I have a story for Katie Jenning's friend. I just wrote it for her now because she may be young and not knowing love is sometimes a faery tale and sometimes Persephone finds it in Hades and comes back.

I don’t expect it to be in the eBook as her good friends have already collaborated but I will send it to you now.

It’s about a Pirate Duke.....................................
.............and a Princess, whom I court for 39 years.

• I published this same faery tale a few days ago. 

• I want it to have a new twist and so I invite my readers to make their own ending. I will give you three alternative endings. You may choose one or write your own. Your choice. Or neither or none.

• Do you think it was wise for the Duke to wait so long before rolling the gold dust into a ring?

• Should the violent Princess accept it?

• What do you think of the new ending(s)?

• What's your favorite? Traditional, baroque, postmodern, or insane?

• I wait for your own stories of love unrequited for 39 years and its conclusion, successful or otherwise.

A LOVE STORY FOR A FAERY PRINCESS AND A DUKE

Her eyes were black and deep like a subterranean pool, her skin olive, her nose aquiline; she said she was Irish. “The black Irish” my mother would have said, and with that came the kiss of the blarney stone, for she was double-tongued and manipulative. I thought she was probably First Nations, Indian dark skinned and salt and pepper hair, and I thought she was bipolar because of her insane mood swings and her long episodes of withdrawal.

She and I shared that secret.

I was forward, dark too, honest and blunt. Persephone loved me for I came from a secret place in the underground, cursed by Hades. I thought I was possessed by the Devil and indeed I was, the devil's spawn this Dark Duke I was, and courted by his demons in Hell. I had escaped only to find the faery Princess more knowledgeable than I. She saw through me to the dark pits of my soul and was frightened, but more shocked than frightened, and more sickened than shocked. So she loved me and tried to help.

In 1974 she broke the hell hound’s spell when she confronted the Beast within me. Since then she fled, fearing the goblins and fiends unleashed as I ran wild over the heather in northern Scotland and the shamrocks in County Cork, wild to the pubs of Canada, the Druid and Kelly’s Bar, unable to imbibe because the whiskey had got the best of me by then. That scared her too, no doubt, I have no means of knowing because I didn’t see her again until 1991.

By that time I was tamed but splashing holy water on the walls of the psychiatric hospital to still the flames that roared from Hades in every crack of the old building. It worked, too, especially when the staff murdered me with a lethal injection.

They didn’t really kill me, of course, any more than they killed the love I had for her and she for me. I was a violent pirate Duke and she was a faery Princess who believed in violence to strip away the evil that lurked in every man's soul. The evil that lurked in my own in particular, although when I looked in a mirror the fierceness vomited back at my image and I was cured through homeopathy.

By 2009 I loved her enough to go to jail for her and say I was guilty of her own offense, her offense of lying and control and holding grudges.



The offense was really love and hope, though, and I pleaded love and hope.
Somewhere over the desire of the mountain to the east, rose a pink blush of moon. Not the sun yet, though that would come after the long silver night had shivered and worn its way down the horizon.

A thousand suns would rise on the morning we awakened, blasting the feeble goblins in Hell to sing anthems, and Hades himself to smile at the triumph of something he could not control, the triumph of her love over mine, and my love over the weakness of my body and mind.

She never liked the pirate or the Duke but bits of them remain to tease and torment her.

They may explain my triumph now, in the 39th year, and the desire of the mountain is gold dust in my hand.

 I won’t forge a chain with it, or a ring. I’ll blow the dust onto the stamens of her orchids and ask for forgiveness and compassion, which once she offered but I did not accept.

If there is a ring it speaks of hope, compassion, forgiveness, forbearance, patience, laughter, and love.

Don’t take yourself too seriously, Duke, the faery princess will not always love you. She will care for you intermittently as you’ll be a Pirate till the day you die, and the lady does not always love an outlaw.

 It’s not so easy to be a lady’s duke and love a lady who loves control, but that, too, can change.

As the dove came back to Noah and the thrush sang Aura Lee, the white bird entwined with roses came back to her and me.