Hi,

'I've also read and viewed about half of last year's thread: "A Wish for Autism".'
Old mistake. I shouldn't have done that, even though I could cope with reading it. Today is a bad day because I can't cope in giving it all a place in my thoughts.

"It's indeed highly emotional, but not about autism, but about who is right." So I thank you for not addressing each other in this thread in that tone of alphabet. Please, don't go "You say .. but" on this one.

One thing I wrote yesterday stuck, and I tried to work it out further to give it a place and to give me a focus:

Once there was a woodsman, living in a small cottage on the edge of the woods, nor far from a small village. He fell in love with a lady from the city, one day, and knew he had to wed her. He wooed her for three years, and finally she consented to come live with him as his legally wedded wife. Exactly nine months after they were wed, she was delivered with a fine baby boy. But that day the weather was hot, and she being from the city she didn't know that when it's black moon, as it was that night, you should close the house. So she left a window open so the tiny room where they had bedded the little boy would be cool.

She didn't notice it in the course of the babe's first night, but on later nights, as she watched the child she wondered whether the face she saw in the moon light was the same she had seen on that very first day. Somehow, it seemed like she no longer felt that overwhelming joy she helt felt was she had received him. Still she cared well for the baby, as did the woodsman, and they raised him as well as they could. But there were strange things about the boy. Even in his first years, he would hardly ever talk, though he could always talk quite well for his age, but if left alone he'd let go agonising series of wails, asif he were singing to an unknown world. He'd never look you in the face, yet without looking he would always know where you were. And his skin was paler than that of any human in the nearby village, and he never wanted to play the games of other children; when he did walk about his movements were awkward, but he preferred to stay in that now really tiny room that he had so far spent his life in.

As the boy grew a bit older, the parents began to wonder whether they had done the right thing in raising this child that seemed too different to be their own. But nevertheless, the father started taking his son with him into the woods. To his fear the woodsman found that his son knew everything he wanted to teach him immediately. The boy didn't even seem to be looking at what his father was showing him, asif he had already known before hand. And this grew even worse when he started to roam the woods alone. Now he did no longer want to come into the house when normal people did, and if forced the young boy would fight so vicious that both his parents were needed to get him inside, asif in the wild he was gaining the strength of the animals. Then came the day that the two of them could no longer control them, and after throwing them against the cottage wall, he fled into the woods.

After that had happened, the parents went to the priest in the village to tell him what had happened, and he berated them for not telling him sooner. When he heard the mother had left open the window on the child's first night, and a black moon night at that, he knew what had happened: Their own child had been taken by the fay folk, and the child they had raised was a changeling. And with all that howling he probably was a wolfkin. But all was not lost; if they could get the changling child to admit it was not human, before it changed into a wilf for the first time, then the fay folk would have to accept that the switch had failed, and would have to return the human child. So the priest went into the wood with a group of strong men following him at some distance. And when he found the child howling loudly, he went to it very carefully and gently, and talked with it until it confessed that the world of humans was not his own.

Then the priest called up the men, and the changeling just stood there and waited for them. But when they grabbed him it took four grown-up men just to keep him from moving, and two more two wrestle him to the ground. Then they called for the parents, and as darkness fell, they started a fire, and hung the changeling over it. The mother could hardly stand it, but the priest took her away a bit, and explained that while they still heard the boy howl at the fire, it would be the changeling, but if he called for his parents, the fay folk would have come and would have given back the human child. So from a bit of distance, through the night they prayed and waited and listened to the howling, until a bright light shown from the place where they changeling hung. After that, they heard the boy call for his mam and dad.

The parents were overjoyed, of course, even though the fay had maliciously thrown the human child into the fire when they took their own. But they nurtured him back to health as well as they could, though he would never heal completely. The boy also kept walking somewhat bowed, almost subservient, from his growing up in the low halls of the fay folk and under their command. But the fay folk would not be able to touch him again as the priest protected the house with strong prayers that would keep them all safe for all the days as a family. Their real son never talked much about the ordeal he must have gone through among the fay folk, and it's no surprise his behaviour was somewhat odd because of what had happened to him. But everyone in the village understood and his parents were simply glad to have a son that did what they asked and didn't howl at the moon.

For a few year, the parents were happy with their son. However, on the morn of the day at which the boy was to be apprenticed to his uncle, also a woodsman, the villagers found the fay folk had come and burned the cottage to the ground. In the night they had taken their revenge on the parents, and had once more taken the son, on the very last night in their house. The villagers tried to follow the tracks, such as there were, but in the woods they lost them. And try as they might, they never were able to find the hill of the fay folk; the magic making it invisible to humans was too strong, even for the priest. The parents were buried; the cottage was never rebuilt, the son was never seen again. But sometimes at night, the villagers would hear the changeling howl in the woods, and they'd close their windows more securely, and shuddered at the thought of the baby who was stolen from his parents.


I know: Fairy tales are just anecdotal.

Bye,
                                                                Mysha