Foxglove Fairy

Amanda Cornwell was thirteen and had a Maltesers ice cream; her friend Jodie Burton was twelve and had a strawberry Cornetto; and Safira Khan, who at only ten was entitled to a lemon ice-lolly out of Mrs Cornwell's generosity, was not so much a friend as a confidante and follower invited along to powwows when big news or plans were discussed. Amanda accepted a bite from the far side of the Cornetto and proffered her own in momentary exchange to Jodie. Then she looked round and ensured they were unobserved here on the brick fence in the sun.

'My mother's going mad,' she announced.

'How do you know?' asked Jodie, who rather thought her own mother was mad too but wasn't sure of the clinical signs that would convince outsiders.

'Talks to plants,' Amanda stated.

'My dad's mad too,' said Safira, swinging her legs. 'He talks to computers and cars and things. Even tools.'

Amanda began to sob with wracking tears. 'I'm sorry, Mr Nicholls, I haven't had time to do my homework, because my mother's gone mad and we have to tie her down and comfort her.'

'You wouldn't have to though, cos she'd be locked up somewhere. A

loony bin

,' Jodie added emphatically.

'No she wouldn't, they have Care in the Community now,' Amanda said happily. 'It'd be

perfect

.'

'I hope she still buys us lollies though,' said Safira, with a lugubrious lick at her vanishing remnant of one.

Safely out of earshot in the next street, Mrs Cornwell glanced over the headlines: the health minister had resigned, another missile attack on Hamas, shake-up of the judiciary, and sadness at the death of Gregory Peck, tempered a moment later when she realized she was conflating him with Cary Grant. Was he still alive? And it was him in

Bringing Up Baby

, wasn't it? It was too difficult to take in much more as she walked back home, unless she too sat on a brick fence and watched the world go by. She did this a few doors down from her own house, at the house with the most luxuriant garden.

Crimson and purple vervain in hanging baskets, tomato plants in slit compost bags on the window sills, rectangular terra cotta pots with geraniums of an acid hyper-carmine so intense that it would give bees sick headaches, and a big sprawling old-fashioned rose with fuzzy leaves (hirsute? glabrous? she wondered) and fretty edges and a few perfect white blooms. Beyond that a solitary large plant she thought was called agapanthus emerged from the soil like a metallic sculpture, an Anthony Gormley cloud of interlocking spikelets.

Near her shoulder were foxgloves, tall and erect, the leaves sharp and stiffly jutting outward. The way they stood was very masculine, she thought, and in remarkable contrast to how feminine the flowers were inside: magenta, maculate and enveloping. She tried to picture a fox wearing a pair but the erotic image overweighed it, and she imagined trying on two vaginas and going to an elegant party with them exuding secretly for her.

Jennie Cornwell found a reason to return home, out of the balm of the sunshine and into a cool private room. Too often lately she had fallen to fantasizing about women: seldom anyone specific, but fetishistically about body parts, kissing the back of a faceless woman's knees, being blindfolded in 69, vulvas encompassing her breasts. With luck Amanda would stay outdoors or go to Jodie's till teatime.

Jennie plucked a solitary glove and ferried it gently home like a recuperating butterfly in her hand. She tossed the newspaper onto the living-room table and laid the foxglove gently on her bedside table, in the expanse of white. To try to get the unwanted fantasy driven away before she aroused herself, she went and washed the newsagent's change off her hands, warmed up the oven and put a chicken in it, and connected to the Internet.

She looked up Cary Grant on Everything2 and found he died in 1986. She discarded some spam with barely a moment's curiosity over what effect penis enlargement offers would have on whatever the plural of clitoris was. She steeled herself not to go over and look up the dictionary. She found herself imagining a woman with two clitorises, and her own mouth trying to decide how to pleasure them both together. With a sigh rather drawn out, she recalled herself to foxgloves and Googled to see if she could find an Arthur Rackham illustration, interested whether he had made them female or male.

A modern artist had posted a picture calling her 'a sullen little faerie', but she didn't think he captured the character of the foxglove. No Rackham, but someone with monogram CMB in the 1930s, whose style she thought she ought to recognize but couldn’t place a CMB, had shown him as a magenta-legged imp with spotted short trousers. Or could it be a

her

? Another look at the search results identified the monogram as CMG: Christina Gordon.

Then there was another modern interpretation by one Amy Brown, and this was more like what Jennie wanted. Very, very female, deliciously leggy and bare above long speckled boots; thighs exposed where the lilac garment flowed into the wind. Good breasts, lilac hair, dagged wings, and a sultry face of elfin beauty. The Foxglove Fairy sized her up with almond eyes and pursed lips; both wanting Jennie's own, perhaps.

The proximity of the bare armpit and the elevated cheekbone made Jennie exhale with desire. There were stars on various pieces of cloth: armlets, waistband, and boots; but two on the bare thigh, as if tattooed or on an invisibly diaphanous undergarment.

With these appealing thoughts she turned off her machine and returned to her bedroom, where she disported herself in a basking attitude in the warm sun, skirt pulled up across her blouse, knickers on the floor.

Half way through she stiffened at noise downstairs. She had not heard the front door open, and after listening for a minute concluded she'd heard neighbours. But the moment was past, so she relaxed in the sun strained through the window, watching clouds sail.

'So why did you pluck me?' came a very small voice from her bedside table, when all the world was still.

