight that she had and the thinner she gets, the colder and less energetic she feels herself becoming.

The fairy yawns.

Mirabelle isn’t sure if she’s tired because of it being the middle of the night, when she would usually be asleep, or because she’s undernourished and weak. She had a piece of apple today. It had gone off as well, but she cut out the parts which seemed okay and ate those. Her body isn’t exactly grateful for the food, given the twangs and twists in her gut, but it’s better than starving.

It’s about that time. The coast is clear.

The old man had spent his day working and then his evening sitting on the chair by himself, sipping his tea and staring at the wall. Now, he has gone up the creaky staircase to sleep. She confirmed this, having watched him go to his bed through the window of his bedroom.

Now, having waited a few minutes longer just to be safe, she is here to make her attempt.

The fairy looks down at the bundle at her feet. Scraps of fabric that she had collected from the seamstress’ garbage. They are all different colors and sizes, but that’s fine. She’s just here to practice. Plus she has some shavings and strips of leather from the shoe-maker. 

She doesn’t like leather. It’s grim. But it exists now and it would be a larger insult to the creatures which the scraps stem from to just let it all go to waste, rather than to use it.

Mirabelle flies up to the chimney, waiting to feel if its cold and if it’s safe to fly down. It seems to be. It hasn’t been lit once since she’s been here, as far as she can tell. It’s summer, after all. For the human-people, it’s very warm.

The cruel fairy flies into the shoemaker’s house, entering it for the first time, uninvited and unknown. Thankfully, the man doesn’t seem to own a cat.

She zips through the room with the chairs, staring at the portrait of the woman hanging there for a moment, before she makes her way to the workshop.

It’s not stealing, she’s only going to borrow his tools while he sleeps. She’s not even taking them, she’ll use them here. The man will be none the wiser and she’ll get to practice what she’s been studying.

Mirabelle lands on the big table of the shoemaker’s workshop, looking around as she notices how cold her feet are. Setting her bundle of materials down, she goes through the steps in her head that the man does when he makes a pair of shoes. She has been watching him very carefully for days now.

The first thing that he does is that he draws a somewhat stretched silhouette of a shoe onto some parchment, which he then cuts out and then wraps around a wooden reconstruction of a foot. There’s a whole shelf of those wooden feet behind her, against the wall. They’re all different shapes and sizes. But there doesn’t seem to be one that is her size, fairy-sized. So Mirabelle will have to make her own.

Or maybe she can just use her own foot? She’s making these practice shoes for herself, after all.

After that, he overlays that sketch onto some thicker box-paper and begins cutting out the pieces along his lines with a sharp, small knife. The result of this practice are several oddly shaped pieces, some of which look like her own wings.

There are many, many more steps. Most of which she doesn’t really understand the purpose or the nature of, but she can start with this and so she does, in the hopes that this beginning with give better context to the other things that she sees the man do.

She can’t hold the man’s pen, as it is as big as she is herself. Instead, she takes a strip of  burlap fabric from her collected garbage and bundles it into a small end, soaking the tip of it with her strange, inky magic.

Mirabelle hums to herself as she works, not because she’s in a particularly happy or sing-song mood, given her weak state. But because the sound of it overpowers the noise of her growling stomach.

The girl sets her foot down onto a piece of ripped off parchment paper and begins drawing around it with the rag.

________________________________________________________

The next day is here. Mirabelle sits at the window again. Today, there was no fruit. The fruit vendor had cleaned out his garbage pile. So she looked behind the baker’s stall. There was nothing there either. Then she looks behind the seamstress’ house. Also nothing.

All of the garbage in the city seems to have vanished at once, as a few men with large carts had dragged it all away, while she could only watch with sad eyes from the rooftops.

A lot of human-people make their living and earn their food in ‘the dungeon’, but she doesn’t like that idea, now that she’s come to understand what it means.

In the center of the city is a large, magical place called the dungeon. Human-people who practice the profession of ‘adventuring’ go in there regularly and plunder its natural bounties, earning their living this way. She doesn’t like it. It leaves a bad taste in her mouth, one that is worse than any of the fruit she’s eaten.

The thought of going into someone’s home and destroying it, of taking everything with you as you leave… On a daily basis even…

- She doesn’t like it.

The cruel, hungry fairy leans back against the edge of the windowsill wall and turns her head to stare inside at the shoemaker as he works and thankfully, quickly loses herself, as well as the sensation of her hunger, in the fascination of her observation.

The day passes quickly, the shoemaker retires to bed and Mirabelle, almost too weak to fly, sighs anew with an exhausted sigh as she lifts up into the air. It’s time to get practicing, empty stomach or not.

She briefly considers looking if the man has any bread lying around, but then decides against it.

That would be stealing.

________________________________________________________

She works late into the night, using her piece of glass to cut out the drawings she had made and then traced onto a piece of thicker parchment from the man’s waste-bin, beneath his desk. It’s not great work, honestly. But she just reminds herself that this is practice and her first time at that. It isn’t supposed to look great.

Her stomach growls.

