It’s time for another round of Silver Threading and Ronovan Writes‘s Writers Quote Wednesday Writing Challenge! I had so much fun with the romance prompt a couple of weeks ago that I decided to participate again! Here goes nothing!

The theme posted last week is one of my favorite creative writing topics: magic! The quote I chose for this challenge is by one of my favorite authors from my childhood, Roald Dahl:

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. – Roald Dahl

This quote comes from Dahl’s last children’s story, The Minpins. In fact, these are the very last lines of his last story, making this quote a final message to his young readers before he passed on. Beautifully said, Mr. Dahl! And now here’s a short story I wrote inspired by this lovely quote. Enjoy!

Believe

Abby watched from behind a tree, waiting quietly with a piece of string clutched tightly in her hand. She had laid candies and chocolates under the box a few feet ahead; surely something would be hungry enough to come along and eat them soon.

She was right; within ten minutes, a few little balls of light appeared from behind another tree across the clearing. Abby watched as they slowly floated over to the box, and the moment they landed on the sweets, she pulled the string. A stick attached to its other end dislodged from under one side of the box, dropping it and trapping the figures inside.

“Gotcha!”

The eight-year-old grabbed a large glass jar sitting beside her and ran over to the box. A minute later, the jar contained a handful of small chocolates and three colorful glowing fairies. Abby smiled at the tiny creatures inside, who were too busy nibbling away at the sweets to even notice they had been captured.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered as if they were listening to her. “I promise I’ll let you go tomorrow.”

And she hurried away through her backyard into her house to punch some holes in the lid. She could hardly wait for tomorrow.

The next morning, Abby took the jar to school for Show and Tell. She was so excited for her classmates to see what she had caught that she couldn’t stop fidgeting in her seat. When it was finally her turn, she pulled the jar out of her backpack and hurried to the front of the room to proudly display it to the class. To her surprise, however, they simply stared at her in confusion.

“What’s so special about a jar of chocolates?” said a boy in the front row.

“It’s not the chocolates,” said Abby, amazed that anyone would ask such a silly question. “It’s what’s eating the chocolates!”

The other children looked closer, but they merely giggled in amusement.

“There’s nothing eating the chocolates!” a girl in the back exclaimed.

“Yes, there is! Look! Don’t you see the fairies?”

“Fairies?!” At this, all the other children burst out laughing. “There’s no such thing as fairies!”

“Ya-huh, they’re right here!” Abby held the jar up for the whole class to see, but the tiny glowing figures only seemed to be visible to her. All the other students began pointing at her and jeering.

“Abby believes in fairies!” they shouted. “What a dummy!”

The teacher tried to calm the class while Abby hugged the jar close, bowing her head to hide her watering eyes. She spent the rest of the school day sitting quietly in the corner of the room, and she went home that afternoon in tears.

That evening, Abby sat crying on her back porch, the fairies eating a fresh helping of candies in the jar beside her. She was so lost in thought over the day’s events that she didn’t realize a man had stepped out the back door onto the porch until he spoke.

“Abby, sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

Startled, Abby looked up to see her father standing to her right. Suddenly embarrassed, the girl wiped the tears from her eyes before she answered.

“Nothing, Daddy.”

“Are you sure?” His daughter looked away as he sat down beside her. It was then that he caught sight of the jar sitting between them. “Could it have anything to do with these fairies?”

Abby snapped her head up, her eyes wide with shock. Her father smiled.

“Your friends can’t see them either, huh?”

The girl hesitated, then shook her head. The next thing she knew, she was sharing all the events of the past 24 hours, from catching the fairies to trying to show them to her class to crying on the way home after being teased. She then listened as her father told his childhood story about the time he had found a gnome in his mother’s garden and tried to show it to the neighbor kids, only to be made fun of for having an “imaginary friend”.

“They laughed at me for weeks”, he said with a shrug, “but I knew what I saw. That gnome was no more imaginary than these fairies.”

He lifted the jar and unscrewed the lid. Abby reached out her hand and her dad tilted the jar to let one of the glowing creatures tumble out into her palm. It was still nibbling on part of a chocolate coin. Father and daughter laughed as the former reached into the container and extracted a lollipop from which the other two fairies were dangling.

“Daddy”, said the eight-year-old as she stared curiously at the creature in her hand, “why can’t the other kids see them?”

Abby’s father set the fairies down on the porch, then split the lollipop in half and offered a piece to each of them. He thought seriously for a moment before turning back to his daughter and smiling again.

“Because they aren’t looking for them.”

Abby faced her dad once more as he scooped the fairies up from the porch. She was too amazed to speak, instead sitting in stunned silence while they both watched the tiny creatures munching away on the sweets in their hands.

“Don’t ever change, princess,” he said after a minute. “This is my greatest advice to you. Keep on believing in magic. Always look for the beauty in the world. And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.”

Father and daughter grinned at each other, then simultaneously lifted their hands to let the fairies fly away into the forest behind their house. Abby huddled close to her father when he put his arm around her, and as the two of them watched the little balls of light disappear into the night, he whispered with a smile…

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

I hope you enjoyed my story! Be sure to join the Writers Quote Wednesday Writing Challenge and share your quote-inspired works! Thanks for reading!

Writers Quote Wednesday Writing Challenge is a weekly blogging event by Colleen Chesebro of Silver Threading in collaboration with Ronovan Hester of Ronovan Writes. Be sure to check out both these authors’ blogs for your weekly dose of inspiration! Happy writing!