The fairy and the fisherman

Once, a young fisherman found a magic shell from which a lovely fairy appeared to offer him a wish.

“Not three?” he asked in disappointment.

The fairy’s pretty brow furrowed crossly.  “If you don’t want the wish” she began but of course he did, so he shushed her and fell to wondering what to wish for.  He could have had wealth, he could have found love, but deep down he knew he wanted none of those things and after a few minutes of indecision he blurted out.

“I’d like to be a pair of boots.”

“Boots?” the fairy asked in puzzlement. “You could have wealth unlimited, then you could buy thousands of pairs of boots.”

“No”, he replied.  “I don’t want to have a pair of boots.  I want to be a pair of boots. I want to still be alive and conscious and I want to be a pair of leather boots.”

 “Ladies’ boots that is”, he added suddenly.  “That’s very important.”

“Perhaps you’d better be more specific, then.” the fairy sighed, taking out a notepad.  “Wouldn’t want this to turn out badly for you in an ironic manner, like in the stories, would we?”

So the fisherman described the boots of his fantasy.  They were tall: thigh length rendered taller by heels four inches long. They had leather laces, tightly wound through bright shiny eyelets all the way up the back, culminating in little leather tassels. They gleamed with a mirror shine. They were, in short, the boots of almost every male submissive’s fantasy.  And he wanted to be them.

“Got it” said the fairy when he’d finished his long and rather creepy description. She looked anywhere except the bulge in his trousers as she took out her magic wand, waved it a little and then the world exploded in a shower of stars.

 

The fairy

The fisherman woke up in some discomfort.  He was standing tied against a wooden frame with arms splayed out above him and his wrists fastened so he could not break free.  His ankles too were restrained, his legs apart.

 

The fairy was sitting nearby, watching.  When she saw that he was awake, she nodded and got up clutching a cloth bag.

“But – I wanted to be a pair of boots!” he protested.

The fairy nodded.  “And you will be” she said, pulling a long, curved steel blade.

“Alive!” he shrieked, desperately.

“Yes, that too” she smiled.  “All taken care of.” And she nicked his flesh deeply with the hooked end of her blade and she began to cut.

Making a pair of leather boots takes time and skill.  First, the animal must be skinned, of course.  The resulting hide will have flesh on it, so this must be removed, first by cutting off the thicker layers, then by scraping.  The resulting skin is salted, folded and left for 24 hours or longer.  Then, after soaking, the outer side of the hide must be scraped to remove any hair and the epidermis.  The material is then tanned, soaking in a vat with chemicals, before being tightly stretched across a frame and left to dry as taut as can be.  True to the fairy’s word, the fisherman remained alive and fully conscious throughout this process.  Although most of his nervous system was gradually cut and scraped away, the diligent fairy ensured that he continued to have all the sensations that an unskinned human would experience.  She even fancied she could hear his silent screams, throughout, and she smiled a secret fairy smile as she worked.

Finally, the leather was ready. The fairy settled down with her tools and she cut with strong shears and she sewed with a thick needle and she trimmed and edged to make the boots of the fisherman’s dreams. The laces she made by nicking the end of a thinned sheet and steadily pulling back, to make a thin but strong strip of cured leather.  She drove the metal eyelets through with a punching tool, she vigorously polished the boots to the required mirror shine, then when she had pulled the laces through, she was finally able to lean back and contemplate the boots she had made.

They were somewhat tacky, she had to admit, but she was quite pleased with how they had turned out.  Not her sort of thing, but someone might want them. She left them on the doorstep of the town shoemaker at midnight and disappeared into the night.

The boots were sold eventually, to a young, spoiled daughter of a local nobleman. She wore them once, but found they pinched, and the business with lacing up at the back was far too much trouble, so threw them into her shoe cupboard and never thought of them again.  And there they remain to this day.

Moral: don’t ask a powerful supernatural being to skin you alive. It bloody hurts.

...and the fisherman.