The fairy frowns, doing her best to hold the glass steady with her shaking hands as she cuts off pieces of the thick parchment. She looks at the small heap of them for a moment and then bends down, picking one up and biting down on it.

- It tastes like tree.

The fairy shrugs, deciding that it could be worse, as she continues to cut the parchment, nibbling on some scraps of it that are perhaps not really nutritious, but at least they make her feel fuller than before.

________________________________________________________

Today is a blessed day.

The sister-sun shines down upon the world with full, radiant intensity and Mirabelle dances around in joy, cheering as she moves in a giddy circle around her treasure.

- A muffin.

A real, full, whole, not rotting muffin. It’s still warm and there are thick, oozy blackberries inside of it.

The baker had sold it to a boy for breakfast. But as he left, the boy had tripped over a cat and fell to the ground, muffin and all. Taking sympathy with him, the baker gave him a new one for free and simply threw the old one over his shoulder, into the box in the alley.

The glint in Mirabelle’s eyes as it flew, careening through the air into the dark alley was not unlike the shine of the summer sun itself, which she now basks in, pressing herself into the muffin with both her body and her spirit.

Another thing is different today too. Today, the shoemaker isn’t in the back, rather, he is upfront, waiting for someone. Mirabelle watches him through the big windows at the front of the house as she sits on the adjacent sill of an upstairs window, eating her muffin and trying not to cry. It’s the best thing that she’s ever had.

The shoemaker is rubbing a rag across something, something vivid and colorful. She can’t really make out what it is from here. Mirabelle takes another bite of the muffin which is enough by itself to keep her full for days and days, if it doesn’t go bad first.

The cruel muffin-thief of a fairy narrows her eyes, staring.

It’s colorful, bright. It’s… a pair of boots? She supposes she should have known that the shoe-maker would have a pair of shoes.

Mirabelle tilts her head, eating another bite of meal. The muffin is her highest priority right now. Aren’t boots usually brown or metally? 

The fairy looks around at the streets beneath herself. Most of the boots really are brown or metal, but now that she really looks at the scene, she sees that some people have more colorful footwear on. Or even just the same boots as the people walking next to them, but fashioned in a somewhat more lively tone.

“Huh…” she mutters to herself, taking a bite of her muffin and then hiding it behind a houseplant on the windowsill. She dusts herself off, licking her fingers clean of berry-goo and quietly flies over to the shoemaker’s window, staring into it.

The sister-sun, only just waking from her deep slumber, is still at the point in the sky where she touches Mirabelle’s back on this side of the house. The light, the warm, orange summer candescence moves in to the small, sleepy business and paints the dusty, old wood with its glow. The building and the room both carry a sadness with them that is made only more apparent by the strong contrast of the loving touch that now finds them both.

The house looks tired. The man looks tired.

But he rubs the thing on the counter with a look in his eyes that Mirabelle has only seen from him on those nights when he sits in his chair and stares at the picture above the empty seat next to him. A gleam, a glimmer… a twinkle.

The polished material, the simple things that are shoes, shine with a luster that is akin to the look in his eye. Mirabelle can’t really place it. Perhaps it’s because of the out of place, dark-apple color of the leather boots. Perhaps it’s because of the wax he is coating them with, giving them their glossy appearance. But something in the light, something in the glimmer of both the man and his creation, gives credence to something… good.

It’s dumb, they’re just shoes.

But Mirabelle can’t deny what she sees. She can’t deny what the sister-sun is showing her on this kind day. It’s as if the glow were simply there for the sole reason of telling her the following. ‘Look. Look. There. Here. This is a good thing.’

The bell above the door to the store jingles as a woman walks in, an orc. She greets the man and he returns the triviality, revealing the finished work to her.

And for the third time now, something glows alight and Mirabelle just doesn’t get it.

They’re just shoes. They’re just boots. They’re just a way to keep your feet warm while you earn food. Why are they all so…

She presses her face into the glass, trying to look closer, trying to see more.

- Why are they so happy about it?

They talk, the woman tries them on and is overjoyed. She pays for them, thanking the man vigorously for his work and while he seems pleased at her contentedness with the finished product, Mirabelle can’t help but notice that he almost seems to appear sad too, as he watches not the woman leave, but rather stares at the boots walking out of the door.

He stands there for a moment, staring at the void, before turning his head and taking down one of a hundred order-slips from the wall behind himself, before simply walking to his workshop to start over from scratch on the next pair.

Feeling the ache in her chest only now, Mirabelle lets out a long breath that she has held in for far too long. The hairs on her neck stand on end, the skin on her body prickles, the tousling of her hair by the gentle wind isn’t even noticed.

That.

- That thing that just happened.

She wants that. She wants that for herself.

The fairy flies up into the air, turning to go back to her muffin, so that she can eat and watch the man work more. So that she can learn how to get whatever that was for herself too. She wants it.

A cat sits on the upper windowsill, where she had sat before, pawing at the muffin. Mirabelle yelps in terror, watching as it simply pushes the muffin off of the second story windowsill, for no other reason than because it could.

The muffin falls to the ground, smushing against some old boxes.

She hates cats.

- So much.