Jennie turned to the Foxglove Fairy without entirely believing what she was seeing. She had not emerged from the flower, she was the flower. Her thin skirt drifted up in the breeze and revealed lilac pubic hair and magenta labia, human-like yet unmistakably the glove of a foxglove. Even as Jennie gazed, the fairy spread her thighs and widened her teasing smile: her vagina was the flower, spotted and mottled and purplish-pink. How would it smell and taste, flowery and dry, or wetly human like her own? Very wetly, Jennie noticed of her own, with the breeze lapping it and her skirts exposing all.

'Should I not have?'

'Not if you're not going to use me,' the faint silvery voice admonished.

'Use you how?' Jennie wondered. She gulped. The Foxglove only narrowed her voluptuous eyes and mocked. She was in mid-air, not flying but floating just above the surface of the bed-table, back arched, arms behind her head, as if prepared to skitter off into another person's life if her needs were unmet. 'Inside me?'

Foxglove's smile of anticipation was answer enough. Jennie picked the flower up even more gingerly than before. The brushing of the wing-tips tickled her hand, and the fairy seemed radiantly hot where she lay cupped in Jennie's palm. She held her in front of her face. The fairy touched the cleavage of her dress and it fell to each side and seemed to get absorbed into her wings, revealing a trim body, human but for the dark stars where her nipples would be.

Jennie brought Foxglove closer until their faces were almost touching. She extended her tongue and as gently as she could made contact. Afraid that Foxglove would find her as gross as Gulliver did the Brobdingnagians, she retreated and mutely asked for reassurance. The flower's impish smile grew more inviting.

With the utmost delicacy until her excitement began to overmaster her, Jennie used her tongue to bathe the fairy's face, then face and armpit together, then breasts together, then belly, then upper legs. A thudding of her heart seemed to vibrate the fairy, making her hair swirl and wings flutter.

'Inside me,' the Foxglove echoed. Her impossibly long legs parted wider and showed a great botanical cavern, from which wafted an odour that was both flower and vagina, commingled tones. It should have been impossibly small, inaccessible even to the very tip of her tongue, but it accommodated her warmly and firmly. She tasted the flower on her lips, and the velvety softness of a flower gloved her tongue, but it melted into thick water like a woman's well.

Unsupported by Jennie's dropped hands, the fairy hung impaled on the tongue thrashing from side to side, wings beating with frantic passion as she pushed herself more deeply into Jennie's mouth. Opener and opener that became, upper lips pressing on her bosom, lower lips almost at her knees. The fairy contracted, curled up, folded her legs below her and her wings close to her back, and thus kneeling she parted Jennie's lips and crawled more and more into her mouth. All the rest of her body seemed to be fitting close to the bell of the flower.

To her astonishment Jennie felt her mouth shut with this fluttering, jerking creature wholly inside her, tasting strongly of woman and gushing down Jennie's throat. Foxglove's spasms tickled her palate. She sucked on her, sucked the naked limbs and the smooth torso, rolled her tongue around the creature.

The orgasm was sudden: a stillness, then an explosion that filled Jennie's mouth entirely with the bittersweet liquid, filled it entirely; and to breathe she had to swallow, gulp down all that had filled her. When she did she found there was nothing left: she had drunk the fairy's body. Only a couple of fragments like eyelashes lay on her tongue, remnants of the wings.

These she drew gently from her tongue and held up in the air before her. Between them a very faint lavender glow held a shadow of the flimsy skirt. Then it became the flimsy skirt. Then these became the wings, grew out, and between them grew the Foxglove Fairy's body in all its delicately-detailed nakedness.

'Your turn,' the fairy said, with a wiggle.

Jennie transferred the Foxglove to her own belly, and as she lay the flower just where her pubic down began, the touch made her acutely aware of her own questing body.

'Go on. In. Use me.'

So Jennie, fearing to crush the flower, placed it against her vulva, where it warmed and fluttered, and against her clitoris, where it was like a distant electric buzz, then pushed the delicate petals into her welcoming channel. It fit perfectly: it fit like a glove. It expanded to fit her, and lengthened too, filling her with the strong legs and body of a young woman pressing against the walls and stroking with her toes deep within. After a minute of this, the Foxglove squirming unseen inside her vagina planting kisses, which Jennie could feel each one of as it tingled, the Foxglove's head emerged, then her arms and breasts. Deep inside her she was just as full, and felt the toes tickling in places she had never felt touched before.

Foxglove lay wrapped in Jennie's labia, bringing her lips and hands to her clitoris. She kneaded the clitoris and used all the different motions of her fingers, splayed around it on both sides, squeezing it and holding it up to bite with her tiny teeth. How Jennie wished she could know what it was to explore her body with such magnification! This was the last coherent thought she had for some time, as the fairy's minute teeth and tongue and lips did their work through a haze of fluid, her body slipping in and out of Jennie's as the orgasm built up in erratic movements.

She cried out.

For a few minutes the Foxglove Fairy was her own size, lying by her on the bed, slick with Jennie's adoring secretions all over her. Then she began to shrink down again, but while still large enough to affect her, she pushed Jennie to roll her over. Jennie was tired but complaisant, and let the tiny hands pull the skirt upward from her bottom.

'One more hole to garden in, my sweetheart,' Foxglove murmured.